Borrowed
BDSM is Like Green Beans
Fetlife gets regular visits from a vanilla man who’s here to save all the poor women from the abuse that BDSM represents. You’ll see him pop up from time to time insisting that subs are too disempowered to see our dynamics as a kind of v******e. I always tell him kink never made me feel small. It made me taller. It dug my true self out of the mud, so I could finally be me.
And suddenly, I was proud to be me. If my Dom of the Day™ loved all my secrets, I imagined I could stop hiding for good.
I was right. The more time I spent in the scene, the more I revealed of myself. As the cliché goes, shame dies on exposure, and I’ve engaged in a lot of exposure in my seven years in the scene. I can share parts of my sexuality with thousands of readers that I couldn’t even share with my boyfriend a decade ago.
My pre and post-kink sex lives might as well be their own separate universes. They’re that different. Before I found BDSM, I was too repressed to own a sex toy. I kept my kinks a secret and blushed whenever anyone asked me about the birds and the bees. Yep. You don’t say “fucking” when you’re ashamed of your sexuality. You need an infinite list of euphemisms lest someone notices your inner slut.
Not too long ago, I went to my first gourmet restaurant. The first course was green beans. I’m not k**ding. Green bloody beans, but they tasted as though they’d been seared in angels’ tears and coated in fairy dust. They tasted better than all the pizzas and pastas lesser restaurants had served me all my life. Before that day I thought I knew what beans tasted like, but I had no idea of their potential. That six-course meal was a revelatory experience. It changed the way I thought of food. It evolved from a survival tool to an Experience that day, with the capital letter and everything.
BDSM is exactly like that for me—It’s sex with extra Michelin Stars. My vanilla self thought she knew what sex felt like. She thought she’d had the best it had to offer, but it was really just green beans without the gourmet treatment.
Kink has been more than sexual intensity for me, though. It allowed me to face my own damned self with all my quirks and weirdness. When I was as vanilla as The Official Rescuer of All Sub-Kind, I always felt I was squeezing myself into a pair of jeans that didn’t fit. I was trying to be someone I wasn’t, and when I failed, I picked up a figurative hammer and went to town on my psyche.
That’s abuse. The self-acceptance that BDSM gave me is not.
You see, the creatures of this planet are far from vanilla. Female kangaroos have three vaginas. Male wasp spiders leave their genitals in females after sex. Bees explode after the act like a brilliant philosophical metaphor, and the male anglerfish hooks into his mate until their blood vessels merge and he turns into a weird pocket of attached sperm.
Sex has never been a vanilla pursuit—not in nature, anyway. I could be biased, but I strongly suspect that vanilla sex is just one more societal cage. We. Are. Not. Normal. There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. Normal. Is that enough periods for you, Norman?
Kink gave me permission to be weird, so I could stop beating myself over the head with a hammer. It turned bargain basement beans into a gourmet meal. It taught me the consent practices I’d always needed to protect myself. It’s vanilla sex that made me feel ashamed and vanilla sex that fostered my ignorance about consent.
Fetlife gets regular visits from a vanilla man who’s here to save all the poor women from the abuse that BDSM represents. You’ll see him pop up from time to time insisting that subs are too disempowered to see our dynamics as a kind of v******e. I always tell him kink never made me feel small. It made me taller. It dug my true self out of the mud, so I could finally be me.
And suddenly, I was proud to be me. If my Dom of the Day™ loved all my secrets, I imagined I could stop hiding for good.
I was right. The more time I spent in the scene, the more I revealed of myself. As the cliché goes, shame dies on exposure, and I’ve engaged in a lot of exposure in my seven years in the scene. I can share parts of my sexuality with thousands of readers that I couldn’t even share with my boyfriend a decade ago.
My pre and post-kink sex lives might as well be their own separate universes. They’re that different. Before I found BDSM, I was too repressed to own a sex toy. I kept my kinks a secret and blushed whenever anyone asked me about the birds and the bees. Yep. You don’t say “fucking” when you’re ashamed of your sexuality. You need an infinite list of euphemisms lest someone notices your inner slut.
Not too long ago, I went to my first gourmet restaurant. The first course was green beans. I’m not k**ding. Green bloody beans, but they tasted as though they’d been seared in angels’ tears and coated in fairy dust. They tasted better than all the pizzas and pastas lesser restaurants had served me all my life. Before that day I thought I knew what beans tasted like, but I had no idea of their potential. That six-course meal was a revelatory experience. It changed the way I thought of food. It evolved from a survival tool to an Experience that day, with the capital letter and everything.
BDSM is exactly like that for me—It’s sex with extra Michelin Stars. My vanilla self thought she knew what sex felt like. She thought she’d had the best it had to offer, but it was really just green beans without the gourmet treatment.
Kink has been more than sexual intensity for me, though. It allowed me to face my own damned self with all my quirks and weirdness. When I was as vanilla as The Official Rescuer of All Sub-Kind, I always felt I was squeezing myself into a pair of jeans that didn’t fit. I was trying to be someone I wasn’t, and when I failed, I picked up a figurative hammer and went to town on my psyche.
That’s abuse. The self-acceptance that BDSM gave me is not.
You see, the creatures of this planet are far from vanilla. Female kangaroos have three vaginas. Male wasp spiders leave their genitals in females after sex. Bees explode after the act like a brilliant philosophical metaphor, and the male anglerfish hooks into his mate until their blood vessels merge and he turns into a weird pocket of attached sperm.
Sex has never been a vanilla pursuit—not in nature, anyway. I could be biased, but I strongly suspect that vanilla sex is just one more societal cage. We. Are. Not. Normal. There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. Normal. Is that enough periods for you, Norman?
Kink gave me permission to be weird, so I could stop beating myself over the head with a hammer. It turned bargain basement beans into a gourmet meal. It taught me the consent practices I’d always needed to protect myself. It’s vanilla sex that made me feel ashamed and vanilla sex that fostered my ignorance about consent.
2 年 前
Yes!
