On her charming blog, A Farmwife With a Twist, Amber wrote a bit about her views of right and wrong specific to the BDSM scene in this entry. It's interesting to read her points of view -- sometimes it's easy to forget in a scene world of tolerance, of "your kink is not my kink but your kink is okay" that there are those that find our life not okay. I've got a few acts of my own I feel that way about --for instance, I won't play with people whose partners don't know that they're playing with someone else --but that's as much an unwillingness to risk being dragged into their relationship drama. Also, I've been cheated on and it sucks.
Anyway, as I said, Amber spells out clearly some things that bother her, writing:
I find that there's a lot room for utterly appalling moral behavior in BDSM realm, or at least from what I've learned from kinky blogs [...]
Those things that steadily continue to appall me are:
-adultery
-unwillingness to have children and selfish hedonism
-polygamy/swapping partners/offering your partner to others "to use"
All of the above to me are a fundamental assault on basic human dignity and are certainly not pleasing to God [...]And there is one more thing I literally have 0 tolerance for - a weekness of character as expressed in fear of commitment to one partner for life with the purpose of starting a family.
[The dots in brackets mark places where I snipped information out just for focus (hopefully without changing the meaning. You can go check her blog and read the whole article if you like.)]
From what I wrote above, you can probably guess I kind of agree with her about adultery. But to me, it isn't "adultery*" when both people are honest and agree -- that is, there's nothing wrong with me playing with whomever so long as P doesn't have any problem with it and vice versa. What would be wrong (imo) would be if I did this either without regard for objections he had or somehow sneaking behind his back.
As to the rest...
... I don't even know what would actually be an example of "selfish hedonism" in my marriage. Staying in bed with P on a Saturday morning rather than getting up and helping my friends move? Using all the hot water for an extra long bubble bath? Taking all the whipped cream for my strawberries and leaving none for his? I'm not quite sure.
Polygamy / polyamory? I don't have a problem with that at all. It's not my thing --I'm introverted enough that maintaining a relationship with P is about all the "primary" I can handle. While we play with other people, they're friends (beloved friends in many cases). But while I think poly relationships can be complicated, I don't think the idea that one can love and be committed to multiple people or that three or more adults can be a family is anything but beautiful. From what I've seen, poly relationships can be remarkably unselfish and passionate. In my opinion, any relationship that's honest and helps each person involved in it to be happy and grow is an honorable and a blessed one.
What I found oddest, however, on Amber's list were her statements about being appalled by people who are "unwilling" (she does make exceptions for those who are "unable") to have children and the notion that a lacking a desire to "start a family" somehow reflects an "assault on human dignity."
My first answer to that would be that P and I committed to each other and became a family years before we were married. By then we had re-arranged our lives to be together, changed countries (in his case), lived together as much as the law allowed for several years and shared as much about ourselves as we could find to share. In fact, I know I found things I didn't know about myself in the course of getting to know him. While I think our relationship has deepened in the two and a bit years since we married, I think that probably would have happen anyway. When do I think P and I started to become a family? The first time he wrote in a whisper that he loved me. And then 9 years ago when he came to see me for the first time.
There's nothing incomplete about our relationship now -- nothing waiting for a child to somehow make it more real.
Why don't we have children? There are a lot of reasons, but they boil down to the fact that neither of us want them. Speaking for myself, I've never wanted to have any children-- something I started telling my mom back when I was 3. I like other people's babies and young children fine for a little while, but not enough to live with them. I do like teens, but the odds of giving birth to a 13 year old are pretty low. To me, what would be an "abomination" would be someone who is pretty sure he or she (or he and she in our case) doesn't like or want children having one on the off chance that she would 1) feel differently about one of her own and 2)hoping it would somehow deepen their marriage and somehow make them a family.
Anyway, I had some more thoughts, but they've drifted away and it's time for bed. I've probably written enough anyway.
The title of this entry is adapted from Sanda Cisneros's author description in her first book, The House On Mango Street. In it she writes she is "nobody's mother and nobody's wife."
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I'm not talking about strict Biblical law here, but rather about when the act (whether sexual or spanking) becomes immoral / unethical.
