Part 2 is Here

Part 3 is Here

Part 4 is Here

Part 5 is Here

Part 6 is Here

[Trigger Warning for the whole series, as it deals with rape and abuse.  This part, however, contains less in the way of graphic descriptions of abuse than previous parts.]

This is the last part.  If you’ve read this far, thanks for staying with me.

The title’s a Leonard Cohen reference.  If that’s trite, then I’m okay with trite.  But here’s the lyric that I’m really thinking of, from Beginning of a Great Adventure, from Lou Reed’s Reagan-era album New York: “It might be fun to have a kid I could pass something on to/ something better than rage, pain, anger and hurt.”  He put that album out when I was in high school, and now there are folks in the TNG groups who were not born then.  Some of these people are twenty years younger than me, that’s a whole generation.  Some of my kinkster friends, I’m almost old enough to be their dad, for me that just sort of changes how I look at it.

I don’t need the public scene for me.  I don’t need the orgs and the parties.  The cops are not going to come knocking on my door and look for a singletail or check my wife’s body for bruises.  Where and how I live, with the class and race and other privileges that go with it and all that, you can tell me to worry all you want, but I won’t.  I tell doctors about my kinks if I need to for complete medical treatment, and I just expect them to act like a professional about it, even if I have no idea if they’re kink-friendly: they’re more afraid of me than I am of them.  (They’re right to be.)  So … it’s not for me.  I can close my doors and play with my spouse the way I like to play and the chances that the outside world will be able to influence that are really small.

People are being raped, and groped and fondled without consent, being coerced and pressured to do things they don’t want to do at clubs and parties, and it’s not me and it’s not my spouse.  But I care that it happens.  I could shut my door and play the way I like and ignore all that, but that’s what entitled privileged douches do with their privilege when they don’t care about justice.  That’s “I got mine, Jack.”  That’s not the right thing to do.  I try to tell my kids to do the right thing, even if it’s hard, so I need to expect that of myself or I’m not much of an example.  The right thing is to speak when something wrong is going on and to raise my voice until I can’t raise it any more, or until speaking up makes a difference.

It’s not very hopeful to catalogue the problems — useful, but not hopeful, and I’d rather say something about what we can do, with what we have, where we are.

Self-Defense For Bottoms: Defensive Negotiation

I said that miscommunications really happen.  Anything that reduces that makes the deliberate violation of boundaries stand out more.  I said in Mythcommunications that the lesson was that:

Clear communication of “no” isn’t primarily going to avoid miscommunication — rather, it’s a meta-message.  Clear communication against the undercurrent that “no” is rude and should be softened is a sign of the willingness to fight, to yell, to report.

This idea, in my view, ports handily to a BDSM context, even though I think that actual miscommunication is much more common in BDSM.  Clear communication avoids actual miscommunication, and also deters abusers by letting them know that a target will make it comparatively harder to get away with calling a deliberate violation a miscommunication.

(I’ll note, as an aside, that the general social disfavoring of “no” that conversational analysis, among other disciplines, identifies is a lot like the way safewords are treated.  Many bottoms, particularly subs and particularly women feel a lot of pressure not to safeword: as if it’s a rejection, as if it’s a disappointment, as if it’s selfish.)

Hard limits and safewords in writing.  Some people negotiate forever by email or PM or whatever, and some meet at a party and decide to play.  But there are a few items that are really important, that are usually the subject of negotitation and are repeatedly the subject of boundary violations.  These can be covered in an email, a PM or a text message and they can be covered fast.  Once they’re in writing, there’s a record and that reduces any uncertainty about what was said.  It’s not a complete solution, but it is a deterrent.

The two most frequent boundary violations I hear are (1) penetration and (2) safer sex practices.  Clear, hard limits not to be renegotiated in scene can be set forth by text message even in a two minute negotiation before a public scene between strangers.  Remember in Part 1, the story about Jay Wiseman and the rope bottom who kept negotiating for no sexual touching and kept getting raped?  Remember Mollena Williams in Part 2?  Those perpetrators would have wanted to do those things no matter what was said or written –would have wanted to, but would they have done them?  In one of the blind items in Part 3, where the top punched the bottom in anger, the contract said no play in anger, and he took the trouble to get rid of it.  I’m thinking of a simple text that says, “NO penile penetration, safeword is RED, not to be renegotiated” or “safeword is red, piv with condom only, no anal penetration.”  There are other items that may be critical and people should always learn to negotiate for what they need: I’m not talking about negotiation best practices.  I’m talking about deterence: putting in writing the boundaries that are commonly violated so as make a record that could cause trouble for an abuser later.

We can’t set these things up as mandatory practices for bottoms because they’ll just be absorbed into the existing BDSM victim-blaming canon: self-defense training is good, after the fact a failure to take some possible precaution no more absolves an abuser than failure to lock a car excuses auto theft, and I’ve never seen anyone get victim-blamed for forgetting to lock a car door.

Self-Improvement for Tops: To Err Is Human, To Get Defensive Is Counterproductive

Aftercare isn’t only the part that looks after the bottom’s emotional needs.  On my account, properly understood, aftercare has three components: the bottom’s emotional needs, the top’s emotional needs, and post-scene learning.  Some folks don’t need a lot of aftercare for their emotional needs.  Some tops don’t really get top drop, some bottoms don’t need or even want a lot of looking after, but there’s always room to learn something.  One dominant I know always asks her bottoms, “Was there anything I did that you were not comfortable with?” and “Was there anything I did that you wish I hadn’t done?”  This tends to work better after the initial rush of hormones and emotions from play has a chance to settle down, and lots of people do following-day check-ins, especially after big scenes.

There are two things to be accomplished here.  The first is for the tops themselves.  I top too, and with just one partner for over a decade.  You know what?  I am still learning.  We push, we talk, we learn, we try things.  I make mistakes!  Yes, I do!  And we talk about them.  Technical errors, miscommunications, and even landmines, as I discussed in Part 5.  Ignoring these things or pretending they don’t need to be discussed doesn’t do anyone any good.

Talking about the things that went wrong helps the top.  We learn from our mistakes only when we know what they are.  We may think that all the perceptions we have in the course of a scene are accurate.  Well, every litigator I know will tell you that when you take a deposition and then read the transcript, the record you made is different from the record you think you made.  And folks I know in medicine tell me that doctors who think they know everything from image tests are often surprised by autopsies and pathology results which show that you really can’t see everything from a scan.  We don’t have perfect information, and cross-checking our perceptions of another person’s reactions and state of mind is an invaluable, irreplaceable process.

Talking about things that went wrong helps the bottom.  If something went wrong and it wasn’t a deliberate violation, the best way to clear the air is for the bottom to say what happened and be heard, and not get shut down.  When the harm in not intentional, that’s often enough.  When the harm is not intentional, that is the first act and sine qua non of amends.

Talking about what went wrong, finally, helps the culture.  What we need to do is separate the predators from the underbrush they operate in, the climate that grants the SL-Op, to put them in a position where their deliberate behavior is not easily disguised as something else.  Hiding mistakes and denying them makes the mess-up look like the deliberate wrong, and the one who erred act like the abuser.  We all need those who make mistakes to act like people who care and don’t want to make mistakes again, so that those who keep on and keep on violating limits look like exactly what they are.

We all need it to become unacceptable and aberrant to get defensive, deny, blame and shut down when our mistakes are pointed out.  If a bottom says, “when I was in subspace and you were calling me names, we hadn’t talked about that and it was really icky for me,” for example, it has to be unacceptable to say, “I’m not a mindreader!  You should have told me!”  How about, “Sorry.  I didn’t realize.  I messed up.  Won’t happen again.”  The bottom may not have even known how it would feel; we don’t all know our limits and triggers until we stumble on them.  Those are the landmines.  The bottom can learn from the experience, about theirself and their limits, but the top can, too.  Acting like all communication failures are solely or principally the bottom’s fault is counterproductive, first because it shuts down the conversation, but second because that’s how the abusers act; and the abusers have more SL-Op if more people act like they do.

I’m not saying this because I think it will make abusers better people.  It won’t.  They do what they do on purpose and they can’t be fixed, only deterred.  I’m saying what I think tops can do to look less like abusers, to create an environment where abuse looks aberrant and abusers stand out, so they can be dealt with.

What the Rest Of Us Can Do:

Talk About Ethics, Expect Ethics

Doing things to people that they don’t consent to is wrong.  We all need to stop pretending that it’s rude to say that.  Violating limits isn’t cute or funny or edgy.  Joking about violating limits isn’t cute or funny or edgy.[1] Kate Harding, speaking in a vanilla context, said something that I think is very true in this context also:

But please listen, and please trust me on this one: you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one. And you probably didn’t know which one he was.

And that guy? Thought you were on his side.

Bold in original.  I talked in Part 2 about the “that guy,” the “stranger in the bushes” of the BDSM community.  That guy is around, on the web and the fringes, and sometimes even at the core of our communities.  If you joke, “hey, I know she said no X, but we should totally X!”, that guy loves your joke.  He thinks it’s awesome that you said it, because he totally wants to do that.  And while you know that you absolutely may not do that …that guy doesn’t.  And now he thinks you’re on his side.

Zero Tolerance for Impairment

If you can’t do BDSM without getting a buzz on, you shouldn’t be doing BDSM.  Call me puritan, I don’t give a shit.  It’s a recipe for disaster and a way for abusers to use drugs and alcohol to incapacitate potential partners or excuse their violations.  We just have to stop putting up with people who want to play impaired.

Listen.

I said it in Meet The Predators, and it’s still true in this specific context:

If we refuse to listen, he can continue to pretend that the rapist is some guy in the parking lot late at night, when it’s actually him, in our friends’ bedrooms half an hour after last call. If we let that happen, we’re part of the problem.

The rapists can’t be your friends, and if you are loyal to them even when faced with the evidence of what they do, you are complicit.

The only way we can really change what goes on is to change the culture, to eliminate the dynamics that allow the abusers to blend in and make their conduct look normal.  We need to create environments where the abusers stick out like a sore thumb.  It’s not easy to say I fucked up.  It’s uncomfortable.  It’s easier not to take responsibility.  That’s how children deal with it: they blame the dog, their sibling, or pretend they don’t know.  Grown ups take responsibility.  I just don’t think there’s any serious downside to admitting to mistakes, owning bad judgments.  The harm is done; acting grown up about it can only help the healing.

I hear a lot of people who top saying that they’re afraid of the conversation that has started, that they are afraid someone will name them for having done something wrong.  I understand that.  I don’t like being criticized either.  But there’s a huge difference between being criticized for fucking up and blowing a boundary, and being criticized for deliberately blowing a boundary.  The first is just ordinary human fallibility, and the second is evil.  I do not believe that there’s any reason to think that people are going to be shunned if they fuck up and own it.  Shit, all the people I know who have made serious fuck-ups doing BDSM, if they’ve owned up to it, they’re good with the person on the receiving end.  (It’s a lot like doctors in malpractice suits: the statistics show that doctors who admit mistakes tend not to get sued, even for serious mistakes, while those who act like assholes and try to shut down the discussion do tend to get sued.)  There may be a few exceptions, but as a general proposition, there’s every reason from human experience to believe that saying, “I messed up” is not only the right thing, but the smart thing.

And what we end up with is an environment where people don’t try to sweep the past under the carpet, where a top can say, “yeah, that went really wrong, zie went nonverbal on me and I didn’t realize how deep zie was.”  If we can all just say, “yeah, that happened to me once,” we have an environment that the predators can’t really operate in, because when three people say, “yeah, ze did that to me, too …” the game is up.  People who admit mistakes and learn from mistakes tend not to repeat them.  People who tend to repeat the same mistake … well, usually it’s not a mistake.

And as we create the freedom to air this stuff, we come to the hardest part.  We have to start to listen to what the issues are and decide how to treat the people who keep having the issues.  Nobody is going to show up with a score sheet or bingo card and make it easy, we’re just going to have to pay attention and think about who is acting in good faith and who isn’t.  If we really want to make excuses for our friends, we always can.  We can explain away an infinite number of fuck-ups and blowups and badly handled scenes if we’re determined to exonerate.  When our friends fuck up, we need to expect them to act consistently with good faith.  If they don’t, we need to be willing to change our understanding about their good faith.

