BDSM & Eros

(I’m at my shop and have to keep my feet on the floor so I thought I’d make a hasty addendum to my hasty note: Is BDSM Sexual?)

I wasn’t saying that there was explicit sexual consciousness during S&M play. If I’m being whipped, sex is not on my mind: I’m not feeling hot and bothered. Well, if she’s kicking or crushing my cock with her boots it always seems to respond delightedly.

And from what I’ve read by tops they aren’t on the edge of an orgasm as they their various wonders they perform on us. If only because of how they have to care for us even as they torment our flesh.

Perhaps it is more conventionally sexual for the otherwise vanilla folk who liven up foreplay with blindfolds and plastic handcuffs. For many of us sexuality is more than a sequence from a bad Skinemax midnight movie. BDSM interaction shouldn’t be expected to be akin to the thrills of copulation.

I was suggesting that the underlying root of BDSM play is largely erotic: the motivating force if only in the unconscious. (Or maybe like the glue that holds atomic nuclei together.)

Michelangelo probably didn’t have a hard on while sculpting David. But he was driven by more than an abstract interest in the physical properties of stone. (Having just cataloged a silly book that claims that every human being who ever lived has an Oedipal complex I don’t want to get carried away.)

If BDSM weren’t rooted in Eros people wouldn’t drive themselves batty over it.