I understand the frustration. I regret that I made statements against the book without even reading it. Its popularity led to it getting unfair weight, so I understand the urge to correct that impression people are left with, many of whom don't or won't know much else about power exchange dynamics in a loving relationship, but I keep reading these posts about abuse and I'm reading that BDSM educators are leaving pamphlets for movie goers. It smacks of desperation. We're talking about a work of fiction. Fiction is different from real life, it's a representation, it can take any number of forms.
Here's a story Joseph Campbell told me. In an ancient human society, they used to bring out four or five virgin boys and one virgin girl. Under a rigged contraption of tree trunks, the boys would one by one have their first sexual relations with the girl. When the last coupling was in the act, the contraption would be sprung. The couple would be crushed, cooked, and eaten by the community. That's not fiction, that's true. So we have two choices when we hear that story. We can condemn that practice as barbaric, or we can consider it from a different perspective and recognize it as a need for those societies to make sense of what they think of the world through myths and through metaphorical enactments.
Fiction is a means of making sense of different things in a similar, much more innocuous way. If you see a relationship portrayed in a work of fiction and determine it to be abusive, you're not wrong but when you're telling everyone else they should find it abusive you absolutely are wrong, because you're putting your interpretation on other people. How do we expect anyone, maybe taking a risk by openly enjoying this book or this movie, to make sense of what they're experiencing through these fantasies enough to incorporate it into a real life enjoyment when they're being told they're doing it wrong before they even get started?
I doubt any practitioner of BDSM, however healthy and loving they feel their real life relationships are now or have been through the course of their adult lives, can say every fantasy construction of BDSM they've ever experienced in their minds would play out in real life in that same healthy and loving form. And even now I'm still playing that game of what's healthy and what's not. Who is to judge these things? It's never ceased to amaze me, since getting on fetlife--a site many people would judge shouldn't exist at all from their narrow perspective--the number of people who feel comfortable stating that this is acceptable but this isn't. This is a healthy relationship but this is abuse. We can't know what the experiences of other people are unless we are those people. Which isn't possible, so what's the point? And when people start in on fictional representations, they sound like people who don't have a grasp of the difference between fantasy and reality. And I don't mean to rant against them, because I understand why. They're protecting something that others have harshly judged. So, that's fine, but use this connection with people, this influx of interest, as an opening to communication instead of dishing out the same judgment.
