It isn’t really a judgement call whether its “real” or just a “game”. It’s something that you need, want, makes you happy. Even if it is just a game – what would that change?

All those people who obsess over the One True Slavery – they need to take themselves a lot less seriously and get over themselves.

I looked all over for this thread on fetlife, btw and couldn’t find it. Can you link?

Think, Think, Think.

Everyone is right, or, at least I find myself nodding like a window bobblehead as I read each comment.

It must be my nature to “borrow trouble” (as Magdala used to say).

These statements, you define as reality, and no one so far has questioned them or challenged them…but I wonder:

Human is simply the word we have chosen to describe ourselves. WE get to do that because we use the language in the way we do, and the other critters don’t. But, the notion of “human” is a construct that we humans made up to describe ourselves. I doubt very much that it is at all “real” within the perception of a blue whale for example…

Female is another “reality” that is real in your experience. The definition is based on your chromosomal inheritance, and thence the genitalia that you came equipped with, but there are surely those with “female” genitalia that don’t see themselves fitting into that supposed reality, so who’s got it right?

Motherhood, is another one of those things we just assume is true and real because we can define it by an event — the birth of a child. But is that all that is really required? I know plenty of women who mother children they never bore. Likewise, there are a whole host of people who give birth and never ever come anywhere close to being “mothers.”

I understand that the world which I experience as solid is, in fact, made up of atomic particles too small for me to see and composed mostly of empty space. So there is no “real” solidity to the world, although I experience it as very solid. What I know does not match my reality, but I live in that reality in spite of the scientific truth of it all.

So, once again, I am left with places where I can quibble philosophically, linguistically, scientifically, legally, and just about any other way you can imagine with the reality of whatever condition one would choose to call “real.” It is just that it isn’t that important to me. My life is my real life, done the way I do it. Whether it qualifies as real in any other context doesn’t change my understanding, experience, or perception of it. I understand the intellectual and factual argument that I am not legally a slave, and it is a simply fact that my life is not lived under the hideously oppressive dictates of someone who cares not a whit for my well-being. I chose. I chose, well and wisely, and so my “reality” is pretty benign though I label it as slavery. That is the fact from where I stand. Others may see it differently and their opinions do not have to agree with mine for my reality to still seem just as real to me.