David Davis 46, part 3

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

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about pickup play—that is, BDSM¹ with someone you have have just met, likely in a cruisey or party environment. For me, pickup play has lived in parallel with anonymous sex, erotic social practices only distinguished by the details. As I’ve been writing this series, however, I’ve begun to reconsider.

In terms of risk profile, a gay bar bathroom blowie with a stranger is different from play party needles with a stranger, which is itself very—if not constitutionally—different from an isolated rope suspension with a stranger with whom you don’t have mutual friends. In any of these situations, you may not know the person you’re hooking up with, but any associated people, places, and communities that you do know will inflect your supposed anonymity, and theirs, too. Which got me thinking: if both anonymous sex and pickup play are contextual and multivalent, then perhaps it doesn’t make sense to apply the same understanding of anonymity when comparing sex and BDSM.

No one told me I had to make this conflation, but it’s easy to do when our culture conceptualizes BDSM as a subcategory; as a stopping point on a sexual spectrum organized, at least on one axis, from least to most normatively violent². But I don’t experience sadomasochism as a subcategory, though I’m sure plenty do. Even if I did, to project that beyond myself would be to reinscribe the sexual norms that pathologize leathersex in the first place. “Kinky” sex is as normal (read: common) as so-called vanilla sex, but only one of these two things has been normalized to the point of naturalization. My conflation was derived from these norms, and like all of normalcy’s derivatives, it fell apart upon closer inspection.

As someone with an interest in sexual risk management, I used to resist criticizing the safety of pickup play because I was worried I would also have to criticize the safety of anonymous sex. But then I realized: it’s apples and oranges, baby. To that end, I’d like to suggest that what we mean when we say risk profile changes when we reach a certain level of intensity in recreational play, because in a heavy scene trust is everything—and you can’t trust someone you don’t know³. If anonymous sex is a trust fall from a few feet, anonymous power exchange is a trust fall you need an elevator for⁴.

What all this means, I guess, is that I’m coming out as someone who thinks it’s a good idea to get to know someone before engaging in heavy play (even if such a position is only controversial to me). But how? Well, by playing at a lower intensity, of course, but also by communicating in other ways, like vetting.

Which brings me to the topic of this post! (Wow, David, way to bury the lede.) For this installment of the series, we’ll be talking about what vetting actually is, and who does it, and how.

Why? Because safer sadists, dominants, and tops don’t mind being vetted—in fact, they like it!