Autonomy continued

At the risk of making the blog endlessly self-referential, I’m going to continue the theme of autonomy from yesterday’s post, and respond to an interesting comment that was left. You can read the whole thing here but the essence of it was: What about 24×7 mistress/slave relationship that doesn’t use safewords? That is a loss of autonomy, but in the context of a loving trusting relationship. How can that be abuse?

I think the issue of safewords in this context is a red herring. I also don’t use safewords when I play with people I know well. I trust they’ll play safely and respond when I communicate a problem. And in the context of an daily 24×7 relationship it’d be kind of weird to safeword. They’re really a very specific safety mechanism that’s useful when doing particular types of scenes or playing with someone new.

What I think is key is that the slave always has an option to step-back and renegotiate (in the loosest and most general sense of that word). Ultimately they must always have the option to walk away. That doesn’t necessarily give the slave control of the relationship. The dominant might simply say it’s my way or the highway, and that single simple choice to consent might carry a lot of significant implications. But meaningful consent can only come from autonomy – from the ability to make an un-coerced decision. If you don’t have that then you can’t consent. And if you don’t consent then that’s an abusive relationship.

I was going to go on to say that you can never negotiate away the need for consent, but with further thought I’m not sure that’s true. I can conceive of doing it for short time periods. For example, a heavy corporal scene where a submissive agrees to be tied down and given 12 stripes of the cane with no option for escape. That seems a reasonable situation for a submissive to briefly give up his autonomy entirely. It might be painful, but it’s not dangerous, and it’s for a very limited time period. I don’t think it’s reasonable to stretch that kind of agreement for weeks or months. I’m not sure where that line is drawn, but I’m sure there is one.

Of course there is one scenario where a lack of autonomy doesn’t necessarily imply abuse, and that’s if you’re unlucky enough to be caught up in the penal system. Prisons don’t go much for negotiated scenes and safewords. I’m not sure what crime the man below committed, or what police department issued her uniform, but I’m sure justice will be served.

Prison Toilet Scene

The image is by the very talented artist Vernice61. I believe she’s saying ‘And drink it down!”

Power & Control – Agency & Autonomy

This is a post about semantics and definitions rather than hot femdom action. That might sound a touch dry, but language shapes how we think, and writing about the language and labels of kink helps me understand my own kinky nature better.

The trigger for this was a post last week entitled Inadvisable advice and a followup comment by Grumpyoldswitch. I’m not going to repeat it all in detail here (feel free to follow the links), but the crux of it revolved around autonomy, free will, power and control. What do you give up in a BDSM scene and what makes a scene exciting? I originally stated that I never gave up autonomy in scene and the commenter suggested that I did or at least pretended to. He felt that doing so, and being dehumanized in some way, was attractive and what a lot of people looked for. So what does a submissive give up in a D/s interaction?

Power and control are two obvious things that are relinquished. It could be simple, like the power to talk and move around. Or it could be more complex, like the power to make certain decisions or behave in a certain way. So does autonomy and agency go hand in hand with this? After all, if I don’t have control over my body, and I can only make narrowly constrained choices, do I really have autonomy? I would say the answer is a very firm ‘Yes’.

The definition of autonomy is the freedom to choose one’s own actions. As Wikipedia puts it – it is the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision. That means that any relationship where someone loses autonomy is automatically an abusive one. That is an important line to draw. I might only have one decision available to me – the option to shout ‘STOP’ – but with that decision all my power must come flooding back to me. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 1 hour scene in a dungeon or a 24×7 D/s relationship. The ability to step back and renegotiate is an essential one that should never be lost.

So what about pretending to lose autonomy? That’s where it gets interesting to me, as I think that’s what BDSM play is often about. Some people fetishize the activites themselves. They love bondage, or spanking, or whatever. But for a lot of others, including myself, the activities are a means to an end. They’re a way of creating a D/s dynamic. By emphasizing all the decisions I can no longer take the illusion is created of a loss of autonomy, where in fact it has just being temporarily stripped back to its bare minimum. When I’m busy being the best damn coffee table I can be, then I don’t have to worry about anything else, and it’s easy to pretend that the option to just not be a table doesn’t exist.

Coffee Table

This image has been cropped but I believe it’s originally from My Slave Life. I found it on the Consensual Spanking blog.

Inadvisable advice

Today’s post features an advice column and an inquiry about becoming a dominatrix. It’s kind of an odd letter, with what sounds like a sudden jump from BDSM newbie to professional domination, but I’m going to give the writer the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s been heavily edited. I’m feeling less forgiving about the advice which has two particularly bad statements in it.

