Top’s Disease is inherently crippling, destructive to relationships and people in the general vicinity, and never becoming.

I’m open to suggestions for things I should do to Mo the next time we play. The more humiliating and unpleasant they are, the more likely they are to happen…

I do agree that no spectator can or should know the precise level of risk that the folks involved within the scene have deemed appropriate for themselves. The quote you mention is illuminated by the sentence that precedes it: the dismissiveness I mention is bound up with the perception many people have that THEIR perception can be entirely accurate. It can’t. Watching a cod and brutal sadistic beating where, at the end, the top walks away leaving the bottom sobbing alone might look horrid to one person and raise a cry for intervention. But some masochists crave just that level us use / discard play.

Mostly what my feeling around this is: got goodness sake, slapping a label or a judgment on people (Top Disease, Sob Sub Sister Complex, Psycho Player, etc) is risky because you cannot know, at any time, what the players are thinking feeling. You may be able to make an educated guess. So calling the crazy players names and pushing them towards the fringe is, I believe, further divisive within an already compartmentalized and contentions community.

Hm…does that make any sense? *laughs*

Peace.

~Mo

I like this piece and I agree with it, but had a problem with this:

“Unless this person is unsafe, and the submissive is in physical or emotional danger, I don’t get the dismissiveness of a more theatrical level of play.”

How can spectators tell when any of the above applies to a particular scene? I don’t think they can. What one spectator deems to be unsafe or that the submissive is in physical or emotional danger, another might see it as just right. Who gets to make the call? That falls under the “slippery slope” concept. Hopefully, the dominant knows what they’re doing and how to read their sub and/or the sub has a safeword. Otherwise you get a bunch of people with different definitions of safe arguing about who’s right. Just my two cents.