[User23]

That reminds me of repackaging a traditional historical male dominated marriage, including occasional corporal punishment, as a BDSM kink to make it normal again. You think you’re seeing a woman in a dress, but actually it’s fetish gear showing her submission.

[Sakos]

What are you talking about? There are plenty of male subs looking to be dominated by women. And either way, it's generally understood to be primarily a sexual kink only consented to by both parties. If it's not consensual, then it's not BDSM, it's abuse. BDSM is also wildly different from marriage of any kind - you might be thinking of 24/7 power exchange?

[User23]

It’s entirely possible to view a traditional patriarchal marriage as a fully consented to 24/7 power exchange with domestic service and impregnation kinks to round it out. That’s not abuse, it’s just a kind of scene you may not personally be into.

[cstrahan]

I don’t know if comment you are responding to was edited after response, but you may want to reread it:

> That reminds me of repackaging a traditional historical male dominated marriage, including occasional corporal punishment, as a BDSM kink to make it normal again. You think you’re seeing a woman in a dress, but actually it’s fetish gear showing her submission.

That’s clearly a joke about normalizing historically traditional roles between men and women, with the man being dominant and woman being submissive. Says nothing about there being men wanting (or not wanting) to submit.

[Sakos]

I don't see how it's a joke. It's clearly criticism and making an unjustifiable judgment. BDSM has no preference about which gender is submitting or which is dominant.

[cstrahan]

> It's clearly criticism [...]

I'm having trouble seeing where you see criticism in that post. Could you help me understand?

> BDSM has no preference about which gender is submitting or which is dominant.

Where does OP suggest otherwise?

> I don't see how it's a joke.

I'll expound below, but in short: I see the original comment as being a joke at heterosexual men's expense, in particular those who wish to dominate their wives.

For posterity, here's the whole quote:

> That reminds me of repackaging a traditional historical male dominated marriage, including occasional corporal punishment, as a BDSM kink to make it normal again. You think you’re seeing a woman in a dress, but actually it’s fetish gear showing her submission.

And this is how I understand it:

> [...] traditional historical male dominated marriage, including occasional corporal punishment

So what we're talking about here is marriage, and one premise is that, historically speaking, men are in a dominant role. I don't read this suggesting any judgement (good or bad), only that it has, historically, been the case.

Also, corporal punishment was not uncommon (and, sadly, domestic violence is still a serious issue). If if we find (as we will in the proceeding text) a suggestion that corporal punishment, or some facsimile thereof, should be preserved, we have two interpretations that we can proceed with: 1) the poster is a flagrant asshat and is being serious, or 2) comedic irony is about to be employed. To each their own choice, but I'm going with option 2, as I suspect most people would have enough sense to keep assholery to themselves: Occam's Razor suggests the second option.

Zooming out a bit:

> That reminds me of repackaging [...] marriage, [...] as a BDSM kink to make it normal again.

The use of repackaging here means, roughly, "same essence internally, different outward appearance". So we're talking about "repackaging" traditional marriage -- that is, preserving the "traditional" role of men dominating their partner, but under new pretenses.

> [...] as a BDSM kink to make it normal again.

I see that this could be taken as a slight. If we're making it "normal again", that implies its not normal now, which could be taken as a negative judgement toward BDSM. While I can anticipate this interpretation, I think its a stretch, and an uncharitable interpretation.

Regrettably, just about all kinks (and often, sadly, sex itself) is considered taboo. That's the reality of our modern (and historical) views on sex. So a proposal, whether in seriousness or in jest, to make BDSM "normal again" doesn't imply any positive nor negative sentiment towards BDSM.

> You think you’re seeing a woman in a dress, but actually it’s fetish gear showing her submission.

This is the "repackaging" referred to earlier, and the punchline of the joke. The butt of the joke is heterosexual men who would like to dominate their wives.

In the interest of diversity, I suppose OP could have picked any other pair of genders -- for instance, they could have spoken of a woman dominating her husband or wife in the same manner... but the joke wasn't about BDSM in the first place, the joke was about a subset of heterosexual married men, and their penchant for being dicks to their spouses. It's not like there aren't any abusive women, but rather that it would make for a bizarre joke if structured that way: men are usually the aggressors. Humor is essentially the combination of a banal setup with an absurd, unexpected conclusion.

Anyway, that's how I read the original comment, and, aside from the interpretations I rejected as unlikely, I can't think of any other way to read it. If I'm missing something, or you have a different perspective, I would legitimately be interested in hearing it. Thanks in advance!

[Scharkenberg]

General reminder: BDSM does not imply "man dom, woman sub". In fact it doesn't even imply how many people are involved and what their genders are.

Edit: Why am I being downvoted for pointing out something objectively true?

[PenguinCoder]

Why are you asking _why am I getting downvoted _ ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Scharkenberg]

Because I was at -1 after just 10 minutes and no one was engaging in discussion about why what I said would not be correct?

And, please, let's not pretend to be socially inept machines - everyone here chooses to ignore a guideline or two when it's convenient - at least I was looking for actual feedback, as I was sincerely puzzled by the situation.

[sdf4j]

This is hacker news