Chicago Workshop on BDSM and Abuse
January 25, 2011
by Thomas
Regular readers know that I think this issue needs as much sunshine as possible, that abuse within sexuality communities and particularly the BDSM community is too often glossed over and covered up in the name of solidarity. I’m always glad to see folks addressing it. DC-area educator Sarah Sloane will be in Chicago on February 12, 2011, to do just that.
Via Clarisse Thorn.
from → is consent complicated?, Uncategorized
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yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com 
do you have any experience with relyfe programming and bdsm?
“ReLyfe Programming” seems incredibly creepy — check the Amazon page for the book, for example; it’s crap like “Drive your lover (or intended lover) insane with uncontrollable need for you! Make changes in your lover’s core personality traits!” in the blurb. That’s followed by a severely dubious biography which runs the gamut from “convicted federal felon” to “asked to be an editor for the 400th anniversary edition of the Bible”, yet is remarkably consistent in not citing a single thing which might make someone an authority on BDSM or hypnosis — if there even is such a thing as an authority on hypnosis. (‘Certified hypnotherapist’ means nothing without a cite to the certifying agency and an evaluation of its own credentials.) That’s followed by a couple of sock-puppet reviews which, of course, have nothing but good things to say about the author and his work, and which of course aren’t tied to any real name or identity. And that’s followed by nothing at all.
Basically, if this “ReLyfe” stuff isn’t just the “pick-up artist” scheme applied to BDSM, then it’s something even more likely to do real harm to anyone submissive who falls foul of it, because it looks to me like it was written to serve as a useful tool for abusers who think that what they do can’t possibly be abuse because they call themselves “dominants” instead.
And I’ll bet $100 out of my next paycheck that ‘kneeling_girl’ knows all this already, as befits a sock puppet of whatever obscure and (sensibly, if cowardly) pseudonymous Ohioan creep wrote the damn book in the first place and is selling it on Amazon — considering that Google’s only knowledge of the rather uniquely spelled ‘ReLyfe’ is references to this guy’s oeuvre, I have a very strong suspicion that the comment to which I’m responding is nothing more than “Michael Scott”‘s attempt to drum up some business.