I see kink as a way of setting ourselves
free by restraint. We limit ourselves through negotiation, safewords and
concepts such as Risk Aware Consensual Kink or Safe Sane and Consensual. The
reason we do so is to be able to undertake things that in themselves could not
and should not be accepted by us, society or our own conscience. By so
restraining ourselves we’re free to hurt, humiliate, force, bind and so on
exactly because we force ourselves to reflect and make sure that we never end
up doing something that is really
bad. By making our fantasies reciprocal, pleasurable and ultimately healthy for
both parties, we can make something beautiful out of impulses and fantasies
that might not be so beautiful in their raw form.
Kink, in other words, is a marriage between
responsibility and emancipation and between what is ugly and what is beautiful.
But it is also marrying the hottest fantasies and the daily grind most of us
also have to navigate – where relationships, careers and all sorts of other
things have to fit together with our Kink. Being kinky, we do not believe in
limiting imagination or perversion, but we live in reality.
Finding out that the side of me that is
attracted to seeing women suffer and lose control could become something
beautiful is one of the best things that have happened to me in my life.
Whether or not I actually live my dominance and sadism, I’m significantly
happier and more comfortable being me having accepted this part of me, and
found it something good. Like so many other movements of its kind, the
emancipation in Kink is very personal at its first step: it starts with us, not
anyone else. Freedom starts with accepting that it’s ok to be me; finding out
how to have fun with it comes second.
Ironically it’s when we get to all those
fun parts that things get complicated. At least for me it is. I’ve been more of
a whole person and have had a much higher self-esteem throughout the nearly
five years I’ve owned up to this part of me. But finding that balance between
fantasy and reality remains a challenge – and may well be so for the rest of my
life.
To me kink is not being without limits, but
taking control and responsibility for my limits. It’s liberation, but with
freedom comes responsibility. It’s not a
chance to make someone hurt without consequence, but sadism with a conscience.
It means that I don’t have to be ashamed of my darker fantasies, but there
still are many of those that I could not live with a clear conscience. It also
means that I am confronted again and again, with people who have other limits
to how far they can and should live their kink than I; that I keep meeting the
opportunity of going a little longer in pursuit of pleasure. BDSM might in many
ways be about saying ‘yes’, it is also often an exercise in saying ‘no’.
It is often not an easy compromise to make.
There are times when I’m ‘sexed’ and feel myself attracted to the most
uncompromising fantasies, even some that I couldn’t condone anyone living out. Even
though Kink emancipates us, there will always be a distance between those
things that have to work in the real world of boring everyday life and the
world of fantasies. The grass will always, or at least often, seem greener on
the other side of the fence, whichever way we end up balancing fantasy and
reality in our lives. And I must admit that I have never been in a relationship
without now and then dreaming about something that was a little more out there,
purer, less tainted by compromise and with less resistance to worry about as a
dominant. I am thankful that I have at least one time experienced letting go of
that dream of that ‘something more’, knowing that what I had was what I really
wanted, and that all the rest would pale after the first excitement and the
first cum.
I
don’t know how far I will end up going in my kink. I don’t know how far I and
my partner will go in the compromise between our sexual and kinky life, and all
the rest that is also important and valuable in our lives. That depends a whole
lot on me, my partner, and also where we are in our lives. What I do know is
what I don’t want. I know that there is a lot more to me than my kink, and that
the girls I’ve loved I loved for so much more than their kink – even though I
do tend to love the girls I hurt. I know that I am humane before I am sadistic,
that meeting another person and seeing what is beautiful in her, and embracing that
and building something beautiful together is fundamental to me. Kink is a medium;
a way of being together, that makes me able to see things that are beautiful in
my love, and between us, that would have otherwise been hidden. But it is still
a medium; a way of loving, not love itself.
I’ve spent too long letting myself be
limited by labels. Of seeing a Master/slave-relationship as this or that thing,
that I on the one hand couldn’t live, but still longed for – or thinking that I
had to be in one certain way in my relationship, because we chose to bind
ourselves to the label of her being slave. Relationships are living things and,
while we build on shared fantasies and ideals, like she being owned, ideals
without compromise become oppressive and fantasies that do not allow for us to
grow, and sometimes change, may become nightmares. The idea that you have to be
in any other way than what feels right for you and your partner, in order to
live up to some kind of label or lifestyle is only to the
loss of those preaching and trying to live it, instead of living their own
lives and their own kink.
From now on my resolution will be to deny
absolutes and embrace the fact that Kink is about compromise. And that there
shall be no one preaching to neither me, nor my love, what our relationship should
be about (apart from consensual, healthy fun with a good dose of communication,
reflection and responsibility) no matter what we choose to call ourselves.
Sometimes I feel rather thick-sculled when
I think about how much time, thinking and confusion it sometimes takes me to
reach such simple points. Yet I hope some of you out there in some way benefit
from my writing about my confusion.
/ I
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