BDSM Intolerance

Mz Raven from Informed Consent kindly gave me permission to re-post her story here:

I've decided to make my reply to a thread currently running on the boards, into a personal blog, but what I want is for people to think before making any sort or reply/response or action.

The subject running is about being “outed” and the consequences of this, there is one reply on the boards which is very well written and precise pointing out the pro's and cons of being outed or even outing yourself. But I feel this is now something I have grounds to comment upon. Yes ok, so you decide to “come clean” to a few people and you relay the basic dynamics of what BDSM is about to you.

Out of experience I can tell you that you will always get one of three responses, those that stand there, raise one eyebrow and go “hmmmmmmmm .. really?” .. or you will get, “errrrrrrrrr .. whats that then?” .. or the one that is most common is, “are you weird or what?” the last kind of response is what happens when people have a lack of understanding and then its down to you as the individual to explain yourself. (why explain yourself you may ask) basically if you don't the media profiles of all of us living this lifestyle turns many peoples minds towards the worse scenarios, ie that we are all deviant freaks that slaughter new born lambs before having wild sex in its offal. Not really the sort of thing that you want others to believe really.

Ok, so there are a lot of plus sides to being honest and open about who and what you are/like doing. But ….. from someone that knows the wrath the of ignorant others .. its really not worth taking the risk … what we all do is ALWAYS going to be considered weird, freakish, abnormal ect .. its not the norm to want to inflict pain or to receive it .. its not the norm to suspend your loved one from beams and set about them with a single tail, basically what we all do and live is not NORMAL in the regular nilla mundane capitalistic world we have to live in.

What I will go ahead to tell you all now is my own personal experience of being honest with people that I thought were friends .. It still upsets me to this day what myself and my family and close friends had to deal with.

So after telling my next door neighbours how I chose to live was first met with the “hmmmmmmmm really?” response .. they asked lots of questions and they seemed to gain a certain amount of understanding of who and what I am about .. no problem so far, then .. my feelings at that point were relief and comfort in knowing I was accepted for ME not WHAT. So cutting a very long story short these people over a period of a couple of months started to change their attitude towards me, they stopped popping in for coffee, they ignored me, their kids stopped talking/playing with mine. Well, ok, fair enough .. life was quiet so I didn't really allow myself to get too worked up about it all .. live and let live is my motto.

Well, that was until one Monday morning at 8am when a team of 10 police officers stood on my doorstep telling me that my house was going to be searched looking for evidence of a crime that I had “supposedly” committed. I was read my rights and arrested on suspicion of drugging and raping my next door neighbour!

My house was turned over by a bunch of overweight CID officers and a few plain clothes coppers, rifling through not only my private items but my childrens as well. They took great delight in trying to humiliate me with all manner of unnecessary questions when finding “the Kit” (and lets just say there's a lot of it Again cutting out a lot of the story here I was hauled down to the police station and after being locked in a cell for a period of time I was then questioned and “evidence” placed in front of me along with the “victims” statement. As previously mentioned it came about that I had gone into their home and drugged her coffee with amphetamines until the point she passed out, then I was supposed to have tied her down and raped her then took photos of her in said position. Okaaaaaayyyyy …… shock and revulsion hits home big time and a multitude of questions of my own… but at that point I was the criminal and had no grounds to ask anything of anyone (or so I was made to feel).

Basically these people had worked out that if they made enough fuss and made themselves victims of a crime they could get what they wanted from the state. They were a family living on benefits in a home that was too small for their needs, they were in a mountain of debt that they could not keep under control, he was a junkie she was a manic depressive. So they concocted a story so extreme, but with a self confessed pervert living next door what an opportunity to not to miss. Here was there get out clause of the avoiding bailiffs and court orders ect. A new life .. a new start with new names. Sounds great doesn't it .. and don't we all wish at times during our lives that we could all do this?

These people (who I say again, I considered to be friends) falsified evidence (including said mentioned photos, which I supposedly posted through there door to intimidate them) they made my life hell, I couldn't even walk 200 yards to the local shop without having abuse screamed at me or my kids, phone calls of people calling me a diseased freak .. people I have known for many years crossing the street to avoid being on the same path as me, the local neighbourhood watch focused solely on my house of ill repute, my kids teased, tormented and bullied at school and all through a couple of peoples SICK and WARPED minds to get what they wanted.

Well after 9 months of living a hell on earth, everything was dropped, there was no physical evidence against me what so ever, (surprise surprise!) they couldn't find my finger prints on the photos that I had allegedly sent, there was no drugs in my home, there was NONE of her DNA on any piece of my equipment, there was NONE of my DNA on or about her body. The case and all charges where then subsequently dropped. The police acknowledged that they concocted this story just because they could, no other reason than to get what they wanted without having to do anything for themselves. Nightmare over! Or was it? NO .. I still have to live here with everyone still whispering behind my back, those that did this to me are now living somewhere in bliss with everything they wanted. They know what they did was wrong but they don't care, they carry no guilt over what they did, they didn't care what lives they ruined on their own paths to get what they wanted from me .. so in retrospect. They have won. I cant prosecute them the police wont do anything to them and all because of the money needed to bring about charges upon them. So unless someone wants to donate in the region of £100K to me, these people will walk free and get away with everything.

What I will say though is throughout this growing acceptance of O/our chosen lifestyle there are many many like myself who have grown complacent with what we do, believing that everyone is going to be “OK” with us, not feeling the need to hide ourselves away behind closed doors because we want to be honest and open and spread the word to make others become understanding of what we are all about. Sorry people but life isn't as kind as that .. yes, you are going to get those that accept you but you will also find those that WON'T and refuse to believe that what we do is perfectly acceptable.. these people don't want to know .. they don't want to understand .. they don't want us upsetting there quiet nilla way of life where the missionary position is the best way. There are many details that I have purposely omitted from this blog and I am more than happy to divulge more details if its requested.

