100 Shades of BDSM
I’ve been part of the BDSM community for quite a few years now, and what has surprised me the most as I think back on everything I learned since I started is how many different shades there are to BDSM.
The term itself reveals some of this diversity. It’s an umbrella term that encompasses a bunch of different kinks. The B stands for bondage, D for discipline, D/s for dominance and submission, and SM for sadism and masochism. Within the lifestyle you find endless combinations of these links: people who only come for the bondage part, people who only do the SM part, people who mix a little of everything. Then there are the degrees to which you incorporate it into your life, be it purely sexual or as a lifestyle. Furthermore, there are all the roles and genders, male Doms, female Doms, heterosexual Doms, homosexual Doms, that need to go together with the fitting counterpart.
Thinking about all these endless combinations, it seems all but impossible to find a good fit. It’s difficult enough in the normal dating pool, right? Just finding someone you have the right chemistry with can be hard. Then you go ahead and narrow it down to a small community, and furthermore some very specific needs. That’s just impossible.
Yet, somehow I found myself being a very lucky sub, finding myself a master who is the perfect fit for me. And I know several others who have been just as lucky. That seems like a small miracle when you consider all the above factors, and the thought of ever becoming single in such a market scares the shit out of me.
But then I dig a little deeper and think about what actually happens when you get together with someone in the lifestyle. Just like in the vanilla world, you’ll never find the perfect match–someone who tics all the right boxes. You’ll find someone with a very specific set of needs and wishes that merges with your own in a sort of compromise. Something you never dreamed about doing might become interesting just because the Dom you’ve become infatuated with likes it.
For instance, I’m not a painslut, just a regular masochist who enjoys pain mixed with pleasure. But the amounts of pain I could take when I started seeing my master… I still can’t comprehend how I managed. He can be a real sadist. Sometimes when I came to his place in the beginning, he would drag me from the hall straight into the bedroom and throw me on the bed, saying, “We’ll start with pain.” Then he’d take out his cane and beat my ass without a warm up. And to those of you who haven’t been on the receiving end of a cane, I can tell you that it hurts like motherf***ing hell. And yes, I’d scream into the pillow and bang my fists on the mattress, but this warm submissive feeling would also wash over me, flood my brain in pleasant fuzzyness and awaken the sensitive nervendings between my legs. It wasn’t as much the pain as the loss of control I reveled in. Just giving yourself so completely to someone that he may do whatever he pleases is truly intoxicating, and my submission for him burned so bright that it would ease the experience of the pain just knowing that he wanted me to take it.
I really think you kind of merge in this way when you meet someone new, giving something to the other while getting something new that you didn’t know you had in you. So even though BDSM can be som many different things, I think that if the chemistry is there and the roles are compatible, you’ll merge your needs into something unique that can’t ever be replicated with someone else.
