One of the most commonly asked questions of slaves in Master-slave relationships is: ‘If your master asked you to jump off a cliff, would you?’ Judges even asked it of contestants for the International Master/Slave title in February 2005 in Dallas. The question is an excellent example of sophistry. Regardless of the answer, the asker gets to criticize the slave.
Slaves who answer ‘yes’ are condemned as fools who would sacrifice their lives for an absurd ideal of slave perfection. Those who answer ‘no’ are told that they are not ‘real slaves’ because they are unwilling to sacrifice their lives to prove the reality of their slavery.
The question is also an excellent illustration of how people who purport to be SM still judge people based on vanilla questions, questions they often learned from their parents at an early age. Regardless of how active or sincere their interests in SM are, they still view the world through a vanilla value system and judge people accordingly. Hence, there must be something wrong with people who go too far or take their relationships too seriously.
Few children escape being asked, ‘if so-and-so jumped off a cliff, would you?’ Clever children reply with ‘only if I had a parachute’ or some similar rejoinder. Virtually all children recognize the unfairness of the question. Afterall, they were not asking about jumping off cliffs, or probably anything dangerous. The situation and comparison are simply absurd. At least, though, children have some context. They asked to go to the movies because their friends were, and their parents responded with some nonsense about cliffs and suicide. Slaves in M/S relationships are not provided with any context, merely handed a situation in which the only way to demonstrate their commitment to their M/S relationship is to to end that relationship by killing themselves.
Those who ask this question of slaves, apparently in an effort to prove their cleverness, actually reveal their vanilla mindset. They fail to understand the basic dynamics and structure of master-slave relationships. A master-slave relationship is not a suicide pact, nor is it something easily explained. Entering into a Master-slave relationship requires a substantial remapping of one’s world view and a rethinking of the often trite truisms with which we were raised.
Much as common SM play inverts many social norms, making pain and humiliation something to be enjoyed or reveled in, master-slave relationships invert many of the norms of vanilla relationships. Many who engage in SM play seek extremes and explore physical and psychological limits. Members of M/S relationships explore some of the same places, but many different ones, and they make these explorations part of their everyday lives.
The people who ask the ‘would you jump off a cliff’ question claim to seek a better understanding of these relationships and their limits, but this question is so limited and constrained that it can only lead to familiar ground and conclusions. It is an intellectual dead end that closes rather than opens debate. This, of course, was one of the problems of the original Sophists. While purporting to be searching for truth and pretending to a sort of intellectual sophistication, they simply ran their highly-developed minds in circles and arrived nowhere.
Steve Vakesh, 2005