Essential elements of Femdom and BDSM

Emotional Aphrodisiacs

The fantasies you create are made of certain prime elements that act as emotional aphrodisiacs. Mystery, feelings, and eroticism are three of the these that direct our BDSM fantasies and therefore are essential and magical elements of playtime This mind-magic wins out over rationality, logic, and reason because our desires, the fantasies created in the erotic mind, are just not reasonable. Emotional aphrodisiacs do not follow any rules, aren't restricted by logic, and aren’t governed by reason. We cannot use our regular and rational thought processes to delve into these fantasies; the only way we can begin to understand them is to surrender to them and experience them. Top or bottom, before one can surrender to one’s desires, one must first accept them. The erotic feelings they invoke exist to be felt, and explored, by the sexual adventurer. Once you locate the prime elements of the fantasy you can begin to direct, or orchestrate, them. Because these prime elements are conceived in the subconscious, they always exist in our fantasies. But since we aren't generally aware of them, we have to search if we wish to find them.

Alternately there are three other emotional aphrodisiacs that do not have the positive connotation of mystery, feelings, and eroticism. These are anger, anxiety, and guilt. These emotions have their place behind the veil because of their associations with the stress and conflicts of everyday life—stress which needs to be released and conflicts that need to be addressed. And we know BDSM games are a release from, as well as a mirror of, everyday life. Great! What does that mean? I'll give you two examples using anxiety as the aphrodisiac in two simple settings.

The first type of anxiety is what I call “situational anxiety” because it is not a deep-seated anxiety aphrodisiac but rather one that appears only under particular stressful circumstances. You and he are playing although you know there is an important incoming phone call he will have to answer. You have given him permission to release himself and just as he goes into his come-stroke, the phone starts to ring. He has five rings before the answering machine picks up. You can see he is getting more excited by his anxiety to pick up the phone before the machine kicks in. His face is bright red and you never heard him make those noises before. On the fourth ring he has the most smashing orgasm, and breathless with relief and release, he answers the phone a nanosecond before the machine. La, anxiety became an emotional aphrodisiac for him. Other situations or circumstances in this category; whether BDSM or vanilla-themed, could include sex or unusual acts in places where he may be seen or get caught.

When a person's erotic mind is developed in an atmosphere of anxiety, then it is a deep-seated anxiety aphrodisiac that can become necessary for arousal. Let's say that as a teenager, his friends were always talking about their dubious female conquests. Whether their conquests were dubious or not. what he dreamed about was a strong female conquering him. She could be an Amazon Queen, an alien, the principal at school, whomever, as long as he was reduced to a pile of jelly quivering at her feet. So when he and the boys did a little circle jerk (and believe me, they did!) in the woods or in the basement of a friend's home when his parents were out, he was always worrying whether his friends would find out he would rather surrender to the girls than conquer them. And although his anxiety was needless because he never spoke of his desires and none of his friends could read minds, he began to associate worrying with arousal. Worrying and anxiety would be the same, wouldn’t they? So, under these circumstances, it would be necessary for him to feel a little anxious during any sexual encounter in order to become aroused.

Discovering the Theme

Since you have already developed a comfortable acceptance of your BDSM fantasies from your previous experiences, you and your partner know that you can feel and express a wider range of emotions toward each other. In the safety of the fantasy, he is able to express more facets of his erotic personality and show you his secret heart. Having trusted you to take him behind the veil, is it not conceivable that you could walk together more boldly in the light?

Select a favorite fantasy from your current repertoire. Fast-forward the fantasy in your mind and search for its prime element. Now select another favorite and do the same. If at first these two fantasies seem dissimilar, take a closer look. In the first, let's say that you are going to kidnap him from the corner phone booth. Then you use your pocketed finger to simulate a gun, grab him by the arm, take him to your dungeon, and have your way with him (whatever that means to you). In this fantasy, you will see that there is an overall plan: to kidnap him. Second, the kidnapper has a gun. Then he is taken to your dungeon and used through the night. In the second fantasy, the overall plan is that he is the consensual slave of the mistress and he is there to service and please you in any way you desire. He is collared and also cuffed at wrists and ankles, clip hooks dangling from each to remind him that at any second he could be restrained, disciplined, and used at your whim. What is the prime erotic theme and what is mere window dressing?

