It’s Not Edge-Play, It’s An Edge-Dynamic and This Is What That Means.

Written by Ancilla.

I wouldn’t say that I was naive, but when I met my previous partner, I was still young enough that I couldn’t renew my own passport. I am tempted to blame my youth for the decisions I made with him but I am not entirely sure that would be accurate, mostly because even though I grew up, the nature of the relationships I want to be in did not change. That surprised me. I thought, for sure, I wouldn’t be tempted by the same things. To be clear, it’s not the depravity or the violent beatings that I expected never to be tempted by again, I highly doubt I can have satisfying sexual connection outside of those constructs, but there were parts of that relationship that enabled the abuse in it that I helped put there because those are the elements of an ideal relationship to me, and I thought I would have learnt my lesson about them. It’s not the anger and the narcissism of my previous partner that I was tempted by either, I am so done with anger it’s hard to relate to the version of me who, with such vehement fervour, went around scratching at the hearts of men until they exploded all over me. I thought I would never be rid of that desire, yet not once after I left him did anger tempt me.

What tempted me, and continues to do to this day, were elements of that relationship that enabled abuse. They aren’t necessarily, inherently abusive in and of themselves, but they are red flags. They’re what you’re taught to look for in a relationship to make the determination of whether there is potential for abuse or dysfunction. I have since learnt a lot of them fly under the banner of CNC here, but that term annoys me a little, because it leaves a lot out. A lot of times when two people are talking about it, they both mean something completely different when they use that term, and my thing is, why use a term when you have the space to give all the details? Details are always better. The elements of that relationship that I knew I wanted to retain, and are at the heart of what really works for me in a power dynamic, are as follows:

(I feel academic today, so this will be in bullet points. While I fundamentally dislike lists in the middle of essays, I can do whatever the fuck I want when I am writing, because it’s my thing and I love that).

a) Conditioned fear-based responses. For instance, with my ex, the sound of him running up the stairs to my place used to make my mouth dry up and elevate my heart rate. Even if there was no immediate cause for fear, it happened every single time. With my husband, it’s when he takes off his watch, or strokes my chin, or the specific beep my phone makes when he texts me.

b) Not being allowed to say no (and by extension, yes). I know this is a very bad idea on the face of it, but it’s at the heart of all that is erotic to me. It’s not about saying no, and having that be ignored, it’s about being disallowed from even exercising enough will to think there is a possibility of saying no. My previous partner was the one who put the fear of the word into me, it made him livid when I used that word for anything. My husband (I’m getting real comfortable using this term, and I still hate it) never gets angry with me, but over the years we have come to the place where his eyes get real dark and disturbing when I say no.

c) Suppression of reflexes. Our bodies react to certain things before we can really intervene, and even for a lot of masochists, the initial experiences of pain can cause reflexive resistance and defence, but you can strip those things down. I don’t want to be able to scream when I need to or move when I have to or cry when i can’t hold it back, I prefer having my partners decide how I behave in moments where responses are most typically reactionary, and I like the process that gets you there. It’s a slow, consistent process.

d) The inability to defend myself. Whether something is an issue or not, really depends on why, but the one things I discovered because of my previous partner, that I did not see coming, was that even when I had a very good reason to be less than good, it didn’t matter. If you didn’t do something you were told to do, even if it was because you had zero free moments in the day or you broke your arm, it didn’t really matter. If my husband tells me to lift a rock, and I can’t because it’s not physically possible, it’s still my fault. This is a rather common characteristic of abuse, you are held responsible for things that are not in your control, so the abuser can reasonably justify their anger at you or their treatment of you. My ex used to do this in a very weird way, he thought I drank too much water, and he would beat me because I drank water even though he told me not to and that I was dying of thirst was not a good enough reason. That’s horrible, and I am actively water-insecure in life as a result of it (I literally cannot go to bed it there aren’t two litres of water beside me), but I used to find it hot. Not the condition, but the sentiment. The idea of being held responsible for disobedience even when it is out of your or human control, I still love it.

