Intensity and Escalation As Risk Factors For BDSM.

The first time I engaged in prolonged confinement, it changed everything about how I view BDSM. In a seven-day phase of continuous adherence to a boot-camp version of my dynamic with my then-partner, I lost my entire damn mind. It was the first instance of severe escalation in style. Until then, it started with scene-based play, an hour or two, then morphed into longer and longer scenes, and finally it attained a rigour that meant I had to give so much of myself in order to get to the pleasure I was seeking. Intensity is a wonderful thing, it’s the splash of vinegar missing in a dish, the ethos in an impassioned speech, but it is also, terribly addictive. Intensity, as I see it, appears to be a personality trait, if you are the kind of person who seeks it, you tend to seek it constantly and in every sphere of your life.

For instance, it’s not just within BDSM that I seek intensity. It’s in everything. I do my job with the constant, drunken fervour that makes people wary of working with me. I write with an obsession that means sometimes I forget the hours, days and weeks, I forget meals and family, I become so immersed, the things I am writing become my entire life. I form relationships at an uncomfortable pace, the kind that the entire world would deem a red-flag; I cannot like, I have to love. Even habits like swimming or yoga, I approach with the mindset of doing to the point where they are life-changing, where they shake me. I talk about things, like music and the waste management practises in my hometown, with a vigour that makes people look at me like they’re questioning my sanity. I cry at everything. I cry when I am talking about grammar, about paradoxes, about life cycles, about every concept that I understand and everything in the world that seems marvellous. It’s not positivity, it’s because a little bit feels like nothing, it feels like I am not living until everything constantly feels like a lot. It seems like bullshit, I know, and I fault absolutely no one for looking at my behaviour and finding it questionable, but I swear, I come by it honestly. In most of life, this is annoying to people so I am largely solitary as a person, but in sexuality, particularly in fetishism, intensity is appealing to people.

It has only ever been encouraged by my partners, both current and former, with my enthusiastic participation, and that’s a perfect storm. I talk a lot about tops and sadists who like to push, but as a bottom, I am just as guilty of approaching BDSM with the same zest for escalation as they are. Escalation seems inevitable sometimes. When I look back through my life, I remember being young and naive, desirous of pain and control, and believing that it would be okay because I only liked being slapped around and told what to do, it would never get to the point where I would have a dungeon in my basement. Well. It did. I never thought I would be one of those people with welts on my back, deep purple bruises on my chest or wires strung through my thighs. But I did become that person. When I wrote frenzied erotica in my bedroom that was the most deviant act I could imagine, I did not think that one days I would want to hire a carpenter to build me a cross with shackles attached it to. That felt like a world and a reality that was not mind.

But, you do things, and you then you want to do more things. For a long time, the fix for intensity can be managed by doing the new. As far as BDSM goes, the menu is pretty damn extensive, the states of strife you can occupy when exploring this sexuality are vast as fuck. BDSM presents a thousand paths to the chasm between sanity and madness. I don’t mean that everyone does it this way, I sometimes feel like perhaps I am not intense because I am kinky, but I am kinky because I am intense. I love pain, but I am addicted to intensity. Now, after all these years, there is little left that is truly new. I have chased intensity all over the gamut of activities BDSM presents, into the immersion in roles and dynamics it allows, all over the emotional connection and richness of construct it enables to…well, here. None of that quite works to get me to that feeling anymore. Not for a while.

So what does work?

It’s hard to explain, that’s why I attempted to do so through the example of week-long confinement. I sustain myself on the regular bouts of pain and violence, on the fabric of service and devotion, on the love of subservience, but what I really need is prolonged, continuous, ceaseless immersion. Every few months I need to have a phase that mimicks the intensity of week-long rapings and beatings in captivity, where I am subject to an environment that is unusual and difficult to endure. The way I always explain it is by saying that as a masochist and a slave, the first beating does nothing for me, it’s the fourth subsequent beating that gets me where I need to go. The first one is an amuse-bouche. Every few months, I need to go someplace “extreme,” I know how full of shit this sounds, but bear with a little, if only because this is reality to at least some of us here, the reason some of us having dynamic that have an inbuilt cruelty, disregard or the kind of persistent suffering that seems inhumane, is because without those things, we may feel nothing. I know I feel nothing. I’m either devastated or perfectly fine. There can be no in between.

