The Fact I’ve Never Safeworded
It’s become something close to a dirty secret, but it didn’t start that way.
I used to feel proud of the fact I’ve never safeworded.
It feels complicated to explain, but I associated safewording with failing. I think many submissives make this link when they first freefall into kink land. With some combination of stubbornness and pride, I told myself it was a mark of success if I could take what a Dom gave me. I think it became a way of proving I could be strong and submissive at a time when it felt like a contradiction.
Now, I know it’s no contradiction. I also know that refusing to safeword doesn’t prove my strength.
I know it’s my responsibility to safeword, just as it’s my Dom’s responsibility to play within my limits. I know refusing to safeword makes play unsafe, by my doing. I know that if I were a Dom, I would question a potential (play) partner if they admitted to never safewording. I know it’s my right to safeword and I should.
Safewording has now become a mark of strength in my mind. How incredibly strong to be able to say: “No. I’ve reached my limit and I feel safe enough to tell you”.
Now, ironically, it feels like a personal failure of mine not to safeword when needed.
It doesn’t matter how many tumblr posts I read saying I should safeword if I need to, that I have the right to, that it’s my responsibility.
BDSM may create its own freeing power exchange, but it’s embedded within global power structures. I’m tired of reading about safewording as if it were separate from the real world we live in: a world that positions men over women, white over colour, straight and binary over bent and fluid. I’m tired of reading straight, white male Doms on their (mostly wonderful) blogs say that it’s simple: you have a safeword, use your safeword.
It’s a huge privilege to genuinely believe it’s that simple, and I envy it.
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t irresponsible: years of playing and I’ve been unable to safeword.
I wasn’t even aware of it, at first. I was semi-aware that I struggled to say an outright ‘no’ to sex. But that’s the case for most people living within this Western society, where we’re encouraged not to reject people so directly. The unwritten social code teaches us to make excuses, rather than say that ugly two letter word.
“I’m sorry but I have a family thing that weekend, otherwise I’d love to…”
“Oh no, I can’t make that night, such a shame, another time…”
“Ah I don’t think I can, work/the kids/friends/family/the car/the dentist/the goldfish…”
It always baffled me that we were told (and expected) to simply say ‘no’ to sex, yet not in any other situation. Especially when ‘no’ in a sexual setting is a far deeper level of personal and intimate rejection.
‘No Means No’ screamed the consent campaign a few years back. In actual fact, ‘no’ sparks anger. I wrote a post about it a while back. No is not my safe word, I typed out, along with some of the poignant moments where I had been forced to acknowledge that fact. And I, very naively, believed that if I replaced ‘no’ with my own chosen word, I would feel empowered to say it. It was ridiculous and simplistic and I wanted to believe it so badly that I fooled myself. I’d found a world that allowed and encouraged me to mark out my own boundaries, communicate my own limits, put my needs first, and I was sky high drunk on the existence of such a community. So high that I ‘forgot’ that this community, for all its wonders, cannot ever be truly separate from the rest of the world. Finding BDSM was still healing in many ways, but a lack of self-awareness can only let the healing go so far.
Until I was forced to acknowledge something different.
I don’t think the details are so important. There was a panic attack during (vanilla) sex because I didn’t want to continue and I froze. I couldn’t voice it. I trusted her, yet I couldn’t say it. There were (and still are) the over-due counselling sessions. There was the colossal realisation that my first relationship was abusive, nearly a decade after I had escaped it. I was only a teen and, just like most forms of abuse, it had me believing it was my own weakness, my own failure, my own responsibility.
But this post isn’t about my abusive ex-partner. Yes, that relationship has certainly had an impact on my ability to say ‘no’ and, thus, safeword. But, sadly, he wasn’t an anomaly in an otherwise golden world. There were all the others I listed in my previous post. There’s the culture that bred my ex-partner. He was an extreme product of it, but we don’t need to have experienced such explicitly abusive partners to feel unable to say ‘no’ or to safeword. We are saturated in norms that punish women for saying ‘no’.
This is a gendered lesson internalised from a very young age. And it’s everywhere.
All those ‘romantic’ films that present girls and women saying ‘no’ as a challenge: just try harder, chase her, she’ll change her mind eventually.
The media that embodies victim blaming culture, framing girls and women as ‘asking for it’. She was wearing that skirt? She was walking alone at night? She was drunk? Well, what did she expect.
Shh, take the compliment… shh, it’s just a bit of banter… shh, give us a smile… shh, we’re just having fun… shh, you were asking for it: wearing that, doing that, drinking that… you just want the attention… shh, of course we don’t believe you. Shh.
‘No’ earnt me name-calling, demeaning and degrading language, physical violence and, most of all, sexual violence. So I stopped saying it. Especially in a sexual setting. That’s fairly easy to understand, I think.
I learnt to contain it, as many women do. That two letter word could be howling a hurricane through my mind, but you’d never know it. I learnt to seal it inside with a smile. I learnt that it’s much safer to laugh it off, to back away slowly and carefully whilst keeping the other person at ease. Always keep them feeling comfortable, I learnt, even if you yearn to scream in their face. It’s not worth it, I was told. I learnt that it was much safer to stay silent. I learnt that ‘no’ gets us nowhere.
BDSM can sometimes feel like a glorious, isolated island with its open communication, personal setting of boundaries and fluid power play. But it is an island surrounded by the oceans of ‘the real world’. And those reality-oceans are certainly powerful enough to tsunami across this island with all those norms, born out of misogyny and racism and homo/trans-phobia. BDSM does not exist separately from the rest of the world.
And stepping onto that island does not immediately free us from our lived experiences. Our experiences form brain patterns that are deep and difficult to unravel.
People internalise and soak up their surroundings in different ways, to varying degrees. Women aren’t a collective, living and breathing as one, and I certainly don’t want to project my experiences onto women “as a unit” (which does not exist). But gender is a powerful structure, by humans’ doing.
I’ve mostly scribbled this about being born a daughter. But that’s only one layer. Racialise these experiences, take away the cis element, the layers get more complicated, the oppression gets deeper.
And then throw typical submissive qualities into the minefield. We can be people-pleasers and sensitive to the lessons that our surroundings preach.
Surroundings that tell you to shhh.
Like I said, safewording is not that simple.
I do believe that it is possible to unravel those entrenched brain patterns. Through practise, with a lot of trust, open communication and patience, I think we can override brain signals that have become automatic over the years. It may seem odd to practise saying ‘no’ or safewording. But, by normalising it and relearning that it won’t spark anger, violence or dismissal with trusted people, we can free our voice. Having a trusted partner instruct you to say it, within very comfortable limits, could break that brain wiring. Not instantaneously, but with lots of patience and time.
I haven’t tried it yet, and I don’t imagine it will be simple.
But I’m tired of reading that safewording is simple.
The fact I’ve never safeworded is not simple.
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