Play on the Edge I - The Assignment

“It’s mean.” he said

I replied, “What? How is it mean if I want you to do it?”

(Sheba, Personal communication, June 8, 2005)

I found the writing of this assignment for my Sex Therapy course difficult in the sense that it was not a conventional research paper. I had to ask myself, how can I best discuss the fullness of my experience while looking back on three month’s worth of conversations, research articles and acutely personal revelations? I wanted to use this assignment as an opportunity to merge together some of the concepts I have found most important in our course. However I didn’t want to get bogged down by them. Instead I wanted them to mingle with the details of my project to make a whole picture, to imbue it with a sense of authenticity. I will begin with what lead me to my topic. I will discuss the discoveries I made and where they led me. I hope to end with how I feel that choice, those discoveries and the direction they sent me in, fit into the matrix of ideas I embraced in that class over the course of the semester.

Our assignment was to do something that pushed our boundaries and stretched our levels of comfort about sexually. Ideally that something would be transformative. Initially I was stuck. What stone had I left unturned in the world of sex? What was there about sex left to transform me? It was a struggle. I spent weeks thinking about this. I started to believe at one point that perhaps I was just full of myself. Perhaps I was completely full of hubris in thinking myself so wonderfully open-minded as to have no un-walked avenues on the road of sexual abandon. I loathed the idea of possibly being a bogus left wing liberal – in bed. I talked to other people about their topics: exploring nudity, monogamy, pornography. None of those topics struck a chord with me and I started to wonder how honest I was being with myself. Should I just try them out in case I might discover something that made me uncomfortable? This didn’t seem like a genuine exploration of my sexuality. I began to worry that I would be forced to do something that was boring, tiresome and dull. I was losing hope. Then, almost by accident, I found something which could be interesting, titillating and new - BDSM. BDSM is an acronym for bondage, dominance, sadism masochism. Even stringing the words together on the same line, in the same sentence, is exciting. I must admit that when I first chose this topic I thought it would be simple. Little did I know that I had a fairly narrow understanding of what BDSM actually was furthermore how I would go about incorporating it into my personal sex life. As badly wanted to try I didn’t necessarily add into the equation that I would need a willing partner in order to achieve true success. I simply knew my partner would be willing. How could he not be willing, he is the one who brought the whole thing up in the first place.

Almost three years ago when we had our liquor induced conversation in a freezing car outside if his parent’s house, I was being brave. With a sexual bravado I had come to pride myself on over the years I announced that in any good relationship partners must be to be willing to experiment. How does one know something is unlikable if one does not first test it out? I declared that certainly I hoped that I expressed this in our relationship and would be sorely saddened if it turned out that he had deviant, or worse yet, mainstream interests he had not attempted to share with me. Women often have impeccable timing. It would serve men well if they did not forget this. I knew my partner wasn’t sober, and melancholy pensive Gemini that he is, I also knew that intoxication was often the key to absolute truth and honesty. He was hesitant at first, but ultimately it came out that on one of our many “breaks” he’d had sex with a woman who had a violent streak. I was intrigued. What exactly did he mean? Looking back he said he was lucky things had turned out as well as they did and that the female was into his rough play, but ultimately he wouldn’t give gory (or possibly exciting) details. Of course I was then beyond curious, and more importantly wondered whether perhaps he would try this kind of play with me.

I recall at the time he said absolutely not, something about not being able to “see” me that way, whatever “that way” was. I can’t imagine not insisting this was not only extraordinarily narrow minded of him but also detrimental to our sex life. He gradually became more detailed about his reasons for not discussing it. On some level he didn’t perceive this kind of behavior as “us”. He didn’t picture our relationship in a way that would allow him to act “that way” with me. More importantly he didn’t want to accidentally tap into my history of sexual abuse by being overly aggressive or dominant in bed. I was not discouraged by this because I didn’t believe it was possible the latter would happen. Though the scope of my thought process was sorely limited at the time, I knew there had been nothing violent about my prior sexual abuse. Here were uncharted waters in our relationship. I wanted to sail them. Eventually, we moved on to other topics. It’s come up a few other times over the years, by my choice, but I haven’t ever gotten him to go more in depth about what had happened or more willing to explore the scenario in our relationship. However when I again stumbled – courtesy of the class reading assignment – on this topic, I thought well surely he’ll be willing for the sake of my grade?