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Notes -
BDSM relationships are rational and adaptive for (some? many?) modern women
[Epimistic Status: Might just be the girls I date]
Oh boy! Another post on gender and romantic dynamics. Discussions on this topic here tend to go in a few predictable ways, and unfortunately there's a frequent vibe of posters here just not liking women. Leaving aside the whole hypergamy bit, there's frequent sneers about girls being attracted to partners that will mistreat them. This attraction is attributed to two evo psych explanations:
Men with aggressive and dark triad traits are more likely to succeed in gathering resources and accruing power. This makes them valuable mates, but also makes them high risks for physical abuse, infidelity, etc. There's something good correlated with something bad.
Females evolutionarily were frequently coerced by mates. They often didn't get to even choose their mates at all. This goes back all the way to chimps and monkeys. The ones that tolerated the abuse better were more likely to survive and reproduce. One of the pathways to tolerate abuse better is to enjoy it at some level. If you can't really control whether you get hit or not, it's more adaptive to get off on it than have a mental breakdown. The same goes for submissive behavior. Once you're wired deep down to enjoy something, you're going to start seeking it out.
I broadly think these two points are true, and I still like women. I think given submissive and masochistic impulses are wired in, the rational move is satify them while minimizing damage. BDSM relationships (which I'm using here as a catchall for everything from hard power dynamics to good 'ole slapping and choking in bed) are a social technology that fills that role.
Women want things in a partner. They also have different reproductive strategies that don't always neatly coincide. Pretty boys will make pretty daughters. Kind and caring partners are more likely to invest in you and your offspring. Dark triad partners are more likely to be disproportionately successful, but they might hurt you in the process. Straight up abusive partners just need to be survived, and some level of massochism helps.
Some of these reproductive strategies clearly work out a lot better than others. It's much better to end up with a pretty boy than an abusive one, but instincts were evolved when mate choice was much more constrained. Leaving a bad partner is much more of an option now, rendering some of the survival instincts counter produtive. So what's a gal to do with that masochistic drive? Get with a decent partner than have them do BDSM. Much better to be choked by the pretty boy that loves you than the dark triad guy that will actually kill you.
Backdoor on Feminism?
So here's my fringe, underdeveloped thought. Feminism and "womens liberation" broadly decreased the amount women had to submit to their partners. A lot of women liked that change. Some more reactionary ones didn't and explicitly volunteer for more trad lifestyles. I think a lot of women have mixed feelings. They really value the practical gains in freedom in some areas. But in others they didn't really want to stop being submissive. Western blue tribe women are seeped in the idea that feminism is good, and wanting to roll things back is bad. BDSM offers a figleaf for that. It's culture is soaked in the language of consent, so it doesn't contradict feminism. Yep, wearing a collar and being your man's slave is empowering. BDSM offers a framework for picking and choosing what bits of power to keep and return. You can still have your own job, but do everything you husband says at home.
My anecdotes
I had an ex who I was keeping on a leash. She really liked being given orders. One day I asked her to fetch me food a few too many times and she said "I wanted to be your girlfriend, not your servant!" I learned then when girls want to be submissive it's more like they want to be your pet than your maid.
I had two separate exes who ran away from abusive partners and then ended up with me. They were sensible enough to flee at the first sign of trouble. They liked me a fair amount at first, but when I introduced them to BDSM they became enthralled with me. I think early in the relationship were satisfying the Pretty/Caring strategy. Once BDSM hit the mix they felt like they were satisfying Pretty/Caring/Dominant. I think the BDSM community downplays the relationship with domestic violence for PR reasons. There's definitely something there.
There’s many kinds of BDSM frameworks but as far as I know, the “doing everything your husband says at home” 24/7 dynamic is not typical and the average BDSM relationship is more about having “sessions/scenes” with explicit boundaries. But in either case consent isn’t a figleaf, it’s absolutely essential and it’s extremely, extremely unadvisable to do a scene without safe words and having talked about your limits.
BDSM is basically role play. You’re not rolling anything back or contradicting feminism, you’re playing at being a slave and you can stop at any time. Same with CNC, it’s a way to live out a fantasy that would be extremely distressing if it happened for real and you had no way to stop it. I’m not sure “empowering” is the right word to use, but you have a certain kind of power by voluntarily entering a dynamic as submissive, because in a way, the dom is performing for your pleasure, the pressure is on them to do a good job, and if they don’t, you can just stop the entire scene.
