I want to spend a moment to talk about rape play and therapy, because I think it is something people keep bringing up as a reason to do BDSM but rarely discuss in detail. A personal story first:

I did confrontation therapy to deal with a fear of bees. I got attacked by an entire swarm of bees when I was 7 and it nearly killed me and I was terrified to go outside for years. I had severe panic attacks. I got triggered by humming sounds. I was, in short, traumatized. And then I started confrontation therapy, which turned out for me to be extremely helpful. I started out just looking at pictures of bees (which was difficult enough), listening to humming sounds, and finally I agreed to visit my therapist while a bee was in the building. It was in a jar, in a different room, but it was there. And if I felt up for it, I could walk into the room and see the bee in the jar.

I won’t bore you with all the details of my slow road to unlearning trauma. I can now deal with bees better than most people (even if they walk on my skin!) and I’m quite proud of that. I want to talk about the therapy though. What was defining about this confrontation therapy was that I was always in control of the confrontation. The therapist never pushed me forward, never opened the jar without my consent, never locked the door. If it was too much, I could leave the room. Every step was mine. Every step backwards was okay. That was fundamental. If the confrontation had ever not been mine to control (say, if the therapist had pushed me forward) it is likely I would have had a panic attack and my recovery would have taken a big step backwards. If she had tied me to a chair and let loose a bee on me, well, it’s likely I would have ended up more traumatized then before the therapy.

Now, when I hear people talk about ‘rape play as therapy’ to deal with traumatic events of sexual violence, their stories are usually very different. Along the line of ‘my dom ties me to the bed and we re-enact rape but with a safe word so it’s not real rape’. And to me that sounds, well, awful. That sounds like the opposite of the very slow, always-in-control road I took in confrontation therapy. That sounds more intense than anything I ever did in confrontation therapy. That sounds like a therapist ripping open a jar full of bees on my first day of therapy (but I have a safe word to leave the room so it’s not a real swarm of bees), and every session after that, until I can get through it without a panic attack.

Now, maybe that works for some people. All brains are different, so who knows? But let me ask you: if you chose that method, did you chose that as the best way to do confrontation therapy after examining 50 different ways of shaping the confrontation? Or did you do that because that was the only kind of ‘do-it-yourself-therapy’ the BDSM scene offered you? And if the latter is true, do you think it is remotely suspicious that the only method presented to you was the one method doms happen to find hot?

Because, ya know, I find it very suspicious.

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edit: turns out some people read this as ‘don’t do therapy yourself, go to a professional!’ That’s not what I meant at all. The medical system is privileged and expensive and also full of abusive therapists. This is NOT about ‘professional = good’ and ‘do it yourself = bad’. NOT AT ALL. This is about the weirdly limited options for ‘rape play as therapy’ BDSM seems to offer and how those limited options are suspiciously likely to serve the needs of doms. I very much support do-it-yourself therapy and healing-together-without-doctors therapy.