A Sort-of-Subly-Mostly-Masochistic-Occasionally-Slavish-Oddball.

BDSM is not poly or monogamish or monogamous; not sadomasochism, age play, or mind games. BDSM is not rope, not fire, not wax or toys or degradation; not total power exchange, subservience or chastity. BDSM is what you and your partners want it to be.

As long as your lifestyle doesn’t harm or prescribe to others, you’re allowed to define your own dynamic. If you want to build BDSM out of one serving of sadomasochism and 70 servings of vanilla sex, I have news for you. You can. If you want to switch, submit, or salivate, you can do that, too. I’ll say it again. BDSM is whatever you want it to be.

A lot of people enter the scene because they’re tired of conforming, but then we tie them up in rules, thump our BDSM textbooks at them, and beat them half to death with expectations of conformity. Did you come to the kink scene to conform?

No, you did not.

When I first created my Fetlife profile, I felt like a drop of water trying to rush up a waterfall. Everything I saw and read stood in direct opposition to my kink preferences, so I began to count my “weaknesses”: I was too inexperienced, too monogamous, too unskilled.

I thought I had to change to engage in power exchange, but eight years later, I’m telling you to throw away the rules. I’ve heard a lot of stories in my time in the kink scene--tales of subs who are as uncomfortable with traditional roles as I am; tales of s-types with dominant personalities; of D-types who prefer unsubmissive bottoms; of switches who don’t particularly care what you call them as long as they get to extract joy from their relationships, so I refuse to fit other people’s labels.

BDSM is not humiliation or pain or suspension. It’s a relationship like any other, and there aren’t four love languages, but thousands. There is plenty of room there for you and me.

The problem with conformity is that it will efface you. It’s a neutral stance associated with oppression--hardly the spirit of rebellion we like to brag about in Kink Country. I didn’t enter the scene to live other people’s lives, but to find the truth of who I am. If Master been-dominant-since-birth wants a different kind of sub, he gets to look for her, but he does not get to redefine me.

And this is who I am: A Sort-of-Subly-Mostly-Masochistic-Occasionally-Slavish-Oddball.