THAT MUST HAVE BEEN TENSE!

Kinky playmate Miss Hardy was sat with me drinking tea, as we waited for the third member of our threesome to join us.

I’d told her how Elita had brought a sudden flood of tears from me the previous week.

”That must have been tense,” she said.

Not “That must have been painful,” or “She must have hit you really hard,” as others might have said, but “That must have been tense,” revealing depths of understanding and empathy that really touched me.

Why is crying in a BDSM session not about the pain, or at least only indirectly about the pain?

The threat of severe pain triggers the body’s fight or flight response, sending surges of adrenaline through the veins. The entire purpose of these changes is to prepare the body for action, make it ready to attack or run away. Muscles are charged with oxygen, breathing changes, systems are optimised, for sudden, violent action.

But in the BDSM scene, these visceral fight or flight responses have to be over-ridden by the conscious mind. Instead of turning on the tormentor or running from her, as millions of years of evolution have taught us to do, we lie there as the whip stroke cuts into our back, fighting to hold ourselves still. And we lie there for the next one and the one after that, and we are still lying there 30 strokes later.

Perhaps this is the source of the tension; the conscious mind, a weak thing that emerged relatively recently in our evolution, is over-riding ancient chemical and physiological changes and forcing the body to lie still as it is under sustained and violent attack. I remember feeling this tension the first time Elita whipped me hard. Yes the sharp pain of her whip was challenging, extreme even, but the tension, God the fucking tension was unbearable. Releasing it in the form of tears felt cathartic and renewing; somehow bringing the systems of my body back into balance.

And that’s the truth that beautiful, shy, brave little Donna had shown me.

Yes, Donna, that really was tense.