Knowing Your Kinks Isn't the Same as Knowing What You Want

You may have taken a lot of BDSM skills classes and you've learned how to flog, you have studied how to tie, you've worked on your verbal acumen too, and you know exactly how to humiliate. You're an expert at edging and you know exactly what service means, how you want to serve or be served, but with all of that knowledge you still do not know how to create a meaningful experience with another person.

Conversely, I see people at parties who are clearly there because they know they're attracted to kink and kinky people, but when you ask them what they're into, you get that blank stare. So whether you know the activities that you like or you don't know yet, creating meaningful erotic experiences requires another layer of erotic knowledge that we're commonly not taught. Understanding what makes an activity compelling, especially in synergy with another person, gives us more information about the charge, the intimacy and the depth that make these experiences matter to us.

Activity vs. Experience

The Same BDSM Activity Can Create a Completely Different Experience

Telling your partner that you like bondage names the activity that you enjoy, and you may have also found something that you have in common, but you still have not told them how you want to experience them while they are tying you. Do you want to be captured in a net and tortured, where your partner is creating fear, versus being held, contained and cared for, experiencing someone who is creating an intricate Shibari art project? The physical act of bondage might look nearly identical. But both of those people are experiencing something radically different.

What Makes a BDSM Scene Connect?

What we know has different levels, and when you're creating a scene or talking about it with a partner, you communicate your "knowing." You can be very clear on the act that you want to experience but still have the scene go in a direction that does not connect with you. Impact with humiliation is very different than impact used for catharsis. Learning to notice your inner experience while you're playing becomes part of the skill. What is your emotional state? What is the relational experience between you and your partner? How is your partner speaking to you or responding to you that lets you access charge and connection that makes something electric and stick with you?

The Checklist Problem

BDSM Checklists Tell You the Activity, Not the Experience

In kink, we're commonly presented with checklists of what we like, what we don't like, what we might be forced to do and what we would like to explore. We've all seen them. These lists are very important because they give us our boundaries and the landscape of our tools. Knowing what emotional experience you're trying to create with those tools is a different job.

We often think of experienced BDSM players as more extreme, more painful, more dangerous or more taboo, and that is not always what deeper or more experienced means. Many experienced players have learned to know what speaks to them emotionally, and that emotionality is what allows them to become very present and in tune with their body. That body awareness is what adds a dimension of richness and texture to scenes.

How Narrative Changes the Physical Experience

So take something like edging and chastity. This can be a physically intense activity, just being edged, denied, then put in chastity, then edged, denied and put in chastity again. But if you are first dropped into a space where you must become very present, very in tune with your body and sensations, where your partner whispers into your ear about desire, about wanting them, your desire to worship and serve, then when they edge you, the experience is intensified by the feelings created around desire and worship and being used as a toy for someone else to play with. So when this emotional landscape is created by narrative, it intensifies, adds texture and richness to the physical experience.

Naming the State

Maybe What You Want Is to Feel Small

Maybe what creates charge for you is feeling small. Once you recognize that, impact or flogging is no longer the only thing that you talk about when you're telling somebody what you enjoy. You now have a psychological experience that you can name alongside flogging or impact. That state can be reached with many different tools, skills and interactions. So a top might ask you, what has made you feel small previously? That top has more room to be creative with what they're doing, knowing that they're trying to achieve smallness, not just impact play. Smallness becomes the exploration, which is an emotional and psychological state that can create a whole other kind of intensity.

What Does "I Like Service" Really Tell a Partner?

For many of us, it's easier to say the activity that we like, such as "I like service," than to say why we enjoy it emotionally. Service is a thing. It's an activity that you can name, you can take a class about it, and you can put it on a checklist that tells somebody about it. What is harder to identify is the emotional experience underneath, especially when what turns us on about it is being subjugated or being dependent, the possibility of being used or controlled. Or, on the flip side, I like being served because I like to be in charge. I want things done my way all the time. I want to experience devotion and reverence.

The Harder Half

Why Some BDSM Desires Are Harder to Name

These states may not hold much value for you in the rest of your life, but they are still things that you feel. We're much more practiced at naming what happened than we are at identifying these states. Naming what happened is what we've been culturally conditioned to accept more readily. We've not been encouraged to give room to our darker side, our needier side and our more demanding sides. Part of our erotic landscape is learning to tune in to our emotional state at the same time as the physical experience, even when what you discover that you're enjoying might not be particularly flattering or acceptable out in everyday life. It's not exactly what you want to bring home to talk about at dinner with your parents.

The Blueprint

Building a Vocabulary for What You Want in BDSM

That missing vocabulary is why I created the BDSM Blueprint. I felt people were missing the skill and the vocabulary to talk meaningfully with potential play partners or established partners about what moves them. The quiz helps you identify your inner world. My class helps you learn how to work with that inner world through activities, as well as helping you articulate it in a clear, meaningful way to partners.

Using Tension and Tone to Communicate Desire

We all have a tension, or a variety of tensions, that we would like to experience in our scenes, and we have a tone, such as playfulness or strictness or ritual, that speaks to us more strongly than another. Putting these into our negotiation gives other people space to be more creative and brings more richness as we play together.

In Short

“I Like Impact” Is True. It’s Just Not Enough Information.

I think it's like saying I like peanut butter when what you actually want is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The peanut butter part is true, but it's just not all the information you need to create something epic. "I like impact" can be completely true too. How do I want impact delivered to me? How do I want to be spoken to while it's happening? What am I actually getting emotionally from this experience? If you want to more reliably connect with your partner and create experiences that have the potential for more intimacy, depth and richness beyond the activity itself, learn how to talk about the emotional landscape associated with your BDSM play.