There is no "safe," part 9

concluding my guide for vetting sadists, dominants, and tops

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8.

As leathersexuals, nonverbal communication is one of our legacies. Like other subcultures, leather and its littermate, queerness—both formulations that predate postwar America, but hit their modern strides in the decades following WWII—have relied upon this kind of discretion for many years. Hankies, uniforms, materials (like leather), and other high signs were technologies of safety, and not just on the street: communication when words are not available, or even possible, is highly normalized in leather, particularly during scenes¹.

Nevertheless, most of us rely heavily on verbal communication to get the job done. Prior to playing, we negotiate with our words to identify when we have consent and when we don’t, a practice that protects us, our play partners, and our community. Because I don’t want to smother, drown, or find myself chained to the bed when the apartment catches fire, my SDATs and I talk about how we can both get what we want out of our scene while minimizing the risks our desires present to all involved (and even to those who aren’t).

I know many players who seem to be able to speak about what they want with ease. While I don’t share this ease, I do think it lends itself to the act of bottoming, the role often interpreted and textured as wanting [more], needing [correction], or requiring [discipline]. It’s our bodies, after all, that are being used, experimented on, and even transformed, and our active participation in that is normalized erotically and practically. While I know many SDATs who have no problem speaking about what they want to do to their bottoms, I have noticed that the proposition of speaking about what they want done to or for themselves can be challenging for some of them.

While I’ll be focusing on SDATs for the purposes of this post, whether top, bottom, or switch, many of us share this aversion to admitting: I want this. I aspire to that. I crave the other. This is no moral failing, but it can complicate things, and complications at our level of play can often open us up to risk. Not just risk of harm, but of dissatisfaction. We flout norms, laws, decency, and even safety to do what we do—shouldn’t we at least be getting what we want in the process?

I mentioned above that verbal negotiation is how we, as leathersexuals, commonly give and gain consent for play—how we as a community exercise our own agency without violating that of other people. In Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, Avgi Saketopoulou makes a provocative case for a new way of understanding and approaching this process². Affirmative consent (also known as enthusiastic consent), writes Saketopoulou, “understands consent as issuing from a subject who is fully transparent to themselves and who, in thinking consciously and deciding rationally, can anticipate the probable effects of their consent.” We engage with affirmative consent with the goal of “fostering mutually satisfying experiences in adult sexual encounters.” For example: during our sober, undistracted, power-neutral negotiation, I grant consent to my SDAT to beat me with a cane until I cry, with the expectation that we both come away from the egalitarian experience with some degree of satisfaction.

But as Saketopoulou points out, “One never knows what one signs up for and what one will get until after the fact, however carefully, dutifully, or earnestly one communicates.” Viewed in this way, affirmative consent is a kind of wishful thinking: the idea that we can guarantee the future by virtue of knowing our desires in the present. She proposes an alternative with what she calls “limit consent,”³ which does not “center on (re)producing an experience of satisfaction but, instead, works to facilitate novelty and surprise.” Limit consent does not presume to know how we will leave any encounter or experience; rather, it “hinges on not respecting limits but on their ethical transgression.” And what is consensual sadomasochism but the ethical transgression of limits? What if we are looking for something more interesting than the assurance of satisfaction? What if we are willing to acknowledge that power exchange between equals does not exist, and attempt it anyway? What if we are looking to take some fucking risks with and for each other?

One of the things I love about Saketopoulou’s limit consent is that it takes into account the risks undertaken by the SDAT in any scenario of power exchange. Readers may already be familiar with my evergreen rant about “where” the power goes during these exchanges. Is it “really” with the SDAT, the person running the fuck (a common misapprehension, especially among those outside the community)? Or is it “really” with the masochist, submissive, or bottom, the person with whom the buck is supposed to stop (the reactionary stance of thoughtless perverts everywhere)? Both make my blood boil. We share the power while fetishizing the unavoidable disparities inherent to our connection! I shriek from the rooftops. Enter limit consent, which “centers, rather, on surrendering to another,” on both sides: on the part of the bottom, who offers up their body and cedes their control, and on the part of the SDAT, too, who not only assumes responsibility for that body, but “allows [themself] to be taken over by an internal force that [they] cannot fully control.” There is risk in controlled suffering, just as there is risk in controlling that suffering. Sketching out a hypothetical rape roleplay scenario, Saketopoulou writes that the top will have to “engage with the rousing of her sadism to let it flow, while also keeping some relative check on it.”