I’m not performing a moral evaluation of being this way. I don’t know how to do that. I just know how it slowly, steadily and ultimately came to be this way for me. Escalation is not necessary to enjoy fetishism, but it’s an ever-present possibility. I have to go much, much further than I ever imagined I would, in order to feel the same euphoria and madness that an evening of whipping and slapping once enabled for days on end. It raises many things for me. The first one, of course, is about whether it is safe to go down a long-term path of escalation. I do my absolute best to always be risk aware and to make my decisions based on all potential consequences and whether they are worth the pleasure for me, but I also know that my appetite for risk has increased over the years. Once upon a time, the possibility of a whip, not just the potential damage it could cause, but also the social ramifications of indulging in symbols of violence, seemed like too much risk to bear, but I changed, my pleasure changed and now it does not seem that way anymore. Once upon a time, the risk assessment I had to perform for engaging in slapping or facial abuse of other kinds had to do with the potential for damage during the scene, now my risk assessment means factoring in years of extant damage that has already been caused by the mere act of engaging in facial abuse with consistency and constancy. It is not about injury, it’s about wear.

Intensity, consistency, escalation — call it whatever you want — but it leads to wear. BDSM stays, lasts, shows, imprints, impacts and informs your body like any other physical (and emotional) discipline, and if you add to that an unending process of escalation, it stands to reason that at some point, you may get to a place where something will break, and you will have to take a step back instead of forward for the first time ever. I imagine thousands of people have been here before me, at this point, and many of them may have handled this well, probably better than I imagine being able to handle it. I fear, terribly, that if I get to a place where I cannot chase the intensity it takes to approach my pleasure anymore, I will lose my pleasure altogether. I am aware that a part of this is because I have tied my pleasure to intensity and escalation, and I am not sure if I have the capacity to extricate one from the other anymore. I circumvent exceeding my own appetite for risk by informing my partner of the possibility of it and ensuring he understands that if given the chance, in the right frame of mind, I will make the leap from suffering to damage, and it works well enough, but I can also see the unmistakable signs of addiction in how I approach sexuality.

For instance, it is difficult to enjoy the simple and the mundane anymore. I can, if I dig at it until I find the intensity in it too, but it’s truly difficult to summon the same enthusiasm I once had for sticking dozens of needles in me or carving my skin. I stopped being able to have penetrative sex with anyone but my husband because with my husband it is a continuous, eight-year, ritualised construct of dehumanisation and punitive rape-play. Nothing else works anymore except that state of mind, or one that equals it. I would be lying if I said that I don’t sometimes miss being able to enjoy tenderness, passion or just something as simple as eye-contact during PIV. I do miss it, but it doesn’t do anything for me anymore. A lot of stuff is like that now. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking love it, but I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t know that intensity of a certain kind morphs into compulsion, and like all addictions, you cannot find pleasure in anything until it is accompanied by your fix. I did not know that was a risk I was taking when I started walking down this path.

Now I know.

I cannot fathom changing, not right now anyway, right now, I still ache and itch to be back inside spaces and phases of constant strife and intensity, I make room in my schedule, space on my body, wherewithal in my heart to be able to endure those periods of absolute immersion, but now, I also know that someday, I may not be able to do it anymore. Someday, it may become corrupted and fraught by my own accumulated damage and changes, not the kind inflicted with deliberate malice by another, but the kind enabled by long-term immersion. The same way that a sport will inevitably lead to permanent changes that may someday disable you from being able to function at the level you took for granted. I now know that you can only escalate to a peak, after that, you either have to build a life at the peak, or start walking down. I don’t know where all of this will lead, but I know not to posit where it won’t anymore. For better or worse, intensity is the path I have chosen, it has elements that I had not previously fathomed, ones I possibly haven’t considered even now, but now I know that intensity and escalation are not just thrilling and beautiful, they’re also risk-factors. I know to think about that now.