BDSM PLEASURE IS AS OLD AS RECORDED HISTORY
Ancient Egypt was keen on enemas. The Roman Empire had cults devoted to whippings and orgies. Prehistoric native cultures decorated their bodies with tattoos and scars. 18th and 19th century London brothels offered bondage and “flagellation.” These are but a handful of the documents — in art and in writings — showing the eternal nature of what we today call BDSM.
BDSM is as old as recorded history because there have always been people like us in the world. People with fetishes. People who use pain to enter an altered state of consciousness. People who like it rough, like it hard, want to enact fantasy roles, who enjoy intense sensation, who love discipline, who want to know the limits of erotic pleasure.
The only force that has turned our history into an indictment of people like us has been a political concept of what is permissible. Not what feels good. Not what feels right. Not what gives people a sense of true agency over themselves and their bodies. And certainly not what makes ALL people happy in bed.
The craving for more sensation and erotic ecstasy seems to be part of our makeup. BDSM — long before we had protocols to make it safe and healthy — has been part of our history as a species.
BDSM IS AS NORMAL AS ANYTHING ELSE
In the last blog, I wrote, “A long time ago someone asked me “what was the most perverted thing you ever heard?” My answer — “The most sexually perverted thing I ever heard was two people who do the same exact thing every time they have sex.” (read it here: https://gloriabrame.com/5-cliches-about-bdsm-that-bdsmers-should-stop-repeating)
Let’s unpack that. Human beings don’t all eat the same foods. We don’t own all the same clothes. We don’t all groom the same ways, either. At any given time, in any given place, at any given moment in history, there will always be a random percent, say 20 to 40%, of people who are outliers. It is human nature to be diverse in tastes, habits and behaviors. So why in the world would we all have sex in the same way?
Yet most people are taught, from an early age, that coitus (or fucking, to make it plain) is the single holy act they can perform in bed. It’s the be-all and end-all, the only act that truly defines sex as sex. It sanctifies sex with a dual purpose: to procreate and to bolster male dominance by insisting that missionary, man-on-top sex, is the only right kind of sex to have. Anything that doesn’t look like reproductive sex may be demonized by various religions, various laws, and even various psychiatrists. At least, that was the path civilization was on until LGBTQIA and BDSM voices began to challenge the narrative, beginning roughly a century ago. By the 1920s in Europe and the United States, small groups formed to assert that Free Love (early polyamory), orgasm control, kink, and all shades of the LGBT rainbow existed as valid expressions of human sexuality.
It is human nature to be diverse. Some people always knew that nonconformist sex acts delighted them more than the type of sex their church or local laws allow. Some of always pursued so-called forbidden pleasures. So were we, the so-called perverts, wrong to place authentic sexual pleasure above what (allegedly) celibate priests told us about sex? Or were the conformists weird for vowing to only use their genitals in the position their religious authorities deemed appropriate?
Happily, today, we can find others like us, who broke with the belief that there is only one kind of “right sex” to have. We live in an age that allows people to explore their true sexual potential. We should be thankful to the pioneers who paved the way for us by putting their own lives at risk to stand up for sexual freedom. Because that’s what it’s all about. If you are a person who adores fucking and nothing else, good for you and keep on trucking/fucking. But if you are a person who adores kink, be grateful you can find community with millions of others like you around the world (thanks, Internet!).
BDSM IS ABOUT LOVE
A shadow lingers over you and me, a persistent social trope that BDSM is dangerous. Outsiders assume that if you hit someone with a whip, you couldn’t love them. They are wrong. A whipping may look like brutality to an outsider, but trust and caring are the golden keys to bring a kinky bottom to ecstasy.
From our highly organized systems of education that teach best practices to engage in hard-core play and highly evolved systems of consent (e.g., RACK, SSC, PRICK), the BDSM communities are innovators. We invented practices and protocols, from safe-words to contracts, out of love, empathy and compassion.
Since our early beginnings ca. 1960s-1970s, what we now call the BDSM Community rejected what conformists said about us. We were normal people with rational minds, leading normal lives, and looking for love with someone who shared our sexuality. As we evolved, we developed a language and a safety code to reflect the philosophy that all love is good love, regardless of its sexual expression, as long as the people involved were happy. Now we’re seeing BDSM itself evolve from a small underground of social outcasts to a global phenomenon with tens of millions of people participating in kink. What draws them and intrigues them is the possibility of finding true love with another kinky person.
BDSMers have a lot to be proud of. We were the first sex community to tackle complex moral issues head-on. We have taught the non-kinky world about consent, safe-words, aftercare, and new ways to heighten mutual pleasure. We’ve taught hundreds of thousands of people to do BDSM safely, saving many lives along the way. We’ve built tens of thousands of loving families. And, while we didn’t need studies to prove we often have sturdier and more emotionally balanced relationships than sexual conformists, there are now lots of scientific studies that say we do.
Learn all about the diversity of human behavior, how Kinsey got the scale wrong, and where fetish/BDSM/poly have been fixtures of human society. See what the discerning readers at Goodreads have to say about “Sex for Grownups.”
