Quote Originally Posted by The I View Post
I’ve long known that I got off – a lot! – on women submitting and in pain way before I accepted this was a part of me that was ok. I was afraid of the creepy dom, just like I guess anyone in the lifestyle should be My fear was that I was afraid that legitimizing my cravings in stating that ‘yes I’m into consensual bdsm’ was just a way of hiding abuse under the disguise of being part of a sexual minority. In short I was afraid that I might be a creepy dom, that the nice guy I usually am were looking for an ‘out’, an ‘excuse’ to shed the bonds of decency and conscience and abuse women.
I don't think I ever worried about the "creepy dom" thing because I don't honestly believe I have that much mental influence! It helps that I've always been attracted to strong confident women (or as my late wife used to say, "submissive bossy bitches,") so I've felt safe that if I really were to lose my moral compass, they would stand up for themselves and put me right.

If I were attracted to the sort of weak self-hating subs I sometimes encounter online, I would be very conscious that I could go way too far, and enjoy it while it lasted, if I didn't watch myself. I have once, to my knowledge, gone over the edge into abuse, and my excuse is that the sub had a safeword and didn't use it. (Turned out she was so caught up in her role-play that she forgot she could safeword.) But it's a thin excuse, because I wasn't thinking about that: I was just having a wonderful time and not worrying about whether she was enjoying it too. I didn't harm her physically, just made her do some things she'd told me she wasn't into, but it was still wrong and I take it as a warning.

When I was much younger and didn't know anything about such subtleties, I was occasionally worried that I was going to grow up to be an axe murderer for having such urges! But not much worried, because I was pretty sure I knew the difference between fantasy and reality, same as I liked to play with toy soldiers but called myself a pacifist in politics. And since I read a lot, I knew that there were people out there who did this kind of thing as a shared pleasure, and all I had to worry about was how to find them.

I got into this whole thing through fantasies of non-consent, rape, and the wrong kind of porn where the objective is giving the girl ‘more than she can take’
Didn't we all? For a while when I was younger I tried to stick to politically correct consensual stuff, but most of it's as much fun as alcohol free beer. Even Antoniou, who I consider the greatest author of consensual slavery stories, is forever pushing the envelope, with characters getting into more than they expected, and being taken past their limits, and occasionally getting into downright abuse which is either OK because they "asked for it" or we're expected to deplore it at the same time as we enjoy it.

Stories are usually more extreme than what we'd want in real life, that's why we read stories instead of going out and doing it. Most people who read spy thrillers wouldn't take 007's job if they were offered it, not for twice the girls and Martinis.
Gradually I discovered the ‘lifestyle’ and being a generally liberal guy I’ve never ever had trouble accepting that others could be into it, and that it could be consensual and beneficial for all parties and so on. But that I should be into it was another matter; were my motives as pure as they should be?
So why do you distrust yourself more than other people? Seems to me that's the key question.

When I was involved in co-counselling, one of the tests of people's personalities was the mantra "Everyone, at all times, has done the best they could in the situation they found themselves in." The world is divided into those who have trouble adding "And that includes Hitler," and those who have trouble adding "And that includes me." I'm in the second category, it sounds as if you are too.

In a matter of months this part of me went from my dirty secrets to one of the things about me I’m most happy about. I still get off on a whole lot of things I don’t approve off, I still have fantasies that should remain fantasies.
So has Joe Public, even if it's only fantasies about telling the boss where to shove his job.

