How BDSM Social Networks Set Me Free

When I was eight years old I remember reading an Enid Blyton book – one of the more obscure ones – in which the heroine, a tiny fairy, is kidnapped by a magician. He clips her wings, makes her cry and keeps her in the kitchen as his domestic slave. Until one day she’s washing a cauliflower and an earwig crawls out of it, promising to leave the castle and tell her friends about her captivity.

That was not my first introduction to stories of power. I was bullied for years before that by my peers, and I understood how power worked in my universe. I will never know if this was the reason I found this story so arousing. But I certainly did. I had my first orgasm thinking about it.

Psychology and fiction will often tell you that sadomasochism – or its cousin, dominance and submission – are the result of childhood trauma, or of the impact of a hostile world of competition and aggression, or of a million other kinds of flotsam and jetsam that swim around in our unconscious minds. Christian Grey of EL James’ series “50 Shades”, for instance, is supposed to like BDSM – Bondage and Discipline (BD), Dominance and Submission (DS), Sadomasochism (SM) – because his mother was a “crack whore”, as he describes it, and presumably abused him as a child.

But sometimes I’d just rather let psychology be. There could be a link between some parts of my childhood and my desire to be sexually dominated, and if I were EL James, I would probably dredge it all up and spell it out to the last letter, until there was no room left to breathe, let alone have sex. That kind of thinking would posit (in fact, it’s the sort of thinking that does posit a lot) that I’m trying, again and again, to re-create the helplessness I felt as a child in a safer environment, and that I’ll be stuck like this forever. In general, I’m a fan of psychological dredging-up processes. But I’d rather think of whatever created these desires (if such a specific “cause” even exists) as a heap of compost. There’s a lot of fermenting and metamorphosing in there, and I’m lucky enough to be able to recycle all this fertile material by – and for the purpose of – having good sex! It’s a cycle, like a carbon or oxygen or nitrogen cycle, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

And so I began to search for an Internet platform through which I could meet like-minded people. It took a while, with a lot of Google keywords, hesitation, terror, and excitement, but after a few weeks I finally signed up on one of a few social networking sites for people who like BDSM (or “kink”, as it’s known), role-play and the like. Functionally these sites serve the same purpose as Shaadi.com, OkCupid.com or AdultFriendFinder.com – they help you find someone with your goals/interests. Except in this case, it’s primarily kinky sexual interests. Some examples are Collarspace.com, ALT.com, F-list.com, Fetlife.com, IMVU.com, the IRC (Internet relay chat) app with its chatrooms, and parts of Secondlife.com. Like Facebook or any of the matrimonial or online dating sites, you create a profile, with photos/images, a write-up about yourself, your location, age, gender, orientation, and a keyword to describe what you like. In my case this was “sub”, short for “submissive”. Other options are Top, Bottom, Dom (dominant), Sadist, Masochist, Switch (for someone who likes to switch between dominant and submissive roles), and more. If you like, you can add keywords about your fetishes, which range from the general (foot fetish) to the very very specific (washing someone’s feet and kissing them). Then you can message people, or vice versa, privately, or write on someone’s wall, as you do on Facebook.

Before this online platform that I found, my earlier encounters with just plain sex (or “vanilla sex”, as it’s called) were initially good, and later fraught, mostly with my lack of desire. I’d begun to wonder if I was just simply asexual and should leave it at that. Within a few days of my registering on the site, however, I began to realize it was more complicated than that. I had my first DS cybersex with a man. We used anonymous user names on Gtalk, and didn’t tell each other our real names for a while. If we used photos or video, we didn’t let our faces into the frame. We used a “safe word” in our role-play, so that I could let him know if I was uncomfortable at any point and needed to stop. And I had to admit that I wasn’t asexual – or at least, not virtually.

Reactions from people in my life were not as varied as I thought they would be: most friends were just happy for me, one or two wondered if it was healthy to have cybersex instead of physical sex, and if cybersex qualified as sex at all. As far as I was concerned, having cybersex was better than being asexual, and that was that for the time being.

One question raised was a feminist one: “Why would you submit to a man?” Being a feminist myself, this question was indeed something that had bothered me in my teens. I still hadn’t begun to think about the concept of “play” then. Play: a bit of gambol and frolic, games and mind games, blind man’s buff, doctor-doctor, teacher-teacher and house-house. Play: joy, exuberance, and most of all, forgetting rules and how the “real world” works. As play began to enter other aspects of my life, my thinking became lighter, my eyebrows became unknit, and laughter was at the edges of many things. My personal brand of feminism became more complex, more inclusive, and more joyful. And I no longer worried about being tied up by, kneeling to, surrendering to, or being ordered around by a man or a woman in a sexual situation. And, as I told someone, kink is the great leveler: men submit to women, and women submit to men, and however this might be related to a male-dominated society, at least the picture presented by this mutual domination and submission is not horribly, intuitively wrong.