It’s obvious to me but the point is for the scenario to be kinky, not practical. Not many subs would be turned on by being ordered to do their dom’s tax returns, which is probably what would happen if the scenario was real instead of just a fantasy for their sexual gratification.
Full service submissive exist, but they’re up there with findom subs and consensual cuckolds for rarity, having pretty esoteric hard nos, and for being overwhelmingly (cis) male.
I’d… also spell out that the more complicated the submissive’s focus, the more likely there’s a narrative they need. Some BDSM doesn’t: for some masochists, they just had a hard medical experience in early puberty involving chronic pain, a cut or injection or pressure made the pain stop, and surprise surprise, that cut or puncture or pressure takes a whole new meaning. Some bondage or dominance subs, the ‘narrative’ is just ‘oh no don’t make me do this thing I want but don’t want make myself admit’.
But even for masochism, that’s not the only variant. ‘I’ve been a bad girl/boy/whatever’ is a cliche, but it’s a cliche that exists for a reason, and that’s to separate the blame from the responsibility. It literally only feels good if you ‘deserve’ it, or you want the release of anxiety from having fucked up and being ‘free’ of that, or it shreds something core to your identity and self-idealation. That’s near-certainly the punchline to Yudkowsky’s Math Pets thing, for those who remember it. Bondage can be about not successfully doing something, or being ‘forced’ into something they’d want to do, or having something you’d normally not think twice about become ‘impossible’.
Even matters like free use aren’t psychologically free. You gotta work with your sub and understand them if you don’t want to breed resentment.
I believe light maledom/femsub dynamics are on a continuum with normal heterosexuality, but extreme BDSM in general, and particularly femdom/malesub dynamics are disruptions that speak to fundamental psychological problems and not kink-as-play.
My crackpot theory is that straight male subs are driven by their actual schemas and beliefs about the world, not by raw sexual desire. Their submission fantasies are actually a means of separating themselves from their sexual desires, which they believe they aren't worthy to fulfill. Submission becomes a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial. "I may not be worthy of having sex with a woman, but I can serve her non-sexual needs." "I may not be able to please a woman, but I can watch and faciliate as she is pleased by another man."
The 'upside' is that you're at least acknowledged by a woman, even if you're humiliated by it. But if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless, then being humiliated by a woman is at least something, some kind of involvement with her, and that's better than nothing.
IMO, this is far, far more common as a fantasy or desire than the actual number of people practicing it, almost entirely due to the complete lack of female dominants.
Female dominants have their own problems -- one thing is there's like 5 of them for every 1 trillion men who want to find one. But also I believe that women who sexually dominate men are almost exclusively 1) mentally ill, and dangerous, predatory or 2) doing it because their male partner got them into it, and his enjoyment of it positively reinforced it or 3) into it because they actually want something else and they've sublimated that desire into dominance.
On #1, IMO, this is not the sort of thing you say at a dinner party, but I believe the majority of self-initiated female dominants are psychopaths, extreme narcissists, or in general people with serious mental disorders who see sexual domination as a power trip. They're often surprised at how low male subs are willing to go, and being able to push against boundaries and find nothing pushing back is the sort of thing that predatory people have always done. An uncomfortable number of female dominants are little more than Warren Jeffs in a dress.
Because of the dearth of female dominants, male subs are often desperate and willing to put up with almost anything, and this is a really, really bad posture to have when entering into a power exchange relationship. "Exploring this side of my sexuality is too dangerous given the environment" needs to be the fallback. But if people were able to do that with their sexuality broadly we'd live in a better world.
On #3, I've seen women who really just wanted to be in a mutualistic and affectionate relationship describe it as a "female led relationship", and their conception of this is literally "having a honey-do list" and "being the one who buys the groceries." I've seen women who simply wanted a man who admired them describe it as "femdom" because their husband called them ugly and they wanted a man she could order to call her beautiful. I've seen women who genuinely wanted a relationship in which she could expect an orgasm now and again describe this as "femdom," because her big idea was that she could order a guy to go down on her.
"Maybe if I get leverage over men and form a relationship in which I'm In Charge, then I can get what I want" is the logic there. In that sense I'm not sure that I can say definitively whether or not it's simply the same phenomenon as the redpill discourse, but from another angle. It's power relations as the resigned second-choice after affection and intimacy didn't work out.
