S & M And Me
I have said in the past that sexuality is an ever-evolving thing. Well, it is for me. Maybe I had a sheltered childhood and adolescence, I don’t know, but I am still discovering new things about sex and more importantly about myself.
It’s one thing being open to new ideas about sex, or anything else. Accepting that others may enjoy something that is outside your experience or inclinations. It is becoming apparent that as I learn more I am becoming hungrier than ever to experience new sensations and states of mind.
Perhaps it’s my own version of a mid-life crisis – after all I’m about the right age now.
My urge to experience new things is for the most part sated by Suze. She’s a very adventurous, understanding and trusting partner. She’s up for most safe and sane activities. Consent isn’t an issue as such because she knows that I wouldn’t even insist we tried something unless we both wanted to experience it. We don’t have a perfect relationship, whatever that is, but it’s not far off.
What am I talking about? Well, nothing in particular, but I was walking downstairs yesterday evening when my dressing gown caught the tender skin on my arm where I burned myself on the paint stripping gun at the weekend. Instead of making me flinch and curse it made my mind race. I felt excited, alive and got the usual burst of colour that I experience when I feel pain.
Synaesthesia has been linked to a tendency towards BDSM (or so I have read, though I’ve yet to find any empirical proof of that), and in that moment I could understand the assertion. I felt the searing pain, but experienced it’s burning rather than recoiled from it, I enjoyed the sensation and it made me feel more alive. My next urge was to give out an animal shriek, but my social conditioning (damn being English) stopped me. It was an ejaculation of pleasure that I stifled, not of discomfort.
So where is this leading? Not to being a masochist. While I enjoy a little bit spanking or light flagellation from time to time I’m no sub, there is no Sacher Masoch lurking within me. I wanted to express this feeling of elation by inflicting the same pain on someone else.
There in lies the problem of course, we all experience pain differently and react to it on a physiological and psychological level in different ways. I see pain in terms of sensation and colour were I to become the giver of pain that I wanted to be at that fleeting moment I could not have known exactly how the recipient of my attentions would react.
It really did make me reconsider exactly what my attitude towards S & M is.