You’re concentrating on one type of rape (often known as “stranger rape”). However, another very common type of rape — and no less rape, and no less harmful — is sometimes known as “date rape”. (Rape by a person the victim knows.)

And by looking at “date rape”, one can clearly see that your attempt to cast the rapist’s mindset as the only important factor is, well … incorrect.

With “date rape”, in some cases, the rapist may actually believe that his (or, rarely but not impossible, her) attentions are desired. So there’s no malice, but if the lack-of-consent was communicated in such a way as “a reasonable man” would understand that there was no consent, then the act is rape. Period.

A lot of people have trouble with this, mainly because of the bad old days when a husband could force himself on his wife with impunity; “He’s her husband, therefore he loves her, therefore it’s not rape” goes the thinking. If you really think through your claim, it’s obvious nonsense. How can the motives of the aggressor change the criminality of the act? If that were the case, then I could rob banks as long as the proceeds were for a good cause!

What makes the crime of rape is exclusively based on the consent of the victim: with consent, it’s not rape (and there’s no victim); without consent, it’s rape.

Other factors, of course, impact what action society takes against the offender, including your point about whether the mindset is benevolent or not, but we’d all agree there is a difference between a criminal who is treated leniently and an innocent man!

The Boss.

“Where it becomes rape is in the head — either you do or do not want those sexual things happening. ”

I have to take exception with this. The victim of rape has *nothing* to do with when an act is rape, or not rape. It has *nothing* to do with what’s inside the victim’s head.

On the contrary, it has everything to do with what’s going on in the head of the perpetrator.

You see, even when your master and you, or me and mine, do something that the submitting partner doesn’t consent to, it’s done in an environment of consent. You and I have consented to give UP our right to say no to things.

Anything that happens between you and your master therefore is by definition consensual. When our owners do things we don’t like, they still have our safety in mind. Anything done to us is not done out of the pure sadistic desire to destroy another human being. It’s not the evil that wants to see another person’s soul crushed, or see them literally broken into pieces.

If our masters do that to us, it’s a creative act: they break us so that they can build us back up, and we have consented to – even begged for – the breaking. When a rapist does it, it’s an act of intentional malice.

None of our relationships with our masters is based on sheer malice. It’s a violent love, but the key part of it is the love. Have you ever thought of how much work and effort goes into being an owner? (Of course you have! You’ve even commented on it…) The majority of their time is monopolized by us! It takes so much effort! Every action they take towards us they are thinking not just of their own desires, but about us. It’s never purely about what THEY want! Even when they say it is! They are making sure we’re safe, and stay breathing. They are making sure no permanent harm comes to us. They’re considerate of us in every action.

Their goal is not sheer destruction.

In the case of the rapist, they only consider their victims when they are enjoying the harm they cause. It’s an act of malicious destruction.

With our masters, the act is always an act of love, even if it is functionally or even legally identical to the malicious acts carried out by rapists.

The difference does *NOT* take place within the mind of the victim, with some simple on/off switch. The difference takes place in the mind of the perpetrator, acts of malicious harm, as opposed to acts of love.

About me: I’m in a relationship that involves as much of the lifestyle as we can manage with our hectic lives. She doesn’t have the time or energy to be a 24/7 master, and I am and have always been defiance incarnate, so I need a lot of work to be a good slave. Life gets in the way of our lifestyle.

We’re not there yet, but I’ve loved your blog about the lifestyle we hope to someday be capable of 24/7.

Thanks for your blog, and your comments.

Leo v. SM

(And the rest of your post is very good too : )

I need to take very strong exception to your comment, because this is very significant to both of us. (This blog is a reflection of reality, not a reality in itself – the post is an essence of a lot of discussion, not the totality of it). In your anger you may have (inadvertently, perhaps) claimed “ownership” of what is, and is not, rape. Rape is a legal concept, and while your personal experiences might match your differentiation (e.g. “you have to deal with for years after … ”), that’s not the legal reality. Whether you like this fact or not, rape does not have to be physically intrusive or harmful — all that matters is the lack of consent.

