Why Do We Need to Feel Helpless?
» BDSM, D/s, S&M: Speculations
I guess the real question isn’t why slavish people need bondage but why we feel a need to be made helpless.
Another one of those attractive manga style illustrations. Artist unknown.
Bondage is an emotional hunger made manifest.
That old devil: why? Why want to be rendered impotent, a willing prisoner of another’s whims.
Digging about in the depths of my own brain - which I hope you will understand is my idea of a keen pleasure - I’ve becoming increasingly sure that I got my earliest sexual cues from my parents’ relationship.
The power was unequivocally on one side: his. Before I knew about sex, before I masturbated I eroticized that marital inequality. So even as a boy I thrilled to see a bound man tortured with hot coals.
Their real life was nothing to be envied. I was too young to understand that. Who is more naïve than a child? I can’t pretend to understand the mechanism. The details are long since lost.
An invisible programmer in our brain begins coding our sexuality very early on. Years later those primary instructions control our needs and desires.
In my case leaving me with a need to surrender to another. My actions temporarily circumscribed by her will.
Over the years I’ve discovered new kinks and fetishes. But they are all ways of realizing desires that were planted long ago and were only waiting to be discovered.
Comments
Bondage has a very powerful effect: it makes one feel completely powerless. So, everything that happens, all that kinky stuff, is NOT YOUR fault. Youre not a kinky perverted, no need to feelashamed. Youre free.
Well, at least I feel like that sometimes.
Posted by: Marcos | January 12, 2006 5:17 PM
Right.
I don’t see any reason to feel guilty for my joy in surrending and being bound.
Nor for anything that doesn’t injure another person (or myself in an inappropriate way).
Posted by: Richard | January 12, 2006 5:20 PM
The lack of being able to move probably makes everything more intense and makes you feel more helpless. So I’m guessing that bondage just adds to the gravity of the situation.
Posted by: Alexandra | January 18, 2006 7:15 PM
Oh, feeling helpless? Isn’t it the same thing? The more options that are taken away from you, the bigger the gravity of the other ones. That seems to cover bondage and helplessness.
Posted by: Alexandra | January 18, 2006 7:17 PM
In a sense this is the emotional, mental bondage: like when I become unable to verbalize.
This is when I depend on you the most deeply and feel the most profound happiness (if only after it is over).
Posted by: Richard | January 18, 2006 7:20 PM
submission is never about total helplessness. The sub is always in control because of the safe word protocols usually pre-agreed with the Dom. However, it takes away your guilt, the submission, the helplessness you feel means the desisions are not yours anymore, there is no guilt attached, all very understandable and normal actually.
Posted by: jessie | July 7, 2009 8:57 AM
This is about the subjective experience of helplessness, not actual helplessness.
It might be an issue of shame for submissive persons. But not all.
Some of us crave the feeling of being completely controlled. This is why devices like cages have such symbolic power.
Posted by: Richard | July 7, 2009 12:24 PM