On objective observers and dark dynamics (and bias and abuse)

Who’s biased?

I’ve been thinking about something a friend said in an organising meeting in January. It’s an idea I’ve heard lots of times before: that people who are biased about someone shouldn’t be decision makers regarding their access to a given space. It’s generally considered good practice. The issue related to someone with a history of sexual violence, a serious topic, and it’s obviously important to take that seriously. (Don’t worry; this one isn’t going to be a post on community safeguarding.)

It’s a fairly common saying in kink that we don’t leave the rest of ourselves behind when we come into a dungeon. We bring our marginalisations, histories, experiences and expectations with us. I run trans-inclusive events, which means that occasionally I get an incident report about a trans women. Because I run kink events, the reports I get usually relate to sexual violence specifically, and it’s impossible to entirely dismiss our shared social consciousness when this happens: the spectre of the predatory trans woman is present when the report is written, when we read it, and when we discuss it. She’s there when we add her to the banned list, as well, maybe moreso.

People have feelings about trans women who rape and sexually assault people, and trans people aren’t excluded from that; if anything, the dynamics are a lot more complex. I’ve heard multiple friends offhandedly talk about “when I get ousted for being a sexual predator”, not as an admission of guilt, but as recognition for the total lack of grace any trans woman gets if she does anything at all possible to take in bad faith; transsexual relationships to sex are complicated by that spectre and the push against being seen as corruptive and violent by default; there is enough sexual violence between or against trans people that you can rely on the fact that everyone has some weird feelings at the very least; and we can’t call the cops about abuse when it happens. Even if your politics suck enough that you’d otherwise be willing to, we all know the stakes are too high for that to be an option.

So, to get back to this discussion about a trans woman who raped people. Nobody’s coming to that discussion from a neutral or objective place. Distance from the woman we’re talking about also doesn’t help here. At best, it means we’re all thinking about our own rapists instead of the actual people involved — which doesn’t really seem all that likely to help with the community safeguarding element. We aren’t thinking about the real people who’ve been hurt, either. The victims are just something for us to project onto: how would we feel if our rapist walked into the event we might rely on for food or healthcare? What would we want to happen?

This isn’t a respectful way to treat victims and it doesn’t provide any inroads for rapists to be able to repair anything or even access spaces where they can get their material needs met and have opportunities for change and growth. Taking the cop approach to event organising means that you need to separate your feelings and desired outcomes and wants from the situation you’re looking at. Often, it’s easier to notice you need to do that when the situation involves someone you actually know. It’s generally harder to notice that you’re projecting or bringing your own feelings to a situation that doesn’t really involve you and that you don’t have a direct connection to (at least, other than your connection to the event or space in question). And if you’re trying to take the friendly community participant approach and facilitate conversations or check in on people, something where you have to have those conversations directly and be in the moment about it, unchecked and unrecognised feelings can be even more of an issue.

We grow up within patriarchy. We’re trans people experiencing constant oppression to uphold sex as a category. We move in with our partners to escape our abusive family, and move onto our friend’s couches to escape abusive partners. Show me the objective, impartial decision maker. If we’re doing community, we don’t have unbiased participants because we’re all invested in the spaces we’re in and other people’s ability to access those spaces. Pretending we’re unbiased, or that we can achieve objectivity, generally just means we haven’t noticed we’re biased (which informs our decision making more than noticing and talking about our biases), aren’t paying attention to our feelings, and think we’re successfully listening to people when we most likely aren’t.

Who’s making shit up?

Much as it’s difficult to recognise our biases and the background we bring to communal settings when we’re talking about harm that doesn’t directly impact us, it’s difficult to recognise those biases when it comes to other people’s relationships. I’m going to focus mostly on dark dynamics here because that’s what I’m personally doing but first we’re going to talk about some friends of mine.

A friend of mine had been dating a new partner for a few months when they both experienced some major trauma. It affected both of them directly, they were close to it and each other, and it took some figuring out how they were going to approach things. At first, they had decided to pull back and take some time to process everything, deescalate and maybe look to escalating in the future when more time had passed. This seemed sensible!

Instead, they ended up basically moving in and spending most of their time together pretty quickly. They were talking all the time and friends would see them at events together but weren’t spending as much time with them one on one. We were all aware of, around, and affected by the trauma they’d experience in various ways.

Over the course of a couple months, most of my friends and I started talking to one another about what we’d noticed about our friend and how we felt about it. Despite nobody actually talking to the friend in question, we’d all decided that this was going to blow up horrifically, things were going to go badly, we were going to need to do something. Did we need to stage an intervention? Maybe we should stage an intervention.

After a couple months of this, a few of us independently ended up casually chatting with the friend in question where she just talked entirely normally about liking spending time with her partner. When I talked to her, she seemed open about how she felt, genuinely happy when talking about her partner, and it was a nice conversation.

