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Thanks for the substantive engagement. I had to reflect on it.
I'm not the biggest fan of tattoos in the world, but I'll admit, a tasteful, discrete couples tattoo is up there with "Baptizatus sum" in terms of tattoos I could respect. I think it's a silly idea, because that's a dangerous thing to mark your body with given the possibility of divorce and it tempts fate, but you know, I don't totally hate it.
And on reflection, I actually don't think it's the possessiveness of it that makes this concerning to me. It's the bodily harm element. I suppose I have what the kinksters would call a 'hard limit' for bodily harm, weaponry, cutting. I also understand there's a big thing in the kink world where people get bruised up and it's a point of pride, and I find that hard to think about. I guess I understand a little redness on the butt if you're into spanking, but when hematomas get involved I'm extremely squicked. I have a slight impulse to use the "I think X is good, actually" meme here, and I guess I'll just say it: "I think people leaving the bedroom uninjured is good, actually."
I actually find possessiveness, when it's mutual, hot and one of the more fun aspects of a monogamous LTR. So the fact that that women into cutting men with knives aren't actually that posessive is actually a disappointment, in one sense, to me. And if they're not particularly possessive by the standards of women, that in a way contributes to my point: that to act this way towards a man creates distance between her and him, in a way that may make actual long-term committed love psychologically improbable.
I guess I'm very skeptical of most means of social control, and I have a bit of that libertarian "ThIs Is My LaNd!" energy in me, where I imagine myself in the place of someone being sexually dominated in the way you're describing, and the visceral reaction is "get the hell away from me." I control me.
So it's not possessiveness as much as it is control that I find uncomfortable; possessiveness in the mutual self-gift sense -- "I'm yours forever, you're mine forever" -- is the most romantic thing in the world. But when it gets to, "I have placed a locked device around your member so you do things for me" it just activates primal bodily defenses. Partly because it's just weird, and partly because it's not mutual.
What strikes me, I suppose, is that "we're together forever" is a good impulse for a couple to have, and it would be great if we had a major social institution that could ratify this formally so people don't have to rely on tattoos and piercings to accomplish it. We could keep the jewelry aspect. Maybe men in robes could officiate.
I guess what I'm saying is that, as a good socialcon, I have suspicions that maybe some elements of kink are post-sexual-revolution attempts to re-impose the compelling aspects of the tradition, and I worry it does so, but in a degraded form.
I'll cop to having had some fairly submissive fantasies from time to time, and if you
bound and gagged me andforced me to take the BDSMtest honestly at gunpoint, I think you'd see me ending up on that edge of the spectrum pretty decisively. If this is what you've been suspecting all along, congratulations, I'll give you one Stanley Nickel.But I think what alarms me in reading your comment is how... alien, and potentially dangerous the 'dominant side' of these kinks are. As I said before, I flat out don't understand sadism as psychology, and I have a serious ethical worry that building out the neurological pathways associated with it, even as part of sex and role play, is a change in the person that leads to vice, not virtue. I just have no desire to 'control' people in the way you've described, and I guess I would find it fantastically hard to trust someone who expressed that sadism or that kind of intense control formed a part of their psychological makeup.
Moreover, I just have significant doubts that femdom/maledom dynamics can coexist with heterosexual love as I understand it. I just have a strong prior that small elements of disrespect in a relationship, which are behaviorally indistinguishable from some elements of femdom, will eventually bubble into large-scale conflicts and profound disrespect that will destroy the relationship. The kinkster claim is that the underlying psychology is different, even as the behavior looks the same, but that's what any apologist says about something that looks bad, and the internal psychological state of dominant women is invisible to me and it would take a very large mountain of evidence to prove it to my satisfaction.
It should be noted that our conversation here is taking place as part of a thread based on a comment that argues some elements of maledom BDSM are compelling to women because of a widespread female desire to submit to men in broad contexts. This is obviously the subject of intense and impassioned debate, but what is hard for me to deny is that maledom dynamics, at the very least, follow the gradient of standard heterosexuality in a way femdom doesn't.
A corrolary of this is that, to follow femdom dynamics where they lead, you must work against this gradient, and I have serious concerns that doing this would also work against the normal psychological gradients that keep men and women together.
I do my best to resist the blackpill, but there are elements of the blackpill I find at least somewhat plausible, and the risk of the blackpill being true indicates to me that the risk of these dynamics to heterosexuality is potentially ruinous. To use the language of the blackpill: saying that these dynamics don't utterly ruin and destroy heterosexuality is to say that women stick with betas, and in particular stick with them while holding them to be the primary object of their sexual interest. I'm just not convinced that it's possible for a woman to 'look down on' or 'control' a man sexually, while still loving him.
To belabor the metaphor, it's a hard pill to swallow, intellectually speaking. It's a nice thought, but I hold whatever fantasies I may have internally, because I just don't see a good argument for how they'd ever be treated with respect or understanding or desire.
I guess it's, again, my socialcon self showing up here, but I'm not sure my first description of it would be "a merely weird nonoptimal coping mechanism." I think what's being asked for is simply love, in its true form, and it's my opinion that making this a 'sexual ritual' -- or more particularly to what's going on, a ritual of control -- is a healthy response. But I also have a configuration of morals such that I hold even people in pain to an incredibly high standard of conduct.
And, as a hopeless romantic, I do have to admit I find it hard not to see a romance-shaped hole in every human heart, and configurations of intimacy that lack this, or seem to approximate it without fully reaching it, strike me as strictly worse than nothing at all. But this requires a pretty demanding set of metaphysics and morals to uphold, and I don't necessarily expect that people will find this persuasive even if I do.
Ah -- I think something got lost in translation here. What I mean is that I actually have felt pushed into being a 'dominant' partner with women before, and haven't liked it. Even if she enjoyed it a lot and demanded I do it more, I really didn't enjoy the part where her nipples ended up bruised or the nasty degrading names she wanted me to call her. It just doesn't feel right to me. Again, I like the version of sex where everybody walks away uninjured. I realize that puts me in a minority.
I admit that female sexuality includes a lot of these features, and I don't love it, really, but I've accepted that to get the companionship and intimacy that I want I have to pretend I enjoy domming from time to time.
No woman has ever offered to dominate me in any sense, and I don't know what I'd do if the offer were made.
I've experienced being on the receiving end of someone's dominant fantasy, in fantasy solely, but it wasn't a woman who did that, and I was alarmed enough by what they were saying that I got the hell away from them as quickly as possible. It hot for a bit, but I knew very quickly this person Meant Trouble.
I suppose the overall texture of my feelings about the kink community is that I just don't experience sex as an avenue of 'play' and identity shifting in the way they do -- as far as I'm concerned, sex is the most identity-relevant and immediate experience you can have, and it's been my experience that trying to shift it away from that identity and immediacy cheapens it, makes it less compelling.
I also find it very hard to participate in role-play and identity shfting in non-sexual contexts, and things like acting, ass-kissing, dishonesty, going along to get along, play pretend are all very difficult for me. I experience the world very immediately and very, perhaps the word is authentically? and I find it hard to put on airs. I just kind of am what I am. So perhaps I just have the wrong psychological configuration to find any of this comprehensible, except insofar as I've stated.
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