The Balance for BDSM
BDSM is all the rage right now, no pun intended. It stands for bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism. As weird as it sounds, it is a type of sexual experience made more prevalent by the movie Fifty Shades of Grey and it's sequel Fifty Shades Darker, and more and more people are wanting to try it.
Why, you ask? Good question! I have been researching to find that very same thing. (Check out my post on Why I don't cite statistics.)
There are certainly myriad factors that go into why a person might be seeking out this kind of experience, but I'm going to just talk about the biggest two.
1. Novelty of letting someone else have control
2. Perversion of authentic sexuality
1. Novelty: included among those interested in this type of experience are surprisingly more and more women. Regular women. Wives and mothers. You would think these would be the last people interested.
But it actually kinda makes sense.
So many mothers these days are Type A women. They are whirlwinds, and boy do they get things done. They are efficient, thinking women, and trying to be good partners for their husbands, in every way. But in many cases, they are married to Type B men because they recognized in themselves a need for balance. Their husbands sometimes have no clue that the baby is about to fall off the couch right next to them. They're the type who leave the gas tank on empty, emergencies be darned. Who don't notice the mud they track in, the baby crying in the same room as them, the fact that their child has now said their name five times in a row. They forget appointments, don't clean up their own messes, and seem to their wives like they are still somewhat a child. And something inexplicable- they don't seem to have any interest in the bedroom. (Dun dun dun!) They know that something feels off about this dynamic, but they're not sure what, and they really don't know what to do about it.
After working all day in the home, most moms want to still feel like an adult at the end of the day. They want to feel noticed, valued, feminine, and desired by their husbands. It is part of what makes all their sacrifices worth it.
They try to exercise, they lose the baby weight over and over (or at least they do their darndest!) They try to plan date nights so they can re-connect with their husbands after a busy week, and they try to tell him what they want him to do to help them feel desire. But often, they still feel no interest from their husband in the bedroom.
But what if she suggests something novel, something unusual, something that allows him to have complete autonomy, probably for the first time ever in their marriage? He finally feels like he's allowed to be masculine, allowed to lead, and she, for once, doesn't have to be the boss. (Or maybe their relationship is exactly the opposite, and it's she who finally has a say! Either way, it feels like there's finally a balance.)
It's twisted, but given the also unbalanced, wife-dominated type of relationship most Type A + Type B marriages exist within, I can see why a temporary shift might feel like a relief to both parties, especially as it puts each party in a psychologically altered state, experiencing time distortion, reduced pain intake, and being in a flow state among other things.
This leads to #2- Perversion of authentic sexuality.
Nowadays, people want to say that the only thing authentic is what you feel, what you really want. But it seems we've lost the term perversion in our national vocabulary, simply defined as the alteration of something from it's original course.
Currently it's widely believed that if you delve deeper into what you really want, even if it's weird or unusual, that that *must* be your "authentic" self. We've forgotten that as creatures with minds, we are subject to being stuck in paradigms, or viewpoints that shape our opinion, and as such are limited by that view. But someone in a paradigm that views sexuality with an "anything goes as long as it's not negatively affecting me or my partner" is ignoring the fact that we as humans are basically wired to seek after pleasure, and our minds won't tell us if we're hurting ourselves, especially when addiction sets in. It's not made to. The only way we can know that we are on a less authentic path of our sexuality is when we have a paradigm shift, and are finally able to lift the ceiling off our viewpoint and see a bigger picture.
Also, did you know that BDSM is listed in the DSM-5? It indicates that something is wrong with the mind that desires this.
Some things to consider to remove that paradigm are the fact is that one can enter a flow state with time distortion, and pain reduction without BDSM, just in regular, old S-E-X. Also, that the "passion" center of the brain is responsible for both love and hate (which is why you can really, passionately dislike someone that you passionately love). Normally the sexual experience is one of love alone- it involves feelings of connection with your partner, feelings of safety, of vulnerability. This leads to feelings of oxytocin, whereas the participants in BDSM get spiked with cortisol, evidence that the *bliss* that they might feel has been perverted, or altered from it's original course, which in this case was to fill the body with the love hormone, and instead is filling it with the stress hormone. The brain is telling you something is wrong, even if the mind isn't.
So when a person coincides love and violence in the brain within the sexual experience, they're essentially re-wiring themselves, robbing their body of a hormonally cleansing experience and instead flooding it with stress. We're essentially forcing ourselves to go through something painful, stressful, and fear-inducing (to the brain, even if not to the mind) against the brain's better judgement. Isn't it obvious that would be bad for us? Why would we do that?
Possibly because lovingly passionate sexual experiences are much harder to come by.
But really- which one looks better to you?
This?
This is a loaded topic- I would really like to hear opinions! Let's skip the red herrings so we can get right down to discussion!
