Ownership in O&P

Posted by Tanos on Fri 4 Dec 09, 11:54 PM

Tags: o_and_p

Today I've posted threads about Ownership on the O&P groups on on Informed Consent, on TSR, and on Fetlife.

For reference, here is the OP of those threads:

Tanos wrote:
This is the last of these weekly threads about the ten keywords in the O&P Manifesto, and we've finally reached Ownership. If Possession is there in the name "O&P" to include the D/s relationships, then Ownership is there for the M/s ones.
Possession may be limited in time or scope, but Ownership is the enduring and veto-less form of possession, in which possession has been maintained long enough and deep enough that it has become ingrained, resulting in the enslavement of the submissive, as a slave.
One useful analogy is with land: in many jurisdictions, if you possess land for long enough without objections from the owner or being evicted by your neighbours, then you become the new legal owner, as the land has clearly become yours in practice by then. In a similar way, everyone that matters - ie the two people themselves - can become convinced that the master owns the slave, and this conviction removes the option of denying the masters authority. That isn't to say that these slaves always obey perfectly, but that they do always acknowledge the right the master has to expect obedience.
(If you're familiar with Internal Enslavement, this is a restatement of IE in terms of possession and ownership.)
However, Ownership is not in any way meant as the right way to do O&P, and O&P as a name is meant to be a "Big Tent" that can accomodate the whole range of D/s and M/s relationships that have the basic qualities of asymmetry and inequality that are set out in the manifesto under Possession itself. "O&P" doesn't mean the "ownership of possessions" or "Owner/possession". If Ownership wasn't one type of Possession, the name could have been "Ownership OR Possession".

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