How Kink Turned My Body into a Home

In my teens, sex was sticky and dripping in guilt. You’re not meant to have sex before marriage, you know, so here’s a poster of seven STIs, one teen pregnancy, and 50 million kinds of ruination. Here are 10 reasons you’re a slut.

When I became sexually legal, I was already in my first long term relationship with a man called Ash. We tried public sex. We tried Five Awesome Sex Positions You Won’t Believe are True. We played with ice and porn and The Godawful 69™. Sex was a planet to explore, but I still felt guilty about it, and that was ameliorated by the fact that Ash was a cheating son of a bitch.

Thus began my Slutcapade years. Ash was gone. I was in pain, so love became a wound I treated with more sex. Those were my numb years. I had a man for every day of the week, and I didn’t care about any of them.

When I finally fell for a good man, I became one of those conservatives who had sex in bed with the lights off. I stopped experimenting and started thinking about marriage. We never got that far, and so I met a man who was into threesomes and bisexual sex and fisting and rape.

Let’s not talk about that last part. Here’s a paragraph of silence.

H came next, but something in our sex life was missing. E showed me what it was: intimacy. He taught me to share secrets I’d sworn never to tell. He accepted all of them as beautiful. He loved my guilt. He even loved my shame. He even loved my terror, so I shared every scream. I thought the sky would fall, but the earth filled with flowers instead.

That was my introduction to BDSM and, somehow, it dissolved all my sexual shame. I don’t know why or how, but one day I woke up feeling at as though my body fit me. Maybe it was the fact that it had been lurking inside me all along, or maybe it was that I felt seen for the first time in my life. Maybe it was love that did it. Maybe it was E who did it. Whatever it was, it melted my paragraph of silence. Then I found Fetlife and, with it, my voice. For some reason, people wanted to listen.

Of all the things that have healed me, BDSM has been the most miraculous. I still walk tall. I still tell hard truths. I’ve still forgotten what it was like to think sex was evil.  

BDSM turned my body into a home, and the kink community decorated it with tulips. Yellow ones like those my first love used to bring me every Friday.