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INTRODUCTION
This meta is based on my experience on the London BDSM scene and as a writer in the Sherlock fandom. It’s intended mainly for people who haven’t done much BDSM themselves, but want to explore it in their writing. A minority of people (including me) regard BDSM as their sexual orientation, and many more practice it as part of their sexual repertoire. As much as homosexuality, kink deserves respectful treatment from ficcers. So let me for the first and only time mention 50 Shades, as the example of How Not to Do It, and then move on...
What this meta tries to do: Give tips on how to write physically and psychologically realistic scenes.
What it doesn’t do: Set rules for what’s good/bad in all cases. For one thing, BDSM fantasy writing – i.e. a large proportion of fanfiction – is outside the immediate scope of the title. For another, there are as many BDSM styles as there are practitioners, so inevitably I’ll be generalising. Please add your perspective in the comments.
The small print: * This meta assumes a basic knowledge of what BDSM is and the terminology used, as this info is available elsewhere online. * I’m referring to all characters as ‘he’ because it's the most logical option when most fans write m/m slash, though I'm not entirely comfortable about doing so. * When it comes to actually having a penis, I’m relying on fantasy/empathy as much as the next cis female slasher. * I’ve tried to use masochist vs bottom and sadist vs top sensibly, but frankly the word ‘bottom’ can be ridiculous, so ‘sub’ it often is.*
BDSM FANTASY/BDSM REALITY
What’s the difference, anyway?
I think of BDSM fantasy as stories in which consequences don’t necessarily apply, for example where a sub takes severe damage but shows no ill effects afterwards, or where characters are able to live an open BDSM lifestyle with no judgement from the outside world. By realistic writing I mean stories where actions and behaviour have their full normal consequences, whether it’s in the context of fluffy handcuffs or 24/7 D/s. BDSM AUs and stories with supernatural elements fall somewhere between the two.
Probably the single most useful thing to be aware of is which of the above approaches you are taking. I love many stories on both sides of the (actually quite fuzzy) reality/fantasy divide, but the ones I think don’t work are often those which mix approaches. For example, if a newbie couple play very hard but experience no physical or emotional consequences (fantasy) but there follows a gritty scene in which the dom worries about whether he’s an abuser (realism), the resulting fic is likely to feel artificial. In life, BDSM is complex and demands high emotional investment. If you write that complexity and investment in, you’ve probably got a realistic fic. If you decide to omit it, you’re writing fantasy.
Reality (the Penny version)
In other words, if you want a realistic feel, you probably buy it by having a certain grittiness. Some of the core issues of BDSM are ones that appear relatively seldom in fic, for example: pain hurts, topping is a responsible and ethically tricky activity, serious Master/slave dynamics are even more ethically tricky, participants’ kinks are often imperfectly matched, and the use of the safeword is quite common and not necessarily a sign of domly incompetence, etc.
If you put all those in one fic you’d probably end up with something that’s too grim, but a fic that has no tensions and is just happy happy is unlikely to work well either. To my mind, being kink-positive in fic as in life means not whitewashing difficulties but dealing thoughtfully with them.
Pain
Felt pain is orders of magnitude more intense than imagined pain, and while the gluttonously whip-craving masochist is a popular stereotype, very few experienced players will tell you that they simply experience pain as pleasure. This can be confusing for people who suspect they are masochistic, but then try bottoming only to find that the pain really is pain (except see subspace, below). It can take a long time to work out what is the best balance for you.
Masochism isn’t about enjoying all pain because your body somehow performs a neat pain-into-pleasure conversion. It’s a more complicated matter of intensity and endorphins and self-abandonment. You’re likely to be feeling pleasure in tandem with/as a result of a particular kind of pain. A broken arm is not sexy to anyone; spanking is sexy to most masochists.
What makes the pain worthwhile is that it’s accompanied by and to some extent (if not as completely as people may think) transformed by endorphins, lust, anticipation, etc. The experience of subbing is also deepened by the fact that you are being, albeit consensually, violated. Your personal space is being invaded and you are being insulted/hurt, and if tied down you may be physically unable to fight back. That kind of thing is intense. The fact that you want it means that the negative aspects are ultimately under your control, and can be defied or even channelled into catharsis, but it doesn’t make them cease to exist.
