Laugh At Your Fetishes, It May Do You Some Good.

Lord knows that I need a smack in the mouth to jump-start my libido as much as the next eyeliner painted masochist clad entirely in black. I will engage in ritualistic practice of protocols and write adjective-laden poetry about it. I will practise a detailed, overly-enthusiastic form of power exchange with gusto. I will kneel and say thank you for any number of things that shouldn’t really be considered a privilege. I will follow a set of rules and even dress in things that I don’t necessarily want to wear to please someone else. I’ll play with sharp edges, sharp words, sharp instruments, the whole nine. I will outline the value of communication and risk awareness to have the most functional form of dirty, weird love that you can but there is one thing that I find matters more than all of it to have good, functional d/s or m/s.

You gotta laugh at yourselves a lot.

A few weeks ago my partner was attempting to bind my wrists against the bedframe and he missed a loop, I slid my hands out when he stepped out of the room to get something. When he did it again, it happened again. I slid them out again. He did it again. It happened again. It ended it a fit of laughter with us rolling around the bed unable to control ourselves. Ultimately he told me just grab the frame.

“That’s a much better display of my ultra domliness,” he said, “Don’t even need rope, I’m that good.”

It took a few minutes into being hit in the face for me to suppress my giggles. It took longer for him. That happens a lot. Sometimes it is because the handcuffs break and hit me in the face. Sometimes it is because I was sweating onto the table and it made a funny squealing noise when I moved against it. Sometimes a curtain rod comes crashing down. Sometimes the cat decides to play with the flogger mid-play. Sometimes the cat decides it really wants to know what I am sucking out of his cock. It’s funny, we laugh.

But that is circumstantial laughter.

Sometimes we poke fun at our own rituals. I mean, think about it, without context a lot of things we take so seriously as practitioners of a sexual fetish seem like satire writing itself. It’s ridiculous how much I can talk about kneeling and how many heartfelt pieces I can find about it. It’s crazy when I tell him he owns my body, does that mean he has to have a waste disposal department for the management of my body? It’s crazy how seriously we take not following certain standard instructions. As if the world will end if I don’t polish his shoes or stand up when he enters a room. We know nothing will happen but we are invested in the illusion of the power structure between us so we support our own delusions.

We also challenge them. We challenge them by doing over-the-top imitations of each other’s submissive/dominant behaviours. I poke fun at him for using his sadism to do the same thing driving a giant, gas-guzzling truck does for the ego of a person. He pokes fun at me for approaching every little action with the intensity only really required to deal with death. We poke fun at how seriously we are both willing to take our sexual fetishes and the seemingly full-of-shit things . It’s all in good fun.

But it serves a greater purpose.

I would never deny that an individual’s sexuality is part of the path to self-awareness. I truly believe that rampant and elaborate indulgence in one’s sexual inclinations is among both the greatest pleasures and the greatest intellectual experiences in life. That being said, in the kink community, unlike most other places, the indulgence in the image of the sexuality over the actual experience leads to the creation of a strange cult of personality that makes you invest less and less in other parts of your character because it seems like being an edgy, whip-wielder is all the personality one needs. There is a limit to how seriously one must take the practise of their sexuality. There is a point at which these discussions about proper protocols and the importance of upward facing palms (someone explain that one to me, actually) go so far that one might lose perspective on what really matters when it comes to sexual engagement. There is a point at which they start seeming important enough to compromise on your relationship with your partner and your community.

I don’t ever want to be in that place.

I understand the allure of this world. I really do. It’s sexy, it’s edgy and before you are accepted into it, it can seem so much more glamorous than it actually is. Being sexually inclined to BDSM and the social experience of the community are two very different things, and it is the latter that makes one more likely to abandon authenticity in the interest of being right/accepted into the community. “In the community” it often feels like people are always taking about big important things that they have done and the big, important people that they are. There always seems to be a right thing, a right way, a right approach to weird questions like ‘\*what is the true meaning of punishment\*. And it’s all well and good to discuss whatever, but when we become so invested in our answers that we forget it’s perversion and not a cure to cancer we discuss, it’s no fun to ruminate anymore. After all, it doesn’t make me cooler or better than anyone if I wanna be punched in the face to get wet. It’s interesting to consider why, but it doesn’t make me bigger or smaller to want that. My sexuality is, in that sense, not sacred. My word is not law even for myself. We’re all just weird, normal people doing people things.

So laugh a little.

Laugh at how funny it is that we sometimes write detailed contracts and get turned on while doing so. Laugh at how often a sexy idea only leads to a giant mess and no orgasms. Laugh at how many rules it sometimes takes for two people to be able to fuck. Laugh at the fact that I once got hit in the gut for looking at the wrong part of the wall and at the time we both thought it was super hot. Laugh at the strange words you say in the heat of passion and how strange “my sexy farm animal” sounds out of context. Laugh at the fact that I once stopped my partner mid-beating because he called me his pet and it made me cry to think about people beating their pets. Laugh because it reminds us that the fundamental reason we do any of this is because it brings us joy and pleasure.

Laugh. It’ll do your kink some good.