What Happens If You Call It Roleplaying?

In observing a conversation between two parties about the roles people take in kink and power-exchange relationships, I noticed, once again, a phenomenon that reoccurs with some frequency. One party insisted that what they did as a slave was not roleplaying, it is much deeper than that, and the other party insisted that if you have the ability to not live your entire life within the confines of that role, socially or legally, then no matter what you call it, it is just roleplaying. I have a hard time relating to this conversation from both sides of it even though I have been part of it many times before. I've been part of being forced to admit that what I do within CNC or TPE is just a role and I have been part of being asked to defend my position on referring to my identification as a slave as roleplaying.

I get it. I get the issue here even though I don't relate to either side at all. There is an idea that roleplayers are not as serious as identifiers, therein playing a slave is not equal to being one, and on the flipside there is the idea that everyone who engages in BDSM is playing a role and has to admit it or dozens of people will exercise the limits of their skills of rhetoric to prove that you are. Personally, I cannot engage on this subject because for me the problem lies in how roles and roleplaying are viewed in these conversations. I view roles as structural units in society and relationships, they connote something about our relationship with the world, ourselves or other people. Roles have some meaning, all of humanity didn't come together to develop language and its systems for words to have no meaning, but the meaning is not an exhaustive definition of how to act within a role, it is merely a definition of some basic parameters. Being a parent is a role, and the meaning of that is only limited to the fact that you occupy a caregiving, possibly birth-giving position in someone's life, how you act within a parental role is much more fluid. For me, slave as a role means being subject to the ownership of another person, the relationship dynamic that emerges from that is more fluid. So, when I hear the term roleplaying, it just sounds like what we all do in life all the time, but I know, that is not the connotation. Roles are part of my identity too, when I say I play a role as a slave or mother, that doesn't make it any less my identity. I identify with the role, but I know that is not how everyone views it.

For one thing, we hear the term roleplaying and immediately interpret it as not real. If you're playing a role, it's not real life. There is some truth there for some roles. For example, it is not real in some senses for me to be a slave, because not only can another person not legally own me, but I also don't want to live in a world where they could. That element of my relationship style will always be socially fantastical but reality isn't only composed of legality or society, one can experience things for real within a belief system of their own making. It doesn't rob from my experience of being a slave to know that I exist in a world where I cannot legally be a slave, nor do I feel the desire to argue the semantics of whether something is pretend because it cannot be legally had. I think, of course, in a social and political system that disallows slavery, to experience it within a relationship you have to pretend a little, you have to let your imagination and fantasy guide what it means to be a slave outside of the confines of its political roots. That does make it my reality, but it also doesn't make it the reality of actual slavery, and I am not trying to make it so. I do not want to make it so. I do not feel more secure in my role by insisting that I don't play a role because I love my social, legal and political liberty and I absolutely have no interest in giving it up. If that makes me a pretend slave, that's good, I am not trying to be a real slave by this definition of it anyway.

But, there are different ways to view reality, and within my life, I do actually experience the role of a slave as I take it on in my relationship. I experience ownership, I experience control and I experience curated (but very impactful) forms of cruelty and devotion. So it's hard for me to view roleplaying as a trivial thing because in all the roles I play in life (parent, slave, employee, comet lover), there is real life experience that helps me make sense of the world, enjoy my emotions, grow, learn and love. I understand that not all roles and roleplaying is the same thing, being a parent is not the same as being a slave as being an employee, but they are all roles I experience that add meaning to my life and in that they retain the similarity that they have impact on my life and that makes them real to me. I make decisions to further my career that change how I live. I make decisions on serving my master that change how I move or behave. That is real because in my finite existence it determines how I use my time and how I feel when I do those things, it is real because it impacts how I think and how I make decisions, it is real because it determines the course of relationships and life. For a single human being, a lot of daily reality is their life and in my daily reality i play the role of a slave to my partner, which is all I need from it. I don't need the world to see it as real or meaningful, I don't need to prove it is, I don't need to defend it against semantic arguments.

Sometimes, I don't see how the argument helps, actually. Recently someone wanted me to say that my conception of CNC is actually pretend because I have the ability to revoke overarching consent at some point in my life, and I don't know why I wouldn't admit that. Yes, there is pretend non-consent but that doesn't change the fact that within the confines of such a dynamic the role you play has very serious, potentially dangerous consequences and that is sometimes part of the risk preparedness and sometimes part of the fun. If getting me to admit that it is pretend automatically made all CNC safer to practise, I would understand this need, but in my experience what has made it safer is thorough pursuit with the assumption that what I do is serious enough to warrant treating it like reality because the consequences are extremely real. That ensures I never take any roles I play lightly because if I did, if I came at it with the blasé association of it being just roleplaying, I wouldn't do half the work I do to ensure I manage risk and communication as well as I should.

To me, my master/slave dynamic is roleplaying (even fantastical roleplaying if you are arguing semantics) where all parties take the role extremely seriously, it's no fun for me if I don't take it seriously and for that a little suspension of disbelief doesn't make all of real life disappear. It just allows you to change certain conditions and see what happens. I don't need anyone in the world nor any systems/structures to legitimise the seriousness to me, it's serious to me because I choose for that to be the case. If you don't, that's your business, not mine, but you don't get to denigrate my serious things just because we don't see the concepts of roleplaying and pretending the same way. For me this role is a space within which I have had an entire life, relationships as deep and meaningful as one may experience being a mother or a friend, and that is impossible to see as just pretending. You can pretend you don't have the real right to make something stop, but you cannot pretend your way through the active subversion of your will, the searing pain on your back, the sound of your heart breaking inside the fist of your lover, the incoherence of being overstimulated to the point of madness. You cannot pretend to change in accordance with someone's training of you over the years. You cannot pretend to change your sexual responses, your reflexes and your associations. You cannot pretend to go through those things, even if you do them within the confines of a fantastical condition, you'll have to really experience them.

That is what roleplaying is to me and that is how I participate in it and so it doesn't offend me to refer to my dynamic as roleplaying. It doesn't even offend me to call it a game. I do that all the time but it is important to remember that games have a wide range. Ludo is a game, it challenges your mind but bears little risk. Football is a game, it challenges your body, helps it grow and develop resilience and endangers it in the long run. Russian Roulette is also a game, it puts you in the thick of the thrill and threatens your life. It is not whether something is a game or not that makes it serious or real, and how seriously I take something depends on the stakes and for me, when the stakes are high, I will always take everything seriously. I play games of power-and-pain, I roleplay as a slave and that is serious to me. I love it. I give it the respect I think it deserves by taking it as seriously as I do. I love myself and I want myself to be able to do this without coming into serious harm so I take the role as seriously as it deserves to be taken. I play the role like my life depends on it because sometimes, it does.

...

(Note: If you don't want to see your dynamic as roleplay, that is also your right as much as it is mine to view it as such. This writing is about exploring roleplaying as a more vast concept than it is usually viewed, not about deciding how one should view their own dynamic)