How BDSM Frames Can Teach You to Talk About Sex
While they may look the same to the untrained eye, BDSM is the opposite of Fight Club: the first rule of BDSM is to talk about BDSM. Lot.
One of the many things that annoy me about the mainstream portrayal of kink is how rarely you see negotiations – real conversation – between kinksters in films and on television. In the real world of BDSM, communicating about what we want to do, how we are going to do it, and what our limits are before, during and after a scene is the norm among experienced players – and should be the norm. period. In most mainstream descriptions of the subculture, however, we usually see a kink without a preamble (and it often seems like it is being played out in a world where consensus is muddy at best ).
While the BDSM community does go for kinks without reconciliation and harm (also known as assault) – this is another essay another time around, my friends – these limited and unrealistic images portray BDSM as an inherently dangerous activity and lifestyle. But there is only one bad fantasy in BDSM: this responsible play can be self-centered, unintentional, and unaccountable to the larger community. When responsible players put that fear aside, kink can be emotionally and physically resilient as well as damn cool.
To be clear, I am not interested in whitewashing or denying BDSM. This is not your usual pastime! But what I’m really interested in is making sure that all players, especially novices and inexperienced ones, have the tools they need to play and participate in BDSM – and in all sex in general – in the most responsible ways.
So what does it mean to be responsible for what the uninitiated might find very irresponsible? In the community, we have three useful acronyms that are used to refer to all of this.
SSC – Safe, Reasonable and Consistent
The oldest of these three acronyms, SSC, dates back to the 1980s , when gay S / M clubs tried to promote what we now call informed consent, both within and outside their own circles.
Broadly speaking, “safe” means that all participants must be aware of the risk of any kink and either eliminate or reduce it as much as possible. “Sane” refers to the need to approach these actions in a common sense, with all parties capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality (this can refer to mental states as well as levels of intoxication and / or altered consciousness due to substances). “Agreed” means that everyone has voluntarily agreed to the actions in the menu and can alert other players if this changes at any time during the scene.
The growing popularity of the leather scene in the wider gay community meant that these organizations, namely the Hellfire Club of Chicago and the New York-based Gay Male S / M Activists (GMSMA), needed a slogan that communicated their values to other kinksters as well as the entire the world. hostile to their growing profile. According to David Stein , a member of the GMSMA committee, the club wanted to distinguish itself from stereotypes about S / M as “harmful, antisocial, predatory behavior.”
Stance – risk-adjusted consensus inflection
At the turn of the millennium, a new evolution of the SSC – RACK appeared. RACK simultaneously interacts with and challenges the SSC; “Safe” and “normal” are subjective terms that do not mean the same thing to everyone. “I don’t know about you, but most of the BDSM I do will not be considered safe,” BDSM instructor Daemonumx writes in his newsletter.
My leather partner, Daemonumx shares an interest with me in a game that is risky by any standard, and of course vanilla. No matter how careful we are, these (very fun) activities come with certain risks. This means that RACK is better suited for our purposes than SSC.
We take the stage knowing, as far as possible, about the risks that we and all participants take on ourselves; Like skydiving, mountaineering, and childbirth participants, we engage in something that can be fun, enjoyable, transcendental, or rewarding without requiring it to be “safe.” “Risk awareness” means that both parties to the negotiation have studied the proposed actions, are informed of the risks involved and have agreed on how they intend to deal with them, ”writes Gary Switch .
In a subculture where learning is self-directed or delivered through apprenticeships, skill exchanges, or workshops, skill-based knowledge is vague and often difficult to access, period. Add that to the natural variety of risk profiles and desires, and one size doesn’t fit all. As Cross writes for XCBDSM : “RACK puts responsibility … on the person. This enables everyone to define their own risk profile. ”
Finally, “normal” in the SSC stigmatizes mental illness — something we paraphilics , with our history of pathologization, might be more sensitive to.
PRICK – personal responsibility based on informed consent
This brings us to PRICK , a new cut that I’ve only seen in the last few months. As a player in the RACK era, I was a little annoyed at first to find an acronym that didn’t immediately add anything new to the responsibility structure. But the more I thought about it, the more it became clearer.
What does PRICK do and RACK don’t? This creates space not only for awareness of risk, but also for personal responsibility for the risky choices we make – a useful distinction for practices that very often exist in dynamics of power inequalities. As a masochist, I take physical risks when I expose my body to pain and even harm far greater than that of the sadist who owns it – but the sadist also takes risks, including emotional responsibility for potential harm to me, because a also legal liability for harm caused if something goes wrong (I do not want to personally involve the authorities, but the possibility of their participation is one of the regrettable risks that we take when we play!).
As part of the PRICK model, my partners and I enter our scene not only knowing the risks, but also with the intention of taking responsibility for our decisions (this, of course, does not include violations of consent, for which only violators are responsible.). There are experiences and even a few strange relationships that I regret, but where there was agreement, I have no bitterness or anger. Consent gives a sense of power even in retrospect.
The need for acronyms like SSC, RACK, and PRICK indicates that our hardware-heavy lifestyles are expensive to maintain – and I wouldn’t want it to be any different. I want this approach to be more normal in a wider culture as well. While the discourse around enthusiastic consent, sexual positivity and #MeToo attempts to satisfy the need for communication, “ordinary” people, heterosexual or homosexual, can learn a thing or two about safety, consent, and desire from the structures of BDSM.