D/s, The Heart of Kink

Domination and Submission —  Kink cleverly annotated by D/S or D/s. From a galloping horse, it’s a kink lifestyle of power exchange gone berserk. Possibly some feel D/s to be socially unsafe much less pleasurable. Quiz a random, middle-of-the-road married couple on the street who’s the dom, and who’s the sub in their house. They’ll reply with something like, “Yeah, at our house I’m the dom, he’s the sub, and that’s the only way we get anything done.”

Heh, heh.

Domination and submission are, in some fashion, swirled into most flavors of BDSM, kink, or extreme sex play. D/s is the ingredient that makes kink work for players.

If you’re muttering, eccchhh, kinky sex isn’t for me, think again. If you’ve ever said yourself or heard your partner say, “You naughty boy, you’re going to pay for that!” or maybe pondered the thought of a little tied-up action or if you’ve let your partner call the shots on a sexual romp one evening just because you fancy “going along” for a time, then you’ve experimented with D/s, the secret ingredient of kink.

Sorry about that news burst, but deep in our souls, we’re likely far kinkier than we’re willing to admit. That’s because sex essentially plays at its core, and as we acquire more and more sophisticated facets of our sexuality, higher levels of the erotic play out in our sexual relationships. Our sexual play evolves into more than simple genital play. We begin to exchange power. Our sexual play takes on nuance which accesses protected corners in our body and soul that we seldom otherwise reach.

Kink — Grad School Sex

D/s isn’t a sexual aberration at all. Kink is graduate school sex, and domination and submission are the elaborate art of power movement between lovers and sex partners. Domination and submission, in their expression, suggest one person holding control over another, yet in most cases something much more profound and beautiful is true.

Balance your own personal taste in D/s, much like the proportion of vermouth to gin in a martini, by deftly mixing your own D/s cocktail of power, vulnerability, trust, and physical and spiritual experience. You actually reach those elusive places in your sexuality, healing, and personal growth by letting go, loosening up, and deeply trusting another.

Lovers negotiate the mix between themselves, and this is the place where intimate communication tremendously exceeds that of most married couples. One person desires to create an experience for the other that reaches somewhere pleasurable or healing or secret in their soul. One takes the role of domination or the dom while the other takes the role of submission or sub. Once in negotiation, creating a scene, an experience cultivated in their combined imaginations, they may find themselves expressing thoughts only expressible beyond pure language and actually understanding them because they’ve abandoned cultural norms and social expectations.

Erotic negotiation dispenses with many social rules yet keeps a few very central: consent, trust, honesty, dignity, and care. You simply don’t violate these. And with such commitments, a kink scene can be a more safe and more secure place than most bedrooms.

In the spectrum of D/s, you can mix almost any flavor depending on how much power movement you negotiate to achieve your desired effect. Purists might desire to surrender themselves to elaborate relationships and emotions involved in the slave-like obligation of the sub to their dom for an established period of time while at the other end of the D/s spectrum you might be craving a calming paddling that lasts five minutes. Someplace in the middle, the dom and sub perhaps create a scene involving the control of sexual expression, orgasm, and arousal. Or perhaps you may have thought up a teasingly romantic game of arousal and reward.

Kink and Power Exchange

Surprisingly, power resides in exactly the last place you expect it. In most D/s play and games of kink, the sub retains absolute control. All agreements include a word or sign that will immediately end the scene for any reason at all. All agreements are for the pure pleasure, feelings of safety and security, healing, or growing experience of the sub, so while domination and submission appear to suggest that the sub has no control, in reality, the sub has all control. In the same way, if the dom doesn’t feel comfortable doing what the sub is asking, they may always opt for another time.

You uncover the magic of domination and submission in the rich, trusting, and vulnerable communication between lovers and play partners. Revealing your soul is a salve to the pain of life. Things can happen in the context of trust that happens in almost no other place in life. Here we can be respected for our desires which others may not understand or possibly even scorn. In kink, you’re actually respected for your bizarre desires and fantasies. It’s no wonder that once you discover the lovely reversals of power found in D/s, you’ll likely never stop digging deeper.

–Martini Photo — Flickr / chris.corwin

–Blindfold Photo — Flickr / Faint Sanity