Violence and BDSM

Yesterday, my podcast with Axe went live. Go listen to it. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Last week, someone left a comment on my interrogation post, saying that it sent both good and bad chills up his spine. When I pried further about what gave him bad chills, he pointed to this section of the post:

“I heard his knife click open, and waited to feel the edge of the blade against my back. Instead, he raised it to my hair, as if he were about to cut a lock off.

Not okay. Said some voice inside me, This needs to stop. Now.”

He replied:

Reading this, I was more than a bit horrified — admittedly, I don’t know you from a stranger on the street, but the thought of violence, real violence, against a woman really does make me see red. I’ve had two female friends in the past who were the recipient of violence from their boyfriends so perhaps I’m more sensitive about this than some would be.

I know the entire BDSM scene is entirely built upon trust and respect, but I guess I question how much trust and respect you can have for someone who is essentially a complete stranger that you only met the night before. Yes, he stopped immediately when you shouted “whoa!” but what if he hadn’t listened? What if the knife had gone on not to cut just your hair, but carve his name into your back? Yes, I’m sure you would have screamed bloody murder, but it would have been a bit too late by then, no? Also, I presume you were taken somewhere private for this scene.

The simple response to this comment is that the scene occurred in an open play-space and not in a private room. Many other people were playing or watching in the space, and there were dungeon monitors walking around to make sure no one did anything stupid. I didn’t fear for my safety because I knew there were people with EMT training who’d be there if something went wrong.

However, this comment raises a point that I think is more interesting: the line between BDSM and violence. I didn’t perceive what was happening to me in the interrogation scene as violence. However, the very same actions in a different context would have constituted violence.

I know for a fact that many people in the scene, especially male tops in my experience, have had to grapple with notions of violence. Men are taught to respect women and never to hit them. It’s hard to reconcile those notions with BDSM. One Dom-acquaintance of mine is a social worker who works with perpetrators of sexual assault. Needless to say, he’s had a lot of trouble coming to terms with his kinky proclivities, since what he does in the bedroom bears striking resemblance to his clients’ actions. Context and intention, as my friend has come to realize, is what separates BDSM and violence. I imagine this is a hard concept for many to wrap their heads around.

Violence is much more than inflicting physical pain on another person. It’s about exerting power and control over another person without that person’s consent for the express purpose of inflicting harm.

While BDSM plays with the emotional states associated with violence, the intention is not to inflict harm or even pain most of the time. Sinclair Sexsmith wrote a fantastic post the tension between her feminist ideals and sexual desires. She articulates this concept far better than I can.

Phrases – like men should not hurt women or rather masculine people should not hurt feminine people, or even more broadly that people should not hit each other and violence is bad bad bad – I had accepted those phrases as Ultimate Truths, and I started to understand deeper the ways that sensation was not violence, and hitting was a way to be sparked into the present moment, to release whatever our musculature was holding onto, and to deepen trust between people and in a relationship.

I think that one of the many reasons why the BDSM scene is built around trust and respect is so that we can articulate and draw those lines. However, the bounds of consent can sometimes get blurry, so I don’t feel comfortable definitively saying that violence never manifests in the scene. Of course, when you build a dynamic on trust, and put your personal safety into someone else’s hands, you always run the risk that the trust will be broken. How did I know that Cannon was not going to slit my throat? I guess I didn’t. By playing with him, I consented to taking that chance. If we were in private and he didn’t stop when I stated a boundary, there may have been genuine violence.

Whenever I get on the topic of kink and violence, my brain goes in a million directions at once. I wish I had a more definitive answer to my reader’s concern. I think it’s an important concept to talk about how we separate what we do from actual violence, and whether the line is as clear cut as we’d like it to be.