On Power And Pain

Transcript

Hello again, listener. Welcome to my little BDSM primer. So, whether you are just a curious one poking your head in to see if this might be for you, or whether you are a dirty bitch who's been fucking hungry for this, let's talk about power and pain, shall we?

Because everything that falls under the umbrella of bondage and domination and submission and sadism and masochism, really, you could argue, it all falls under the umbrella of power and pain. One person in a very vulnerable context trusting another with control and allowing ourselves to experience things that would be very genuinely dangerous in a context that was not controlled. And make no mistake, listener, before I let you go here, I am going to serve up a tasty fucking platter of your custom-sorted pleasures and pains.

But, first, we have to talk about safety, we have to talk about consent, and we have to talk about communication. And arguably, communication is the most important one, because without it, we can't have either of the other two. The things that we are talking about doing are things that can harm people.

That's why I use the word pain. I'm not just talking about physical pain. I'm talking about emotional pain as well.

I'm talking about psychological pain. I'm talking about the damage you can inflict to someone's relationship with themselves and their lives if you're not fucking careful with what you do to them at their most vulnerable. There are a lot of ways you can damage someone without laying a fucking hand on them.

And if you're not willing to respect that power, you have no business wielding it. But pain is not always something that should be avoided at all costs. Pain can be a teacher, it can be a temperer, it can be an opponent that makes us stronger by sparring with us.

When we are in control of our exposure to physical pain, emotional pain, psychological pain, when we can design the way we interact with that pain, and we can trust someone to take us through those interactions, it can be euphoric, it can be uplifting and empowering and freeing on a level that simple sexual gratification, for most of us, can't. It just can't. Because, for most of us, we've never run from gratification the way we've run from pain.

We've never feared gratification the way we feared pain. And that, to me, is one of the beautiful things about experiencing what it means to be vulnerable. To come face-to-face with the things that scare you and that hurt you.

To have someone show you, safely, while hearing you, that you can face and experience those things and be okay if you're the one in control. Or at least in control of who is in control. This is one of the many reasons why communication is so goddamn important.

If you're going to be trusted with that kind of control, you have to know. You have to know what you're being trusted with. You have to know who you're being trusted with.

You can't just assume. You can't just decide. You have to learn and know.

The onus, the responsibility, is on you before you accept that control. And this is also why safe words are so goddamn important. Because they are an encapsulation of what's really going on here.

They are a pause button that you put on the scene, the session, the playtime. The submissive, the supposed victim, has the power to stop it at any time. If you're playing without safe words, what you're doing is ridiculously fucking dangerous and you should stop.

Right now. Don't do that. No, you need to care about not hurting people.

Unless you're in a stop when they say stop. But if you're going to put them in a situation where they want to experience having someone's will forced on them until they don't want to experience it anymore, you need to give them a genuine mechanism for making sure you know when that change occurs. It's not up to you to decide.

It's up to them. Communication is everything. Because it allows us to understand each other's limits, each other's desires, each other's state of being.

It allows us to know whether something hurts or is comfortable, whether something feels right or feels wrong. If we're not talking about that, if we're not sharing that information, then we are not making sure that we're not fucking each other up. So communication is everything.

And I want you to understand, I don't say this as someone who has been a paragon of sexual communication throughout my life. No, no, no, no, no. In many ways I would argue that I am more of a cautionary tale.

I am a person who has worked very hard to learn from a whole lot of mistakes. Most of which were mistakes that I made. I mean, yes, obviously there were also people who made mistakes that I bore the brunt of and I learned that way as well.

And there were people who just straight up taught me and I learned that way as well. But yes, I made a lot of mistakes. And if I can help anybody else avoid any of those mistakes just by talking about them, then I mean, I think that's worth it.

Or I mean, I guess if I can help people do the things that will give them the best experience by sharing what I either muddled my way towards or had amazing people take the time to teach me, I am blessed and grateful for the experiences that were brought to me by people who wanted me to have the best in my earlier years. But when it was just something that we did one-on-one behind closed doors, there was not a lot of guidance. Unless you really, really took the time to go looking for it.

And when you're hungry to try something, you don't always stop to go looking for guidance. Sometimes you just want to give it a fucking go. And there are a lot of things that can go wrong when you have no one who can show you whether you're doing something right.

Whether that's because it's something neither of you are familiar with, and so you don't really know how to assess the other person or give them pointers. Or whether it's because you just haven't established the kind of communication where you can convey to one another how it really feels if you don't actually like it. And it's not going to create strife between you to acknowledge that, you know.

That is so important. And I know that a lot of you may be afraid to explore this side of yourselves because of the darkness and the danger. And the fact that communication is not something that a lot of us take to like ducks to water.

It takes a lot of patience with yourself, it takes a lot of practice, and it takes a lot of people who are willing to be patient with you. Which some of us don't have the luxury of. I don't want to seem like I'm being too judgy to people that haven't been taught, haven't had proper communication modeled to them.

So they don't really have a context for talking about these things. I absolutely know what that's like. I remember being filled with all these desires that I felt like I could not say anything about.

Even if it was someone that I knew that I loved and that loved me and cared about me, there was something about telling my partner or a prospective partner, someone I wanted to be a partner, there was just something about telling them anything sexual about me that I didn't think she was going to want to hear. I let it hold me back too many times. It frees me up.