So, yeah, like 6 or so adults just spent two months making up a problem in our head that didn’t exist, stirring up feelings about the make-believe problem in ourselves and each other, and in the meantime being kinda crappy friends to the person we’d all been talking about. This is, obviously, incredibly stupid and not a great way to approach issues in our friend’s relationships. We resolved the non-problem by, uh, having a nice lil chat, realising we were acting like assholes, and then stopping acting like assholes.

Objectivity in dark dynamics

My point with this is: we have feelings about harm, we have feelings about our friends’ relationships (even if we aren’t involved, or even actually talking to those people at the time), and we have feelings about the spaces we’re in and the other people in those spaces. These feelings, unchecked, can have pretty major consequences for those of us who do lifestyle authority transfer, and in particular, dark dynamics.

We talk a lot in lifestyle spaces about the need for a support system and at an introductory level we often don’t really explain what we mean by that. I think people tend to get the impression that the most important quality in our support system is objectivity; people who can look at our relationship from outside of it and watch for things that cross lines, or bring up red flags, and let us know about that if that happens.

There’s a few problems here. First, our support people aren’t actually objective. They have their own feelings about what we’re doing, and a lot of that is based on their own experiences that we might not know about or be able to account for.

Secondly, objectivity centers distance from the relationship as something uniquely useful. This is probably all the relationship anarchist community-brained stuff, but I don’t think someone disconnected from me and my relationships is likely to be better positioned to see or understand what I need. I spend hours each week reflecting and expressing and explaining what I need and why to my Owner (who I have these conversations with constantly because things will come up that prompt them) and that’s a constant and ongoing process. I had various extensive conversations with close friends while I was working through my feelings about starting to explore submission, which was incredibly helpful, but which are not the whole story or even necessarily reflect how I feel about things a couple years on. Understanding one another isn’t a science where we can put pieces of information together and perfectly understand what the consequences, affective experience and personal conceptions of that information would be. I can’t even necessarily do that for myself and I certainly can’t do it for anyone else. And I expect the people engaging with this kind of thing to be willing to take the time to try and understand me when it relates to me.

Thirdly, dark dynamics look at lists of red flags and use them as a checklist. Even if our support people could reach impartiality, and could do that without being too distanced from us to understand what we want and why, there’s no reliable way to tell from the outside whether things are okay or not. We can’t reliably tell this for normal egalitarian relationships (though we may tell ourselves that we can); trying to look at someone else’s dynamic where they use hard limits as a checklist or keep a sub under constant surveillance or ignore safewords for fun, sex and enrichment is a fool’s errand.

Social support in dark dynamics

So, what does social support mean when we’re talking about dark dynamics? Personally, I don’t value “objectivity” or distance in my support systems. Dark dynamics and lean into vulnerability and risk where most people within the kink scene are trained to avoid it. I need the people I’m talking to for support to already be on board with that, or at least willing to try and understand what I might get out of it or why I’m invested in structuring my life this way.

This is where I’m going to diverge a bit from the community-brained shit. My social support networks are different for different things, and for dark dynamics/TPE/lifestyle CNC/whatever my support networks are specific. (Hmm, maybe I can get a potato-based acronym out of this blog post.) The kind of play I really like is pretty niche; I fetishise diminishing agency, my consent being irrelevant or ignored or changed, and being customisable property. I’m up for being gaslight, changing my memories, changing the things I want and like and the way I feel, and the ways I remember feeling. The risk of all this play actually materially affecting my agency and understanding of what I’m signing up for is a feature, not a bug.

And similarly, because lots of people have feelings about abuse, and because lots of people have feelings about the kinds of people I spend most of my time with, people I’m in community with are likely to feel pretty weird about that. I don’t think the kind of play I do should be inaccessible, but I do get that it isn’t something everyone wants to do and that it’s something people the spaces I’m in probably aren’t all that familiar with, even within the local kink scene. The people I’m in community with locally aren’t necessarily the same as my support system; I’m not going up to someone I see at the friendly community event with vegan food and asking for their advice on having different trauma responses during sex. I’m not even going up to most people at the leatherdyke night for that kind of thing.

I don’t need people who can step in, because what I could want them to step in for is going to change on a timeframe neither of us can totally control, and that’s part of the point. I have people who listen to what I’m trying to do and help me do it better, people who offer advice when it’s asked and center my agency outside of the dynamics where I give that up (or occasionally, go around my agency if they understand how to), and who have broad enough exposure to other dark dynamics to have insight into what could be going on. My list of red flags to check off is going to be different to someone else’s, but if you read and listen enough, you can draw connections between the different styles of fucked up and the different ways of problem solving enough to identify the investment behind it, and my support networks are the people who are invested in doing that. Sometimes that’s just exposure to people I don’t know who write about this, sometimes it’s classes, connections I make to people through those classes, and sometimes it’s people I talk to multiple times a week. I need other people who are perverts in similar enough ways to intuitively “get it” and different enough ways to broaden my perspective. None of it’s objective, and none of it’s unbiased. But it does respect me, it does recognise investment in what we’re all into, and it does keep space for both of us to be vulnerable, and I think that’ll support me best long term.