…you won’t be good at dominating another person unless you know what it feels like to be on the receiving end. Have you ever been a partner’s true submissive, consenting to bondage, gagging, whipping and verbal abuse? …. You will understand why they do it if you’ve experienced the scope of it.

I would have thought it obvious that BDSM isn’t symmetric. Unless a person is wired to be submissive or masochistic they’re not going to get anything from being on the receiving end. If you’re not into pain and corporal play, then getting whipped isn’t going to be instructive, it’s just going to hurt. That’s not to say a top can’t experiment with sensations and try out some toys, but that’s about understanding the physics and biology of the situation. Not being someone’s ‘true submissive’ (whatever the hell that means). Oddly nobody ever tells submissives that they need to try dominating someone before they can really understand how to play.

You’re effectively creating a complete power exchange. You are stripping a human being of their autonomy, dignity and free will — and physically abusing them on top of it.

This comment annoyed me even more than the first. I certainly do not lose my autonomy or free will when I play. I might temporarily cede control and give up some power, but I always the retain the ability to make my own informed decisions. Submitting does not make someone less than human. And while some types of play deliberately mess with dignity, a lot do not. Personally I’m pretty proud of my scenes and how they’re conducted.

What I think the columnist should have said is – go learn from pro-dommes already out there. Read their blogs. Scan their forums. Go to their conferences. See if you can apprentice with one in your area. By all accounts it’s a tricky job with many pitfalls. Better to learn those from someone else than repeat them all yourself.

Mistress Absolute

The image is of Mistress Absolute, a London based pro-domme. According to this article she shares my thoughts on starting out as a submissive.

There’s a school of thought that says you should start out submissive before you become dominant,” the dominatrix says as students begin to arrive. “That if you don’t know what it feels like, how can you do it to someone else? I don’t follow that thought. I don’t have a set of balls, but I torture balls.”

Labels and perception

I’m always interested to read mainstream descriptions of kinky behavior. When you spend a lot of time reading sex blogs it’s easy to get blasé about all sorts of activities. Seeing it filtered through a vanilla perspective can help illuminate how other perceptions might differ.

Take for example the article from yesterday’s post featuring the unfortunate domme who was arrested for needle play. It’s not particularly judgmental (compared to some of these articles), but it still talks about drawing blood, sticking needles into genitals and suturing. I can imagine most vanilla people, and quite a few kinky ones, reading that and going “Ewww! That’s crazy. What kind of insane masochist would do that?” Yet I’ve done all those things, and they don’t really hurt that much *. I’d say an old fashioned caning is way more painful. Hell, smashing my toe in the dark into the corner of the kitchen table is more painful. Familiarity normalizes them.

It’s also a good example of the importance of language. Call it play piercing and it sounds relatively innocuous. Play isn’t exactly a scary word and lots of people get decorative piercings these days. Describe it as needle play and the intensity ramps up a little. Describe it as needles stuck into genitals and it sounds nuts. I touched on a similar theme with respect to the idea of sadism a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a concept that applies pretty broadly in BDSM. Spanking sounds fun and lighthearted. Corporal punishment not so much. Breath play is innocuous next to asphyxiation or smothering. Would you rather say you were pegged or that you were anally penetrated with a dildo? And talking of which…
Pegging
I found this on the Pegging with a Smile tumblr. I’m afraid I’ve no original source for it.

* One possible exception to the “don’t hurt that much” comment is suturing. It’s OK if you use hypodermic needles to pass the thread through the skin (as I experienced here), but using a genuine suturing needle hurts like hell (as described here).

Continuing negotiations

I find it amusing that I happened to start writing posts on negotiation just when our glorious political leaders in Washington DC decided to give such a fine example of how badly it can be done. I can only imagine somebody up there must have forgotten the safeword. It’s certainly doesn’t seem to be Safe, Safe or Consensual from this perspective.

I had a couple of follow-up thoughts from yesterday’s post. One came from a comment by Pat, who suggested that ‘Keep it honest’ should have been on my list. I very much agree. There’s nothing to be gained from exaggerating experience or being overly optimistic about limits and abilities. I’d rather start at 70% and enjoy pushing towards 100% than start at 110% and have to stop the action and ask to scale back.

My other thought was on the topic of negotiating with a familiar domme. Yesterday’s post was mostly about dealing with a new relationship, but what happens when you’ve got a few scenes under your (leather) belt? What’s the best way to handle a scene negotiation? Well, this might seem like crazy talk, but I’ve found asking the domme how she prefers to structure it works pretty well. I know it’s odd to give the domme control, but somehow it seems to work for me.

