Published in the July 2009 “Force” issue of the alt.sex webzine, Filthy Gorgeous Things. In 2010, this won the Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award from the National Leather Association-International.
The bite of a cane, inescapable captivity, a new identity. What do these things mean to you? At the heart of BDSM eroticism are mysteries inside of mysteries which make those of us who were born kinky find those things, and many many more, irresistibly, passionately exciting.
Perhaps that’s the hardest aspect of BDSM to explain to the larger non-kinky world. BDSM can be an in-your-face kind of sexuality because some of the toys and outfits are flamboyantly strange. Thanks to global media, today’s image of a BDSMer trades in stereotypes as broad as the Village People: latex dresses, whips, chains, and slave collars. In the popular imagination, these kinky accouterments define what BDSM is about.
It’s not. While sadomasochistic impulses are literally as old as humanity, the accessories constantly change. What does, however, eternally resonate with millions of people throughout the world, is the underlying emotional experience of BDSM and fetish sex. If I had to distill that emotional experience into just one word, it’s “transformation.” It would take a book to catalogue all the different ways transformations occur for BDSMers (and possibly a second one to detail fetishistic transformations). But to keep it brief, I’ll break it out in three very basic categories of BDSM play.
Transformational Pain
Most people can’t get past the idea that SMers enjoy giving and receiving pain. Generally speaking, sadomasochists feel pain the way everyone else does. But we also know that not all pain is equal. We draw a dividing line between pain that makes us unhappy (like having a root canal or getting punched by a stranger) and pain that rewards us with excitement and visceral satisfaction. For BDSMers, pain isn’t just about pain, but where pain can take you.
Some crave pain as a form of expiation which relieves of stress or guilt. For some, it’s a shock to the system that wakes them up and makes them feel more alive. No time to think about a fight you had last week when a needle is piercing your nipple. The intense focus and concentration needed to endure pain are both draining and liberating: some people walk away feeling as if they’ve been on a mental vacation from their worldly woes and can revel in the afterglow for days, even weeks. I’ve known people who view pain as an endurance contest, a sober, invigorating test of courage whose pay-off is the sense of personal triumph. I’ve known many who just think spankings and whippings are fun, and feel happier, lighter, connecting with a more playful and child-like side of themselves.
For sexual submissives, pain blasts open doors to psychological surrender. Consenting to pain means the submissive accepts that the dominant has special rights and powers over the submissive’s body. Acting out the rituals of pain are, in a sense, object lessons in dominance and submission. Pain play is also an exercise in trust: to make yourself completely vulnerable or, conversely, to accept full responsibility for the trust you’ve been given, is an ultimate form of intimacy that cements the emotional bonds between partners:
At its darkest and most intense, people may explore the edges of pain uniquely for the intense biological rushes. The brain releases intoxicating flushes of natural opiates and adrenalin to remedy pain and even casual players relish the high of those natural chemicals. But those who explore the edges learn to ride the surges with skill and grace, sometimes all the way to euphoria.
Transformational Restraint
The paradox at the heart of consensual bondage is that restraint and captivity are mentally liberating experiences. In the act of bondage, normally shy, inhibited individuals may transform into intensely sexual creatures, writhing with pleasure. One may speculate that it is a survival mechanism for the mind to go into repose when you turn over control to another. During consensual bondage, a state of full-body relaxation sets in. People raised to believe that sex is sinful or dirty may become euphoric in restraints: they no longer have to choose — they are “forced” to accept all the wonderfully intense sensations their partner wants to give them. They are free of their inhibitions.
While bondage is most commonly enjoyed for the sake of intensifying sexual pleasure, many BDSMers take it far beyond its immediate sexual thrills. The ritual of binding or being bound is a form of living art for some people: they use ropes to transform a body into an object of transcendent beauty (especially true of the Japanese bondage techniques of Shibari). Bondage has become increasingly popular as a means of personal and spiritual exploration as well. By placing the body in extreme bondage (such as mummification or suspension), people report metaphysical, out-of-body experiences, as deep and as calming as hypnosis or time in a sensory deprivation tank. For those who are spiritually inclined, the bondage experience is a voyage through the body that takes you beyond the body and into the realm of spirit, magic, and connectedness with the divine.
Transformational Roles
Though BDSMers are collectively associated with pain and bondage, it is the power of the BDSM imagination that offers the most intensely visceral, soul-deep transformations. Depending on the fetish or kink, pain or bondage are optional, even irrelevant. The real drive is to transcend one’s routine life and escape into an altered, and more emotionally naked, state of being.
The most obvious and best-known example of radical transformation is genderplay such as cross-dressing or exploring gender roles (butch, femme, etc.). But innumerable fetishes and flavors of kink depend on the partners’ ability to step into roles.
This includes infantilism or ageplay (in which one partner takes the role of an infant or child) and animal fantasies (in which one or more partners acts like a pony, a dog or puppy, a cat or kitten, etc.) It may happen in Daddy/boy/boi relationships (in which the submissive partner is mentored, protected and controlled), and scores of other fetishes and scenarios are predicated on the emotional needs to become something and someone else, even if only for a limited time.
Master/slave (and Mistress/slave) relationships trade in transformations. The powerful person at work or home who transforms into an abject slave in the dungeon; the ordinary people who become all-powerful Masters when they step into their fetish clothes or hold whips in their hands. And everyone in between who engage in, play with and delight in stepping outside of ordinary constraints into private universes of passion and pleasure.
The next time you read about or see a BDSM activity, try to remember this. It is not just what BDSMers do to each other: it’s all about where their journey will lead. For most of us, the destination is ecstasy.
@copyright 2009, 2019, Gloria G. Brame
Special thanks to colleague and author Vincent Andrews
for digging this out of the NLA Archives!!