Worried About Bondage
Clayton Cramer describes himself as conservative with libertarian sympathies. He’s certainly not as libertarian as a fetish porn blogger like myself might prefer, although I would hope the gods view him with special favor (and will slather him with eager houris to reward him in tangible, sensual fashion) for his yeoman’s work in defense of gun rights — the ultimate freedom from which flows the power to demand, and defend, all other freedoms. Anyway, he’ll doubtless be horrified when he sees traffic from this URL in his referral logs. Friends, there is a culture war and Clayton is not on our side.
I say this in response to this bit from his archives:
Is there anyone besides me that is troubled by bondage’s mixture of sex, dominance, restraints, and power? Think about it for a minute, and you can see that bondage and discipline fetishism is a form of simulated rape. What does it say about the participants in this type of behavior that they are interested in being the dominatrix or the dominated?
…
Mixing power, sex, pain, and humiliation together with pleasure–am I the only person who finds this abhorrent and worrisome?
No, Clayton, you are sadly not alone. But what does it say about you, that you are worrying about the mental state of other people during their arousal?
Fetish is a state of mind. I’ve never understood the mentality that makes it OK to judge and condemn (or even just to worry about in public fashion) the things that happen inside other people’s heads. When I tie up my girlfriend, and she likes it, and we have nice private civilized grownup sex, complete with orgasms and smiles and exhausted panting, why in the name of Aphrodite’s accommodating anus is a grown man in another state worrying about that, much less abhorring it? Don’t you have better things to do?