Also, the things that scramble a sub’s mind are not always obvious. Being caned while in four-point restraints has a profound psychological effect as well as a physical one, but so does being attached to a doorknob by nothing but thread wrapped around your thumbs and told you mustn’t break the bondage no matter how much you’re tickled. What overloads the brain is often not so much the pain itself as the ferocious concentration on contradictory impulses – ‘Want to fight off tickling! But must keep thumbs still!’
Pain, fear, frustration and rage are present in many real-life scenes, and they’re live and dangerous – as they should be. Show me someone who’s been conditioned out of ordinary human fear response and I’ll show you an abuse victim.
Responsibility
Topping is complicated, and not just because you have to learn the knots/strokes/moves. Like the indiscriminately pain-hungry masochist, the cold and remorseless top doesn’t really exist, or at any rate exists mostly as a deliberate pose.
For the sadist/top there is the conscious sense that they are doing something that is very stridently not allowed by society and that is causing someone else technical harm. It’s both a liberating and terrifying experience, and it doesn’t entirely fade with increased familiarity and competence, because when not in-scene most people do go back to their normal socially acceptable selves. In a way, every scene is a new transgression. The joy of topping is finding how to ride the edge of a sub’s endurance for a sweaty hour, or make him go cross-eyed with frustration as you mix pleasure and pain in subtly shifting balance.
My personal recipe for an ideal sadist is one part desire to inflict pain, two parts caring and nurturing. A top who is exclusively interested in getting and not giving might find a partner or two who is interested in what that particular top dishes out, but is unlikely to form a close relationship with anyone psychologically healthy.
Levels of play
On the physical front, it’s probably obvious to say that you need to match the level of stimulus to the level of stimulation. Taps with a riding crop, for example, can be merely mildly stingy, while pain that is vicious enough to mark the body, be it with flogger bruises or clamp welts or electricity burns, is much more intense. Also, things that seem a huge deal to a novice (‘Whoah, being zapped with electricity – scary!’) may not seem like a big deal to an experienced practitioner (‘Yeah, lots of pretty lights, but you can barely feel it on that setting.’). That works the other way around, too. ‘Being blindfolded? That’s just like putting my hand in front of my eyes, it’s nothing,’ a novice might think. ‘OK, being deprived of sight when I’m already in pain and can’t move? That’s heavy,’ a practitioner might respond. Everything that happens in a scene takes place in the context of everything else, and the more sensations you add, the harder each individual one is to handle. Taste will also have a major effect, as if you enjoy clamps and play with them a lot then it’s likely you can handle more of them, and stronger grips, than someone who only uses them occasionally. Or if you were beaten with a belt as a child you might be willing to try playing a belt scene as deep psychological healing with your life partner, but freak out if someone else tries it during a casual scene.
The temptation can be to make play heavy to the point of being physically improbable, to create an intense feel. That’s a great fantasy trope, but if used in an otherwise realistic story it can come over as mockery of the subject matter. In a successful real-life scene, a good half of the intensity will arise from the dynamic between players, not the kit.
Writing realism
* Include negotiations. It makes clear this is consensual, and ramps up the expectation. It doesn’t have to be a dry list; if well-written, it can take the form of people turning each other on with dirty talk.
* Include negative emotions. Fear and desire often alternate, clash and merge throughout a scene.
* Pay attention to both sides. You may be writing from only one POV, but make sure the other character is motivated by his own desires and not just acting to script.
* Think about marks. What marks does each kind of play create? Is the player anxious to avoid marks? Or does he love them?
* Mix tenderness with roughness. A scene is likely to build from mild to intense overall, but there can be huge variation within that. The intensity may gather in waves, with lulls between. Or a full-on flogging could be leavened with occasional, well-timed caresses.
* You can do an incredibly intense scene with bare hands. Kit is fun too, but bring in more than a bit and the reader starts thinking about that instead of the characters.
BASIC PSYCHOLOGY
What is a sadist/masochist?
The unhelpful answer is that there’s not much formal agreement. Sadism and masochism are still in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (though they’re only supposed to count as disorders if they’re impairing your life), which hinders unbiased psychological investigation.
