The Kink Universe Isn't Divided into Dangerous Assholes and Safe Prince Charmings

E saw himself as a Kink Lite Player. He was into breath play, impact play, and deepthroating. He thought these were “vanilla” kinks, so he didn’t need to exercise restraint. E wasn’t RACK. He wasn’t even PRICK. He didn’t know he was into some of the deadliest kinks in the BDSM biome. He wasn’t like Those Other Guys™. His scenes weren’t bloody, so he wasn’t a real sadist. RACK was for The Real Deal, not moderate players like him.

I knew he was a wonderful man, so I didn’t have to worry about my safety. He was mindful of my boundaries and lovely to know. He always played with safe words, and he checked in with me often. E wasn’t one of those Problem People. He truly cared about his partners. He was careful about consent, and wasn’t that what mattered?

It was only in retrospect that I realised my impressions of E were a false equivalency. I assumed the kink universe was divided into two kinds of players:

• Dangerous assholes
• Safe Prince Charmings.

Now I know there’s a third type: Compassionate tops who are as clueless as they are caring.

You don’t need to be an evil pick-up artist to do stupid things. Even the most compassionate of people can take absurd risks. Sometimes they do it because they’ve never tested their own assumptions. Sometimes they do it because they have a virulent strain of Dunning-Kruger Effect. Just because they aren’t evil, doesn’t mean they’re right.

E was a wonderful, thoughtful man. He still took absurd risks in our scenes.

At the time, though, I trusted his conscientiousness. We both assumed that he’d notice if I was in distress.

We never thought far enough to realise our play was intended to cause distress and it was well-nigh impossible for a top to tell the difference between safe distress and I’m-freaking-out-right-now distress. We were drowning in assumptions that could have caused serious damage.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it was that huge swathes of the human population are terrible at critical thinking. Vaccines cause autism, COVID isn’t real, and breath play never, ever kills. If there’s no blood in a scene, there’s no risk, and if he’s a wonderful guy, he can’t do dangerous things.

I knew something was amiss with our play. You’d think I would have discussed it the first time he did something we hadn’t negotiated, but I didn’t. I felt puzzled by the fact that he’d pushed into breath play without a safe signal, but he was a good guy. I fixed my cognitive dissonance by convincing myself that I was too cautious, so I never said a thing. Am I alone in that tendency? <shrug> I don’t know. You tell me.

Stupidity, ignorance, and recklessness are not traits that are isolated to evil people. We cause unintentional harm all the time, and ignorance can kill just as well as psychopathy can.

E was a good guy.

I’d never doubted that. It was perfectly clear he was one of the good ones.

It didn’t mean he was one of the safe ones.