flexibeast.space - gemlog - 2025-03-04
Kink: ‘submissive’ vs ‘slave’
[ Originally posted in a different space, 2025-02-05; lightly edited. ]
Someone recently asked about the difference between a kink ‘submissive’ and a kink ‘slave’, and if a ‘slave’ should be able to have any say at all.
Well, i ‘own’ one of my current partners, and she is my ‘submissive’, but she's certainly not my ‘slave’. i also owned a former partner (now friend), and again, she was my ‘submissive’, but not my ‘slave’. In both cases, it is/was about the connotations of the word for us: ‘slave’ was not a word that Sparked Joy for any of us, whereas words like ‘property’ and ‘possession’ do/did. As for what it means to me to ‘own’ someone, here's a post of mine about exactly that:
“Some of what being an ‘owner’ means to me”
Additionally, here's a post about the ‘title deed’ i had with my former partner:
To a first approximation, i'm very concerned about any ongoing dynamic that doesn't fundamentally involve the bottom having the right to revoke consent at any time and for any reason. If this is not possible, then in what sense can it be said that this dynamic is ‘consensual’? i know from experience - having learned it the hard way! - that stuff can come up that neither owner nor property have realised is a hard limit, despite extensive discussions around actual and possible limits. And crossing someone's hard limits can cause significant psychological (let alone physiological) harm. To say a bottom shouldn't be able to use a safe word at such times is to say that the top shouldn't care about the harm they're doing to their bottom, and that the top should just accept any harm done to them; and i don't agree with that.
Of course, some people actively, explicitly, consent to no longer being able to revoke consent within the context of the dynamic (although they could still end the dynamic itself). i can't say i don't worry about such agreements, but in the end, i want to try to respect their choice, because i want people to respect the choices myself and my partners / play partners make. And many years of experience have demonstrated to me that there's a steep slippery slope to condescending paternalism; cf. this blog post of mine:
“Self-righteous condescending paternalism in the kink communities”
Nevertheless, to me this is a very different scenario to the notion that by default a ‘slave’ shouldn't be able to revoke consent.
☙