In the kidnap-scene fantasy, we can expect that certain physical actions go with kidnapping, like being blindfolded or gagged, being handled roughly, and most likely, some form of bondage. But some of those details also fit well into the second, consensual fantasy. He talks too much, he gets the gag; he squirms around, he gels inescapably tied up. These are the small but essential, and sometimes tangible, things necessary to make the fantasy realization a good one. I call these details—the blindfold, the gag, the rope-window dressing. Strip them away and what is left? The script: being kidnapped in the first fantasy, being the slave boy toy in the second. These may appear to be dissimilar fantasies: In the first, the theme is that he is forced to accept your dominion over him; in the second, he consents to be your personal slave.

With further delving, you may find that your scripts are also window dressing! The two seemingly dissimilar fantasies illustrated above may, in fact, both be expressions of a desire to surrender to primal sexual urges without fear of guilt or reprisal. In one, he is taken prisoner by an armed stranger, in the other, by an insatiable Mistress who owns him. in both fantasies, he is in a position of helplessness, whereby his life is dependent on the whims and will of another. So maybe helplessness is the prime erotic theme. Being kidnapped is a way to ultimately surrender control and experience helplessness and heightened sexual arousal without guilt, and so is being a piece of property. Many submissives have more than one prime erotic theme, preferring different fantasies to suit their frame of mind as well as their need and desire for exploration.

Prime Erotic Themes

In Dr. Jack Moran's book The Erotic Mind, I read of what Dr, Moran called the “core erotic theme,” which, in a nutshell, is the distilled essence of a fantasy. His core erotic theme was what was left of your fantasy after you stripped away the window dressing and looked beyond your sexy scripts. He gave his core erotic theme the acronym CET. Well, I agree with his research but I am a romantic and calling this theme a CET just wasn’t sexy enough for me. So, I call it a "prime erotic theme," or PET. No matter what you call it, core or prime, the main erotic theme occupies a special place at the heart of the erotic mind. Anyone who has ever had even one fantasy has a PET, although they may not know it, or have not thought of it in that way before. Themes are usually simple and can sometimes be described in a sentence or two, or even in a phrase. Your theme, or your PET, can be inspired by a single yet profoundly meaningful fantasy.

In the fantasies about the kidnap or the consensual piece of property I used earlier, the PET could have been the helplessness of the captive, willing or not, and the knowledge that one is still cherished and desired. Or the PET could be the desire to surrender guiltlessly and totally to sexual desires. In either case, the theme is the core of the fantasy I want to enact; the scenes are the separate little vignettes to be enacted inside of the PET, and the window dressing is the props and wardrobe. If you are like me, as you explored your alternate sexual personae, you found recurring themes in your fantasies.

Different fantasies, BDSM or not, come to life under certain circumstances. In an ongoing committed relationship, you both may find that you are willing to go beyond your original Yes List and begin enacting fantasies from the Maybe-so List. Your willingness, and his, to play out more fantasies will increase in time, just as his willingness to accept more pain will increase as he becomes more aroused.

Remember, too, that there are different levels of fantasies: those things we really want to happen to us, those we think we'd like to happen, and those we love to imagine but never would want to happen. Your PETs grow quite nicely in all three categories, including, and maybe especially, the last. Enacting different scenarios allows you to explore issues and challenges, sexual and emotional, and heal wounds from the past. If you do explore your PET, you may find that it is like a coded message that reveals which people (or characters), situations, or images will light your erotic fire. Your PET is a framework in which you create sexy scripts; its extraordinary power stems from the link it creates with today’s turn-ons and yesterdays difficulties. Your concept of eroticism could be an attempt to deal with the challenges you experienced in childhood. Inside your prime erotic theme is a blueprint for turning unfinished emotional business from your childhood and teenage years into excitement and pleasure as a responsible adult.

