Just posted this in my blog. But I'll post it here as well, as I'm interested to hear your views on it (if I break any written or unwritten laws of etiquette I beg your pardon).

I recently read a good article on how to spot a ‘creepy dom’. A creepy dom is the the kind of dominant no-one could wish a submissive getting in the hands of. The kind who doesn’t play by SSC, doesn’t care if what he does truly hurts his sub… the abuser in the guise of a dominant. It’s the image which kept me from the lifestyle for years. 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 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’ (or looking like it at least – have you noticed how a lot of ‘nilla porn is much more abusive than the kinky stuff?) 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?

I’m over this now (you guys here are among those who helped me with that!). Falling in love with a sub, and being loved back, helped. Finding out that I didn’t want, or get off from, submissive girls ruined for my amusement helped. Finding out that I deeply cared about the women ready to trust me with their submission, and that I was able to help and support them in our mutual exploration of their submission, helped a lot.

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. 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.


By now this is mostly ancient history. What makes me bring this up is this relationship between our fantasies, our conscience and the lifestyle. As I see it BDSM is at its core about the marriage of emancipation and conscience. It most certainly was the central question for me at least.

On the one hand we insist that we should be free to get off on whatever we want without feeling ashamed of it. And we should be ready to respect others who get off on things we don’t. On the other hand we have our creeds of SSC or RACK; we may be raging perverts, but we will keep it within the limits of reason and consent, safe and sane and consensual.

Interestingly those principles weren’t what got me to accept my own lifestyle. They certainly made me less worried about others being into this, but again my own motivation was what did it for me. 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’.

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. Men, or women, who simply get off by writing out the fantasy of a girl wanting this kind of life of ‘pure slavery’. But 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.

I guess there are several reasons for that. One I experienced soon after accepting this lifestyle is the ‘now I want it ALL’-approach… accepting that one is kinky can get so obsessing that nothing else in life seems to really matter. One of my subby friends did that; became slave not long after turning 18 in a relationship escalating towards where she got cut off from her family… luckily she ran and ran well and is in a sensible D/s relationship now. But I could easily see a girl not having the courage or the sense, or a Dom not only being irresponsible enough to let things go that way but an abuser who wouldn’t let her. I can feel that way at times, when I’m turned on and ‘sexed up’… can be attracted to lives and relationships wholly centered on the lifestyle… The ‘cum-and-think-about-it-in-the-daily-grind’-test usually cures that, and is highly recommended.

But then there’s the subs who truly believe they have no more worth than that… that may understand that they’re cutting themselves of from other kinds of self-explorations, from family, from being loved. Or who can think of no other kind of relationship they could handle – or feel valuable in. That is the kind I really fear – or would fear, if I did not trust my own motives, I still fear for them – because they would give no indication that they are not getting exactly what they want and need even when they’re abused. It’s a known fact that abuse survivors do gravitate towards abusive relationships. I know a sub like that, a girl who’s pretty much been abused all her life, and who’s bright enough to know it, and know that even at that she still craves for someone to use her hard… it’s very hard giving her a sense that she’s worth something beyond her sexual attraction – even though I’m pretty sure she understands on a rational level that she is.

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.


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.