If you decide that your friends can’t possibly be abusers, you’re part of the problem. If you decide that anyone who is an abuser can’t possibly be your friend, you’re part of the solution. It is up to you whether you want to listen to the survivors and expect better from tops, or whether you want to pretend that you “don’t do drama.”

[1] It may be terror play, but terror play is the kind of thing that you negotiate first.  We all know, if we’re half-way competent, that terror play could do permanent damage to some people, and none of us would do that without making a solid effort to ascertain whether the bottom has a significant history that would make it unsafe, or limits that preclude it.  Right?  Otherwise, we’d be abusive or incompetent, right?

(1) It’s all made up.  

(2) Confessions are extracted by torture.

(3) The result is execution.

Let’s look at a historical case, the North Berwick Witch Trials.  James VI, who later succeeded Queen Elizabeth as James I of England but who was then the Scottish king, sailed to Denmark to marry.  The weather was bad — really bad, and the fleet had to shelter in Norway and wait it out.  The Danish admiral blamed witchcraft, and there were witch hunts in both Denmark and Scotland.

More than a hundred suspected witches were rounded up.  One of them, Agnes Sampson, was personally questioned under torture by the King.  She was kept without sleep for prolonged periods and tormented with a device called a “witch’s bridle,” which forces metal spikes into the cheeks and tongue.

Sampson confessed to over fifty counts, and was strangled, then burned.  There were more than seventy people implicated, I don’t know how many executed.  Estimates I’ve seen of European witch hunts put the total number of those executed over thirty thousand for the core period of witch hunts, from the mid-1400s to the mid-1700s.

First, neither Agnes Sampson, nor any of the dozens of indicted coconspirators, cause the storms that forced the King’s ship into a Norwegian harbor.  Storms are not the result of black magic; there were no “real witches” to find.

You can’t say that about rapists, and you can’t say that about rape.  Or, you can say it, but it’s ridiculous, and you won’t be saying it here.  The problem of rape in BDSM communities is not a natural phenomena like weather top which we simply assign a blameworthy cause.  It is a problem of bad actors doing bad things.

Second, I have yet to see anyone advocate the procuring of rapists’ confessions by physical torture.  In fact, my position is that all physical torment should be entirely consensual and the recipient’s limits respected.  I think I’ve been quite clear on that.

Third, I have yet to see anyone advocate execution as a punishment for rape in BDSM communities.  I have not seen that, and I have not taken that position.  I am not the government, I don’t have the power or the inclination to sentence people to lethal injection or electrocution or to be hanged by the neck until dead.

When people talk about the consequences of someone saying, “so and so raped me,” let’s be realistic.  They’re not going to go to prison, except in the most unusual circumstances, for the reasons I covered at length in There’s A War On Part 4: Just Us.  Realistically, what might happen is that some party promoters will decide that person is not welcome and some people they know may decide they don’t want to be friendly with that person anymore.  And my observation is that even that is usually only a very partial effect.

So that’s nothing at all like confession under torture followed by burning at the stake.

(Anyone planning to deploy the term “lynching” outside its historical context will be banned for racism.  You have been warned.)

This use of “witch hunt” to describe a process of social transparency is misplaced.  At best, it represents a failure to think though the meaning of the rather shopworn phrase.  At worst, it is a conscious rhetorical attack, trying to enlist the image of broken limbs and burned corpses to churn up sympathy for the wrong side.  It’s bullshit, and I plan on liberally linking this post when people say “witch hunt.”

Part 2 is Here

Part 3 is Here

Part 4 is Here

Part 5 is Here

[Trigger Warning for the whole series, as it deals with rape and abuse.  This part, however, contains less in the way of graphic descriptions of abuse than previous parts.]

Justice Brandeis said that sunlight is the best of disinfectants.  We’ve talked about abusers and how they derive their Social License to Operate by using the cover of other dynamics: the miscommunications;  the secrecy; the geek social fallacies; and so forth.  They can’t operate in the open in the harsh light of day.  If people are free to talk about their experiences without intimidation or ostracism, if they are as free to say, “I had a bad experience with so-and-so, ze ignored my hard limit” as they are to say “I had a really good experience with zir,” then the predators can’t operate. In a transparent environment, people would have to own and learn from their mistakes; those who were not really making mistakes would become apparent really fast. They’d get shut down and shut out and maybe even prosecuted right away.

Who could be against that?

The single largest online organ in the BDSM universe is against that: Fetlife.  The Borg that is taking over all online BDSM discourse has a TOU (Terms of Use) that flat-out helps the abusers.  There have been suggestions to change it through formal channels.  They’ve gone nowhere.

A radical social experiment started last winter.  In one small group of mostly New York youngish queerish kinksters, the owner started taking anonymous, first person accounts and posting them — including ones that named names.  The results were mixed.  Several people owned up to past misconduct, or said that if anyone thought they should be named that they welcomed it.  Some folks who were named talked about things they had done wrong and their process to fix it, including not playing while impaired, or recognizing bad relationship dynamics that they had felt gave them license to act wrongly.  Others reacted poorly, of course, and some people whined about the drama, because resolving interpersonal conflict is uncomfortable.

On March 5, the Carebears who run Fetlife shut it down, disappearing the items that named names.  Their message to the owner went as follows:

We really love that you are presenting an opportunity to FetLife members to anonymously tell their stories in “Confessions: TRIGGER WARNING”. We’ve thought from the beginning that allowing people to present their stories of experiencing non-consensual activities was an important thing to allow on FetLife, and even wrote a clause into the Terms of Use to specifically state that real rape could be discussed from a therapeutic perspective. Registered sex offenders convicted of sexual violence and/or non-consensual sexual offenses are not permitted to have accounts on FetLife. We’re also trying to work with the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom on their “Consent Counts” project, which is helping to tackle the problem of sexual abuse & intimate partner violence in the kinky community. In short, if someone is convicted of non-consensual activities in the scene, we’ll kick them off and we should be warning people about them!

However, we also do not allow accusations of criminal conduct when a conviction has not happened. Unfortunately, many of the posts in this thread are doing just that. We’d like to give you the opportunity to continue this great service to the community in this way. We’ll delete all the comments that name names. If you can anonymize any accusations that come in from now on, we’ll allow the thread to stay open. If not, we’ll have to delete the thread completely. We hope it doesn’t come to that – we’d really hate to do that – and we hope that we can come up with a way to keep this going in a way that helps everyone.

[Bold mine.] I got the group owner’s permission to post that.  It’s such bullshit.  I discussed in Part 4 that conviction isn’t a realistic expectation.  This policy ensures that in well over 90% of incidents, and abuser can’t be named.  See, there is no way to “help everyone.”  We can help the victims, or we can help the perpetrators. ”Help everyone” is Fetlife’s “I Don’t Do Drama.”

(Let’s be honest about Fetlife’s history: they now ban discussion that encourages child molestation, and they now ban actual photos and real-world recounting of bestiality, but that wasn’t always the case.  That was a recent change just a few years ago, and as I’ve heard the story in many, many Fet groups, those rules were instituted when those topics became a threat to Fet’s ability to process credit card transactions, and not before, and Fetlife apologized profusely to the pedophilia and bestiality group members for having to spoil their fun.  Halfhearted enforcement of these rules remains a bone of contention among Fet customers, and popular writings recently have decried the Carebears’ laxity in pulling down pedophile content.  There is money to be made off BDSM communities, and there’s access to partners, especially young women, to be had.  See Part 5: there’s no shortage of craven self-interest when it comes to stifling discussions of rape and abuse.)

The real kicker is that Fetlife isn’t even consistent about its own TOU.  I linked to the Consent Counts project in Part 4; lots of consensual BDSM is a criminal act in many places.  Someone who says they were flogged and caned by their partner in Boston, for example, has just accused their partner of a criminal act.  Fetlife, of course, makes no effort to shut down that discussion.  And it’s not at all clear that violations of consent are all criminal where they occur: sexual assault statutes vary widely, and penetration with an object of a finger may or may not violate the law where it was done, depending on the jurisdiction, and participants and the circumstances.  So Fetlife has this unworkable and ambiguous TOU, and their effective interpretation is that if you say that someone did something nonconsensual to you, you won’t be allowed to say who it was.

It may seem I’m unfairly picking on Fetlife here.  I am picking on Fetlife, but it’s only fair.  John Baku wanted to make his creation the Facebook of kinky people … and succeeded.  It’s so ubiquitous that it sucks the air out of the room.  Fetlife isn’t just one organ of BDSM, it’s the overwhelming online center of the BDSM universe.  With great power comes great responsibility.

Look at it from the victim’s perspective: going to the cops isn’t realistic.  Often, going to the leaders of the community isn’t realistic; the abuser may be better connected and that would just mean ostracism.  Going to the abuser only works for actual miscommunications, so that fixes the easier problem but leaves the really scary people untouched.  So … what?

The other alternatives are (1) say what happened; or (2) don’t.  Fetlife has made their position clear: don’t.  They’re not saying go away mad, or even go away, just shut up.

When the possibility of people telling the truth comes up, people always always raise false allegations.  I direct you to this post on why that’s a derail:

Those of us who are spearheading this discussions are coming from a place of reality and shared history. We are coming from direct personal experience. We are coming from pain. We are coming from abandonment, apathy, and downright hostility from our community. It is real. It is current. It is now.

We have lost safety. We have lost friends. We have lost lovers. We have lost time. We are still losing by taking on this conversation. But we do it, because we know what its like and for me, I will do everything I fucking can to make sure that no one else has to lose.

Then the masses come in. What about false accusations, they say. Well, what about them? Its a hypothetical. Yes, it can happen however it is rare. In the meanwhile, we are seeing slews of stories of abuse. So I need to ask to those who are worried about false accusations to look around you. When you say that someone may falsely accuse, therefore the consent efforts are harmful- it is implying that this is a problem in Boston. That this is a real problem in our scene. So tell me, who you do think does it? Why do you think it is a problem? Can you tell me via private message who these people are so I don’t play with them? Please, do this. I really want to know where this epidemic is happening because somehow my ladybrain has missed it.

Or do you think that once we get a consent culture, your friends, lovers, play partners are such manipulative, selfish people that we’ll start seeing a slew of false accusations appear that moment that a consent culture becomes an actuality?

Here is the thing. Our society teaches us that some people are inherently untrustworthy. That women are hysterical and overemotional and manipulative. We have these things for all marginalized identities. This is where the myth* of false accusations comes from.

When there is a discussion on rape, abuse, predators and survivors and people come in and say “but false accusations”, it is saying that the discussion over false accusations is more important and takes more precedent over the discussion of abuse- despite it being incredibly rare and despite abuse being reported left and right. Take into accounts that many reports of “false accusation” are actually true events that are just not believed and then the derail gets even more insulting. Also, in my world- rape is a much more serious crime than slander.

[Bold mine.]  There are several points that bear repeating or emphasizing here:

First, the relative frequency of rape and abuse, so often unreported, swamps all other narratives.  There are just a lot more rapes and boundary violations than there are accusations.  Most victims stay silent.  The scale of that problem is so large in comparison to all allegation, true and false together, that all effort should go to dealing with the rapes before worrying about the smaller number of false allegations.

Second, convictions just don’t result in BDSM cases except the most severe abuse cases with the most video evidence or severe injuries.  The harm of rape and assault far outweigh the harm of an allegation of rape or assault, since all the allegation actually does is, at most, get the accused disinvited to a few parties.  The real-world consequences are stress and reputational damage rather than imprisonment. Somebody might have some story about a false accusation that led to loss of job or kids or something: it’s always someone’s cousin’s brother-in-law and you won’t be able to verify the facts, and if you could, those facts would look a lot more sympathetic to the survivor than they’re made out by the accused’s supporters.  Anyone fantasizing that simply made-up allegations of abuse in a BDSM scene are going to result in imprisonment is just out of touch with reality, or they’re really acting as a press agent for the alleged abuser in a well-known story.

Third, there is no effective method to verify the account.  For the reasons I stated in Part 4, the courts won’t resolve BDSM community cases unless there’s a video or a hospitalization, no matter how clear the boundary violation.  There’s no grand high panel of dispute resolution, and if there were it would be immediately co-opted by the Powers That Be in the scene and the panel members would have to worry about their own access to parties and play spaces.  So we don’t have the formal process, and we don’t have an informal process, to tell us who is telling the truth.

