Watch a bunch of blaxploitation flicks, watch a bunch of Tarantino, start singing along to rap lyrics while alone, etc. I've spent quite a lot of time in the black community, not with activists but with regular people, and in my experience, most black people are capable of interpreting words in context. It's mainly white liberals who can't.

That sounds shittier / more flippant than I intend. LW seems like a good person motivated by good impulses. But true progress will come when we can begin to relax strict rules of decorum, simply treat each other as human beings who respect each other, and interpret words in context.

+1 @1. Dan, is this guy not allowed to reclaim a word for himself, like you did. And why isn't c*** seen as a hidden word anymore.

@2 I think Dan's joking with us because he's busy.

@3 It's more because the letter is fake as fuck.

Thanks for asking the question SJW.
I take Dan's answer to mean that someone (such as you) who cares about others cannot use the n-word even in play.

I consider myself lucky that even being born in Virginia in the early 50s, my parents quickly corrected me when I asked after hearing the word at school. "It's a bad word. Never use it." And I haven't, except to quote someone.

I'm as white as it gets, and I love my black brothers. I am particularly attracted to many of them. I have had a few subs looking to be called the n-word in scene, and so far, I can't let myself go there.

Perhaps other invectives for blacks would work as a compromise.

Hypocrisy alert. I can throw the word faggot around among friends and playmates (but not in public), but it bothers me to hear the n-word thrown around by blacks in public.

Just say nigger. It's not going to kill you. You won't have to turn in your woke card.

Great signoff. But why all the irrelevant background? Her other relationship and her orientation have nothing to do with the question being asked.

@4 Maybe, maybe not, but I've heard people discuss this fantasy before.

n****r

nagger?

This person is a grown man, don't infantilize him. He's asked for this and why is it a problem? He wants to take the power away from that word, mix it all up with the play between he and the LW. If she can't go there, then that is to be respected as well.

This man has issues with self-hatred and image. No self respecting black person wants to engage in "race play".

Um, Google is your friend, white people (or non-black POC). Google articles written from actual black people so that I don't have to come back, yet again, and explain the actual perspective.

Ugh, by actual black people.

@11 Congratulations! You've become the arbiter of everybody else's morality and an armchair psychologist!

Just say it since he already asked you and it's behind closed doors. It shouldn't blemish your standing in polite society.

@11. This guy is an actual black person too and his perspective is what matters here, and he's fine with it.

What @10 @13 said

The hard part here is the emotion he’s requested. I could say the word. But if his kink requires me to feel the emotion required to deliver the message that the word normally carries, I couldn’t handle the cognitive dissonance. That would make me ill. I don’t think we have enough information about him to solve the puzzle.

Not long ago I watch a top whip their bottom until the bottom's torso was bloody. It was hard to watch, but they both had a great time.

SJW and her partner are both seeking the same intensity as the couple I watched play, only using words instead of a whip. The words are meant to sting, but just as kinky people consensually negotiate an intense impact play scene and engage in aftercare, people can consensually engage in humiliation play. Done right it can be hot and fun.

@11

You're right. The white LW should probably use the fact that her black partner disclosed a hidden kink that I'm sure there is some level of shame attached to as an opportunity to tell him how he's supposed to feel about racist terminology.

Maybe she should also educate him on what black writers have to say on the subject and then recommend he go to therapy so he can finally view his race and that slur correctly. That wouldn't be condescending or damaging at all.

@17 and how's that any different from what you're wanting (and getting?) from him?

@20 That's the conversation that's needed.

@20 As much as a double standard as it may be, I think the emotional dynamic of those terms is different. Speaking for myself, while my own aversion and discomfort with misogynistic terms has come with age and maturity, my discomfort with racial slurs, particularly the N bomb, was drilled into me from a very young age.

