BDSM: Pleasurable Pain

A Brief History
by Shiloh

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From Ms Petal
I'm going to try to keep my comments fairly brief.  First, a correction or two.  Shiloh does a fairly good job of describing the history of the overall BDSM community, but there are a couple of inaccuracies.  And very minor, I might add, but still, for the sake of disseminating accurate information, I offer this. BDSM: the acronym is actually a sort of three-in-one deal.  It stands for: Bondage/Discipline; Dominance/Submission; Sado-masochism or sadism and masochism.

Also, the leather history she (?) points to is not entirely complete.  My understanding is that the "leather community," such as it is, evolved out of the experiences and practices of post WW II gay men, veterans, who chose to continue their shared militaristic experience within the context of consensual erotic and romantic relationships.  They incorporated the concepts they new about, chain of command, discipline, honor, traditions, service, loyalty and practiced various forms of sexual expression, including s/m.  These men were instrumental in forming the old gay "biker" clubs, many of which have faded away, with still many of them surviving in one form or other to this day.  Many of the gay leather bars which sprung up later on provided safe meeting places for tops and bottoms to meet each other, prove themselves to one another through the practice of s/m, and to form deep alliances.

As a woman who entered the leather community later in life (about 4 years ago when I was just turning 40) I would encourage all to remain open to the various possibilities in life.  BDSM is certainly not for everyone, and the leather lifestyle, even less so...nevertheless, to the person who suggested that there is no love in s/m...nothing could be further from the truth.  If you have never known the joy of topping a willing bottom in an s/m scene...no, I will not use the euphemism "play,"...if you have never experienced the electricity of shared consensual pain and the trust that goes along with it... if you have never looked into the eyes of a bottom after a particularly intense scene of varying sensations, then you truly cannot know what joy and what degree of love is possible.  I have experienced this as both a bottom and now as a top.  I would never wish to go back to my life the way it was those few short years ago.  Leather has opened my mind to a whole universe of new possibilities and no one in our community is asking that you agree with us or what we do...only that you do not condemn nor incorrectly judge.

From Shiloh
BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism) has been around as long as people have been around. It's my understanding that what we think of as the BDSM "scene" today is an outgrowth of the (predominantly gay male) leather enthusiasts who started to form groups in the 50's to indulge their socially unacceptable tastes. People were separated into "tops" and "bottoms", the tops being served by the obedient bottoms, and disciplining the latter with spankings or floggings when the latter failed to please. An etiquette also developed involving forms of address. A bottom would always say "Yes, Sir" instead of just "Yes", and when writing a written letter (yes, this was the practice long before the internet came along) a bottom would use a lower case "i" when referring to himself, and sign his name in all lower case letters.

When first joining such a group, one always started out as a submissive. It was not about whether you were "sub" or "Dom" by natural inclination, it was about learning the ropes, metaphorically and literally. Since domination required both a certain social comfort level within the group, as well as skills with whips, floggers, paddles, ropes, and so on which had to be learned if one was to play safely, everyone began as a sub, and then worked their way up to Dom. And safewords were always a part of the game.

Straight and lesbian leather enthusiasts soon began to copy these protocols and form their own groups.

This is when it starts to get hairy. As more and more people were exposed to these groups, they started forming their own definitions of a BDSM lifestyle which incorporated some elements from the leather scene, together with some of their own personal philosophies. This has produced some rather bizarre, at times, notions of BDSM.

"Sir" became, in some circles, not just a form of address in its traditional since but a title. Very un-grammatical things like, "I live to serve Sir" rather than "I live to serve Mark (or whoever)" began to surface here and there, which a lot of Old School people think is quite silly.

Some Doms did not really fancy training their subs first to sub, then to dom. They preferred to keep them as subs and never teach them domming skills, never letting them "graduate" to Dom status. And some subs also preferred to stay submissive rather than move on and become dominant once they learned the ropes.

Some Doms and subs found they wanted more what would come to be called TPE, or Total Power Exchange. This means, for one thing, the disappearance of safewords. In TPE it is entirely the responsibility of the Dom to know how much is enough, how much is too much, to inflict on a sub at any given time.

Then you have people like, say, John Norman. Once upon a time he was taken by a friend to a traditional English spanking house, an Old School kind of place where people were able to put aside their real lives and be Doms and subs for the duration of their stay. While there he got the idea for an alternate earth where men were naturally dominant and women were naturally submissive, and this lifestyle was not just for shrouded gatherings in privacy between consenting like-minded individuals, but was the norm throughout the whole planet. Might makes right. Men would drag their slave girls naked through the street on collars and leashes, and so on. He wrote some fantasy novels based in such a society, a world called Gor, and a whole massive group of people were so infatuated with them they started calling themselves Goreans and their beliefs the Gorean lifestyle. (My husband has sort of equated it to a group of people going around saying, "I am Klingon" just because they admire the philosophy of the entirely fictional Klingon characters in Star Trek, or saying, "I am a British Secret Service agent" just because they like James Bond.)

Within all these groups of BDSM'ers (except for the fact that, of course, just to be a little more different, Goreans say that the Gorean lifestyle is not about BDSM at all, go figure) everyone brings their own fantasies and needs. Some subs like to have things done to them without their consent, some don't. Some subs like to be kidnapped by their Doms with no warning whatever, used and abused without safewords, some don't. Some subs like to give their Doms the right to let other people in on their fun and games without letting the sub know beforehand (rape or gang bang scenes w/o prior knowledge on the sub's part that it's about to occur), some don't. Even within my own family, I call my husband by his name, my sister sub calls him Master or Daddy, even in public. There are as many kinds of BDSM as there are people who play the game.

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