‘More acceptance’ of S&M needed

[Imnobody4]

talkradio.co.uk/news/more-acceptance-needed-sm-activities-19032230392
My morning isn't starting well. Haven't heard the programme - not sure I could stand it.

Is all this kink positive malarkey because of that chuffing book "fifty shades of shite"?

50 Shades has undoubtably contributed to the current situation where some extremely dubious sexual practices are promoted as normal.

Another normalising factor was undoubtably the advent of HIV/AIDS resulting in sexual health professionals needing to wise up as to the wide variety of sexual practices engaged with by men who have sex with men and to provide realistic, non-judgmental advice on safer sex.

This open minded approach to a wide spectrum of sexual acts has filtered down into the provision of sexual medicine generally.

Certain NHS sexual health services and certain academic journals have included training / published works by extremely dodgy dangerous people involved in cults of the most abusive kind.

Mike Lousada the "tantric healer" who treated the alleged feminist Naomi Wolf via his "yoni massage" resulting in the publication of her risible book Vagina had his quackery published in an apparently reputable journal of sexual medicine.

This is an incredibly serious issue and is part of the infiltration of the NHS, psychotherapy and sexual medicine by quacks.

The current situation regarding children and vulnerable adults being abused by quacks and narcissistic parents in gender clinics is directly linked to this appalling situation.

I was shocked by the TV programme The Sex Clinic on Channel 4

I need to add a warning here that it is likely that readers will be distressed by the content of this programme.

One episode featured a lesbian (or possibly a bisexual woman who mostly had sex with women - my memory is not 100%) who enjoyed being throttled / strangled during sex and another woman who found anal sex painful but who wanted to learn how to do it without the pain.

In the episodes I watched some of the attitudes of the patients, men and women were shocking and disturbing.

www.channel4.com/programmes/the-sex-clinic/episode-guide/

The staff at these clinics try their hardest not the be judgemental as they want to encourage people to come and get tested and to not be scared of being judged. They want people to be honest so they go out of their way to be non-judgmental.

I understand the importance of this but the people they have on the show seem, for the most part, to be living very dysfunctional sex lives.

I am in agreement that it is appalling that certain sexual predators claim that their abuses were "rough sex" that went wrong. It is perfectly possible to support a diversity of sexual experience and loving playful experimentation without supporting rapists and murderers. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous.

I am interested in why some people are aroused by power play? I have some inclinations this way myself, which I have never explored, partly due to the sentence I have quoted

That is a very courageous thing to post given the hostility expressed towards such things here.

I might post some of my own thoughts about this later, although I reserve the right not to given the general tone of the thread, which I do not experience as being conducive to thinking about the issue.

I don't think I'm being disingenuous, quite the reverse, Hooda. I'm saying straight up that I completely hate BDSM because it fetishises and sexualises and acts as propaganda for violence against women. I'd be being disingenuous if I pretended to a faux-naivety about it all, saying "I don't want to kink shame but..." My attitude is "fuck it, I damn well do want to kink shame, and for very good reasons."

I can see that you find this very difficult for very good reason, having been on the receiving end of some of this shit and been left strongly affected (I will not say damaged, because I take on board what you say about not wanting to be seen as a victim). FWIW, for what you have been through.

However, the fact that your experiences have left you with very ambivalent feelings towards it such that you do not want, personally, to say outright that it's damaging is not a reason for me personally, looking at the damage it does to enormous numbers of women and girls, to refrain from saying outright that it's damaging.

Incidentally I will never victim-blame a woman who says she likes being submissive - she has been subject to a massive, highly coercive, society wide grooming initiative which pervades every fucking aspect of our society.

I will blame the men who dominate and abuse, I will blame them every fucking time they do it. And I will blame society for letting them get away with it.

This is a really difficult subject for me because my sexuality is sub, and I do play with the more extreme bits of bdsm and power play.
My options are: never have a satisfying sexual experience again, or, engage responsibly in bdsm with my partner, who loves me.
Believe me, I’ve tried option a, tried walking away from kink as a form of radical self care. But I really like sex, and the only sex I enjoy is power exchange. It’s been this way for me from my very earliest sexual feelings, before I had been exposed to any bdsm imagery.
But I’m still, very strongly, a feminist.
I can’t reconcile my sexuality with my feminism, though.

I’ve also done fetish porn, so ask away if anyone has questions.

Agree 100% with @fermatstheorem - BDSM should never be seen as normal. Just read the transcripts of the Graham Dwyer murder case in Ireland. I’m more and more disturbed by what is now being promoted as normal in sexual relations and what our children are being subjected to and if this gets me classified as a conservative Catholic mother then so be it.

The funny thing is, I used to be considered quite liberal and I haven’t changed my views!

but there are men who want to be submissive too (and as we know with some of them this gets tangled up and manifests as AGP).

so it's not just women who are sexually submissive

think about how being in positions of power enhances people's sexual attractiveness. That's fairly mainstream.

I'm kind of groping around here. But my personal experience and observation tells men that power play is arousing for people. I won't personally follow that particular white rabbit because I am unsure of how much of that comes from me, and how much is learned from my surroundings. And I am very troubled by even a facsimile of violence.

I can’t reconcile my sexuality with my feminism, though

much, much less strongly for me. But yes

I can't think of anything I'd like to ask about fetish porn tbh.

I have never felt more lucky to have a happy sex life based on boring old love and mutual appreciation.

People are normalising acts during sex that would get human rights campaigners up in arms were they to be performed on political prisoners. That concerns me deeply.

