The glorification of violence

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The glorification of violence

Every time we fuck, I get bruises.

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My lover hit me with a large, hardcover book about horses, a rattan cane, and a black leather strap, folded over a thin metal plate and riveted together. The book is personally and culturally symbolic and layered, and it left dark plum nebluses on my skin that burst the red borders of the cane marks into purple blossoms the size of Hydrangeas and blood red poppies. They beat my skin red and swollen,  in some places the skin burns, where the force of a slap acts like a scrape, and abrades my flesh.

In all my sexual and romantic relationships, we cultivate a garden of vicious beauty. This is less about flowers than about intensity—emotional and physical—springing forth like wild, thorny growth. Sometimes I wonder if it is the strange alchemy of myself and another together that makes these intense environments, and therefore these relationships, possible. That is not to say romance is grounded in sex, far from it; rather, the skills and curiosity that allow such risk in sex empower intimacy and trust elsewhere. This transforms our lives, empowers a deep intimacy that impacts everything.

The romantic landscape of my life changed when I realised that my experience of romance was directly tied to heightened intensity. Learning this, finding this channel of emotion inside me and following it has led me to discover life-changing love and connectedness that teaches me about myself and others in an ongoing way. It is impossible to do these things and not have them change you,

With high intensity or edge play, I come alive in a way I don't anywhere else. The stroke of cane feels like it happens inside me, glowing, ripping through the core of myself, stealing for one moment all my focus and attention and using it for a single purpose. To feel something. A slap is a strike, but not against a boundary; it is an attack, direct and at the heart. It is an attack, the way a kiss is an invasion, but it is welcome, and that changes everything.

Power used without love or compassion, without the exchange of consent, reduces us to emptiness and collapses most interactions into expressions of authority and force. But power, when shared and carefully articulated, can become a sensual grammar. This is a truth that transcends role (there is no such thing as a dominant or submissive in negotiation, anyone who tells you this is a predator)*. Consent weaves itself into everything we do. The first thing to understand about consent is that your body is not something you possess like a mirror, a hammer, or a coil of rope. It is yourself. In the landscape of negotiation, it is you. This lesson becomes clear with pain, becase you must experience it. You can not consent to pain and not feel it.  

Regardless of how much we negotiate with our agency, our experiences will colour our judgment and change what we see. With intense BDSM, we risk not just a violation of our consent but that the things we consent to will hurt too much, will feel too much, will break our hearts or our skin.

There is no permission you can give that makes pain not painful; no safe word can remove risk, numb sensation, or responsibility. You cannot revoke reality. That's why acting without consent is assault; you are changing something that isn't yours to change. This is why violating consent, ignoring it, or retroactively denying it are all forms of sexual assault - these experiences of having our consent and our realities denied are corrosive and traumatic.

But life is beautiful, and when we give and receive agreement to mutually experience the risk in choices we intend to own, pain and power become places from which we observe ourselves. When we own our risk and our desire, we can observe the human in ourselves and in each other; and even our mistakes can become a way we learn the geographies of our personhood, we see rare sides and sites of ourselves and others, and we expand our definition of what it means to be human, what it means to be compassionate, and even what it means to be hurt.

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In my life, I have witnessed and felt sensations across the spectrum of emphatically welcome to horrifyingly intimate to grotesquely and traumatically painful and invasive. Pain, I know, even when not sexual, is always sensual. At times it is an appetite, after decades of CPTSD, 12 years of chronic pain, and a deep love of several roles within sadomasochism across several long-term relationships, I know pain is an appetite, that sometimes it is a ravenous need for something -for comfort, release, validation, satisfaction, distraction, void. Occupying and experiencing my body and the bodies and minds of my partners in this way is powerfully meaningful to me.

If you love me, pin me to the bed with teeth, clutch me so hard you leave bruises in my skin, like petals leaving their scent and colour.  

The seeking of pain has a lot of subjective sensory-emotional value; it provides models I use to understand the world and myself. Pain, like love or beauty, makes my heart beat faster. Like making love or art, I create romantic realities with these experiences at their heart.

Why do we seek out pleasure that looks so difficult, that requires so much risk and trust?  

Why do people make beautiful things?

 Love creates its own spaces with its own rules and laws. And my law of consent doesn't look much like what we teach on an individual level.  “Explicit, Informed, Ongoing, and Enthusiastic" ... my interactions are not usually like this, and I doubt very many human ones are. Certainly not ones rich with emotion, electric with risk, physically engaging and immersive and invasive as sex, as queer sex, as queer BDSM, as queer bdsm where everyone has trauma.  In the many fascinating rainbow of experiences from enthusiastic and enjoyed, curious and hesitating, to consented to and not enjoyed but grateful, to consented to not enjoyed and asked to stop, I can find myself in any one of these places, and back and forth, all within a single engmagnet with a partner and come out knowing I was seen and safe and loved the entire time.

The self is never still, always loaded, flying through change. This is true of everyone - and no one, not the people who ask us to give ourselves to them, can promise they know themselves completely. But this makes the effort more important, the agreements more precious because we share the risk of eachother - together.

Sadomasochism is an appetite that supports a greater willingness to go to extremes. High-impact romance, full-contact trust. An energetic drive to push away the rest of the world, create something of our own. It is refusal to stop moving, to typify anything, to be reasonable. We agree to howl like wolves at the moon, to pounce on all fours on the dining room floor and bite each other's throats like dogs, pinning eachother to the polished hardwood like animals.

The ethics and aesthetics of risk. The glorification of violence

Every time I fuck, I get bruises, teeth marks on the back of my neck, the warm abrasion from open hand spanking, the dense nebula of bruises that come from a leather strap, the half moons of finger tips dark on the white night sky of my skin. I don't just give permission, I seek it out.

For my wedding, I chose paper flowers, because I want everything to last.

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*My writing isn't intended for beginners in BDSM; I write for everyone, but I am writing about my own experiences, and I am not writing advice.

Consent is a complex and dynamic idea in edge play and high-risk BDSM, and I talk about my experiences here. But the core tenet of consent remains the same and unindividuated: consent is freely given, informed, and enthusiastic about something specific, and can be withdrawn at any time during the event.