For the Kinky Collective, bondage-domination-sadism-masochism (or BDSM in short) is about the freedom to safely explore consensual pleasures in a world that needs more of both cooperation and pleasure.
I’m not speaking about the community here, but about myself. Having said that, to be able to find that place of peace, stillness and calm within oneself is something that kink enables for me. The route that I see closest to this is the spiritual route. I would call it an inner-personal freedom, a freedom to do with inner-peace, à la Kung-Fu Panda ( laughs ). To achieve that place of peace, engaging with fear and ego are essential. This might sound a bit abstract but it’s not freedom from fear but freedom from the fear of fear.
It’s not like in BDSM you don’t feel fear, you actually feel a lot of it. When you surrender you are engaging with fear. You embrace it completely and go into the heart of it. It’s like what a Buddhist philosopher said, “There’s an energy to the fear and pain. The point is to stay with them and not just stay with happiness. This can truly animate you, like nothing else can.”
Four years ago, a friend of mine who had joined the community had told me about BDSM and I was curious to see what it was. The first time I checked out the forums, their whole sensibility resonated strongly with me. The moment I joined, it was like stumbling upon something and falling in love with it immediately. A few weeks after I had discovered BDSM, I was looking out of my bedroom window and there was a grapevine growing outside with these spikes on it. I reached out and touched these spikes, I just felt them and that whole situation — the greenery, the spikes and feeling them, it really spoke to me.
For those of us who are part of the Kinky Collective (a national BDSM support and awareness group) BDSM is also about stripping the ego, because when you’re in a dominant-submissive situation, the submissive’s ego is stripped. The whole thing about surrender is at the core of things. It’s not about ‘surrender to god’ or anything but we are talking about surrender to the dominant: a deeply consensual surrender. A dominant’s sense of self is also put in a vulnerable position since it is the submissive’s submission that allows the dominance to be expressed. Here’s where I feel there’s a lot I learned from my experiences with kink and BDSM, the freedom to say yes or no is about consent. In so many contexts today, this freedom cannot be emphasised more, everyone’s dealing with issues of consent in a patriarchal society. Despite working for 30-odd years in the women’s movement, in the last few years, by practising BDSM I have learned so much about consent.
There’s also the freedom to explore my potential — you know, to push my limits or have someone else push it. So yes, that’s the other aspect I have learned here. And of course, being part of the community is also freedom from stigma. I’m game to try a lot of things but I do draw my lines. I will not try anything involving children or animals, nor will I try anything with anybody whose allegiances are towards the right wing or communal forces.
As a queer and women’s rights activist, we face similar problems as the LGBT community. I was stunned by the similarities. You grow up thinking you’re the only one in the world, leading a double life, fearing whether you’ll marry someone whose sexuality doesn’t match yours, the fear of being ‘outed’, the fear of blackmail.
We are just a small number — around 20 or so in the Kinky Collective across cities like Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. But the larger BDSM community in India is huge, nearly 30,000 people who meet online as well as in safe forums and spaces. The collective is really about strengthening the BDSM community and helping people outside the community to understand BDSM... the way things are now, it’s all the more harder. The battle has just begun for us.
( As told to Sibi Arasu )