While using the word in question would ignite a firestorm in public (because you're white and not allowed) anything goes behind closed doors when it's consensual. People are weird as shit, but it's their bodies, and their minds, so choke, hit, bind, whip, kick, bite, piss, shock and lock his dick in a cactus-lined cage if he wants it. You can even call him nigger. There. I wrote it. We all know what the N-word is...it's not polite, but it's just a word. A particularly incendiary word, but just a word. I get the history behind it, I get the reaction that most black people have to it being used by non-blacks, but iron-clad, never to be broken rules about what other people can say or think are ineffective and Orwellian. That being said, I never use it because other people are sensitive to it and they have every right not to want to hear it. For the same reason I don't go around shouting, "Hey, you fucking asshole, your face looks like it was on fire and somebody put it out with a golf shoe!" at the church pianist (even if that may be absolutely true.) But, if an African-American girlfriend asked me to call her that 'cause she gets off on it... I might, but we'd have a long discussion first.

As typical, the whitesplaining sucked. 0/10. Black people actually have different life experiences than you, but you must think we are living in "post racial America.

Ask any expert on the colonized mindset (yes, you condescending people don't know that exists), having someone white yell that word to you is damaging.

This isn't "should I shit on my partner". But thanks for proving how horribly uneducated on "other" issues you actually are.

Can I delete my account now? You can stay clueless.

Lava @15: Applause!
Jade @24: Who says LW lives in America? Now whose privileged assumptions are showing? You are the one who's blacksplaining another black person's preferences. Asserting that all black people think the same way is pretty racist.

Dear SJW,
Here goes a long story. My parents were communists, and I was raised to challenge racist and sexist comments, to the point of telling my kindergarten teacher, in 1952, that _Little Black Sambo_ was "chauvinistic."

At high school in Texas, I became deeply involved in the civil rights movement, working with CORE. One night I was given a ride home, and was the only white person in the car when a brother let the n-word fly. There was instant silence, broken by another person saying: "It's okay; he's a brother."

The moral, if there is one, is that if he wants you to say it, say it, with the understanding that you are both being humiliated at that moment.

Keep fighting the good fight.

Start by saying it in a fake Southern accent—think overacted Blanche du Bois; not Mitch McConnell— forcefully dropping the ‘r’. You'll sound so stupid and embarrassed that it'll break the mood, and you'll both start giggling. That should put an end to it.

@27, Gasper, maybe not. The scenario this kink threw up in my mind could be a southern woman during the years when the n word was freely used, to let the slaves know their place. So much fear about the black man raping the white woman masked the secret, and maybe not so secret, desires of some of the white women, and the rage and jealousy of the white men towards the black man.
A southern woman with one of her slaves, both enjoying each other, then that word defines the power structure, the ownership. This man is working thru his story his way.
Kinks are personal trips, right. And all you guys with your own little no, would ask that others don't judge. That we view kinks in a non judgemental way, each to their own attitude. And some kinks, do stretch one. So why is this so different? Kinks are kinky. Surprise.

Apologies; Gaspar.

First time I've LOLed at a Dan response in a while.

Touché Dan.

But in seriousness, I think she should straight up bring up her troubles with her guy (he's going to find this charming), and maybe there's some nearly-as-bad-slang that she can work herself up to, on her way to the full N-word. I'll resist the urge to give examples.

@24 I'd say it's more kinksplaining. A lot of folks have kinks that do not match up with their actual views. Kinks are deep seeded and I would urge you to educate yourself on the well being of those who engaged in their kinks safely and consensually vs those who do not. Or the damage of any sort of sex shaming, vanilla or kinky.

Furthermore, of course having someone yell a slur at a marginalized person would be damaging. Unless done at the marginalized person request in a sexual context? The nature of ALL sexual activities is that they can be a lot of fun when desired and consensually, but sans desire and consent are horrible.

Tops have limits too! She shouldn't feel like she has to do this if she really doesn't want to, and it doesn't matter whether he has used terms for her that he, or she, or commenters on Slog think are just as bad. If she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to. But if she wants to be GGG, I recommend trying @1's suggestions.