And that’s where your assertions got offensive; pretending that rape has to be injurious and/or have long-lasting harmful effects is just self-absorbed. Rape is rape regardless of whether the victim recovers in hours, days, months or decades, regardless of whether it was painful or not. As a parallel, you are like someone claiming that the theft of a single dollar isn’t theft because someone stole everything you had — the severity and harm done are different, but it’s still theft – and lacking that buck may make a difference.

And at the risk of pointing out the blindingly obvious, if one’s partner is bound and gagged (for fun) and one day is happy and the next day you do it all again but they change their mind and withdraw consent midway (for any reason at all), no external observer would be able to tell the difference, because (no matter what you claim) the physical ACTIONS are precisely the same both days. In our universe, and in law, one day its sex and the next it’s rape. (It’s probable that prosecution wouldn’t happen, but let’s not pretend that the offense of rape depends on whether or not the courts prosecute).

One your second point, I find it truly amazing that you have, for your own reasons, decided that I have a “rape scale”, even though the concept is clearly binary (want/do not want; consent/nonconsent). We all KNOW there are an infinite variety of rape circumstances (not including, by the way, your “guilt them into having sex” example, because that ISN’T actually rape — if someone consents to sex, it’s not rape, even if the consent was unwise or alcohol-fueled or out of sympathy or out of guilt).

The whole POINT is that actions with consent are NOT rape, while the exact same actions without it are. So if a simple act like, say, a blowjob can be either rape or not rape, depending on consent, then a complex and apparently brutal act like, say, tying someone down, gagging them and sodomizing them can ALSO be either rape or not rape.

The rest of your post complete diverges from this core point. If there’s consent, there’s no rape, so no long-term harm… even if the actions look a lot (to an outside observer) like rape. The reason you (and everyone else) should have no problem with rape play is not that its PLAY, but that its NOT RAPE.

As an aside, the sort of play we (and many, many others) do can be variously cathartic and occasionally problematic. People have worked through issues – including rape – through play, and others have uncovered problems that require profound effort to resolve. So sometimes, when a scene ends, the feelings and maybe even trauma continue and the healing work begins.

The Boss.

I just want to preface this with – I think rape play is perfectly normal and I have no issues against it, and also that this is all in my opinion and experience from having been raped, and obviously I cannot speak for anyone else who has been raped. I was raped by my ex-boyfriend, which is probably the closest you could get to the line between rape and rape play.

Firstly, the physical motions are NOT the same thing. Think of it as the difference between someone hitting you with baseball bat to steal your purse, and your Master hitting you with a cane (this is the closest analogy I can think of.) In the first instance, your body’s reaction is probably to double up in pain, to protect yourself. The pain is excrutiating, and you would do anything to rid yourself of it. You try and crawl away, but he keeps hitting you with the bat. Your body tenses up, which makes the pain even worse. You don’t know when the pain will stop, or if it will end in your death. In the second instance, this is something you have welcomed. The pain is bad, and sometimes you may want to get away, but you are not in a total state of panic and self-defense. Your body may go into shock but it also accepts the pain, and far from your whole body becoming rigid with terror you get turned on. You will often know when it will end (as long as you keep counting out the strokes!)

Secondly, it is not a simple matter of a “do not want switch”. He probably didn’t intend it, but to me it sounds like everyone has a sort of ‘rape scale’. For some it’s ok if your boyfriend has sex with you when you don’t want it, but anal is too far. For others it’s ok if you give him a blow job when you don’t want to, but sex is too far. I don’t have a certain point or act where it is too far. Rape isn’t just strangers kidnapping you off the street and having sex with you at gun point. Rape can start before you’ve even taken your clothes off, when he guilts you into having sex. Rape can be when you begin to have sex and it’s too painful because you’re not ready and you tell him to stop but he won’t. Rape can be when a man gets you too drunk to say no. It’s not a problem of communication – if a woman says “I don’t want to have sex” and a man persuades or bullies her into it, it is still rape. It is more a situational thing than a definitive, “This is my line don’t cross it” thing.

