All the discussion of BDSM and mistreatment of girlfriends lately has made me think of some stuff out of my personal experiences.
Situation #1: dating a person into BDSM
This experience came out of dating. I started what I hoped would be a relationship with a former professional colleague, who I had always been fond of and whose wife had died only two months before of natural causes, after an apparently successful 40 year marriage.
Shortly into this relationship, my friend mentioned that he and his late wife had been into BDSM. He liked being a dom and he claimed that his late wife had enjoyed being a sub.
I was horrified. I imagined him taking pleasure in causing me pain, whether emotional or physical. Suddenly, this man who I had always liked and respected turned into a monster in my mind.
I went home, grabbed my pillow and started bashing it against the wall, pretending the pillow was his head. I was so angry that I went to a therapist who I had seen in the past to ask if I had become dangerous.
She didn’t think so, but she thought that it was clear that I didn’t want to be in a BDSM relationship.
My professional relationship with this man had been so long and so cordial, and I respected his professional abilities so much, that we managed to remain friends after this. He explained more to me.
His wife had been the eldest of four children and had been put in a position of responsibility to watch her younger siblings. She had evolved into the sort of person who always took leadership roles. He, on the other hand, had never been a leader type at all, and tended to get into subordinate roles outside the marriage. Therefore both of them, in the bedroom, enjoyed pretending to take the opposite role from there natural type. He said that it was role playing game that both of them enjoyed. They had even regularly attended a social club with other couples who enjoyed playing this game.
I could not check with his late wife whether, in fact, she enjoyed this game, or whether she only pretended to enjoy it to please him. BUT, in asking around some of my other friends, I found two other women who were very much alive and told me that they enjoyed being subs. They told me this when we were alone together and they were not in relationships, so there was no one coercing them to say so.
Therefore I believed them — and consequently believed that what my male friend had said was possible. His late wife might have enjoyed playing this game with him. I still wasn’t entirely convinced that she hadn’t pretended to enjoy it out of some sense of obligation, but I couldn’t prove anything one way or another.
It was very clear to me, tho, that I could not enjoy this game, or, if I were to play it, I would have to be dom, not the sub. Nevertheless, I still was clear that I would not likely enjoy it and would rather be with someone who would not want to play it.
Situation #2: raising a sadistic child with Asperger’s Syndrome
My older son was very frightening as a toddler.
Once we were in a grocery store when he was 2 or 3 and he asked whether we could kill the lady in using the next door of the freezer case. He said this, I believe, because she was black.
It took me a long time to figure out why he was so afraid of black people, but after some role playing with dolls, I figured out that he was afraid of our cleaning company. This was because he was afraid of vacuum cleaners. He did not have a good sense of relative size and he thought the vacuum cleaners could suck him up. Our cleaning company was composed of black men and these were the only black people he knew, so he feared black people.
In any case, it was horrifying to have him say this in the grocery store. I asked him how he would feel if someone were to say the same thing about him. He screeched in response and did not answer. I couldn’t tell if he understood the question.
Another time, when he was about 4, we were in a restaurant and he tried to trip a woman passing our table. She was angry. He seemed to be clueless about what might be wrong with this.
Similarly, when we were stuck in traffic, he wanted us to kill all the people in front of us.
These frightening statements continued when he went to school. He physically attacked teachers. He talked about blowing up the school, electrocuting his classmates, and putting people from his after school program through a meat grinder. He attacked his older second cousin with a gardening tool in a frightening manner.
My husband (now ex) and I were terrified. We thought we might be raising another Unabomber. My son was intelligent, but his ideation was totally off.
We learned that he suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome and that this disorder prevented him from having empathy. We got him into therapy and into a special program in school.
His therapists and his teachers focused on trying to teach him to understand social relationships and empathy.
Gradually, over the years, his desire to kill people morphed into a desire to annoy them. He talked about tying strings all over a room to make it difficult for people to get through. He sometimes spoke in an unintelligible language that would force others to figure out what he was saying. He also was fascinated with putting up other barriers. I would call this his sadistic period. A time when he wanted to annoy people and watch them get frustrated.
Professionals kept working with him. By the time he got to high school he had become a very right thinking, hyper moral person, overly rigid, but not frightening at all. This was due to years and years of work by many caring professionals: special ed teachers, social workers, and therapists. He still has issues, but he’s not a frightening, violent person now.
During his sadistic period, his desire to annoy or emotionally injure others was part of his disability, an autism spectrum disorder. He lacked empathy. He did not understand the concept of his having an effect on other people.
Now let us suppose that, instead of getting so much therapy and intervention, we had let my son grow up into a sadistic adult. My son’s sadism would not have been the same as that of my friend who viewed BDSM as a social game to enjoy with a consenting partner. My son’s sadism would have been based on a real, warped desire to see people suffer.
This makes me wonder, for the woman who wants to go into a BDSM relationship with a larger, stronger, wealthier man: how she would know whether he was of the first or second type? Presumably the second type might, over time, learn how to mask what was really going on.
I wonder about this concept of “safe” words also. If one were in a sexual encounter — and one’s larger, stronger partner suddenly became unexpectedly violent and rough — would one remember the “safe” word when frightened, injured, and angry? Instead, might it not be more likely that one would simply scream, or say “no” or “stop,” which might make the perpetrator more violent?
I still find this whole topic disturbing.
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Addendum: I don't want to express an opinion about the truth or falsity of certain rumors. However, I do feel that people's reactions to these rumors might depend on who they perceive BDSM. Is it a fun role playing game? Or does it really involve hurting people?