Letting the survivors speak out in public is actually more likely to lead to an adjudication: in the US, truth is a defense to libel, but the wrongly accused have a claim and they can hire a lawyer and sue, and the standard is preponderance of the evidence.  Juries sure are not perfect, but if people really want an impartial (whatever that is) panel to determine what happened, then allowing survivors to speak out subject to defamation laws is the best we’re going to get.

There is no value-neutral choice.  Anyone who says to survivors, “police report or it didn’t happen” might as well say, “I’ll side with the rapist every time,” because that’s the effect.  They should just be honest about it.  Instead of “I don’t do drama,” they should just be straightforward, and say, “when I hear allegations of rape, I choose to treat it as if it didn’t happen,” or even, “if someone I like does something bad to you, you’re on your own.”  That’s what “I don’t do drama” means.

I reject that solution out-of-hand.  I find any outcome better than simply throwing up our hands and saying, “survivors should just shut up, because we can’t know whether they’re telling the truth.”  Any outcome.  I’m not going to mince words here: the comparatively small problem of false allegations is not important enough to me to stop the solution to the comparatively huge problem of real abuse for which there is no other remedy but transparency.

A note about comments: I am not going to let this blog be a forum for people who think that the mere possibility of false accusations is a reason to silence survivors.  This is my space: comments serve the function of moving the conversation in a direction that I want it to go, and I do not allow comments that move the conversation in directions that I do not want it to go.  You can call that an “echo chamber”, and you’d be correct.  Also, all comments are my property and I’ll publish your IP if I see fit.  [1]  Because I’m not a nice person.  You have been warned.

If tops know that people feel free to just say that a top violated boundaries, tops might be a bit more worried about how they conduct themselves, they might be a little more stressed, they might have to trust their partners more.  But right now, bottoms have to trust their partners a ton.  Checking reputations and safecalls and the community leaders don’t protect someone from having their limits violated in private, or even in public.  Right now, all the weight of risk is borne by the bottoms.  How the hell is that fair?  (It’s not.  And it leads to a slash-and-burn culture where bottoms, particularly women bottoms, come into the scene and many just bail because of experiences they have.  I think some people prefer it this way, because it can have the effect of lowering the average age of bottoms while leaving the same cohort of tops.[2]

[1] blah blah whine entitled free speech waaaaah:  Free speech is a right against the government, I am not the government and this blog is not a government program.  My threads are my space; people express here only what I choose to allow, and what I allow is subject to my policy: complete discretion, which may be exercised for any reason, no reason, inconsistent reasons, biased reasons, or arbitrary and capricious reasons.  Blah blah marketplace of ideas: I do not agree that all spaces are open to all debates, and my purpose is not to discuss this here.  In fact, properly understood, this series in particular is not a discussion.  It’s a brief.  The purpose of this series is to provide tools to people who agree with me.  If you disagree, we’re not having a conversation.  You’re the enemy, and I’ll treat you as such.

[2] Yeah, people switch; in fact, probably most of us do.  But a lot of people lean heavily one way, particularly in play outside one or a few lasting relationships.  And there are a lot of cis het male exclusive doms.

Some folks are already following the story. Others might vaguely recognize the name; for example some folks read about it here.  (Warning about the comments … if you don’t want to see people making excuses for the dead neo-nazi, don’t read them.)  For those unfamiliar, here’s the capsule:

Cece McDonald is a trans woman.  She was walking with friends past a bar, when an older white man provoked a verbal altercation.  When Cece McDonald turned around to stand up to him, his friends turned it into a physical altercation.  Cece fought back.  She ended up with a bad cut on her face, and Dean Schmitz ended up dead.

Many in this country were outraged by local authorities’ refusal to charge the man who killed Trayvon Martin, when the self-defense claim seemed at best highly dubious.  Yet the local prosecutor in Hennepin County, Minnesota, decided to charge McDonald despite a far more credible claim of self-defense.  How credible?  Schmitz had a swastika tattoo on his chest, a domestic violence record, and was on cocaine, methamphetamine and alcohol at the time of his death.  A drugged up, violent white supremacist started hurling insults at a black trans woman, and he died in the ensuing fracas … and the prosecutor doubts that she acted in self-defense?

Rulings were expected this morning on the issue of the admissibility of the swastika, and on whether McDonald could present an expert to testify to the climate of violence that trans people face.

In Florida (where the law is different), George Zimmerman’s supporters assert that he can provoke a confrontation and “stand his ground” by shooting (I credit almost nothing of his story).  In Minnesota, where a black trans woman stood her ground when words were hurled, then held her ground when others threw punches and finally used deadly force, the prosecution is trying to convict her.

And as Cece McDonald goes on trial, people in Oakland mourn for another trans woman killed. [update:  three, very recently, in fact.]

Support page here.

Coverage of the trial here.

h/t Asher Bauer

Part 2 is Here

Part 3 is Here

Part 4 is Here

[Trigger Warning for the whole series, as it deals with rape and abuse.  This part, however, contains less in the way of graphic descriptions of abuse than previous parts.]

In the previous parts, I talked about what I call the “Social License to Operate,” and since I’ll now talk about it a lot, I’m going to abbreviate it “SL-Op.”  I repurposed the term from extractive industries like mining and oil, where it expresses the concept that aside from whatever formal regulations govern their operations, they have to maintain enough goodwill that forces are not mobilized to shut them down.  Which is not far from what I mean in the rape and abuse context.  Law and regulation and social structures are all dynamic systems through which power is exercised, and how exactly it is exercised is a social phenomenon.  If there is sufficient desire to make something stop, usually a society can manage to change the law of the interpretation of the law to at least make it much rarer and more difficult.  Conversely if there is widespread support of acquiescence, legislators and law enforcement will find that they are swimming against the tide to deploy effective measures against it.  In the mainstream of American society, and I can say the same at least for the UK, you can look at the infrequency with which acquaintance rape is successfully prosecuted and punished and simply say that it is not really illegal; not in the thoroughgoing sense where the society collaborates in deploying power against it.  It’s nominally illegal, certain kinds of rape are illegal, in the sense that they are often successfully prosecuted, but the most common kinds of rapes, those committed using intoxicants and no overt force, by a man against a woman he knows, are punished at such low rates that a would-be rapist is safe in concluding that if he follows the usual protocol of repeat rapists he is likely to go unpunished.

So how does this interact with the problems particular to rape and abuse within BDSM communities?  We have several dynamics that operate socially to allow rapists and abusers to go unpunished.  Some of these mirror dynamics in the mainstream and some don’t.  This is my incomplete list:

(1) Miscommunications

This may surprise some of my regular readers, because one of my better known writings is all about how evidence from conversation analysis shows that miscommunication is not the reason for rape.  And that’s true.  This is one of the areas where BDSM parts company with the mainstream most dramatically.

If you’re reading this, depending on your play style, you’re likely to have been a party to something like the following conversation:

Top: This may hurt a bit
Bottom: Oooooow!  Shit!!
Top: Shit is not a safeword.
Bottom: Fuck you!
Top: Fuck you is not a safeword.
Bottom:  You’re from Hell!
Top:  East Hell High, class of ’72.  ”You’re From Hell” is not a safeword.
Bottom:Owww! Shit, shit shit.  Oh my God.  That’s really harsh.
Top: And what do we say …?
Bottom: Thank you Ma’am.  May I have another?

If we simply ignore bigots who hate us or think everything we do is abuse, there’s a whole tier of the public who have gotten the message that we have lots of tools to communicate about consent and limits and such, explicit tools of verbal communication.  We have negotiation and safewords and safesigns and checkins and all kinds of best practices that people could stand to learn from.  And sometimes we use them, and sometimes we talk a good game about using them and are a lot more loosey-goosey in application.

When we communicate explicitly, consent isn’t confusing.  I’ve written before that people don’t even need safewords unless they need “no” and “stop” not to mean “no” and “stop.”  If somebody is getting caned and says, “that’s it, I can’t take any more,” unless the participants have agreed otherwise, that means, “that’s it, I can’t take anymore.”  Real simple.

And when I’m doing something painful, my safeword is usually just a backup, as lots of people’s are.  I want what I want, and as strange as it is to people who don’t enjoy painplay, I sometimes want to push myself to take thing that reeeeally hurt.  I’m not likely to be whimpering “no, please …”  I’m likely to be panting, “please don’t give up on me, I can do this, I just need a second to breathe …”

But that’s not everyone’s play style.  Some people want to shout no and stop and do resistance, all of which has risks, and they’re often reasonable risks that can be managed by negotiation and safewords and other measure.  But like most risks, they can’t be managed perfectly.  They can only be managed reasonably.

For some people, much of what they want to do is out in the thin air where they can’t get a breath, where they’re scared and thinking that maybe what they agreed to was a bad idea.  I’m not dumping on that kind of edgeplay, as long as people who do that know themselves and know how to negotiate for what they need.  Ultimately, if you’re really good with just, “nothing that requires medical care and don’t mark my face” … well, okay.  Some people base jump in squirrel suits and some people dive in caves, and they’re grown-ups and accidents on those edges are serious shit.  I’m not lumping in people who choose, who consciously together choose, to play out on those edges with Eddie Ball and Glenn Marcus, with the abductors and the “my slave can never leave” abusers.

Shit happens. Whether for a newbie getting fucked while tied to the bed or the experienced adventurer in the middle of a two-day abduction scene, anywhere on the map of What It Is That We Do, shit can go wrong.  Among the shit that happens: technical errors, landmines and spontaneous misreads.

(a) Technical Errors:

You can educate and train to minimize technical errors, but they happen.  Unintentional wraps and mishits.  A miss with a soft flogger is rarely a big deal, a miss with a hard striking object could be.  A miss of five inches with a soft toy is nothing, a miss of an inch when slapping the face is more serious.  A technical error in suspension bondage or electrical play can result in death.  Some things carry a lot of inherent risk.  A slip during knife play could result in an ER visit.  Jay Wiseman, author of of SM 101, thinks nobody should do breath play, and that’s controversial.  And so on.  Hey, I’ve caused bleeding when I didn’t intend to (I don’t have the bottom’s permission to discuss the circumstances.)

In social justice communities, we generally understand that intent isn’t magic.  The common example is that if you run someone over with your car, they may be dead or injured even if no harm was meant.   But just because intent isn’t magic, doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant.  In law, the major factors to criminal offenses (and civil liability, but that’s a more complex discussion) are the act and the state of mind, the latter being divided into broad areas like intent, recklessness, and negligence, with some subcategories.  Running someone over with a car on purpose, with premeditation, intending to kill them is murder, a capital offense or a life imprisonment offense just about anywhere in the US.  Running someone over with a car accidentally, even if they die, may be negligent, and may be a misdemeanor and result in no jail time and only probation.  Why such a big difference?  Because intent isn’t magic, but it matters a lot.  It doesn’t fix the harm, but it mitigates the wrong.  It’s worse to be reckless, to know of a risk and ignore it, than to be negligent, to have a duty and fail it.  It’s worse to act with intent than to act recklessly.

We all intuitively know that.  That’s why most people don’t freak out about technical topping mistakes.  People may not want to play with someone who makes a lot of them, or makes big ones, but it’s an issue of competence rather than evil.

The biggest problem with technical errors isn’t that they happen.  There are two problems with technical errors, and they are related.  The first is that “safety” is used in an umbrella way to scoop in both technical competence and evil, and the second is that sometimes some people get defensive about them, refuse to own them and apologize for them, or worse, try to cover them up.  Staci Newmahr talks in Playing on the Edge about tops getting bad reputations for mistakes, and people advising her to only play in public with new partners, and only with people with good reputations.  This is a pretty good way to make sure that the tops one plays with are competent, but as I discussed in Part 3, not really an effective way to make sure they are not evil. The more that people who are not evil rapist pieces of shit tend to deal with being called on something by denial and coverup, the less it looks aberrant when the evil rapist pieces of shit do that, and they have to be able to do that and have it look sort of normal, otherwise they cannot operate.

So we have to normalize open communication about technical errors.  Let those who are without error cast the first stone!  We’ve all fucked up, mishit, flubbed it.  It happens.  Let’s not act like the predators act when we do.

