Linguistics and Fetishes.

Yep. A thread on both. IJBM: BDSM community's linguistics make no sense.

1. Why does one "sub for" someone, but "submit to" them? Pick a preposition and stick with it. Using "sub to" instead of "sub for" also has the added advantage of letting us know from which preposition you use, whether you mean "submit" or "substitute" by "sub."
2. For that matter, why do we need to shorten "submit" to sub anyway? Do vanilla people say "stamp your forms and sub them here?" You're a pretty crappy slave if you're lazier than a vanilla person.
3. Humiliate and degrade, I do not think they mean what you think they mean. People in BDSM insist that they aren't "degrading" their partners, they're "humiliating" them. To humiliate someone is "to lower or hurt the dignity or pride of." To degrade someone is to "reduce in grade rank or status; demote." Humiliation harms someone's self-esteem, and degradation just takes someone down a peg. So if they're doing it SSC, they are degrading their partner, not humiliating them.

Please, mods, don't lock this. Have mercy.

"Sub" is short for "submissive" in its noun sense — it's not a verb. That ought to go some way towards explaining 1 and 2. I don't have an answer for 3 off the top of my head.

A/abuse of C/capitals annoys M/me more than any of the above, though. Fortunately, that seems to be dying.

edited 26th Oct '10 5:24:28 PM by Nornagest

A/abuse of C/capitals A/annoys M/me too.

Note: I onse used this notation for something having nothing to do with BDSM. It's a long story.

@Norn, re the capitalization thing: it bugs the living crap out of me, too. To a minor degree when it's between two people who have a relationship/arrangement of some kind. To a major, rant-inducing level when it's used outside that context. And even more so when people feel the need to use slashes ("Y/you", etc) when addressing their readership.

Yes, I realize you may be doing the lifestyle thing and your dom may have instructed you to do this. In which case, he or she is a dumbfuck abusing the written word.

(Insert parenthetical rant about the obsessive need to be "lifestylers" and in general make this your complete fucking life in the big game of BDSM scene one-upmanship.)

In general, insistence that others, not part of your relationship, must participate through addressing you or your partner idiosyncratically, or in any way which implies any global hierarchy or rank, is involving me nonconsensually in your scene and meets with my very, very strong disapproval.

Likewise any assumption that a dominant should be acknowledged as that status by anyone other than those they're involved with — or, in fact, a submissive must be treated as such by others they're not involved with.

Even more so, the opinion that those labelled 'sub' should have to defer and show exaggerated respect to those labelled 'dom', absent any kind of relationship or agreement.

And yet more still, the insistence that there is any kind of natural hierarchy in the world; that "men are naturally dominant, women naturally submissive" or suchlike, or any other division of people based on the circumstance of their birth. A slightly milder form is that you are either "born dominant" or "born submissive".

Note that this is not saying what you can do inside the contexts of your relationships and your private scenes. What it's about is confusing your scenes with consensus reality and demanding that your conception has precedence. If it turns you on to roleplay that, in your new reality, men are naturally submissive worms and women are all naturally dominant goddesses, have fun with it.

But your right to overwrite reality stops at the boundaries of your personal relationships and scenes.

Of course, you're quite free to have a private organization or club that accepts those personal roleplay rules collectively, and organizes events where those rules are the ground-rules of the scene. I do have an issue where such things are presented as The Only Way To Do It.

In fact, the BDSM Scene is full of My Way Is The Only Way To Do It people. Pisses me off.

In general, don't treat the BDSM community as one giant consensus LARP with uniform rules.

edited 26th Oct '10 5:57:19 PM by Morven

I'm so confused.

You. Win. The. THREAD!

Everyone in this thread is now Your slave.

edited 26th Oct '10 6:04:07 PM by LeighSabio

Even Kirk and Spock, Leigh?

@Evilneko: very little of my rant will make sense if you haven't been around the wrong bits of the BDSM scene, online or off. But feel free to ask questions!

edited 26th Oct '10 6:07:23 PM by Morven

Can you be an under-sub for a sub...in a submarine? AKA: A sub-sub-sub-sub?

If you're confused, google "Gorean". Or don't; you probably won't enjoy what you find.

@Norn: If you hadn't added that last, that would be sadism; Goreans are brain-breaking.

Yes, well...

edited 26th Oct '10 6:12:19 PM by Nornagest

@Leigh

...Hmm. I'm not sure I have a problem with that.

Um... don't want to be the stop having fun guy, but is there a reason why this couldn't have been discussed in Fetishes?

Because this is about jargon. I think.

And people are afraid of Fetishes sometimes.

Yeah, I don't think this actually qualifies as sex talk.

Fair enough. Carry on then.

I find it amusing that Morven is a mod and has no problem with it.

Also, carry on, nothing else to add.

My reasoning was that it wasn't about sex, it was about a particular "It Just Bugs" to do with the social scene. If it derails to just being a sex or bdsm thread, it gets locked and pointed towards the Fetishes thread.

See, Morven's cool. He knows where the line is, hence why he never gets thumped.

Cunnilinguistics?

Anyway, I think it's because you hear much of e.g. Jews being degraded in the holocaust, less so of them being humiliated. Maybe this is because humiliation is more of an individual experience and due to "degrade"'s association with the holocaust and other genocides, prejudices and slavery, it's considered worse. I'm not using a dictionary.

I never hear of them being "degraded." I hear of them being "dehumanized."

I think the difference between "degrading", "humiliating", and variations ultimately comes down to connotations; don't put too much weight on the dictionary definition here.

My take is that if you humiliate someone who doesn't WANT to be humiliated (ie most people), then you are degrading them. If they expressly WANT to be humiliated, such as a submissive person in the BDSM lifestyle, then it isn't degrading them. Or is this too simple?

Nornagest: No way, Goreans are the practitioners of the one true god I can't even finish this sentence, laughing too hard to type.

They're like, "Hey, here's a series of hack and slash fantasy stories in which females have no rights whatsoever! That would be an awesome way to build a caring relationship!"

AAAAAAARGH!

edited 28th Oct '10 5:26:09 AM by BlackWolfe