learn to distinguish the two is to talk openly about our screwups. It's an intimidating proposition; for one thing, many outsiders leap to label BDSM as "all abuse, all the time,” and none of us wants to give those folks anything that they could use for ammunition. But we have to start talking about this stuff more openly, because the alternative is creating a community where it's much easier to get away with abuse.
In Thomas MacAulay Millar's epic series on abuse in the BDSM community, he's got a whole post dedicated to the various types of miscommunications and mythcommunications that can occur: http://vesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/ theres-a-war-on-part-5-wallowing-in-the-sl-op/
Otherwise, I hope that this piece is a fairly complete treatment of this incredibly difficult topic.
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What Happens After An S&M Encounter "Gone Wrong"
I've often thought that BDSMers should talk more about our "failed encounters." Sometimes the best way to learn is through "failure," or by looking at others’ "failures." But when a BDSM scene "goes wrong," it's often highly personal for everyone concerned. So it's really hard to talk about and really hard to write about -- both for the dominant and submissive partners. This is just like any relationship, really. After all, people rarely talk about their most embarrassing or awkward or otherwise difficult "mistakes made" during vanilla sex, right?
(I use phrases like "failed encounter" and "gone wrong" and "mistakes" with caution, because I think these situations can often be viewed as learning experiences, and therefore they are successful for a lot of purposes! But certainly in the moment they feel like screwups, and a lot of the time they can make the whole relationship very difficult, and I think that most people who have been through them feel as though some kind of failure happened... whether it was a failure of understanding, communication, empathy, caution, or something else.)
Much of the problem, I think, is that people have such a hard time communicating after serious miscommunications and mistakes.
The following quotation is from Staci Newmahr's Playing At The Edge, an excellent ethnography of the BDSM community. (I've changed a few jargon terms for the sake of accessibility.)
Sophie had been engaged in a long and intimate S&M relationship with Carl, a friend whom she deeply trusted. During the encounter she describes below, Carl changed his approach, and Sophie subsequently felt that Carl was somehow not quite himself. Sophie and Carl never quite recovered from the incident; though they remained friends and tried to do S&M again, it was, according to Sophie, never the same.
Sophie says: "He was very much a rope top. That was his big thing, was tying people up. And he was excellent at tying people up. And our dynamic was always -- I mean, yes, he would absolutely hurt me when the time came for that, but there was also always this element -- even when he was hurting me, it was done in this incredibly, like, touchingly
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