Quote Originally Posted by The I View Post

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. That’s what I had to be very sure I wasn’t after. But what exactly is this then?

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.

If this is a lifestyle it’s also about living lives that we can be proud of, that we can feel good about, and that’s about so much more than BDSM. Being into BDSM is no excuse for not being a good person and it’s not any excuse, either, for not expecting others to treat you with decency.

I don’t have a ready-made solution on how we fight abuse, especially on the internet, but I think it’s important we keep telling each other what it is, and not to accept it. 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 just wondered if this might help:

http://www.revisef65.org/psychopathology.html

It is a short overview over various research which all show that BDSM people are not different from other people.