freaksexual

I got on this topic because of a discussion on Midori’s student list. I highly recommend her workshops.

The question before me is, what do we do about kinky abuse? BDSM practitioners are a group of people who engage in activities that often closely resemble abuse, and sometimes that play crosses over the line into actual abuse. Sometimes this abuse is accidental, the result of a scene gone wrong, but other times it is downright purposeful. While I suspect that the incidence of abuse is lower within the BDSM community than outside it (and surveys such as this one seem to confirm), there are still a certain number of habitual abusers within our ranks. Worse, abusive people can use the trappings of BDSM to disguise their abuse. What can we do about these people? How can we as a community (to the extent we are a community or multiple communities) identify and stop abusers?

Before I get into answers for this question, I want to say that I consider this a feminist issue, because women are much more likely to experience abuse than men, and they are most likely to do so at the hands of men. While there is not much in the way of statistics on this, it is a fair assumption that BDSM practitioners mimic the power dynamics of the general culture in this regard. Also, the fact that straight kinky men are more likely to be sadists in the scene than straight kinky women supports this, if we make the assumption that sadists are more likely to abuse. (There is some question if this last bit is actually a good assumption, but it seems to make sense.) I fully expect that women are on the wrong end of abuse in the kink scene more often than men, as happens in the wider culture. So, finding mechanisms to stop abuse in the scene is a feminist undertaking, even though it would help people across gender (and would help the overall community).

When confronted with this issue, a common first response seems to be to refer it to the legal system. After all, abusive kinky situations do make it into court, so the idea is that we should let the usual authorities do the work of regulating abuse within the community, as they do outside the community. I consider this a cop-out (no pun intended). The law, the police, and the state have failed to significantly reduce abuse outside the community, and there is every reason to think that they will be even less effective when dealing with the BDSM subculture.

Much as it might be popular to show dominatrices and kinky marriage scenes in mainstream movies, BDSM play remains a marginalized activity, one that is nominally illegal in most places. Because it fails to distinguish between kink and abuse, the law itself is therefore insufficient to handle this sort of situation, and there is no reason to think that courts, juries, and police officers will be any better. In fact, the failure of the law in this regard is evident in the composition of the jury: if it were truly a jury of one’s peers, there would be twelve kinksters sitting in it.

Also, depending on legal remedies will of course fail those BDSM practitioners who are marginalized in various ways beyond their BDSM practice. It is foolish to expect that African-Americans, Latinoamericano/as, queers, and people in poverty will be able to get a fair hearing in a kinky abuse case (either as plaintiff or defendant) given that they often do not get such a hearing even when kink is not in play.

We cannot depend on the law to handle abuse. To the extent that we are able, we need to develop extralegal mechanisms around kinky abuse, not just to protect community members from abuse, but to find positive ways to rehabilitate abusers. (Prison, it should be noted, does not rehabilitate violent actors in most cases.) After all, the BDSM community is all about creating positive pursuits for what would otherwise be destructive behavior. If we can teach people to administer serious beatings that are still safe, then we should be able to teach people to overcome their abusive tendencies. The rest of this essay will focus on things we as a community can do.

1) We need to provide community support for victims/survivors of abuse. This support comes both in the form of actually being personally supportive (which often does not happen, unfortunately), and in the form of actual support organizations. Organizations like the National Leather Association have been taking on this task. This work should be continued and expanded, especially at a local level through kink organizations.

2) We need to provide kink-specific resources for abusers to stop abusing. To my knowledge, this has not been happening, though there are similar resources aimed at the queer community and straight men. (Of course, I’m not necessarily in a position to know. If you know of any kink-specific resources, let me know.) We should hand out flyers and set up discussion groups if they do not exist. Again, this is one of those areas where the BDSM community is uniquely positioned to help abusers heal themselves: we have a ready supply of people with vaguely similar desires (say, sadistic straight or bi men) who can help abusers manage their anger and power issues, and stop abusing.

3) We need to educate people on what is and is not abuse, and what is and is not relatively standard kinky practice. This is already happening. It is impossible to crack open a kink manual of any sort without finding some version of SSC (safe, sane, consensual) or RACK (risk-aware consensual kink), both of which contain the key word “consensual”. Furthermore, the idea of the safeword is ubiquitous within kink communities, to the point where it has been leaking into mainstream culture. We should perhaps focus a bit more on doing this sort of education at the first point of contact, which is often munches. Perhaps I will start bringing a “kink and abuse” fact sheet to the munches I attend, to hand out to newbies.

4) We need to self-police the community, and find ways to react to abusive behavior as a community. This is extremely difficult because the BDSM communities can be disparate to the point that even calling them “community” is a bit misleading. Most kink play happens behind closed doors instead of in group play spaces, and I suspect that the majority of people practicing kink have never been to a single event. However, we should do whatever we can within these limits. The limits themselves are no excuse for inaction. I have seen two different suggestions on the self-policing front.

First, we should not be shy about excluding people from clubs or play spaces. I personally have called men out (and they have all been men) on their creepy behavior or nonconsensual touching both at polyamory events and sex/play parties that I have organized. It is not difficult, even when the event is large or the venue is semi-public. In fact, I suspect this is already happening to some extent. If someone started randomly groping people’s asses at my favorite San Francisco play space, I do not think they would make it to the end of the party.

