Stabbity has started an interesting discussion on ‘forced’ scenes over on her blog Not Just Bitchy. There are a lot of ideas worth digging into, both in the post and the comments. For the moment I’ll start with her basic idea, which is that the fantasy of being forced to submit (imagine quotes around that if you prefer) is partly a fantasy about submission and domination being easy. It removes the risk of screwing up on both sides of the D/s equation. I kind of get this from the dominant point of view, but I’m not so sure about the submissive side.
For a dominant there are always a lot of choices in a scene. Just picking up a bundle of rope raises issues of where to tie it, how tightly, what to attach it to, when to loosen it, etc. And that’s before anyone has even been hit, shocked, pierced or penetrated. Adding force into the mix adds a safety margin to decisions. It suggests that the scene isn’t primarily for the benefit of the submissive and therefore there’s less to get wrong. If that wasn’t enough warm-up for you or that penetration was a little rougher than you like, well that’s just tough. I’m forcing you to do it.
On the submissive side I’m more skeptical, because personally I don’t worry all that much about screwing up in a scene. That’s not to say I’m some perfect submissive. I worry about communication. I worry about the intensity I can take. I worry about getting a cramp after we’ve spent 30 minutes getting me bound in just the right position. I worry about a spider scuttling across my naked body when I can’t move. But all these things are just as much an issue in a forced scene. I’ll safeword out if a major limit is exceeded whatever the nature of the scene (particularly if arachnids have decided to crash the party). Similarly the quality of my communication isn’t affected by being forced. I worry about being a good or a bad submissive, but not typically about screwing up.
That’s not to say force doesn’t offer some interesting possibilities for the submissive, but I’ll save further thoughts for another post. In the meantime I’ll leave you with some artwork by Eric Stanton. He was always a great illustrator of powerful forceful women who could physically bully and dominate weaker men.