BDSM school

Someone on the fetlife facebook group asked–If you went to school for BDSM, what would you study?

Sounds fun!  I wanna go to BDSM school!  I considered what topics stimulate me.  What do I ponder most often?  Then I answered: major in transcendence through ecstatic pain, minor in power.

bdsm school

I got a thrill from imagining going to BDSM school.  Hmm, like witch school, but better!  I would have my student gear–notebooks, sharpened pencils smelling all woodsy.  Pink eraser.  I would wear a Catholic school girl uniform, though I never went to Catholic school!  Hmm!

I’d be busy in a defined way and know what to do with myself, all the time: study.  Write papers, crush on classmates and teachers, walk around dreamily with big thoughts shifting my paradigms, complain about course load.

Sounds blissful.  A meeting of the minds, to be joined by other students with similar passions.  Study dates, libraries, defined trajectory.

My actual schooltime was complicated, and I worked a lot.  But this fantasy BDSM school, I would be more focused on the material.

ecstasy

As for my major–I’d love to study transcendence and experiencing God through pain-ecstasy.  I’m a religious person always looking for her religion.  I have a few!

Pain is a way I go elsewhere.  I love the other-worldliness of subspace.  I love when consensual physical force jerks me out of my everyday reality, into a frame of mind where I learn something new.  I’m no longer my usual self.

A slap on the face can shock me in a wanted way, unlike everyday civility and coldness of modern life.  There’s nothing subtle about it.

It can get primal really fast.  I don’t want violence, in everyday life.  So this adult play brings me to something basic–force I don’t have in my kind, responsible, measured regular life.

power

Power is the charge that holds it all, so tension-ly.  Why does it matter, what we’re doing?  The physical is enlivened by what’s at stake.  The ways we come together, with emotional risk, consent, ambiguity, vulnerability.

Who has the upper hand?  Who wants more?  And who has more to lose?  Our mix of privileges and disadvantages is always there.  Then particular relationships have their power differences too.

Even within a context of kindness, the discrepancies of desire, gate keeping, what’s withheld intentionally or through reticence.  The meaning of what we’re doing physically is like a secret river, underground.

thesis

Sounds like I’m already writing my thesis.  The golden-white light that fills my head, when the consensual pain knocks me, feels like God.  Maybe they are the same.

I’m happy to do this work, in another mode.  Even if we use language, it’s ritualized.  I’m grateful to have an immediate, physical way of healing, reenacting trauma in a safe way.

We’re no longer quite ourselves.  If religion is going to hate me for being a slut, loving outside of conventional marriage, having a life besides churchly pursuits and raising subdued children…  Who could blame me, for worshiping the body, and holding sex as sacred?

My clitoris is the flame of a candle, always flicker-glowing in reverence for God.  She is pain, intense pleasure, losing my spirit in the animal, or my spirit becoming animal, flooding my animal self.  My flesh transforms into an energy that vibrates.

Religion rejects me, so I make my own.  Love to the creative, queer learners.  Our queer desires mean unwelcomeness in most churches, so we build our own.