strings of blood and pearls

It's "Boys will be boys" taken to the extreme.

It's the attitude that leads to bullshit like blaming rape victims for the way they were dressed.

I was reading the reviews of a movie I watched (which I won't name because it was boring LOL) and a lot of them were outraged by a scene where, during a BDSM scene, one of the characters began complaining that she didn't want to do it, that she hated it, that it was terrible. To anyone who's an avid consumer of kink-based media, it was clear that this was bratting. The other character even called it out as such and told her she didn't hate it, she loved that activity.

But viewers in the reviews were still upset by it, and refused to take her agreement later in the scene that she did actually like it as anything but coerced, or a lie to appease the other person.

I see this happening with books lately, and with fic too.

In BDSM focused fiction words like 'terrible' and 'horrible' and 'hate'- those aren't negatives.

They're the equivalent of describing a deep tissue massage you paid for, one that gave you a great deal of pain relief but was extremely painful in the process as 'horrible'. You might say that you 'hated' the massage when you tell your friends about it even though in reality you felt much better at the end and are planning to go back for a second massage with that person.

In kink media, suffering is very often part and parcel with the pleasure. To do something you hate is also to do something you love. To say 'this is terrible' is also to say 'this is amazing'. The horrible aspect is also the pleasurable aspect, and hating the person doing the 'horrible' thing is also loving them.

The use of typically negative words does not make it abuse.

But everything right now is so damn black and white. Unless the character says 'I hated what they were doing to me, which really means I deeply enjoyed it and consented to it and even though I said out loud to them I hated it I actually did not want them to stop', some readers assume that this a traumatic experience and vilify it. They feel deeply upset and outraged by the scene, despite it being marketed by the creator as a piece of BDSM media. And please, don't come to me saying anything about 'well the author needs to have them negotiate and make it clear-' No. The author does not need to do anything because their target audience understands the consent aspect, and in my experience kink content creators actually do make it very explicitly clear when it's the opposite and the character is suffering in a negative way.

And yes, while there is poorly crafted kink media out there, every single creator does not need to shoe horn in a red-light-green-light discussion just so that the reader does not have to engage their critical thinking skills. I could get into a whole essay about how for some pieces of media a negotiation scene is actually unrealistic, and the truth is not everyone follows modern kink etiquette rules perfectly behind closed doors (either because it's not a modern piece and those did not exist at the time or because they are imperfect people or because one of them is a monster who has mind reading powers, etc etc-) but for the purposes of this post I won't.

Because my point is, if someone is reading a book that the author very clearly stated was centered around BDSM or watching a film that centers a kink based relationship, and they feel outraged whenever something is described as horrible, or when a character complains about the acts that they're doing, or they refuse to accept it when the character says they loved the period of their life where they experienced a BDSM relationship even when they describe that period with 'negative' adjectives- they need to evaluate whether or not they actually like kink-focused media.