Disappointing attitude from a local BDSM/fetish site.

[Gutted Gladiator]

(What Chase wrote)

(EDIT: Originally I quoted Chase's post, but because he's since deleted it, I've done the same.)

I refuse to see this fetish as a moral or ethical issue. The fact is that I (and probably the vast majority of people reading this) don't get off on real people's suffering.

Look, I'm afraid of knives; just the thought of cutting myself in the kitchen makes me feel faint. If I went anywhere near a real gladiator fight—if I so much as knew that it was going on in the building next door, if I could hear the shouting of the crowd—I'd feel afraid. It'd make me sick to my stomach, to know that people were getting hurt in there, maybe even killed. And when I watch the "wrong" kind of violent scene in a movie, if it's filmed "wrong" (even if the literal content of it is identical to something I would write about in one of my erotic stories), I have the same reaction.

But if it's filmed "right," then it gets me off. Well, why is that?

See, it's not the pain and suffering that gets me off, it's the way they're framed dramatically—it's the dramatic struggle with these things that gets me off. Certain exaggerated facial expressions, sounds, or combinations of words on a page. It's the artifice that I'm attracted to; in other words, anything but the real thing.

The times that I've fled in shame from sites like this, or deleted my stories in panic, it's not been because I thought that what I do and feel is evil; instead, it's been a fear of being found out. But at this point in my life, even that is a hill that I'm willing to die on (so to speak). If my worst paranoid nightmare came true, and some government agency put me on trial for obscenity, I'd gladly fight against a charge like that—I believe in embracing the complexity of human nature, specifically human sexuality, as difficult as that can be sometimes. But I doubt it would come to that. Because over the years, I've told probably a dozen people about my fetish—friends, boyfriends—and about the stories that I write. And believe it or not, I've had no bad reactions, ever; if anything, in my experience, people seem to think it's charmingly weird. But mostly, they just get it—they understand that people are complicated, and sexuality especially, even if my thing is not for them. They recognize the fact (which, come on, is pretty obvious) that sex and violence are intimately tied together in the human experience, and that most of the time people are able to deal with this in a healthy (i.e. non-raping, non-murdering, non-abusive) way.

My way of thinking about all this may be peculiar to me: I'm youngish, non-religious, grew up pretty liberal. I've found a way to fit my sexual interests into my hobbies and my relationships. But even if my experience has been different, I hope what I've shared here is helpful to you.