(b) Landmines

Clarisse talks about hers, though not in any detail.  Humans are messy.  When we push into scare emotional territory, we may freak out over something that we didn’t know would affect us that way.  A landmine is an emotional problem in a scene that wasn’t reasonably forseeable by either the top of the bottom.  The bottom can’t warn or negotiate it away.  The top can’t steer clear of it.  There’s nothing to be done.  This is the place where the absence of bad intent can do the least to mitigate the damage.  There’s not much to say, except that landmines really are not anyone’s fault.  They really are like natural disasters; they can’t be avoided and there’s no point in blaming anyone.  They can be bad!  A landmine can make it impossible for two people to play together again!  It can traumatize someone so badly that they can’t do certain kinds of play anymore.  But hurricanes and tsunami can kill thousands, and they are not anyone’s fault either.

(c) Spontaneous Misreads

This is where the real trouble, the real close cases, are.  This is the place where the only difference between what the predators do and what ethical folks do by accident is intent, and all we can really assess that by is track record.

We can’t talk about every possible direction a scene should go.  It would be easy to say that no top should do anything that hasn’t been explicitly discusses; it would be easy and unrealistic. Responsible, caring tops want their bottoms to have happy, hot experiences.  If the bottom responds well to something unexpectedly, tops will read that and often go with it.  That’s not a bad thing.  That’s a good thing.  This is particularly true of verbal aspects of scenes; tops often say things to turn the bottom on.  It’s very tough to know with precision what could cause a problem, though it is certainly possible and advisable to negotiate known issues.  But it’s inherently inexact.  ”We hadn’t talked about it and I thought you were into it because of the noises you were making” may be a completely true statement, or it may be a bullshit story someone tells after doing something willfully abusive, and the difference is only state of mind.

One particular issue with spontaneous reads is the mid-scene renegotiation. In the third segment, I linked to a comment on Charlie Glickman’s blog about an abuser.  There was good, clear negotiation.  The victim’s nightmare started with a midscene renegotiation:

 In midst the scene, after she was spacey and not able to speak, he re-negotiated the scene and got her agree to body punching. She expected a thumpy massage. She got three ribs dislocated.

One of the common themes I hear in BDSM abuse stories is the mid-scene renegotiation.  Lots of bottoms, especially subs, are not really in a state of mind mid-scene to advocate for themselves.  Some folks are typically very conscious while bottoming — I can be doing  things that are very painful and if you asked me what my mortgage payment is, I could tell you.  Not everyone is like that.  The victim in that blog comment and many other bottoms I know get really out of their heads, sometimes totally nonverbal and sometimes very submissive and unable to displease the top.  Some folks just can’t use safewords at all because they can’t access them in scene: they have to negotiate up front and then trust.

(2) Disinhibition

The word “inhibited” gets a bad rap.  I’m glad people are inhibited.  Out inhibitions prevent us from doing every damned fool thing that we have the urge to do.  We shouldn’t go around saying anything we think, or punching everyone that we think deserves it.  In vino veritas, the saying goes, and while what we say under the influence comes from within us, our sober selves have more sense.

There are two major disinhibition effects in BDSM communities.  The first is the disinhibition effect of sexualized spaces, where people (and not always entitled cis het men) get the sense that grabbing and groping and being intrusive is okay: okay because we’re all here to play, okay if it’s clearly a joke, and we’re all part of one community here and … It’s not okay, It’s bad in and of itself to violate someone because you think it’s funny, but doing that creates the underbrush that the predators hide in. A pinch because ha ha we’re all kidding around is hard to tell from a pinch to see if boundaries will be defended, which is the predators’ victim targeting device.

The second major disinibition is mind-altering substances.  We talk a good game about keeping alcohol and drugs separate from BDSM because they cause people to ignore safety, miss signals, and do what they should rather than what they want.  We talk a good game and it’s a rule honored in the breach. I’ve heard a lot of boundary violation and topping mistake stories, and a lot of abuse stories, where played drunk or stoned, and even his from their partners that they were on something.  There’s no way to handle this without being judgy:  everyone says you shouldn’t play impaired, because it’s true. Don’t play impaired.  Just don’t.

(3) Geek Social Fallacies

As far as I know, the list of Geek Social Fallacies is almost ten years old, but it may be older.  There have been other attempts to apply the concept to sex. But I’m going to go with the original formulation, highlighting the first three:

Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil
Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am
Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All

These combine in alternative sexuality communities to create a meta-ethical code that does two things:  (1) criticizes the very idea of the adoption of rules, standards and ethics; and (2) prevents resolution of interpersonal conflict.

I’ll take the first effect first.  In Part 2, I wrote about folks who were for “total power exchange” and fetlife groups about revoking women’s rights.  Well, in sexuality communities, if you criticize anyone for anything — anything — that turns them on, somebody is apt to say, “hey, you’re saying YKINOK” — Your Kink Is Not Okay.  Well, having ethical rules means that some people’s kinks are not okay.[1]  It should be pretty easy to agree that Jeffrey Dahmer’s kink is not okay; Dennis Rader’s kink is not okay, and Jerry Sandusky’s kink is not okay.  I can hear the screaming now! You just compared me to serial killers and pedophiles!  Well, no, I am a BDSMer, so I just compared us to serial killers and pedophiles.  The similarity is obvious.  Their sexual self-expressions were outside the norm and stigmatized, too.  The difference between our kinks and theirs is just as obvious, too: consent.  If we don’t stand for consent, then there is no difference between us and the serial killers and child molesters.

(For BDSM Ethics According to Thomas, read Not What We Do.)

The second effect concerns the resolution of interpersonal conflict.  I’ve noticed a funny thing:  “I don’t do drama” is, in my experience, a contrarian indicator.  There is more drama around people who say they don’t do drama than those who don’t say it, IMO.  Why should that be?  Because “drama” isn’t avoidable merely by saying you don’t do it.  Drama isn’t actually avoidable at all, if we’re engaged in social interactions.  Here’s why:

Drama is the stress produced by resolving interpersonal conflict.  When people interact, there’s interpersonal conflict.  Nobody has found a way to avoid that yet, in about 10,000 years of compex human interactions.  People disagree about stuff, and resolving it produces stress.  Trying to avoid that stress means simply being in denial about the conflict instead of trying to resolve it.  That just increases the conflict, until it can’t be avoided, but the resolution then produces more stress.

Of course, like wealth and income, the stress is not evenly distributed.  A group of people can decide to resolve interpersonal conflict by ignoring someone’s grievance until they go away.  That’s what “I don’t do drama” means.  People who say it mean that if you have a grievance against someone they know, you’re on your own.

(4) Culture of Secrecy and the Cycle of Silencing

In everyday life, the things we consider private are the exception and we mostly expect transparency.  Someone who prefers opacity sort of stands out and requires explanation. In BDSM communities, people operate under pseuds all the time, are cagey about their identities and jobs and real lives and it passes without notice because it’s so common.  That is for good reason!  I write under a pseudonym, and I’m not about to stop.  My wife shouldn’t have to live with everything I write; that alone is a good enough reason.  But by allowing people to cover up histories of going from scene to scene and place to place as their behavior gets discovered.  I’ve heard stories of abusers hopping from venue to venue, group to group and city to city to stay ahead of stories that spread slowly.  It takes a long time for the victims to realize they’re not alone, and to reach out and tell their stories, and by the time they do, the abuser can move on and get a clean slate.  One might naively think that the stories of rape and abuse would follow, and yet … they often don’t.  See above, “I don’t do drama.”

This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.  A survivor speaks out, but without transparency, people can’t evaluate the full set of information.  The survivor gets a bad reception, and clams up or goes away.  Then, the next time a survivor has to decide whether to speak out about the same person, they make that decision in isolation, because the other survivor has already disappeared and their account is down the memory hole; and for that same reason, if the second survivor does speak, people lack the whole universe of information because they can only consider the allegation they know about, not the whole universe of allegations.  And so forth.  Graphic illustration:

That’s the way it goes. But sometimes, it goes the other way, too. (2)

See how each incident exists in a vertical column, what’s sometimes called a silo?  Siloed information keeps us from making informed choices about whether someone just made a mistake or is a bad actor.  The thing that is necessary to have all the information on the table is to de-silo the information, to tear down those walls and allow the information to flow freely.  What does that is support.  If survivors get a supportive reception, they’ll say what happened.  We need that.  If they don’t, they won’t, and that allows predators to hide their history.

(5) Craven Self-Interest, or, The Pussywagon[3]

Never underestimate the depth of human venality.  One of the things that operates to create structures where abusers have a social license to operate is that anyone standing up to groups of their leaders may lose access to play spaces and play partners.

We all get up on our high horse about Sandusky, thinking that if had reason to believe that a trusted and respected member of our group were doing something really, really wrong, we’d tell everyone until someone listened.  We’re bullshitting ourselves if we think that’s universal in the BDSM community.  Number 5 and something like number 3 operated to protect Sandusky, and that was enough to let a molester have access to prepubescent boys for years.

[1] For this reason, I’m skeptical of the “orientation model” of BDSM, which positions BDSM as a sexual orientation.  It has rhetorical advantages, but mere immutability is not justification.  The reason BDSM is morally acceptable can’t be a characteristic that it shares with pedophilia.  BDSM is morally acceptable because we’re not doing anything wrong, and to be morally acceptable, we have to circumscribe the boundaries of what we do at the point where it becomes wrong, not look for some metaethical cheat code like immutability.  My metaethical views are very nonmainstream even in philosphical circles, and I won’t take the space in an already long series of long posts to get farther into it than that.

[2]  This reference is a bit obscure.  Feel free to guess in comments.

[3]  Pretty obvious Tarantino reference, footnoted for anyone living in monastic isolation from popular culture.

Part 2 is Here

Part 3 is Here

[Trigger Warning for the whole series, it is all about rape and abuse in BDSM communities.  This post deals with the criminal justice system and its systematic inability effectively to deal with rape and sexual abuse in general, and in a BDSM context specifically.]

When issues of abuse in BDSM communities come up, the farther one is from progressive, anti-oppression commitments, the more likely it is that lots of people will assert, essentially, “police report or it didn’t happen.”  The more anti-oppression the crowd, the more likely that anyone raising the justice system as a solution will be greeted with a slew of stories about how bad cops and the system are and how many people just cannot go that route.  On the criminal justice system as it applies to rape and abuse, feminists are kind of all over the map.  Even folks who acknowledge that the overall function of the criminal justice system in the US particularly is to maintain a prison state and impose social control on poor people, people of color and other disempowered demongraphics often want the criminal justice system to function to punish abusers.  Good alternatives are hard to come by, after all: barring vigilante justice there isn’t much that can be done to punish rapists and abusers without some criminal justice system, and vigilante justice is a question of whose friends are scarier.

Given what we know from Predator Theory, that the lion’s share of the problem is the repeat offenders, it’s tempting to say that the solution is to catch them and jail them — so tempting, in fact, that I won’t say that’s wrong.  Just that we’re not in a place where we have a system that can do that fairly for lots of people.  But I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about some of the ways the criminal justice system fails to do that job.  The circumstances are, I think, pretty compelling, and what they amount to in my view is this: it can’t be counted on as a thoroughgoing solution, and thinking people either need to write it off entirely (I’m unwilling to do that) or to talk seriously about how it is broken and how to fix it.

The General Problems

As it works on the ground, not all people are equal in the eyes of the criminal justice system. I’m not going to spill a lot of pixels to prove this.  If you don’t know this, we have nothing further to discuss.

At every level, the criminal justice system is a machine operated by people, and those people have more or less the prejudices of the wider culture, as well as the interests and biases of the institutions themselves.  Just as there are plenty of people in the population who don’t like and won’t listen to women, people of color, trans folks, queer folks, sex workers, disabled people … so too there are cops and prosecutors and judges like that.  Experiences with the cops vary widely.  I’ve seen the NYPD deal with a stalking complaint by a sex worker, and I’ve seen a detective be wonderful and professional.  But it goes the other way, too.  Telling a survivor they have to report is a lot easier if you’re someone who has a lot of privilege and makes the comfortable assumption that the cops serve and protect everyone equally.  But the survivor may not have the same social position and may not be able to count on the system and shouldn’t be pressured to take that chance.