And of course, the biggest portion of #3 is dominatrixes/'findom' 🙄 where "the thing they want" is simply money, and because there's far more demand for female domination than supply, money is a... workable selection mechanism and it's one that many men are willing to pay. Often for crumbs -- again, male subs are desperate, and the amounts of money men are willing to pay to be indifferently humiliated by a woman flabbergasts me. I read a story on the internet once about a mildly sexually traditional woman who got into doing paid femdom chats on the internet, was utterly disgusted by it, but kept going because she made wildly good money. The oldest profession in the world is quite remunerative.
I personally believe a big part of the large numbers of female submissives has to do with women genuinely desiring hot sex, but feeling ashamed of this, for traditional ('sex is sinful'), status ('don't be a slut'), and feminist ('male sexuality objectifies women') reasons.
It's hard to overstate how much of the past 20 years has been a sustained attempt at putting in the water supply a level of cynicism about women's sexuality re: men that competes with the Victorians in terms of how bad it makes people feel about sex. As a teenage boy, I actually believed women got exactly zero pleasure from vaginal intercourse -- not just that they typically couldn't have an orgasm from it, but that they genuinely felt nothing, it had no level of satisfaction either physical or psychological for them and they did it entirely because men made them do it, and then when I actually started having sex and she enjoyed it and said she wanted to do more of it I was utterly shocked. She was too!
It's also not hard to find women whose three extreme kink interests are exactly the same: "free use", breeding, and CNC. In other words, sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and rape. What are women desperately afraid of? What are the complaints we hear from women about their fears of men? They're afraid of being sexually instrumentalized ("objectification"), being stuck with a pregnancy ("deadbeat dad"/"men want to control women's bodies"), and rape, which of course needs no reference because its badness is clear.
IMO, I think this is another form of painful (and not always true) schemas about the world being sublimated into a kind of resigned acceptance, and therefore made in some way pleasurable or sought-out. These young women believe that the state of the world is such that all women can expect is sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and assault, and seeking out explicit BDSM relationships becomes a way of finding a man who will at least admit that's what he's doing, and provide a safe word escape route from the experience of being treated like a warm body by a man's sexual desire that wants nothing else from her.
It's "all sex is rape" being taken to its ultimate conclusion, formalized and made explicit, even to the point where a submissive woman's desire for sex is sublimated into it. If this is the dark and unforgiving world a woman lives in, and every man is in fact a rapist-in-waiting, then the only option available, unconsciously and psychologically, is to find one who will at least be nice about it.
I guess you can say I have ethical and psychological critiques of the kink community. I don't believe they're in general bad people (although predators love to wear the language of kink like sheep's clothing), but I do think there are unexamined psychological problems, pain, and mental illnesses that seriously affect the community and those deserve to be interrogated.
[disclaimer: I might be reading past you, given some other discussions you put forward separating this-category-objection from stuff like hotwifing or stag-and-vixen or other sub/dom-themed-but-not-matching kinks. I've tried to trim this down so it isn't a tl;dr of completely missing your point if so, but I apologize if I did in fact just miss your point.]
If you're just saying the physics, biology, and psychology aren't friendly to it, I'll agree with and go further than that. Even if you go looking for a power bottom, male or female, the relevant mucus membranes in question get tired out a lot faster than a top will get chaffed; if you go looking to get pegged, the artificiality of a sex toy is practically small fries compared to how quickly even fit women tire of thrusting; if you want to get beaten black-and-blue, it's actually a pretty big psychological ask for the person with the flogger. For some stuff, there's not even the potential for direct interplay: there are definitely women pegging tops who match pretty well philosophically with male subs, but a male foot fetish sub and a female foot domme are usually looking for entirely different things.
But I don't think "a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial" is the only, or even most common, response.
((Hell, I'm not convinced it's even the most common source of denial fetish, though it probably is top for heterosexual men.))
That class does exists: the whole self-flaggelating 'hit me because my boner is evil' thing does happen sometimes, the human pet who's about getting stuffed into a cage and ignored, the guys who are into chastity not because the denial or test makes the sex hotter but because it's about being desexualized or unmanned, the cuckolds that are only visible in the scene to make sure they're not getting off or pathetic for getting off, so on. There's some finesse about whether the influencers are 'deliberately' inflaming the kink, rather inflaming the treatment of heterosexual male desire as fundamentally unhealthy, but to be fair that's somewhere between asking about how many angels dance on the head of a pin and tomato-tomatoe sorta difference.
