I Know Less About BDSM With Every Passing Year

I ended my first D/s relationship in 2014. Back then I thought someone with six years of kink experience would be pretty adept at navigating BDSM, but I'm still a beginner. I still make yuuuge mistakes. Yuge. This sexual planet we live on has its own ecosystems and physics laws, so sometimes I think I'll always be a foreigner here.

We don't like saying things like that 'round these parts. We want to believe that submission is made of candy floss and teddy bears, otherwise we might lose our sense of safety. But maybe it would be safer if we all asked more questions than we could answer. 

In 2016, A researcher named K. Klement found that BDSM's consent culture was associated with fewer rape-supportive beliefs, and I've certainly experienced it that way. Kink has taught me more about consent than vanilla society ever could, but that doesn't make D/s easy. Not for me.

I still find it difficult to tell dominants from psychopaths. I still take risks unwittingly. I still struggle to tell dominance from exploitation. I still give more than I can bear. Most of all, I still don't know how to keep submission from muddying my clarity about my relationships. D/s requires us to lay our spirit down at the feet of a dominant, and from down there, it can be difficult to see the sky.

That's the sky you navigate with… The sky that warns you of hurricanes. The sky that lights your way.

Submission has often required me to find true north in the dark, so I've sailed straight into icebergs. I can handle consent like a pro, but I'm still an "unsinkable" ship when it comes to finding strength in submission. I used to blame my inexperience, but I've sailed around this iceberg a few times now, and I'm not finding the sky much brighter than it was before.

The more BDSM experience I rack up, the more ignorant I become.

This is the part where I insert hope and sparkly lessons into the writing, but all I have are these question marks. Over the last few weeks, I've taken these questions to some trusted friends, and I found out that I'm not as unusual as I thought. Submission isn't easy. Not even a little bit.

It was arrogance that sunk the Titanic, not an iceberg. If its captain and creators had been a little less certain and a lot more careful, 1, 500 passengers would have survived. Maybe questions and uncertainty are the best traits to bring to BDSM.