But even assuming that everyone in the system was perfectly professional no matter who the victim is, in the US the criminal justice system comes down ultimately to the jury trial, even though in the vast majority of cases, no such thing ever actually happens.  If the police and prosecutors and the judge are all entirely fair to victims of abuse who might be queer and/or trans and/or kinky and/or people of color and/or undocumented and/or doing sex work, it doesn’t mean a jury would.  The jury is drawn from the general population, and we all know they’re always perfectly progressive, right?

That’s why in Australia, a man could basically admit on the stand that he raped a sex worker, in a jurisdiction where sex work was legal, and be acquitted.  That’s why a bunch of boys in Orange County, California could rape an unconscious high school girl and videotape it and get a hung jury based on nothing but slandering the victim.  That’s why trans panic defenses sometimes reduce to manslaughter what are pretty clearly cases of premeditated murder.  That’s why a New York City cop can penetrate a woman who is too drunk to consent, lie about it and get caught, confess on tape, and still get a jury acquittal.

How grim is the situation for rape survivors seeking a conviction through the criminal justice system?  Roughly half of rapes go unreported, the highest underreporting of any crime; when they are reported, arrests result only 25% of the time.  That’s a lot lower than other major crimes.  It’s not because they can’t find the rapists: about 85% of rapes are acquaintance assaults.  They know where the guys are.  They just don’t bring the cases. So right off the bat, knowing nothing else, if someone says, “I was raped, what are the chances that if I report, the rapist will be arrested?” the answer is, “without factoring in anything else, about one in four.”  So the survivor would have to go through the process of reliving and talking about it and whatever difficulties come with that, and than in all probability, it will go nowhere.

And they don’t bring the cases because they can’t win.  Because juries.  I’ve written about how to deal with this in a mainstream context at length and I won’t repeat that discussion here.  The rates across more than a decade for several countries are here (I can’t say much for the provenance of the figures and some things in there are obviously some strange artifact; if I had better ones I’d use them).  The US convictions as a proportion of reports is about 12%.  That is on the low side for Western Europe, though there are outliers in there.  The UK rates are really out of line on the low end, though, and the England and Wales rate, about half the US, has been widely discussed, though the Scotland and Northern Ireland rates are even worse.  I don’t have internals on this, but it almost has to be heavily skewed to the stranger attacks:  they’re 15% of the offenses, but they are certainly disproportionally represented in the reports, maybe in the arrests, and almost certainly in the convictions.  They might be one seventh of the rapes and one half of the convictions, which means what for the chances of convicting a rapist for an acquaintance assault?

By the way:  I’m still looking for a case where a white man who was famous before the alleged attack was convicted of rape (or of the statute that constitites the rape statute in the jurisdiction, not some lesser offense), of an adult woman.  I can think of a handful of African-American celebrities, Mike Tyson and Dave Meggett come to mind.  But the closest I can come up with for white men is Marv Albert, and he pleaded at trial to a lesser offense.  Can you think of one?  Celebrity white man, convicted of raping an adult woman (or the state’s equivalent to rape, such as first degree sexual assault), not a lesser offense?  So, if he’s famous and white, there is literally no empirical evidence that it is even possible to get a conviction.

The BDSM-Specific Problems

But that’s just the obstacles survivors face when they are not kinky.  It gets much worse.

Let’s start with this: if you tell the cops in many jurisdictions that you do BDSM, you may be giving them evidence that you’ve committed a crime.  I’m not being facetious or hyperbolic.  It’s a very strange legal flux; anyone who tells you that there’s a simple answer in the US or the UK is either unfamiliar with the law, or is trying to sell you something.

In the UK, the highest court ruled that men who did heavy BDSM that caused actual bodily injury were engaged in crimes, even when all participants consented.  There have been two legislative changes since then and there are probably cases I don’t know about so I can’t say what the law is now, but  it’s not at all clear that heavy bottoms couldn’t still be prosecuted as aiders and abetters to assault in their scenes.

In the US, it’s basically also unclear.  There are a number of appellate decisions in various state courts saying that in a BDSM context consent is not a defense to assault, or to battery, or to harm.  There are lower court cases that add some complexity, but there’s nothing definitive anywhere that I know of that anyone could cite to say “if it’s consensual, hitting someone with a flogger isn’t a crime.”  For those who really want to drill down, a much more complete review can be found at the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom’s Consent Counts project page.

I’m not concerned that the police are going to bust into private play parties and start arresting people for consensual BDSM.  I’m just not.  Of all the cases out there, if you leave aside ones which constitute performing surgery without a medical license (for those unfamiliar, there’s a case of people doing castrations that I don’t have the patience to get into now), there are not any cases where the victim said the conduct was consensual.  The cases in the NCSF link, at least every one since 1990, were all cases where the victim said it was nonconsensual, and where the prosecution set out to prove that.  So I’m not trying to make a point about the government coming to take our riding crops away.  In fact, I believe prosecutors will studiously avoid prosecuting clearly consensual BDSM in the US, because they don’t want to create a test case, just as happened with sodomy laws in the 1990s up through Lawrence v. Texas — they were rarely applied because prosecutors realized that a case with sympathetic facts was likely to change the law.

The point about the legality of BDSM is that it’s still marginalized.  The victim not only has to deal with the social stigma, but if the victim is a kinkster, with the possible illegality of their regular play.  As the facts come out, the victim may be admitting to participating in criminal assaults regularly, for fun.  That’s not good testimony for a complaining witness in a criminal case.

The difference between the cases of rape that get brought and those that don’t are “bad facts,” which means facts that will make the jury judge the victim instead of the perpetrator.  And in almost all BDSM abuse cases, there are going to be “bad facts.”  The first bad fact is that none of them are going to fit the profile of the stranger rape, the only scenario where juries can apparently be counted on to convict.  In BDSM cases, the victim will almost always have gone to a club or a party, or met up with the perpetrator, with the express intention of playing.  The victim probably will have said something to that effect by email or PM or text, or said it around witnesses.  The defense lawyer can always point to that and say, “see?  The so-called victim consented!”  You and I know that consent isn’t a lightswitch, consent to being tied up isn’t consent to be fucked and all that.  We know that, but do juries know that?  Your boss is on the jury pool. Your mail carrier, your mom, your high school principal, and the yenta in the bookkeeping department are on the jury pool: do juries know that?  (Actually, my mom was awesome.  And I was out to her in college.  And she understood that consent was not a lightswitch.  But she’s dead and can’t serve on any juries anymore.  My mail carrier … I’m not so sure.)

All the things that make acquaintance rape cases unprosecutable in front of shitty mainstream juries — they knew each other, they had a prior relationship, there were messy personal dynamics, they intended to get together for sex, alcohol was involved — will make an appearance in a disproportionate number of BDSM rape and abuse cases.  They’re all the kind of cases that don’t get prosecuted.  (Yes, even alcohol.  We all know that alcohol and BDSM go badly together.  And yet people do it alllll theeeeee tiiiiiiiime.  As a teetotaler, I try to recognize that my decision not to use any alcohol is a personal standard and not a standard for everyone’s life or sexual conduct.  But when it comes to BDSM I’m not willing to be charitable.  Don’t play under the influence.  I judge you if you do.)

You might be thinking that you’ve seen — I’ve posted about — prosecutions in BDSM abuse cases.  And I have.  But the set of cases that have been prosecuted is very small, and looking at what does and doesn’t produce convictions is actually really illustrative.  I’ll review briefly.  Two that led to convictions and long sentences, and one that I believe is virtually certain to:

Bagley.  The victim ended up in cardiac arrest, near death, hospitalized.  The physical acts were very extreme, and there were video records.  The victim has some sort of mental or learning disability, and was likely underage when the conduct started.  There are allegations of death threats and killing her pets to intimidate her.  The actual charges involve sex trafficking, i.e. coerced sex work. (The trial is on for September; but there are cooperating witnesses and I’m really sure of a conviction.)

Marcus.  She asked to leave, and he punished her.  When she left, he stalked her.  The physical acts were extreme, and there were video records.  The actual conviction was for trafficking.

Longoria.  Ended in a hospital visit, with burns.  The physical acts were extreme.  Longoria had a violent criminal record.  The victim testified ostensibly for the defense, but what she actually said was that he went way too far.

Two that ended in pleas to lesser offenses:

Jetton.  She reported that she had a safeword but he drugged her and she was unconscious and unable to use it.  He plead to a misdemeanor and got probation.

Karlson-Martini.  The victim went to the hospital.  She had a concussion.  He gave an incredible excuse.  The physical acts were high-risk; you can’t safely hit a person hard with a rigid dowel the diameter of a closet pole except in a few spots.  Certainly not anywhere near the head.  I’m told he had priors.  He pleaded to a lesser degree of assault and got time served.

One that ended in an acquittal, which is sort of a very plain-vanilla BDSM rape scenario:

Senter.  The victim met Senter to play, they had played before, maybe a dozen times over several years.  She said she safeworded and he ignored it.  She said he admitted it and apologized.  The jury acquitted.

The wildcard is an unresolved Seattle case:

Hauff.  The docket seems to reflect a trial date that keeps getting kicked down the road, and I don’t know what will happen.  Media reports are that he negotiated and topped entirely consensual scenes with women other than the victim and acted ethically as a BDSMer on some occasions.  He knew how to negotiate limits, he know what a safeword was and agreed to respect safewords with some partners.  The victim wasn’t someone he met through the BDSM community, though, she was a sex worker that he allegedly didn’t know before he picked her up.  Her account is that he threatened to kill her — fake death threats are the sort of thing you can’t just spring on people IMO, you have to specifically negotiate that.  She says he filled her bladder through a catheter — risky under perfect circumstances, and again, not something you spring without asking medical background questions.  Improvising with medical play is a bit like improvising with high explosives — just because it might be fun doesn’t mean it’s ethical.  Folks in the Seattle community who have talked to the press have, as far as I’ve seen, been uniform in condemning at least part of the alleged conduct, and I think if the victim’s testimony is consistent with the media reports he belongs in jail.  But I don’t know that the jury will do that, and I’m afraid that they won’t.

If you look at the commonalities, the strong cases are the ones with not only allegations of nonconsensual sex and torture, but also nonconsensual sex work, and the ones where the torture was documented on video.  That may be for a variety of reasons: that those cases produce more evidence, that they attract federal authorities who have more resources and higher conviction rates, that people who see heavy pain are shocked, or maybe that people are just more willing to see sex work as coerced.  Some of those factors are bad things.  Or maybe the stronger cases are just the clearer abuse cases, where the perpetrator’s refusal to let the victim go looks abusive and not consensual the whole time.  But (fortunately!) few kinky folks are going to find themselves victimized in these scenarios, tortured on video for subscription websites.

The most common situations are a very mixed bag.  People who negotiate to play together where one partner seriously and willfully violates boundaries can produce convictions, but in in Jetton and Karlson-Martini, even though the allegations if believed were pretty slam-dunk, the defendants pleaded to substantially reduced charges.  Longoria was convicted, probably because of the fireplay and the burns, even though it appears to me that it was undisputed that it started as consensual play – the victim said the top “went way too far” and the jury accepted that as true.  It’s a huge win, even though the victim herself actually seemed to want an acquittal.[1]  But the one that appears to me to be the most garden-variety, top-ignores-safeword scenario, was Senter, which resulted in an acquittal.

This isn’t a complete data set — there are other cases.  Erwin in Ohio about ten years ago, which ended in an acquittal; Eddie Ball and his two accomplices who kidnapped and nonconsensually tortured Japanese students in Spokane and then tried to blackmail them into silence were all sentenced to long prison terms; Van, a men-on-man abuse case, produced an opinion that appears through the NCSF link.  People have cobbled together lists over the years but there isn’t really any central clearinghouse of trial-level BDSM criminal cases that I’m aware of.  Mostly they hit the news and then start to fade and sink down the memory hole.

There are all kinds of theoretical questions about creating an obligation to report, and I’ll leave those all aside.  Let’s just look at it practically.  Is reporting a sexual assault in a BDSM context likely to work?  No, absent serious injuries or hospitalization, or video evidence, it’s hard to conclude that it’s likely to work.  It’s hard to conclude that it will work even for relatively privileged people within BDSM communities, let alone the sorts of folks who can’t count on the cops for other reasons.  So if it’s not all that likely to actually produce a conviction, the notion that we should pressure victims in the the criminal justice system is busted.  It’s a derail, a way of throwing up a hurdle and washing hands of the allegation.  Until it’s fixed (if it can be), it cannot be a mandatory part of any solution and we can’t count on it to save us from having to figure out how to deal with rape and abuse in BDSM communities ourselves.

