BDSM As A Love Language.

My former partner stole all my things when I broke up with him. Except for the one bag of clothes and essentials I took when I left that apartment, I never got anything else back. He took all my books, my coffee machine, all my journals, most of my jewellery, all my utensils, the stove in my kitchen, the linen and all the (sex-and-kink) toys I had accumulated over the years. It didn’t matter, there is no maudlin trinket that is worth more than freedom, I would have given him more than I had just to get rid of him, it is just strange when, overnight, everything you’re used to reaching for is gone. Whether that’s a cup or a choke chain, it doesn’t matter. A month or so later, when I spent my first weekend with the man to whom I am now married, I brought nothing with me by way of a “toy bag.”

Past a point, you get used to doing the kink a certain way, and toys often become vital to this practise of being kinky, I needed the whips, the chains, the binders, the gags, the floggers because..how do you design play without those things, right? How will you know I am kinky, if I don’t have those things? It’s not just the equipment that becomes tied into what it means to be kinky or into BDSM, it’s also the language, the community, the events, the marks on your body, the credentials and the like. BDSM as a sexuality takes a lot from BDSM as a community. Some of it — safety, validation, support, information and consent culture — is really great, and some of it, is a non-vital indulgence that is choice-based, but it doesn’t always seem choice-based.

When I was younger, I was swayed by the imagery. I had been a masochist my whole life, there had never been any (consensual) sex in my life that was devoid of masochism, and I had managed to find partners who would hurt me with relative ease and for a long time the rest didn’t seem important. I wanted to be hurt and most people I encountered organically had a belt or hands with which to hurt me, every once in a while I hooked up with people who were card-carrying members of the BDSM club, and they had toys it was fun to play with, but I could take it or leave it, you know? The goal was connection, pain, fear, arousal and discovery, and the stuff didn’t seem vital to it. Until, I put myself in an environment (this one) when I attained the age of majority where everyone had stuff. I want to be very clear, no one told me (directly that) I had to buy a whip or own six floggers to be kinky, but as I began to play within the community, certain messages were reinforced.

For instance, the more stuff a person had, the more experienced they were (and sometimes, by extension, the more trustworthy). I saw all this stuff around me and I figured, I had to have it too otherwise I wouldn’t be seen as a real kinkster; I saw people, my new friends, doing all these things like events and “scenes” and I figured that was how I had to do it too because that’s how BDSM is done and I had just been playing at it for years without being a real member. This may not be something that everyone who is new to the scene experiences, I could just be a special kind of stupid. I got the stuff, I went to events, I put on the outfits, I attended my first play-party, I brandished the marks on my body, I learnt all the terms (though I retained some contrarian obstinance against using them). There was definitely some thrill to it, to being seen as this young, experienced, edgy woman with her own things and the courage to participate in decadent sexuality. To little things like bringing your own bag of toys to scare the sadist. To being in exclusive environments of revelry where you are invited and enjoyed. I didn’t know this was happening but even in my head, I had become a real fetishist, when I began to participate in these ways and it felt good. It just wasn’t clear why it felt good.

It must have been borne from a level of insecurity as well. There is a lot of social media to the practise of BDSM. I didn’t know this until well, I got on social media specifically designed for it. Outside of exhibitionism, voyeurism and the healthy desire to share your life with people like you (especially to the goal of advocacy), there are the negative elements of social media that exist here as well, the only difference is, they apply to an esoteric sexual interest. The ability to see all the things someone else is doing and you are not, makes those things seem like a zero sum game sometimes, and in that, the contemplation about if you even want those things begins to matter less. Very simply, you don’t feel like a real masochist until you have pictures of bruises like the others. You don’t feel like you have real experience until you have gone to a munch or had a whipping scene. You don’t feel like a real sadist until you have a bag full of (leather) weapons. You don’t feel like a real submissive until you have signed a contract. You don’t feel like a real slave until you’re into CNC.

This is not to disparage anyone who has felt this way, lord knows I’ve been there, if anything, it’s natural. When you come in from the “outside world,” this environment (digital and its real-life counterpart) feels like the Olympics of sexuality, and it is naturally overwhelming. I have a hunch about this. Outside of this world or prior to finding it, most practioners of BDSM have had to defend their sexuality to people, and often, we’ve felt like the only ones, or like there’s something wrong with us, and for some of us, eventually, that meant we developed a defensive pride in how we are different. Upon entering this “community” though, there are two things that happen almost instantaneously. The first is the discovery that you’re not alone, there is a world of people who make you feel like you are not a freak and there are safe ways of indulging yourself. It’s great. The second is the realisation that you’re not as edgy/cool/different in this environment as you were outside of it. I think people feel this to varying degrees and some don’t feel it at all, but it exists. Sometimes frenzy is borne out of excitement and sometimes it is borne out of the urgent need to pad your kink resumé so you feel like you are at par with everyone else in this world.

