BODY!

Very early in my exploration of the thrilling underworld of Dominatrix’s, discipline and dungeons, I enjoyed a book by a Canadian professional Mistress working in London. She described a session with a disabled client on whom she performed fisting, a fairly extreme BDSM act. I was touched by the client’s wonder that the same body that caused him so much difficulty in his day-to-day life was now providing such a blissfully transcendental experience. The way she talked about his relationship with his body made me wonder about my relationship with mine. I’m doing so again.

More because of the social mores of the time than through any specific intent, I was brought up in a way that tended to view the body, its needs and its capacity to create pleasure with standoffish suspicion. Sex was never discussed, let alone self-gratification. If a sex scene appeared in a TV movie, the room would instantly fill with stultifying awkwardness and mutual embarrassment. It’s hardly surprising then, that my early exploration of my body’s response to pain and pleasure was something to be indulged out of sight: a clothes brush on my bottom in the utility room of an empty house, a tube of Deep Heat in the bathroom of a school dormitory. These acts felt illicit and exciting, but also lonely and isolating. They felt weird, and somehow wrong.

One of the pleasures of my early BDSM sessions with a Dominatrix was to be able to focus fully on those same sensations and my body’s responses to them, but to feel less weird about doing so. To enjoy my own body with someone who actively encouraged that enjoyment was new and exhilarating. The way the sharp bite of leather or wood on my skin made me more aware of my body, made me live in that external, physical self rather than in my, often messy and confusing, internal self, was simultaneously both exciting and calming.

“What about your marriages?” might be the cry at this point. Yes, I enjoyed healthy, vigorous sex in the early years of both marriages, but it faded away through my failure to form the emotional connection that makes good sex good. Also, sex has always been only part of my sexuality, and the other parts were being ignored or denied. When I eventually found my way back to sex, I enjoyed it in new ways, losing myself in the  new-found emotional connection and also in the glorious sense of being a hot blooded, physical being. There was the same sense of living in my physical self that I had experienced with a Dominatrix.

So what now? What now I’m in lockdown and, like so many others, starved not just of intimacy and connection but of touch and sensation?

It would be easy just to close that side of me down for now, ignore my body and hope for a better future.

But, having worked through this post (which has its origins in a recent therapy discussion) I prefer a different way.

Although I still, after all this time, find it difficult to talk about, I’m going to try to continue to enjoy the pleasures that my body has to give, but on my own. I’ll try not to feel embarrassed about using toys from my collection to help me do so, and I may even look for new ways to immerse myself in the physical. I saw a great self-bondage video recently, all tight rope and constriction. That might be fun! In the supermarket yesterday, I found myself looking intently at a perfectly shaped piece of root ginger. All those sensations. Mmmmm.

And I’ll still post pictures of my body when I feel in the mood.

The exhilarating and heady pleasures of the truly physical world may be a relatively recent discovery, but I don’t see why I should let Covid-bloody-19 take them away.

Sod that!