[1] Longaria’s victim has a child with him.  Some people may think that her wishes should control, but that’s not how the criminal justice system works.  The criminal process is the public’s representative against the defendant.  Civil cases are [person] v. [person]; criminal cases are The People, or in federal court The United States, versus the defendant.  Whether Longoria’s victim wanted him acquitted because he’s her child’s father, or because she was terrified to testify against him, or for some other reason … it’s not her choice.  In the view of the criminal justice system, and in mine, crimes are not private matters but breaches of the social contract that we’re all parties to, and I don’t think that the victim should be able to just stop a prosecution.  I just don’t.

Part 2 is Here

[Trigger warning for the whole topic.  I'm talking about rape and abuse in the BDSM community. This post specifically contains narratives of rape and abuse. ]

I said in the last section that when the predators manipulate their way into central positions in BDSM communities, they are unstoppable.  We have to talk about this, and this is the uncomfortable part.  Predator Theory, backed by empirical research, tells us that the bad actors, the repeat, deliberate, serial abusers, are less than 10% of the general population (depending on the population; the research is sketchy, but 4% or 8% depending on whether one looks at Lisak’s college sample or McWhorter’s Navy sample).  Four out of a hundred, one out of twenty-five: someone we know.  Someone we’re friends with.  Someone we trust.  Someone who is friends with our friends.  It may be worse in BDSM communities, nobody has any numbers.  Pedophiles try to become priests, teachers, coaches, run camps: places where their access to targets will be easy, where they can select and groom targets.  Given the way BDSM communities offer access to targets and unwittingly or even recklessly provide cover for abusive conduct, why wouldn’t predators who want adult victims gravitate toward BDSM communities?  Anyone who thinks that can’t be true is in denial.

The first step is admitting we have a problem.  And we do have a problem.  I’ll skip to the end: there’s no shortage of stories that start “I was abused” and end “when I tried to say something the community closed ranks around the abuser and I was frozen out.”  It’s happened to friends of mine.  It’s happened in communities where people insist that the community isn’t like that.  And almost always, you have to actually know the participants to know what happened because nobody talks about it.  It’s all secret, there’s no sunlight and no transparency.  You, you out there on the internet, can search blogs until you’re blue in the face for a record of some of these stories, or some indication that you shouldn’t play with some of these people, and you’ll never find it.  Even when “everybody knows,” the “everybody” is very narrow.

Here is a classic example; a pretty typical story that was left in comments to Charlie Glickman’s blog post on BDSM and rape [TW specifically not so much for the violation but for the community shut-down, but if you can, I encourage you to read this and not just TL;DR skim it]:

A good friend who is a non-masochistic female submissive negotiated “a painless singlestail scene” at a convention dungeon. She was not a novice, but had 3-4 years experience and was very active in the local community. The dominant man was a was a current title-holder, doing the circuit of regional conventions.

In midst the scene, after she was spacey and not able to speak, he re-negotiated the scene and got her agree to body punching. She expected a thumpy massage. She got three ribs dislocated.

When he punched her kidney she fell, so he held her to the floor and kept punching her. She had to pull herself together enough to speak, and to call red, before he stopped. Then he told her not to tell anyone what had happened, and he dumped her on me and left. He did not show up at the pre-arranged meeting place the next the morning.

This was clearly not a scene gone wrong, or a mistake.

The man could not have claimed ignorance. He was a trained martial artist, so he would have known the effect his blows were having. It could only have been deliberate.

Rather than dropping out of sight, she chose to warn people. When she tried the tell the kink community what had happened, she got shut out. Her forum posts were deleted. She was told to have a mediated discussion with the man who had assaulted her. The rape crisis center wasn’t interested because it had happened in a kink environment and there had been no penetration. People in the community stopped talking with her.

She found other women who had had their limits violated and had been beaten or even put in the hospital by this man. Of course, some of them dropped entirely from the scene, which made them invisible. If she hadn’t sought them out, they would have been forgotten.

People in the community still didn’t want to hear about it. She continued to fight for three years before anyone agreed to help her.

This response was not merely local. People acted in the same way in our home state, in the state where the convention was held, and the home state of the man.

The result is that this man seized the one thing she enjoyed most in life, BDSM, and took it away from her. That was the last time she ever allowed herself to to get spacy and unable to speak. And for that, the community treated her as the villain.

We tell ourselves that the kink community is self-policing, but we’re lying to ourselves. The community prefers to minimize visible conflict. If a predator says the right things in public, and abuses people in private, not only is he accepted by the community, he can be made a title-holder.

[Bold mine.] Now, I don’t know who the hell that is.  I don’t know who the victim is, who the perp is, nothing.  But it rings true because it matches what I’ve seen.  A close friend of mine, a queer cis woman, won a leather contest title on the East Coast in the late 1990s, then moved out to the Bay Area.  After playing and participating for years, she met a guy who was a relative newbie Dom and they decided to try a 24/7 relationship.  It didn’t last very long, and they broke up, but when it fell apart and she tried to get back together with him, he punched her in the face.  It wasn’t consensual, it was in anger.  They had a written contract that specified that play in anger was a hard limit.  The contract conveniently disappeared.  She reported and it ended up in court.  The BDSMers generally sided with him.  He’s a sought-after speaker.  She tells me she feels like persona non grata in her old play space.

Here’s the grim punch line: a friend of mine, a feminist, a prominent feminist BDSMer, played with that guy.  After the incident.  Nobody told her.

There are stories that have me gritting my teeth, ones where I’ve talked to the participants and know what happened as well as anyone except an eyewitness can, stories where the abusers are very public, very well-connected, and where there have been attempts to tell people that a top is wildly unsafe and untrustworthy.  Those attempts resulted in no meaningful action against the tops, and a whole lot of personal consequences for the victims and other people who tried to speak out; so much so that in some cases the survivors have personally asked me not to be more specific because they don’t believe anyone will do anything about it and they just can’t go through it again.  It makes me sick and sad not to say what I know, but … I understand.  Some of the people who do very fucked up and wrong things are also the fixtures at some of the parties, or the hosts, or in the inner circle of organizations.  Some survivors decide that they need to be heard, however, so I have permission to print one such story.

This one appeared on Tracy-Clark Flory’s Tumblr, after she posted the story about Stryker that I linked in the first segment:

I was at a play party some years ago where I was seriously abused non-consensually by a woman who figured she could do anything she wanted because “sub males should consider themselves lucky to get any kind of attention from a dominant woman.” After it happened, everyone kept telling me to stop talking about it because she was a known dominant, and it would only “hurt your reputation in the community.”

One of the founders of one of a big city party operation was accused of sexual assault by a woman.  His friends, on Fetlife, piled on her and attacked her.  A second woman’s allegations came to light — she hadn’t wanted to say anything publicly, but she got dragged into it.  Team Perp was well on their way to shutting the women down and protecting him, when a prominent youth organization threatened to boycott the perp’s parties.  He took some time off to address issues in his personal life.  Recently, I read a first-hand account that that guy’s co-founder nonconsensually and against event rules finger-penetrated a woman at one of the events.

One friend of mine started asking questions about a prominent, well-connected Midwestern kinkster.  He and his wife started making threats, and they’ve threatened other people who have made inquiries about whether his conduct was all consensual.  Some of his friends then tried the good-cop approach: they were trying to change him, to make him be better about consent and limits, but if she attacked him, he’d just get defensive and would stop trying to change.  Charming, right?

(I’m listing blind items here.  Some of these incidents, I don’t know who it is.  Some, what I know I know only second-hand.  Some, I got the stories firsthand and I do know who it is, and I have not said.  I could give you all kind of excuses for why I’m not naming the names I know; but the blowback if I tell other people’s stories isn’t just on me.  I’m not afraid of the abusers, or not afraid enough to shut me up anyway.  But I am afraid to set in motion events that will harm people who trust me.  So … right now I’ll just say that I did what I did.  I’ll return to what it means to name names later.)

There are more.  Kitty Stryker collected some stories for a blog carnival.  If you follow online BDSM communities, the stories sometimes pop up, but then they are sometimes quickly hauled down, or they occasion a flurry of attacks on the victim, and only occasionally the victim’s supporters returning fire.  Some I get by private email or PM, some I hear third-hand, some are laid out in personal blogs, under the radar with a readership of a dozen.  Those are the stories that you don’t hear unless you’re already close to it.  You have to know somebody to find out what was said.

The plural of anecdote is not data.  The plural of anecdote is evidence.  How many does it take to make a pattern?  One woman, a friend-of-friends, had this to say (Sorry, folks, Fetlife login req’d):

I joined the New York scene around end of summer or early fall of 2009. I wasn’t new to kink, but I was brand-new to joining public groups about it. I got to know a bunch of people, but I made closer friends with a group of maybe 10-12 women who bottomed/subbed at least part of the time, and who got into the scene at around the same time I did.

It’s now spring 2012. Out of these 10 or 12 women, 3 (including me) are still in the scene. Out of all these women, 100% were raped, abused, assaulted, drugged without their consent, or had their hard limits totally ignored by members of the scene.

Most of them didn’t even think of going public for fear of backlash. If you asked one of their acquaintances why so-and-so left, they might say “didn’t she move?” or “I thought she got a new job that kept her busy” or “oh, I think she left after her breakup with that guy” or “you know, people just drift in and out sometimes.” You wouldn’t know the real story unless you were one of their close friends. I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten an “I can’t believe what he just did to me, but don’t tell anyone” call. Single digits would be unacceptable; double digits is incredibly disturbing.

I think at least 90% of people in the scene are good. I think the others get around a whole lot.

I think even in a relatively small sample size, a violation rate of 100% is a sign that something really needs to be fixed.

[Emphasis mine.]  There’s a theme here: that silence and secrecy are the paramount values, and open discussion is to be avoided.  It’s a basic function of institutions, but often of informal social networks as well, to protect the body from reputational damage.  That’s what colleges do with rape: they use nondisclosure agreements so that whatever the result, nobody can talk about it.  When I was in college and there was an accusation of a sexual assault on a woman I sort of knew, I got the account from her, and she said it happened and I believed her, so I told anyone who would listen about the perp.  So the administration told me I’d be punished if I didn’t shut up.  That’s how it happens.  Not talking about it is rule #1.

I said before that even when “everybody knows,” everybody is really narrow.  Even when there’s a paper trial, a police report, a restraining order, people who are new in the scene often don’t get told.  When I was a teenager, I believed that reputation was the gold standard and that if there were stories about a top violating boundaries, that it would get around pretty quickly.  It turns out that it doesn’t.  People sit on what they hear.  To tell you, the people who have heard need to trust you, and the people who nobody knows well enough to share the story with are those who are newest and least protected.

I titled this series, “There’s A War On.”  There are two sides, and the two sides are Transparency and Secrecy.  Justice Brandeis famously wrote that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”  People who are against sunlight have arguments, some of them even sensible arguments.  But when it comes down to it, either you think things have to change, or you don’t.  For reasons that I’ll write about in greater depth in the sections to come, the only real way to make change is to let the sunlight in.

There’s a way I think I need to come at this.  Some of the people on Team Secrecy are not evil, just misguided, and on my account they’re misguided because they’re not seeing the critical relationship between the predators, and the environment that allows them a social license to operate.  So the rest of what I have to say is about those factors and that relationship.

It’s easy to be against rape and abuse committed by the Other.  Someone else, out there in the nebulous “not us” isn’t a threat to our social environment.  In mainstream discussions of rape, the theme is to deal primarily with stranger assaults even though they’re about 15% of the rapes, because it’s a lot easier to talk about them.  That’s why almost all the “how not to get raped” advice has several items — sometimes all of them — that are primarily or exclusively applicable to stranger rape scenarios.  (Take a look at this one, would you believe this shit is the first hit in a Google search for “how not to get raped”?)  I won’t go into how problematic those lists are because of the limited scope of this post, but mostly because I hope anyone reading this already knows all that.  The theme of the list that addresses the easy-to-discuss less common circumstance repeats in BDSM.  Much of the “safety” advice addresses a certain scenario, BDSM’s own version of the stranger in the bushes.

