The Privilege of Choice

I received a lot of gratifying comments on my last post, but it reminded me that I perhaps had an obligation to balance it. The wired world has become a mosaic of communities who share common interests. There are groups for every interest under the sun and it becomes easy, if you spend too long in the company of like-minded individuals to become oblivious to the experiences of others. From time to time they collide and flame wars ensue, but it is always worth keeping in mind that the online world is, by its very nature, a privileged one. A large proportion of the world doesn’t have regular internet access at all, doesn’t speak English, or has a lot of its internet access blocked by governments, like China, who prefer to maintain an internal virtual playground rather than a global one.

More specifically, I wanted to address the issue of people who associate, either online or in real life, or both with BDSM and their surrounding issues. It is the happy couple who  find their sexual tastes intersect. People who lived steeped in the language and the subculture of BDSM often forget that they are, in fact, a subculture. It is a non-normative form of sexuality. And I feel that, in attempting to validate our own desires, we forget that.

We also forget that choice and consent are at the very heart of how BDSM can remain non-normative yet still tolerable within a modern, diverse society. This ‘outness’ is a very modern phenomena. Its increasingly public nature is something I have ambivalent feelings about. I’m quite sure the popularity of books like Fifty Shades of Grey have sent many, especially women, flocking to the darker side of the social net to seek what they think of as a way to spice up their sex lives.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not belittling anyone who is curious and adventurous and looks for broader horizons in the experience of their lives as a whole or their sexuality in particular. But I’d like to point out that demanding that someone participate in that adventure with you is fundamentally unfair. To make someone feel like a prude or selfish or unaccommodating for not wanting to smack your ass or have theirs smacked is just as wrong as treating someone like a freak for wanting it.

Furthermore, many people who have come from cultures where physical abuse, cruelty, corporal punishment or sexual control are mainstream, normative practices may not see the sexual fun side to indulging in power play. Similarly, people who have been caught up in institutions where power hierarchies are dominant structures in their lives may see the voluntary taking on of sexually dominant or submissive roles as something approaching their worst nightmare.

I don’t wish to pathologize perverse sexualities and yet I can’t ignore (through my own anecdotal experiences) that some people seek to ritually play out in adulthood the power dynamics they experienced in childhood. No, I’m not saying everyone in the BDSM community has been abused, or neglected. I’m saying it has been my experience that for some people who have been, the BDSM paradigm can be an alluringly familiar structural orientation. Nor do I think it is bad that they have found it and found comfort in it. I’m not making a judgement. It’s just what it is.

What is worth remembering is that a considerable portion of the world lives under circumstances that, to us, would look like institutionalized BDSM. With one very salient difference: it’s not consensual.  And for people who have experienced that kind of power imbalance, without their consent, BDSM can seem like a disorienting dose of PTSD. To believe that you have grown up and escaped physical abuse, power imparity and lack of sexual choice only to be confronted with it in the guise of liberated sexual fun can make you feel like you’ve walked into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

So -  the point of this post? Just that while we are all busy congratulating ourselves on our openmindedness and adventurism, our liberating demands to have our ‘needs met,’ it is worth recalling that our current circumstances are born of having immense scope in our choices. And that is not everyone’s reality.