Recently, I had a discussion with several friends about framing BDSM as "healthy" when talking about sex positivity. In the context of this discussion, sex positivity was being defined as an attitude towards human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable and encourages sexual pleasure and experimentation. One friend took the stance that you cannot always call BDSM healthy when framing it in a sex positive context because people play with unskilled players, which puts them at risk of injury. The other felt that the key to being sex positive was having adequate consent and open communication with your partner and that if these requirements were being met in a BDSM relationship, then, while an activity may not be able to be classified as "safe," it could certainly be posited as "healthy" when spoken about in the context of sex positivity. As a professional dominatrix of over 6 years, these two views intrigued me.

Let’s face it: some of the things we do in the course of scenes are decidedly unsafe. Does this, though, mean they are unhealthy? It depends on how you want to define “unhealthy." If we are going by purely biological terms, then a lot of BDSM could be coded unhealthy. Pain is, after all, a sign that your body is being pushed to do something that is not within its normal course of biological function.

The key, as the one friend pointed out, is consent and communication. Part of consent is not just “it is okay to do these things to me," but also “I trust you to do these things to me in the safest, least damaging way." Consent goes both ways. Let’s use the example of being caned. Caning, purely by its definition, is not a safe activity. You are inflicting blunt-force trauma onto the body of another person. However, there are steps you can take to minimize the risk - never cane over major organs, stick to nice, fatty, padded places, etc. But really, these are just steps taken to minimize - not completely get rid of - the risk of permanent, life-threatening damage. Just as when I have a client, I trust that they are aware of the risks they are taking when they consent to being caned. A condition of them giving their consent to me is that on my end, I have not lied about my abilities and can inflict on them both their pleasure and their pain in a way that minimizes risk of long-term, permanent, or fatal damage. After all, if they didn’t care about doing it in as least-damaging a way as possible, they could walk into a McDonald’s and ask the cashier to give them a few wallops.

So, yes, in this way, I would feel pretty comfortable coding BDSM that falls within the boundaries of RACK “healthy” (even if it is not necessarily “safe”) when discussing it in a sex positive context. Saying that not everything can be posited as “healthy” in terms of sex positivity because people play with unskilled players is ignoring that this is a violation of a very basic tenet of BDSM - that players on both the giving and receiving end are aware of the risks of the activity in which they are engaging and that you can administer and/or receive said activity in a way that will not cause long-term, permanent or fatal damage. If this is not the case, then you are violating some pretty serious consent boundaries and that is decidedly not sex-positive.