I think you have a good point that the understanding, and 'philosophical background' of BDSM in particular varies, perhaps not only with culture but from individual to individual. As I see it since kinky people are as different as 'nilla people with different world-views and opinions the way we integrate our kink in our world-view logically will differ as well - the fact that some of us come from fairly different cultures will undoubtedly reinforce that variance.

Therefore I believe it is a good idea to make a disclaimer early on in a tread like this. I strongly believes there can not be and there should not be any common 'culture' or 'philosophy' of us as a community. Since we are, and should be, a varied bunch with as different world-views and opinions as anyone else, building our community on one philosophy or another will only alienate some groups. There are enough things to make one’s kink hard to come to terms with in our culture today, feeling that BDSM associates you with a world-view and a philosophy that you can’t subscribe to shouldn’t be one of them.

So, if there should be any common belief or principle a community such as this should build on it should be the principle of tolerance, the principle of plurality, ‘let each believe what makes them happy’. Other than that there are of course a lot of procedural wisdoms, practices and practices that I believe valuable to everyone, like the principle of RACK, risk-aware consensual kink, using safewords, being responsible and never hurting anyone beyond the good kind of hurt. Of course toleration should not extend to predators or the like.


I’m Danish, but my knowledge of BDSM stems from sites like this so I do not speak out of a distinct ‘Danish way of being kinky’.

When I strive to understand what goes on in the D/S relationship I’ve found Sartre one of the more useful philosophers. I am not a student philosophy (except perhaps from a little bit of the political branch of it), nor have I read that much so I would like to make clear that my account may be somewhat simplified. Sartre has this distinction (which I believe he borrows from Heidegger) between ‘being-for-oneself’ (‘être pour-soi’) and ‘being-in-oneself’ (être en-soi). Being-for-oneself means basically ‘living in the future’, or perhaps more precisely: 'living for the future'. This I believe is a very normal mode of human, and in fact a big part of what makes us ‘human’, that much of the time we spend not in the present but planning and worrying about our future, putting needs aside in order to secure the future for ourselves, and generally acting not from the needs and impulses of the moment but from the needs we foresee in the near or not so near future.

Being-in-oneself means you are being into the present ‘you’. You are not living constantly ahead of yourself as you do when you live for yourself. This of course makes you able to feel the ‘now’ much more keenly than if you have your thoughts, your being, constantly poised towards the next now. You are, so to speak, in a mode of existence much closer to that of a child or even an animal (in the sense that animals are, I believe, not very able to ‘think ahead’ very far). You are also very vulnerable to the ones who are more ‘for’ themselves than you because you logically do not take the future as much into account as they do. Therefore Sartre often sees the one ‘being more in oneself’ as objectified by the one being more for himself because, a bit like an object, that person is deemed likely to just ‘sense’ what is happening in the moment, made passive because ‘taking control’ is an act inherently poised at controlling the future.

Interestingly, as far as I remember, the above makes Sartre believe that these persons who are ‘in themeselves’ are likely to be dominated by those for themselves. In his view this easily ends up as an abusive relationship but this is where I find the D/S relationship has relevance to Sartre’s philosophies, or the opposite, if you would: That exactly in the D/S relationship one part, the sub, is able to pursue a state of ‘being in her-/himself’ without ending up in abuse because she can consensually give away control of the immediate future to the dominant person. Submission, in my opinion, is very clearly close to Sartre’s conception of être en-soi in that exactly when you give up control the future becomes irrelevant, considering the next couple of hours, being in that future instead of the presence is irrelevant because you do not have any control of what is going to happen in those hours anyway, you might as well let go of the future and just ‘be’, just ‘sense’ what is in the present and go with it. Perhaps the almost legendary state of ‘subspace’ is something especially close to that.

On a site note: because of this I do not find it strange that some people consider ‘objectification’, or the various kinds of play where one is reduced to an ‘animal like’ existence for a time, kinky, since these states are exactly an approximation to a state of existence where one just ‘is’ and has no regard for the future. The state of a slave or a kajira, I believe, is close to ‘being-in-oneself, as well and I believe some goreans actually word the ‘giving up control’ of the kajira relatively closely to what I have been describing.

Of course: the perquisite for this relationship not being abusive as Sartre would describe it is that it is negotiated beforehand – that the submissive reconcile those perhaps conflicting modes of excistance of being-in-oneself and being-for-oneself by splitting them up, so to speak. In the situation of negotiation the sub, of course, should be anything but ‘in-her-/himself’, she/he should not follow her immediate impulses, for example to please the dominant, but consider the future very close, both in regard to those hours, days or even more, she will surrender her ‘being-for-herself’ to the will of the dominant but definitely also with due consideration of the time afterwards and the effects her submission will have on that. In my view of kink such a contract, even if it is pertaining to full ‘slavery’ with a total exchange of power, should, in principle, always be up for renegotiation or dispantion – even if such a relationship is never renegotiated I believe it becomes the real, despicable, kind of slavery that was abolished centuries ago if the sub is not, in principle able to walk out on the relationship.

Of course another point that is needed, in order to avoid the potential of abuse that Sartre sees in being-in-oneself is that the dominant needs to be anything but in him or herself. The perquisite for the sub being able to ‘let go of the moment’ is exactly that the dom retains the control of the situation, and the consideration of the future, that he or she gives up. Being in-one-self while domming, I believe, is the same as entering ‘dom-space’, letting oneself be carried away by the sometimes intoxicating feeling of being in control and being able to take his or her submissive the places she/he goes when dominated, and that is definitely not a thing to strive for.

To me at least Sartre’s thinking is a very good tool for understanding the existentialism of submission in particular and hence understanding what goes on in the mind of the submissive.