Browsing Tumblr for photos to repost to my site there, I encounter all sorts of spanking- and BDSM-related images. Some are eminently to my taste; others very much not. In the former camp recently was a photo of a particularly harshly-caned backside after, one would imagine, fifty strokes or thereabout. One blogger had added a caption to the picture stating:
Attention all doms and subs, this, this is abuse. This is betraying trust with the person who is giving you their entire body and entrusting you don’t harm them more than necessary. This is ABUSE, not PUNISHMENT. Please remove yourself from these situations, because this is taking advantage of someone’s trust for you
No, I would have answered had Tumblr’s features permitted replies: it’s just someone with different tastes than you when it comes to play. There’s nothing in the photo that suggests that the lass concerned hadn’t given her informed consent to the severe thrashing she’d just received. And some people love to play harder than others – whether that’s all the time, or occasionally amidst lighter spankings more generally.
I very occasionally struggle with the “your kink is OK” mantra – mainly, it has to be said, with age-play where the character is particularly young and the set-up sexually abusive: that’s just so not my thing that I find it hard to get my head around it. But even there I have to stop and remind myself that what I say on the “About Abel” page of this site holds true:
I don’t approve of abusive behaviour or of activities involving those not of legal age. I do approve of adults fantasising about their kink, and enjoying safe kinky play to which all parties consent.
If it falls into that camp, it’s fine. And if people want to photograph what they get up to – and share it wherever they like with similarly consenting / informed adults – then that’s equally not a problem. Yes, some of those viewing the images may get squicked, but that’s a risk they have to take when the choose to wander onto a site like Tumblr.