Re: [UUPoly-L] Report from PNWD AGM

[Victor Raymond <vraymond@iastate.edu>]

At 02:49 PM 3/1/2007, you wrote:

> I think I would find it personally distasteful, and I think it also
> walks a fine line for me, but I can't really come up with a logical
> reason for it to not be OK, so I would have to go on the side of not
> having a problem with it.
>
> While having a slave on a collar may be an expression of sexuality in
> a way, it's not people having sex in public.  If I kiss my girlfriend
> and my boyfriend in public and we snuggle, it's a declaration in some
> ways of what it is that we do in bed.  A person on a collar is more of
> a declaration of what the people are doing in bed than an explicit
> showcase of sexuality.

From a BDSM perspective, I would think that the maxim of "safe, 
sane, and consensual" would apply.  I would venture to guess that the 
reason why making a visual statement of a 24/7 relationship might be 
considered not the best idea is that it extends the scene into public 
view, and the public has not been given a chance to provide or 
withhold consent to their tacit participation in the scene.  Granted, 
in some spaces - like BDSM clubs - simply being there is a sign of 
providing consent.  But I would venture to say that many public areas 
are not thought of that way.

This is not to imply that all situations *ought* to provide tacit 
consent; I would suggest that making such an assumption would miss 
why the idea of consent is important.  And with all due respect to 
distinguishing between sexuality and what people "do in bed", people 
in a 24/7 BDSM relationship are likely to think of it as much more 
than sex (and probably more basic than sex, too).

And what I am trying to do here is explore how this might look from 
within the kink community, and less so from an explicitly UU 
perspective.  Put another way, ostentatious displays of a 24/7 BDSM 
relationship might look kinda tacky, more than anything 
else.  There's a lot more negotiation involved, and therefore I 
suspect that there are more people out there who are in 24/7 BDSM 
relationships than any of us realize from a surface observation.  On 
the surface, this is not unlike sexual orientation, which is not 
always visible - but there are much deeper functional differences as 
to *why* it is not visible.

Just a few thoughts, and not intended as anything other than my own thinking.

Victor



Victor J Raymond
vraymond "at"  iastate.edu

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