So I'm definitely not debating whether it's present or got that directionality, or that (most) of it is unhealthy.
I'm skeptical that it's massive, growing, or that common. I can understand why it feels that way, given the tendency for media involving this genre to end up shoved into random unrelated spaces, to be extremely off-putting, and to be hard to avoid without getting exposed to the off-putting parts.
The numbers are a good deal more complicated. That's with the caveat that statistics aren't very available or reliable, as evidenced by anyone taking Aella seriously, and what statistics are available merge stuff that's clearly inside the category as from outside. But we don't see cuckolding or male humiliation overtaking a lot of more mainstream kinks, or even weirder kinks that act as sublimation of prohibited desire for sex, on sites specifically focused around fantasy.
That's not quite the fantasy. There's a fair argument that this is incredibly 'safe horny' - it's not quite 'step on me' bad, but it's still pretty intentionally portrayed so that the man's sexuality is 'blameless' or 'victimized' - but it's still recognizing the male as an object of desire, if sometimes a lopsided or goofy one. This is not a video written from any perspective but androphilia and value-of-men, even if it's also very much not going to have the man top afterward.
That's not common, from either side. It can still be psychosexually weird: the full service sub wants to prove himself 'worthy of sex' by doing chores, human pets want to prove themselves a good boy (and get weird about those literal words) as a way of replacing or burying inhibitions, the guys who need to be bound so their second thoughts don't fuck over their boner. Hell, there's a not-undeserved reputation for het male subs as selfish because they have a sexual script centering around them and their orgasm even as they're 'worshipping' a woman in ways that require her to bend over backwards.
((Not always literally, but the figurative parts can be worse. Yoga has nothing on what a foot fetishist demands of their 'tops', and asking a loved one of any gender to hit you hard is a psychologically big ask!))
This class exists, but I'd caution that they're going to be overrepresented in both the literature and in the markets (for lemon reasons).
There's a lot of psychosexually weird stuff that favors femdom. A bound sub is 'unthreatening', and there's a lot of reasons women find that a lot easier to get or stay in the mood. Bruises and cuts and piercings are a way of making a male sub 'yours, irrecoverably', and women don't have to be so possesive as to be mentally ill to want that. Chastity can be a way of making sure everything he does, he does for you, and then after-orgasm overstimulation can get a guy to do the funnest and most attractive motions imaginable. Pretty much every pegging top I've run into frames it as a trust and vulnerability thing. A guy in an uncomfortable pose that needs you to make control the situation... needs you, that's not rocket science. A leash is a fulcrum, a blindfold is a way to drive focus.
There's a mismatch even when this comes up - just like the foot kink, these aren't mirrors of their sub variants and especially not of their male sub variants - but it's more subtle than the numbers alone.
You offer some degenerate forms of these motivations, and I recognize they exist and happen, but this is also... just kinda how relationships work?
I don't want to overstate that. Presumably someone on this planet has encountered a perfect mirror to their own desires and interests in every way. But for everyone else, a good relationship necessarily means growing to work with your partner, and making compromises to meet their needs, and spelling out compromises so they know how to meet yours.
There's a significant discrepancy in what gender prefers sex in the morning or evening. If you're in a het relationship you're more likely than not going to end up not matching on that. It's nothing that gets spelled out on online hookups, or tested by matchmakers, or shows up on people's bumper stickers, or in Seinfield. Often it's not even something that's an explicit discussion. It's just something that's gotta be handled.
Kink mismatches don't have to turn into something broken. The median form of #2 probably doesn't look like a big heart-to-heart conversation filled with therapy speak, but the boring 'hey, could we try X', 'doesn't tickle my pickle, but seeing what it does to you is kinda fun' is actually pretty enjoyable from the latter perspective, and while it doesn't necessarily turn into liking the kink on its own, for some people it can. The median form of #3 might not be 'real' domination in the same sense as someone that someone who had Feelings from the first time they saw a cartoon character tied to a railroad, but there's a lot of male subs for whom 'I order you to go down on me' is a not-that-briar-patch moment and it's a perfectly reasonable exchange for them.