BDSM’s stranger in the bushes is not a part of a community, not in any real way.  Maybe he contacts newbie sub women (it’s a cisnormative and heteronormative trope) on the internet only and has little real-world contact with the upstanding people who belong to organizations and go to well-attended parties and clubs.  Or maybe he hangs out on the fringes, shows up for a munch or at an event but doesn’t really know anyone and nobody knows much about him.

The thing is, like the stranger rapist, the creepy doms are not figments of anyone’s imagination.  Oh, they exist!  And they are dangerous.  Some of the worst abuse cases to come publicly to light are these sort of marginal characters, with no or peripheral involvement in the local community.  It’s my understanding that Bagley fits this model: sometimes attended munches, but wasn’t really integrated into the “scene.”  Longoria, as far as I know, wasn’t part of any formal BDSM community.  Glenn Marcus, whose case went all the way to the Supreme Court, fits that model.  Travis Anton[1], shot and killed by his victim of several years, fit that model.  Hauff, charged in Seattle (but not convicted of anything and to my knowledge still awaiting trial) fits the profile, said to have been a “wallflower” at the Wet Spot, a creepy guy who read the Gor novels, allegedly abducted and nonconsensually tortured a sex worker after his marriage to a Filipina woman 25 years his junior fell apart.  It’s easy to call those situations abuse, because the perpetrators were on the fringes.  They didn’t subscribe to norms and standards and pay lip service to ethical precepts that the people in the organizations do.[2]  They didn’t talk a good game about limits and consent.  They didn’t go to demos and take classes, or at least not as regular participants in the formal scene.

There’s a whole cultural issue about who is in the club and who isn’t that goes along with this.  I’d recommend Margot Weiss’s ethnography of the Bay Area BDSM scene – I have not read it in its book form but I did read her doctoral dissertation (I’m assuming the material overlaps heavily, though I assume the book was edited to make the academic language more accessible), and it is all about the operation of BDSM in late capitalism and how it interacts with social norms and constitutes serious leisure.  It also puts me in mind of the essay Mr. Benson Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, about the valuing of form over substance in gay men’s leather communities, in the wonderful and under-cited anthology Leatherfolk, edited by Mark Thompson.   There’s a middle-class-ness, a mark of approval and propriety, a performance of norms about this determination of who is us and who isn’t.

(Also, I just feel like I need to note the conflict of interest from people who say, “newbies, especially newbie women, need to play in public with the organized community for a while to get experience”:  it preserves older community members’ access to a stream of younger people, and in pansexual communities particularly younger women, to play with.  It should be noted that the discomfort of being constantly cruised for play by older community members is one of the things that makes a lot of younger folks more comfortable in age-restricted “The Next Generation” or TNG groups.)

Folks who remember my post Not What We Do may wonder at the tension between saying that Bagley is not Us, and decrying the people who say Bagley is not Us.  I want to be clear:  what I meant to do in Not What We Do was to make an ethical statement.  People who say, “screw you and your ethics” are voting themselves out.  I don’t say Bagley wasn’t one of us because he lived in a trailer (as some people have — that’s classist and messed up.)  I say he isn’t one of us because, if you credit the statements under oath by his co-defendants, he practically owned the tee shirt that said “I don’t do consent.”

People who “don’t do consent” can rot in hell.  I have nothing to offer them: no common ground and no compromise.  You might think that expressly eschewing limits or continuing consent is rare, but you can’t poke around Fetlife long without coming across groups where people — so often cis het male doms — say they don’t believe in consent or limits, they believe in TPE, total power exchange, etc.  Now, the first great online battle of people using the terminology of TPE broke out in the 1990s and ruined some Usenet groups and I’m old enough to remember that.  I’m not having that discussion, simply because I don’t care what the “no limits TPE” people have to say, I won’t engage with them or their “ideas” and I won’t let this blog become a forum for them. (Don’t bother commenting, assholes.  I won’t put the comments up and I’ll ban you. Free speech is a right against the Government; I’m not the government and I don’t owe anyone a space to be heard.)[3]

These people wouldn’t be so dangerous if everyone agreed that both they and their tactics are marginal.  But while it’s easy to say that these people are on the margins after they’ve been criminally charged, they’re the ugly secret that the upstanding people with their SSC banners hide when the mainstream is looking around.  People have an attraction to edges and extremes.  One time I posted about the problems I have trusting BDSM porn made by big companies.  Well, the problem is that the basement operation may be even worse:  of the cases of abuse (or alleged abuse, for the pending ones) I references above, three made porn for paying subscribers.  Travis Anton used photos and videos of his victim and supplied writings that purported to be hers, under the name Delia Day.  Glenn Marcus used his victim, the one he punished when she tried to leave, the one he stalked after she did leave, to produce subscription porn.  Bagley also ran a website, and even took the woman to a photoshoot for Taboo, a part of Flynt’s Hustler family of porn magazines.  Anyone looking at this material is watching actual rape and abuse, and all of them bragged (or are alleged to have bragged) about how extreme and edgy they were.

I’ve met several people, mostly women, whose introduction to BDSM was that someone talked them into a 24/7 dominant/submissive dynamic when they were brand new.  That’s just wrong.  Even if someone is really, really convinced that 24/7 is where they want to end up (and I’m not saying 24/7 dynamics are always bad, but they’re always difficult and I’m always wary of them), how can they possibly know that without a background of experience doing temporary power exchange and seeing how it feels?

I’m dating myself here, but I remember back in the 1990s when Michael Payte was outed as a dangerous top.  He was at Bear Stearns and it made the Village Voice.  I remember people saying, “yeah, I played with that guy.  You just had to know that it was a no-safeword scene.  But if someone freaked out I could see him getting nasty.”  So basically, there were people who thought that he didn’t respect consent or limits and sort of shrugged because he was a scary, edgy top.  A friend of mine quoted Mollena Williams, who in the last part I noted had written about the violation of her consent, as saying, “tops get scared and anxious, too, unless they’re completely sociopathic.  And if you are playing with someone sociopathic, more power to you … just get a spotter.”

As long as we’re romaticizing the scary, nonconsensual and evil, we can’t be surprised when the actual scary, nonconsensual and evil people manage to hang around at the fringes of the community and prey on newbies.  But sadly, BDSM’s stranger in the bushes is the scenario that the formal communities actually deal with best.  Asher Bauer wrote one of the best pieces about this, Field Guide to the Creepy Dom.  He says, in part:

You all know this guy, or have at least heard of him. He’s the one who got banned from the local S&M club. He’s the asshole who just sent you a rude “Submit to me now” message on Bondage.com— even though you’re listed as a femdom. He’s the guy who seriously abused your friend under the guise of “D/s.” He might’ve even made the national news, but more likely, his victims have never reported him to the police.

***

This… gentleman… began by intruding upon a scene in progress. He proceeded to speak only to Dylan and Char, completely slighting me. He said he could get them into a private party at Mr. S. He asked us where we usually hang out, and when Char said “The Citadel” he reacted with suppressed scorn. Before any of us fully knew what was happening, he had grabbed Dylan (who was already subspaced out) and forced him onto his knees, without so much as a ‘by your leave.’ “You can always tell if someone’s submissive by doing this,” he said, digging his finger into a pressure point on Dylan’s wrist. He pointed out the involuntary twitch of one of Dylan’s fingers, then reached for my arm to do the same to me.

“I didn’t give you permission to touch me,” I hissed.

He laughed, and said something to the effect that “she,” on the other hand, was not submissive.

“My name is Asher, I am not she, I’m a transman, and not letting you touch me has nothing to do with whether I’m submissive,” I informed him.

Finding no fertile ground in me, he focused his attention on Dylan. Char sat by, not quite sure whether to interfere, but not willing, either, to leave Dylan alone with this person.

***

What is so intoxicating, and also so dangerous, about Creepy Dom, is that he does not distinguish between the scene and reality. This is why he thinks that dominant people are dominant all the time, and submissive people are doormats. This is why he doesn’t negotiate or ask permission. This is why he has no regard for rules.

***

Around him, there’s no “off” time. Even when you aren’t technically in a scene, he takes control of the situation. Although he may not say he’s interested in 24/7, what he wants is complete power over you.

When all’s said and done, Creepy Dom is just a classic abuser dressed up in leather. And that, my friends, is a lot less sexy than it sounds.

I’m not summarizing the whole post here; there’s a list of characteristic red flags and explanations, and it’s really a post that I encourage people to go read start to finish.

That guy often does get banned from the public spaces and the orgs. The stories about boundary violations circulate pretty quickly because this guy isn’t any good at hiding what he is. He ends on the fringes, in the bushes as it were, looking for victims.

But he can still sometimes manage to find victims, especially among the less experienced and less savvy, because he has at least a partial social license to operate.  I’m using Predator Theory language here.  Some of my best-known writing is on the empirical research on undetected rapists that shows that a single-digit percentage of the population are serial predators responsible for the vast majority of the abuse.  These are the predators.  What they do is not a mistake or miscommunication.  However, the rape and abuse they commit is under any strategic cover they can find that will allow them to escape consequences for what they do.  That’s their “social license to operate,” the social circumstances which they use to conceal, justify or excuse their conduct, that make it seem grey or borderline or unknowable when in fact their conduct is intentional.  ( I may shorthand it “SL-Op” from time to time.)

There’s a lot of room in BDSM communities to blur the line between reality and fantasy.  Asher himself says:

It can be really hot, at first, because let’s face it– none of us fantasize about negotiations and limits. We fantasize about some big rough brute coming up to us in the corner of a dark club and demanding exactly what he wants. And that’s pretty much what this guy does. He makes it all real, and that is the source of his charm. That is also why he will destroy you.

And some people do go around making the claim that there is no “off” time, that “real” submissives don’t use safewords, that doms “just know.”  In fact, some of these “real subs don’t have safewords” people have significant cult followings. There’s a whole subculture of Goreans, for example, who model their play on John Norman’s Gor sci fi novels: heteronormative, gender essentialist and, sometimes, without limits.  The romanticizing of bad actors who don’t understand or respect limits and can’t be trusted even manifests in (usually) barely concealed support for the worst abusers.  Apologists for Marcus are rare, but there are still apologists for Bagley.  Mostly they take the form of asserting that the media may be getting the facts wrong, which is a fair criticism.  But I see some folks flat-out assert that he did nothing wrong and it was all consensual and she’s only lying now because … well, we’ve all heard that one before, right?

The Creepy Dom, the guy living in isolation and soliciting 19-year-old newbies to move half way across the country to be his live-in slave, that’s the easy case. Very few people are actually for that guy, and not many are friends with that guy or make excuses for that guy. The problem is that when that guy (on occasion not a guy — the trope is gendered and cis and het but the reality is more complicated) is good at manipulating people, everything changes, and suddenly, communities are not so good at dealing with it anymore.  There’s just enough underbrush to give these predators a slender SL-Op … but when they’re really good at manipulating people, and they move into the center of their communities, then they have almost unlimited freedom to operate.  Abusers that work their way into central positions in BDSM communities are almost untouchable.  That part is coming.

[1] The events of ten years ago are increasingly invisible at the bottom of the internet memory hole, and complete summaries of what happened are hard to find.  Travis Anton’s victim was an artist from Mississippi from what I understand to have been a very sheltered home.  He was self-employed with a software company, his children were in boarding school and he had isolated her in rural Mississippi.  Nobody really knows what happened but her; she was arrested after shooting him in the chest with his own shotgun, released on bond, and then as far as I know, never charged.

[2] Hauff may actually claim to subscribe to meaningful, recognized community practices of consent, though it is hard to tell what the defense will be from the stories in the press.  I guess we’ll all see what the trial looks like.

[3] True story: a fight broke out in a Fetlife group called Revoke Women’s Rights when a group of feminist and feminist-friendly women who wanted a place to explore extremely misogynist fantasy dynamics pointed out that the group had to be fantasy oriented because actually advocating a politics of patriarchy would be hate speech and violate the TOU.  They got piled on by people (not all claiming to be men) who really, really insisted that the space be a forum for people who wanted women returned to conditions of legal and social subjugation long since left behind in almost the entire world.

b. Arming Sequence. First remove the safety clip, then the safety pin, from the fuze by pulling the pull ring. Be sure to maintain pressure on the safety lever: it springs free once the safety clip and the safety pin assembly are removed.

c. Release Pressure on Lever. Once the grenade is thrown, the pressure on the safety lever is released, and the striker is forced to rotate on its axis by the striker spring, throwing the safety lever off. The striker then detonates the primer, and the primer explodes and ignites the delay element. The delay element burns for the prescribed amount of time then activates either the detonator or the igniter.

