Lots of small-minded folks weaponize BDSM against Queer communities, claiming that we are immoral heathens who can’t be trusted due to the things we do between fully consenting adults. In a twist of immense irony, they ignore the fact that BDSM is often an adaptive strategy we use to cope with the sadistic pain, bondage, and control they exercise over us without our consent.
For example, when I was a teenager I used to write rape fantasies in my diary. I wrote about being choked and physically forced to do things I absolutely would not have consented to and did not want to happen. These fantasies were part of how I coped psychologically with my body being sexualized by all the adults around me from age 10, when I first grew breasts. I felt like maybe if I could write about those fears, if I could turn them into something safely contained in a book like Goosebumps novels did with the monster under the bed, maybe being raped wouldn’t feel so gross when it inevitably happened to me. I thought I could use my words in private pages to turn the kids on my elementary school playground groping my breasts and bullying me, into something that, somehow, I could gain control over. As an 11 year old with an acute sense that men could and would do whatever they wanted with my body whether I allowed it or not, I believed rape was unavoidable forever. And not too long later, in a predictably abusive relationship I stayed in to “prove” I was heterosexual, after a student in my high school attempted to murder me for being Queer, that rape finally did happen.
When my mother invaded my room to read my diary as a teenager while I was at school, I came home to find her sitting with a bookmarked passage in hand. She made me read the rape scene out loud to her and her new husband while I squirmed uncomfortably and cried. What I was forced to read was a private thought, never meant to be shared with her or anyone else. She asked me why I was such a slut, and what I would do if this really happened to me, and told me if I got myself pregnant from “letting” someone rape me, I would have to carry the baby even if it killed me, and live with the punishment for the rest of my life. That’s the kind of humiliation and coercion even many of the most seasoned BDSM veterans I know won’t touch, because it’s the kind that can do irreparable harm to a person’s psyche. In BDSM, we care too much about one another to cause that kind of harm. What my mother did there was violate my consent, dispose of my autonomy, and deny my sense of safety in my own home. She convinced me that if I was raped, it was my own fault. If there were consequences to that rape, I would be the only one burdened with facing them. No wonder I was thinking about intimacy in terms of sexual assault as a young teenager! No one ever taught me I could have my consent respected! No one taught me a place existed where my body was safe. No one around me bothered to create a world where I could even imagine I was safe as a queer teenager.
As an adult, my mother and I went to a family therapy visit once. She brought up those diary entries again, saying that she “had to be” the way she was — controlling, invasive, dominating, forceful, disrespectful, humiliating, shaming — because I was (*gasp!*) fantasizing about being raped and writing about it in my diaries. No acknowledgement that she should never have read my private diary in the first place. No acknowledgement that she taught me “boys only want one thing”. No acknowledgement that she had a responsibility to create a world around me where I felt safe enough as a child to say “no” to someone forcing their control over me. No acknowledgement that she forced her control over me in ways that showed me I had no freedom, no right to my own consent or privacy in the home she forced me to live in under legal threat if I ran away. No acknowledgement that she had a responsibility to create a world around me where I felt empowered to say “yes” to what I truly wanted instead. Just blame.
Stop blaming Queers for how we cope with what you do to hurt us.
This is where anti-Queer people fail to observe the massive plank in their own eye when threatening us with violent domination and forced control, stripping away our freedoms and human rights, over an alleged splinter in ours. They say we shouldn’t engage in BDSM, that it’s immoral or some such insanity. But BDSM is literally just consenting adults getting together to play consensual, negotiated, respectful games with power, pain, and control. The irony of using your authoritarian-style power to cause us emotional and physical pain, deprive us of the freedom to heal ourselves in the ways that works best for us, and control us in ways we do not consent to by restricting how we are(n’t) allowed to express ourselves, runs deep. The irony of my mother blaming me for having rape fantasies as a teen instead of blaming the environment she created which caused me to feel I had no alternative, consensual, safe reality I could turn to, runs deep.
BDSM is a common and vital coping strategy for Queers. The weaponization of our coping strategies plays out every year at Pride parades between folks who want family-friendly, historically-sanitized, corporate rainbow events — and those of us who express leather-bound, minimally-clothed, AIDS-epidemic-aware gratitude for the unconventional coping skills that have helped us survive against all odds. People do exist who call themselves queer but then shame those of us who use BDSM as a healing strategy. I don’t know what kind of paradise they’re living in that they don’t feel the need to process their oppression through kinky affirmations of identity, love, trust, and respect in the privacy of their own home, ever. I do know that sometimes they try to earn brownie points from cisgender, vanilla outsiders by eagerly distancing themselves from us to show how “respectable” they are. Those folks can take their betrayal of the Queer community up with God.