Just as there’s a wide variety of play styles in scenes, I’ve also found there’s a wide variety of negotiation styles. Some dommes, once they know you, are happy to structure the session with minimal input. My last few sessions with Cynthia Stone in LA were that type. I was comfortable letting her do that and she certainly had no shortage of ideas to try out on me. With others I might give a single area or idea for them to riff on. That’s the approach Lydia and I use for our sessions. Typically it’s just a single theme per session and she elaborates on it, blending in other ideas and activities as she likes. Other dommes prefer a more detailed negotiation, with a more specific list of activities they can pick from. That works fine for me as well.

Ultimately this ties back to one of my original points about playing as much as possible with the same domme(s). How to negotiate a scene is in itself something that can be discussed and negotiated between the participants. But before doing that we need to already have a good understanding on the basic stuff (limits, interests, triggers, etc.), and that only comes with familiarity.

I wasn’t really sure what image would be appropriate for this post, so I thought I’d return to the subject of my opening paragraph for inspiration. In both cases somebody is getting fucked. It’s just that for the couple below, it’s the fun kind of fucked.

Pegging with a smile

I found the image on the Pegging with a Smile tumblr. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to track down an original source.

Negotiation

A few weeks ago I wrote about scene negotiation and one particular way it could go wrong. I originally planned to follow that up with a post on the right way to do it, before realizing how incredibly egotistical that would be. I’m no expert to be telling others what to do. Instead let me simply describe what has worked for me in the context of negotiating professional sessions. That has been a learning experience for me over the years, and maybe there will be something relevant to others.

One of the primary things I’ve discovered is that familiarity breeds understanding. My best sessions have always featured people I’ve played with multiple times in the past. That’s not to say I haven’t had great first sessions, but it’s hard to have a really intense and moving scene when I’m still getting to know someone. I therefore play exclusively with Lydia in Seattle and I try to revisit dommes I already know when traveling. It’s so much easier to do scene negotiation when I’ve got past history to draw on and a shared understanding to work with.

That said, there are definitely learning opportunities that come with playing with new people, and all relationships have to start somewhere. So here’s my approach when I’m getting to know someone…

  1. Keep it simple.
    There’s a lot of figure out when playing with someone new – chemistry, communication, physical response, etc. I therefore like to keep the activities list short to try and minimize the variables. Picking just a couple of general areas, for example bondage and CBT, gives enough scope to play while keeping the negotiation easy.
  2. Focus on areas of expertise.
    A lot of pro-dommes will list particular activities they enjoy or areas they specialize in. I always like to suggest these in our initial negotiations. Seeing someone at their best is highly informative. If there’s not good chemistry doing something they profess to particularly enjoy, then that’s a red flag.
  3. Trust my instincts.
    I’ve had very few bad experiences. Any domme that I’ve played with and named on this site has been someone I’ve had a great experience with. For the unnamed dommes I’ve had problems with, there were almost always signs early in our communication that I ignored. This has included things like obviously not fully reading my (short) emails, introducing D/s dynamics at the negotiation stage, chopping/changing session times frequently, and introducing activities I’d clearly identified as problematic in initial sessions. I’ve learned that any early problems in negotiating (and sticking to it) is a sign of more problems to come down the road.
  4. Do paired sessions.
    I think it’s really hard to negotiate or give non-trivial feedback in the middle of a session. I’m typically in a submissive mindset and it takes time to switch gears, step back and get perspective on a session. With someone new I therefore always try and do two sessions a couple of days apart. That gives us both time to evaluate and re-negotiate when there’s not rope, whips and sweaty bodies involved.
  5. Review before clothes come off.
    I do most of my negotiation in email, and normally a week or so before a session. I’ve no doubt all good dommes will reread that communication before playing, but I always find it useful just to review it verbally, even if there’s nothing to add. There’s often detail and emphasis that can get lost when emailing someone, particularly when you’ve not met before.
  6. Distinguish suggestions from asks.
    This is a minor thing, but it’s something that’s bitten in the past. I’ll say something like “Doing A and B might be fun, I particularly like C”. To me that means “Definitely do C, pick as you like from A,B”. To someone else that can simply mean “Pick as you like from A,B,C”. I then spend a session expecting C at some point, and I’m slightly surprised and disappointed when it doesn’t happen. I’ve therefore learned to be very clear to distinguish between when I’m asking for something specific and when I’m merely suggesting some possible options.

Hopefully that short list might be useful for a few readers. I’ll save some follow-up thoughts for another post. Picking an image for this post was kind of tricky. Nobody photographs pre-scene negotiation. So going in completely the opposite direction, here’s an image of the kind of session you’d really want to negotiate carefully upfront. Guns don’t do much for me, but I do appreciate their iconic nature. It’s just not the kind of activity I’d want to be surprised with!

