What Is BDSM?

BDSM stands for Bondage Discipline Sado Masochism.

Technically Bondage is the act of forced confinement by restraints on the body or confinement to a cell. As ethically and legally practiced in BDSM the confinement is always consensual. Also in the parlance of BDSM the word always refers to a restraint such as a tie up or handcuffing as opposed to confinement in a cell.

Discipline is the maintaining of obedience of a submissive by a Dominant. It also refers to punishment.

Sado refers to Sadism, the act of deriving pleasure from the torture and suffering of another. In BDSM the intensity of inflicted suffering never goes beyond the masochistic limits of the submissive's pleasure, unless briefly for punishment. As ethically practiced, it never does permanent harm. A person may however, by consent, be permanently marked by various means for ornamentation. The word is derived from the name "Marquis De Sade" an early writer and practitioner of torture involving sexual pleasure. He spent part of his life in prison for having his servants tickle a man to death.

Masochism The practice of deriving sexual pleasure from pain, either emotionally or physically. The term was coined by the German psychologist Krafft-Ebing, and  inspired by the life and writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

There is much variation in how BDSM is practiced and its intensity. Some never do any more than get tied up with rope. Others may go a little beyond that to being put in restraint and be sexually teased to desperation before finally being stimulated to a finish. There are all variations of intensity from the extremely mild and sensous to being whipped with the pain intensity of a bee sting. Rarely there are masochists that crave severe whippings that bloody the back. In obedience and slavery there are those that want only to serve as a slave for a few hours on a weekend and there is also the 24/7 relationship where the submissive consensually serves as a slave twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

Why BDSM?

Civilized life is basically boring. We have, by our technology, eliminated the danger to ourselves from animal predators. We spend hours at the TV and movies watching people on adventures we wish we could experience. We no longer fight off warriors from other tribes, and hunt game for a living. That is the primitive environment our brains have evolved in for all but the tiniest fraction of our evolutionary history. Now to make a living we spend time in the security of offices, factories, or outdoors in our vehicles, most of us doing repetitive tasks. Only a very few of us have the chance to live adventurous lives.

Just as kittens play with each other to gain the coordination needed for hunting skills, so do children instinctively play to prepare themselves for a life we lived until recently in our evolution. Hide and Seek, Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, are all predator and prey games. Capture the flag is a game of tribal warfare. As adults only a very few of us get to live the lives these games and evolution prepared us for. But we still can and do play the games. Some of us play paint ball, or seek danger by parachuting, or skiing. And some of us do BDSM. For a Dominant, who might be a secretary by day, it might be the satisfaction of having an executive pay lots of money to obediently grovel at her feet as a slave by night. Or the predatory satisfaction of seeing a submissive squirm under torment. It might be the intellectual satisfaction of figuring out what to do with a submissive, whether it be new ways to torment and humiliate, or ways to make a reluctant slave obedient. For the submissive it may be the thrill of being in danger, of not knowing what will happen next, of an order and structure provided by another, and of the direct erotic stimulations or those stimulations derived through erotic pain. With these games to play, BDSM relationships tend to be exciting ones rather than the bland conventional ones. It provides a framework and stimulus for interaction and satisfies the desire for adventure. It also tends to produce strong emotional bonds in the submissive to the Dominant.

When these games are played  in a relationship twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for years is it a game anymore or has it become real?