Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Yes, My Lady: Strategic BDSM

I want to encourage practitioners of bondage and discipline (BD), dominance and submission (DS), fetishism, and sadomasochism (SM) to think about why you engage in sex acts called BD, DS, fetishism and SM. If you are new to sadomasochistic, queer practices and the BDSM community, don't fret, this discussion stills apply to you. However, I have found in My ten years of domination and submission that the people in most need of examination of their acts are seasoned players. It has been My experience that while most novices thoroughly ponder and explore as much as the "why" as "how" of BDSM, many experienced players lose interest in the exploration of why they practice BDSM somewhere along the journey. Be it from repetition or burnout, they forget or lose interest that BDSM is a constant journey, not a destination.



Strategic BDSM asks an unusually clear and direct question about BD, DS, SM, and fetishism: Why? BDSM, or more appropriately the desire behind BDSM, is typically regarded by practitioners as instinctual, often unconscious, a force from the id and libido. However, as a lifestyle Switch and Professional Dominant, I do not operate this way. I prefer My sexual acts to lead, not be led by some blind force such as the id or libido. I think incessantly about BDSM: before, during, and after, especially after. I strive to examine why BDSM is powerful, what values I am projecting to make BDSM powerful, and why other players believe BDSM to be powerful. I not only strive to keep BDSM's power intact, but I also strive to use BDSM's power.



The most important thing we can produce while examining and engaging in BDSM is knowledge about BDSM's potential and effects. BDSM, after all, is one of the most imaginative ways of harnessing and putting to work the energy and power of sex. Mine is sex with a purpose, sex with direction: strategic BDSM.



Describing the attendance of Mike's first public play party, "Playing, no, the playspace, was like this big magnet. It was like the scenes had some form of control over me, but it was this weird kind of control -- I didn't feel violated, just pulled. I wanted to go away with something tangible, but the scene offered nothing material. I didn't want my yearning to end. I could see and feel the players' energy. I didn't play that night, I promised myself I wouldn't, but I got to see, no, to experience, something that I never have before."



Dialogue, critique, sharing of discoveries, and the passing on of BDSM history require a public forum. One-to-one communication behind closed bedroom or dungeon doors is the least effective method of disseminating information, building skills, or sharing ideas. Hence, a great deal of strategic BDSM is happening right here, right now, between you, the reader, and Me, the author: public BDSM. We must continue to use the resources such as the Internet to discover and promote the powerful influence of BDSM when it goes beyond closed doors. You will learn how to be, where and how to play in chatrooms, through hotlines, guides, invitations, advertisements, listings, and web pages, passed hand-to-mouth. For the seasoned player, these interactions constantly change you, renegotiating who you are and how you play.



Strategic BDSM does not offer writing about BDSM so much as it shows writing as sex--the cause for censorship among social convention and many US lawmakers. Those who support the censorship of sex, BDSM, and public displays of such acts, view writing about BDSM as sex, as something dangerous if expressed publicly. You may not wish to accept how others define your BDSM, but as this column will show you, you are playing with a force that often knows its own power by how threatened people are by it.



Public BDSM, like public sex, is often dismissed and censored as a perversion with shallow, selfish motives. To leave the analysis there belies the great anxiety, the sex panic, public BDSM arouses in our culture, which fears the body, power, and sex. We would lose the important analysis of how class, race, gender, and privilege inflect the definition, maintenance, and even challenge of social boundaries of proper/improper.



Ours is a pleasure that requires a collective space. The presence of a willing and knowing audience makes our relationships and us visible to others. Public BDSM spaces maneuver players into something other than our other public identities. The public playspace, the dungeon, the alley, the leather bar, the sex club, Folsom Street Fair, is an asset, an accumulation of techniques and scenarios. We are all apprentices to the space. Our fetishes, our toys are fields of possibilities among bodies, hands, and holes.



BDSM does not make us whole but we make each other the scene on which the practices particular to our BDSM spaces are enacted. Many look for sex and BDSM to be the expression of their fullest being. I question, Is pleasure a sign of your privacy and self-possession? Or rather, Is privacy and self-possession a sign of your pleasure? The public BDSM space will expose and see you and your values. Do not think you can use the space of BDSM without being changed by it.



I become different every time I engage in public BDSM. By doing, I make future BDSM encounters possible. I would like to think that I mark the space as much as the space alters me, but I know better. My Western upbringing attempts to push the individual as all-powerful and all knowing. It is through public BDSM that I learn better.



Public display of private realities disseminates information and facilitates change. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Public BDSM is community building and social reimagining. Like private BDSM, public BDSM is thrilling and depressing, paradoxical and contradictory. Like this column, boundaries are blurred and definitions are messy in public BDSM. Strategic BDSM is about questioning, thinking, and exploring. I will not provide you definitive answers or pronouncements. Rather than resolve, I hope to deepen the journey of BDSM, and, in so doing, inspire more exploration, thought, and discussion. And more BDSM.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

super nice.