The BDSM Bssh

It was the annual party for one of our local BDSM groups and they celebrated in style by having a weekend of activities, a dinner friday, seminars on various BDSM topics Saturday, and a play party Saturday night. We all decided to join in the festivities and attended the events, and it was quite an interesting experience.

My background in BDSM, except for attending some fetish night parties in Toronto where I was a spectator only, has developed exclusively in private. None of our triad has every "played" pubicly at a play party, including those held at somebody else's private residence. Everything has taken place within our own home. So being at one of these events was all new to us. The dinner was a laid back enough affair, with the exception of the fact that about double the number of expected guests turned up at the restaurant, causing some torture to the restaurant staff. But othewiise nobody underwent any physical trauma that night.

So on to the seminars. The seminar we were most interested in was the first of the day, a seminar on Total Power Exchange, a.k.a. internal enslavement. This is essentially the 24/7 form of D/s practiced by a minority of participants, but dear to our hearts. Within TPE no limits are accepted on the situation, there are no safewords, negotiated limits or other things to fetter the Master, because the slaves are not viewed has having rights, period.

The Master/slave couple presenting was one known to us through the lovely vehicle of the internet, two people whose ideas and views we respected and as a result we were looking forward to hearing them expound on their favourite subject in a presentation format, rather than gleaning their ideas from scattered comments and writings on related, but not identical, subjects. They weren't disappointing, the Master displaying a quiet and humorous grasp of his ideas and the ideas present in TPE/IE, and the slave displaying a strong scholarly background in the subject and a good deal of self awareness as to the relationship dynamics it creates. Unfortunately this wasn't mirrored in those who came to hear the seminar, and answering irrelevant questions took up a lot of their time in the seminar. Many of those questions focussed on a hypothetic Master going beyoind the confines of normally practiced BDSM and in the process endangering his slave's life, with the question being when should another individual or the BDSM community step in on behalf of the slave. More on this another time, but I don't believe the community should ever involve itself within a particular relationship. The Master giving the seminar had been involved in the community for well over a decade and had not personally seen anything resembling a life & death situation such as was being proffered as likely in a TPE relationship. Suffice it for now to say that for me Care, from the smallest day to day concerns to the overwhelming love I feel between myself and my slaves, is the fundamentally human activity, in a TPE relationship no less than a traditional marriage, and someone who is outside that caring is both a) inhuman and b) involved in something as different from TPE as a sociopathic wife or child abuser is from the ideals of traditional marriage. The existence of such people doesn't invalidate a true, loving TPE relationship, any more than it invalidates the traditional marriage ideal.

The play party gave me mixed feelings really. A couple were playing with a single tail and the Master involved really was a master in the use of the instrument. While barely touching the woman with the whip, he created a tension and a situation that was increasingly erotic and sensual, The submissive was pushed into an overt and intense subspace that was very beautiful to watch, and there was a control of the instrument, and a self control in what was intended with it, that descried any notion one might have that it was an act of brutality or sadistic in intent.

We didn't play in public ourselves, for various reasons. Emmie is shy in most situations and this was certainly a situation that exemplified them. And with the exception of the above discussed single tail scene the beauty in most of the BDSM acts shown was contained and kept between the participants themslves. Administering a flogging can have the same erotic self control and beauty in power exchange that was demonstrated with the single tail, but it has it between the flogger and flogged, and is just not so much a public, sculptured dance that can be shared with non-participants. I have every intention of taking up the single tail myself, but it will be a long time, I suspect, before I gain sufficient mastery of the instrument to try using it on anything animate.

Mitdasein