Is BDSM a Preference? Or a Sexual Orientation?

Thank God/dess for my readers, who often inadvertently help me discover the next blog topic, lol. This one was inspired by a question posted on the JWHMembersOnly FB page back in December. The reader noted she had a family member who didn’t see BDSM as an orientation, like gay or straight, but rather as a preference, like the missionary position or doggy style.

Well, lots of girls experimented with other girls in high school and college, but always identified as hetero, dated hetero, married hetero, etc. They would not see themselves as gay.

Likewise, a guy who playfully decides to give his girlfriend a spanking, and she retaliates by tying him up while she goes down on him…it’s all good fun, but neither of them would view themselves as a Dominant or submissive.

But…then there’s the girl who struggles with romantic/sexual feelings for her girlfriends all through junior high and high school, endures a few disastrous or meh relationships with guys, and then has the utter relief of coming out, falling love with a woman, marrying her and living happily forever after. Or, as my brother likes to say, she gets the opportunity to be just as miserable as married hetero couples (he has baggage, forgive him).

On the BDSM side of things, there’s the girl who, during her pre-pubescent years, has Ken tying up her Barbies so he can punish them in his dungeon. During those same formative years, she has fantasies about being dominated by Batman (yes, the Adam West version). She has a variety of self-destructive high school and college romantic relationships, and goes on to a career field that allows her to fully embrace her strong service tendencies (secretarial field). Then, in her twenties, she finally has the relief of stumbling onto D/s books and, starting to write them, does enough self-exploration to realize she’s not messed up – she’s a submissive. After which, she becomes involved in the D/s world and meets a wide variety of folks just as committed, personality-wise, to their Dominant or submissive traits.

Yeah, that last one’s me, as you probably know.

So, we often hear the word “spectrum.” During the discussion on FB about this topic, the word pan-sexual came up, because the teens are using it a lot these days. Now some of it’s to be cool and trendy, but I’m going to agree this is a cool and sex-positive idea – not classifying oneself sexually, letting it evolve organically in the relationships you pursue. The reader who talked about it said the term started being used when researchers realized sexual preference falls on a continuum rather than “strictly gender binary.” She said she thought a person who identifies as pan becomes attracted to other people because of their personality first.

How freaking cool is that? A world where sexual orientation isn’t hammered into little boxes. But see, we humans do have a problem. We have a couple less than stellar ways of giving validity to our personal sense of identity. Two ways we do that:

We classify and categorize.

We denigrate to validate.

Now despite it being on the list, I will say there is a lot of classifying/categorizing that isn’t bad. It’s simply a useful tool, that can be used in positive or negative ways. We like to organize and label things in ways that make sense of them. Like years ago, when we were on vacation for a week and my mother, who was petsitting for me, decided to organize my linen closet. She labeled bath towels, beach towels, face cloths, dog towels…and then left the plastic novelty item vibrator (believe it or not, the only sex toy we had at that time) in a nice little spot all on its own…sans label.

And there is the teasing form of classifying/categorizing. I’m Southern, and I routinely enjoy bashing my Yankee friends, as much as they enjoy repaying the favor with their favorite below-the-Mason-Dixon jokes.

However, there is the other way we classify/categorize that’s not as positive. It’s human nature, but it is a tendency I try to recognize and curb in myself as well. For instance, when I embraced the Wiccan faith back in my twenties, there were people who responded to that with comments like, “Oh, that’s that made-up religion that came out of the hippy movement in the 60s. Not like Christianity.”

Now, Wicca as I understand it actually has its roots in shamanism, one of the oldest forms of spirituality there is, but since it did gain a lot of its present structure and appearance from those who started practicing it in the 60s, I wouldn’t have a problem with it being “classified” that way, except for the obvious intention of those specific people to denigrate my faith in favor of their own. Because why would time be a measure of how valid a faith it is? Can you imagine that in year 1 A.D.? “Oh, yeah, there’s this group of crazy guys running around, pushing a religion based on a guy who supposedly walked on water.”

So how does this relate to our topic? I have been in a discussion where a gay person was quite angrily insisting that being Dom/sub was nothing like being gay, that being D/s was totally a preference, whereas being gay just is. In thinking of how vehement this person's reaction was, I came to the conclusion that, seeing as being openly homosexual is at such a nascent yet positive point of acceptance in our society, and gay people being no different from straight ones (in that there are many who don't really understand what BDSM is and isn’t), the person didn't want to be associated with a lifestyle that they perhaps did not think of in a good way themselves. I don't know. That one is just speculation. But we tend to primarily only be tolerant of what we ourselves understand - we have to stretch ourselves to understand that there are groups equally striving for, and worthy of, acceptance.

But there’s another explanation for their reaction as well. Sometimes we denigrate to validate. We feel like in order for what we are embracing to have worth, we have to elevate it over other things. I do not know which explanation fits what this person was feeling or if I’m entirely off base on the reason, but it did give me food for thought about my own lines in the sands about things and why I draw them.

For my own two cents on it, I've always thought of BDSM as a term that describes practice/method/preferences - scarves versus chains, psychology versus fully equipped dungeon - much like the example of missionary vs doggy style for preference. But the terms Dominance and submission describe the drive/need toward those practices. And that drive/need manifests at difference levels, depending on the person. As I noted above, there are plenty of people who integrate elements of BDSM into their romantic/sexual life, because we all have Dominant/submissive tendencies. Same way we all have interests in both same sex/opposite sex attractions. There’s a reason for the term bro-mance and girl-crush, after all.

However, there are people who identify with the Dominant/submissive/switch orientation as deeply as a gay or straight person does with their gender/love preference. For them, I do not believe it is a preference; instead it is a deeply ingrained need/desire. Just like any person who walks a different orientation than the "norm" (I'm glad that definition is getting far broader these days), they might have to bury or set it aside to handle other priorities in their life, but it never goes away. Plus, there are plenty of true Dom/subs that have that orientation, but because they are with a significant other they love deeply who doesn't have a complementary orientation, they channel it into other things to express it rather than the expected ones. I’m one of those, much of my submissive side channeled into my writing and research, since my husband is not a Dom. However, I've never had any doubt it's as much a core of who I am as being a writer or a woman.

The pansexual side of things gives me hope that we may live long enough to see a time where questions of preferences, choice versus "this is who I am" become irrelevant. We'll fall in love totally based on a soul-to-soul connection, not on classifications. And express ourselves sexually the same way. We won’t denigrate to validate – we’ll simply celebrate the amazing spectrum of possibilities for love to be expressed.

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Controlled Response, Honor Bound, Beloved Vampire, Vampire Mistress and Taken by a Vampire have been re-released as self-published books – with gorgeous new covers! Click on the links below to check them out (you can click on the cover picture and it will expand into a larger size for more exciting viewing (grin). I’m including the one of Controlled Response here to give you an example of how awesome they are! (If they’re books you haven’t yet read, buy links are below their blurbs.)

Beloved Vampire

Vampire Mistress

Taken by a Vampire

Controlled Response

Honor Bound