Hehe, and it was this totally unrelated to Eve thread which made me register for this forum.
While I dig the aesthetics that usually go around with the BDSM scene, I'm pretty vanilla myself if viewed from the perspective of a lifestyler. I have gotten to see a lot of the scene however as we used to run a techno club way back in the day which had a lot of crossover due the aesthetics we embraced and the personal preferences of a few of our other guys. A fun crowd, certainly.
One thing which sort of bugs me about going BDSM - and this is personally for me of course - is a sense of... ah, I can't pin it down well, but it seems a little bit hypocritical to me. The very idea of safe words and "the submissive being in true control" wrecks it for me. It isn't domination after all if we agree to it. And that.. somehow it takes something out it.
I should probably add that though I am very vanilla, I am also sexually .. well, dominant. If you sleep with me,
I will
ravage you and it will be me who's taking you places. And trust me, if you were attracted enough to be led to the bed with me, you will fuckin' like it. It's not bragging, it's experience. Indeed, in my experience all girls respond well to a dominant male who knows what the hell he is doing. So, the point is, there is a certain resonance in my still rather vanilla preferences to this stuff. In that vein too, I can play at being more full-out BDSM-style for kicks, but I would never be able to be submissive without feeling just a little bit too uncomfortable. So, if a chick would pull that off, we would probably end up wrestling.. which well, doesn't actually sound bad if you accept that you at some point you will be under me and screaming out an orgasm.
So, what I'm saying isn't only that I have that resonance. I think the archetypical male personality does as well. The instincts that make up the BDSM scene are hardwired into us all. It's just that some people take it a lot further than the rest and that - it becoming a lifestyle instead of just something I prefer - is where my identification with it stops.
Edit and caveat - please read my text understanding that I do
firmly believe that there is an exception to every rule and so called stereotype, but those exceptions don't negate the power and usefulness of archetypes.