The kink is humiliation. It's difficult for those of us who don't have this kink to understand how anyone would want to be humiliated. But those who have the kink get off on exactly that. Jade is right, being called the n-word is humiliating -- the worst possible humiliation for a person of colour -- and that's exactly why this guy wants it. He's got his Jim Crow fantasies that he wants to live out. I think Compagno @26 makes a good suggestion: SJW obviously also gets off on being humiliated, and if using the n-word is humiliating for her as well, perhaps she could view it as, I dunno, racism topping them both. Or she could have him punish her afterwards for using such an awful word. Or, Nastamer @32 is correct -- if it feels too wrong to her, she can decline.

The fact that the word "nigger" has been granted near-magical powers in this country - it's like "Voldemort" in the Harry Potter books - is a shame for everyone. But when life hands you stupid-ass racist shibboleth lemons, LW, at least you have a chance here to to make kinky lemonade.

I don't care who came up with it--"social justice worrier" is a great sign off.

The problem is not that a sub would hear me say the n-word. It is that I would hear myself say it. I cannot pretend to be something I am not. Because I value my subs, I cannot even try to make them feel worthless. It is not the authentic me.

@18, When I whip a sub intensely, I am releasing my inner sadist on a consenting masochist. I have no inner racist to release. I have my limits as a dom, and that includes things that I consider physically unsafe as well as things that I am not interested in giving. Dan says that kinks should be presented as opportunities and that we should not be ashamed of our kinks. However, a huge part of dominance is doing what You want.

@33/BiDanFan: "Jade is right, being called the n-word is humiliating -- the worst possible humiliation for a person of colour -- and that's exactly why this guy wants it."

I'm going to disagree with this statement based on something I learned in a humiliation play class taught by Midori. Effective humiliation play works, not by undermining the submissives' primary characteristics of their identity, but by reinforcing these primary characteristics, while undermining secondary or tertiary aspects of their identity.

For example, SJW likes to be called "slut," "whore," and "cunt," among other derogatory terms. Let's say that SJW's primary characteristics are her intellect, her sense of worth from her activism, and her ethnic background (i.e., cultural connection to the European nation her family immigrated from). So humiliation play with SJW would work by reinforcing her primary pillars of her self-worth, "You're so smart SJW, and everyone sees when you're organizing other activists. But I also see what a dirty slut you are..."

That SJW's friend is willing to engage in racially charged humiliation play scene suggests that his race isn't the most central part of his self-worth, and that such terms are not the worst possible humiliation for him, because being on the receiving end of the worst possible humiliation for him wouldn't be be erotic or fun even in a humiliation play scene.

The lw says: "I told him I like being called names: bitch, slut, whore, dyke, cunt. I also asked him to spit in my face. He was into all of that."

So what turned her on, also tuned her partner on. It wasn't hard for him to call her those names, because he already was into the idea of having sex with a bitch, slut, whore, dyke, and cunt, and he also found it exciting to be able to call his partner that, because that's simultaneously celebrating and denigrating his partner, and he finds that hot.

But the lw doesn't find calling a black man a "nigger" to be hot--in fact, it upsets her a lot. It's in no way asking the same thing of her that he's giving.

Being ggg doesn't mean forcing yourself to do something you find absolutely abhorrent and she is under no obligation to do or say anything she can't; even if the reason she's trying to is make herself at least as equally happy as she wants to make him, because she's being a good partner. And the reasons she may have for not wanting to say that word don't need to be justified, either.

SA @38: Fair enough. I am in fact projecting; I was mainly addressing Jade's assertion that SJW should not do this because every black person on the planet would find it humiliating. For this particular black person, that's exactly the point.

