So I asked a person this question tonight: "what do you call a person in a relationship who is neither Dominant nor Submissive, neither Switch nor Vanilla?"
It was, of course, a variation on an old ontological theme. "What is one who is neither self nor non-self, neither both self and non-self nor otherness from self and non-self?" However, instead of a simple being, my question was geared towards a being in a relationship with an other.
But she didn't see that. She looked at it from the BDSM perspective and found that I had excluded "all" possibilities and answered that this person is masturbating. I do give her some credit, because she had half of the answer correct. True, that person is alone, but not in a relationship with only self.
There is no alterity without ipseity. You can't be in a relationship with someone else if you are not first and foremost naked and alone with and as your self. There is no 'selfness' without 'otherness'. It's the paradox that love is active strength because of its passive vulnerability: active and passive at the same time. Forgiveness as the secret of invincibility.
The firey water.
The circle squared.
Paradox.
Or, as Éliphas Lévi would put it, "harmony results by the analogy of opposites."
Eh. The old BDSM terms are like most technical jargons - Good only for the "initiated" who are transmitting information to others of similiar "initiation". It's all just insider code-speak imonsho.
You call it primal. Or kinkster .
You don't have to decide if a role.
on any given moment, the label i would use could change.
"harmony results by the analogy of opposites."
i fully agree, especially if the analogy and the anti-analogy of opposites is included in the set of opposites.