The Making of a
Shibboleth
by slave david stein
under the Guardianship of Master
Steve of Butchmann’s
History is what happens while you’re
doing something else - and it may not be until years later that you discover
what you did was “historic.” When i agreed in mid-1983 to be part of a
committee charged with drafting a new “statement of identity and purpose” for
New York’s Gay Male S/M Activists (GMSMA), which i’d co-founded two years
earlier, i had no idea that what most people would remember of our work would
be a single phrase: “safe, sane, and consensual S/M.”
Tens of thousands - maybe hundreds
of thousands - of kinky men and women all over North America and around
the world, many of whom have no idea what GMSMA stands for, know “Safe Sane
Consensual (SSC). They’ve seen those words on T-shirts, on Web sites, in
personal ads, in the bylaws and foundation statements of hundreds of
organizations, on porn videos, in virtually every kink magazine, in every book
or pamphlet or instructional video produced for kink-curious audiences. It has
become literally a shibboleth: a linguistic marker used to distinguish “us”
from “them.”
Blame me, if you must, though it was
not a result i ever intended. The August 1983 report of that GMSMA committee
contains the earliest use of the phrase anyone has found, and it seems very
likely that i was its author. The statement we drafted reads in full:
GMSMA is a
not-for-profit organization of gay males in the New York City area who are
seriously interested in safe, sane, and consensual S/M. Our purpose is to help
create a more supportive S/M community for gay males, whether they desire a
total lifestyle or an occasional adventure, whether they are just coming out
into S/M or are long experienced.
Our regular
meetings and other activities attempt to build a sense of community by
exploring common feelings and concerns. We aim to raise awareness about issues
of safety and responsibility, to recover elements of our tradition, and to
disseminate the best available medical and technical information about S/M
practices. We seek to establish a recognized political presence in the wider
gay community in order to combat the prevailing stereotypes and misconceptions
about S/M while working with others for the common goals of gay liberation.
This wording was adopted without
change by the board of directors on August 17, 1983, and from then on the
statement has appeared in every GMSMA brochure and membership application as
well as other literature distributed at meetings and events or mailed to
thousands of individuals and hundreds of other organizations. (The only changes
made over the years were to drop the reference to New York City and to replace
“males” with “men.”)
While i have no specific memory of
coining “safe, sane, and consensual S/M,” i do
remember that i came to the committee meeting where we hashed out the
statement with a complete draft that was close to the final text. Both of the
other members of the committee, Martin Berkenwald and Bob Gillespie, are now
gone, but before his death in September
2000, Bob told Gil Kessler (who discovered the committee report in the GMSMA
archives) that he believed i had come up with the formulation. It certainly
sounds like my style, and it seems to grow out of other pieces i wrote in the
early 1980s where i struggled to distinguish the kind of S/M i wanted to do
from the criminally abusive or neurotically self-destructive behavior popularly
associated with the term “sadomasochism.” However, i’m not claiming authorship out
of pride - I think the phrase’s popularity may have done as much harm as good - but to support my interpretation of its origin.
The Past Recaptured
Looking back, i’m convinced that
“safe” and “sane” were not conjoined by chance but derived from an exhortation
familiar to most Americans, “Have a safe and sane Fourth of July.” Every year
while i was growing up, i heard that phrase on TV, or saw it in the newspapers
and on billboards, and it stuck. Apparently it stuck with the late Tony
DeBlase, too, because “safe and sane” appears in an unsigned essay he wrote for
the Chicago Hellfire Club’s Inferno 10 (1981) run book:
In 1980 the
following was adopted as the club’s statement of purpose: “. . . to provide
education and opportunities for participation in S&M sex among consenting
adult men and to foster communication among such individuals.” Responsible
S&M has become more popular and less feared in the gay community and
Chicago Hellfire Club continues to serve its community — striving always to
educate and promote safe and sane enjoyment of men by men.
Inferno 10 was the first i attended,
and it made a big impression on me, so Tony’s words may have suggested the
application of “safe and sane” to S/M, and even the association with
“consensual.” But the GMSMA statement of purpose was the first place all three
terms were jointly applied to S/M.
