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possibly be BDSM! Because I'm not a BDSMer! Because BDSM is dirty." But we shouldn't necessarily blame people for this instinct to reject and categorize: the instinct is one that comes from being scared and oppressed... because the social penalties for "getting it wrong” are high. Remember, those New York City dominatrixes thought they were "safe" from the law as long as BDSM didn't count as sex. But as soon as someone decided BDSM "counted as" sex, those dominatrixes were arrested. It's just one more example of how sexual stigma for "different kinds of sex" is constantly intertwined. No type of consensual sexuality can express itself freely until people agree that "among consenting adults, there is no 'should’." The Romans, those ancient imperialists, used to say: "Divide and conquer." When consensual sexualities are scared of each other, we will continue to be conquered. As long as "vanilla" people are afraid of "BDSM"... as long as "BDSMers" are afraid of being seen as "sexual"... as long as the social penalties for being a "slut" or a "whore" are incredibly steep... as long as sex workers are stigmatized and criminalized... everyone will be bound by these oppressive standards. te KK The Embodied Side of BDSM versus Sex Although Part 1 was all about how the divide between "BDSM" and "sex" is often nonsensical, or purely political, or socially constructed... that doesn't mean that the divide does not exist. I once had a conversation about ignoring social constructs with a wise friend, who noted dryly that: "One-way streets are a social construct. That doesn't mean we should ignore them." Just because the outside world influences our sexuality, does not mean that our sexual preferences are invalid. Some polyamorous BDSMers have very different rules about having sex with outsiders, as opposed to doing BDSM with outsiders. For example, during the time when I was considering a transition to polyamory, I myself had a couple relationships where we were sexually monogamous -- yet my partners agreed that I could do BDSM with people who weren't my partner. Those particular partners felt jealous and threatened by the idea of me having sex with another man, but they didn't mind if I did BDSM with another man. Maybe the feelings of those partners only arose because they categorized "BDSM" and "sex" into weirdly different socially-constructed ways... but those partners' feelings were nonetheless real, and their feelings deserved respect. And there are also unmistakable ways that BDSM feels different from sex. There is something, bodily, that is just plain different about BDSM, as opposed to sex. I often find myself thinking of "BDSM feelings" and "sexual feelings" as flowing down two parallel channels in my head... sometimes these channels intersect, but sometimes they're far apart. The BDSM urge strikes me as deeply different, separate, from the sex urge. It can be fun to combine BDSM and sex, but there are definitely times when I want BDSM that feel very unlike most times when I want sex. The biggest political reason why it's difficult to discuss this is the way in which we currently conceptualize sexuality through "orientations": we have built a cultural “orientation model" focused on the idea that "acceptable" sexuality is "built-in," or HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018539