There is a huge difference between the emotional factors of rape and rape play, too. I would describe my rape as terrifying, humiliating, and painful (both physically and emotionally.) When you are engaging in rape play, you would probably agree with the later two, and maybe the first if it is in your scene. The difference is, once the scene ends, the emotions end. I lived with the humiliation and terror for years. Until I worked through my experience, sex was painful as I kept having panic attacks and flashbacks to my rape. I experienced my rape as a negative in my every day life, and if you experience your rape play it is probably as a positive.

The main difference for me is that at the end of the day, you trust your partner and you consented. You may not have consented during that particular scene (because that would negate the purpose) but at some point, you and your partner probably had a discussion where you agreed that this was an allowed sexual act. You have the trust that he will never take you too far, no matter how much pain you are in. You have the trust that if he really pushes you over the line and you break, you can say so and he will stop. You know that there is an end. With rape, there is no trust. As soon as a man does something sexually that a woman does not want, he has gone too far. With rape play, there is always that little bit further towards the end of the scene, but with rape, everything stops at the start. You have no trust that if you say no he will stop, because often you have already said no and he didn’t. There is no end in sight, and if the pain is too much you cannot end the situation.

Again, I have no problem with rape play – because it is PLAY. I think of it as something entirely different to rape, because in so many ways they have absolutely nothing in common. There are so many emotions and physical responses you have to deal with for years after the rape, which (apart from your guilt maybe?) you don’t experience with rape play. Don’t feel guilty about it, really. You have every right to do what feels good to you, and what you are doing isn’t harmful (I guess you get my wider meaning of that?) You indulging in rape play doesn’t diminish my experience. But please think of it as rape play, and not anything, anything like real rape, because it’s not.

mumbojumble — You’re very welcome, and I’m glad you have also worked through your guilt (mostly — I don’t think any of us will ever banish it completely, and nor should we — keeps us aware of the facts outside our fantasies) and you’re able to enjoy your kink!

Naohai — Goodness, I’m sorry you had to feel that — I’m not trying to squick anyone out by just being in this relationship! Thank you so much for sticking with me through that unease — I value your comments a great deal!

I’ve actually gotten the child-free couple guilt-tripping a time or two! Last time was on a plane — the (vulgar, I might add) woman beside me started asking about my life, and inquired whether my husband and I had children. When I said we had no plans for that, she sniffed, “Oh! You were an only child, weren’t you?!” “Umm, no…” I replied, for I have a full younger sister and four half older siblings, and my Master has two full siblings and three step-siblings! “Well, why don’t you want children, then?” she cried, as if having siblings would somehow make you a better (less selfish, obviously) person!

I thought later that I should have guilt-tripped her right back, and made up a tale of tragic infertility due to an extremely painful and horrific illness. Next time someone does that to me, I’m ready!

(You’d really think that people being self-aware and responsible enough to decide not to bring children into the world unless they are in a space to care for them properly would be something that was admired. But no….)

OK

OK

**wheeze**

Thanks for WARNING A BITCH that homeboy just rips right in and calls someone a “bloody nigger” right in the beginning of that clip!!

**DIES**

lulz.

Yeah.

What she said.

I had a horrible, horrible time watching the rape scene in “Irreversible” for that very reason. The brutality pegged for me at one point yet part of my id-level thinking was too far gone to fully disengage when the violence pushed me past arousal to fury and horror.

But those emotions, at the core, feel so very, very similar.

And Ganesha knows I know a little something about kink blurring the line between what we find arousing and what is genuinely horrifying.

Can we say “race-based kink play”?

I offer you a fierce cry of solidarity for your making yourself so flagrantly effulgently vulnerable in your strength and your utter soulnakedness.

Love

Mo