Anita Rao
The first time I ever heard about BDSM was from Dan Savage. If you're a millennial like me, this man may have also played a role in your sex education. He calls BDSM "varsity-level sex play," which to me is the perfect metaphor. If you're going to engage in it, you've got to put in the time, effort and education to do it right, which means safely and consensually. And if you do, toying with power exchange can open up vast new dimensions in your sexuality.
Vanessa Carlisle
One of the things BDSM has taught me is that I am truly a mad scientist of the senses. My clients and my play partners go various places in their minds, in their bodies and they often describe sessions with me as trips.
Anita Rao
This is Embodied, our show about sex, relationships and your health. I'm Anita Rao. Bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. It's a mouthful of sexual preferences and behaviors, succinctly wrapped up by one acronym: BDSM. It can involve arousal through pain or humiliation, roleplay, toys like ropes and harnesses, intercourse or just erotic play. It's about exploring sensation and boundaries. Folks find many ways into the world of BDSM, not excluding late-night TV series.
Smoky
I just remember, you know, in the summers when you're up late at night cause you don't have to go to school the next day and you're watching TV and just something kind of came on HBO and I was like "Ooh, what's this?"
Anita Rao
That's Smoky. She's a Black, queer femme based in Los Angeles. Her introduction to kinky sex play was through the long-running 90s HBO documentary series "Real Sex." It profiled everything from early adult interactive video games to foot fetishists.
Smoky
I'm like, you know, 15, 16 years old, turning down the volume so that my mother won't hear what I'm watching while she's sleeping. And I was fascinated by all of it. I just needed to know more. And so that was kind of my awakening of both, like, my sexuality and knowing from a really early age that that was going to be connected with the kink and BDSM world.
Anita Rao
Smoky's instincts were not wrong. Today she's a leader and educator in the LA area BDSM community and the co-founder of Obsidian, an organization that creates kinky events for queer people of color. Her desire for a group like this stemmed from her early experiences with BDSM after college.
Smoky
I started looking up local dungeons in Los Angeles where I'm based to see if I could find a place that was near me that offered classes. And so the first dungeon that I ever went to is called Sanctuary and it is in Los Angeles near the LAX airport. And that was kind of where I dipped my toe in and started to learn the ropes.
Anita Rao
So what was your first experience like? Take us into it.
Smoky
Oh my God, it was horrible! I went to a party that was, it was based on, like, nerdy subculture because I'm also just a big old nerd. And so I go and immediately I'm being mansplained. I'm being fetishized for being the only Black person there. I am very clear and was not interested in any kind of play with cis het men. But those were the people who were coming up to me and trying to teach me the ropes and explain things to me. And it was just, I was immediately turned off by that experience and, like, doubted if, like, the kink world was actually the place for me.
Anita Rao
You had a number of these not-so-excellent experiences in kink spaces. But at this time you were beginning to uncover the roles in BDSM that were appealing to you and you identify as a submissive. I'd love for you to help us understand what being a submissive is for you and how did you uncover that this was a type of sexual play that felt right in the right environment?
Smoky
Yeah, so for me being a submissive is the opportunity to release all of the control that I constantly have in my day-to-day life. I'm very, like, type A kind of person. I'm, like, a leader and an educator. I'm always having to, like, manage people. And so having that space where I can go into subspace and just have somebody else making the decisions for me and telling me what to do and I can kind of fully let go of all of that mental energy that I'm having to put in outside of that subspace is just really healing. And then also, like, the secret of the BDSM world is that the subs are really the ones that are in charge, and they're the ones that are setting the parameters and calling the shots. And so, like, secretly I'm still in charge. I am in charge of giving up control to somebody that I trust to take it from me.
Anita Rao
As a type A, pretty tightly-wound person myself, I am not uninterested in pleasure activity that involves letting go of control in a new way. And if I wanted to immerse myself more, organizations like Obsidian offer several ways to start learning the ropes, so to speak. I could attend a munch...