More cybersex with other members of this site followed. Some didn’t work for me; others did, phenomenally. I would lazily ascribe this to chemistry or lack thereof, but I know it was also about how much consideration, respect and generosity the dominant showed me. When he orchestrates the entire “session”, a lot depends on his interest in my own reactions, turn-ons, energy levels and half a dozen other factors. If he’s not that interested in my side of things, it usually doesn’t work. And everything depends on my willingness, sense of responsibility about myself, generosity and lack of prejudice too! Both these factors worked with some people, and didn’t with others.

A new energy crept into my life, sometimes creative, and sometimes destructive. I was literally inviting more “life” into my life now, and when I could remember to be, I was grateful. I didn’t have to enjoy BDSM porn wishing that would happen to me too. I could just enjoy BDSM porn.

The site I tried, like any other Indian site with its structure, has a skewed ratio of men to women. This creates different kinds of anxieties in both sexes, heterosexually speaking. The simple economy of supply and demand changes attitudes quite drastically, which means I can only talk about my experience of it as a woman. (I don’t even know about the queer scene there, because I never earnestly tried it.) On my side, I could pick and choose. And on the men’s side, I sensed gratitude and sometimes despair at the difficulty of finding someone. They (or at least the ones I liked) really had my sympathy, and sometimes, when I experienced a rare rejection (rare only because of this ratio), it was bracing. It’s not necessarily great to be on the right side of an economy all the time.

And there are always people around in any social circle (virtual or real) who wish you ill. Back in the 90s the only kinds of stalkers were either three-dimensional or telephonic ones. Now, of course, they’re on the Internet, because many of us are on the Internet. I had my share of stalking, but not enough to put me off. I have heard horror stories though, just like with any other stalking medium.

As I grew more confident in my ability to be aroused, I began meeting men from the site in my city. We’d meet in a public place, talk for half an hour or more, and part ways. The idea was to find someone I might just, despite past evidence to the contrary, want to have a physical DS experience with.

It took around half a dozen meetings, but it did happen. And the previous meetings were well worth it. Surprisingly for me, the most valuable thing I’ve taken away from all this is the experience of meeting such a variety of people, the kind I’d never meet in my usual social and professional circles. The “blind dates” would go like this: I’d meet someone in a restaurant, and we’d talk. With each person the conversation would move differently. Sometimes we’d be really focused about discussing kink and sex. Sometimes we’d just casually amble along, conversationally speaking. It was incredibly refreshing to talk, just talk to a stranger. I found that I liked it – I liked it very much.

After meeting, if we decided we didn’t want to pursue this sexually, I’d often try to keep in touch anyway. Making a friend off the Internet whom I would never have met otherwise struck me as a bit of a miracle. And though I’m not as effortlessly grateful as I’d like to be for my sexual experiences, gratitude was the easiest thing in the world for these interactions. Because I hadn’t socialized much with a wider range of people before.

When I finally, amazingly, met someone I wanted to touch, I experienced physical submission, and being tied up, for the first time in a DS context. The most obnoxious thing one can do about this is theorize, and I will try my best not to. The next most obnoxious thing one can do is spiritualize, and I’m afraid things might move in that direction now. So all those who are disgusted by sexual delusions of grandeur, you might want to look away! But rest assured that I find claims that tantric sex is better than non-tantric sex equally annoying. Because I’d rather not leave out this part of how I experienced physical submission, while of course disclaiming heavily by saying that this was just my own, very personal experience.

I’ve been on meditation retreats where we meditated eleven hours a day and weren’t allowed to talk, read, listen to music or do anything else cerebral. Experience, physical experience, became our worlds, not least because we were told to focus on it. We were told that awareness of every breath, every itch, every drop of sweat running down our backs, every ache and pain, every pleasurable sensation, and all the pins and needles was crucial to our practice, that the path to less suffering consisted of observing these exclusively and with an equanimous eye, understand that they were transient. I wouldn’t say I was successful at this, but I tried. The more I learned to accept both physical pleasure and pain as one, the more I surrendered to my physical experience. And this physical experience became increasingly vivid and sharp as my awareness grew, until I was suddenly experiencing life more directly than I had ever done, trapped as I have always been in my obsessive, wandering mind.

I couldn’t access this full and rich experience of my body and world in sexual terms, not before meeting like-minded people and not with another person in the room. Sure I could masturbate, and that worked in its own way. I could meditate, and that worked too. After all, the best orgasm I’ve ever had was on a meditation retreat.

I found a new route to this experience when I submitted physically, and when I was tied up. The same surrender, the same fluidity between pleasure and pain, led me to a direct, non-cerebral experience of my life that I wish I had every day in every way. And I could, too, if I meditated more. But meanwhile, these were the gifts that the Internet bore.

I have an obsessive, wandering mind, and I often think about how I’ll look back on my life when I’m dying. The best scenario, I think, would be if I didn’t look back at all. But if I do, I’ll want to know that I experienced my life directly, hands-on, through my body, instead of through the lens of a million thoughts and feelings. I’ll like to know that even through the lakhs of hours on my laptop, I enjoyed feeling the keys under my fingers, that I enjoyed sitting cross-legged, the feel of the seat under me, the heat of the machine on my lap. I want to be able to think: I was alive, and I knew it. And BDSM has helped me with this, in its own wickedly sexy way.

First published on Yahoo! Originals.