BDSM is an interesting one. I admit I don’t know enough about the actual practice of it. And by that, I don’t mean what people say is the ideal practice of it. I mean the actual practice of it in practice behind closed doors. How do you properly evaluate a thing like that when it’s behind closed doors in the first place? And when the privacy of sex is so important to so many people?

This is where I figure community (in the meaning of interdependence and accountability) can make a difference, insofar as people talking to each other and feeling safe saying stuff like “my partner isn’t being respectful enough or is being pushy, especially about dangerous acts” and having a process they can go through to try to improve it, or be advised to end the sexual partnership if necessary. But in the transition, not having that, I’m not sure what the answer is. What comes to mind is having public services for people to go to that act in a similar manner, but are a bit less personalized than community systems of accountability. Not only public services to go to about misconduct, but also for education.

Leaving it to liberal individualism definitely has its dangers. There are likely people who have been raped or abused in a context that they went into thinking of as BDSM but which did not actually follow proper BDSM practices. This is a kind of thing that needs to be addressed, regardless of BDSM, vanilla, or other. Part of the problem of the liberal capitalist system is it doesn’t tend to take any of it seriously, tends to treat things as a bothsidesism “one person’s word against the other”, and acts like promoting consent will be enough.

Were that same thinking applied to sports, we’d know immediately how absurd it looks when players are fouling each other and no one steps in to put a stop to it. Not to say sex is quite like competitive sports, but just to use it as an example since it’s something that is done as a public show. And even in public, with many eyes on it including cameras, people still misbehave. Sex may not be competitive, but it can easily have people wanting different things and it can easily have imbalances of power in a relationship, and so of course problems are going to arise some of the time. And that’s not even getting into when people want, or think they want, something that is fundamentally risky or dangerous to do and so needs more thought put into consideration of it than “horny brain go brrrrrr.”