As a kid, what i took “Have a safe
and sane Fourth” to mean was, “Have a good time, but don’t be stupid and burn
the house down or blow your hand off.” More than two decades later, that seemed
to fit S/M just fine. What we meant by “safe and sane S/M” in 1983 was, “Have a
good time, but keep your head and understand what you’re doing so you don’t end
up dead or in the hospital - or send someone else there.” It seems likely that
the echo of a phrase trusted authority figures (like firemen and police
officers) have used for many years explains why many Americans felt immediately
comfortable with “safe, sane, and consensual” - and also why many others, less
inclined to trust authority, were immediately turned off by it.1 Clearly, GMSMA’s consistent use and
dissemination of the phrase through the 1980s and beyond laid the groundwork
for its explosive spread in the next decade.
But the most important vectors were
the S/M-Leather Contingent in the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay
Rights and the even larger S/M-Leather-Fetish Contingent in the 1993 March on
Washington. During a planning session for the 1987 march called by GMSMA and
held at New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center on April 21, 1987,
representatives of the S/M-Leather Contingent discussed the pros and cons of
“Safe Sane Consensual” and various alternatives (“Safe Responsible Consensual”
is the only one i still remember). At length we settled on SSC as the most
effective slogan for leather-oriented march publicity - never dreaming how
fateful our choice would turn out to be. From June 10, 1987, onward, the slogan
appeared at the top of all correspondence, press releases, and newsletters from
the contingent, and it was the centerpiece of thousands of T-shirts as well.
The 1993 march may have been even
more instrumental in popularizing the SSC slogan, since in addition to its use
in publicity material and on T-shirts, it was also emblazoned on the S/M-Leather-Fetish
Contingent’s 20-foot-wide banner. For the entire day preceding the march, that
same banner hung across the grand entrance of the government building on
Constitution Avenue that hosted our huge S/M-Leather-Fetish Conference.
Thousands of men and women from all over the U.S. and many foreign countries
saw those three words, identified with them, and took them back to their local
communities.2
The Devolution of a
Slogan
The trouble is, once an idea is
reduced to a slogan that can fit on a button or T-shirt, no one can control its
meaning. Everyone who sees it interprets it with his or her own prejudices and preconceptions - it all depends on how you understand the key terms. If you
read “safe,” for instance, as “avoiding pointless or unnecessary risks,” then
SSC will look very different from the way it does if you read “safe” as
“risk-free.”
While most people active in S/M
organizations have taken SSC as validating a form of sexuality still considered
“sick” or “crazy” by much of our society, others have read the same formula as
devaluing “edgeplay” and even simple excitement in favor of cautious,
conventional, and completely scripted sex games. Shortly after the 1987 March
on Washington, T-shirts appeared reading, “Unsafe Insane Nonconsensual,” and
some prominent S/M educators were seen wearing them once or twice, but these
were more of a joke than a serious critique. Thoughtful, articulate attacks on
SSC didn’t appear until later, particularly Laura Antoniou’s “Unsafe at Any
Speed, or Safe, Sane, and Consensual, My Fanny,”3 Joseph W. Bean’s “The SSC Mistake,”4 “The Future of Leather,”5 Phil Julian’s “Beyond Safe Sane
Consensual,”6 and Gary Switch’s “The
Origin of RACK / RACK vs. SSC,”7 which
proposes “Risk-Aware Consensual Kink” as an alternative slogan.8
In the beginning, however, “safe,
sane, and consensual S/M” wasn’t a slogan but simply the preamble to a statement
of purpose that goes on to talk about such things as community, responsibility,
tradition, education, and gay liberation.
Moreover, in that statement the SSC
formula was explicitly said to embrace all levels of S/M practice, from the
first steps of novices to the edgeplay of veterans, as well as all degrees of
commitment, from “a total lifestyle” to “an occasional adventure.” This context
demonstrates that SSC was originally intended neither as an ideal to live up to
nor as a way of defining S/M in general. But it was definitely intended to draw
lines between S/M behavior we wanted to encourage and other behavior we wanted
to distance ourselves from.
Being sexually aroused by the
infliction or suffering of pain, bondage, or humiliation can lead not only to
ecstasy and fulfillment, but also to destructive or self-destructive behavior that no
ethical, grounded person would condone. S/M releases powerful emotions and
involves intense vulnerability, and the results aren’t always pretty. Sometimes
people do things because of their kinks that wreck their lives — or the lives
of others. This must
not be forgotten or swept under the rug in the quest for social acceptance.