Smoky
A munch in the BDSM world, kink world is a, like, non-sexualized get-together. So it's just hanging out with people who are of the community and building community and relationships.
Anita Rao
I could visit a workshop...
Smoky
Then we also have purely educational events, where people can come in and learn from an instructor, everything from like BDSM 101 to, like, how to properly use a flogger to more philosophical things about, like, how to discover your dom or your sub side.
Anita Rao
Or I could go to a play party.
Smoky
Quarterly, we have our play parties. And that's for people to come in and use what they've learned and rely on those connections that they've built within our community to engage in the lifestyle and to have a safe space to do that.
Anita Rao
So Obsidian came to be in part because of your personal experience. So you all are really explicit about centering queer folks of color. Orient us to kind of the vetting and rulemaking process for Obsidian.
Smoky
Yeah, so we are very open about the fact that we are a QTIBIPOC organization. So for our events, unless like stated otherwise, you have to identify as queer, trans, intersex and Black, Indigenous or otherwise a person of color. We don't police people's identification of themselves. We allow people to define who they are. And then we have a system for white allies. We will allow white queer people to come in as allies if they are sponsored by a BIPOC person who is a member of our community. So yeah, we take it really seriously because so much of the kink world and the structure that is put out there is dominated by a very cis, heteronormative, straight society. And rather than feeling otherized or ostracized or exoticized, we have a space where we can just be us amongst ourselves.
Anita Rao
If you spend even just a few minutes on the Obsidian website, it's clear just how intentional they are about the spaces they create. They have clearly laid out policies on allies, accountability, finances and safety. And their accessibility information about their events is truly a model for all of us. It includes information about the layout of the physical space, the lighting, the music, the cleanliness and even the ventilation. It is chef's kiss, I'm telling you. If a lot of this runs counter to what you thought you knew about BDSM, you're not totally to blame. Popular culture focuses almost exclusively on the leather, whips and pain. A big thing they leave out? That many people are drawn to the sexual kinks because they can be healing.
Dia Dynasty
A lot of these folks are seeking a place to just be vulnerable because they've had to be strong for so long. They've had to kind of wall in this, like, the secret fear of being exposed or of being vulnerable.
Anita Rao
That's Dia Dynasty. She's a professional dominatrix based in New York. And if her name or voice sounds familiar, you're officially in the Embodied fan club. We talked to her back in 2021 about the impact of the Atlanta spa shootings on Asian American sex workers. That episode came out on the radio before we were bringing everything to the podcast feed. But if you're curious to give it a listen, we'll link it in our show notes. Dia first got introduced to domination in 2008 at a dungeon in Chinatown. After that first immersion into power dynamics and fetish play, she was hooked. And not just on the pleasure piece.
Dia Dynasty
For me, personally, domination is a way of getting people in the door and a way of opening up areas of exploration and guiding them through these areas of exploration deeper into the self. And to be able to kind of unpack the feelings that trauma has frozen in your body. I think that that's extremely valuable no matter who you are, in having somebody that you can, you know, really, really trust to hold you in that space.
Anita Rao
What are some very practical ways that you establish physical and psychological safety with clients? What does that look like?
Dia Dynasty
That's a great question. I think safety is extremely important for people who have experienced trauma and, and even to the point of, like, say, privacy and discretion. So it begins at the very, the very, very first contact through email. I asked a lot about, say, bodily injuries, trigger words. I am physically going to be meeting a person for the first time and playing with their body, like I need to know about their body. And that goes deeper to, like, say, phobias and fears, as well as, you know, what's going on in their mind, talking about what they're seeking to feel also in the experience. And so I think it's really important for somebody like me to be trauma-informed and to know what, say, like dissociation looks like. And of course, that's not the goal though. I wouldn't want to ever re-traumatize somebody. So it's really important to also have that conversation of having a similar vocabulary when talking to somebody about the kinds of activities they're seeking and also make sure that we're using the same language and that they are also feeling safe enough to have enough agency to advocate for themselves if something is not going right.