Thanks Fan. Jade sure got her knickers in a knot. What is that, thinking a whole race has the same way of being. How reductionist is that.
If the LW can't join her lover/ play partner in what he's requesting, then why did she write in? Just say no. The whole world would understand. She wanted Dan's take on the dynamic, which wasn't very helpful, and to perhaps explore her ambivalence about this play.
If it's a straight out no, then she needs to go with that.
If a mixture of other emotions/ desires, then talk it thru with the man. He is an adult, he is an individual, he can talk and text.

SJW: Watch the entirety of The Boondocks and start listening to and singing along with 90s/00s hip hop. If you don't have the opposite problem of your filter being completely broken after that, there's probably nothing to be done.

@jadegreengirl #11/24: Shockingly to some (and apparently even some of you who are Black), Black people are not a monolithic group with homogeneous opinions! You do not speak for all Black people, not even all liberal or Leftist or "woke" (quote marks because I'm quoting a self-descriptor that I actually think is inappropriate for me to use except as a direct quotation, not to suggest that I think the concept is illigitimate) or anti-racist or whatever subgroup of Black people. There's been a disturbing narcissistic/authoritarian trend in supposedly Leftist circles gaining traction in the last decade that you are exhibiting here - Dan and Buck Angel tackled the trans activist version on the podcast a week or two ago - where a non-representative subgroup (or even a single person) universalizes and essentializes its (zir) own views, often erasing as much as a majority of the community for which it (ze) purports to speak in the process. By all means, I encourage you (not that you need or even desire my encouragement, clearly) to argue your positions as your own positions, informed by the experience of living as (in this case) a Black person, but do not project your views onto other people who disagree with you by falsely claiming you represent a consensus.

In case your flounce was feigned and you're interested in challenging your current perspective (or in case others are interested in the issue), you may want to start with some of these pieces grappling with what is a very messy set of questions about language, identity, activism, and community norms:

http://www.ravishly.com/2015/02/05/how-m…

https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/…

http://feministing.com/2015/04/23/words-…

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/…

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/17/come…

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/racec…

https://www.thenation.com/article/femini…

Lava @41: Not only did Jade assume the LW was American, she also assumed that everyone who commented is white. Wrong: at least one commenter is mixed race.

I think SJW wrote in because she wants to find a way to satisfy her lover and wondered if Magic Dan with the magic sex advice had any tips. Sadly, none this time.

Wasn't there a German recently who was reluctant to participate in a Nazi scenario? Or something along those lines.

Yes Fan, there was a nazi scenario fantasy letter. The details I don't recall.
Two consensual adults can work this stuff out. And if they can't, then perhaps let the play go.

" in case your flounce was feigned,"
John @42 great phrase, in an excellent post. Women pull each other up on that all the time. There is no universal life experience, sharing honestly is what keeps the movement bubbling along.

#38 Sublime: thanks for breaking down those important subtleties.

#11 Jade: "This man has issues with self-hatred and image. No self respecting black person wants to engage in "race play"."

Let's say I'm a feminist woman whose kink is humiliation via language like slut/cunt/whore/bitch. Does it follow that "no self respecting feminist person wants to engage in "misogyny play"?

What is kink if not consensual play with the boundaries of what's acceptable or even moral in civil society? Fetishes come in all shapes, sizes, colors and flavors. It seems like what was once traumatizing can become fetishized behind closed doors. We are sometimes drawn sexually to that which repels us cognitively. I abhor actual torture but adore BDSM play. My blood boils when some rando calls a woman 'slut', but my juice flows when a lover calls ME slut during kinky time. Go figure.

Diff'rent Strokes.

@47: Yes.

@48 And?

@49: And nothing, except to say I agree with a lot of what Spidieweed wrote @47. Many of us have kinks in which we like to be treated or called names which are the exact opposite of the way we want to be treated in all other aspects of our lives.

That's all I meant. If the comments had a "like" button, I'd have clicked on it.

Okay, thanks for clarifying. I was kind of wondering if your "Yes" was answering this rhetorical question (the one and only question in the comment that could have a yes/no answer):

Does it follow that "no self respecting feminist person wants to engage in "misogyny play"?