On a basic level, your prime erotic theme is one that will elicit the most physical and psychic excitement. Much more than a list of what turns you on and off, it expresses your individual eroticism and empowers you with new self-knowledge. As I said earlier, it is not unusual for the sexual explorer to respond to more than one PET, and lucky you if you have more than one. PETs are the fertile soil where our special turn-ons grow.

Exploring Your PET

When, and how, did your PET start? Our prime erotic theme begins to evolve during childhood, and some of your early fantasies probably stemmed from the veil of secrecy that surrounded sexual impulses and other interests considered inappropriate for children. Other fantasies stem from societal mores and the breaking of taboos.

Over the years, our life’s experiences contribute to the choices we make in our PETs. There are some PETs that even as adults we keep to ourselves, deeming the fantasy too sacred or too personal to share with another, or perhaps it is one that we simply do not wish to enact. Everyone and anyone may wish to keep one or more aspects of their PETs to themselves. I think this is very natural and do not consider it to be a breaking of trust. Some things need not be spoken of, ever. Besides, this is fantasyland! You can both arrive at the same place even if you began at different staning points. Are you ready to know that he is solving a childhood trauma in this fantasy, and are you ready to understand? Or vice versa?

This could happen to either of you or both of you at some point; it is a very difficult personal decision to make. When enacting a scene that echoes an earlier trauma, strong emotions are often triggered. Although informed consent is a byword of BDSM play, it can be very hard for him to explain to you what may happen to him emotionally if you, let’s say, spit in his face. He may not even know what the aftermath will be, so how can he explain it to you? Then there is always the possibility that you, or he, will not want to enact the scene for fear of the emotional fallout. He can choose not to tell you and have his safe word on the lip of his tongue, or he can choose to tell you about it to ensure your support throughout the experience.

During BDSM play, more so than during vanilla sex. we are in an enhanced state of awareness that makes us very conscious of ourselves and of how we are relating both physically and emotionally to our partner. There is an intense interplay between you and what you perceive your partner to be thinking or feeling. Since trying to express in mere words our prime erotic themes is rarely as satisfying and complete as our mental enactments, this unintentional interplay could divert you from the undiluted version of your PET. Even the most articulate Mistress or slave may have trouble communicating a clear picture of their desires. Additionally, as we agreed earlier, some thoughts and fantasies don’t need to be shared. Sometimes, a PET can be most freely explored if unhampered by the need to negotiate it and make it mesh with another’s needs.

I feel that if you enjoy an aspect that he doesn’t, there is no harm in it if you think of that aspect while you are performing or enacting another without telling him about it. For example, both of you are into digital anal penetration. You are also into enemas but he is not. You know this because he told you so, but what doesn’t change your desire, does it? So, while you are penetrating him anally with your fingers, you fantasize that your fingers are a nozzle and that you are giving him an enema. Because you feel no desire to be in the bathroom when he “empties" himself, the small fact that there is nothing to empty doesn’t even enter the picture He is enjoying what you are doing on his level, and you are enjoying it on yours. So what if you have an underlying fantasy’ in your head that he doesn’t know about? How do you know he doesn’t have one running in his? One that he is not sharing with you? Aha!

You can decide if and when you want to discuss your PET with him, and he with you. By all means let him know what turns you on, but you needn’t tell him the extremely personal details, just what feels right and comfortable to you.

Training Your PET

When you think about one of your best sexual experiences, look beyond the deliciously wicked details and flesh-tingling sensations and try to see why this experience was so exciting. Could it be because it dealt with one of your life’s unresolved struggles? Now, ask him to do the same searching. Irrational as it seems, high sexual excitement can flow from the tension between emotional problems and their joyous solutions. While we are becoming more and more aroused, we aren't consciously aware that any of our problems are on our minds because we are riveted on the pleasure at hand. This is a good thing. This suspension of regular life shows us that our PET is working. Part of our PET's purpose is to turn old wounds and concerns into aphrodisiacs, as well as resolving conflicts of days gone by. In this instance BDSM is not subtle in hurtful problems; it turns klieg lights on the pain and gives us a game plan for conquering it—by playing top and bottom, Mistress and slave, Sadist and masochist. We know the top and bottom feel validated and powerful after a scene because the scene played to the needs of both.

