Sex-Ed Series: On BDSM
After a week’s break, Rev and I are back this Friday, 29th May, with a discussion on BDSM.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about BDSM, besides discovering the novella by Masoch, Venus in Furs, in college (which subsequently led me to discovering Nico and The Velvet Underground collab album.
Last year, at the Orikalankini+Nazariya QFRG Gender & Sexuality Fellowship that I partook in, somebody from Delhi’s Kinky Collective (I’m so bad with people’s names😔😔) came and took a workshop for us on kinks and fetishes.
Here’s a visual note from that session that also reminds me of Tove Lo’s lyrics: “Pain and pleasure go hand in hand, they say. But no one mentions that pain is just a path to more pleasure. No more fear, you know?”
During that conversation, several participants came forward to share their fetishes. I can’t remember if I did, but I remember more than one person abashedly sharing their rape fantasies. A lot of them felt like they were ‘asking for it’, when in fact, or at least in my opinion a rape fantasy is very different from asking to be raped. Any fantasy to be acted upon requires a great deal of communication, boundary-setting, and therefore, consent!
This post will be updated later this week with takeaways from the session.
You can watch and participate via my Instagram profile @tejnesss.
This was the initial poster I had designed, but Rev expressed her reservations about the aspect that it seems to represent a woman as a sub — and well, it seems to perpetuate traditional gender roles as a result. As someone who identifies as agender, I don’t see the gender markers in it, but the long hair, the things and the position of the sub may certainly be interpreted that way.
So, I decided to introduce a dominatrix. If you’re trained/conditioned to see (most of us, so no need to feel self-conscious or ashamed) the gender-markers here, then the dominatrix may too seem like a woman. This was a deliberate choice because reworking the sub would be a loooot of work. Instead, I thought I’d challenge the idea that a sub-dom relationship needs to be a hetero-normative equation. It doesn’t. In fact, BDSM is all about reversing, challenging and playing with traditional gender roles.
More on this in our session! Feel free to DM me your questions if you have any, and feel free to share what you know about BDSM too — we are unlearning and learning this together!
The first motion poster has similar music as the poster I made for our session on asexuality and masturbation, except for a minor change in style.
The second poster was, well, made first — but like you may have noticed, it doesn’t have the dominatrix. The music is also quite different as I played around with a MOOG synthesizer and some drum loops. I didn’t think too much of it when I was first done with the sound file, but now I kinda find it fascinating because it reminds me of the chenda-kottu in Kerala during festivals like the theyru.
