What BDSM Taught Me About Sexual Empowerment by Headmistress Shahrazad
What BDSM Taught Me About Sexual Empowerment
By Headmistress Shahrazad
The role has become a part of me: the swagger, the eye contact, the confident smile, the assertive manner of speaking. After 15 years as a professional and lifestyle Dominatrix, it has infused my being and I cannot undo it. I don’t want to undo it. Intimidating to some and enthralling to others, I carry myself in the world with a strong and unapologetic ownership of my sexual energy, and I owe it all to my kinky lifestyle.
It never used to be this way. I remember years of awkward teenage self-consciousness, hiding my body shame under oversized t-shirts and a beat-up leather jacket. I remember going to parties and being too terrified to say a word to anyone, sitting in corners in silence while my friends mingled. I remember pleasuring myself to lots and lots of fantasies that I had decided would never come true in my lifetime because “women don’t do those things”.
I don’t remember the first time I was exposed to the BDSM lifestyle, but I do remember early moments: watching Madonna’s music videos, seeing the leather fetishists go by in the pride parade, secretly reading erotic stories of female dominance and male submission on an online forum my friend found. Kink was captivating to me and provided a much-appreciated contrast to the sexually-repressed role that my religious upbringing was attempting to mold me into.
In my late teens, armed with determination and not much else, I left home in search of a life more authentically me, specifically with regards to my sexual nature. I did a lot of exploring and found a part of myself in kink that I never thought I’d have the opportunity or courage to express. Looking back, I can say that the process of mastering the core tenets of BDSM gave me a roadmap to finding sexual empowerment, and that process may well do the same for you. Here’s how:
The world of BDSM is one in which the only limit to your sexual possibilities is your own creative imagination. You can take on any role your heart desires. The caveat, however, is that once you identify what that role or role(s) are, you are unwittingly pushed into a place of confrontation with all your feelings about that role. Sometimes there is guilt or shame about wanting to own and express a part of yourself that you’ve been told is “inappropriate” or “perverted”. For example, coming to understand myself as a Female Dominant required that I cast aside ingrained social and religious beliefs that a woman’s only sexual role is to please her husband and have children. Although it can take a while, if you successfully battle and silence your inner voices you will find sexual self-acceptance. This will enable you to give yourself permission to be who you want to be.
Every time one wants to engage in a “scene” (play experience) in BDSM one first engages in a negotiation with one’s play partner. This negotiation can involve sharing fantasies, turn-ons, edges, hard limits, triggers and more. What I quickly realized was that it was very hard to negotiate with someone else if I didn’t have the sexual self-knowledge to know what I did and did not want to experience. Having to take the time before each negotiation to be introspective about this helped me learn to identify, and then give voice to, my desires.
Negotiations exist in the kink realm to ensure that what is taking place between two people is consensual and respects the boundaries of those involved. In the beginning, while I was good at respecting other people’s boundaries, I sometimes allowed my own to flex beyond what I was comfortable with. Luckily, over time, I got more and more comfortable discerning my hard limits, eventually gaining the self-worth to be able to stick by them. As a result, I mastered the skill of boundary-setting so that I could experience more of what I wanted, and less of what I didn’t want.
Since one can never predict how one is going to feel or react during a pre-negotiated BDSM scene, it is common practice to agree beforehand on a safeword. If spoken during the scene (whether by the Dominant or the submissive), those playing stop and check-in with each other to determine what is needed in that moment. Having to regularly use safewords taught me to speak up in the moment if something wasn’t working for me or didn’t feel right. This was invaluable to me from a sexual standpoint because I stopped trying to endure uncomfortable or unwanted experiences and began to speak up when something needed to be adjusted.
Finally, exploring my dominance meant that I was playing with submissives, and those submissives wanted to “worship” me, to put me on a pedestal and provide me with service and pleasure as part of the expression of their submission. Although it sounded great, this challenged me at first because at my core I didn’t believe that my body and my being could be the focus of someone’s adoration, EXACTLY AS IT WAS. Taking in the reflection that I was worthy of worship has, over the years, increased my body positivity and my feelings of self-confidence.
To conclude, sexual self-acceptance, being able to identify and voice your desires, being able to state your boundaries and speak up if something is not okay, and feeling positive and confident about your body are the pillars of sexual empowerment. While they can be mastered in many ways, my journey was catalyzed by embracing the world of kink and BDSM.