As we all know (because I’m just addressing my past and future selves… okay, addressing you too, dear reader, but you probably also know. Also, you’re dear. You’re a dear. Also maybe a deer. I mean, I have furry friends. You could be.) I am knee deep in the theory shit. It comes with the English grad student territory. As I work and try to make sense of the incredible quagmire of bullshit that theory entails, I find myself coming back, time and again, to one thing: Dom\/sub, power play sexual relationships, BDSM or no.<\/p>\n
The question I have to ask myself is why.<\/p>\n
For some reason, it makes it quite easy for me to grok a lot of these theories when I go “but how does this apply to a D\/s situation?” I quickly lay out these ideas and I am instantly fine. Well, okay, not instantly, but they do make a whole lot more sense to me. I mean, it is something I know, but at the same time, it’s not something I KNOW. I dabble, but I can’t say I’m really in such a relationship. The closest thing I have to that is my relationship with Ecks, but even that is just an incredibly awesome friendship wrapped up in that kind of clothing simply because it’s fun. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and it’s something I know about, but it’s not my life. It doesn’t seem like it would be something I’m constantly drawing on.<\/p>\n
Yet it is.<\/p>\n
If I had to venture a guess as to why things work out that way, it would be because a sliding scale of social power is a metaphor I use to easily and, as far as I’m aware, effectively deal with social situations that come my way. I use it to plan my actions and feel out how people are reacting to me and what I’m doing. I use it to judge when people are not being honest, because if they’re playing outside of their projected power space, they’re up to something, or they’d be projecting that level of power. Similarly, I tend to look at how the world works as social relationships and social systems. Even my potentially bad habit of putting a ton of personification on objects that don’t really fit that mold (the writer of all the post-humanist rhetoric I’ve read would be disappointed in me) is all done in order to make the world work in the social interactive metaphor I’ve put forth.<\/p>\n
Once I’ve force everything into that view, I suppose that a D\/s sexual relationship is one of the purest, and least hidden forms of such a relationship, making it easy to choose as a non-confusing example to apply it to.<\/p>\n
In the end, I have a pretty good grasp on this stuff, and that’s what’s important, education and future-wise. But I’m endlessly interested in my own thought processes and why I do things the weird way I do them. I spin it around in my head again and again. I write blog posts to put my thought processes out there in a more concrete way, to better understand them. I do these things. <\/p>\n