BDSM, and what it isn't (for me) 13 June 2001
	We hurt the ones we love the most. It's a subtle form of compliment... Shakespeare's Sister- I Don't Care

There's been a very interesting thread on LiveJournal today about BDSM, and why people do it. The thread was started in response to a description of a play party which I was at, and opened with a question often asked - why do we do this? Why do we hurt and let ourselves be hurt by the people we love? (If you're interested, you can see the thread here.)

The more the thread went on, the more I realised that not only did I not have a good answer as to why I did this, but none of the answers given gelled well with my experience. I think I've now worked out why that is, which is why I'm writing this web page. But first, a few very necessary disclaimers:

Disclaimer 1: when I talk about BDSM, I mean BDSM as I have experienced it. This may not be what everyone else means by it, and I have by no means done everything that there is to be done. The part of the definition that I'm most concerned with here is the pain part; flogging someone and being flogged, playing with hot wax, biting, pinching and scratching. It applies to other things that I do which I call BDSM, but the pain part is the one most people seem to focus on, and the one I can find hardest to explain.

This shouldn't matter too much because of disclaimer 2, which is that what I am about to say is just about me. It's how I personally view BDSM, and may well be different from how other people including my partners view it. I'm telling you how I feel about it, not how I want or expect you to feel.

And disclaimer 3 is that I'm relatively new to all this. What I'm about to say may seem hopelessly naive to an experienced BDSMer, and may have been discussed to death on soc.subculture.bdsm ages ago. I'm not claiming it's a major insight, but it has only just occurred to me.

Whenever I've tried to think about my BDSM relationships with other people before, I've always tried to relate them to other aspects of the relationship: specifically to love, sex, or power. I (and others) have tried to reconcile causing pain to someone I love with my love for them, or seen it as an extreme form of sex play, or as an exploration of the power dynamic between us. It can look like any of those things, and when I'm describing how it works to someone who hasn't done BDSM before, I more or less have to describe it in those terms, because they are the only frames of references that the other person has.

And every time I've tried to explain it in those terms, I've struggled. It hasn't felt right. Other people have done a much more convincing job in explaining how they felt, but I've never felt that I found the right way to explain it for me. I think I know why that is, now; it's because BDSM isn't about sex, or power, or love for me - it's about BDSM.

The way I'm relating to someone when I'm in a scene with them is unlike how I relate to anyone any other time. It's not a manifestation of love, it's something completely different, which isn't to say that it doesn't feel very special with someone I also love. It's not directly sexual - it's rare for me to get sexually aroused during a scene unless I'm being directly stimulated. It's not about power, and it's not about control; sometimes those are tools used in the scene, but they're not the point of the scene. It doesn't always feel the same - even with the same person, it can feel very different on different occasions - but there's a common feeling of BDSM-ness to every scene, which is the reason I enjoy them and continue to do them.

When I do BDSM, what I'm getting out of it is the simple fact that I'm doing BDSM with another person (or, on occasions, several people). I don't know how better to explain it, and I'm not sure that it needs explaining better. After all, I don't feel the need to explain what I get out of sex with another person beyond the experience of having sex with the other person. If I try to explain the beauty of sex in terms of love, emotion, hormones and power I can get at some of the meaning. Certainly all those things can feed into the experience of sex, but I'd still be missing out a huge part at the centre of the experience simply marked 'sex'.

For me, it's the same with BDSM.

When I'm flogging someone who wants to be flogged, there's a connection there that feels totally unlike any other connection I can make with that person. When someone's dripping hot wax on welts on my back, making me scream and shake and sob, they are close to me in ways that just have no equivalent in sex. And it's not about the power, either, although I can see how it looks that way. Yes, I am submitting to that person, placing enormous trust in them, but that is a means to the end, just as the pain is. For me, the pain and the trust and the submission all come together to make something greater than all three, a feeling that I can only refer to as 'BDSM', because I have no other words for it. The other words may come, in time, but I don't think they're concepts that mainstream society and the OED has had much use for previously.

Why didn't I see this earlier? I think that at least a part of me recoiled from the idea that I could enjoy inflicting pain on someone, or having pain inflicted on me for a reason that didn't have to do with anything more 'conventional'. I wanted it to be 'about' sex, or 'about' love, or 'about' power, because that was explainable, excusable, safe. It isn't about any of those things, though. The thrill I get from BDSM is a thrill unique to BDSM. I enjoy consensually hurting people and being hurt because I enjoy it. I don't have any other reason, and I actually I don't believe I need one.

But it does make it a complete swine to explain to anyone who hasn't done BDSM, or who doesn't see BDSM the same way I do, because I don't have the vocabulary I need to explain it. I can't tell you what I get out of it because you have probably never experienced anything similar enough to how I feel when I do BDSM.

And there's no guarantee that even when you do BDSM, you'll get the same thing out of it that I do. So, not a very helpful answer, I'm afraid, but I think it's an honest one.