The “safe, sane, and consensual”
formula was put forward as a minimum
standard for ethically defensible S/M,
because that must be the basis for any defense of S/M rights. Today, however, and especially in
the hetero and pansexual communities,
S/M itself (or “BDSM,” which some
find more palatable) is frequently defined in terms of SSC, while the SSC slogan
is treated with quasi-religious reverence and even explicitly referred to as a
“credo” or “creed.” Instead of asking people to think about what it means to do
S/M ethically, and to make the hard choices that are sometimes necessary (if
only between what’s right and what’s right now),
many organizations today act as if these issues have all been settled, assuring
us that sadistic or masochistic behavior not deemed SSC isn’t S/M at all but
something else — abuse, usually, or domestic violence or poor self-esteem.
As a result, some people use
simplistic conceptions of SSC as sticks to beat anyone whose limits go beyond
theirs, while others apparently think mere lip service to the SSC idol absolves
them of any responsibility to behave with decency or compassion.
The idea has taken root that
whatever is safe, sane, and consensual is good, and whatever isn’t is bad. But that’s as
cockeyed as saying that all food approved as safe by the U.S. government is
equally nourishing and flavorful, while whatever hasn’t been approved isn’t
food at all. Just because an S/M interaction is safe, sane, and consensual
doesn’t mean that it’s well done, mutually satisfying, or worth emulating! Even
experienced tops and bottoms can have an off day, and even if nothing goes
obviously wrong, a well-planned scene may fizzle rather than sizzle. On the
other hand, an extremely risky, “lunatic,” or dubiously consensual scene might
provide peak experiences that neither party - assuming they survive it - would
want to have missed. Being
SSC alone is not enough,
because it says nothing about why we do S/M in the first place. Or maybe it
says too much? The idolization of SSC occurred during the same period that S/M
activity came to be almost universally referred to as “play,” S/M practitioners
as “players,” and the tools we use as “toys.”
This is probably no accident: no one
tells us to “Have a safe and sane” - let alone consensual - day at work.
Sensing something lacking in SSC as an ideal, Race Bannon and John Warren,9 among others, have suggested that a
fourth term should be added: “fun.” But even while conveying that good S/M is
more than just SSC, them amended formula - “safe, sane, consensual, and fun” - reinforces not only the mistaken notion that SSC is a criterion of value at
all, but also that S/M is something you do merely “for fun” and not with any
serious intent.
There is, indeed, such a thing as
“serious play” - some of humanity’s finest artistic, intellectual, and
spiritual achievements fall into that category - but it’s not what most people
think of as “having fun.” The same revolution that decoupled heterosex from
procreation and gave us sport-fucking has turned S/M into a sexoptional form of
recreation (explicit equations of S/M with sports are commonplace in pro-S/M
discourse today). Less hazardous than football but almost as strenuous, it even
has aerobic benefits.
The Dangers of Definition
To define is to limit, and GMSMA’s
original purpose was not to establish an orthodoxy but to facilitate dialogue - that’s why we resisted attempts to promulgate any “official” definition of
S/M, or of SSC.10 Back
in 1983, we knew that beyond the obvious applications of “safe,” “sane,” and
“consensual,” there are vast gray areas and no absolutes. Reasonable people can
differ on what these terms mean or apply them differently in different
contexts. But they provide a starting point for making choices about the kind of S/M you want to do (not the
specific kinks and scenes, of course, but the ethical principles that shape
your practice).
Safety, especially, differs from one
individual and situation to another. A maneuver that’s perfectly safe for a
gymnast to perform could easily lead to a broken neck for an untrained tumbler.
A flogging that one bottom finds exhilarating might damage another with less
experience or preparation. A session of rigid bondage and sensory deprivation
that leads me to ecstasy might send you to a mental hospital. Even crossing the street, we have to decide
what level of risk is acceptable - why should our responsibility be any less in
an S/M scene or relationship?
What we meant by “safe S/M” back in
1983 - as the full GMSMA statement of purpose implies - was the opposite
of careless,
irresponsible, or uninformed S/M.
We meant doing your homework and taking reasonable precautions. We never
intended to promote only G-rated S/M or to turn the leather scene into a
risk-free playpen where pain doesn’t really hurt, bondage isn’t really
constraining, and dominance is being ordered to do what you want to do anyway.