For many years I used to while away boring journeys or waits by finding the hottest girl in sight and building a fantasy round her. Suddenly the room or train was gone and we were all alone... she saw me coming and knew the worst... I ran her down and ripped her clothes off, beat her into submission and raped her into sobbing surrender... The most I ever did for real was to force a girl to kiss me, and my sub-spotting instinct must have been working even back then, because after a minute's struggles she responded and spent the rest of the party snogging me enthusiastically. The lesson I took from it was to not assume I could get away with it again; I'd been lucky.
But I’ve found that my way of practicing my sadism has a whole different effect than those fantasies; the fantasies are nice up to the point when I’ve jacked off. What I’ve been and done with my girls I can smile of whether horny or not.
Try repeating in the mirror: "Having bad ideas does not make me a bad person."
I guess my problem with SSC and RACK is that you can easily do things that come of as safe and consensual in a fundamentally abusive relationship. The kind of creepy dom that I was afraid off might well obtain the consent of his girl, he might well stay in line with all the obvious safety-precautions needed not to outright hurt the girl (on the physical, short term, level), and he might even argue the saneness of the relationship on the grounds of both parties ‘wanting it’.
This is a weakeness of human nature. It happens in vanilla relationships too.
One problem is that there are girls out there claiming to ‘want’ abuse. Browse most fetish dating sites and you’ll find the ads by ‘girls’ stating they want no SSC, no limits, no humanity… I put ‘girls’ in citation marks since I believe (and somewhat hope) that a good portion of such profiles are by someone very different from what they claim to be.
I'm sure you are right that most of them are just fantasists. A year or two back my eye was caught by one who claimed she'd always been into heavy breast pain, but now for medical reasons she had to have a double mastectomy, so she was looking for someone to take this once in a lifetime chance to torture her breasts with absolutely no limits. Just for fun, I wrote her a proposal (as I recall it started by burning the skin off them with a decorator's heat gun,) but I heard no more and assumed I'd been right.

But the interesting question, as thir rightly asked, was what if she'd turned out to be real? And so taken with my ideas that she wanted me to be the one to do her the kindness of turning her breasts into bloody rags? (And could convince me that it was all true and not a self-destructive insanity, including the weakest bit of the story, that her surgeon wouldn't call the cops when she showed up with the amputations already half done by a messy amateur.) Would I have done it? Or perhaps what thir really wanted to know was, would I have enjoyed it? I think so. Does that mean I would enjoy so grossly hurting a woman without all the get-out-of-guilt-free cards involved in that fantasy situation? Absolutely not.

I’m afraid there are some out there who are ready to believe that a life of being treated as nothing but an object of someone else’s pleasure is what they truly must seek.
It's worse than that, Jim. There are some who have sought it and found it, and are tearing themselves to bits trying to force themselves to be happy in that situation, or rather, trying to shut down their feelings so that they're not happy or sad, just mindlessly there for their Master. I've corresponded with some of them, and it would break your heart.
The problem is that you can so easily advertise abuse in this lifestyle – especially if you’re seeking to be at the receiving end. It is easy, and ‘acceptable’, and perhaps even considered submissive by some to state that you want to be used without limits and without consideration to your needs. I fear it’s a bit easier to want that fantasy, without stopping and thinking ‘is this really a good thing’ when you’re setting yourself up for the abuse.
There are self-destructive people in every community, and you can't save them all from themselves. But I can't think of a place better than this for giving people wise advice, and spotting the ones setting themselves up to be hurt and talking them down off the roof. We do protect our newbies and fools, so far as anyone can.
But the frightening point, and what scared and still scares me about the lifestyle, is that we must admit that it can also be the guise of ‘abusees’ teaming up with ‘abusers’ in relationships that may well be consensual.
Well, yes, but so can the vanilla world. Ask any women's refuge. And I think that victims have a much better chance of being spotted and helped here than in vanilla-land.
My whole point here, and I guess it’s a fairly short one, is that we need to emphasize the ‘sane’ part of safe sane and consensual. It’s not enough for things to be consensual, and nominally safe (you could argue that anything unsane is unsafe on the long term); we also need to ask ourselves the basic question if I could look myself in the mirror after I’ve lived my fantasy and still consider myself a decent person. AND we need to also ask ourselves the question if we’re putting our partners in a position to be decent persons as well.
I'd hope that everyone does that, and if they don't, they're probably already a sufficiently nasty or self-deluded person that your advice is not going to help. To me, that's not sanity, it's simple decency. Or, perhaps, to invoke another thread on this forum, honour.
. We should not let the acceptance of unsane, abusive, relationships go unchallenged out of mistaken tolerance; and we should never ask anything out of ourselves, and others, that we cannot feel good doing the day after.
I think everyone here would put their hand up to that.