Anita Rao
I want to talk a bit about the aftercare piece as well. And I guess specifically, when we're thinking about kink and desire, there is often an urge to kind of pathologize, like, where does this fantasy come from? Why do I have this fantasy? What does it mean about me that I have this fantasy? When those kind of thoughts and feelings come up for people in the aftermath of a session with you, how do you walk people through that?
Dia Dynasty
I think it's really great to question, you know, like kind of where these desires and fantasies come from. And I think it's also, there isn't, like, one answer. It's a form of self-expression. And so I do find that some of them do question it because of the shame attached to it. And the shame comes from, in my belief, a very kind of narrow education on what sex should be or what sex should look like. And to me that's relatively harmful because sex or attraction or desires can really be anything. And to classify it as, like, not normal or abnormal or anything, you know, oh it's sick, or whatever like that — I think that that feeds the shame. And the shame is something that also causes people to kind of behave in different ways of, of the cyclic, like, kind of mania and then disposal and then mania and then disposal where they go crazy and they buy like all these toys, then then they have their experience that has a component of sexuality attached to it, and then they get rid of everything. Most people, they have — just their desire is so much stronger than what the shame does to them. Then they realize that kink and BDSM is a world where shame and guilt are fodder for play, but they are not where we have to live. And that we can explore these things with freedom and joy and pleasure with other people who are also consenting. And usually, that, like my presence in their life as a professional who facilitates these experiences that are wrapped in shame and guilt is enough for them to finally start seeing that there is a world outside of the shame and guilt.
Bodacious Beautee
One thing that BDSM has taught me is a new way of finding community. Just like anything else, when you find your people, you learn so much about ways of freedom, liberation, understanding, support. I get to enjoy these wild and passionate experiences where people that think and feel just like me.
Phrygian Monk
When I was younger, I definitely struggled with a lot of body image issues, self-confidence issues, personality issues — and that was really debilitating. But through BDSM, through getting into this community, I have allowed myself to see myself in a different light. I've allowed that in and that's made me a much better person, both in terms of how I relate to people, and how I view myself.
Bodacious Beautee
There's a big misconception on what this is. Movies and books and things have definitely portrayed it to be one thing, but it's a truly, truly empowering space to play in. And I hope someone hears this, take that step to, you know, walk on this other side of liberation and pleasure.
Anita Rao
That's Bodacious Beautee, a masochist based in Texas who has been involved in BDSM for four years. And you also heard from Phrygian Monk, a BDSM peer educator who's got some amazing content on their TikTok account. You know the drill: we'll link it in the show notes. Like them, Smoky also sees the ripple effects of BDSM in her daily life.
Smoky
My involvement in the BDSM community has affected my life outside of it significantly. It's so important to know how to communicate what your needs are to someone else in order to, like, keep yourself safe. And it's also, you have to be in touch and in tune with yourself in order to identify those needs. And that's something that's really helpful, like with relationships, even at work, just being able to know, like, this is what I need. And to be confident enough to go to someone and be like, "Hey, here's what I'm experiencing, here's what I would like help with." And then additionally, consent. Consent, like, isn't easy and isn't simple. And so being in the BDSM world and understanding all of the different nuances of it and practicing having to use consent, give consent, take away consent, is also really helpful in daily life, being able to say no to people.
Anita Rao
How do you balance the giving and taking of consent with also feeling like you're in a space of play? And how did you, I guess, come to a place where you were able to balance those things, because they can seem far apart when you are a less sexually experienced person or have experienced sex in a very different context?
Smoky
That was something that my wife and I actually talked a lot about because they did not come from the kink world in the same way that I did. And so when I started using, like, my knowledge around consent in our sexual relationship, they were really put aback at first and was like, "What do you mean, you want to know what I want? Like is that how sex happens?" And me being like, "Yeah, it can be, it should be, in my opinion." Rather than thinking about it as a negative and a way of, like, shielding and protecting yourself, I like to think of it as a positive, as a way of really honing in on what the other person wants and needs and providing that. And it creates such a much deeper and beautiful connection and experience when you're able to kind of approach it in that way.
