Throughout these weeks of edgy sexual D/s exploration – no wait, it’s months now – I go to Fetlife hoping to see more people “like me.” I want to feel normal. And I can’t look away. Well, I can easily scroll by all the exhibitionist girls with stilettos and waxed pussies trying to lure people to their web sites. It’s the normal looking people that absorb me for hours – a little overweight, showing off whippings, ass fistings, their flesh red and bruised and cut and bleeding, jizz and cum everywhere. All stunning in their torture extremes, boastful of those extremes – look at what I can take.
Oh yes, I am absorbed, but none of it makes me feel better about much milder me, nor does it make me feel more normal. My fascination makes me fear of going that far, becoming freakish. I like a little spanking, a little nipple clamp maybe. 
I like the submission mind game. But I don’t like the idea of going over some dark line, getting lost in freak territory, becoming unrecognizable and unreal to myself.
Up until now, David Deida and his writings, like Intimate Intimate Communion has provided a wonderful framework for me to understand what is happening with me and my Daddy husband, helped me understand why our exploration in ravishment and surrender are so thrilling to us, and why it has so dramatically opened hears and bodies to each other. Yet nowhere in what I have read from Deida so far does he talk about BDSM or dominance and submission. He talks about the masculine partner loving his woman “forcefully” and “even aggressively,” and how the feminine partner can yield to this energy. He talks about going after “the style of intimate relationship that best serves our expression of love.” He says “every desire, every taboo must be embraced and then converted, by love.” But he will not describe what all that may look like. He recommends embracing the taboo without naming the taboo.
To me, it seems he is referring to power exchange. But his writing is very airy, almost in the vein of romantic poetry. He doesn’t bring it down to earth. And so his advice is lacking in practical applications. It is not “implementable,” as one poster who is familiar with work wrote on a message board I discovered.
I am frustrated by this. I want a wise teacher to tell me, Yes, woman, letting your husband torture your nipples is a spiritual exercise. I want to continue my noble project of thinking of “submission as a path to God.” I don’t want it all to just be a perverted fetish. For a brief while I am comforted by the idea that one BDSM devotee posits on a message board, that Deida likely considers BDSM an area to “grow through” or a “kink to be ironed out,” and that eventually a couple will discover that such extremes aren’t needed to open up one sexually.
At first, I like this idea. It calms the feminist chatter in my head that never quite goes away that I am doing something wrong by withdrawing my right to consent to my husband. I like thinking, “Okay, this D/s stuff is a phase we are moving through on the way to some greater cosmic place, a proving ground for some relationship nirvana we are on our way toward.”
But then I think, no, attributing this glorious physical heat we are experiencing as a phase on the way to something else is doing a disservice to that heat. Why can’t the heat be a noble end unto itself? 
There is a reason there are so many women on Fetlife, asses in the air, with blissed-out looks on their faces, waiting to be beaten, penetrated, loved roughly. There is a reason why 50 Shades of Grey, by all accounts a terribly written book, is so fucking popular, even more popular than Harry Potter. The desire to be dominated is clearly a universal longing.
To look for something beyond the immersive experience of BDSM strikes me a little like standing on top of ladder in order to look for a ladder. I am already there. Michael grabs me hard, and I am immediately present, immediately pulled into my body. Immediate nirvana.
Maybe that is why I end up drifting away from the gaudy entertainments of Fetlife and start reading what surveys and studies I can find about BDSM. According to the science of statistics, BDSM practitioners are actually happier than their vanilla counterparts.
For example, one Australian study shows that BDSM people show signs of being more psychologically healthy than the average population. Another 2013 study, called “Psychological Characteristics of BDSM Practictioners,” explains why: “Individuals experienced a reduction in the stress hormone cortisol and elevation in testosterone levels after kink activities suggesting that there is a biochemical enhancement for some who engage in these behaviors.” This same study also “revealed improved measures of psychological relationship closeness in participants. Both people who received and administered kink activities were notable for these increased measures of intimacy.”
Furthermore, “BDSM participants were less neurotic, more extroverted, more open to new experiences, had more conscientiousness, yet were less agreeable compared to non-BDSM control groups. The subjective well-being of BDSM was higher than that of the control group, and the study summarized that people who engage in BDSM are characterized by greater psychological and interpersonal strength and autonomy, rather than by psychological maladaptive characteristics.”
Okay then. I can stop worrying, go ahead and set aside this need to justify my sexual longings as noble and not antifeminist, and especially “not sick.” Although I suppose this blog is exactly that, a justification, my own version of women posting their pictures on Fetlife, asses in the air, pussies exposed, look what I can take. I am just doing it with words instead of photos.
But writing through this – and hearing back from women like me, going through what I am going through, takes me ever closer to peace with it all. Writing this allows me to let it be what it is – the most intense sexual and love experience of my life.
“My mouth is on fire.”
I have never been touched there like that, so slow and gentle and loving. The tender intimacy of it makes my heart beat hard. The pleasure of it suffuses me with glowing heat. My eyes fill with tears.
It makes me feel like I did when I was a kid and had to get chores done before my parent came home, or I’d be in trouble. I am squirming like crazy under the covers when he finally comes in. But oh the joy to see him, and to feel him close. The love just flows between us, it is so palpable, so warm.
I am receiving all this love he is pouring into me, and becoming love and the whole time he is speaking, chanting, “Daddy’s sweet girl, you’re my sweet girl, so beautiful… I need this, I need you naked on my lap…”
When I open my legs for him, he doesn’t tell me I am wicked or bad; rather he tells me I am a “good girl.” Morality feels like it is resting on its right foundation.
We come into the world involuntarily, our hearts beat involuntarily, our breath fills us involuntarily, our sexual organs engorge with blood involuntarily. None of us are creations of our own will. And sexual submission allows me to embody that, understand live that.
The man, he says, is like the boat sailing the ocean, deciding which way to go, maneuvering the boat to a specific destination. If the man doesn’t feel any sense of direction, the woman cannot surrender to him, cannot carry him to where he wants to go.
He is also Michael and sweet baby and lover and husband and friend. There is plenty of room for him to be all those things at once, and each is always there, and it’s just a matter of focus on which arises in the moment.
I implicitly trust my husband not to do anything bizarre or dangerous to me, to know the difference between pain and harm. He is a good person, he loves me, I don’t feel the need to protect myself from him and his desires.
There seems to me a difference between becoming a servant to sex – which is how much of the BDSM scene-negotiation and contract stuff I find online strikes me – and through sex becoming a servant to love.
As his fingers keep stirring and swirling inside me, I feel as if he is touching the essential core of me, creating an opening, and the universe is pouring into me as my body pours out, expanding, filling the room, and oh jesus fuck, it is achingly exquisite. I feel literally caught between heaven and earth, and I am hanging there astonished when …
Nothing in my life, no physical activity, has ever been as life-changing as that one thing Michael does for me. I lie there, legs wide open, whole body self open, and I am changed. And oh, if he does it while I am face down across his lap, there is the added dimension of submission to him as well. Body and mind are both transformed at once.