Switches

One of my goals with Fetish Meme is to suppress my own opinion. I have sites for those. I’d prefer to maintain a detached, clinical approach here in hopes the readers will supply the opinions. That self-abnegation isn’t nearly as easy as I’d hoped.

That there is a controversy surrounding people who switch: who enjoy both sides of D/s and / or S&:M experiences baffles me.

Do you believe that there are kinky people who really are switches or do you see falsehood in their claims?

As near as I’ve ever seen it appears that the arguments objecting to the concept of switching assume that people are dominant or submissive. Period.

And the discussion that follows tends to demonstrate one of the great weaknesses of mass education. People take college courses in psychology and ethnology and take their elementary education as a source of expertness. Or they read some fairly simple popular books on social anthropology and quote the bits they like.

As with bisexuality I can’t help but see this as proof that people are so protective of their own sexual orientation that they feel compelled to reject anything that conflicts with it. Just as monosexual people - gay and heterosexual - often reject sexual and affectional fluidity as false, hypocritical or deluded so do some BDSM people with power exchange orientation.

Perhaps they sense some of this fluidity within themselves but are so attached to what they’ve established with one mode leaves them feeling threatened by the idea of loosening up. Also some people seem to feel that being able to move outside a specific role threatens the validity of the role they want the other person to maintain.

Accepting that some men and women are both sadistic and masochistic, dominant and submissive seems to require nothing more than accepting that much of human sexuality is a matter of degrees and often contingent in context.

Are BDSM switches, uh, ouch ‘real?’ Is switching roles legitimate?