A Newbie's Guide to BDSM

[SilvertongueLyra]

Hey there! For many newbies, Fifty Shades of Grey was the door that led them to BDSM, and fifty, for all it's promoting BDSM culture and making it widely popular, it does get a lot of things wrong.

First thing - BDSM is an umbrella that encompasses many kinks and fetishes.

B+D= Bondage & Discipline
D+S= Dominance & Submission
S+M= Sadism & Masochism

There are many on this site, who practice all three, there are some who only practice one of these and some who mix things up based on their likes and needs. It's an umbrella term, just because you practice BDSM doesn't mean you practice all of the various types, you might not even know of all the types.

Now for a historic point of view of the little I know about it.

Documentation of BDSM has been around since 3000BC, so it's not something that just came up the last century or whatnot. Its ancient, but with every batch that's practiced it, it's become more refined until Safe, Sane & Consentual has become the catchphrase of BDSM. Modern changes to it came around during the war, where soldiers who went to Japan learnt about their geisha culture. Geisha means a person who does art, and modern geisha engage in art, beautiful light conversation, dancing and singing. The soldiers saw these women immediately obey whatever they were told, with no question and got entranced by it. They returned home expecting the same willful obedience and teaching it to their wives or girlfriends. At around this same moment, many heterosexuals who had identified themselves being so because of the war began the leather movement, they were the beginning of the gay male leather community.

As the internet grew, so did communication and more people began practicing BDSM.

Bondage +Discipline - Something I really liked here was the Japanese art of Kinbaku and Shibari. Some literary context even claims that submissives that totally give up control to their Nawashi (which is a Kinbaku Master) can have an orgasm just by their binds - which sounds totally unbelievable, but maybe I haven't found the right Nawashi yet.

Dominance + Submission - Whether vanilla or not, powerplay plays a great role in sexual position and control. Some Dom's and subs are called sexual Dom's and subs, who only exercise control and the lack of it during sexual encounters. Then we have the TPE - total power exchange relationship where the sub(now a slave) would have no limits or choices, and would surrender them all to their Dom (now a Master). There are way many more flavours and I am hoping that readers can add to them to enlighten everyone and especially little all me. Please?

Sadism + Masochism - You can actually get off on a spanking if delivered in the right intensity, with the right dominant and the right atmosphere. But there are some who crave much harsher sadism, the leave your butt black and blue type - and those are called masochists. There are different types of masochists with some liking pain and some liking humiliation, just as there are different sadists. Now, unlike Christian Grey who just bullied Anastasia and is what we call an abuser, a sadist only gets pleasure when his/her masochist likes the pain, with their consent to turn them black and blue, not just cause they had mommy issues and wanted something to vent their frustrations on. (Oh sorry, spoiler alert).

Thank you for reading this far, I am hoping that all of you, many of you who have been at this for a lot longer than me, could shed more light to guide any Newbie's to what BDSM really is. Thanks