-from US Army Field Manual 3-23.30,  instructions on use of hand grenades

[Trigger Warning.  The whole thing is about rape, abuse, and apologist tactics.  There are descriptions of rape, abuse, and apologist tactics.]

It’s invisible to the mainstream.  There’s a war on within the BDSM community[1] about whether to face up to abuse within.  There are a lot of dynamics overlapping here, and it’s hard to see the whole picture even for those of us who keep up with these things.

There is so much that I want to say, so much ground to cover, that I don’t know where to start.  I’ll start here:  I have certain advantages.  I can speak about BDSM as a kinkster; my critique is an internal critique.  At the same time, I have little to lose by pissing all over other people’s opinions.  I don’t currently belong to any formal organizations, and I don’t play in public.  I engage with other kinksters socially and politically, mostly politically.  I don’t need to stay in anyone’s good graces to have a place to play or people to play with.

I say this because one sex educator I know said to me privately that they will take no part in this dialogue, because of the reaction they got years ago trying to have the same conversation: vicious personal attacks.  It’s easy to be against rape and abuse, you see, as long as it’s in the abstract, as long as the abusers are some nebulous other, as long as the proposed solution does not require any tough choices to be made, expose anyone with important friends to actual accountability or threaten to actually change the way things are.  Everybody’s against rape as long as we’re not proposing to do anything about it.

Do rape and abuse happen in kink communities?  Yes.  Yes they do.  In any forum where people have the space to talk about it, stories come out.  For most of my adult life (and I’ve engaged with other kinky people in some forum or other for just about my entire adult life) the only forums where those stories were welcome were small conversations among friends.  Recently, that has started to change, and there is a new paradigm of open discussion which threatens to upend the applecart and actually change the way things operate.

I’m going to go ahead and credit two people with finally breaking through and making this conversation unavoidable, but they are not alone.  Those two people are Kitty Stryker and Maggie Mayhem.  In July of last year, Kitty posted I Never Called It Rape, about her own experiences of rape and assault:

When I start to think of the number of times I have been cajoled, pressured, or forced into sex that I did not want when I came into “the BDSM community”, I can’t actually count them. And I never came out about it before, not publicly, for a variety of reasons- I blamed myself for not negotiating enough, or clearly, or for not sticking to my guns, or I  didn’t want to be seen as being a drama queen or kicking up a fuss. Plus, the fact is, these things didn’t traumatize me, and I didn’t call it sexual assault or rape, because I felt ok afterwards. There was no trauma, no processing that I needed.

 That makes me really angry, because I realized I didn’t feel traumatized because it happened so bloody often that it was just a fact of being a submissive female. WTF, right? I used to see on Alt.com and Bondage.com female submissives talking about predatory behaviour in the BDSM community, and I still see it on CollarMe and Fetlife. I remember being given the stage whisper not to play with this person or that one because they had a history of going too far, something that was often dismissed as “gossip” and kept on the DL to avoid that accusatory label of being overly dramatic. Being in the scene meant learning how to play politics- how to be polite, even good-natured, to people that you kept an eye on.

 As I reflected on the number of times I’ve had fingers in my cunt that I hadn’t consented to, or been pressured into a situation where saying “no” was either not respected or not an option, or said that I did not want a certain kind of toy used on me which was then used, I’m kind of horrified.

This turned into the kickoff of a project, and with Maggie Mayhem, Stryker is now leading the Consent Culture project.  Their work hit the mainstream when Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory wrote this article in January.

But Stryker isn’t the first or the only person to try to address abuse within BDSM communities.

Kinkylittlegirl’s blog has been addressing abuse since late 2009.

Mollena Williams, probably the most visible African-American in BDSM, has written about when her consent was violated:

And maybe you are thinking

Oh but how could that happen?! You’re an expert! You TEACH other perverts how to do the perverted shit? How could ANYONE take advantage of you without your consent?

I asked myself that after this encounter.

I blamed myself.

I thought “Well, I didn’t say “No.” forcefully enough. I didn’t insist. I didn’t hit him, push him away. It must be my fault.”

I sat in a narcotized place of self-blame and self-hatred for months around something for which I claimed100% responsibility.

I blamed myself for “letting” someone violate one of my strongest boundaries. And I sat on this alone and in reflexive revulsion, because clearly I was too stupid, weak and foolish to handle myself like a responsible adult.

And because I had so much shame around this, because I was so afraid that others would look at me and think “What a fucking idiot. What kind of dummy lets something like them happen to them?” I didn’t tell anyone for months. Then it began to eat me alive, woke me up at night, freaked me out.

I finally told several people close to me, And then a few more. And no one told me I was stupid.
In fact, to my dismay, my story was common. Standard. Typical.

And that is horrifying. THAT is shameful.

[Plain bold Williams's original, except the final bolded portion, which is my emphasis.]

There may be no name in BDSM more widely known to the public than Jay Wiseman, and here’s what he has to say back in 2008 in Are We Men A Bunch Of Lying Pricks?:

One of the things she *wasn’t* interested in was that the play be sexual. Given that “sexual” is a somewhat vague term, I proceeded to ask her if several different acts would or would not be OK. All of them were not. OK. Candidly, I don’t much like doing nonsexual scenes but I figured what the hey. I find her attractive, we seem to have a certain rapport, the scene will probably be “adequately” fun anyway, and who knows what the future might bring, right? So we do the scene, and it’s actually not half bad. (For a non-sexual scene, anyway.) Oh, and no, she couldn’t get loose. <G>

So the scene is finished and she’s getting dressed when I hear her quietly say, almost more to herself than me, “You actually kept the agreement to not be sexual. That was interesting.”

Huh?

I turn to look at her, my jaw hanging open.

“What do you mean?” I ask her.

“You’re the first one who ever did that,” she replies.

HUH???

“Yeah,” she continues, “All of the other men have just gone ahead and had sex with me anyway.”

I cannot believe what I’m hearing.

“What do they say afterwards?”

“Usually something like, Oh, it just happened.”

Asher Bauer’s story is here (my post, with link to the original); it has the added complexity that it happened pre-transition and he has a hard time finding a place to talk about his experience where his gender isn’t ignored or misused:

That night, he raped me again. This time there was no “ambiguity” about it, nothing “gray area” about the twelve hours that went black, permanently lost to my memory, after I accepted a drink from him.

And it didn’t stop there. For two more days it went on and on: the repeated failure to stop when I said stop, the refusal to use contraception or even let me buy a morning after pill. For a week after we parted ways I was in and out of the doctor’s office with mysterious bleeding, various infections, and finally, an STD. So much for “clean.”

I didn’t have a baby, no thanks to him. I did finally get hold of the pill on my own. Perhaps part of the motivation for his actions can be found in what I had thought was a sick joke. Once, when I’d told him I never wanted children, he’d threatened, “Don’t make me tie you down and breed you.” Only maybe it wasn’t a joke after all, since that is more or less what he did.

[Bold mine.]

Tacit, a cis man, writes eloquently about these issues, and links his friend CircleofLight about the assault she experienced:

In the BDSM community, victim-blaming can be more subtle and more insidious. I’ve heard folks say “Well, everyone knows how so-and-so likes to play. She should have known what she was getting into when she agreed to play with him.” I’ve heard folks say “Well, she should have checked his references (or established a safe call or not played with him in private or any of a dozen other things) and this wouldn’t have happened.”

These “she should have” games play out after the fact, too. I’ve heard folks, including one person I know who I consider to be basically a decent guy, say “She should have done thus-and-such after the assault happened.” Usually it’s “She should have reported it” or “She should have confronted the perpetrator directly” or “She should have gone to a community leader and let him know that there was a problem”.

To me, all these “she should have” statements are a little fucked up. See, here’s the thing: Often, the folks in the BDSM community who end up assaulting someone are well-respected leaders in the community, with impeccable references and strong community support.

[Bold mine.]

I could point to several more, but there are a lot of things I don’t have the right to write about.  There have been scandals where members of BDSM communities have been accused of sexual assault and intimate partner violence.  I have seen only one that was handled in anything like a way that gave me comfort.

Much of this discussion, for the last few years, takes place primarily on Fetlife.  Fetlife requires a login, but more importantly, two things really limit the visibility of these discussions on Fetlife.  The first is the structure of Fetlife: it is a series of walled gardens without any search functionality for text or discussion topics. Whoever is talking about, say, the Salon article or Mollena’s post, you can’t find it.  You’d have to look in every group and check the discussion topics.  You can’t pull up old discussions even if you know the date, there’s no chronological archive, and the default setting is that the order changes to move topics with current comments to the top.  This structure has led multidimentsional activist and queer kinkster Maymay to conclude that Fetlife is harmful.  Since on Fetlife your friends can see your activity, people’s workaround is to comment on a discussion and say, “breadcrumbs,” so that their friends will know to follow the discussion.

The other problem is that Fetlife’s Terms of Use and caretakers (the “Carebears”) are opposed to anything but a theoretical discussion of these problems.[2]  The TOU bars anyone from accusing another member of a crime, and the Carebears discourage crosslinking to another group to discuss a particular member, so that if one starts a discussion saying, “what so-and-so said in this group is a rape apologist crock of shit,” it may not be around long.  There are suggestions in the suggestion box group to change the TOU around speaking out about assault and abuse and I support those and I encourage my friends to as well, but I’m not optimistic because Fet is a business now, and pretending everyone can all get along is better for business.  And worse, Fetlife’s TOU bars quoting without written permission, so while I can quote people who I agree with because I can usually get permission, I may be in violation of the TOU if I quote wrongheaded or fucked up things that people say in response to efforts to deal with abuse.

I’ve spoken up before on abuse in BDSM communities, FWIW.  If you want to read what I’ve written in the past, here are the links:

No Chosen People

Tracking Shit On The Carpets (sadly, Halo P. Jones’s original post is gone, and that’s not an aside.  You can’t find her anymore unless you know her well because she was stalked and harassed by a nasty piece of shit, and now she keeps a very low profile.)

Not What We Do was my first post about the Bagley abuse case, winding its way through federal court in Missouri now.  I have posted several more, all with Bagley in the title, for those who wish to follow the case; everyone except Bagley and his wife, charged in March 2011, has pleaded guilty and the Bagleys face a phalanx of cooperating witnesses.

Breaking the Silence, my response to Kitty’s landmark post, with a short reading list.

And more generally, I’ve written (making extensive use of ethnographic dissertations by two academics who immersed themselves in major city BDSM communities) about Domism as a dynamic.  Reactions to this piece have been decidedly mixed:  lots of folks say they see the same things, lots of folks say this doesn’t reflect their communities, and some folks have started discussions about to what extent these dynamics play out in their communities, which is the most productive reaction.

I’m usually a fan of long posts.  I’m okay with four to five thousand words, and I’ve never written something long and said to myself, “I’d better make this a series.”  But I have to make this a series.  There’s too much to talk about:  the cops and the criminal justice system and how they interact with BDSM, self-policing in formal and informal ways and how it has failed, abuse situations at the fringes and at the center of communities and how communities react to protect themselves like institutions, how what we know about predator theory and mythcommunication apply to rape and abuse in BDSM, why people are resistant to actually making change … it’s a lot to cover.  There are seven parts to the series, and it comes within shouting distance of twenty thousand words in all.

[1] What community?  It’s a very loose term.  I’ll be more specific in other places.  Maybe.
[2] That’s not how they’d characterize their views. That is the conclusion I have drawn from watching how the TOU are and are not enforced in certain particular instances, and from Fet’s resolute silence in response to repeated requests by many of us for an explanation of the TOU and the intent behind a certain provision. If they don’t mean to stifle discussion of rape — in reality, not in the abstract — then they should stop acting like it and engage in a dialogue. More on this in a later part.

Also, if your idea of BDSM ethics is that anything with safewords or limits isn’t “real”, you and I have nothing to talk about.  I can’t remove you from my planet, but I can keep you off my blog.