I ran on way too many assumptions. I missed way too many opportunities because I was afraid they weren't actually wanted by anyone other than me. And I also made too many people, at least a lot more than I would have wanted to, made them feel uncomfortable or worse because I was running on too many assumptions, believing that things would probably be wanted just because I hadn't been told that they weren't.

And not confirming, not double-checking, not asking to make sure I was interpreting someone's desires correctly. Communication is fucking everything. It's everything.

I can't say that enough. And so I want to be really, really clear that when I say that, I am imparting a lesson that I learned the fucking hard way. And I really hope that you don't have to.

But it is extraordinarily important when you're going to take someone's well-being into your hands that you, first of all, that you know your own strengths and weaknesses in that respect. Know what you are and are not capable of doing with a high degree of control. And be very, very, very aware of what it is you're being entrusted to give.

Because as much as our popular culture might portray a dominant and submissive dynamic as being one of genuine, cold demands for servitude with no compassion, legitimately seeing a person as being an actual object, it's a person seeing it from the outside without understanding what they're looking at. Now, I know that no one's personal experience is indicative of the totality of the way things are, and so I recognize the limitations of that. But I mean, I have met a lot of people in my day who were very active practitioners of BDSM in very public ways, where their actions were open for scrutiny and held up to it.

A lot of them. And in my experience, the actual relationships between these actual people, doing these apparently outwardly abusive, horrible, depraved things to each other, these relationships, more often than not in my experience, are exceedingly loving and gentle and kind and compassionate and attentive. You have to be when you're not playing.

You have to be in order to be able to make something like that function. When you let yourself go into that space, whether you're on the taking or receiving end of that kind of voluntary abuse, it does something. This is why aftercare is so fucking important.

So fucking important. Because when you take someone to a dark and intense place, it stirs up a lot of emotional shit, a lot of deep psychological shit, and it's hard on the body. It takes a fucking toll.

It takes a lot of energy, and a person is emotionally and physically and even mentally and spiritually exhausted sometimes. by a very intense play session. And you need to recharge.

You need to reconnect. You need to reground and rehumanize. We're all still people.

We're all still just real people who are trying to feel good and help our partners feel good. It's what we do. And whether we do that by snuggling with them or choking them and fucking them hard and telling them to thank us for the pain, whatever it is that we are sharing, if it's shared from a place of love and it is consensual, and it can be done in such a way that it is controlled and will not cause real harm, then it is beautiful.

At least that's how I feel. Even if it's something that I wouldn't personally do, because it's not actually a turn-on for me personally, I can still respect other people's right, and I can still appreciate other people's joy. And it's really not my business if they want to do something that I'm not into.

As long as they enjoy themselves and everyone is okay with it, and everyone is aware of what that means, that's really all that matters, right? That's the thing. Consent.

Consent. Consent. I think this is the time to really start driving that one home.

We've talked about the responsibility of keeping someone safe, but there's also the bare-bones fucking human respect of making sure that you're not doing things to people they don't want done to them. And making sure that you give people the opportunities for things that you both might actually want. But you confirm that shit ahead of time.

It is vitally important. And it is, honestly, I mean. ..

Talking about what you want is the best fucking foreplay there is. The best fucking foreplay there is. Learning about what's going to turn somebody on, what's going to turn them off, how you're going to give them the best fucking experience you can, how you're going to make them come hard as fucking possible.

Why would you not want to know about that going in? Oh god, yes. This is also the place to really nail down what you need to stay the fuck away from.

In BDSM parlance, we call those limits. There are soft limits, there are hard limits. A hard limit is something you will not consider at all, under any circumstances.

It shouldn't even be brought up, because the mere mention of it, at times, can ruin things for you. A hard limit is something you want to be able to set and just have respected. You do not want to have to reassert it.

A soft limit is something you generally don't want, but you are willing, under certain circumstances, to negotiate and possibly do it. It's not a never. It's a not usually.

Or not unless. And those things need to be very, very, very specifically negotiated. And if they haven't been, then treat them as a no.

Until you have. Always err on the side of enthusiasm. Consent, regardless of what the dictionary might tell you, consent in BDSM is more than just permission.

Consent is enthusiasm. Something that is not a genuine fucking yes should be treated as a no. And this is something that I really feel like our society ought to emphasize more.

When I was young, we were taught no means no. But that still puts the onus on the person having the thing done to them, to say something when it's happening. And sometimes people have been traumatized and freeze up.

Sometimes people will not have the wherewithal to assert themselves. And so it really is your responsibility to make sure that you obtain that permission ahead of time if you're going to be doing something that has any kind of risk. And generally, if you're going to be just touching them at all, it's the thing you should do.

But especially, especially if the thing you're doing might hurt them, you absolutely, absolutely must make sure that they're okay with it. Even if they were okay with it before, that does not necessarily mean they're okay with it now. People can change their minds.

Consent can be withdrawn. There is never a harm in confirming when you're doing things that are particularly intense. There is never a harm in confirming.

It is. .. It can, in fact, be extremely sexy to make someone express their desires or to have someone tell you to be honest about what you're fucking feeling.

It doesn't have to be apologetic and sheepish. It can be sexy to check in. How is that feeling? Do you want more of that? Is that too tight? Are you comfortable? Does anything need adjusted?