We left “sane” and “consensual” much vaguer, “sane” because it’s pretty vague anyway once you get past the obvious meaning - “able to distinguish fantasy from reality” - and “consensual” because we didn’t realize how tricky it is. We didn’t have the benefit of a couple of decades of rising awareness of just how hard it can be to leave an abusive spouse. We did not discuss, back then, whether consent was something you could give once and for all, or if it has to be renewed continuously - the now-familiar paradoxes of “consensual nonconsensuality.” Without such an analysis, however, it’s all too easy to read the requirement of consensuality as analogous to the rules against “date rape,” meaning that the top, dominant, or Master/Mistress has to stop and ask permission of the bottom, submissive, or slave at each point where the type of activity changes. This might work okay in a play session between people who are simply interested in sharing certain sensations, but it would fatally subvert any ongoing Dominant/submissive or Master/slave relationship - or even the kind of intense S/M scenes where the bottom goes nonverbal and is temporarily unable to make choices.
The choice GMSMA faced back in 1983 was whether to explore/discuss/defend the full range of S/M behavior - thus opening ourselves to attack based on every case of predatory sadomasochism critics could uncover, or invent - or to limit the field in some way. By saying we were interested in “safe, sane, and consensual S/M,” we were trying to draw a very basic distinction: between, on one hand, the bondage, torture, or control inflicted on willing partners for mutual satisfaction and, on the other hand, the coercive abuse of unwilling victims. We thought this restriction would leave those hostile to all S/M no rational basis for objection to what GMSMA was up to, exposing the more fundamental sex phobia that underlies most attempts to police sexual expression. (Setting ourselves up as a new brand of sex police was the farthest thing from our minds.) At the
same time, we felt that the SSC emphasism would help those of us who had to
some extent internalized the same prejudices - which back then meant most of
us! - to accept that you don’t have
to become a victim
or a predator to satisfy sexual needs for pain or control.
Unfortunately, it is not only
sensationalistic journalism and reactionary religion that persistently equates S/M with
coercive behavior, but also much of our own erotica, and this, too, is no
accident. Back when GMSMA was getting started, almost everyone understood S/M
in coercive terms because those were the only terms we had. The first step in
bringing consensual S/M out of the closet was to forge a language to talk about
it. SSC was a spectacularly effective part of that process, but today it is
sometimes more of an obstacle than a help in continuing the kind of dialogue
that builds community - and even more of a hindrance to the partly nonverbal
dialogue of seduction and consent11 that
underlies satisfying leathersex between individuals.
Freedom from Fear
For most people in my generation and
earlier, the images of S/M were initially as scary as they were arousing. And
taking the first steps toward realizing our fantasies - from either side, top
or bottom - was even scarier. We didn’t yet have the benefit of two decades of
S/M education and activism, and the iconography of gay S/M in Drummer magazine and elsewhere was very
edgy, very “noncon.” In the early 1980s, as again today in certain circles,
being known as “dangerous” or “having no limits” could seem sexy or exciting,
while being “taken” or forced into submission could seem more authentic than a
negotiated encounter. While it was probably no more likely for an S/M scene
back then to end up in the hospital than it is today - maybe less likely - the
gay leather scene had an aura of danger that made me and many others hesitate
to get involved in it, or have mixed feelings about it, despite our strong need
for S/M. A desire to
reduce that aura of danger was one of the chief things that led us to form
GMSMA in the first place,
and i’m sure there was a similar motive for founding many later organizations
as well, particularly the heterosexual and pansexual ones.
Obviously, we’ve succeeded to a
remarkable extent, with more than a little help from the zeitgeist. Since the 1980s
S/M has grown progressively less scary, to the point that many teenagers today
are more comfortable with piercing, bondage, and dominant/submissive role-play
than their parents were with oral sex. For these kids, coming out into S/M is
no big deal - much less of one, in fact, than coming out as gay or lesbian.
(Thank you, Madonna and Trent Reznor!) But maybe the pendulum has swung too
far. The critics of SSC have focused mainly on the “vanillification” of S/M
that an overemphasis on safety and mundane “sanity” can produce. For a good
many bottoms, risk-taking is part of the point of
doing S/M - if a scene doesn’t get their adrenaline pumping, it’s a waste of
time.
For me and many others, though, fear
is a turn-off - we need to feel safe as a precondition for surrendering
control; only then can we fly. Yet even for us, the transformation of “safe, sane, and
consensual” from a vague guideline to an all too rigid ideology has a downside.
Fear can be a survival mechanism,
and novices who rush into heavy scenes on a first date, counting on “safewords”
or the SSC “credo” to protect them, can be horribly disillusioned even if
they’re not physically traumatized. The risk of being snuffed by a psychopath is minuscule
(though not nonexistent). What seems all too common today, however, is for
novice bottoms and submissives to be used and discarded by tops and dominants
spoiled by the endless supply of fresh meat — and for novice tops and dom(me)s
to be used and discarded by bottoms and subs who never learned that
responsibility for a good scene goes both ways.