What is clear is that people’s desires vary hugely in nature, origin and intensity. Some subs have a deep desire to serve someone 24/7; some have a huge kink for verbal/situational humiliation but don’t want to be hit; others are solely masochists and just want their arses whacked. BDSMers are usually very clear about which category they are in, though they may lie for their own ends (‘Yes I want to be your slave’ when actually he just wants to get the dom into bed.)
If you’re trying to paint a fictional character, it can be tempting to use a shorthand explanation for why they are a certain way. Histories of abuse are sometimes used here, as some people with that kind of trauma in their past choose to explore and even heal their experiences through BDSM. That’s not the same as being driven to repeat trauma, though clearly that does happen too. And some players have no history of abuse at all. In my experience, fanfic is pretty good at acknowledging this – from what people who read commercial BDSM fiction tell me, novels are much bigger culprits in the ‘broken victims tragically re-enacting their trauma’ stakes.
On the other hand, most people’s kinks - like the preferences of people practising vanilla sex! - do have some root in their experience. I think of this as being less a sign that people’s traumas deform their sex lives (seeing sexuality as a shameful, distorted mirror of reality) and more a sign that all parts of life are interconnected, which is a plain fact and lessens the potential for stigma.
Usually kink formation is not quite as simple as ‘caned at school, likes caning’, though. It might take an indirect route – for example my usual approach to writing sadist!John is to present him as a protective type who therefore likes domming Sherlock because he can simultaneously guide/protect him and get a perverse thrill from hurting him.
Dom/sub and beyond
Some people only find sex satisfying if they are intensely inhabiting their chosen role. Others enjoy vanilla too. And there are of course a whole lot of levels and identities beyond sadist/masochist and top/bottom. One of the most obvious, and least seen in fic, is the switch, someone who enjoys being on both sides of the divide. In life switching is common, in fic less so. I’m a switch who never seems to write about switching, and yet who wishes more people did write about it! I suspect the reason it doesn’t get much airtime is that ficcers tend to be romantics. We like to see a character deeply crave subbing/topping and get it, and be fulfilled. Switching makes that a lot more complex.
Then there’s non-sexual kink. People who don’t know anything about BDSM often assume it is by definition a type of sex, and because it’s sexual for me I tend towards that assumption as well, but for a lot of people it’s absolutely not true. Bondage, submission to orders, caning... these things and many more can be done as ritual, as discipline or as mind-clearing exercises in addition to or instead of sex.
And there’re master/slave relationships, kink which spills out of specific scene time into daily life. These are really outside the scope of this meta, and of my first-hand experience, though I know people who live this way. If you want to do justice to this type of relationship without personal experience, I would say that’s a tall order, but start by looking for the websites of people who are living the lifestyle and keen to explain it.
All the above could sustain their own metas. But I suspect that for the time being most writers will be doing dom/sub... which also happens to be what I like reading.
Writing a masochist/sub
* Is this guy a masochist, bottom, a sub or some combination? Know what he gets off on, and how much of it.
* Match your terminology to the action of your fic. For example, if you tell the reader a character is submissive instead of or in addition to being masochistic, they need to see him behaving that way; they need to see him being challenged and stretched by instructions/punishments that he finds difficult, as well as getting off on being hurt.
* Limit the repetitive pleading. There are a few people with a kink for it, but ‘Please master’ every other sentence doesn’t add much to the ambience of a story.
Writing a sadist/top
* Give full importance to his desires. He’s not just a vehicle for second-guessing what the sub wants.
* Give him ownership and control of his sadism. If he’s really new he might worry about the ethics of this but that will fade fast (see Writing about Experienced Players).
* Give him joy and let him love. Unless you make an active choice to write him so, he doesn’t have to be doing this because he’s broken. He’s doing it because it brings him profound pleasure, and because it brings his partner profound pleasure and he gets to see that.
LEVELS OF EXPERIENCE
Beginners
Nobody steps over from being vanilla to being kinky in a single shiny moment of self-revelation. A beginner will probably have a menu of things that he thinks he wants to try, and like as not he will initially think he wants more extreme things than he actually does. He may have emotional baggage, for example being told by a previous partner that he’s a fledgling abuser, or an internalised belief that he’s sick. Or he may simply crave kink so desperately that the hugeness of the desire – and the accompanying risk of failure and disappointment – paralyses him.
