It almost never lasts.

I’ve been in two relationships (with white male doms, no less!) that were allegedly 24/7. That lasted maybe a month. What most Domly Dom types fail to realize is that assuming that degree of control over someone is a hell of a lot of work. Especially if you’re already in a non-D/S relationship, like marriage or living together or even good friends, the normal patterns of the relationship will inevitably reassert themselves over time. That’s when you start noticing that you’d rather snuggle in front of the TV together than play, or you hear things like, “Dammit, Master–I thought I asked you to take out the garbage!” 24/7 D/S is one of those things that’s great in theory, but tends not to work in practice (always assuming all parties are sane to start with).

Anyway, my point is that BDSM (like Christianity) is a continuum, and we can’t say “Those people are good BDSM practitioners (or Christians) and those other people aren’t because I don’t like their interpretation.”

yyzian–erotic spanking also (and more often) involves someone saying “Hey, I like being spanked” and his or her partner obliging. My partner and I–who keep the kink strictly in the bedroom and strictly mutual, don’t pretend either of us is “punishing” the other. He likes the way flogging feels; I like the way spanking feels. We also like lots of things most people wouldn’t be at all shocked by, like cuddling and vanilla sex and being nauseatingly cute in public.

Full disclosure: sub-leaning female switch, in LTR with dom-leaning male switch, BDSM dynamics apply only to sex (and only when we feel like it), not to every day life. And I know when I originally met him, he was pretty quiet about being a switch because he’d had bad experiences with people making assumptions if he identified himself as a switch–which is one of the reasons I don’t like the BDSM scene. There ARE assholes who assume subs and switches are common property, or who assume that all relationships are 24/7 (my partner does not tell me what to do except in an agreed-upon private sexual encounter, thank you very much, and I can always say no).

chingona: at some point I think insisting on people’s “agency” becomes pointless, especially if they use their agency to give up their agency by putting themselves completely under the power of someone else. And there’s a point at which the presence of agency starts mattering less than whether or not it’s being used for good or ill. This is especially true when agency is being given up, whether through abuse of drugs or willful ignorance or submission to a religious/familiar order that actively denies your agency.

In defense of the ancient Romans (since they aren’t around to defend themselves), the so-called patria potestas wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Yes, the Twelve Tables said that a man could legally kill his wife for looking at him funny, but in practice… well, evidence is sketchy, but probably not so much.

As for domestic violence: a Roman man could generally beat his wife, but actually the practice of wife-beating (widespread well into the modern period) was considerably more limited and even controversial in Rome than in, for example, Victorian England.

There, fixed that for you.

Stupid typing fingers.

I’m not sure I was clear about Tavris’ view — basically, she felt that the women in the situation were going for the stable known (even if that known kinda sucked for them) rather than going for the unstable unknown. Sure, you could break out and try and find someone to forge an egalitarian relationship with, but you’d have to reject (and be rejected by) all of your family and friends and be left with no recourse if things didn’t work out. And there are social upsides to conformity. We may have rejected those upsides as being worth the oppression, but we shouldn’t pretend those upsides don’t exist at all.

I don’t just mean honorary man Ann Coulter types, but what, for example, women get out of embracing traditional gender roles or traditional religious restrictions, what self-justifications and rationales they use, etc.

I think it was Carol Tavris who pointed out that traditional or religious gender roles for women almost always go along with a similar set of restrictions for men (though men get to violate them more often). So a woman is adhering to the role in the unspoken assumption that in return she’s getting a husband who won’t sleep around or drink too much or whatever. It’s a “rights and responsibilities” construction.

It’s when the husband isn’t keeping up his end of the bargain that things get really ugly.