Judgment of our coping strategies has been the basis for oppressive legal maneuvers to erase us for decades, by the same people who refuse to simply cultivate a less traumatizing world where maybe BDSM wouldn’t be necessary to cope with what they do to us. In the absence of that utopia, BDSM remains an historically imperative tool that trans and Queer people use to
•reclaim our identities
•explore power dynamics in ways that have been denied to us by the patriarchy
•establish our bodily autonomy
•give voice to our consent in a world where where consent is not always afforded to us
•process pain and trauma in healthy ways that allow us to let go of what isn’t good for us
•and liberate one another from the absolute exhaustion of being on protective high-alert at all times in a society that loathes us.
At a physiological and neurochemical level, BDSM functions to bring many of us down from daily states of fight-or-flight, recover from PTSD, and transcend the overwhelm so we can bear to face another day. BDSM is consent-respecting, safe, healthy, queer, cathartic, empowering, and usually community-centered. It’s an activity that allows us to collectively say, “This is the pain the world has caused me, and this is what we’re going to do for the next two hours to reclaim my sense of safety, personal responsibility, and healing from that pain.” Erasing BDSM from the trans experience is to erase much of the trans experience itself. Erasing BDSM from conversations about queerness means erasing Queer trauma, Queer survival strategies, and Queer methods of overcoming indescribable barriers. To deny us conversational space where BDSM is acceptable to discuss is to deny us conversational space where being fully, unapologetically Queer is acceptable.
Is there any safe enough space to express myself? If so, where is that space? Does it only come one week a year? And only ever the kid-friendly version? Does that safe space even exist in Arkansas? What do we need to do for and with one another to create an adequately safe, adult, emotionally supportive, judgment-free space together?
Recently, I overheard more than a dozen teenagers gathered outside in a courtyard, passing around their phones and discussing their BDSM test results. One of them said “My highest score is age play,” and I shuddered. Is anyone sitting them down to teach him consent? How to negotiate? How to respectfully honor boundaries? How to choose dates and partners who will respect their boundaries? Or is that just going to be left up to the Washington County police officer who lives next door to them, like the one who taught me these things with his hand in my pants from the time I was 12 to 14?
One teen came up to me and asked how to tell the other kids he didn’t want to talk about it when he goes back to school, because the BDSM test has been a popular discussion topic in his jr. high school. He said his friends have been getting their sexual health education from Reddit because only abstinence-only education is allowed in Arkansas schools, which means they get no real education about sexual health and safety at all. For us to pretend the kids don’t already know about BDSM, and refuse to construct healthy conversations with them around it, is to set them up for a probable future of abusive relationships, mismanaged consent, and poor boundaries.
I believe we owe the kids better education than to let them suffer through the unsafe learning experiences that taught me about BDSM when I was their age. I believe we owe them a world that doesn’t push them toward BDSM as a necessary coping strategy for reclaiming their autonomy from a society where their literal human rights, medical rights, and rights to participate in sports with their peers are being legislated against as though these teens are already second-class, sub-human citizens.
If you have a problem with teens exploring BDSM amongst themselves, stop doing non-consensual, sadistic forms of domination to them through legislative and social maneuvers designed to mistreat, abuse, and denigrate them.
And if you have a problem with adults who engage in BDSM as a completely valid, scientifically proven strategy for lowering our blood pressure, disengaging an overactive fight-or-flight response that stays hyper-engaged all the time for fear of what the next attack on us is going to be, and psychologically cushioning the impact of harms against us that are beyond our control — how about you take all your misplaced outrage, and turn that energy toward making the world less harmful for us, so we can find easier ways to relax than being tied up and beaten? You trying to control what we do with our bodies is precisely why we do what we do with our bodies to regain the control over ourselves that you’re taking, or allowing to be taken, away from us.
When you stop trying to control and take away personal power from Queer people, you might just be pleasantly surprised to find that we stop going to such intense lengths to take back our personal power from you.
Some light reading, for your educational convenience:
Brandyn Gallagher 