All photos via @garthknightart
When one is vocal about how much one enjoys sex and BDSM related activities, it’s only natural that people around you feel curious. Especially if they see sex related stuff as still more or less taboo.
To me, curiosity is an awesome trait to possess as a human. This belief, combined with my fascination for anything sexual and my being vocal about my kinks, often makes people take me for some kind of sexual guru, or expert, or educator – or, most often, a big slut. I must say I am none of those things. I’m just a girl on a journey and I love to share. Which is why I find myself writing this during work hours, and wondering where to start and what to tell you to make you relate to my experience as a solitary kinkster.
Let me start by saying that I live in a third world country. In fact, if I were to detail the culture of – often religious – shame, conformism, and ignorance that permeates Paraguay as a whole, that would have to be a whole other article, so let’s just leave it at that. I was raised and still live in a country that’s poor in more ways than just the economic, where sex is taboo and where we don’t talk about “those things,” even if we do them on the regular.
So, where does the journey start when you don’t know where you’re going? No matter what topic we’re talking about, my answer to this is always the same: the Interwebz. And your favorite search engine. I was introduced to the world of BSDM through shibari and bondage, so the first kinky Google searches I did in my early twenties were about those topics.
The first results are, obviously, always porn. You know, rule 34 and all that. So, as with pretty much any sexual discovery in modern days, my kink education began with porn. But it was curiosity what drove me to look beyond porn. What I found then and what I continue to find and learn, one could say, has stuck with me and will never be unstuck. I discovered something about myself that could have taken many more years to surface and that could have been much harder to accept.
My then boyfriend and I were far more interested in the aesthetic aspect of bondage and shibari. Well, he was, because for me after the first few times of being tied up, it was all about that feeling. As he experimented with different “rope looks” or whatever and mastered different kinds of knots, for me it was all about getting that feeling again. The feeling of being bound, gagged and restrained became like a high that I desired over and over again. This was long before I knew what “sub space” was or even learned the kinkster lingo.
All this brings me to the importance of community. I assume that by now all of us know that lots of th ings can go terribly wrong when trying bondage or other kinds of play without proper information about it.
Even though I don’t feel like I have a BDSM community of my own, where I belong, I have benefited greatly from others’ and I was lucky enough to have all this happen at a time when Tumblr was still a thing (good times, huh). By following other kinksters, first on Tumblr, then on Instagram, and finally on Fetlife, I was able to read very detailed accounts about what it’s like to live the lifestyle. By spending hours reading the personal blogs of other subs, I became aware of how dangerous the play could be. I learned that people with bad intentions could use D/s kinks to take advantage of others, and that it takes a village to make everyone safe. All this newfound knowledge had only one downside, if we even dare call it that: I had become extremely selective about choosing play partners. This, in consequence, has limited my hands-on experience over the years.
Being more of an introvert than extrovert, without participating much in discussions, I learned vicariously online and then took the new information to a close group of friends. Those friends were not necessarily interested in trying out all those things I found attractive about BDSM and that I yearned to experience, but were curious enough to want to learn with me, to do the research or discuss with me the questions or doubts I had. They were, and continue to be, the community that supports me in everything related to my personal growth. Without them, I don’t think I could’ve become as confident in my sexuality as I am today. #Blessed, am I right?
I believe these two things, curiosity and community, are equally important to vanilla and kinky folk alike. No person is an island and every one of us needs a support network of curious comrades that are willing to see us through our journey, wherever it may take us. Personally, I feel like being publicly curious about stuff is a great way of building some semblance of community, or at least, it’s a way of starting conversations.
One could say that this applies to everything in life, and sexuality is as important a part of self-discovery as anything else.
