A few weeks ago I attend West Pride here in Gothenburg and for the first time walked in a Pride parade. These last few years I've made an extraordinary journey through myself with my own sexuality and I felt it was about time I participated more activlely outwards and started using my voice. There was some confusion on with section of the train my small company of friends should walk in, but we ended up not inaccurately with the polyamorous people. It felt good proudly walking there in front of everyone with my wonderful girlfriend in hand beside me, but I'm going to be frank with you, we would have walked even prouder in a BDSM-section.
The BDSMf*-scene is a world wide place of society where you'll find people with an amazing sense of integrity, respect and open-mindedness, because these things are absolutely vital to the lifestyle. You cannot have sadomasochism or bondage without an enormous respect for safety and the dangers that may arise. The integrity of every participant is paramount, both in form of feeling comfortable in the situation and that this side of you will not be public knowledge in a world where an essential part of you is taboo and often not protected against discrimination. And in that part of society where people will meet and support each other and create a forum for sexuality you would be nowhere without an open mind and an acceptance of others attractions. All this creates a place where you would be respected as you would nowhere else, but also a collection of people whose expertise on sex and safety is probably as high as it can ever be. Of course there are rotten eggs in this basket as well. BDSMf is not one monolithic thing and there are about as many versions of it as there are participants, and not att participants and good people, which leads us to the problem I mentioned earlier.
The justice system and law here in Sweden is seriously lacking in both protection of the participants and expertise on the subject. Lately there have been popping up many newsreports of rapes done in the name of BDSM where the rapist has gone free, here's one example (all links in swedish today). The handling of cases like this has gotten a lot of critisism, not the least from the BDSM-scene. The thing I hear the most is the wish for the law to be altered so that sex must require a consent in some form or negligence of damage caused to that person, and I love that this is finally being discussed, not to mention it being discussed this openly. But the biggest reaction of the BDSM-scene is another. Earlier this week I attended my first meeting with the BDSMf-group of the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU) (for which I am not a representative, just to be clear) and the main concern there was the same as mine, the amount knowledge that judges and attourneys possess of these types of sex is frighteningly low.
The kind of activities we're talking about when we say BDSM can be dangerous. Dangerous to the extent of the worst case senario if done wrong being death (though extremely rare and far from acceptable). We know this and I won't go into here why we like this stuff, but we also have adapted to it. Like a said earlier, there's enormous respect for safety here and we accomplish this through the abbreviation SSC. It guides pretty much all our activities, and since law doesn't seem to apply to us we are very strict on this. SSC stands for Safe, Sane and Consensual:
- Safe as in "how might this be dangerous?" and "can I use some form of safety through devices or tecniques that removes or minimizes that danger?". For instance, everytime i tie someone up I have a special kind of scissors at hand at all times in case of emergency. Things like that.
- Sane most often applies to how activities might affect people around and the participants themselves. There can be things you really want to do but it would be reckless in its raw form. For instance, if you drive someone to tears and then leave him or her there and do nothing else, you would have failed on the sane-part in my book.
- Consent is perhaps the most relevant here. We deal with that mostly in two ways. First the participants talk to each other to establish what they want out of it, things they don't want to do, would do if asked and generally getting a feel of each other to make things easier and more fun. This part can be shortened if done at a club as there are other people around that can come to your aid if needed.
Secondly there are safewords. A safeword can be anything really, a word you otherwise wouldn't use during sex (not "stop", "no" or something like that), humming a melody or even a nonvocal signal of some sort. If tied up and cannot speak, some hold keys or a rubber ball in their hand to simply drop. The idea of a safeword is that when spoken all activities stop at once, you abort the play because something is wrong. Two words often used as safewords are "red" and "yellow" and are often house rules in clubs, "red" for stop and "yellow" for pause.
This is how safety is done in the BDSM world and this is what the justice system does not understand. If you're doing bondage or having rough sex with someone and don't have a safeword, "stop" means stop, "no" means no. Negligence of that is not acceptable, it's rape. And I can tell you it's scary to know that if I would rape somebody, I would get away with it. Of course, I would be shunned by the whole community and generally hated, but there would be no jailtime and no fine for me to be paid. And when attourneys and judges use words like "dominanssex" ("dominance sex") it screams lack of knowledge and we in the know cringes from how poorly educated they are on the subject. (Is dominance sex opposed from submission sex? Are you then having different types of sex with each other at the same time? This is not a term used in the scene as it would be confusing.)
Anyway, these are some of my thoughts and opinions on the ongoing debate. I've been wanting to speak up on this ever since i saw this wonderful and inspiring article, I do have some knowledge and experience here. But at the same time it's scary to know that we are operating outside the protection of law, but I have high hopes that this might change soon. Debates like this can make societies better places to live in.
Prosperity and peace
Joakim Henberg
*BDSMf stand for Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism, Masochism and Fetishism. It encompassed A LOT of different sexualities and versions there of.
