It's almost reduntant to add another voice, but I have met this "you have a safeword but don't you dare use it" trick, and it stinks. I agree that all it shows is the Dom's insecurity. In a new contact where people don't know each other, safewords are for the Dom's safety as well as the sub's. The only casual sub who ever accused me of abuse was one who got so caught up in her victim role that she forgot she had a safeword!

Established relationships, of course, are a whole nother matter, and my experience is of starting with a safeword and phasing it out over time. Sometimes it's a step in the relationship when the sub is told she no longer has a safeword, sometimes it's just allowed to go out of use. In extremis under sexual torture my ex-slave routinely yelled every safeword she knew, before telling me furiously that as soon as I untied her she was going right round to the police to charge me with rape: but she would have been horribly disappointed if I had stopped.