That's not just or even primarily a sex thing. What's the Proper way to load a dishwasher? Because if you live with someone long enough, you'll pretty quickly find that there's a million ways to do it wrong. Does the responsibility for cleaning out the laundry lint trap fall on the person removing the clean clothes, or the one putting in dry ones? I'd never have tried FFXIV if my SO didn't get me into it and probably never would have liked it without that had anyone else tried; that doesn't make it bad. (The same SO also liked Alien: Prometheus, so we can definitely declare that Pavlov is definitely not mind-control here.)
Yeah, especially the central cases, will agree here. It's not the only motivation for kink, but it's definitely a major part and probably in the top three for femsubs (and I could believe it beats masochism-as-learnt-response and submission-as-permission-structure).
I'll quibble that most 'breeding' as a kink is more about primal and unprotected sex (to the point where 'no pregnant, only breed' is a snowclone). 'Free use' is typically more about sublimating the need for explicitly saying 'yes', but they're desperately afraid of that for traditionalist, status, and feminist reasons, too. There's a literal women-as-livestock version, but it's not particularly common.
((I think pregnancy kink and 'stuck' kink are probably overrepresented as a woman's extreme kink? But they're pretty far from top-ten as extreme women's kinks go.))
But my bigger objection is that I don't think it's fully about fear, or at least fear alone. There's a lot of people who have complicated feelings about motherhood and have a impregnation kink, but it seems like the overwhelming do need to have at least a complicated feeling on the matter; with fear and some other consideration, even if not a consideration you'd ever want to go with. If you just hate it, even the more fatalistic women just have backup plans.
Yeah, that's reasonable, and I agree. You don't get vore fantasies from a healthy perspective about what sex should be, or need to tie down your romantic partner to sate your anxiety from a centered and stable mindset, (or, to self-criticize like orientation play if you have a healthy relationship with your own identity). There's a lot of kinksters that are coming to kink from a fucked up place, or get there and find that they're among mad people now and have been for years.
I just don't think they're necessarily a self-abnegating or sexuality-abnegating fucked up place.
I actually would say that the signs of the growth of this genre don't come from fantasy-focused sites -- they come from traditionally-vanilla sites where these kinks are gaining significant ground. As more and more men are addicted to pornography, which inherently includes the experience of watching a different man have sex with a woman, there's a strong current of shame and self-contempt that I see growing in the water supply. Coupled with the increasing sex gap and loneliness crisis, what's happening is that increasingly men feel that the possibility of sex is above them, that women in particular are 'above' them, beautiful but untouchable, and this psychosexual viewpoint, combined with porn, is corrosive.
When I say "influencers" I mean something more like "onlyfans creators" and "pornstars"; a growing genre of pornography, even softcore, is "woman berates you on camera for your inability to have sex with women," which as a sign of the times is something along the lines of the rivers turning to blood. Onlyfans creators are starting to turn to this, because the demand is there, and guys who pay onlyfans creators for the 'privilege' of indistinguishable nudes seem to me to have a sense of profound sexual inferiority, which belittling and humiliating femdom can and does exploit. The problem is that shame is being eroticized and sold back to the ashamed for profit.
I don't doubt that these kinks make up only a small percentage of the active, long-lived, and well-practiced fantasy scripts in kink communities, but my concern is about the metastasis into vanilla or mainly-vanilla spaces, where I believe these kinks do real psychological damage and contribute to significant shame.
I'm not so vanilla as to be totally prudish, but I admit that reading this part made my skin crawl.
I guess reading about pure femdom gives me the same kind of heebie jeebies as when vanilla women read about maledom dynamics -- the whole thing just rhymes with "someone's being abused here, something bad is happening, get away from this as fast as you possibly can" in a way that strikes me pre-cognitively. I also don't know that I'd describe "I've cut you so you're mine, irrecoverably" as a not mentally ill cognition, but I guess at that point we're entering Szasz territory of debating what a mental illness is, and at the very least I simply believe that kind of thinking reveals a level of possessive that I can't pre-cognitively differentiate from predation. Your examples so alarmed my unconscious threat-detection system that I went into fight or flight.