I’m not recommending throwing away the baby with the bathwater by dropping negotiation as we know it, but rather augmenting your process with deeper consideration of what you want, what outcomes might be acceptable, and what could be gained from a more holistic conception of risk. In any case, Saketopoulou’s recognition of the “complex,” rather than “dichotomous,” distribution of power and responsibility in any dynamic resonated with me tremendously. And while I don’t know for sure, I suspect she would agree with me that safer play happens because all parties work toward it by building intimacy in and out of scene, something which only happens when we are both brave enough to be vulnerable and wise enough to be aware that true vulnerability requires the support of our lovers, friends, play partners, and community.

Back to our SDATs. As I wrote last time, safer sadists, dominants, and tops talk about what they want. Why does this matter? To answer this question, we’ll first need to interrogate wanting, starting with this: why would anyone conceal their desires, especially within leather, with our watchwords of fantasy and freedom and fuck?

Desire is inextricable not only from the unrealized, and even the unimagined, but from that which is excruciatingly known. In permitting us to indulge in what we don’t or shouldn’t want, leather shows us, with great tenderness, that we can never hide from what we do want. I’m a germaphobe who licks dirty boots. I’m a prude who wants to get fucked. I’m a masochist who is terrified of pain. Admitting my desires reveals my weaknesses, shortcomings, fears, failures, and needs⁴. (I have found it helpful to conceive of desire as a field of preoccupations, including things that I both do and don’t want.) As much as they’d like to think of themselves as vampires, SDATs aren’t immune to this mirror: they, too, have a reflection.

What do you want? I feel a deep empathy for anyone who, when confronted with this simple question, responds with irritability, confusion, anger, numbness, or nothing; whose first instinct is to turn away, fight, change the subject, or cause a distraction. To admit what you want is to expose yourself, which is to say that it builds intimacy with a receptive audience: it is worthwhile, but challenging, especially if you’re not in the habit of doing it because of your upbringing, trauma history, or lack of experience, in that you haven’t yet learned that the benefits of connection far outweigh the risks.

I don’t know that concealing desire is easier for SDATs than for anyone else in leather, but those of us in community know that SDATs are often caretakers in and outside of scene, accustomed to and skilled at putting others before themselves, sometimes to their own detriment. At its best, leather corrects for this by creating an alternative infrastructure for vulnerability—a means to give and to accept care that may not be readily apparent to outsiders. Service bottoms provide their tops with a safer framework for accepting help; pain sluts allow their sadists to exercise (and exorcise) genuine feelings otherwise repressed for the happiness, safety, and agency of others; fetishists of dehumanization offer their dominants new opportunities for connection when eye contact, physical touch, or “normal” sex are unpleasant or even impossible.

Little story for you: an elder femdom friend of mine used to go off when people at play parties would degrade or harm her submissives without first asking for their permission, let alone hers⁵. Their violation of etiquette betrayed an entitled ignorance of what we’re all doing here, which she corrected immediately and without mercy⁶. “I treasure my subs,” the femdom would tell the rube in question, towering in her heels. “I am here to protect their happiness and safety.” Even if parenting, nurturing, or “care” is not part of the dynamic, SDATs assume a sacred responsibility for their bottoms, even if it’s just for the space of a scene, no matter how challenging the activity or cruel the pageantry.

Unfortunately, not every SDAT is like my femdom friend. Some hide behind our shared fetishes for violence and degradation, perverting perversion to express a very real malevolence or disregard for other people; one of these assholes is why I started writing this series in the first place. Others—more common, in my experience—hide behind their own propensity for caretaking: my bottoms have needs, not me. If I fulfill those needs, then I have fulfilled my responsibility as a top. They abandon themselves in leather as they were trained to do in their vanilla relationships, a tragic turn of events that all too many of us can relate to on some level.

If we’re not intentional in how we build our leather communities, we enable SDATs who harm others or themselves in these ways and others. But this is not inevitable! My advice to you, as I end the final post of this long series, is to add this question to your vetting toolkit, one you can utilize throughout your relationships, and not just at the beginning: Is your SDAT using play to connect with you, or using you to dissociate from themself?

I can’t believe this series is done! Thank you for joining me on this journey. Many of the other posts are locked, so I’ll remind you that I’ll give you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of the fundraisers featured on Gaza Funds.

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1. I don’t personally know any leatherfolk who are Deaf, have mutism, or don’t speak for other reasons. If anyone has any articles or books to share about these experiences (written by those who experience them), I’d love for you to send them my way.

2. Yes, I know I keep mentioning this book!

3. Saketopoulou calls it “limit consent” because, “unlike affirmative consent, [it] is predicated not on setting and observing limits but on…initiating—and…responding to—an invitation to transgress them.”

4. Isn’t it interesting that I include needs in this list of negatives without a second thought?

5. Obviously they were usually straight.

6. “Kinky” and “in leather” are not synonyms! My culture is not your costume, Mary!