I just had a really wonderful scene with Lydia. Many needles and much moaning on my part was involved. However, I don’t want to talk about that tonight. Instead I want to talk about a bad scene. A scene with an abusive asshole of a dominant. Specifically, this scene described by Little Dorky Cyclops. I’m not going to try and summarize it, so feel free to go read it if you want the rest of this post to make sense.
I have to admit that a few years ago, when I was not particularly young and still stupid, I would have been sympathetic but bemused by that scene description. I would have been the idiot saying “Why not just safeword? That’s what it’s for.” Now that I’m definitely older and possibly wiser, I get it. I don’t play in public and I’ve been lucky enough to encounter very few bad dominants. I’ve only really had one session go seriously sour on me (described here and here), but I still completely understand LDC’s reaction in the scene. It’s tough to switch gears and take control back from a dominant. You’re fighting the natural dynamic of the scene and a desire to do your bit to make it work. It’s always tempting to think it’ll get better, that that you just need to hang on till the endorphins kick in. It’s easy to safeword on cramping or going numb, but this scene was a far more complex dynamic, with social pressure added into the mix as well.
Obviously the dominant here – Jefferson is his fetlife handle (aged 50, in NYC) – behaved abusively and there are serious questions the people who attended the event should be asking themselves. Hopefully making this public reduces his chances of going to other events and repeating the process, although given he’s done it before I’m not optimistic. From a submissive (and possibly selfish) perspective it makes me wonder what I can do to avoid getting caught in a similar situation. Even assuming the BDSM community can do a better job of policing itself (big assumption), bad dominants will continue to be a fact of life. So what are good self-defense techniques for a submissive to practice?
In a weird way this problem puts me in mind of a common problem in computer systems, namely handling backup and recovery when disaster strikes. I know that sounds like a bizarre connection, but stick with me on this. The problem computer users often have isn’t defining the recovery process or setting up the emergency systems, it’s making sure they work when needed. They’re hard to test properly and are rarely used. Unfortunately when you need them, you need them to work flawlessly, the first time of asking and in the most difficult circumstances. That’s a really bad combination. Typically people find out their recovery system isn’t working the first time they try and use it.
I wonder if submissives face a similar problem? They have a theoretical mechanism for safety, but the only time they use it is when they’re already in a bad situation. That’s exactly when you want to fall back to a frequently used and easily deployed mechanism, not step further into the unknown.
I’ll continue this post tomorrow with a few more thoughts. Feel free to leave comments until then. I’ll finish with what seems like an appropriate image. Thanks to Little Dorky Cyclops we’ve found out about some of that lurking evil in one particular man.
This image is by the artist Ybar. I found it on the Velvet Underground tumblr.
