> The way leftists -- practitioners as well as supporters -- discuss and defend BDSM, though, it essentially reduces it to gentle, egalitarian desires that promote virtue within the limits of political liberalism: consensual play between mentally competent adults, good for intellectual enlightenment and community building.
Also good for getting your rocks off.
> So, the paradox is that supposedly kinky sex, in discourse on the Left, becomes not so kinky after all.
Depends on what you call kinky. As the normative line keeps shifting, what is kinky changes.
> "Bad" becomes "good," which is to say, on the way to becoming boring.
Wrong. That which is not kinky is vanilla (depending where the normative line falls at any given moment) , but vanilla does not equal that which is boring. You're making a mistake in logic. Kinky sex can be boring just as vanilla sex can be just as a movie can be boring, etc., etc. Boring is an experiential value and not inherent in any particular type of sex.
> Such a defense suggests an anxiety that pleasure still isn't its own justification even for a harmless activity, a curiously un-hedonistic defense of hedonism, taming sex again.
This makes no sense. Kinky and vanilla are just varieties of possible sexual practice. Sex is not being tamed. It is being expanded.
Chuck:
> Radical queers have complained and protested the mainstreaming of the queer community. Long time kinksters have complained about the influx of new "straight" people, which has led to
situation where people do bad things because they don't know about safety and common practices in the scene.
One of the things I have talked about with regard to both the queer and kinky communities was that as prohibitions came down, the element of outlaw culture in these communities would decrease. For some people, practicing outlaw sex was/became a kink in and of itself. I never fetishized the outlaw nature of kink (possibly because I had already experienced outlaw sex being queer and found the thrill of transgression to be non-existent), but the loss is powerful and real to some people.
Joanna:
> If every time we have sex, I have to dress like a nurse, or you have to jerk off in a shoe, or we have to pretend that you are Superman and I am Lois Lane, or (fill in your own details), we are not free.
Again you are confusing compulsion with fetish.
> We are imposing conditions within which it is safe or permissible to have sexual feelings
Vanillas do the same thing. So do people who say that they have to be in love to have sex or that sex is an expression of love.
> And, all I'm saying is that if people agree to have sex like that, that's fine. But it's not free.
Of course it is free so long as they choose how they have sex.
Yoshie:
> Besides, mastery and submission, at the heart of BDSM . . .
Many would argue that point.
> . . . is also at the heart of religion, sports, art, and other perfectly normalized activities that billions find extremely pleasurable, so BDSM might still yield the same quantity of pleasure after normalization.
It always has for me. I have never seen bdsm as trangressive, but just as one avenue of pleasure.
> But people who take philosophical interest in BDSM (whether or not they actually practice it), as many LBO-talk subscribers appear to do, do so in large part because it is considered "transgressive." For them, normalization might mean the diminution if not end of pleasure. After all, it's a head game.
I think you might be projecting your own comprehension of bdsm as trangressive on to others. I do the stuff and have never myself felt transgressive. If a person engages bdsm on only a philosophical level, then maybe its transgressive potential dominates their concept of it since its physical joys are unknown to them.
You are right that bdsm is a head game, but also a body game as well. Engaging bdsm only theoretically is like filling in only the down clues in a crossword puzzle or playing tennis without a ball.
James:
> It really is narcissistic for the self-appointed kinksters to pretend outrage at other people's outrage.
I am not a self-appointed kinkster. I am a flesh-and-blood real live one!
> After all, the appeal of crossing boundaries is precisely that you are breaking conventions.
If crossing boundaries is a kink for you. For the majority of kinksters I know, trangression is not a kink.
> That is where the inner shiver of delight comes from.
No, the inner shiver of delight comes from the perfectly symmetrical sergeant's stripes, the exquisite mummification, finding places for two whole bags of clothespins on a man's body, the incoherent mumblings when your slave has passed beyond verbal coherence. Let me stop. I am at work.
> Are the powers that be really challenged by the re-enactment of oppression as play in the bedroom? I suspect not.
I think they are since I believe that every successful act of resitance a person performs helps build her confidence to dare to perform others.
> But you are definitely right that ragging the Nepalese for their gender orientation policies is just Orientalist condecension, dressed up as concern - and haven't we seen that a thousand times before?
But my friends in Asia and Africa want those who oppress them to be ragged on -- they want help in ending their persecution. Why is it Orientalist condecension to act in solidairy with my queer brothers and sisters?
Queer Dewd:
> want people to quit speaking from ignorance and making judgments on them -- including the judgment that they only enjoy it because they think its "transgressive".
But this is the catch-22. To obtain knowledge about bdsm you have to practice it, and many people are not interested in practicing it, but love to theorize about it. I can theorize all I want about Paris, but until visit the city I will not know it.
Charles:
> In fact, with a woman as the dominatrix over a man, one could even argue that there is some feminism in it.
There is also feminism in it when a woman subs to a man.
> You might want to consider that it is not immediately evident how BSDM is distinct from some other things, since there is some superficial similarity.
How long does it take to get past the superficial?
> Rather than be amazed that some people thinking about it for the first time make comparisons, you should really be able to understand their confusion more readily rather than acting as if it makes no sense for anybody to wonder about it.
But Charles this is not your first time at the bdsm rodeo.
> And there is a big problem of male violence against women that many leftists struggle with and are sincerely concerned to do something about.
Then work on eliminating male privilege and stop worrying about who's flogging whom.
Brian