Gunplay with Mistress Eve

The image features Mistress Eve, a pro-domme based out of London. She has a very extensive list of interests, so if you’re in the area I’m sure you’ll be able to negotiate something interesting.

Sadism revisited

I feel the need to return to the topic of sadism and sadists. Some of the comments left on my post from a few days ago were thought provoking. In particular I was struck by how overloaded the term ‘sadist’ is.

Most labels we apply to people also carry a judgement about their behavior. Consent (or the lack of it) is seen as so important it’s often baked right into the label itself. For example, if I have consensual sex with a partner them I’m a lover, but non-consensual sex with anyone makes me a rapist. I can be a consensual flirt, but never a non-consensual one. That’s sexual harassment. I can be an employer of consenting workers, but only a slaver or trafficker of non-consensual ones. Actions themselves can be neutral, but the labels we use on people rarely are. A punch is neutral, but a boxer is not the same as a mugger.

Sadism is fairly unusual in that respect. It carries no information on consent. It’s accurate to describe a domme who enjoys S&M as a sadist. It’s also accurate to describe a horror movie psychopath in the same way. This strikes me as problematic when talking about kink in a mainstream context. As hmp accurately pointed out, non-kinky people really don’t get the idea of consensual sadism at a gut level. Having the same label used for very different behaviors is therefore particularly confusing. People are used to labels implying judgement about behavior, and given their gut feel about the infliction of pain, their default view of sadism will always be a bad one.

Masochism doesn’t have this problem. It’s a more passive label and consent is naturally implied. We really need another word for sadist that pairs more tightly with masochist. That way we could leave sadism as the general label for non-consent and save the new word for only when masochists are consensually on the receiving end. I’ve no idea what that word should be however. Any suggestions? Maybe I should get Dan Savage on the case. He’s done a pretty good job so far coining pegging, GGG and Santorum.

Divine Bitches

Given the subject matter it seems only fitting to finish with an image of a sadist in action. This is from the Divine Bitches site.

My favorite kind of people

The New York Times has an interesting but annoying article on the subject of sadists. Interesting because, well, it’s about sadists, my favorite kind of people. They’re the Yin to my masochistic Yang. Annoying because it suffers from all the usual problems these kind of pseudo-scientific articles often suffer from. It simplifies, conflates and doesn’t define terms clearly. I’m left with way more questions that I started with. Not to mention a desire to quit my job and do a doctorate on the topic.

The basic point of the article is that sadism is far commoner than people traditionally assume. You don’t have to be a Hannibal Lecter to be classed as a sadist. However, it seems to tangle a lot of things together in strange ways. I’m left wondering…

  1. What’s the correlation between sexual sadists who get off on the reactions of their consensual partners and everyday sadists who get off on hurting whoever they come across? My experience is that the former don’t strongly overlap with the latter.
  2. What’s the split between people who enjoy power, those who enjoy destruction and those who enjoy the suffering of others? The article conflates them all, but for the first two the sadism is incidental to the main goal. Someone watching a clip of a race car crash is typically watching it for the awe and the spectacle of the crash, not because they’re hoping the driver got hurt. Similarly I don’t think shooting a collection of pixels in a videogame necessarily identifies someone as a sadist.
  3. How many people identified as sadists are conscious of their sadism? And of those that are, how many seek out opportunities to act sadistically? Does being aware of the trait cause people to act on it or attempt to control and diminish it?
  4. How many people act sadistically in groups but not in one on one situations? It would seem to me that the dynamics of social bullying are very different, although this article conflates them.
  5. Are sadists typically selective in how they inflict pain? Is it the reaction of the victim that matters? Or the way in which the sadist provokes the reaction?

It’s a fascinating area, and sadly this article doesn’t get to the heart of it. I’m surprised the scientists haven’t paid more attention to people who self-identify as sadists and masochists. They can’t use them to decipher the broader story, but they’d at least be a good starting point. And it’d be way easier to set-up ethical experiments with a pool of subjects who will happily zap and whack each other for fun!

Nipple Torture

I’m not entirely sure where this shot of two sadists indulging in a little nipple torture comes from. I’d guess it’s one of the Kink sites, but my search foo is failing me.

Anything is contextual

One great way to infuriate a dominant is to claim you’ll do anything. It’s like a red rag to a bull. The typical response is either to reach for an extreme form of play (‘go fetch me my branding iron’) or to propose a very un-fun type of play (‘go clean my car while I watch TV in sweatpants’). The idea being to demonstrate that the submissive better be careful what options he or she open up. Mistress Matisse wrote a column some years ago that covered the topic from the dominant point of view pretty well.

