Our friend Emma-Jane has written an interesting post on her blog (which is brand new, by the way: check it out) about struggling to reconcile being a kinky Irish girl with hearing about the results of the Ryan report into child abuse in Irish State Institutions:

“An emotionally abusive institution. Girls were humiliated and belittled on a regular basis”

Sounds like the brochure for a reformatory roleplay my friends are planning.

“CP was often administered in front of other girls and staff members. The use of denigrating and humiliating language was commonplace”

Sounds like the type of scene I’ve been fantasising about all my life.

“Physical punishment was severe, excessive and pervasive”

Sounds like a description of my latest play weekend.

Yes, well. I’m not going to make anyone feel better if I say that, without taking on and processing different kinds of violence visited by one human being on another throughout history, we would be bereft of any settings for role-play. The stuff we feed on, from Roman slaves, via Victorian maids, to nearly modern schoolchildren, is in its core quite appalling.

How much of it you then make it yours, whether you decide to play with certain aspects of it at all, is then a sensitive individual choice.

Abel and I discussed this the other day, and he wondered whether his ease or difficulty in accepting his own desires depends on how recent the historical event that triggers the fantasies. Does the fact that the Irish schoolchildren of the reports are real people who may be still not quite into their middle age, amplify the guilt?

When he said this, I wondered out loud how, then, the role-play involving trafficked Eastern European girls – who are our actual contemporaries – works out better for him. For me this is a semi-hard limit: I will only go there with one of a handful of extremely trusted tops, and only to please them as opposed to entertain my own desires. Abel, on the other hand, has independent fantasies in the white slavery milieu.

I think that, rather than being a question of historical proximity, our comfort level depends on how personal the story of the suffering is to us. History helps, to an extent, to soften the grip of guilt, but it’s personal involvement that creates qualms and hardens limits.

And it is, unfortunately, something each of us has to work through in our heads, alone with the shadows in our consciousness.