Anita Rao
Dia, I would love to turn to you and hear a bit about this concept of play from your perspective and how engaging in play through your work and your professional sphere has shaped your personal discoveries outside of that sphere?
Dia Dynasty
I think that play is extremely important and something that we as adults lose touch with more and more if we're not actively engaging in something that is playful. And so I think it's important with my clients to establish a connection of trust and safety. So, of course, all these take a little bit of time. And the play for me is — it's oftentimes born out of a lot of curiosity of an asexual pervert. Like I don't personally don't get a lot of erotic satisfaction from my professional experiences, because I'm very focused on providing that experience for my client. And it works out perfectly because I'm not hypersexual. You know, I'm more, just, like, infinitely curious about other people's bodies and other people's desires and fetishes. And so that's why I think it works so perfectly for me to, to really hone in on the other person's desires and fantasies and arousal and their needs as well as, you know, what they're going through, and just kind of become one with them as an architect of a fantasy.
Anita Rao
The practices of BDSM go way back in history. Art and texts from ancient Greece, Rome and India reference sexual kinks, roleplay and so much more. So far, we've been talking a lot about dominance and submission. But how about the M in the acronym, masochism? That term specifically describes experiencing pleasure through pain. And it was first officially coined in the late 19th century. Much more recently, it has also been the subject of inquiry for scholar Amber Jamilla Musser.
Amber Jamilla Musser
Originally I was drawn to the subject when I was studying the work of Simone de Beauvoir. And in "The Second Sex," she talks about all women being masochists. And I was like, what? How does feminism conjoin with masochism? And, like, what does that mean?
Anita Rao
Amber is an English professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the author of "Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism."
Amber Jamilla Musser
I really started getting into kind of two different strains of how people are talking about masochism. And one is really kind of masochism as a way to explore different aspects of embodiment and different play with power. And then there's sort of this other strain of masochism, where people are thinking about it, I guess more negatively, in terms of the question of, like, why are people submitting to regimes of power that are harmful to them?
Anita Rao
So take us back to the coining of the term and how it maybe set us up for those dual interpretations.
Amber Jamilla Musser
So obviously, people have been producing forms of this practice, you know, forever, right. But the first person to really use the word masochism was the psychiatrist named Richard von Krafft-Ebing. And he produced this, like, giant kind of encyclopedia of sexual perversions, called "Psychopathia Sexualis" in the late 19th century. And basically, people were writing in and were like, "I am very turned on by women stepping on my back or whipping me. I really love to see them wearing leather or furs." So for him, a lot of what he was really interested in was the way that masochism was part of submitting to power. It was a lot about where people saw themselves in society and kind of the steps that they were taking to get away from those different roles, right. And so one of the things, for example, was that all of the [masochists] that he talked about were men, and they were all talking about heterosexual relationships where they wanted a female dominant. But women masochists, he didn't really consider that possible because the innate condition of femininity was to desire pain and that's kind of like that other strain that I'm talking about. And so for him, whenever he came across a female masochist, the way he would talk about her was to focus on her masculine attributes. And to sort of say that, like, her masochism was actually a symptomatic of her being more masculine-inclined, rather than something that could be within the realm of femininity.
Anita Rao
So how have feminist historians and feminist thinkers taken up these two ideas and wrestled with them? I know that there are some very, very conflicting thoughts within feminist scholarship. So take us into that.
Amber Jamilla Musser
I mean, in general, with feminism, they're always kind of a few different strands. They're the people who, and this kind of blew up in the late 80s, who are called the anti-porn, sort of anti-sex feminists, who really kind of argued that anything that was not explicitly about avoiding power was demonized. So there's this long history, especially around actually lesbian S&M, where feminists were like, you know, why are you wanting your own oppression? This is not a way towards avoiding patriarchy. It's in fact producing like a mimicry and therefore harmful to our political ambitions. And then you sort of have later on feminists, who are sort of thinking about BDSM more as a way to understand empowerment and curiosity around what power and different feelings of the body can do. So I would say that at this point, that kind of version of anti-sex feminism is no longer really as prominent. But you can see its ghost in terms of questions around respectability. And that's kind of like the friction that I see.