This is getting a bit personal without me meaning to! I think I'm going to duck out now

Fazackerley - believe me, I would love LOVE to be able to be turned on by vanilla sex! It made me horrendously unhappy in my younger days that this was the case for me, I’m more accepting of it now. I felt like a monster.

I think Fermat answers Bernard’s question really:

“she has been subject to a massive, highly coercive, society wide grooming initiative which pervades every fucking aspect of our society”

It’s a lot like the female socialisation thread, where we coined the phrase ‘inner Beryl’ to both describe socialisation give it a shape that we can rebel against.
Fifty Shades of Shit no doubt spoke to many women due to the sexually submissive aspect of cultural grooming/female socialisation. What’s the main female character in FS’s called? Anastasia?

Some of us have an inner Beryl, some have an inner Anastasia.
Many of us have both, some of us will learn to rebel against them and kick one or other of them out.
I suspect an inner Anastasia is hard to shift due to the trauma bond described above.

Ultimately, we can still be feminist, even with Beryl and Anastasia in situ - we just have to be able to recognise them and do our utmost not to pass them onto our collective daughters, whilst raising collective sons who don’t expect women to be Beryl or Anastasia.

Julietee I don't know your personal situation and don't want to make assumptions, but FWIW people's sexuality can change over the years particularly if they have therapy to work on trauma. That said, what you describe as consensual BDSM in a trusting relationship is not so much what I'm concerned with, but the way this infiltrates the mainstream and means women get violently assaulted non-consensually during sex because this is what men expect now. There's another thread from a few days ago describing some of the things women have been subjected to completely non-consensually as a result of this, women in their teens being anally raped in their sleep etc. Worst of all is that women won't feel they can prosecute violence against them because it's normalised.

abuseofpower absolutely. This (extreme bdsm, which is what most mainstream porn is morhing into) is not what most women want, or should it be. It shouldn’t be, for want of a better word, normal. It has always been no the fringes, it needs to stay there, even if it is accepted, which is of course positive for people like me who are going to engage with it in one form or another.
Teens being expected to capitulate to pornified abuse is horrifying.

This is just more queer theory shite, you've got to push the envelope at all times, to 'liberate yourself' from mainstream sexuality.

Yet these sexual libertines, cant cum without whips and chains and a flipping beating. You're the sexual ingenue, not me.

I've always not liked (the idea) of kinks. Just have a feeling that it's a symptom of some mental problem and not a healthy or a good thing? Reading through hoodathunket's reply and others here (and some feminist writing on the subject) makes me feel that my guts on this were right. I love doing the sex, me, but the porn culture vileness or kink stuff just leaves me cold.

AGP is a kink isn't it?

Call me a sex-negative kink-shamer, but the one thing that bothers me about BDSM relationships is that it’s almost always the woman who is the slave/sub (yeah yeah, some men are subs, but I’d wager they are a very small minority) and therefore it’s almost always the woman subjected to dubious and/or harmful sexual acts/behaviour and, sometimes, all manner of creepy/coercive/controlling behaviour outside of the bedroom as well. I just cannot buy that because it’s consensual, it’s OK. And I’m disturbed by the men who get off on brutalising women (and also, but to a lesser extent, the women who allow themselves to be brutalised).

I think I’m just agreeing with Horse - that it’s a symptom of a MH problem.

Julietee My question then is how can we manage BDSM being allowed between consenting adults, whilst avoiding (particularly young) women being coerced into non-consensual violent sex acts. I see the problem with policing people's sex lives, but at the same time the reality of widespread violent porn means this that violent sexual abuse of women is becoming normalised. When someone is let off for manslaughter with a rough sex defence, this is a licence for any man to rape and murder.

There's an old joke 'the masochist says hit me, hit me and the sadist says No'. That sums it up for me , a sadist doesn't need a partner, they need a victim and will push past any 'safe word' or resistance.
I really feel in this case the law should consider the sadist/Dom to be 100% responsible for any harm. No report to police of harm, no crime. The risk of prosecution and prison fairly balances the risk of injury or death. It is not fair that the risk should lie with the weaker partner. Trust is after all supposed to be central.

This is getting a bit personal without me meaning to! I think I'm going to duck out now

I'm definitely understanding why and feeling the same way

The subject is important though and I might try to write something up for when I'm feeling stronger

One thing I will share is that my belief that when it comes to sex and sexuality and to racism for that matter, generally the people who understand the most appreciate how much they have to learn and how little they know.

The people who understand the least tend to be the most confident in giving their opinions, which they share from a position of absolute certainly.

What always struck me in places like TG was the imbalance between the (conventional) attractiveness of the men and women.

Lots of incredibly beautiful, young, impeccably groomed, outlandishly, expensively attired and carefully made-up women and lots of older, fatter, unkempt men walking around in lacy underpants and everyday work brogues, or combat trousers with no tops.

It very much felt like something unhealthily unbalanced was at play.

And TG is (was? This was some years ago) known for having more rigorous entry rules than small town clubs/parties.

I realise my experiences are merely snapshots (I only attended if friends were performing in the stage or fashion shows and I was going along as their companion unpaid PA/dresser) but it seemed to me like a stage that women would go through and age out of (or were doing it professionally/semi professionally?) but that men would either stay stuck in it, or perhaps only find it later in life?

This was all very early days of the internet though, so I’m sure the way people find each other/advertise events has changed significantly, perhaps altering the balance of the attendees, too?

I agree the UK is still very uptight about sex and especially with BDSM. The way forward is to reduce the stigma and to talk more openly

"it’s almost always the woman who is the slave/sub (yeah yeah, some men are subs, but I’d wager they are a very small minority) "

Have you heard of "femdom"? There seems to be plenty of guys who want to be tied up and dominated by women etc