e) A total lack of fairness or reasonable expectations. This is an extension of what I was saying earlier, or maybe, more accurately, it’s the other side of it. You can expect me to kneel when you come back from work, but it’s much hotter if you expect me to hold back tears until you tell me I can cry while you do the most horrible things to me. It’s great to expect me to ask to orgasm, it’s much better to expect I never do it. You can excuse me from hammering nails into my skull because they’re rusty, or you can express your sympathies, and do it anyway (<- that was me being hyperbolic, please, for the love of all that is unholy, don’t take it seriously. Sometimes when I put these mini-disclaimers into things I write, as i write, I wonder how anyone writes just for themselves, and without considering a hypothetical, eventual audience, that skill completely eludes me I think). I like unreasonable, unrelenting, unfair people, because I can logic/argue/explain my way out of anything except that and them. Lack of reason is the most horrible condition, you can never get past it, and even if you do, you won’t know how you did it, nor will it work the same way ever again.

f) Helplessness. I suppose, this is the result of the two former points. In a well-negotiated, power-exchange based construct, you can retain a lot of power as the bottom, and that’s a great idea. It’s not exactly the conceptual power of consent, it’s more like the representation of your needs and conditions in the negotiation and communication process that empowers you to act not only as your top wants in a scene/relationship, but as you want as well. It also stipulates the conditions where that is not expected of you. You won’t be held responsible for things out of your control, and whatever level of leniency is acceptable in your relationship, it would be known to and agreed upon by all parties in it. Abuse, is different. It’s not empowering at all. It’s the opposite, it’s helpless. You do modify your behaviour in order to minimize the instances of friction that you believe are causing the problem so as to be able to take control, and ultimately, responsibility for what is happening, but that is not possible to do because you cannot take control of or responsibility for an abuser. It’s not yours to take. They don’t even have control, which is why this method of minimising friction does not work, if they can’t even know what will cause them to lose control, you can never guard against it. You never do the right thing in an abusive relationship, even when you are being, by your estimation of the standards, perfect. I’m hot for that construct. You’re never good enough, you’re never right, no matter how hard you try. You’re never able to be exonerated, even when you’re as right as right can be. There’s nothing you can do to take control, no method in which you can modify your behaviour to predict the outcome. For sure, you can’t slip from any standards that are already stated, but there are standards that are unstated, and sometimes unknown, and you are responsible for not slipping from even that which you cannot fathom. Fuck. Turned myself on writing that sentence. I think, if this is unrelatable, think of it in terms of a high-achieving athletes and their coaches, which doesn’t make it any more palatable, but perhaps easier to comprehend.

Those are largely the conditions of power and control on which I build my relationships. Is that CNC? I don’t know. Is that power exchange? I don’t know. Does it qualify as a master/slave dynamic? I dunno. I know exactly what it is, so it doesn’t matter so much to me what I call it. I don’t need to title the folder to file it away, a number shall suffice in my filing system. However, if you do need a term, i often think of my relationship as reminiscent of abuse but loving.

I know.

I understand that we all have different reasons for liking what we like, but for me, and I have always said this, and I always will, BDSM is a safe way of simulating an abusive relationship with sprinkles of romantic symbolism. I don’t want to be abused again, i really don’t. There is an emotional toll to that and it’s not worth the violence, nor the madness. If I had known there was a healthier choice before I committed myself to the asylum of my ex, I would have made it. I didn’t know, and I believed his method was the only way for a person like me to get what I needed, so I went with it, and by the time I learnt there were other ways, I was in too deep. I had already let him build me, and let myself love him. However, even after I left him, I still wanted the same things from my relationship, I just wanted them delivered a different way.

The first thing I saw after the fog had cleared was that you can do the right thing with the wrong person, and it may not necessarily work, and you can do the wrong thing with the wrong person, and that’s a disaster, but there is a great amount of success to be had in doing the wrong thing with the right person. I thought my ex was the right person to play violence and control with because he was violent, and had no control, but it’s not that simple. I don’t presume anyone wants to do what I am talking about, nor that d/s is about replicating abuse to you — we don’t all always have to want all of the same thing, maybe it’s just an element, or maybe it’s the same thing at a different degree of intensity, or maybe it’s none of it — but there is in many power exchange based constructs the potential to enable or resemble abuse, and for that reason alone, I have to say, there is no safety measure better than the most thorough and considered process to choosing who you’d do it with.

