The Problem With Photo-Friendly BDSM.

Construct is everything to me when it comes to kink. I realised that twelve-years ago when I planned my first “formal” scene with a man who had been “practising BDSM” for a decade. He insisted that the fact that I had been getting beaten up and indulging in “informal” power exchange for years wasn’t real. The scene I had with this guy was shit.

The entire discussion we had was about a list of things he wanted to do to me and the implements he needed to use to do them. He told me in detail about the way in which he would humiliate me (and established why I should feel humiliated by that), he asked me to choose a word that he should use to humiliate me and he told me how I should dress. It was tedious. When we played, it felt like he was checking the boxes in his head about exactly what had to happen for it to constitute BDSM.

He pulled out as many toys as possible, and it felt like he wanted to show me just how many he had. Strange motivation, especially since literally everything in the world can be used to cause pain if you try hard enough. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not disparaging negotiation. Negotiation is a great thing and its intention is to keep everyone safe, compatible and satisfied. A lot of the questions and details I listed above could very well come up in a negotiation, but there is a distinction between that and what I am talking about.

Negotiation is a tool of safety and sanity. What I am talking about is a very specific phenomenon I have noticed in kinky people wherein to truly qualify as kink, things have to look a certain way and involve as much equipment and dress up as possible. As much ritual and protocol as possible. As many honorifics. There is a distinct group of people who have to check every box and do everything a certain way for them to feel like this is kink. The real problem with that is that it’s fucking boring. Some of them are just idiots with a lot of toys, who may convince you that without all of the equipment and methodology what you are doing is not really kink.

Without the latex outfits or the bruises on your skin you haven’t really experienced “real” BDSM. I call bullshit on this nonsense really. Real “BDSM” is often just photo-friendly BDSM. I don’t care for that shit, because I love constructs, and you cannot photograph a construct. You must understand it. Develop it. Explore it. Again, nothing wrong with photography in general, god knows I love looking at people all beat up and desperate, it just doesn’t feel like a good goal.

What I mean by constructs is a framework within which your interaction with another person is rooted. Ten years ago, on vacation, I met a man who made me realise exactly what I meant by the term. We met in a bar and we spent the entire evening talking about our lives and the world. Before we hooked up he told me what he was into and I told him what I was into, and we came to the decision that we would spend the week together in a daddy-daughter set-up. That was a construct.

We established roles we were taking on with one another, and while the roles were short-lived because upon the end of the week we were both returning to our own countries, they gave us both structure and the room to explore within that structure. Except for the one weird thing he tried to do to me (which he stopped as soon as I said I didn’t like it), we had a great time together. I think of him, in retrospect, as a father I wore for a week, and not as the guy who peed on me for a week. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with activity-based interaction, one can certainly meet up for an afternoon of rope and cuddles and have that be as bereft of roles as is possible, and I have no right to say my method of doing things is any better than theirs, but i cannot do that. It doesn’t spur any eroticism for me.

For me the eroticism of kink is about knowing who I am, and who you are, and who we are with regard to one another. It’s impossible to describe it as a physical manifestation or as activities we do together. For instance the role I take in my relationship with my husband, that’s the construct, what you could call a dynamic as well, I suppose. It’s not entirely real, it’s built on our understanding of the roles we take with one another, and it governs the nature of our communication with one another. That I am his slave is the kink to me, not that he whips me and tramples me under his feet. Those are things we do. That I long to serve and pleasure him is the kink, not the act of sucking his dick for an hour.

That I feel a sense of objectified inferiority with regard to him even when I am just seated beside him typing away on my phone is where the eroticism comes from, not the bruises I wear on my skin 24-hours after he is done with me. Within the construct we embody, we can do many things, and often they are things that make no sense to anyone else.

Like, recently in a scene with another person he shamed me for being unexpressive person, he brandished to me the face of another, much more responsive woman, while he hit her, and told me how it felt like he was with an actual human person. That doesn’t make sense outside of our dynamic, it doesn’t even seem like a humiliating thing on the face of it. It only makes sense to us, because we know that he spent years training me to be as quiet, lifeless and stoic as possible while he beats me, and then he makes me feel inadequate for it, and it hurts because he he made me feel like he doesn’t like what he taught me to be. That cannot make sense outside a construct.

That’s where I find all the kink in the world. In the narrative that develops between two (or more) people within a construct where everyone knows where they stand. That moment between us, that couldn’t have been photographed, there were no beautiful clothes and no marks on my skin. There were no toys to brandish and no leather anywhere in sight. It was a moment, enabled by the roles we take on with one another and all the history within those roles. It isn’t possible to create that nor plan it at all. It cannot be put on a checklist, it only comes by within the power dynamic and the room to explore it.

I love constructs. They’re everything to me when it comes to kink. Without them, it’s just a series of toys that look great in a picture.