Instead of approaching our S/M
encounters like gourmets relishing a rare feast that required planning, skill,
and perhaps some sacrifice to arrange, more and more of us are fast- food
junkies satisfied to eat and run. Instead of engaging with each other as unique
individuals who happen to need or simply enjoy kinky sex, more and more we
treat our partners - both short-term and long-term - merely as props for our
fantasies (a tendency exacerbated by cybersex).
Safewords can’t save you from a bad
scene or a bad relationship with someone you didn’t know as well as you
thought you did, and chanting “Safe Sane Consensual” like a mantra can’t
replace years of study and practice in guiding you through the maze of choices
we all must make. Whether you do S/M to achieve ecstasy, intimacy, or
self-transformation, or simply to have a good time, all that the terms “safe,
sane, and consensual” can do is suggest where to begin drawing some boundaries.
After that, the real work of establishing - and testing - your individual
limits begins.
1 The S/M community often splits along a fault line defined by
divergent responses to authority. Some of us are drawn to authority, and even
fetishize it, while others rebel against authority and cultivate an outlaw
aura. These divergent tastes are expressed not only in how we dress for sex,
what kind of playspace décor turns us on, how we talk during a scene, and how
we behave toward our sex partners and peers, but also in how we respond to
efforts at organizing and mobilizing the community. To go into this in any
depth, however, would require an entirely different article.
2 Earlier versions of this essay stated that “Safe Sane Consensual”
appeared on the 1987 S/M-Leather Contingent banner and that the slogan was
chosen for the contingent by GMSMA’s Community Involvement Committee. Bruce
Marcus, a longtime GMSMA board member and officer who was a key figure (along
with his partner, the late Barry Douglas) in organizing both contingents,
recently corrected these points based on documents and photos in his files.
3 Delivered as part of a 1995 speech in Seattle and subsequently
published in Tristan Taormina’s shortlived zine, Pucker Up; a transcript
of the whole speech is currently available on the Web at www.sexuality.org/latrans.html
4 Published in the newsletter of Vancouver Activists in S/M, VASM
Scene (January/February 1998, Vol. 16, No. 2), and available online at
www.iron-rose.com in the Library area as well as on other sites.
5 Delivered as the keynote address at the Great Lakes Leather
Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, on Saturday, September 30, 2000, and
available online at www.leatherpage.com, under Columns/Opinions.
6 Posted on www.LeatherNavigator.com in 1999 as one of his “Black and
Blue” columns but no longer available.
7 Published in Prometheus #37 (May 2001), the magazine of The
Eulenspiegel Society (TES) in New York. Gary coined the term RACK on the
TES-Friends list on 11/25/99, and it has been discussed on a number of lists
since.
8 According to e-mail from an Australian leather Master who goes by
the name SARRAS, in some “old guard” circles the slogan was
“Committed Compassionate Consensual,” but i haven’t found any independent
corroboration of this.
9 See Race Bannon, Learning the Ropes: A Basic Guide to Safe and
Fun S/M Lovemaking (Daedalus, 1993), and John Warren, Safe, Sane,
Consensual and Fun (Diversified Services, 1996).
10 Nonetheless, the evolution of SSC into a tribal shibboleth was
already implicit in GMSMA’s use of it.
11 Joseph W. Bean has suggested “seducing consent” as an alternative
to the negotiation paradigm for leathersex encounters. See his Flogging,
pages 18-20 (Greenery Press, 2000).
Author’s note: An early draft of this essay was presented in a
workshop at the Leather Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C, in April
2000. It is available on the LLC Web site (www.leatherleadership.org) and was
also published in one of the final issues of The
Sandmutopia Guardian and later reworked slightly for the Spring 2001 issue
of NewsLink, the GMSMA newsletter. Although my understanding of the
genesis of the “safe sane consensual” idea hasn’t changed, my views of its
later development and possible future usefulness have evolved substantially
since then.
This more complete and
fully thought through version - which also corrects some historical errors -
was published in the 20th Anniversary issue, September/October 2002, of VASM Scene, the newsletter of Vancouver
Activists in S/M of Vancouver, British Columbia. The essay was commissioned by
Joseph W. Bean for an anthology on leather history to be published by the
Leather Archives & Museum, and it may eventually appear in such a volume,
though Mr. Bean retired as executive director of the LA&M before seeing
that project through to completion.
