a while ago i saw an anti-cnc meme that went something like “if your boyfriend learns not to stop at "no”, do you really think he’s gonna stop at Pineapple?“ and ive been thinking about it a lot. like, it assumes that words have some kind of mystical meta-meaning that persists in all contexts, that if we discard the word "no” we also discard the concept of saying no in a symbolic sense. It’s a lingually prescriptivist argument in disguise.
when you denote a safeword you’re doing language. you’re adding another meaning onto a word, i don’t have to put it literally. for our purposes it means “stop for real, get out of character right now” and if my hypothetical partner ignored that, it would semantically be a normal violation of consent. weird argument.
the same applies to social scripts. beating someone can be affectionate, acts of violence don’t have an innate quality of evil. maybe its the autist in me, i understand that social behavior is always arbitrary and constructed pragmatically and physical abuse as lovemaking isn’t a stretch. sometimes piss is a delicious beverage, grow up.
it’s interesting cause this is a deep linkage between anti-kink/bdsm, SWERF, conservative gender-reactionary and TERF arguments: the insistence on a deeper foundational truth about things (Sex, sexuality, gender, sex work) that is not context-dependent.
BDSM, however, is a wonderful way to explore how meaning is context-dependent.
Hitting doesn’t always mean the same thing - hitting can be abusive if non-consensual, but it can also be freeing, wonderful, trust-enhancing, euphoric, cathartic, etc.,if consensual. “No” doesn’t always mean the same thing in every context, and neither does “pineapple.” I could say no during sex and not mean it (because we have pre-arranged that “no” doesn’t mean stop.) I can ask you to pass the pineapple at dinner and it doesn’t mean “stop everything,” because even though that’s our safeword, the context is different. And, of course, many words function this way outside of BDSM completely.
In a situation where we care how people feel inside, and want to protect everyone and make sure they have a good time, everything means what everyone involved agrees that it means, and the agreements and linguistic structure we create is meant to preserve and clarify consent under a variety of circumstances. In this way, BDSM is a very postmodern institution. But that doesn’t mean it’s not one that’s also based on mutual consent with regard to meaning.
Postmodernism isn’t actually a loss of meaning, only a loss of FICTION of the the absolute (non-context-dependent) meaning of words and actions.
There are fundamental underlying experiences (like feeling good, feeling bad) which humans experience. We may experience them in different contexts, but we all experience them. We all want experiences that make us feel good, we all wish to avoid suffering as it exists within our own definitions. We do want to produce desirable experiences and avoid undesirable experiences.
But desirable experiences and states are not produced in some uniform way for every person.
And the same with being transgender. Does being a woman mean the same thing to all people, all the time? It does not. Trans people wish to define things like womanhood and manhood in ways that include us, because to not include us causes suffering to real human beings. This suffering is not instructive, it does not lead to growth, and it makes our lives quantitatively and qualitatively worse in every way.
& Neither does sexwork mean the same thing to everyone who participates in it or observes it. Sex workers speaking for their own empowerment emphasize context: Consent, safety, pay, legality. These contexts change what is occurring; the context matters. Those who condemn all sex work seek to remove context from the conversation.
Context matters, but it matters precisely because it is relevant to the establishment of consent, which is the only tool we have to meaningfully protect people’s right to happiness on their own terms (ei., with dignity and self-determination). This is not perfect – people can choose bad things for themselves – but it is all we have, and I would argue, all we will ever have, upon which we can actually base human rights and good policy. Context can be abused to justify bad acts - but this happens when context is not being used to preserve consent anymore, and instead to take it away. The purpose of context is to care about people’s subjective experiences in a meaningful way.