Day 13: Explain as best you can what the appeal of kink/BDSM is to you? Why are you drawn to what you’re drawn to?
I’ve been pondering this question for awhile now. The easy answer is, “It turns me on.” And that’s certainly true. It makes me hot, it makes me wet, it makes me crazy with lust. I’ve never been so in tune with my body or what makes me sexual and desirable and female before in my life.
That’s very appealing.
What we do also makes me feel beautiful and unique–special. I can do things–and enjoy things–that not many women do, and I have partners that value me for those things. And oftentimes for things that others might revile me for. They see me as desirable and beautiful, and as I have learned to accept that they do, so I have become in my own eyes.
There’s a lot of appeal in that, as well.
But…
There’s more to it than that. It fulfills some other needs in me, things I have a hard time putting a name to. Giving in, giving up control–what I feel in those moments is not always, or only, just sexual. There’s a feeling of settling in, of settling down, of…release. It makes me feel…comforted, and safe. It echoes the feelings I have when I start to float in rope space, when I know that I am well and truly bound and helpless…there’s no fight, and I don’t want there to be. I just want to…be. Right there, the focus of his or their attention, safe because they keep me safe.
I don’t know how to name that, what to call that feeling. Perhaps it is just relief that I don’t have to make all those decisions alone. That someone else can, and will.
I don’t always acknowledge how hard it is at times to be a single parent. Truthfully, I know I have it easy. I have a good relationship with their dad, we share in child-rearing responsibilities fairly equally, and I get a lot of time to just be me, not a 24/7 “single mom.” I am wildly blessed in this. And yet…I am still a single parent. I still have decisions to make all the time on my own, for them, about them, about myself in regards to them. I also have responsibilities at work, and in relationships, decisions and choices that I have to make alone, and sometimes…the weight of that feels so very, very heavy. When I do what I do, when I give myself up to whomever it is that I am submitting to, for just those couple of hours, I don’t have to think of one other thing. All I have to think about is pleasing that person, or what we are doing together, or nothing. Nothing at all. I can just be.
Yeah, there’s a whole lot of appeal in all those things. I guess writing this wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be.
