I'll cover the most elemental triad of BDSM--D/s, B & D, S/M--and where I fit within or without those categories next week. From there I'll bounce gleefully between listed topics. It is imperative that I discuss the most critical triad before I explore anything else in detail.
My philosophical roots as applied to BDSM are very much intertwined with scholarship by three felow krauts, all born in the 19th Century: Alfred Adler, Friedrich Nietschze and Wilhelm Reich. I don't have time to specify these roots in great detail here to-nite; blogging is a format that prizes relative brevity and this trinity of giants in the history of human consciousness deserve more than a laudatory blurb or three. I will add that they all teach us how to recognize and learn to differentiate the uses and abuses of power, which is paramount wisdom for a dom. Reich, in particular, warned us how dangerous, deeply ill and potentially lethal it is to be a domineering, not dominant faux-dom or a subservient, not service-oriented faux-sub in a broader sociopolitical context of individual behavior. His courage and prescience were unduly rewarded by the temporary triumphs of Nazism and Stalinism and, later, imprisonment by Uncle Sam, who burned crateloads of his books not long before he died in a taxpayer-subsidized cage.
More personally speaking, I see BDSM everywhere because in various guises it is indeed everywhere we "see". We may for the moment consign S/M and B & D to metaphysical cornertime, not as punishment but with a kindly promise to return to them later. D/s is the closest thing to God I know, a gnostic epiphany encapsulated in two letters with a slash between them. Power dynamics are the central organizing principles of the known universe. If we accept the leather given that submissives actually possess at least half, if not more, of the power in any conscientious roleplay, then further analogies take shape before us in potentially limitless holistic manifestations.
Physics itself embodies the science of D/s dynamics. The sun is our alpha dom in this piece of astronomical real estate, the real play we inhabit. Earth's moon expresses the power of submissive energy by moving our waters. No dom exists in a vacuum. The process of power exchange, erotic and otherwise, is interactive. Mother Nature is the ultimate domme.
Artists have ever struck tones of guardian beauty in service of religion and philosophy, whether they've been dogmatically atheistic or not. They seduce their intended with aesthetic powers of persuasion and intimations of ecstatic release. They beckon and resist, paint with chiaroscuro, leaven drama with levity and so forth. So do dom/mes, and so do subs in a less explicit way. Intensely sexual activity may be interspersed with and co-exist with states of asexual being. Denial and delight may share the room in fond embrace rather than struggle. Pain and pleasure may develop as photographic signatures on a continuum, the personalized imagistic poetry of sensation. The electromagnetism that drives our natural realm can be stretched like silly putty into greater and lesser magnitudes. Genitalia can be objectified as totemic idols, belittled or ignored entirely, or positioned anywhere between these two extremes. Neotantric and other mindfully tender alternative methods of erotic power exchange are fully as D/s as the most outwardly vicious and brutal S/M encounters. EPE can be a stiff chill envelope to push or a soft warm bed for snuggling or either or both.
We in homo sapiens all tend to be homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. We also all tend to be dominant, switch (willing to roleplay either way) or submissive in our triad of power orientation. It is more than a little oxymoronic to separate the active BDSM community from what is essentially an imaginary vanilla community.
We all wear leather. Even the vegans. This fact is a real play, not a roleplay.
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