Even if your character is happy with himself, he will probably have some hilarious/touching/dangerous misconceptions, for example the belief that admitting to limits or safewording is a sign of failure. The contrast between what the character doesn’t know about kink and what the reader does know can be a hugely fruitful source of narrative tension.
One jarring trope that does appear quite a lot is the idea that the dom fights against the urge to hurt the sub until he is overcome by lust and gets sucked in. I think people do this as a way of signalling that the dom is a decent, responsible guy at heart but in fact it says a number of things that amount to the opposite. Someone unable to control themselves should not be topping at all; someone who understands BDSM so little as to think that topping = doing harm is unlikely to be very competent; and someone who has that little knowledge of his own mind can have little empathy with a partner. There are tops like that, particularly inexperienced ones, but these are danger signs, not romantic plus points.
Self-control and the ability to wield it are more prized IRL. Your newbies will either have those tools and be learning how to apply them to the physical practice of BDSM, or need to develop them in the course of becoming competent players.
Experienced players
Experienced players are generally more relaxed and accepting of cock-ups, and they are likely to have a laugh where a newbie might have a meltdown. They will have favourite kinks, and a variety of hard and soft limits (see below). They will probably be competent, confident and willing to experiment – though they could also be devoted to one way of doing things and resistant to changing it.
One key thing is to have the characters at ease with what they are doing, and not continually thinking/exclaiming about it. What I mean here can be illustrated by an analogy with vanilla gay men. Once they’re past the first flush of coming out, I’m pretty sure that gay guys seldom think ‘OMG, I’m about to touch an actual penis!’ It’s more, ‘I’m going to get laid, cool.’ Likewise kinky people don’t think ‘I shall apply the medium-sized ballgag harness, the three-strap armbinder and flog him with the black suede cat, how marvellously deviant!’; they think ‘This is going to be fucking hot!’ and get on with it. Obviously you will need to describe what’s going on in the text, but the characters themselves won’t be mesmerised by the kinkiness of what they’re doing, they’ll just be doing it.
Writing newbies
* Have your character think he will like a particular activity but find he hates it/vice versa.
* Don’t have him horrified by his desires once he actually starts playing. That kind of ambivalence is common in fledgling kinksters but it eases when they start to play. If it doesn’t... well, you’re implying that either your character is stupid (has no sense of the true nature of what he’s doing) or that what he’s doing is actually horrible.
* Do however have mutual embarrassment and awkwardness about desires, especially if you can make it lead to laughter. Laughter bonds people.
Writing experienced players
* Put in humour and flexibility. A cock-up probably means a cue to try again, not a personal crisis.
* Give your character a favourite kink and then fuck with it. Make it stop working for him, or annoy his partner.
* Avoid cheesy/arch/ironic ‘ooh matron, this is so saucy, nudge nudge’-style talk. It’s seldom to the taste of people who actually do ‘this’.
And if you aren’t experienced yourself
Well, if you are a statistically normal slasher, you’ll never have shoved your cock up someone’s bum, either. That doesn’t stop fandom writing buttsex by the bucketload, and it shouldn’t stop people writing about specific BDSM activities. Just do the research and give careful thought to working out how your fantasies probably differ from the actual experience.
ASPECTS OF A SCENE
Negotiation
The way the negotiation goes depends significantly on the experience level of the participants. Newbies probably will have a halting discussion, filled with fear of rejection and uncertainty about what exactly they want.
Experienced players might use negotiation as a kind of verbal aperitif, savouring the discovery of each other’s hot buttons. They might start kissing or touching as a spice to proceedings. What they won’t do, if they’re being responsible, is start actually playing with power while they are still negotiating, even half-seriously, e.g. a top reaching out, grasping a sub’s wrists in his hand and saying ‘How do you feel about handcuffs?’ in a meaningful tone.
