Capitalism manufactures your consent
Capitalism LOVES that people love domination.
The BDSM practice of eroticizing loss of agency trains us to look outside ourselves for control, validation, security, moral guidance, satisfaction. Trains us to measure ourselves by the feelings we can extract from other people.
Humans are kept hungry this way. Restless and craving.
When we can’t be sustained with what’s within, and we are denied community support, we are loyal consumers.
And when raised and nurtured within the structure of capitalist society, why would we question domination?
The human mind loves the familiar, even if that familiarity is hurtful. We learn to survive believing someone else has the cure for our discomfort, and someone else can take responsibility for the problems we see.
Practicing domination/submission through BDSM is a natural outcome of the oppression we face in this kind of system.
The cult of kink and BDSM offers a childlike sense of make-believe; a container to pretend the abuse inherent to our larger culture of domination can be consented to, tamed into a fantasy.
Dominance functions by being unexamined.
And most kink resources teach an “anything goes” consent mentality.
Alienated from our bodies and desires, we end up conditioned to accept the inferior, the harmful, the numbing.
When pleasure is a danger to the system, your complacency will be fetishized.
From toxic jobs, relationships, and habits, humans are so often pulled to say yes when we know deep down we are feeling our no.
We may not be forced or coerced– we just don’t feel or know any other options yet.
Challenging dominator culture begins by affirming a reality of shared and mutual power.
It comes through rejecting in all forms the mainstream call to eroticize and normalize hierarchy.
Revolution and liberation lies in our mutual wellbeing, in refusing to repress (dominate) parts of ourself or other people. In refusing to submit and accept the unacceptable.
The shadow forms of power in domination and submission– controlling or pleasing outside of ourselves– are both forms of powerlessness.
And each have been cleverly manufactured into an "empowered choice" divorced from any real world implications or pressures.
Who benefits from a system where the status quo has been branded as personal choice?
Rejecting this dynamic opens us to the possibility of knowing and playing with real power: The thrilling and decadent, mind-opening, life-changing stuff of revolution...
Imagine the world we’d have if that’s what we got off on.
