Tame BDSM “How-To” Books
Monday, February 15th, 2010I’ve noticed that a lot of BDSM books seem to go to extreme lengths to stress the importance of safety, safe-words, Safe-Sane-Consensual, etc. Important!: I do not think that this is a bad thing! But it seems to be at odds with some of the older BDSM traditions. For example, in my experience, there are many in the leather lifestyle (and especially Old Guard) that don’t play with safe words.
So I’m wondering if many published S&M how-to books are written with the kid gloves on because that’s all publishers are willing to print. As one example, Jay Wiseman, author of SM 101 among other books, is pretty adamantly against any type of breath play or choking. Even carotid chokes by people who know what they’re doing; chokes which have been used in Jiu Jitsu for hundreds of years without fatality. Of course I’d never recommend that a beginner try such a thing, but saying that it shouldn’t be done, across the board, is extreme in my opinion. There is always some element of risk, but that is also less risky than a lot of the things that he does encourage in his books. But I digress.
I think another part of the reason that many published SM books seem to be conservative (hah!) when it comes to theses sorts of things is that the intended audience for many such books is BDSM newbies, for the most part. You don’t exactly want to tell a newbie it’s sometimes okay to play without safewords; that’s like telling a kid it’s sometimes okay to ingest bleach. While it’s true (there’s a little bleach in your tap water), it’s easy to take it the wrong way and end up doing something dangerous.
But is that perhaps giving the younger generation a bias? Laying down “laws” which, to quote Pirates of the Carribean, are really more of guidelines? It’s not uncommon to see the attitude of, “If you’re not doing it how I think is best, then you’re doing it wrong,” but these days that seems to usually end up coming out as, “If you’re not playing with these certain certain precautions (like safe words), you’re doing it wrong.”
7 Comments to “Tame BDSM “How-To” Books”
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We live in a society where accidents don’t happen. If something bad happens, then it must be someone’s fault and that someone must be punished. As a society we enforce this both at a legal and social level. Is it any surprise then that these books would go the extreme towards caution? Remember that domestic abuse is a state crime (the victim doesn’t have to press charges), and there’s many a S&M evening that could be prosecuted if you were unlucky enough to get an aggressive DA.
Sorry for rambling, but my point is this. For such a system of blame to exist, there must be hard and fast rules for who is “right” and “wrong”. Otherwise we’d have to accept that sometimes mistakes do happen, people do get hurt, and there is no one that SHOULD be blamed… and that is something we will not accept (anytime in the foreseeable future)
Hah, I feel this about to turn into a medical tort reform discussion, and that both of us would be preaching to each other’s choir in talking about it. 🙂
To your point, it’s a bit of a catch-22. Even if you do everything right, go out of your way to take safety precautions, but something goes wrong… the top is still every bit as legally liable. So it does make sense to minimize the possibility of something going wrong by going to lengths with safety (and again, I do think safety is a very important thing).
Maybe it is, as someone else called it, the more litigious nature of today’s society that has caused a lot of this. But then again, if that results in fewer people being hurt by accident, and newbies taking things more slowly, then that is a silver lining at least.
You know what I’m going to say.
I’m not (god forbid) advocating recklessness (perish the thought – what sort of madman…), but I can’t mention knifeplay without a forty-minute lecture on the subject by some fat, leather-panted parrot of some 55-year-old douche in Kansas with Wordperfect and RedTube as his “first-hand experience.”
Frankly, I never thought I’d see cleft assholes in a community of against-the-grain people. It’s the first sign, to me, of someone full of shit. You don’t see a lot of gun advocates who jump down your throat with a lecture on gun safety the minute you say you might like to go to the range someday.
Yeah, there’s a lot of age-ism in the lifestyle too, I’ve found. People assume that if you’re young (or look young) — which in lifestyle terms generally means younger than 40-40 — then you must be new/not know what you’re doing/etc.
Also, I think a lot of doms (especially male ones) tend to be “helpful” as a guise to put themselves in a position of authority and trust, and eventually seduction. It’s interesting to watch what happens when there’s an attractive piece of new meat in the scene. “O hai! My toyz, let me show u them!”
Jay Wiseman has a very mixed reputation. Did you know that he now works as an expert witness in BDSM cases … and talking about how dangerous everything we do is? He basically makes his living setting legal standards that set some folks (eg anyone who does breath play) up to be attacked, from what I understand. I’m not really up on this debate but I know there’ve been some threads on FetLife about it recently.
I’ve recently become aware of this, through FetLife discussions — probably the same ones that you’re talking about. Philip the Foole seems to have some good logical points in those discussions, and the_lab_rat has some good legal points, both in opposition to Jay’s points. Here is something that Philip had to say in regards to Jay being an expert witness in breath play cases (I hope the blockquote HTML works here):
I’m actually drafting a post about breath play, and carotid chokes in particular, for release within the next day or so.
[…] mentioned breath play a bit in my last post; specifically, that Jay Wiseman is against all forms of breath play. And as a preface to this, […]