Author tells: BDSM and I – a preference for life?

author tells
BDSM and me: A love for life?

There is probably not a single person in the world who has not had the feeling at some point that something is wrong with their sexuality. But there is no need to dwell on these petty notions of what is “normal” and what is not: they can, on the contrary, be seen as a tantalizing opportunity to break the rules. In my twenties I had figured out what I wanted: an eroticism with a concept of tenderness, in which a slap in the face can be more intimate than a caress. A partnership in which equality and submission, devotion and domination can stand side by side, complement each other.

Baby instead of bondage?

By the time I was 30, I had allowed myself to want that. At 31, I knew who I wanted to be with. And at 32 the baby came, I broke my tailbone giving birth and hooked his cradle to the ceiling hook I had previously hung from in elaborate Shibari knots. I could neither lie nor sit in my bed, which was no longer a playground for consensual erotic couples, but a childbed that increasingly smelled of sour mother’s milk, and my sexuality took an indefinite time off and disappeared to a better place.

After the first six months things got better, but I came across something remarkable: a lot is being said and written about modern mothers these days. They’re allowed to “be anything”, fat and overwhelmed, fit and bored with a routine of mashed parsnips and diaper cream, they’re allowed to regret their motherhood, take drugs, work full-time or not at all, but they’re not allowed to live their fetish sexuality openly. You may know your way around NFTs and cryptocurrencies, but not the beauty of a precision full-body flagellation striking technique. That touches a boundary, it creates the kind of judgmental looks that mothers usually throw at each other in playgrounds when a “bad mother” forgot the rice cakes at home.

Eroticism as a space of fantasy

An acquaintance with a child told me that my demands were too high. It is clear that in the baby year there would be no room for “extravagances” like mine. I don’t know how she imagines a sadomasochistic couple relationship; with her it sounded as if there was nothing to be done with a sexuality like mine under masked balls with code word on Renaissance castles. In fact, it’s like this: For my eroticism, I enter a space of fantasy in which roles and gender, boundaries and dissolution of boundaries flow into one another. This room doesn’t have to be a castle. It can be anything, a tiny moment between the high chair and the learner bike, a word, a gesture, a look. I think that BDSM in the baby year even has a very practical advantage. The space belongs only to us, we decide about it, its size adapts to the external conditions.

Before the baby I had, in retrospect, an obscene amount of time in the shower to shave my legs (both legs! With complicated knee curve shaving!), a libido not torpedoed by sleep deprivation, and I enjoyed the perks of a polymorphic pervert Big city bubble, which in Hamburg means that the Berlin fetish clubs are not far away. I recently moved to the country with the baby (and his father). I took my sex life, broken down to baby size, with me, by the way, it fits wonderfully into an old Bavarian farmhouse in the middle of the high moor, the Bavarians also accommodate us architecturally, I’ll just say: ceiling beams.

The three B’s

Incidentally, the Bavarians themselves don’t give a damn about what other people lift their duvets like the people of Hamburg didn’t care, tended to even care less: the neighbors are even further away than the nearest supermarket (five kilometers), nobody peeks in at us Window, there is enough else to see here, for example the Alpine crowns at sunset or the starry sky over the moor. Maybe it’s also because in a CSU-governed federal state, suffering is part of the regional customs anyway: Bavarians, the baby, BDSM and I, we’ll get along well.

Bridget