Pacific Standard
by Jillian Keenan
Responsible BDSM practitioners realize, perhaps more acutely than anyone else, that “yes” is not enough. We could all learn something from this stigmatized community, if only we’d talk more openly.
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The first time I learned about safe words, I’d just been spanked.
“If we ever do something you don’t like, just say ‘red’ and I’ll stop,” my boyfriend told me later that night, as I squirmed on a hard chair during dinner. “You know that, right?”
I did not know that, actually.
“Like red light, yellow light, green light?” I asked.
My boyfriend—let’s call him John—nodded.
“Exactly,” he said.
I was 17 years old. John, my first boyfriend, was 24. (In the country where we lived at the time, that combination was perfectly legal.) We were young. We didn’t know anything about responsible BDSM even as we explored our kinks together. How were we supposed to learn? Neither of us owned a laptop, and I wasn’t about to research our unusual sexual fixation from a public Internet café. John and I were merely following our impulses into murky—and potentially dangerous—territory.
Consent is critical in every sexual expression. But those boundaries and responsibilities are heightened in kink. And they’re not always obvious. After all, it was only after a spanking—one of many—that John finally thought to introduce a safe word into our play. Before that, it would have been entirely possible for our consensual and mutually satisfying encounters to cross the line into assault. When hurting your partner as he or she cries and begs you to stop is part of the fun, how do we know where the fun stops? Can the foggy edge of kink teach us anything about sexual consent in general? …
…The isolation of stigma also leaves kinky assault survivors with few ways to report crimes without exposing themselves to the victim-blaming, scorn, and condescending pity that are directed at sexual minorities even under the best of circumstances.
“There is such a strong stigma against BDSM that even people within the community are afraid to reach out and learn how to do things safely,” says Susan Wright, the spokesperson for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. “They’re more afraid of being ‘outed’ than they are of being assaulted. That stigma creates a haven for predators.”
It’s a cruel and dangerous cycle. To fight prejudice and misconceptions, we defend ourselves and our community. But the need to incessantly remind people that kink is not abuse makes it hard to admit that kinky relationships—just like vanilla relationships—sometimes do become abusive. When we’re made to feel that we must defend ourselves, we become afraid to perpetuate the stigma against us by calling out abuse. (Even FetLife.com, ground zero for sexual fetishists online, has refused to blacklist known predators in its midst.) One BDSM blogger described abusers in the kink community as “missing stairs” in a familiar house: people who have lived in the house for years avoid the gap automatically, but visitors are at risk of falling through.
A consent advocate and activist for marginalized sexual communities, who asked not to be named, told me that stigma adds an additional layer of risk when it forces BDSM practitioners to express our sexualities from behind the veil of pseudonyms.
“There are major figures in the BDSM community who have multiple restraining orders against them,” she says. “But how would their partners know that? When everyone uses pseudonyms, criminal histories are easy to hide. You can’t look up restraining orders under a fake name.” …