There is no "safe," part 7

my guide for vetting sadists, dominants, and tops

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

Of course I wish I had a normal body, but it’s becoming more difficult to separate what that could look like from the rituals of normalcy I see around me. The regimens that produce this normal body—one that is thin, buff, or powerful, but ideally a combination of the three—have become increasingly inextricable from the body itself. Had I that normal body, I would no longer live to stay alive. Instead, I would live to attain an ever-evolving suite of health goals (many of which have little to do with overall longevity). Is that any better, to be freed from the tedium and time-suck of disease, only to become a Sisyphus of another sort?

Hustle and grind, gain and cut, crush and shred, maximize and master. Having been sick, and occasionally disabled, for most of my life, the concept of health optimization sparks a furious fascination within me, and it’s only gotten worse as the optimizer’s influence has grown. For the optimizer, the body is not a living thing. Not unlike a corpse on the pathologist’s table, it’s an object that, with the proper technology and data, can be known, refined, and even perfected. Institutional divestment from healthcare, general austerity, and the myriad oppressions of non-normative bodies in a failing consumerist culture have resulted in this: the repackaging of lack as an opportunity to bootstrap, which is then, most cruelly of all, sold back to us as a luxury good¹. If you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention.

Now, the optimizer is far from irrational. Even more than balanced blood sugar or faster splits or boosted mitochondrial function, their reward is a sense of control and the promise of conformity, which come at a premium in late capitalism. Health optimization can improve your literal health, but quality of life runs deeper than what we as individuals can dictate; we all know, intuitively if not otherwise, that thin, healthy, white people are treated better and afforded more². This context incentivizes buying into the myth that it’s possible manage your body to the extent that your environment can no longer affect you. Forget plummeting food, water, and air quality, lack of equity in education and medicine, or endemic microplastics—if you buy the right fits, chug the right shakes, do enough reps, and run the right functional tests, none of that has to be your problem.

Like the microplastics in our bodies, the optimizer ethos permeates our culture—social/media, policy, commerce, you name it. This is by design: American capitalism (ableism 🤝 racism 🤝 eugenics) puts the onus of survival on the individual, which means it’s your fault if you’re sick, and doubly so if you stay that way. Even if you aren’t sick, you still must be a competitor, not in order to achieve personal satisfaction or even material success, but to just get by. “Survival of the fittest” is not a dictum or a destiny, but rather a description of conditions, and its misconstrual is a prime example of this ethos’ entrenchment in all our lives.

Which brings me to this edition of my guide for vetting sadists, dominants, and tops: why would leather spaces be exempt from the seduction of optimization, which creates a commodity out of health (as well as various nebulous notions of wellbeing, wellness, and hygiene)? Especially now that leather has proven to be just as vulnerable to appropriation, co-opting, and commodification as any other subculture?

If anything, the optimizer brain worms may have an even easier time finding purchase in our scene. Because in leather, we don’t just value skill, power, precision, discipline, and control, and the ego required to accomplish them—we fetishize them! We want our SDATs to know what they’re doing (and to be absolutely insufferable about it). So how do we know when that desire for more knowledge and greater technical skill has crossed over into optimizer territory, a place where risk management and connection take a back seat to ego? We may know that safer sadists, dominants, and tops don’t optimize—so how do we use that information to weed out the SDATs who are lost in the sauce?

More on that next time.

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1. Variations on this theme include the tradwife, which is super hot right now.

2. I include “white” here because of the centuries-old racialization of health and weight, about which you can learn a lot from Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, and C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity.