What is BDSM? (And how I unintentionally become a sexpert)

I am guessing you aren’t writing a dissertation on the topic nor are you reading this alongside your hogtied, latex-clad personal slave. This book is intended for beginners, for those who are curious and want to discover what BDSM has to offer. Maybe you and your partner have been banging away in the missionary position for twenty years and just want to spice things up a bit. Maybe you are single and looking to get involved in BDSM. This book will provide you with a solid foundation for doing just that. This is not a book for people who are already submerged in the lifestyle, but for those who are curious.

If you think of BDSM as a foreign country that you desperately want to visit, but where you don’t speak the language, this book will teach you a few words to get by. Consider this a crash course in the basics and me your nutty professor. Keep in mind I am not a licensed sexologist. Though my qualifications are manifold, they are based largely on my sense of adventure, my libidinous nature, and years of debauched “fieldwork.”

My own introduction to BDSM came through literature. As a teen, I was interested in any book deemed obscene; so naturally, I picked up a copy of Story of O, a tale of female submission. In it, a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, O, is brought to a chateau by her lover Rene, where she is trained to serve a group of men. She is blindfolded, chained, whipped, branded, pierced, made to wear a mask, and taught to be constantly available for intercourse. It was a novel I read several times, always with one hand. Despite being a feminist, O’s objectification turned me on, and a few years later, when I found a boyfriend and we experimented with blindfolds and rope bondage, I discovered why. Surrendering made me feel appreciated and beautiful, if only on the most superficial level. It was the ultimate narcissistic high. And like reading a book many considered filthy, the idea that I was doing something “bad” got me hot.

Still, my sex life remained fairly vanilla until shortly after graduating from art school when I found myself without rent money or marketable skills. Rolling pennies, writing, painting, and doing performance art in rundown art-holes was just not cutting it in terms of a financial plan. I needed a job fast or I would lose my rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment. That’s when my friend, Velocity Chyaldd, made a suggestion. Velocity was the front woman for a metal band who also did performance art wherein she simulated knifing her vagina onstage. She suggested I could make some money at the dungeon where she worked. A dungeon (sometimes called an S&M/fetish parlor) is a place where men and women (mostly men) pay hundreds of dollars so that dominatrices will dominate them. Sometimes the men and women (again, mostly men) pay hundreds of dollars so they can dominate submissives. Velocity thought I’d make a great submissive. I was twenty-three, had a gamine’s body, loose morals, a writer’s curiosity, and “an ass made for spanking”—according to her. Plus, I was intrigued.

Though I had no experience in the sex industry and very little experience with BDSM, I got the job, which I accepted without hesitation. Though the sex industry scared me, the thought of eviction scared me more. As a result, I spent the next few years working as a professional submissive, first at the dungeon and then for a woman with a master’s degree in human sexuality who founded a company for counseling, erotic role-play, and video production for health-related services.

Finally, when I tired of both the dungeon and the “counseling center” (which was really just a dungeon that offered therapy) taking 50 percent of my profits, I began to do private sessions with another submissive named “Annie” at her Chelsea Hotel pad. We did all our sessions together and only with regulars. Plus, we kept 100 percent of the profits, which meant I worked about five total hours a week while devoting the rest of my time to making art and going nuts—partying, drinking, and screwing an assortment of crazies. (I was in my early twenties, a time when it’s almost a crime against nature not to.)

But when all was said and done, I got a lot more “material” than I bargained for. Like O, I was blindfolded, whipped, humiliated, caned, and chained, but the difference was that O had submitted for love and I was doing it for money. It was a big difference. I occasionally reached unbelievable heights of sexual ecstasy, but I also spent a lot of time dealing with douche bags. Money changes everything, though not always for the best.

Eventually I quit and found “normal” work in retail. In hindsight, I realize that there were other options I could have explored as a broke twenty-three-year-old, but I didn’t. Why I didn’t, I’ll never know. Maybe it was truly writer’s curiosity that led me down this path. What I do know is that I chose to traverse the road less traveled and that it was a great learning experience. I got a firsthand look at the fetishes, obsessions, and desires of others and a thorough education in BDSM.

But the adventure didn’t end there. Almost a decade after I quit the “industry,” Nerve offered me an even stranger job writing a column called “I Did It for Science.” Nerve is an online magazine dedicated to sex, relationships, and culture. Each month, they asked me to perform a new “sexperiment” and then write about it. For the next two years, I exhausted myself performing every deviant act known to man and in the process became an accidental sexpert.

I worked as a live nude girl at Wiggles (a nude strip club), made a sex video, threw a key party like the one in The Ice Storm, attended a “balloon fetish party” (wherein I jumped inside a giant balloon), became a nude housecleaner, attended fellatio school, held a Sex Toy Olympics, and more. At one point I attended an S&M academy called Princess Reform School where my graduation entailed being stripped naked at an orgy, chained to a wooden X, blindfolded, caressed by strangers, encased in plumage, and (via the use of a high-speed vibrator) brought to screaming orgasm in front of everyone. It was a BDSM scenario that became a permanent part of my mental spank bank. Yet, despite the fun I had, the column eventually ran its course, though my collected columns led to my first book, Live Nude Elf.

When I lost my job at Nerve, I didn’t even bother looking in the normal help wanted section of the paper. Instead, I but turned immediately to the “adult help wanted” ads. Clearly, I was too insane to get a normal job but too sane to get disability. My search led me to yet another unusual gig—working as a sex surrogate for a renowned sex therapist.

Many people are confused by what sex surrogates actually do. Because the words sex and surrogate are involved, many people assume surrogates are prostitutes, which they are not. Most surrogates teach through talking, listening, and demonstrating sexual touch. Patients saw the therapist for forty-five minutes of talk therapy before seeing me for forty-five minutes of “physical” therapy. The list of problems I assisted in treating ran the gamut from premature ejaculation to erectile dysfunction and everything in between—inexperience, shyness, vaginal aversion, and inhibited orgasm.

The therapist I worked for advocated the use of sensate focus exercises to overcome these issues. Sensate focus is a term that was first introduced by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson and was aimed at increasing personal and interpersonal awareness of self and the other’s needs. As a Wikipedia search will reveal, each participant is encouraged to focus on his or her own varied sense experience, rather than to see orgasm as the sole goal of sex. In other words, instead of focusing on whether you’re going to blow your load too soon, or blow your load at all, or make your partner blow their load, you should just focus on how good sex feels. This is a task that’s easier said than done given most of the population’s anxiety, low self-esteem, reliance on porn, and distractibility. We’re all so caught up in what’s going on in our heads that we’ve practically forgotten we have bodies. Exercises I did with patients ranged from simple “hand touching” to actual penis-stroking to teaching men “sexual touch” by first giving them an “anatomy lesson” wherein I displayed my beaver and pointed out the various anatomical “parts.” None of this bothered me. In fact, the idea of helping hordes of men find the clit thrilled me. I nicknamed the therapy center Dick School and considered myself one of its greatest teachers.

Work at Dick School was fulfilling and I stayed until my boss retired, less than two years after I started. When first hired, she had promised me I would change lives—and I did. Maybe I wasn’t going to win a Nobel Prize for my work there, but I helped many patients overcome seemingly insurmountable problems in order to finally experience pleasure. And at the end of the day, the more people who experience pleasure on this planet, the better.

Keep this in mind as you read along. Happy, fucking people with awesome sex lives are part of the solution, not part of the problem. (Except for the overpopulation problem.) Aside from that, happily fucking people are far less likely to blow shit up and randomly kill people than those who aren’t fucking happily. Just by reading this manual—by attempting to spice up your love life and, in the process, make your partner (or partners) excited and joyful—you are making the world a better place. Enjoy the lessons learned herein and pat yourself on the back (or anywhere else you like, should you find them titillating) for making the effort.

And finally, a special shout-out to the laydees. As mentioned previously, I am a feminist. For me, feminist simply means you believe women should have the same rights as men, which sadly, they don’t. Atrocities are committed against girls and women in every corner of the globe every day (and against the greatest Mother of all—Earth ... Guess I just came out as a pagan goddess-worshipping hippie as well as a feminist). I mention this because of the book Fifty Shades of Grey, which it seems roughly a gazillion people have read and which has spawned newfound interest in BDSM. It’s doubtful my mother and I would have ever had a conversation containing the term “butt plug” were it not for the book’s publication.

However, since it came out many people have called Fifty Shades a backlash against feminism, arguing that the story, one of a female submissive falling for a dominant male, is degrading to women. Sure, it’s not highbrow literature, and yes, the female protagonist is na'ive while the male character is strong and successful, but these are fantasy archetypes and Fifty Shades is the S&M equivalent of a Harlequin Romance bodice-ripping novel.

Though part of the fun of BDSM is that you get to act out fantasy archetypes, hopefully anyone who reads this book will realize that whether you are submissive or dominant, male or female, gay or straight, the reality of BDSM is that it is a shared experience where both partners are equals. It can be intensely erotic, loving, transcendental, or just plain ol’ dirty fun. Regarding BDSM, I’d have to say, “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

I was a female submissive for years, working within the sex industry, and at no point did I feel degraded. It was painful at times and always frustrating because I was still a struggling writer who (much as I love S&M) would have rather been writing than swinging from a suspension bar half-naked. But the lessons I learned and the human connections I made were invaluable.

So please, if you are a female with submissive urges, do not feel like a freak. Do not feel like you are weak or that you are betraying your own sex. (And if you are a dominant male, it does not mean that you hate women; it simply means you have a kink.) So people, let your freak flags fly. If you practice BDSM in a safe, sane, consensual manner, you are simply courageous sexual explorers.