BDSM isn't a Slippery Slope That Sinks Into Domestic Violence

In 2016 when I got involved in BDSM, I thought the boundary between kink and abuse was so narrow you could slink right through it in a moment of thoughtlessness. I spent many months asking more experienced people how I could stay on the right side of that far-too-permeable membrane. None of them gave me quite what I was looking for. They shrugged and said, "You just will. It's called consent."

This wasn’t obsessive or paranoid enough to be useful to me—I was determined that you HAD to be terrified and obsessive to prevent a consensual BDSM scene from transforming into domestic abuse by accident.

More than a few BDSM scenes later, I became exactly like the people who'd shrugged at my noob self. Kink, it turned out, wasn't on a downward trajectory that lead to domestic violence, mainly because love and contempt are opposites. There isn't a membrane between consensual BDSM and abuse. There is an entire universe.

As a masochist, one of my favourite parts of BDSM is the second between the last point of impact and the first cuddle. It's always amazed me how the dominants I've known can switch so fluidly and easily from Dirty Harry to Cuddly Harold. But they do it. <shrug> They just do.

I've been involved in an abusive relationship before. The man in question never beat me nonconsensually. Our sadomasochistic play never did me any emotional damage. It was his psychological manipulation and gaslighting that destroyed me. Domestic violence isn't always about getting thrown into a wall.

People who are compelled by CNC often choose risk awareness over SSC, partly because we're willing to take certain risks provided we do so with open eyes. And that's okay. Those risks are ours to take. Just as we get to jump out of planes or abseil into caves, we get to engage in harder scenes if we want to. Your unwillingness to expose yourself to the same risks does not make our scenes domestic violence.

Many of the kink community's most compassionate people are hard sadists. I've met a few, so let me tell you what I know about such dominants: it takes an ocean of compassion and empathy to play hard in an S&M dynamic. You must dial up your skills of observation impossibly high so that you can spot trouble before things start going wrong. Your empathy must be entire or you will break hearts and other things. You must see the slightest flash in the eye, the smallest difference between tears of physical pain and emotional trauma. You must be absurdly honest and vulnerable or your lack of self-knowledge will destroy you.

Does that sound like domestic violence to you? I don’t think so.