David Davis 46

there is no "safe": introducing a guide for vetting sadists, dominants, and tops

What began as a single post has somehow snowballed into a longer project. While this intro is available to everyone, the rest of the series will be paywalled. More to come!

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There’s a recent viral Twitter prompt that goes like this: What are 5 topics you can talk about unprepared for 30 minutes? “How to vet tops for sadomasochistic experiences” might be one of mine—not because I’m an authority, but because I’ve fucked up enough, over the years, to have learned a thing or two. To these lessons belong the physical and emotional scars that I feel complicated about (regret being, as it usually is, inadequate).

Now, some of those fuckups weren’t really fuckups at all. They were my best choices under the circumstances, albeit sometimes made in ignorance or while otherwise limited by factors beyond my control. As much as I have tried to ignore or deny it, some of these scars are ones it was not in my power to prevent.

As for the actual fuckups? They were self-harming or self-serving (sometimes both), and led to damage done to me or to someone else; sometimes, that someone else included a particular scar’s perpetrator. I’m not responsible for the harm caused by their malevolence or neglect, but with the benefit of retrospect and the knowledge shared by people wiser than I am, I now understand that I could have substantially reduced my risk profile by exhibiting more care toward myself and those around me. Not all of these scars were inevitable.

I can’t deny that I’m writing this guide for selfish reasons: to better understand why I made certain choices in my past, if only so I can make better ones in the future. But I’m also writing this guide so others can learn from my carelessness. Maybe it will help you avoid complicated scars of your own.

I wish I could channel Wile E. Coyote to deploy a big, red, neon arrow to direct you to the sunny pastures where they keep all the safe sadists and dominants—but I can’t. The “safe sadist/dominant” doesn’t exist, just as the “unsafe sadist/dominant” doesn’t exist. A person who may have once been a walking red flag may now have their shit together; a person who I may have recommended to you a few years ago may now deserve to have their DMs ignored. People change, and regardless of what’s going on inside, we are concerned with behavioral patterns, here, not internal states (This applies to everyone, not just tops¹!)

While there is no safe player, there are habits, practices, and beliefs that lead to safer play. In my experience, a person who consistently demonstrates these habits, practices, and beliefs tends to be safer to play with². Perhaps more importantly, they also tend to be more willing to be accountable for their mistakes³ ; to problem-solve to avoid future mistakes; and to establish and maintain boundaries to protect themselves, as well as the people around them.

Before we get to the guide part of this series—which I’m hoping to publish within the next week—a little housekeeping is in order.

First of all, this guide is not designed for everyone, though everyone is welcome to it. This guide is also not designed to be read without a hefty dose of context and nuance: my North Star here is personal responsibility and community accountability. Partaking in SM means accepting that, even if we do everything right, something still may go wrong. That is the nature of high-octane sex, just as it is skydiving, extreme sports, giving birth, one-night-stands, unregulated drugs, falling in love, signing a contract, getting behind the wheel, and so many other things that are fun, interesting, meaningful, or otherwise worthwhile.

So, without further ado, my notate bene:

• This guide operates on the assumption that the reader has foundational knowledge about SM and may even be active in their local leather scene. While I think those with less experience, or those with less of an intention to act on this advice, could also benefit from it, it’s aimed primarily at those who aren’t merely kinky (i.e., they are leather-identified, not weekend warriors), or who don’t need BDSM 101 to first understand what we’re doing here.

• Like I said, I’m no authority. I’m not an educator, a teacher, or a leader—and certainly not a sadist or dominant. My credentials are, mainly, my mistakes. If it helps for you to know, for the past decade or so I’ve played both recreationally and professionally and have been involved in my local scenes in the Bay and New York City.

• Just as “safe” is not a permanent label, neither are “sadist,” “dominant,” or “top.” The people you’re vetting may disidentify with these labels some or all of the time, but it may still be relevant to them; that’s your call. While I think most, if not all, of my advice can also be applied to be masochists, submissives, and bottoms, this guide was written with people who are looking to have stuff done to them in mind.

