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There is a certain projection that SM/BSDM and other sexual expressions are therapy, ok-to-play-in-all-ways, politically correct pursuits despite the chains and pain. What is striking is that the impulses we humans have don't account for politics, for safety, for cultural acceptance nor should they have to. Steven's experience is so interesting because he embraces the mystery of being attracted to something that doesn't purge him, leaves him with complicated and painful feelings and yet makes him feel alive and human. That's why humans are so wonderful and strange...at our cores we aren't necessarily driven by some nice picture of what we should be.
The judgement I hear from others just screams how uncomfortable we are with feelings and experiences we can't distill down to some understandable cause. We want to analyze it...say it was because he was raped or that he is working something out that has to do with feelilng unloved or unwanted. Why does that necessarily have to be? Why does his sexuality have to be justfied as right or wrong? And why do we always use that blanket justification of therapy as the rea? People who appologise for S/M are just as uncomforatble with it as those who vilify it.
The meaning he gets from his sexuality are singular and hard to understand, but I don't think we have to understand any of it nor do we have to justify it.