Negotiation scenes can fall flat in fic when, as someone said when I asked what people would like to see in this meta, ‘characters rattle through what they like and don’t like as though it’s a shopping list, not the most taboo and embarrassing things that make them tick.’ Whatever your experience level, negotiation is a big deal, either because of nerves or delicious anticipation.
In real life, mismatched desires, even between people who are nominally compatible as one identifies as dom and the other sub, is a frequent problem, and pops up both at negotiation stage and in-scene. It’s unlikely this will ever be carried into fic very much as, hey, we do actually want to write and read hot, successful sex, but you can hint at it and introduce compromises. Fiction probably works best if the characters are neither perfectly matched nor incompatible. E.g. the top may say that he loves having someone blindfolded and gagged; the sub may respond that he loves blindfolds and bondage generally but panics if gagged.
If you don’t want to deal with negotiation at all, you can easily say it was done in an off-stage scene. In Malta Bright, I had Sherlock and John sext at length prior to John’s arrival in Malta. But if you’re writing a new relationship negotiation is a great way to build trust.
Writing negotiation
* The negotiation can arouse one or both characters. Sometimes knowing that your partner wants to do such-and-such a deviant thing to you/have it done to them can be extremely sexy in itself, particularly if they are good at describing it...
* For drama, have one character desperate to include a particular activity, and the other nervous/uninterested/shocked.
* Or have one character refuse to mention a particular desire, and the other have to winkle it out of him.
Limits
A limit is something that one or both of the participants refuses to do, but there are a number of ways this can manifest in a story.
Just because you’re kinky it doesn’t mean you embrace the entire palate of BDSM without question. It’s not a competition to see who’s most hardcore – or if it sometimes is, then that’s not really healthy. All experienced players have their own complex, and sometimes shifting, landscape of hard and soft limits. For example, I love intense violet wanding on my neck but will safeword if a wand touches my hands. Someone else might like being mummified in plastic wrap but freak out at being gagged.
Limits should be taken very seriously but are usually not absolute, even hard ones. For example, a common hard limit is permanent scarring, but a couple might specially negotiate to create a planned scar to celebrate a significant anniversary.
Soft limits are quite often things that the player hasn’t tried yet, but that he might like when he does. Or they might be things that are just not pleasurable rather than actually traumatic, for example I dislike being tickled but submit to it occasionally because my boyfriend likes doing it.
It’s also possible to really enjoy and crave a particular activity, but to refrain from it because intellectually you decide it’s too dangerous. Something which one player thinks is safe and does routinely, such as mild to moderate breathplay, may be considered unacceptable by someone who takes a different view of the risks.
Writing limits
* The no-limits sub in kink fic is the equivalent of the self-lubricating arsehole in buttsex. IRL claiming to have no limits is akin to waving a red flag saying you are clueless and possibly dangerous. Everyone has limits.
* That includes doms. In my experience it’s just as common for the dom not to want to do a particular activity as it is for the sub. Reasons vary from ‘I’m not comfortable inflicting more than mild pain’ to ‘I don’t have the experience for that’ to ‘I’m just not into it.’
* Don’t be afraid of using the safeword. People do, and then the scene can go on after a hiatus (or, yes, it can dissolve in a mess). As well as the ‘stop now’ absolute safeword, most players understand ‘red’/’amber’/’green’ to mean ‘stop’, ‘go easy’ and ‘hell yes, more!’
Subspace/topspace?
When I asked what people might want to see in this meta, the biggest response I got was ‘can you explain topspace?’ I think subbing is considered slightly more accessible – someone does stuff you like and you get off on it. But topping = enjoying hurting someone. How do you find a psychological way into that without simply creating a monster?
I’d like to describe this all rationally, but I find myself thrown back on having to describe what subspace and topspace are like for me. Both states are an expansion in the mind. It literally feels like there is extra space spreading out around you – the landscape inside your head. In subspace there are no real worries any more; in topspace there are demands on you but you meet them so easily, almost psychically.
In subspace, you drift. Violent things happen to you and they all feel good and gentle, and perhaps unimportant. Someone loves you, or maybe the universe does. You please and are pleasing. I’ve gone on about how for masochists the pain still hurts; that applies until you reach a certain point, which is the entry to subspace. Chemically I know endorphins are involved, but that’s the extent of my medical knowledge of altered states.
