The Ultimate Guide to Kink (41 page)

One thing we can plan for is aftercare: what takes place after a session. It’s the attention you give one another emotionally and physically. Aftercare is for both tops and bottom. Like other BDSM activities, age play can drain us, especially emotionally. Aftercare is a wonderful way to be taken care of, revitalize, and come back to embodying
you
again. Aftercare looks different for many people. It can be minimal, or as detailed as the players want it to be. I know people who just want a cup of water and to be left alone for a while. Others need constant touch and affirmation. Still others want no verbal communication, just to be held tight. Whatever your aftercare needs, remember to discuss beforehand.

I’ve laid out some tools based on personal experience, conversations, and writings on the subject that I hope will help you and your partner(s) understand and navigate age role play. Experimenting with age play can be scary but it can also be extremely fulfilling. Sexual age play is vast, dirty, and desired by many. Take time to figure out what turns you on about it. Sit with it. Fantasize about it. Jerk off or touch yourself to the possibilities of it. Decide whether you want to take your desires from fantasy to reality. Communicate openly and as honestly as possible with your fuck buddies, lovers, play partners, or spouses. Play to your heart’s content. Listen to your inner voice and concoct all the sexual age play you desire.

CHAPTER 18

DIGGING IN THE DIRT: THE LURE OF TABOO ROLE PLAY

MOLLENA WILLIAMS

Author’s Note: I recommend that you read Chapter 11, Stop, Drop, and Role! Erotic Role Playing, before reading this essay. It will help provide context. Okay—let’s rock.

Naughty is nice. Bad is good. Evil is better. Violence is love and fantasy is a secret passageway into a reality gone deliciously, dangerously, erotically haywire.

You with me? Good. It only gets darker from here.

One of the aspects of role play that I love is taking responsibility for abdicating responsibility. How is this paradox possible? By enacting a scenario where you take or relinquish control, you inhabit a sexually charged world of endless possibility. By negotiating your scenario including your limits and boundaries, and mapping out expectations and outcomes, you create a matrix into which you can insert your dreams, fantasies, and darkest desires. This liberates the role players, giving them the freedom to explore some of humanity’s darkest impulses, and to explore them without the limiting trappings of guilt, apprehension, and fear. Sound intriguing? Want to jump right into that hot-and-heavy rape fantasy? Ease back there, my friend. There is a lot to dig up, uncover, and sift through before you jump into the deep end.

Uncovering the roots of your desires can truly assist in your explorations, especially if you are experiencing guilt around wanting to ravage—or be ravaged by—another human. It is not easy to get to the point of being comfortable even thinking about some of the darker fantasies that many people entertain in the recesses of their hearts. I know that, for me, it was a multistage process and remains an ongoing one.

One of the earliest sexual memories I have is the fantasy of being overpowered, ravaged, taken against my will, and forced to submit to a power I cannot resist. Every captured-princess tale whispered to me of secrets behind the gauzy veils and pointed hats. The creaking wire bookstands in the supermarket were packed with racks of romance novels. The covers of these pulp fictions depicted heaving-bosomed and wild-eyed women resisting, pushing, straining against broad-shouldered, thickly muscled men who smiled arrogantly, seemingly impervious to the willowy resistance of the heroine. One of my favorite
Star Trek
episodes, “Space Seed,” included a rather evocative scene in which the villain, Kahn Noonian Singh (played with smoldering sensuality by a young Ricardo Montalban), seduced, overpowered, and dominated a crewmember of the Enterprise into crawling, pleading, abject submission. I looked to those fantasies, told over and over in different forms and narratives, as confirming my desire to be overpowered, to be ravaged. Until reality hit me and I became convinced that my desires, my fantasies, were wrong. Very fucking wrong.

