Maybe Mental
Random quote snatched from Fet:
Loving this “No dealbreakers, no limits, it’s His perogative” stuff. Not to pass judgements, but if I’m on his jury when he cuts your throat, hey….
A lack of self-preservation and survival instinct indicates mental illness. And frankly, I don’t see why a Master would want a slave with that kind of low self-esteem.
Thoughts? Agree? Disagree? Why?
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Uncategorized | kaya | 
Tuesday August 3rd, 2010 1:11pm
now here’s a familiar topic. :)
if you have a Master where lengthy and in-depth communications have taken place then yes, i do believe you can state “no deal-breakers, no limits etc”
making these statements would have to be based on the knowledge that your Master would know and honor your now unspoken limits etc.
however, the trust you place in your Master should never exceed your own sense of self preservation. after-all, one of the things most Masters task to their slave is preserving the property. you are the property.
i have said that i trust my Master with my life, and i do. this is said knowing full well he would never betray that trust.
i look forward to the comments of others.
storm
FEH.
Frankly, I think all the “NO limits!” and “NO deal breakers!” and “HIS prerogative no matter what” is… Well, it’s a bit hyperbolic. Sue me for my disbelief in a “true” slave.
It’s easy as hell to talk about that stuff, especially on the interwebz… But as the great internet meme tells us, “PICS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.”
Obviously, I don’t mean photographic evidence proves this kinda thing… Just that saying something exists (like “no limits”) does not make it so.
I’ve never met anyone who truly has NO limits and NO dealbreakers. Fewer limits? Sure. No limits within the scope of your partner’s limits as a normal person? Sure.
But until I see a slave lie down and ACTUALLY have her head cut off and DIE, I’m not going to buy the idea that there are all these slaves out there with TRULY no limits.
ANYWAY…
Secondly, having a lack of survival instinct is one, debatable, and two, DIFFERENT from having low self-esteem. Period. People do insane shit that might SEEM to say “I don’t give a crap if I live or diiiiie!” every goddamn day, WITHOUT the label of “slave” or “Master” tacked on. They jump from airplanes, get swung round on hooks inserted under their skin, swallow swords, and swim with sharks. SHARKS, man. Are we saying all these people have low self esteem too? Nah. Could we argue they have less of a survival instinct as other people? Maybe. But I’ve seen them in action, and they seem pretty damn happy to me. And, for the most part, mental-illness free.
Because, in case anyone has forgotten their Psych 101 lectures… One of the unifying features when it comes to getting a diagnosis of almost ANY mental illness is that it has to “cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”
Basically, it has to lower your quality of life. So even if you meet a list of symptoms for any illness, or if someone else thinks, “I’d be miserable like that!”… If it doesn’t negatively affect YOUR quality of life? Rock on, you’re disease-free, baby!
So I repeat. Feh.
(Not my most well-thought out comment. But hey, I’m brain dead right now. Forgive typos and idiotic rambling.)
~Chloe
[rq=682648,0,blog][/rq]The Era of the Firstborn Son Is Over
Kaya,
I’ll leave the first quote alone; it’s been done to death. The second, however, simply shows someone who doesn’t understand what mental illness really is (which describes 90% of the general population).
Chloe made a couple of good points on this, but I can add a couple more. A strong survival instict, or a high level of self esteem can be a bad thing. It’s been my experience that most bully’s and abusers think quite highly of themselves (applying the common, and incorrect, definition of self esteem). A high survival instict can paralyse one into inaction, rendering one’s life, essentially, a fail.
My second point concerns this need, we seem to have, to label things as mental illness. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard someone comment on a particularly hienous crime with, “Oh my God, he must have been crazy.” No, No, a thousand times No! It doesn’t take being crazy to do evil. Sure, there are some insane people who do horrendous things; but most horror is perpetrated by perfectly sane people who know what they’re doing and just don’t give a fuck. We shouldn’t be letting them off the hook by labeling them insane.
Dave
Well… We already know I’m nuts. So…
[rq=684270,0,blog][/rq]SJP540 – Down Time
“Not to pass judgements, but” And suddenly, you’re being judgey. Even if you claim you’re not.
Everything else, well, other people can debate that better than I can.
Firstly why is it assumed that “No Limits” for the slave means there are suddenly no limits on the Dom? His personal values, society’s hard limits and many other variables will play a part in defining his actions even if the slave puts no limits on him. Why would this make the Dom any more likely to commit murder?
Then there is the dumb-ass equating mental illness with low self esteem, plus a very shaky definition of mental illness vs self-preservation and survival instinct..
Frankly, based on these samples, I would attempt to skip any of this nick’s previous or future comments in a thread I was reading.
I just beginning to totally hate this stuff anymore.
Sure, I have limits, tons and tons of limits… limits I sometimes get totally fucking sick of. HIS LIMITS. He has a butt ton more limits than me… I would be doing all kinds of “non self preservation” type shit. But HE SAYS NO. (sucks monkey balls, it does).
So even if I wanted him to cut my head off… the party pooper would say NO. Arghhh… such a stick in the mud.
Rant over. (Pant… Pant…)
Now regarding his limits… I know the dude, really, really know the dude. I have been with him for 20 plus years. I completely trust him. Get that? COMPLETELY. He is not ever going to put me at risk. He may bore me to death some day, but he is never going to harm me.
And to infer that somehow I am crazy for trusting another human being? That he somehow suffers from low self esteem because he expects me to trust him, believes I trust him, deserves my trust? Come on Ladies… why is it so hard to believe such a thing can exist and that it can make me and my Master happy, happier than 18 years of distrust, argument and struggle ever did?