Anita Rao
I'd love to hear a bit about how this tension then comes into play for Black feminists in particular, who are thinking about maybe even race play as a part of BDSM. And how race and subjugation go hand in hand in some of these play encounters. Talk to me a bit about that and what struck you about looking at how that thought has changed over time?
Amber Jamilla Musser
As I said before, so much of the way people have understood masochism has to do with the ways that they're understanding how power is working in a broader sense. Someone like Audre Lorde and Alice Walker were very negative about the practice, largely because they saw it as kind of repeating a lot of the oppressions that were already facing Black people. And so this sort of idea that it was not only about patriarchy but that somebody could want to be seen as being the slave of somebody else was just like a really problematic repetition of something historically bad. And we definitely see that, I think still, there's like a lot of anxiety around race play. And so race play — I know you just mentioned it right — it's where people are, I think, more explicitly playing these interracial sexual dynamics in BDSM. And so people are often more comfortable when Black people are taking the role of someone who's dominant. And in large part, people talk about that as kind of like a way to erase racialized guilt. But people become, like, very uncomfortable with the idea of Black submissives. So there was, like, that doubled anxiety happening there.
Anita Rao
How have contemporary Black women and femmes that you have talked to or looked at kind of reclaimed masochism as a tool for joy? How do they respond to those arguments and critiques?
Amber Jamilla Musser
So I mean, a lot of the arguments that I was talking about were really, I think, more central to discourses in feminism in like the 70s and 80s. Right, so they're not necessarily circulating as much now. And I think a lot of what's happening, what we see is actually like a massive explosion among Black women, Black feminists, Black queer people, in thinking about what constitutes Black joy. And BDSM, I think has been really an important site for people to — I wouldn't necessarily say like explicitly grapple with histories of enslavement, though that may also be happening — but really to kind of say, like, my body is my own and it's a space that I can use however I want. And also to try to move really away from these politics of respectability, especially because we're in this era where I think people have really come to see that, you know, even if you behave the way society tells you that you should, it doesn't really guarantee your safety, it doesn't really guarantee anything. So in a large part, I see these kinds of, like, movement towards really embracing kink, embracing BDSM as part of this kind of way to imagine living in an anti-racist way, right, in sort of ways that people want to be, as opposed to the way society is trying to restrict behavior.
Anita Rao
Yeah, I love that. And I want to take you even deeper into what you get to in this book about pain in particular. Like there is a lot of talk about maybe the more visual aspects, I guess, of of masochism and of BDSM. But people often stray away from really talking openly about the pain piece. So I'd love to hear about what interesting representations and conversations around pain in particular that struck you throughout this research.
Amber Jamilla Musser
Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that it's harder to talk about pain in relation to these power dynamics. But I think a large part of it is also just that people really have, like, this real difficulty hearing and reading about pain. But one of the things that was striking to me when I was doing this research was I wrote a lot about Bob Flanagan, who called himself a supermasochist. And he famously suffered from cystic fibrosis. And he's talked about using BDSM as a way to control the pain and sort of what he mentioned was that he was feeling pain in this medical context all the time. And BDSM really gave him a way to take that pain and really re-signify it into pleasure, into sort of like an exploration of the body that he was in charge of, as opposed to the way the medical complex was like really working on his body, right, or the way disease was working on his body. And I think in general, it's just, people have a really hard time describing sensation. So I think that's part of, like, why it's under talked about but also one of the, like, really cool things about what BDSM can do.