For instance, I am able to feel helpless in my relationship with my husband because I have no expectation of compassion, but I am able to feel safe in it because I know he is capable of compassion. He’s more compassionate than I am, especially to me, which doesn’t mean he won’t be a complete ass to me when I seem to be dying, it just means that he’ll be compassionate when I need it, because the empathy is constant, and I just have to trust that he’ll make a good call on when I need it. It’s not risk-free but it’s a lot more tender than it seems based on my earlier descriptions of it. That’s where it genuinely differs from abuse, there is an alarming level of intimacy, it sometimes feels like we’re never looking at each other’s bodies, and always at each other’s insides. He always has to know exactly how everything made me feel, I always have to know that he loves me and wouldn’t let harm come to me, and that has to be expressed in little ways everyday. Sometimes it’s very little ways. Like sanitising objects he used on me immediately after, or in front of me, so I don’t have to worry later. Trust is built in very little ways, but it goes a very long way.

After my previous partner, for eight months, i thought I had learnt my lesson, but I had learnt the wrong lesson. I separated my needs into bad needs and good needs. Pain was the good need, games of control were the bad need. I tried not to indulge the bad needs, but they didn’t go away. Upon realising I needed what I needed, and that the person I love, in an alarming twist of magic needed exactly that, i endeavoured to do it better. A big part of the was allowing someone else to take charge of what I wanted, I love being the boss of things, but I shouldn’t be the boss of this. That was a very difficult realisation for me. Not least of all because I was allowed some charge, and I did a spectacularly terrible job of it. However, that is a very subjective part of it, because allowing someone else to take charge when you’re trying to build a dynamic reminiscent of abuse is also dangerous, i just got lucky, in that I met a person who would take the scissors from me with authority, and show me a better way to cut, but that won’t always be the case.

The most troublesome part of CNC, let’s call it that for a minute, is that you think of it, and fantasize about it, in moments when you’re sexually stimulated, but you may have to practise it in moments when you are not. Beat me, when I don’t want it. Fuck me, when I don’t want it. Except that we think those things in moments that we do want it, and when they happen in moments that we didn’t actually want it, it’s not the same at all. A lot of times it’s not even hot, and at the worst of times it’s downright traumatic. The way I fend against this is to open the doors only to places that can stand more trauma. I don’t think the trauma is inevitable, but i think it’s wiser to treat it like it’s inevitable. Like potential business losses. You do a better job communicating what areas are already too plundered to damage even a little more. Also, you have to examine your relationship with trauma, if its avoidance is the goal to you, don’t do something where you have to treat it is inevitable. For me there’s allure to trauma, I like consistent, long-lasting impact; it’s a narrative, not an act, and I like immersion more than engagement. So, before you do something potentially traumatic, really think about your relationship with trauma, and how deeply more of it would impact you. If it threatens to cause grave mental or physical impacts, don’t do it, or do it differently. My relationship with trauma, and its control over me, changed when I started dealing with it before it can happen, instead of taking it apart after it does.

But the most important thing, and the one thing that was completely missing in my relationship with my ex was that there was no outside of the dynamic in our relationship. It was just all dynamic. There were no boundaries, no lines, no space to step out and communicate with a human being, no room for breathing, nothing. Now, with my husband, I need that very much, and it’s easily accomplished by having other roles in our relationship, and individual lives. We aren’t just master/slave, we’re also co-parents, lovers, each other’s recreation, co-habitants, a couple (like we have dinner parties, and I don’t know how the hell my life hot here). That doesn’t mean there is a moment at which the dynamic stops or we must push a button to turn it back on, it means there is a space for us to be other things with each other that take dominance over the roles underneath, and that’s a great space. We make fun of each other and ourselves, and everything we do, and that helps retain some perspective, it’s only life, no need to take it so seriously there’s no fun left to it.