I can understand this, and my point in the post was to assert that this is essentially what I think is the not-broken version of femdom. I suppose it's just a prior, or a psychological heuristic, for me that a woman who autonomously, on her own, developed the kink for domination is not the sort of person I would feel safe around. I also think #3 is much sadder than you're giving it credit -- it's not about "wanting oral sex and demanding it," but genuinely sad stuff, like a woman whose reddit post I once saw talked about how her husband calls her ugly and she was looking for "male submissives whose task it would be to praise me highly", which is all kinds of fucked up no matter where someone lands on kink.
In general, I find desires for domination to be deeply uncomfortable, and again I just can't differentiate them from predation. I can understand the masochism-pleasure-pain thing, and I can understand the "obedience as permission" thing, but what I find incredibly hard to understand is sadism. I hope I never understand it.
I do resent to an extent the fact that women I've dated have pushed me to accept those kinds of kinks, and it's a consistent thing for me that romantic, slow, intimate sex is what I enjoy and is memorable to me. Rough sex just doesn't even feel like sex to me, in a way that's hard to describe.
And I guess, to put it bluntly, "I enjoy the part of sex where I'm blindfolded and flogged," makes about as much sense to me as "I enjoy the part of the football game where the pitcher throws the ball at the batter" -- just seems like a category error.
That's fair, though in turn it's harder to get serious numbers. PornHub-Straight has a cuckold category, and it does beat VR porn... but it's a third the size transgender stuff, a fifth the size of public sex or squirting, and half the size as explicit watersports. And that still has a bunch of stuff that's not actually excluding the male sub from having sex with his wife, nevermind berating it.
It's also hard to separate popularity from prominence. I don't know much about the het side of OF, but last I looked one of the biggest personalities on the gay side was feederist kink. This is a weird, (literally and physically!) unhealthy redirection, to the extent I can understand it... and it's also incredibly rare as something people actually want, and afaict isn't something you can get trained into. It just naturally favors concentration, both because feedes are rare, and because the nature of the kink favors multiple feeders. That's still bad, but it's bad in the way Jackass is bad, rather than because it's trying to hypnotize people. If it weren't for the inevitable anorexia or bulimia, it'd just be dumb.
Unfortunately, I can't find even bad numbers on OF kink breakdowns, so I can't really speak to or against it in deeper detail.
That's fair. They are weird kinks, and I tried to pick ones that were weird in the specific way you're motioning around, rather than, say, omorashi.
Do these things strike you as wrong because of their motives, because of the degree of possessiveness, or because the actions don't fit your sexual register? Most women I've met into this sort of marking aren't especially possessive (for women, damning with faint praise as that might be by gay standards). Male impregnation kink (uh, straight or gay) can focus around the exact same 'we're together forever' now thing, as can just the 'fingernails down back' kink, or even people who get really worked up over giving hickies. Are couple's tattoos or piercings bad because they're Szasz-adjacent, or just because they're trash?
Those sort of situations exist, and they are sad, and there's a lot of variants on it. I just don't see the recovery as the sad bit, necessarily. The initial abuse is sad. Maladaptive coping mechanisms do happen, and they are bad as a tautology, and those are sad.
Getting off on a merely weird coping mechanism feels more... nonoptimal? Inefficient? Getting into relationships where 'value my appearance' or even 'don't call me ugly' is a sexual ritual rather than just room temperature is a limiting factor because a lot of guys will genuinely find that goofy, but it doesn't mean you can't also have it as the room temperature outside of the bedroom (or the scene), either. But the asshole ex-husband caused the damage; this is just the repair work.
If you have this coping mechanism, it's worth admitting and spelling it out, both to yourself and to potential partners. It is a limitation. Even small stuff can be enough of an ask, and some forms are a lot more invasive. That's true of a million things, though.
That comes into a difficult spot, because there are some useful notes to show ways domination can be different from predation, or how healthier (or at least more sub-friendly) forms of sadism look, if sometimes weird ones that are far away from what you see as sex (or far away from what is sex, thank you fucking machines), but I don't want to throw them out if they're going to be actively harmful for you.
I can empathize with the division: even as someone that likes subbing, it doesn't take much that doesn't fit the scene to break the mood, and I've experienced it. Dunno if it's as rough for me as for you, but it's definitely a difficult situation, and actually pushing back can be uncomfortable.
Not wanting a single drop of it's absolutely fair, and honest, and something you can and should draw a thick red line around. Just because someone has these kinks doesn't obligate you to try them out, and even if someone has these kinks for sympathetic reasons, that doesn't mean anyone has to try them out.
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