Although it isn't necessary that you search for and recognize your PET, and it is true that you can have absolutely fantastic sex without ever knowing what your, or his, PET is, I would strongly recommend that you explore this area of your psyche. Explore it to whatever degree you feel comfortable because even a small discovery about PETs can be a useful revelation. Once revealed, you can start to “work with it." After you know what your PET is, how it began, and what challenges it is meeting or conflicts it is addressing, you can deliberately direct the PET where you want it to go. (Just like walking it on a leash.) Exploring your PET can, in some ways, set you free, because consciousness can increase your choices and give you more freedom. Many of us, including myself, tend to search out partners who fill in aspects of our own personalities that we feel we may be missing or lacking. Since I am an emotional, high-strung yet introspective and reflective person, I prefer my slave to be as calm as the Sea of Tranquility, and something of an open book.

But billions of people have perfectly good sex lives without giving one moment's thought to their prime erotic themes. If you are not comfortable exploring this deeply behind the veil, then don’t. Only you know how far behind the veil you are ready to venture, and some people prefer not to know the reason behind their PETs. Others study their PETs closely because they feel this exploration gives them a deeper respect and understanding of their eroticism and their sexual choices.

Sexy Scripts

Sexy scripts are twofold: The first part is the plot (the armed kidnapper takes him captive), and the second is the details or the window dressing for our PETs, like props. The sexy script has been researched by sociologists William Simon and John Gagnon. They have separated the central themes of erotic fantasies, our PETs, into three basic types: cultural scripts, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic (within the mind) scripts. Just as many of us have more than one PET, some evenings preferring to enact one theme rather than another, so, too, can we have fantasies about each of the three script types.

The first script, the cultural script, is about the societal mores so ingrained in us that we don’t question their existence, or even notice them. A script contrary to cultural mores wouldn't necessarily be a “fetish,” like desiring to worship the foot; a cultural script would usually break some taboo or ethic of the individuals society. A cultural script is blissfully indifferent to the dreamers preference and can change from culture to culture as well as over time. Incest would be a good example of a cultural script because in some ancient cultures, marrying brother to sister was desirable to keep the blood lines of the ruling house pure. But I want to use a less controversial example.

Let’s say there was an ancient tribe where some of the people had long ears and others, short. In this tribe, from time immemorial, long-eared men were proscribed from marrying short-eared women. No one even remembered why; it was just accepted as part of their culture. Indubitably, some of the short-eared women would have fantasies about the long-eared men simply because these men were forbidden to them. Their arousal would be caused by the breaking of an ancient taboo. The women would wonder what else was different about the long-eared men and probably have some pretty far-out fantasies. Did their long ears denote that other things were long, too? Did they have twelve-inch penises, three balls, exceptional stamina, what?

The neighboring tribe, however, had no proscriptions about ear size. Small ears were actually preferable to long ones, so just over the hill no such cultural taboo existed. In short, a cultural script is imposed upon us only by the society in which we live. Wouldn’t it seem reasonable then that by removing oneself from that society, that by just living on the other side of the hill, that in time those peoples cultural scripts would lake over and the old ones recede?

The second type of script, the interpersonal script, is highly colored by our personality and early environment. An interpersonal script, thankfully, can thrive in even the most erotically restrictive cultures. Starting in childhood, we gradually form this script as we learn the rules of our society, first within our family and then from our peers. To put it succinctly, the interpersonal script is imposed upon us by the people we are in direct contact with from the beginning of our lives: family, friends, teachers, and so forth. For example, in my family no one even saw another family member in the nude, we were dressed (and I do mean dressed) at all times. It was rare to be seen in one's pyjamas.