However, this sort of exclusion response is typically not coordinated among venues, nor does it take into account episodes of abuse that happen outside of the venues. Stopping abuse (and other forms of bad behavior) is very difficult if the person in question can just start hanging out in a new locale. If someone is known to be abusive or problematic, we should be able to present them with a solid wall that says “come back when you have changed your behavior”. Will this process be somewhat arbitrary, and subject to the judgment and good intentions of the people running the venues? Absolutely. Is excluding someone in this manner an uncomfortable and often thankless task? Yes. However, neither of these are excuses. We should not be afraid to trust our judgment here, and indeed venue organizers are already making this sort of call on a regular basis. We need to find ways to share information around this.

This brings me to the second suggestion, which is an organized blacklist or rumor mill of some sort. Usually this is conceived of as a website. Judging from what I have read online, this is not a popular idea among kinksters. But I disagree. I think it’s a great idea, and perhaps the best way to reach kinky people who are not in the scene or who are new to BDSM. Let me go through the common objections to this scheme.

There is some question as to who would chose the people who are put up on the website. While I think this is another case where we should not be afraid to use our own judgment, I prefer a website that would be easy to post to, to lower the barriers to entry and just get more information and discussion circulating. A rumor mill website, in other words, or perhaps a rumor mill combined with a set of judgments by community leaders.

People seem to think that this would not be legal, or would attract lawsuits. However, there are a number of other websites running that do similar things: Don’t Date Him Girl, Woman Savers, and Holla Back NYC. (Note these sites are all primarily for women to post on. More on that later.) It is not difficult or illegal to run websites of this sort.

One objection is that these websites are not going to work, or are not going to attract the right audience. This is a legitimate concern, though we really cannot tell without giving it a try. One way to make such a website more popular is to use it for positive as well as negative experiences. In other words, it becomes a sort of BDSM player review website. I personally would love such a site. While I have had lots of kinky lovers and kink experience, I tend to move between venues or scenes. Being able to send people to a website for references would be excellent. Also, this changes the tone of the website, so that a lack of positive reviews would be problem, though not as damning as negative reviews. Even better, if we could attach this review website to one of the popular kink personals sites (which are again entry points into the community), it could function as a personals reference website, which again would attract more users and establish it as an easy way to get information on BDSM practitioners.

Of course, easy access to information on people points out the final objection, namely that such a website would violate privacy and encourage abuse. This appears to be the primary objection, actually, and seems based in people’s fear of losing control of the information that affects their lives.

I suspect that abuse of such a website would be rare, and fairly easily handled. Looking at the sites I have listed above, it is fairly clear that posting a report requires enough time and energy that it is not undertaken lightly. Also, it is typically easy to detect whisper campaigns or attempts to spam a website of this sort, since spammers are rarely up for writing multiple believable stories. We need to step back, take a deep breath, and perhaps relax a bit over what others might be saying about us. I personally am in the most vulnerable position for rumor-mongering: I am a sadistic man who mostly plays with women. However, I trust that any person I meet will trust their own feelings and any interactions we have over what someone has posted on a website. And they will. Even if someone posts something bad and untrue (or even true) about me on a website, hopefully anyone interested in me would take that as the starting point of a conversation about who I am, not the end point. And if they do not, maybe I should not be playing with them. Really, I trust my circle of friends and lovers to support me enough to fend off any malicious rumors. In the final calculus, people will trust their own judgement and make their own decisions, and websites such as this are only providing extra input into those decisions.

Privacy is of course a huge concern in BDSM circles, as people can lose their jobs or otherwise be ostracized if it comes out that they are kinky. However, kinky people already have a number of mechanisms in place to protect themselves, which would not be obviated by a review website. Scene names, the ban on photos in play spaces, and similar mechanisms are there to protect identities. However, these tricks are never perfect. It is entirely possible that your boss will randomly run into you in full fetish gear walking out of that downtown club, and so we are never entirely safe from exposure. People I have known who want guarantees of privacy do not play on kink websites or go to kink events. While the internet of course speeds up the dissemination of personal information, it would not necessarily undermine the privacy of kinksters. For example, if someone is listed by their scene name and description, the posting may be readily identifiable by people in the scene who know them, but not by the general public. The rumor mill is already in use for the purpose of identifying abusers in scenes, and it should be noted that it is probably our most effective mechanism for this, and that people rarely complain that their privacy is being threatened. Putting it on the web makes it more effective.

Our culture maintains a stony wall of silence around abuse, rape, domestic violence, and harassment. This code of silence is what keeps survivors from talking about their experience, what keeps abusers from being named, and what helps maintain an abysmally low rate of rape convictions. While the silence around abuse primarily comes from shame around sexuality, its primary effect is to protect abusers and encourage abuse. Our culture likes to talk a lot about privacy concerns and individual rights, but these arguments are typically deployed selectively, in a sexist manner. Recent outbreaks of online misogyny illustrate this nicely: the same men hiding behind anonymity and “freedom of speech” have no problem posting the pictures, physical addresses, and social security numbers of the women they are attacking. The culture basically puts the privacy and individual rights of people (mostly men) ahead of the right of people (mostly women) to be free of abuse. We should be careful that we do not do the same in conversations around community self-policing and community-based justice.

Note that the three websites I listed above are all public responses available to women. This is no accident. Community-based response is one of the best ways to empower women and stop abuse or harassment.

In order to really address abuse, we need to move towards a model of collective responsibility in our community (and this goes for the overall culture as well). The person most responsible for abuse is the abuser, of course. At the same time we as a community are collectively responsible for abuse that happens in our community, or using the trappings of our community, or through connections made at our venues. We need to take responsibility, come up with collective solutions, and expand the things we are already doing that work. We should not use the situation in the culture at large as our yardstick, because it is heinous. Because we are a subculture, we have an opportunity to do better. Let’s take it.