In terms of how to write someone in this condition, they will probably slur their words, or have a hard time bringing them to the surface at all. Thought works in concepts and colours. Some people will go limp and happy or get extra-affectionate in a slightly malcoordinated way. I tend to cry, slowly and lazily, which has occasionally resulted in doms stopping the scene in concern, which I found incredibly frustrating as I had to fight back to normality to tell them there was nothing to worry about.
Topspace or domspace is a sharpening of alertness. You feel at the centre of everything and competence radiates from you, in general and particularly towards the sub. You know exactly what he needs, and you’re going to give it to him. You might have a physical ache to hurt or humiliate the sub – his beautiful skin, his lovely hair, his helpless cock, all waiting for what you choose to do. What he feels, you feel at one remove, but transformed into pleasure.
If you’re writing a top in this condition, heighten everything he feels and sees. It’s all sensual and beautiful and there for his pleasure, most of all the sub. His voice gets more confident, his movements are precise and everything is done with relish. If something starts to go off course, he simply nudges it back on.
Writing scenespace
What is the difference between BDSM and vanilla? Someone asked me that when I canvassed for input to this meta and I have to admit that, if there is a way to summarise it, I can’t find it. Still, to deepen the kinkiness of a scene beyond the vanilla + trappings level, consider including these -
* Actual power inequality. The dom really is in charge and not just doing what the sub wants.
* Decentred sexuality. This applies to many flavours of vanilla too of course, but in BDSM the focus is seldom on genital orgasms, though they are nice. Kinky people find pain and power inequalities profoundly erotic in and of themselves, not just as tools for progressing along the road to ejaculation.
* Indirect description. This works better than just layering adjectives for describing intensity. For example, the dom finding flakes of skin under his fingernails is more evocative than ‘He scratched very hard’.
* Role-based POV consistency. If you are a het woman it’s possible to write both participants in an m/m vanilla sex act in a similar way, because they are both looking at each other with desire for a male body, as you’re doing. Once you introduce a dom/sub element, the chances are you will identify with one of those more than the other, but as a writer you need to make sure that what the dom sees as desirable in the sub differs from vice versa.
SCRUPLES, SQUICKS, PREJUDICE AND PRIDE
One area of BDSM that you can, if you want, ignore in a bedroom setting is the social stigma. Yes it’s an issue for people who identify as lifestyle, but they don’t usually make their lives all about it.
As a straight woman I feel I need to be very careful when writing about homophobia, and a vanilla-identified writer tackling anti-BDSM feeling may have similar concerns about potential appropriation. If you do want to go for it though, hell yes, give me powerful drama.
Self-acceptance
Coming out is a significant process for most scene people. The rise of the internet means that some younger people just find kink online in their early teens, realise they like it, and start to do it with minimal fuss (massive cheer) but most people will have had some difficulty such as hostility from family, or at least the need for concealment of their kinky side. The basic issues here are relatively familiar to anyone who’s ever had a serious lifestyle disagreement with relatives, and I suspect that’s most of fandom, so I won’t go into details.
More specific is the way people handle their own internalised doubts. The most common fears are being a monster/abuser (for doms) and being a headcase/dupe (subs). If someone is struggling with this, the issue will be consistently present for them. Storytelling convenience would have the doubts come and go so that angsty conversations can be alternated with hot sex scenes, but in reality the worry will be constant.
Hopefully the angst will ease with time. The most powerfully affirming experience a character can have is a scene that goes well. His own, and in particular his partner’s, pleasure is a powerful proof that actually this is a positive thing.
As with homosexuality, the question of nature or nurture has yet to be decided, and there are supporters and detractors in both camps. A lot of people feel very strongly that they are wired to be kinky. Others feel they acquired a taste, voluntarily or as a side effect of life experience.
The haters
Most people these days have some clue about what BDSM is. General tolerance is increasing, though it may be that some people don’t know quite what they’re tolerating: they have a hazy idea that pervs tie each other up and that it’s harmless, and the IRL existence of some of the more extreme practices doesn’t occur to them.
