As if all that weren’t bad enough, yesterday’s example contained an even more insidiously vile insinuation: the idea that fantasies of violent sex are deeply connected to, and are at risk of mutating into, true desires to inflict violent sex on non-consenting partners. In plain English, the nasty pearl-clutcher who wrote the article is saying that all a man with rape fantasies needs to turn him into an actual rapist is the opportunity to act them out, even on an inanimate piece of plastic. And while that might seem reasonable to naive vanillas without any D/s type urges, as a BDSM switch I find it deeply insulting and dangerously ignorant. Yeah, I enjoy getting rough with pretty girls…and the part that turns me on is that they want it. If I got as much as a hint that a bottom wasn’t really into what I was doing, the space between my legs would get as dry as the Gobi in a heartbeat. And the same thing goes for nearly every top I’ve ever been with; in one case I unintentionally ruined a scene by reacting so realistically that I spooked him, and he couldn’t continue. Kinky people understand consent in a way most vanilla folk never learn to, and the notion that it’s the opposite is nothing but bigoted projection. The dogma that consent must be explicitly verbal, ongoing, and “enthusiastic” is the sexual equivalent of training wheels; it’s a prop for people who are so sexually illiterate and obtuse that they need a highly-artificial, externally imposed structure to ensure nobody gets even the tiniest bit hurt (physically or emotionally), and it destroys the basis of a lot of kink play. In one example from my own life, a partner was teasing me about what was going to happen to me later. I looked him straight in the eyes and said, absolutely deadpan, “I do not consent.” But he knew me well, and could clearly see both the sparkle in my eyes & the Mona Lisa smile on my lips. There was no further discussion at the time, and when similar conversations came up during the day I repeated: “Remember, I absolutely do not consent to that.” But we had already clearly established safewords, and our very deep bond of trust included knowing that I enjoy having consent seduced from me (which is again total anathema to the “enthusiastic consent” crowd). The result: some of the hottest sex of my entire life that night, I mean literally screaming. The “ongoing enthusiastic consent” crowd would be utterly horrified if they could see a video of it (especially the audio), and yet both of us knew that I was fully consenting & would’ve safed out had I changed my mind. The people who push the artificial, authoritarian “enthusiastic consent” crap are just sex-negative moralists