Clearing my throat in front of a microphone

So,

I usually go by Sam when I can manage it (and thankfully, I can usually manage it). I’m an ex-Muslim immigrant femme in Psychology and really good at punctuation-less internet jokes (although you don’t know this yet). I’ll be posting about a ton of different topics. One of my favorites is social justice, whether in theory or practice. Another topic that’ll likely be a bigger project than a single article is moral capital; its prevalence and usage; certain features of it that we, as a society, seem to increasingly have trouble with (for example, the use of -isms as pejoratives); and how it interacts with social justice. Some other topics I’d like to discuss are abuse in social justice communities, labels and identity politics, and cultures of effective compulsory forgiveness. These topics are often going to intersect on both superficial and deeper levels. I’ll also periodically analyze different media, mostly tv shows.

More about me though:
– I’m just coming out of a years-long depressive thing and trying out “better”.
– I’m learning to be okay with tomatoes.
– I really like lists and semi-colons – a proclivity for using the full range of punctuation available is oddly attractive to me (although strategic use of the absence of punctuation is also attractive, but in a different kind of way, and only as long as it’s strategic).
– I’m actually a social justice walrus.

(that’s me winking at you)

And finally, because someone might need this reminder (that I am also learning to tell myself when it applies): Today is an okay day. It doesn’t need to be amazing to not be terrible. Today, I have everything I need and it is easy to live.

BDSM 101: What & Why?

=AtG=

Hello lovelies, Shiv here again. I hope you all had a lovely week, what with April Fool’s and something about… Trans Visibility? I’ll write on that later. Ideally you all had a tolerable Easter, too. One can dream. My breakup went from “bad” to “I can’t even,” so I apologize if I’m already slipping on my publication schedule!

Today’s topic is an introduction to BDSM, and what I think needs to be in place for the practice to be considered ethical.

 

What is BDSM?

 

BDSM is an initialism that combines Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, and Sadomasochism (or Sadism & Masochism) into an umbrella, catch-all term for “what kinksters do.”

I start this way only so that you know what the initialism literally means, but my actual definition is as follows:

“A series of practices which involve expressing and exploring interests that may be seen as unconventional through a system of rigorous ethics which conscientiously acknowledges and mitigates physical and emotional risks.”

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