As a child, watching the miniseries
Roots
was a major event for me, and everyone I knew watched it. It was especially gripping, as a black kid, to see the story of people who looked like me, people with a similar ancestral history, unfolding in epic glory night after night. I was swept away in surges of emotion: pride at their bravery in the face of oppression, rage at the evils of enforced slavery, fear at the pain and suffering depicted, rather graphically, in the story. But the biggest conflict for me came up in the scene where a white man forcibly rapes a black female slave. This was not the sexy ravishment of those Harlequin Romance novels. This was not a whispered fairy tale, where allegory and wistful gasps and sighs gave only hints of secret lust. This was brutal violence, horrible and horrifying, and I couldn’t understand how something that looked so much like my fantasies left me sick and terrified. And fascinated.

Unable to make sense of this dichotomy, I internalized the idea that there was something profoundly wrong with me, that I carried a secret I could never, ever share. I knew that there had to be a difference between the fantasies I had and the reality depicted in this scene of brutal violence, but—they
looked
the same. What
was
the difference?

The deeper and darker a secret feels, the more likely it’s a common one. When I became old enough to take control of my own fantasies and let go of my initial fear of being “sick” for having these thoughts, I discovered that not only was I not alone, but these fantasies were common. My first boyfriend and I played with resistance in our sex: “You want it, I got it, I ain’t givin’ it to ya without a fight!” Sometimes he would let me overpower him, and I would exert my own power, with much delight. And sometimes I would find myself overpowered, taken, and ravaged to my heart’s content. This was still not something I felt I could share with anyone but him, but it was a delicious secret that we shared and we thoroughly enjoyed its transgressive energy.

These early explorations might never have blossomed into a deeper, darker journey save for a brief incandescent affair I had in my mid-twenties. Previously, any rough sex I’d had was playful, contextualized, and something both parties had to agree to for any play to begin.

Then I encountered someone who did
not
ask, did
not
negotiate, took what he wanted with no preamble. And I found that…irresistible.

It was a revelation to have an encounter with a man who was effortlessly dominant, sexually aggressive, and able to read me so well that even my stunned responses and token resistance did not slow his roll. Previously, any sexual aggression I’d absorbed had taken place after explicit communication. This was not so clear. He pushed, I acquiesced. He pushed harder, I retreated. He demanded, I crumbled. He took what he wanted, I gave it up with a delicate blend of relief, fear, and confused arousal. Here was exactly what I had secretly craved: someone who knew, just knew, my deep, dark secret who took one look at me and reached inside to that dark place and exploited it for his own pleasure. And ultimately for mine.

Fantasizing about acts that are manifestations of nonconsensual encounters is one thing. Deciding to consciously explore them is another.

As I unpacked this experience and started sharing it with trusted friends, no one chastised me for my fantasy. Friends nodded, a gleam in their eyes, asked for details, wanted to know what happened next. And next. I realized I wasn’t on the fringe. Not by a long shot. And I wanted more.

But getting more presented a substantial challenge.

Fantasizing about acts that are manifestations of nonconsensual encounters is one thing. Deciding to consciously explore them is another. I think we can all agree that the violence of rape and sexual assault, the violence of bigotry and racism, the horror of sexual abuse, the crime and horror of incest, are not acceptable. They are inexcusable, criminal acts of violence.

So how can it be that so many of us have fantasies along these lines? How can it be that, in one breath, I can condemn the rapist and yet fantasize about being ravaged and raped?

INTENT AND CONSENT

There are two fundamental concepts here: consent and intent.

The
intent
of those participating in taboo role play is not to harm others. Their intent may vary. It can be a reclamation, a re-creation, an exploration—but it is
never
a decimation, an obliteration of the humanity of the people involved. Intent is all-important when diving into these dark waters.

Consent
is also pivotal. Inasmuch as a person who engages in a fantasy about being used and degraded by a terrifying sexual predator has consented to the scenario being manifested, the acts are elevated above criminality. Rape, incest, abuse based on race, gender, sexual preference, or physical ability are not acceptable—
unless they are
. Once these taboos are brought to light as a forbidden fruit that the participants willingly, and with open eyes, choose to ingest, the game is entirely different. It can be transmuted, with negotiation and consent, to a profound exploration of the darkness within us all. It can be everything from light and fun to darkly cathartic.