Why, you ask? Good question! I have been researching to find that very same thing. (Check out my post on Why I don't cite statistics.)
There are certainly myriad factors that go into why a person might be seeking out this kind of experience, but I'm going to just talk about the biggest two.
1. Novelty of letting someone else have control
2. Perversion of authentic sexuality
1. Novelty: included among those interested in this type of experience are surprisingly more and more women. Regular women. Wives and mothers. You would think these would be the last people interested.
But it actually kinda makes sense.
So many mothers these days are Type A women. They are whirlwinds, and boy do they get things done. They are efficient, thinking women, and trying to be good partners for their husbands, in every way. But in many cases, they are married to Type B men because they recognized in themselves a need for balance. Their husbands sometimes have no clue that the baby is about to fall off the couch right next to them. They're the type who leave the gas tank on empty, emergencies be darned. Who don't notice the mud they track in, the baby crying in the same room as them, the fact that their child has now said their name five times in a row. They forget appointments, don't clean up their own messes, and seem to their wives like they are still somewhat a child. And something inexplicable- they don't seem to have any interest in the bedroom. (Dun dun dun!) They know that something feels off about this dynamic, but they're not sure what, and they really don't know what to do about it.
After working all day in the home, most moms want to still feel like an adult at the end of the day. They want to feel noticed, valued, feminine, and desired by their husbands. It is part of what makes all their sacrifices worth it.
They try to exercise, they lose the baby weight over and over (or at least they do their darndest!) They try to plan date nights so they can re-connect with their husbands after a busy week, and they try to tell him what they want him to do to help them feel desire. But often, they still feel no interest from their husband in the bedroom.
But what if she suggests something novel, something unusual, something that allows him to have complete autonomy, probably for the first time ever in their marriage? He finally feels like he's allowed to be masculine, allowed to lead, and she, for once, doesn't have to be the boss. (Or maybe their relationship is exactly the opposite, and it's she who finally has a say! Either way, it feels like there's finally a balance.)
It's twisted, but given the also unbalanced, wife-dominated type of relationship most Type A + Type B marriages exist within, I can see why a temporary shift might feel like a relief to both parties, especially as it puts each party in a psychologically altered state, experiencing time distortion, reduced pain intake, and being in a flow state among other things.
This leads to #2- Perversion of authentic sexuality.
Nowadays, people want to say that the only thing authentic is what you feel, what you really want. But it seems we've lost the term perversion in our national vocabulary, simply defined as the alteration of something from it's original course.
Currently it's widely believed that if you delve deeper into what you really want, even if it's weird or unusual, that that *must* be your "authentic" self. We've forgotten that as creatures with minds, we are subject to being stuck in paradigms, or viewpoints that shape our opinion, and as such are limited by that view. But someone in a paradigm that views sexuality with an "anything goes as long as it's not negatively affecting me or my partner" is ignoring the fact that we as humans are basically wired to seek after pleasure, and our minds won't tell us if we're hurting ourselves, especially when addiction sets in. It's not made to. The only way we can know that we are on a less authentic path of our sexuality is when we have a paradigm shift, and are finally able to lift the ceiling off our viewpoint and see a bigger picture.
Also, did you know that BDSM is listed in the DSM-5? It indicates that something is wrong with the mind that desires this.
Some things to consider to remove that paradigm are the fact is that one can enter a flow state with time distortion, and pain reduction without BDSM, just in regular, old S-E-X. Also, that the "passion" center of the brain is responsible for both love and hate (which is why you can really, passionately dislike someone that you passionately love). Normally the sexual experience is one of love alone- it involves feelings of connection with your partner, feelings of safety, of vulnerability. This leads to feelings of oxytocin, whereas the participants in BDSM get spiked with cortisol, evidence that the *bliss* that they might feel has been perverted, or altered from it's original course, which in this case was to fill the body with the love hormone, and instead is filling it with the stress hormone. The brain is telling you something is wrong, even if the mind isn't.
So when a person coincides love and violence in the brain within the sexual experience, they're essentially re-wiring themselves, robbing their body of a hormonally cleansing experience and instead flooding it with stress. We're essentially forcing ourselves to go through something painful, stressful, and fear-inducing (to the brain, even if not to the mind) against the brain's better judgement. Isn't it obvious that would be bad for us? Why would we do that?
Possibly because lovingly passionate sexual experiences are much harder to come by.
But really- which one looks better to you?
This?
Or this? (And this is only .1% of how disturbing BDSM gets.)
So what's the balance? How can couples find a sense of balance, in which a wife can feel cherished and loved, and her husband is being a leader, is seeing the home and the people in it, is initiating sex, and feels respected and understood? It's totally possible with a little tweaking of the relationship dynamics.
When this balance is found, people don't search for the strange anymore because they have the ideal.
This is a loaded topic- I would really like to hear opinions! Let's skip the red herrings so we can get right down to discussion!
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