After that last post wondering about the underlying similarities in 24/7 and ‘just in the bedroom’, I stumbled onto something that might be a qualitative difference (or at least a dimension) after all.
I woke up one night, at oh-mumble-hundred AM, stressing out about work stuff… and after dealing with the stress, had a minor epiphany just as I was going back to sleep. To articulate it in any but the most banal terms I’ll probably need to explain where I was coming from.
It’s been hard for me to perceive how much I’ve expected of myself and how much self-control I’ve felt I’ve needed: after all, I’ve been so accustomed to the expectations that I’ve become blind to them. It is strange and disorienting to start questioning those self-conceptions. To quote Matrix, “You think that’s air you’re breathing?”
I think that my interest in BDSM is linked to both the expectations themselves and the need to question them, which is somewhat disorienting in itself… There seems to be a cliche in popular culture of a successful, over-achieving politician or businessman visiting a professional dominatrix for humiliation and pain, to release the tensions of his demanding job. The point seems to be the dichotomy of the two implied roles: successful and dominant in work, craving punishment in private. While this image is offputting in a number of ways, there is some truth in it for me.
One of the payoffs of BDSM for me is the potentially transformative nature of it. Giving over control of myself, even in limited degree, is liberating. I’ve been so used to the perfectionist demands of my super-ego that it’s difficult/rewarding to hand over the authority to make demands, to let someone else choose on which criteria I’ll be evaluated and how to apply them. But (and this is an important but) I think this works for me because it is limited in time and purpose. In giving over that authority I gain a better understanding of it and of myself, and I use the process to question the demands I’m so used to placing on myself. For me this seems to require deliberation in the power dynamics and the transitions into and out of them.
(From what I’ve read I suspect that at least for some people identifying as 24/7, such transitions would rather defeat the point of the power dynamic. They prefer to keep their power dynamic stable within the context of the relationship, and I suspect this is related to their payoffs (even when transformative in nature) being in some way different from the ones I seek. I might be full of hot air here, though.)
So what was the epiphany? In simplest terms, I think this: in aiming to relax the expectations I place on myself, I have no wish to give over the authority to place them, or to place them on others. Instead, I wish to learn how to let go of the need for expectations, by playing with them and by choosing them mindfully.
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