So I would fantasize about the day I got my own place and could walk around in the nude. My friend shared my fantasy because her family had the same dress code as mine. So when we got an apartment to share, the first thing we did was walk around nude. As a matter of fact, my roommate and I painted the dining area in the nude, then, becoming so enthralled with our nudity and with breaking all those taboos, we began to paint each other’s breasts and butt cheeks. After that, we got really "wild" and danced nude in the window, with our breasts and buttocks painted turquoise like the little dining area, hoping someone would see us. Since we were seven stories up in a building on lop of a hill, no one did—but it was fun anyway, and exciting to have a friend there to break the taboo with, even in this playful way.

I find intrapsychic scripts are by far the most fascinating scripts of the three. These are true mind scripts, and as such they express the individual's responses to his own life experience even more than the first two. Although intrapsychic scripts are certainly influenced by and contain elements of both cultural and interpersonal scripts, these scripts are as totally and wonderfully unique as are we who imagine them. These are the fantasies that we create for ourselves based on our most secret desires. There is no rhyme or reason to them, they matter only to the dreamer. They express our responses to our own life experience, unlike the first two, which are intrinsic, or unconsciously imposed. Because of the very nature of the intrapsychic scripts, because of the broad expanse of erotica these scripts cover and the uncountable number of humans conceiving these fantasies (if there are twelve million people in New York City and on average each had only three fantasies, that would be thirty-six million fantasies in New York City alone) it would be hard to find any connections among them.

As with cultural and interpersonal scripts, many of the PETs for intrapsychic scripts begin in childhood. Other PETs for these mind scripts can start in adulthood, triggered or brought on by a specific experience. Intrapsychic scripts are the most compelling as they reflect the true erotic mind of the individual, the shadowland of the mind that we are exploring behind the veil, not specifically the built-in cultural or societal scripts. And because erotic minds and the fantasies conceived within them are so voluminous, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find any connections among them.

Themes: Terse yet Titillating

A script tends to be very detailed whereas a theme can be expressed in a single thought or phrase. Our flights of fantasy provide the details of the script and express the different facets of the erotic mind. The clothes you choose for the scene, the style in which you dress your hair and apply your makeup, your voice, where you do the scene, and the props you use are the details of the sexy script that make the fantasy, our PET, come to life. If his PET is the helplessness of bondage, it makes it more fun and romantic to play the unwilling captive tied to a chair for interrogation one evening and the hot boy toy lied to the bed begging his mistress to use him please, use him for your pleasure, the next. This is the integration of a prime erotic theme (the helplessness of bondage), with a sexy script (how he came to be in bondage). In the second instance, he may wish to experience both the helplessness of bondage and the freedom from sexual guilt.

For example, he is enacting the part of a young man visiting his doctor, which turns out to be a woman—you. Although embarrassed at being examined by a female, he goes along. The doctor notices the cane marks he is sporting and mentions their severity. He breaks down and tells you of his relationship with a Mistress, a cruel mistress who uses him for her own pleasure; a couple of nights ago, caning him was her pleasure. The doctor tells him that if he does as she directs, she will leach him how to better serve his Mistress. He accepts, whereupon she binds him to the examination table and snaps on the gloves. Realizing that his struggles are useless, he ceases them. After a thorough and humiliating examination, he surrenders to her completely, and begins to enjoy it. She has become his teacher in one of the ways of submission for pleasure, and he has come alive under her expert hands.

The fantasy of being defiled, of being taken, is probably as old as humankind. And both women and men have this fantasy, although in slightly different ways. But innocence in a fantasy just screams out to be trampled underfoot, and those screams are heard by women and men. (Haven't you ever wanted to give that silly character a good ringing slap?) There is reciprocity between the one doing ihe defiling and the one being defiled because reluctance is first turned into compliance and then into an exchange of erotic energy or power. The doctor scenario is a perfect example of being freed from the guilt of enjoying the loss of what he once so highly valued: his male virginity. Starting with the purity that fascinates and repels us, through the fantasy we are able to corrupt innocence without damaging its heart (the male virgin comes to like anal penetration) and release passion in both partners. The doctor and examination is stage dressing, part of the sexy script for the prime erotic theme.

When you combine your emotional aphrodisiacs and his in the right ratio, using your PETs, sexy scripts, and themes as the road to sexual fulfillment and enlightenment, as your essential elements, BDSM experience can be transcendental.