[rq=671742,0,blog][/rq]Trust
Everyone has limits. You can say a million times over you (general you) don’t but in the end everyone has the capacity to leave.
Well, the counter argument from the no-limits crowd is that they maintain they really are incapable of leaving. Even if, hypothetically speaking, the dom/top/domme starts to cut their head off or some other over-the-top act.
And to support that position, there are tons of cases where a person has refused to leave a relationship even if they were being abused, even though they died because they stayed and they knew they were in danger.
So why would it not be true in a consenting relationship? I suppose you could counter-counter that argument and state that, if you consent, you automatically have a different mindset from someone who lives in ignorance or is being forced against their will. And this knowledge changes it so that you WILL always have the ability to leave if you really wanted to.
But I have no idea if that’s true or not, that’s just conjecture.
So does that mean it’s nuts or wrong or abusive for someone to allow themselves to be completely dominated? To the point where they truly have no more will of their own and this of their own choice?
I don’t know. I know that to me personally it sounds utterly hot. I also know that for me personally it’s 100 percent impossible. My personality wouldn’t allow it, even though my sexual self thinks it’s a huge turn on.
But can others do it? I don’t know. I guess if they say they do, then they do.
I’m nowhere near anyone here in terms of kink, but I told my Daddy the other night, “I’m as dirty as you want me to be” knowing full well he’d never be so dirty as to HARM me, within the bounds of my own physical, psychological limits. :)
We have no safeword but we both have limits. I trust him to know how far to push, when to step back, when to step up and he has not failed me – ever. He knows exactly what he is doing and when I present myself to him I know that he can see in me the difference between a no being a solid no and a no being not really – why? Because that is exactly what occurs.
I have toyed with the idea of a safeword and I don’t feel in the situation I could make the right call. I feel like I would back out where I don’t really want to and also where I would want to back out and don’t. With a safeword I don’t think I could get where I want to go.
Of course there are limits and boundaries but they are fluid – a constant conversation that shifts with each scene, each day because every day we are both someone new, dealing with a situation we have never been in before.
I don’t mean neither of us know what we are doing, rather I think it is because when he looks into me I see he knows me. He knows that today I need to cry because my dog died or I want to try something new because I feel playful and need to be pushed – because it is not just about what happens in the room – it is about interweaving our lives to an extent so that we can cope, recover, unwind and for me it is very much about trusting that process.
[rq=686834,0,blog][/rq]Some Sub Text
In any given situation, there will always be at least one person who takes a hypothetical situation to it’s absolute limit of credulity, then procedes to generalize as though his position were perfectly reasonable and middle-of-the-road.
My personal opinion is that this man is a complete jackass to even assume that people are going, as a matter of normal response, to lie down and willingly die.
That’s not even within sight of the realm of Safe, Sane and Consensual. Nor, for that matter, is it within the scope of rational human behavior. The Prime Directive hardwired into the most primitive part of the human brain is: Survival.
Rule number two, so long as it does not conflict with rule number one, is Reproduce. Pass your genes into the next generation. there are time, as when a parent protects their offspring with their life, that rule two Superceeds Rule one. but, bottom line, every kind of life on this planet lives (and dies) by those two rules. Almost everything humans do flows from one or both of those simple, primal rules.
Trying to construct a reasoned argument from a position that is unreasonable to begin with is a mental oxymoron. You may make it pretty but it will never be true.
My definition for this kind of person is -Flaming Asshole. HE a Troll looking for someone to try and reason with his ‘unreasonableness’.
GreyMac
Ok,how hard is it for most of us to NOT say no? I know I want to be a slave, but it’s freaking hard to actually live that way. I don’t think I’m the only one to have bitchfest days where I don’t want to do it, nope, not me.
It’s the human in me…and somehow I haven’t managed to rid myself of that…lol.
I think people who exhault themselves to such a height of perfection are in a way mentally ill…they don’t see reality. Not really a lack of self preservation, but a removal from what is realistic and what should be saved for fantasy time. Plus it’s a manipulation in a way. They have to make others feel bad to make themselves feel good. It’s like a S&M version of a playground bully.
Do I think it’s possible to get so “deep” into the lifestyle that saying no is impossible? Maybe. Of a surety, it’s so rare that I probably won’t ever see an example. It’s something fun to think about, something to strive for, but like I said, not realistic.
[rq=713673,0,blog][/rq]Some bad- followed by some good
Saying “I have no limits” is a lot like saying “I will love you forever” It’s far more the spirit of the idea that matters than the actuality, limits we never even knew we had will probably appear at some point. The Master/Dom’s own limits also are VERY relevant. Is it low self esteem to say “I will love you forever”? Hardly !
Too often the negativity aimed at anyone expressing such sentiment is rooted not n the sentiment it’s self but in the negative persons inability to resist picking the nit. Its smart arsed to poo poo anyone who genuinely feels they dont have limits where their own particular (and often intimately known psychologically) Master/dom is concerned. Just because “You” dont feel you will love (have no limits with) dom big boots for ever doesn’t mean you get to sneer when sub little boots says she does.
bleh rant over
This sounds to me like someone who thought they had “no limits” until one day her dom pushed her beyond where she was capable of going. Wah wah.
I’d guess that it’s usually not a LACK of self-preservation instinct, but the capacity to ignore it (especially when we know our “instincts” are being silly, and there isn’t any real danger).