But you must enter into this maze with a grounded sense of yourself, your motives, and your desires, and an awareness of the inherent and hidden risks.

Let me be very clear. I am in no way condoning any behavior that is nonconsensually perpetrated upon another person as a means of physical and emotional violence. Rather, I am saying that those who desire to explore these fantasies in the context of a consensual, self-aware, intentional exploration of personal desires ought not be reflexively pathologized. I believe that these fantasies can be deeply empowering, and we should give ourselves permission to dig in this dirt.

It is vital to understand that consent must be granted by all involved parties when exploring scenarios that employ physical manifestations of violence and psychological shades of coercion. As someone who has been on the receiving end of sexual assault, I can tell you firsthand that there is a universe of difference between the dark seduction of a rape-play fantasy and fighting off a would-be attacker or being taken advantage of via emotional pressure or coercion. Consent and choice are what sets this type of play apart from abuse and assault. I choose the time, the place and the partners with whom I play in this realm. I make the decision with a clear-eyed and sober mind-set. I negotiate and I check in. I know my partners will be with me before, throughout, and in the aftermath of our shared experience. And I know that they care for me. The sexual abuser or rapist is not in the business of negotiation and thoughtful, caring planning. Your fantasy and desire is not their
¹
concern.

Playing in the realm of
consensual nonconsent
may blur the lines of default “No means no!” language. But remember,
all involved parties must give consent to and accept responsibility for the risks associated with these boundary-pushing scenes.
Everyone assumes a risk. Being aware of and prepared for these risks is pivotal. Maintaining boundaries is not something to be compromised.

WHY GO THERE?

Taboo role play is heavy stuff, for sure. So why go there? Why dabble in behavior that tips on the edge of consent? There are as many reasons as there are people who choose to walk these dark paths. Some people are simply sexually curious—dark fantasies arouse their inquisitiveness, so they go for it. Others have demons they wish to exorcise, fears that are rooted in a very real situation that they seek to recast and over which they seek to gain control. This type of role play is a means by which they might access that past. Still others are specifically aroused by the forbidden nature of it. The edgier and riskier the game, the more desirable it is to play.

Many publicly eschew
edge play
, as it is called, and make an effort to demystify kink by downplaying the risks and the danger.

I have spoken to thousands of people in the kink/leather/BDSM community, and thousands who are not involved with this subculture, about their private sexual fantasies. What I find striking is that among those who are not actively leading a lifestyle that openly embraces kink, there is
less
stratification and judgment about the content of forbidden fantasies.

Perverts often have a great deal invested, egowise, in codifying and justifying their kinks and fetishes. Many publicly eschew
edge play
, as it is called, and make an effort to demystify kink by downplaying the risks and the danger. Nonkink-identified people tend to have a “kinky is kinky” approach, which paradoxically gives them an initial advantage in processing taboo desires. When I came out to my nonkinky friends as submissive and confided that I was struggling with having fantasies that included scenes mirroring historical abuses, their reaction was generally “Okay, well that’s pretty kinky!” Whereas revealing the same desires within BDSM communities earned me widespread ostracism, questioning of my “blackness,” insinuations that I was mentally ill, threats against me and any potential partners “caught doing that fucked-up shit,” and all manner of ridicule. Not all kinks are created equal.

One doesn’t have to look far to find kinky people playing out the fantasy of the innocent schoolgirl/schoolboy over the knee of a stern disciplinarian. But darken the sexuality of it, add the sheen of sexual exploitation, coercion, or force, and the level of discomfort spikes. Reconciling something as horrific as the sexual abuse of children with the fantasy of playing that scene is a razor-edge dance. Many of our fantasies are rooted in real nightmares, fueled by the energy of real demons. But does this mean we ought to cut ourselves off from them, and in so doing, alienate ourselves from a base but valid aspect of our psyche? Does it mean we wish to
actually
abuse the innocent in a nonconsensual way? Does having a rape fantasy mean you desire to be beaten and sexually assaulted by a violent predator?