Outside the BDSM community, you hear the phrase "kinky sex" - the two ideas enmeshed. Within the BDSM community, though, the two ideas - kink and sex - are generally discussed as distinct entities.
And for me, this is a neverending source of confusion. For me, the two are part of a seamless whole, with kink being an expression of my sexuality. (More recently, it's come to be almost the entire definition of my sexuality, but my lack of interest in vanilla sex is the topic for another post.)
So the widely-heard prohibition "No sex in the dungeon" has always been a mystery to me. If someone's beating me and I come, did I just break the rules?
I know I'm being intentionally obtuse and refusing to understand that when people say "sex" they mean intercourse; they mean penetration. Because, well, I spent a lot of years having awesome sex with women who were not so into the penetration. Besides, there's so much more to sex than the penetration.
An incredibly fun Dom I've played with recently, Abel, told me that he has a rule that he doesn't have sex with someone the first time he plays with them. That about broke my brain. I mean if I didn't trust someone to fuck me, I certainly wouldn't trust him to tie me up and hit me. I'm private about my body and having someone touch me is almost always a sexual signifier (like being Naked with them). So if I didn't want a Dom to touch me sexually, I'm not so sure that I want him touching me at all.
Even so, because "non-sexual play" is a thing in the community, I did try it once. Adah and I had a memorable afternoon playing with clothespins at GKENE* last August. I certainly trust her. But that separation of sex and play didn't do it for me. I kept wondering what was the point? Why get all turned on with someone and NOT have sex? There was also a limit to how much pleasure I could take in the sensation since it wasn't meant to really be a sexual encounter.
For me, BDSM is so much MORE intimate than just sex, I don't know how to want to share the one intimacy and not the other.
*GKENE = The Geeky Kink Event - New England Imagine ComicCon with a dungeon.
I'm with you 99% on this issue!
ReplyDeleteI"m dying to know what the remaining 1% is
DeleteI tend to agree with you although I have enjoyed both nonsexual kinkplay and nonkinky sexplay. FYI, just to file away for future reference, Dark Odyssey is the one major SEX friendly big kink event. People are expected to get aroused and to have sex in various permutations and expressions thereof during their kinky dungeon scenes and etc. (Other events often have rules against it. And YES there is this profoundly patriarchal and heterosexist equation of "sex" with "penis in vagina"... I guess either lesbians aren't capable of having sex or the only sex dirty enough to be prohibited is the PIV variety... either way I have political/social issues with the rule)
ReplyDeleteCertainly, I have enjoyed nonkinky (what a nice word, too - so much less judgemental-sounding than "vanilla") sex, just over the past year, I've noticed my interest and enjoyment waning.
DeleteThe whole "no sex in the dungeon" thing strikes me as a distinction without a difference. If I am with another human, and our bodies are in contact and we're aroused, by my view of the world and all that is holy - THAT'S SEX.
One of the things I like about the Jeff Mach events is that their dungeon rules for sexual contact are quite specific, making no assumptions about what one does or does not consider "sex". Of course, that specificity doesn't always make perfect sense, either. At last summer's GKENE, neither vaginal nor anal penetration were permitted with a penis, but *were* permitted with a strap-on.
I do understand that some of this is semantics and zoning ordinances and health codes as well. Back in the mid-80s, during the Koch administration, when NYC closed all the bath houses and sex clubs to curtail the spread of AIDS, BDSM clubs and practitioners made a big point of distinguishing between kink and sex so that they could keep the doors open. 30 years later, though, it seems to me like the East Coast BDSM community has accepted that distinction as canon and not a bit of legalistic sleight of hand.
ReplyDelete