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Aswad -> RE: How do YOU explain bdsm to vanillas around you? (4/21/2007 3:58:46 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: softness
she found the explanation of my kinks very easy to accept but had real problems understanding submission - and slavery just freaked her right out. [...] i am still helping her to learn about BDSM .. but she is vanilla, to her soul,,, she cannot get herself to the headspace to empathise, she has knowledge and comprehension, but not understanding of what i am.
At least she's trying to wrap her head around it. I certainly get the distinction between knowing it and understanding it, though. We have a friend that would certainly have no problem knowing and accepting it, for instance, but we don't tell him, because we know he wouldn't understand the dynamic, and the misunderstandings would just end up giving rise to wierd situations and unexpected quirks in our friendship.
In some cases, though, I think it's mostly because, starting as little girls, women are now being indoctrinated with the duty to be "strong" (vanilla use of word, hence quotation marks), independant and feminist (not used in the "equal rights" sense). When they get a bit older, mass media starts hammering them with the impression that male aggression is something they need to emulate in order to fulfill this "ideal", which some also end up internalizing.
I'm convinced that the biological alpha female exists. But I'm also fairly convinced that the image being pushed now isn't her, and that it's being pushed to many who aren't inclined in that direction.
This was a problem for nephandi. She's been dreaming of slavery as long as she can remember, yet, in part due to her submissive nature, she has deeply internalized this conditioning, causing lots of internal conflict. We can honestly say she doesn't have a dominant fibre in her being, and that she is a lot happier submitting, but stripping years of conditioning to allow her to accept it without feeling guilty is a long, hard road.
I'd say your friend might very well be fully capable of understanding, and may even be submissive in some contexts, but her upbringing/conditioning does not allow her mind to take in what you're saying. Essentially, you say something that she's been taught is "wrong", yet she likes and respects you, so the dissonance between those two cognitions causes her mind to shut down any further processing of what you are describing.
A good indicator of this, from my experience, is that men seem to have no problem grasping the D/s dynamic (absence of conditioning against the dynamic), but have a lot of problems accepting S&M beyond what they consider "kinky sex" (conditioning against hurting the "weaker" sex; popular term, not mine), while lots of women can accept S&M (absence of, or weaker, conditioning against violence), but cannot grasp the D/s dynamic (conditioning against women submitting to men).
You could try explaining it in a femdom/malesub frame of reference, from the POV of the femdom. This might "outflank" her social mores, depending on how they have been internalized.
I think helping her understand you better seems like a worthwhile thing to do.
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