Now, we are going to go back to my first point, that while sexual feelings (according to my definition) do play a role in BDSM for me, they are a minor factor compared to others. My three strongest interests my love of playing dress up and make-believe, my obsession with violence, and my fascination with spiritual seeking and altered states of consciousness.
In the first case, I have loved to put on a costume and step into a role my entire life. The role-play may have sexual aspects of it may just be for the enjoyment of exercising my creativity and being someone different for a while. But, by this, I don’t mean that my mistress persona is “just an act” I put on to placate my clients. When I speak of stepping into a role, I mean that I go so deeply into the role mentally and emotionally that it becomes real for me. I think of it like a Pagan religious concept known as aspecting, where you call down a being with the qualities you desire, be it a deity, and animal spirit, or something else, and take the essence of that being into yourself to manifest their qualities. I think of myself as aspecting my dominant persona to manifest the best and most powerful self I can be.
There can also be a more serious side to the role play, as indicated by my analogy to aspecting. I do believe that BDSM can promote altered states of consciousness and, as such, it can be a spiritual experience. I do view himself as the High Priestess, the facilitator. The idea of the God sacrificing himself to the Goddess and suffering to exalt Her, is a very common archetype in many mythologies and is played out in miniature in almost every session. For me, spirituality is all about archetypes. They are what triggers your mind and body to shift from what is called ordinary state of consciousness to the ritual or shamanic state of consciousness, and BDSM, at least the way I like to do it, is totally laden with ritual. The dominatrix’s fetish attire is like ritual clothing, her stylized behavior, the dungeon setting, the elaborate tools, the submissive’s formalized gestures or obeisance all become symbolic and help the shift to a higher state of consciousness.
I can also see parallels with the vision quest or cave birth where the initiate is isolated in a darkened chamber where they may undergo physical pain, like piercing, tattooing, or scarification, or be deprived of necessities like food, water, and sleep in order to open the mind to higher things. Sometimes they were even bound to help detach the mind from physical body and simulate a womb like atmosphere. The goal was often to completely destroy the initiate’s ego or sense of self so that they could be reborn as something better (often trading a child’s identity for an adult’s or the identity of an ordinary person for one who has a special calling, like a warrior or a priest). Emerging from the chamber was like coming out of the womb, reborn into their new identity. In BDSM, the client enters a dark chamber, in which their sense of self is broken down through humiliation and depersonalization, physical suffering, and/or sensory deprivation. I’m not saying that every sense reaches this kind of mystical level, but the possibility does exist and that is intriguing to me.
The final appeal BDSM holds for me, stems from the fact that I am a very aggressive and violent person. Oh, you wouldn’t be able to tell now. Aggression is extremely frowned upon in society, especially in women, so I’ve spent years learning to repress it, so I could survive in the “real world” without even fully realizing I was doing it. Recently, I’ve become aware that I’ve gotten so far away from the real me that I hardly know myself any more and my journey into BDSM is, in many ways, a quest to try to unearth my real identity again.
I like to imagine myself as a warrior, strong, fierce, and iron willed. Like the time, in middle school when a bunch of girls I didn’t like cornered me against a wall and stuck me with thumb tacks. I didn’t flinch, but just stared them down icily until they backed off. But I’ve never been one to just sit there and take it. I’ve always been very in-your face about my beliefs, no matter how offensive they are to others. In high school it always made me very angry when girls would brag loudly about how many guys they’d been with with no concern for how this would effect people who couldn’t help overhearing them (such as my friends and I) who had a number of zero. To silence them, I would tell them they were whores to their faces and, when they objected, I would say, “Oh, you’re right. You can’t be a whore because you don’t get paid for what you give. But that doesn’t make you pure, just stupid.” One girl, I mocked and humiliated until she burst into tears.
I’ve also been told I pick fights. I’ve never done this physically because I’ve always known there are real world consequences for physical violence. But I certainly have no qualms and rather enjoy beating people down verbally and emotionally, like the above situation. And, just because I’m generally not able to ACT on my physically aggression doesn’t meant I don’t have it. I tend to have fantasies about torturing or brutally killing people who piss me off. The best friendship of my life was with a girl I met in college who turned out to have similar revenge type fantasies. We would even play a game where we took turns writing down a couple sentences of a torture scene and then passing the paper to the other who had to try to top our brutality.
I also loved to engage in physical violence whenever I could find at, at least semi-, socially sanctioned venue for it. I liked to do violent things with my friends, like having mock duals, which were basically just an excuse to beat each other with fairly substantial branches. We also played war games about reconnaissance in enemy territory that involved sneaking through the undergrowth and springing out on the others or chasing after them and trying to wrestle them to the ground. By the time I was in high school, most of my friends were guys and, as is fairly normal among teenage guys, their vocabulary included a great deal of punching, shoving, and wresting, in which I participated as fully as they would allow.
But this is where things start getting complicated again, because my violent interactions with some of these guys were sexual. It turns out that sexual desire for me is fueled by competition and aggression, not competing with another girl over a guy, that actually turns me off, but competing with the guy himself to prove who is better. I like to think of myself like Brynhilda: I won’t take an interest in a guy unless he proves his worth by taking me on, be it physically, mentally, or in a battle of wills. I met my partner because we got in a huge fight about sex and religion in our college dining hall and it was the fact that we were arguing that made him so attractive to me. I always liked guys who make me angry but, sadly, most of them didn’t like me back. Being on the receiving end of my anger is not a pretty thing and very few are men enough to take it.
A big attraction of BDSM for me is that it allows me a safe place where I am free to explore my violent fantasies. Just because you imagine yourself as a heroic fighter and want to stab someone, it doesn’t mean you’re actually going to commit murder. You can repress your fantasy, or you can do it in a scene with a retractable knife. Take a while guess which I would rather do.
So, what it comes down to is that, if you want to argue BDSM is or isn’t about sex, I’d have to ask you how you are defining sex. If, for you, sex is about physical pleasure, arousal, orgasm, than, no, it doesn’t have to be about sex and it isn’t for me. But, if you think sex includes things like decadence and sensuality, imaginative fantasy, and “natural highs” produced by your emotions, well, then you are working with a much broader pallet and that’s a different story.
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