Just take this as a kind warning from someone that knows that being open and honest isn't always the best path to chose. Think very carefully before disclosing anything private about yourself or your partner, you might find yourself the victim of a scenario that you have no control over. Don't let my hell become yours. It's not a nice place to be.

You know, I hope some anti-BDSMers read this and re-think their prejudices against women who choose lifestyles they look down on.

Stacked Decks and Rubber Cocks

I want to talk about stacked decks. I got into a discussion here with another dominant woman about the use of strap-ons with male partners. She is vehemently against them, or at least vehemently against the stereotype that all dominant women use them or that they should be the culmination of a female dominant, male submissive scene:

And, no, fucking someone with a strap-on is not empowering. Having to use a rubber cock to fuck someone is – I think – rather the opposite. It’s like an admission that a woman isn’t equipped to fuck and dominate someone. It’s equating the dom-fuck with the penis.

Having to strap a phallus to myself to be a dom? Empower me backwards!

Listen carefully and you’ll hear the oh so subtle message of strap-on play: You need a cock to be on top, you need a cock to be a dom, you need a cock to fuck.

I mean really, seriously really, does no one else think that it is *fucked* *up* that scenes of a woman dominating a man often culminate in her doing a more politically dubious drag act than your average forced fem session.

A culture where femdom sex puts more value on strap-on up arse than cock in vagina it is saying that the person on top, doing the fucking, intrinsically has more power than the one on her back getting soundly pounded. Which really isn’t true. There’s a lot of nasty things I can do to a person when I’m underneath them, close to their belly and their chest and their nipples. Things that they can’t really stop me doing because their arms are busy bearing their weight and doing all the work of fucking me extremely nicely and hardly

Now if you know me, you can probably predict my reaction to this pretty accurately. That being that it's profoundly insulting to claim that I'm disempowered by having sex in a way that I like, (even worse, that I don't come from the sex that I like, as if 1) I'm lying and 2) how good the sex I had is is dependent only on my orgasm, and whether others are adequately aware of it, even if they're predisposed to believe I must not have had one!) and worse to suggest that I must do it because I'm only serving someone else. As I said in the comments to her post, I fantasized about penetrating my partners since I knew what penetration was. Part of the reason I sought out the SM community was precisely because of that hokey, woman as penetrator stereotype. I was like “Oh, whoa, women like me! I’m not crazy!”

And there's also the disability angle. Relaxing enough to enjoy being penetrated is somewhat difficult for me. On rare occasions, it's worth doing. But when I could be inside my partner, experiencing what it's like to actually literally get into someone... relaxing enough to like something in my vag just seems a bit silly and off-point.

So there's the whole whiff of ableism in people telling me what I should and shouldn't be doing when I'm having sex with a man. (Interestingly I see much less shit about whether I should be penetrating a woman. The feminist in me asks "Why is that?" Knowing what people think of my flexi-semi-stone-ity, I know the answer well, I think: Some cunt needs to be getting penetrated, and well even if hers isn't, at least hers over there is. That's what cunts are for.)

But here BJ is again, responding to me:

And there is so much gender fucking in femdom compared to other deviances. You have to ask why.

That's when I realized, thinking about how I didn't dare say in her space that I love gender fucking (alongside good old fashioned pain, it's my biggest turn-on) and actually prefer to be called Sir rather than Ma'am, that the deck is stacked either way.

The deck is stacked against me because I'm too butch, not adequately representing my gender if I do what I want to do. If I do what I want to do, no holds barred, I must be demonstrating that being masculine and being dominant are one and the same. No matter how vehemently I insist that I don't believe this is the case for anyone else. I will be seen much more easily and much more frequently than I will be heard.

The deck is stacked against her because every time she claims that being penetrated can be a dominant act, someone out there isn't going to hear that either. Someone out there is going to go right back to thinking that she must be less dominant or be submissive deep inside, because she really likes to be on her back.

And I think it's very important to acknowledge that all of us fit the "problem" stereotypes in some way. I fit them because I love being a butch top with the feminized male bottom. I've introduced several partners who never would've liked or wanted it to feminization, who've come to love it precisely because I like making them my "girls" every now and then.

And as far as she goes, I don't know or well enough to know how she fits them or doesn't. But I do know that she calls herself "Bitchy Jones," and even though I get the pun (on "Bridget Jones' Diary"), it makes me groan because I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired of the stereotype of a dominant woman as "A bitch." I hate that.

It makes us all sound like harpies, shrilly picking at people, with nothing real or serious to say. It bothers hell out of me. Yeah, we're bitches, baby. It couldn't possibly be that we're smart, or taking pain from us is fun, or we're authorities who deserve to decide. Nope. Don't fuck with us because we're bitches.

Reminds me so strongly of the stereotype of overly "dominant" vanilla wife/female partner-as-petty-controlling-nag that I cringe.

And there she is, OMGBWTFBBQ, REIFYING IT ALL BY NAMING HER BLOGX0RZ NO WOMAN SHOULD WANT THAT!!!111!!!eleventy!!!!zomg! IT'Z BAD 4 UZ.

To me this stuff, this inavoidability to ever fully divorce ourselves from the crap version of what we do, is why a careful, thoughtful feminism is something the SM community badly needs. It's not necessary because it's better not to be feminine, or better to find an empowering way to be feminine. It's necessary because patriarchal stereotypes create Catch-22's where no matter what we do, someone out there can call us not feminine enough, or disempowered due to or femininity, and have what they say stick. Have what they say taken to define us, over our own voices and we have to say for ourselves.