However, plenty of people still have negative ideas about BDSM. Some of the most common are -
1) sincere belief that it’s all formalised abuse and/or mental illness (possibly off the back of reading material that does shamelessly conflate kink with these things),
2) commitment to radical feminist ideology that says all power inequality, even if voluntary, is a reproduction of patriarchy
3) commitment to patriarchal power structures that says moderate maledom/femsub is fine but everything else is unnatural
4) sexual repression with the attendant jealousy and projection
5) religious objections, which usually mix in parts of points 1-4
I was asked how to write characters who demonise kink without creating a story that demonises kink, and I think the key is rooting the hostile character’s objections in one of the viewpoints above, or in some other more unusual but equally plausible psychological quirk. That way the limitations of their argument are on show along with the argument itself, and the reader gets to make up their own mind.
Dealing with prejudice
A newbie might be very upset by meeting with prejudice, or conversely energised by it because it’s an opportunity to reconfirm his identity to himself. An oldtimer is more likely to roll his eyes and give the finger, figuratively or literally, because he’s already comfortable with himself and nonsense from outside is an irritant rather than a destabilising threat.
Context is very important. There is a lot of real abuse in the world, and BDSMers know it. If questioned politely about odd bruises, a sensible player will reply courteously because he knows that the questioner’s concern comes from a legitimate place. So resist any temptation to make observers as dumb as sticks in order to generate dramatic misunderstandings. Even people who think BDSM is an excuse for abuse understand that a collar means something different from an ‘oops, walked into the door again’ black eye. They may hate both but they will distinguish between the two.
Everyone who’s into kink has to decide where they draw their own moral lines. No matter who they are, there is some practice they will consider not only a squick but morally wrong. Almost everyone, for example, considers that legally binding slave contracts would be a bad idea – even though there is a small community minority vocally in favour of them. Neither you nor your character is obliged to approve of everything that people label as BDSM.
‘Safe, sane and consensual’ and its expanded implications is a useful explanatory tool. People don’t tend to go on about it, however, except in an educational context. Practitioners mostly learn by doing, and the biggest tool against hostility is positive visibility. If someone is deciding whether or not they think a practice is repugnant then actually seeing it is more likely to win them over than any amount of wordage. For example, the idea of a dom leading a sub on a leash might seem horrible, but if you actually see that happening you see the sub’s peaceful expression, the dom’s fond caresses etc.
Writing kink-positive without writing cheese
* If a character has triumphed over prejudice, he’ll need to have faced a few obstacles in doing so. No need for a litany of wrongs though; just hint at the resulting scars.
* Avoid implying that your characters are the most wonderful and safest players ever. The implication is that real kinky people fall short. For the same reason, tread carefully if having one character ‘rescue’ another from a sex life that was entirely dysfunctional till now.
* Have your characters acknowledge the problematic aspects of kink, e.g. whether a particular dynamic is psychologically unhealthy or is feeding racial or sexual inequality. They may well embrace that dynamic anyway, because they find it too hot not to. (‘OMG so wrong, I love it!’) How do they (or you) feel about that choice?
* Don’t have your BDSM lifestylers think their relationship is normal and resent vanillas for doing things differently. Scene people know they’re a minority.
* Then again, it’s not unheard of for lifestylers to think their kind of sex is best and, amongst themselves, use ‘vanilla’ to mean ‘dull’. If your characters think that way, what does it show? Arrogance? Insecurity? Humour? An excusable defensive response to hostility from outside?
CONCLUSION
If one point repeatedly sticks out at me, it’s probably that BDSM is a whole different headspace, not just vanilla sex + bits of leather. BDSM and vanilla practices overlap, but they aren’t mere variations on each other. Powerful writing is likely to accommodate that.
Is there something inherently dark about BDSM? Yes, I think there’s a harnessed darkness, which is summoned to serve the players’ ends. Does your BDSM story have to be ultimately dark? No, I don’t think so. At any rate, mine take the characters through dark places, but lead them to profound fulfilment. The challenge of writing BDSM is to explain or at least depict the paradox of how apparent cruelty and suffering becomes intimacy and pleasure.
Or just make it really, really fucking hot. That’s good too.
Relevant links
Meta on the London BDSM scene
Meta on Professional Dominatrices by eldritch-horrors