I try and bring my readers a range of links. Some smart, some funny and some annoying. Sadly, this article on Slate by William Saletan is from that final category. His basic point seems to be that S&M will never go mainstream. That may or may not be true, or even desirable, but his backing reasoning is idiotic. It takes the form of slippery slope arguments, a sure sign of a poorly thought out point of view. For example…
BDSM can be quite dangerous. Responsible practitioners insist it must be “safe, sane, and consensual.” But it attracts people who like to push boundaries. Some submissives are adrenaline junkies: They don’t believe in safety. Recently, several men have admitted to or have been charged with or convicted of crimes including sexual abuse, kidnapping, and murder, all under the cover of BDSM. These men don’t represent BDSM, but they do represent the far end of sadism.
The first part of this is just dumb. Some people like motorsport, rock climbing or parachuting out of planes. They’re adrenaline junkies. Do they also not believe in safety? And if some people go motor racing without a crash helmet does that mean it’s inherently unsafe for all? The second part is offensive. If they don’t represent BDSM then why bring it up? It’s like talking about dating and then bringing up the fact that some men are rapists.
He then goes onto claim that consent cannot be maintained, safewords don’t work and that non-consensual slavery is alive and well. It’s tempting to go through his reasoning line by line and pull it apart, but life’s too short to spend on this kind of drivel. However, I do want to comment on some of the posts and comments I’ve seen around the internet that followed the article. As you’d expect a lot of people were annoyed by it (including Dan Savage) but a few tended to make the argument “Yes, there are crazy people doing X but there’s nothing wrong with Y.” Inevitably X was something they thought weird (piercing, electricity, breathplay, etc.) and Y was something they liked (bondage, pegging, D/s roleplay, etc.). In doing this there making exactly the same mistake Saletan does.
There isn’t a hierarchy of kinky activity or gateway activities to the world of the Cenobites. People doing edge play don’t have more issues with consent or safewords than people doing light bondage. Dangerous activity isn’t limited to BDSM and the capacity to abuse isn’t correlated with your sexual tastes. Sadly assholes who put others at risk and have issues with consent are a worldwide problem in all parts of life.
I’ll finish with an activity that Mr. Saletan considers particularly harrowing – breathplay. I just hope the Sado Girls site didn’t need to pay for psychological counseling for these two after the photoshoot.
