Hurt vs. Harm - Again.

There’s an age-old argument in the BDSM community about not playing when you’re angry. I’ve blogged on here about that before and I’m not going to go into it all over again, but a conversation with a friend recently brought up another extension of that discussion.

He said something along the lines of – “I could never hurt someone that I was dating.” (No, it’s not an exact quote, I’m not digging through IM logs for it, but that’s the jist of it.)

Now, this is not to say that this friend does not have dominant tendencies, he does. It’s also not to say that he doesn’t have any fantasies about force or spanking or shoving his cock down someone’s throat or anything of that ilk – he does.

But I think where things get tangled up for people is with the word ‘hurt’.

I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about hurt vs. harm here before. If I haven’t, let me explain briefly:

Hurt: Cause pain but no permanent damage physically or emotionally.
Harm: Cause pain and permanent damage physically or emotionally.

The two words are far from interchangeable but they are interchanged sometimes, and it makes discussions like this much more difficult.

(I was actually working toward a different point, but I’m on a roll here so let me finish this up and I’ll get back on the other road. Further, this is not a discussion about sadists and masochists, or people who’ve been doing bdsm for years. It’s for anyone else who lives on the fringe of this.)

Maybe in casual relationships – those in which the two (or more) people don’t know each other all that well, hurt could be mistaken for harm and vice-versa. But if you’ve spent enough time talking with someone about your own fantasies and desires, and you’ve listened to theirs – along with exchanging fears and dislikes, too – it’s going to be pretty hard to tangle those two words up. For instance…

Discuss “face fucking” with partner. Male partner has it as a fantasy. Female partner is not concerned about it, finds the idea exciting. Male partner tries to pull it off one night. Female partner gags a bit, but doesn’t pull away or run away screaming. Female partner has tears on her cheeks during the “act” but isn’t really crying. “Scene” ends.
Did he hurt her? Perhaps.
Did he harm her? No.
When he asks her about it later, she admits that it made her weak in the knees.

He was concerned about hurting her, and he likely did (No matter how much you might enjoy a good sound face-fucking, gagging does not feel like a massage for the gagger *smirk). But he didn’t harm her – emotionally or physically – and the small amount of pain she endured was done out of desire for same.

Push my back up against a brick wall? Hurt? Maybe. Harm? Fuck no, hot as hell.

Getting a picture here? *evil grin.

With above-average communication skills, fantasies that involve a bit of “controlled force” can be highly charged and hellaciously fantastic for both people.

(And yes, Controlled Force is where I started this to go, but I got all kinds of distracted. I’ll come back to that later *wink)