• I do not believe that the power in the scene is concentrated with the sadist, dominant, or top. Nor do I think it really belongs to the masochist, submissive, or bottom, as some people like to say (this reactionary stance drives me nuts!). Here’s what I think: that SM is people coming together to exchange power in an eroticized way, and that while that exchange can take many different shapes, it aspires to—though can never really attain, IMO—an egalitarian expression of desire among likeminded people. SM is the dramatization of inequality, but while it explicitly names power differentials in a way I don’t see in any other context, it doesn’t take place among social equals, just like vanilla sex, or indeed any other interaction. I play with people of different races, genders, ages, (dis)abilities, economic statuses, etc., and while trying to find an absolute answer to whether one person is more powerful than another tends to devolve into useless “oppression Olympics,” the fact of the matter is that some people are more at risk of me abusing them than vice versa—because I’m white, because I get a W-2 in the mail every year, because I’m not subject to transmisogyny, because because because of an ever-shifting amalgamation of reasons. Abuse is the leveraging of social, legal, and political power to harm someone else, and it is, again IMO, more often than not a crime of opportunity, an (often unconscious or repressed) expression of entitlement reinforced by the culture at large, and ultimately reliant on deep-seated assumptions about what is natural, essential, and inescapable.

• I may use sex and play somewhat interchangeably, but this guide is more about play than sexual intercourse (to the extent that these things can be distinguished from each other). By that I mean: while anyone can be harmed during vanilla sex, your risk profile changes when you add sadomasochism to the mix. SM and its associated identities and subcultures are criminalized and/or illegal⁴, socially stigmatized, and involve what are, essentially, weapons.

• Intent matters, until it doesn’t.

• My approach to SM is grounded in RACK: it is risk-aware and consensual. These days, some people are also using PRICK (or personal-risk informed and consensual kink) to guide their play. This extra “P” doesn’t really make any sense to me, because I think everyone involved in a given scene should be aware of the risks involved for everyone else, and so I’m sticking with RACK for now.

• This guide is only for recreational play. Screening for transactional play partners is a different beast (about which my knowledge is increasingly out-of-date), although there are many aspects of professional vetting that I think might be of use to recreational players⁵.

So, as I said up top, more to come! In the meantime, if you don’t care about any of this, I’ll still be writing other ad-hoc newsletters and continuing with my other series on sex scenes. Until next time!

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here. Learn more about the history of this newsletter here.

1. I’m often fast and loose with the distinctions between sadist, dominant, and top, but they’re not interchangeable. I broke down the distinction several years ago in a primer I wrote about aftercare for them.

2. Safer—never safe. There is no certainty of safety, and to expect as much from recreational violence is not only silly, but unfair to those doing it with you. A quick google revealed a short blog post on the difference between safe and safer sex is a good corollary for what we’re talking about here.

3. Daemonumx recently shared this resource on accountability on her Instagram, if you’d like further reading/listening.

4. The amount of people who have gotten angry at me on Twitter for acknowledging that SM is assault blows my mind. EYE do not see it as assault—unless we append that word with adjectives like “consensual,” “organized,” “romantic,” “therapeutic,” “sexy,” “risk-informed,” “thrill-seeking,” “spiritual,” etc.—but guess who does? The people who make and enforce the laws! That’s just the reality, people!

5. That being said, there are problems with the adoption of sex workers’ tactics for professional safety by civilians, which can become appropriative when used to reinforce the whorephobia that afflicts so-called “sex positive” and even leather spaces (imagine being whorephobic in LEATHER???). Here’s an example that I didn’t make up: on a Discord server for a private sex party, people were asking if attendees would/could be compelled present STI panels before entry. “I’m vetting them for my safety,” was their rationale. Requiring that people prove they don’t have STIs to attend a sex party reinforces all kinds of stigma (and it also doesn’t prevent the transmission of STIs), including the kind that gentrifies leather spaces—which originate in hustler/sex worker cultures—making them more hostile to sex workers. That’s the gist of my argument, one that deserves expanding on. Maybe another time.