1. Do you really believe a ‘community’ built around re-enacting patriarchal abuse (paedophilia, slavery, prisons, concentration camps) is going to attract abusive men at the same rate as, say, a bowling club?

Do you really believe that people put into situations where they are bound and gagged, in so much pain they cannot speak, are having flash-backs to childhood abuse and regressing to a helpless state, are at no more risk of abuse than members of a bowling club?

Do you really believe a ‘lifestyle’ predicated on misogyny isn’t going to attract large numbers of misogynists?

2. While men continue to abuse women at such high rates, and women are uniformly worse off in het relationships, maybe ‘political celibacy’ isn’t a bad idea after all. The patriarchal status quo relies on tying women to men, economically, socially, emotionally. Liberating women means liberating them from economic, social, and emotional dependency on men, after such liberation, truly egalitarian relationships between men and women would be possible.

3. We live in a patriarchy, a system of male supremacy, that doesn’t stop within the BDSM bubble; even if some professional dommes enjoy it, so what?

I’m sure there are a number men who get paid by women (but given that poverty is feminized, the majority of people doing BDSM for money are going to be women), maybe their ‘professional’ status keeps them in check, or maybe their status as ‘professionals’ makes it easier for them to commit abuse (if the woman feels violated, she may assume that’s because there is something wrong with her, rather than the ‘professional’ dom).

4. Hierarchy, dominance, submission, are all inherently patriarchal. In a genuinely egalitarian society, free from inequality and abuse, why would anyone fetishize and re-enact inequality and abuse, who would even think of it? It is a by-product of a violent, hierarchical society.

Endorphins are literally opiates your body produces to protect you in emergency situations; submissive behaviour is self-harm by proxy, and a person with self-harming tendencies putting themselves in situations (either in a ‘private relationship’ or a BDSM ‘scene’) where others hurt them, is endangering themselves. There is also trauma bonding, which keeps people in abusive situations (BDSM or ‘vanilla’), and the emotional isolation and dependency that comes from being part of any ‘closed community’.