I can’t do the math on what that’s like for someone else, but for me, it involved backing up my fetishes with toys. Lots of them. And just to be clear it is not my contention that being the person who is into equipment or outfits is wrong in any way, nor that your sexuality is necessarily performative because you want to explore it within a community, for some people, that really is what they enjoy, and when they participate in it, they’re being true to themselves. When I did it, I was misidentifying who I am in order to fit into a role I thought had to define me. There was a lot to it. It wasn’t just the social pressure of how it looks to be kinky, but also the fact that was in a relationship that was part abuse and part kink, and I was confused about the rules I had made, it seemed like a good idea at the time to rely on the rules and guidelines of the community. Maybe having a cage and twelve whips did mean you were trustworthy, like, what the fuck did I know? Some of it was a genuinely good idea, like learning about risk evaluation and explicit negotiation, and some of it wasn’t for me, it just made me feel like I belonged. It was like putting on a fancy outfit when you’re invited to a high-end event even though you spend most of your life in ratty sweatpants and obscurity, and you don’t really even want to go but it feels like you must because, how could you miss this opportunity? The fancy outfit was meant to make me look like I belonged. The toys meant I was legit.

So when I spent that first weekend with my husband, I was almost apologetic about the fact that I didn’t have my fancy toys anymore. I really must have thought, in some way, that he wouldn’t be able to enjoy my range or nature as a masochist, if I didn’t bring him all the equipment. I may have worried that he wouldn’t see how well-versed I was at these things, I needed him to know I was so strong and brave and cool. Come on. Bravado, you know, is idiocy, but the kind that is endearing in hindsight. I don’t remember thinking that, but retrospectively, I can see a pattern I didn’t see back then. My husband laughed at me when I apologised to him about not bringing a whip and chains. He, laughed.

“You’re going to spend your entire life discovering that I don’t even need to move to destroy you,” he said, “I don’t need your weapons, I promise, you don’t need them either.”

Normally, I don’t respond well to cocky men, but I was already in love with this one so everything he said had me swooning like a moron. I was also..I had just been sprung from a war. My relationship with my former partner, the thief, was a whole-ass war and leaving it involved a level of destruction of the self that had left me completely without guard or tether to a former life. I had no stuff, no home, a new job (at which the money I earned was for me alone, not in service of a man who could not hold down a job), barely any clothes, no imminent plans and most importantly, because I was no longer living my life in a war-zone, no more credible fear. I didn’t have to govern my behaviour based on roles, ideas or who I used to be anymore, I didn’t have to act in ways that made me safe from him anymore. And then this man, whom I had come to love with so little information, stood in front of me, and he was everything I didn’t know about the world, but more than that, he was everything I was willing to trust as unknowable. Like the ocean. I don’t know if I believe in miracles, really only as statistical anomalies that are still within the realm of possibility so they will occur from time to time, but his presence in the world was miraculous. From the moment I saw him, I felt like I had been talking to him my entire life. Everything about me — every construct, convention, belief, role — everything that I had acquired by way of armour and in response to my life, just disappeared alongside all my stuff.

And over that weekend with him — without toys, belongings, community rules, armour or performance — I discovered BDSM as I had always longed to experience it, as a way to love. As a language of love. Yeah, I know how that sounds, okay? It’s over the top. And I’m not even saying that’s all it is. It sounds romanticised and it is, but come on, if we aren’t even going to romanticise love, what is romance even there for? I have never experienced anything more romantic than two people communicating with one another through eroticised structures of power and pain; deliberately evoking fear, longing, devotion, deference and liberation from ideas of how things should look. It didn’t take a whip to do that, throughout that period the worst thing he hurt me with was his elbow, and let me tell you I still fear the elbow more than anything in the world. The elbow is the unsung hero of sadism. Threaten me with a whip, I’ll lean myself against a wall, threaten me with an elbow, I’ll shut my damn mouth and accept defeat.

Losing everything I owned made me extremely mindful of defining myself by things I have and adorn, by valuations and definitions of community standards, behaviours as part of roles in relationships and even by concepts I learnt. It made me consider my sexuality and what it was about, outside of imagery and sometimes this meant that when I didn’t go along with the established standards I had to defend myself. Once, it meant that a self-styled community leader felt it fit to attack me about not being “real” kinky like him because I never posted pictures of the extreme things I wrote about and I just wanted to present as a literary whore (which, I do, I have no interest in being seen for what I do, really only for how I write). Sometimes it meant that I was “no fun” because I didn’t want to do casual, fun play at parties. They are little things though, they don’t matter, because I am not trying to fit an image, I am trying to be myself.

Over time, I did acquire new things, recreational ideologies and even kinky toys, but my relationship with equipment, kink and display is permanently changed. The real toys are the emotions and they cannot be photographed or brandished the same way, there is something transgressive to me about the decision to live for my eyes. To define my sexuality and fetishism in a way that may not fit the image but it lets me be who I really am. In being with my husband, I was able to dismantle all established conventions of what it meant to be a slave, a masochist and narrow it all down to what it is I really want. Pain and control. It is that simple. I don’t need the outfit, I don’t need the equipment, I don’t need the words, not the world, just this space of sacred privacy that no one could understand even if they could watch because this language doesn’t extend past us. Use whatever you want to play with me, what I give you is not my big bag of toys, I give you the endless liberty to make me feel. I’ll love you like a slave, I’ll show you like a masochist, you’ll love me like you own me, you’ll show me in the currency of pain. It’s a love language. That’s the kink. That’s my kink. This is the process by which I came to understand how it fits into my life, everyone has one.