A shirtless man with money in the back pocket of his pants holds a gun against the chest of a naked man chained to a bed.
Playing with power dynamics is sexy—the more extreme the power disparity, the sexier play can be. Guns, which instantly bring to mind the balance of life or death, are therefore tools of immense power and, consequently, unsurprisingly common in fantasies involving power exchange.
When consensual and acted upon with aware intent, creating power disparities—binaries in which one person has all the power and another person has none—can be a lot of fun. However, when such disparities are implicitly built into social codes of conduct, they are devastating. The binaries enforced by implicit authority are at the root of sexism (man/woman), ageism (young/old), racism (black/white), classist behavior (rich/poor), and other such prejudices.
For the record, those who play with such extreme power therefore need to do so with incredible responsibility, and I know of no gunplay scene that has ever involved a real firearm.
(via loveboom)
