When BDSM Lacks Safewords

I don't talk about it much, but my first BDSM relationship was quite abusive. I was young, and had no idea that there was a community, or even that other people understood the things I desired, shared those desires, and had given them names. When I got together with someone who started tying me up, introducing spanking, and so forth, I was excited, ashamed, confused. He was older, and I leaned on him to know what we were doing.

We didn't have safewords. We didn't have negotiations. He just did things to me, and we had all the problems you might expect. There was no way to differentiate between fun "no" and serious "no." There was no way to express that -- really, truly -- I wasn't ready for something. And I was too dependent and not in control of my own sexual fate.

Why am I talking about this now? In conversation on Twitter the other night with @eroticawriter (author I.G. Frederick) and @MenageReviewer (Mary's Naughty Whispers), the question came up: "Is there such a thing as nonconsensual BDSM?"

I understand where the question came from, because these days to me BDSM is deeply intertwined with consent and negotiation. I'm sympathetic to the idea that if there's no clear sense of consent, it's abuse, not BDSM. I wish we lived in that world. But the truth is, we live in a world where a lot of people (including my past self) aren't very educated about sex, and don't have a good sense of how to take charge of what happens to them in a sexual context.

As part of the conversation, I discovered two incredible blog posts on this subject written by I.G. Frederick. I think they're must-reads for anyone who's ever been in a BDSM relationship that felt "off."

The first lays out the difference between abuse and BDSM:

But without training and experience, without care and consideration, abuse can happen even with consent. Someone who consents to a D/s relationship without prior knowledge of what it involves or the person to whom he/she is submitting is a perfect candidate for emotional abuse. This statement, in a “slave’s” online journal, speaks volumes about what the person writing it has experienced in the past. “i need some security and to feel good that i am not going to be thrown away for a simple reason.”

The second describes the anger that inspired Frederick to write disturbing erotic novels on this subject:

These novels are not romances. They’re cautionary tales about abuse and the meaning of consent. (In Broken Jessica consents to enslavement by her professor when he threatens to expel her from the university and blacklist her.) I know some readers find them arousing. Others have found them revolting. But, my intention was that readers find them thought provoking and that has indeed been the case.

This is a great example of why I think it's important for there to be at least some erotica that exists apart from the requirement of a happy ending. I need to read stories like this sometimes to understand the things that have happened to me. Other stories have given me a vision of hope -- the idea of what a BDSM relationship can be. But sometimes, I just need to know that someone else understands these situations in all their complexity -- pain and arousal both included.