I definitely understand that viewpoint when playing with someone new. In that case communication to set expectations is vital. In past posts I’ve termed the failure to do so Meat Loaf syndrome – ‘I’ll do anything for you….but not that‘. However, I do think it’s a viewpoint that sometimes gets pushed too far. BDSM negotiation isn’t divorced from the normal conventions of discussion. Being a dominant doesn’t give you a right to abandon common sense, and ‘anything’ is always contextual.

If a partner asks me where I want to eat tonight and I reply “Oh anywhere really, you pick,’ nobody would interpret that as carte blanche to do whatever they like. Dumpster diving behind Pizza Hut is out. As is booking tickets for a 6 hour flight to the New York restaurant scene. And if they know I’m horribly allergic to crab, my answer doesn’t mean I’m willing to swell up and die in the local crab shack. I don’t have to specify these things because any friend or partner with half a brain will understand my ‘anywhere’ response as being implicitly qualified.

The same thing goes to BDSM negotiation. Assuming we’re somewhat familiar with each other, then ‘anything’ means activities the same as or vaguely within touching distance of stuff we’ve tried or discussed before. And if there’s something new that a dominant would like to try, then the ‘anything’ response is a great cue to suggest it to me as an option. As a submissive I like to give my dominant choice and flexibility in a scene whenever possible. It seems odd to punish people for trying to do that by deliberately picking the worst possible interpretations of their responses.

Mistress Matisse

Having referenced an article from Mistress Matisse, that gives me the perfect excuse to feature an image of this rather fabulous lady. This is an old shot recently republished on her twitter feed, and captioned by her as “Behold me as a little baby dominatrix! Look how scowly and stern I was! Rar, fear me! (That didn’t last very long.)” Her professional site is viewable here.

Payment and power

It’s widely accepted that the power dynamics within a BDSM scene are separate to the dynamics outside of it. In some cases they may happen to align (e.g. couples in 24/7 D/s relationship), but often they will not. Outside a scene the players might simply be casual play partners, or in a standard egalitarian relationship, or even enjoy a reversed dynamic, where a dominant outside the bedroom bottoms within it. Pretty much every combination possible is working successfully somewhere. Yet, if you add money into this mix, attitudes tend to change. I’ve often heard it said that a pro-domme’s client always has the power because he or she supplies the money. That no matter what the intended power dynamics in a scene are, it can never be genuine when money is involved.

As regular readers might predict, I find this an odd attitude. Firstly, it suggests a leaking of the power dynamic across scene boundaries that doesn’t apply in any other situation. Nobody would maintain that a couple can’t have a ‘real’ D/s scene because they regard each other as equals in daily life. Secondly, it implies that somebody paying for any kind of service can never have a submissive experience. That’s self-evidently not true when you look outside the sexual realm.

My favorite counter-example of this would be high end dining experiences. Eating at places like Saison (in SF), é by José Andrés (Vegas) and Uraswawa (LA) is always a submissive experience. These are restaurants where you don’t get to choose the food, you don’t get to choose the preparation and you don’t get to choose the accompaniments. You eat what the chef decides to present that night. Some places have even specific rules about how to eat. For example at Urasawa, the chef insists you eat each sushi piece in less than 10 seconds from when he places it in front of you. The restaurant’s clientele may be paying the bills, but nobody expects that in doing so they’re buying ownership of the chef. Instead, much like a session with a pro-domme, they’re paying for access to an experience.

Nobody would claim that my decision to dine or not at Le Bernardin puts me in a position of power over its chef Eric Ripert. Yet that’s exactly the argument advanced when it comes to pro-dommes and their clients. I suspect this contradiction arises from prejudice against sex workers. Some people erroneously believe, possibly subconsciously, that nobody would voluntarily choose to do sex work. They wouldn’t do it, so they can’t imagine anyone else choosing to. And if they believe a pro-domme isn’t there by choice, then she clearly isn’t operating from a position of power.

Note that I’m not claiming that all sex workers love their jobs, or that all pro-domme/client interactions are models of D/s perfection, or that a professional interaction is the same as a lifestyle one. I just to want break the idea that money inevitably corrupts and negates any BDSM scene it comes into contact with.

Mistress Wynter

Given the nature of this post it seemed appropriate to finish with an interesting image from a pro-domme. This is from Mistress Wynter. I’ve sadly never had the pleasure of doing a session with her, but by all accounts she is one of the most talented dommes in NYC. Certainly someone who enjoys her chosen profession.