Anita Rao
Somehow we've gotten this far in the conversation without mentioning "Fifty Shades of Grey," so I'm going to bring it up now. And how both the book and the movies really brought BDSM to a mainstream audience and made it a subject of conversations in popular culture. And there been a lot of critiques from the BDSM community about representation in "Fifty Shades," saying there's really no discussion of consent and safety. There's a lot of depictions of violence that were really not at all what anyone was consenting to, and a lot of conversation there. But what do you think have been the ripple effects of how those narratives have shaped how we think about masochism in contemporary culture?
Amber Jamilla Musser
Yeah, "Fifty Shades of Grey," talk about a bad cultural reference. I mean I think the thing that it did do was get people, like, more familiarized with the possibilities of masochism. My sense, at least, is that there has been kind of like this explosion in, at least, curiosity around BDSM because of the book. There is something about the way the book is so focused on the sensations. So I can see that there's suddenly this imagination of, like, what does it feel like to have, you know, like, the sting of the whip, or, like, restraint, at least that opening of a sensual arena. And I want to imagine that, like, that is part of why people kept reading, just sort of, like, suddenly they were like, Oh, my God, there are all these things I didn't even know I could do with my body.
Vanessa Carlisle
Something that I would love for other people to know about BDSM is that we call it play for a reason. It's creative, it's interpersonal, it does require consent to function. It's also a place where I've encountered a large number of cis men who aren't drag queens out in the world, but in the safety of a dungeon, they want to play dress-up. And I think of that as a really profound commentary on masculinity in our culture.
Phrygian Monk
It's not supposed to be this scary thing. It's not supposed to be this super intense, secretive, exclusive club. It's supposed to be people living their lives in a way that fulfills them and makes them happy.
Allie Eve Knox
It's not all black and leather and dungeons and whatever. There's also a lot of, you know, mutual power exchanges, and so much consent and just love and care that is really the forefront of this industry. And I wish that people would understand that these types of things can, you know, expand outside of just the kink community, should expand in everyday life. People should be familiar with consent and how it works and using it back and forth. BDSM can be such a freeing and empowering tool for, you know, your entire life really.
Anita Rao
If you've ever been curious about BDSM, or if this conversation has sparked a new interest, there are lots of different places you can start your inquiry. But to minimize the overwhelm, we asked Smoky to give us her starter kit.
Smoky
I think the very first thing is that if you're thinking about it, if you're, like, at all curious about it, you might as well go in and learn and explore and you might find, you know what, this isn't for me, and that's fine. And then the first thing to do would be, in my opinion, is to go to a munch. Again, a munch is a BDSM kink leather community event that is completely desexualized. And so that's when you can start to meet people, ask them questions, find out about what's going on in your local community in that kink world. And the best way to find out about those kinds of events is social media. Specifically, there's a website called FetLife, F-E-T Life, L-I-F-E. That's kind of like a Facebook-type message board system dedicated to the BDSM world. Creating an account there, which is completely free, is how you can start to find out about what your local community looks like, and then starting with a munch is the perfect way to get started.
Anita Rao
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast, consider a contribution at wunc.org now. Incredible storytelling like you hear on Embodied is only possible because of listeners like you.
This episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and Paige Miranda. It was edited by Laura Pellicer with help from Amanda Magnus. Paige Perez also produces for our show, Skylar Chadwick is our intern and Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer. Quilla wrote our theme music.
A special thanks also to everyone who contributed to this episode, including Bodacious Beautee, Phrygian Monk, Allie Eve Knox and Vanessa Carlisle.
If you want to stay up-to-date on new episodes or weigh in on anything we talked about on Embodied, give us a follow on Instagram and X. Our handle is @EmbodiedWUNC. If you're more of a thinking out loud person, leave us a message with your stories, thoughts and ideas at our virtual mailbox SpeakPipe. Find a link in our show notes.
Thank you so much for listening to Embodied. And if you liked the show, please spread the word in your own networks. Word of mouth recommendations are the best way to support our podcast. We so appreciate it.
Until next time, I'm Anita Rao taking on the taboo with you.