Why I Write About Sex & BDSM

I was really inspired by Still Searching For Prince Charming and her really authentic blog post in which she discussed her reasons for writing about sex. Indeed, it got me thinking more about why I choose to write about sex and BDSM.

As a personal blogger who discusses my personal life and kinky interests quite freely, I am sometimes subjected to quite a lot of criticism for what it is that I do. Whilst many of my readers love my blog for being a place that they can come to and maybe change an outlook or learn a little something, some people aren't so keen. Today, I wanted to share a little more of my story.

I grew up in quite a modest and unassuming family. We had nothing much and very little to go by, but we did have lots of laughs and love. We were a tight-knit bunch that were impenetrable, though therapists and social workers did try. When it came to friends, I wasn't interested in my classmates. For me, there was no playmate better than my brother.

I wouldn't say that my parents were strict and controlling, but my parents definitely had a lot of anxieties and they definitely had a lot of expectations, too. Maybe there was a time that I would have considered them to be controlling, but now that Mum and I have reshaped our relationship, I've come to understand my parents even better. They weren't controlling because they wanted to be, they were controlling because they worried and cared.

In our household, certain topics of conversation were off of the table and toilet humour simply wasn't allowed. My grandparents too didn't like talking about certain topics, and I can still recall my grandmother closing me down when I starting an innocent and curious conversation about ageing, death and loss. When it came to sex and relationships, sex was for married people and happened between a man and a woman. Mum and Dad did "bedroom athletics" occasionally and it never once crossed my mind to ask what bedroom athletics might entail. I was young, naive and innocent until I wasn't.

 

 

As a child, I can still remember that my parents used to go to an "adults-only swim". Of course, being so young and naive, I thought nothing much of it at all. I liked swimming too, but I gathered that Mum and Dad also needed their alone time. Instead of creating a ruckus, I'd sit at the top of the stairs with the babysitter downstairs and I would wait for them to come home. Once I saw the headlights of our old A-reg Ford Fiesta pull around the corner and reverse into the driveway, I'd charge my ass back into my bedroom and dive back into bed almost as fast as I humanely could.

As I aged, I began to be naturally more curious about all things sex, love and relationships. I discovered masturbation at quite a young age and the thoughts and ideas that boys gave me not too soon after. Having once caught me in the act of exploring said newfound discoveries, my mother picked me up a small, NHS-distributed pamphlet about sex and menstruation and tossed it awkwardly on my bed. That was pretty much it, that and school was about as much sex education as I had to go by.

I still remember the pages about sex and masturbation and I still remember learning that masturbation was something that you could do alone or with a partner. The graphic was unreserved in depicting a woman's groin and a man's hand with little speech bubbles of her explaining to him how to stimulate her better (believe me, it left nothing to the imagination as to what was supposed to be going on!). The thought of being stimulated by a partner excited me, but for now, flying solo would have to make do.

The more I learned, the more I asked. The more I asked, the more my mother shut me down. Any time I asked about sex with men, my mother would have me believe that sex was boring and unenjoyable and that sex wasn't meant to be particularly pleasurable for women. Sex was also depicted as being messy and gross and women would be better off with a toy to stimulate them. Dissatisfied with the things that I'd learned, I lost my interest in sex and focused on my education once again.

Over the years, the one thing that I was aware of was how many friends my mother and father used to have. There were good friends and bad friends, nice friends and not so nice friends, funny ones and weird ones. In all of that, I never once stopped to question them as to why. As far as I knew, they were my parents' friends, and they sat around laughing and drinking tea just as friends normally would. They went swimming together sometimes, all was well.

 

 

Once I was old enough to understand, I quickly learned what was really going on. The people that were my parents' friends weren't just friends, some of them were also potential partners. The bad and awful sex that my mother had made me believe existed was a cover-up for all of the great, adults-only fun that she was having. Far from feeling enlightened and informed, I felt hurt, angry and betrayed.

For a long time, I rebelled against my parents. Once they'd betrayed me, I'd betray them. I became feckless about the risks of hanging around with the wrong boys and I started to date. I liked naughty boys, I liked boys that didn't care about not kissing on the first date - I was all for it, in fact.

In 2007, my grandmother was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease. My mother was her full-time carer and my family unit fell apart. My brother started smoking and my father frequently went out for long drives. Desperate, alone and craving attention and validation, I turned myself to sex.

Around the same time, Matt was not long out of a relationship. Having been left the day after he'd lost his job (and after one final blowout on his then-girlfriend), Matt and I were both on an internal path to self-destruction. It would be sex only, we agreed, nothing else going on.

If you've seen Friends With Benefits, you'll know exactly how this story goes.

I found validation in the rough and kinky sex that we were having and I found freedom in the pain that was inflicted upon me, I came alive. I didn't care for my mother's judgements on my behaviour because, to me, she was a fine one to talk. At that time, I saw that she was trying to control me and I wasn't willing to listen. I changed as a person, I became something else. I became something different.

Once I discovered sex, I discovered that sex wasn't so bad at all. Heck, I'd go insofar as to say that I even enjoyed sex, and just occasionally, I was even quite good at it. It wasn't exactly something that I could write about on a CV, but it gave me something that I'd never had before, something that I knew would emanate over into other areas of my life - confidence.

 

 

Sex gave me pride, it gave me agency and it gave me the ability, quite unintentionally, to be apparently quite alluring to the opposite sex. Sweet little old me, the very same girl that could never get a boyfriend at school. That thought still amuses me now.

I still remember the conversation I had between my mother and brother. I don't remember how or why the conversation happened exactly, but I do remember my brother telling us that he had a confession to make and that he'd started smoking. Not to be outdone, I shrugged it off and admitted that I wasn't a virgin anymore. At the time, I was slightly too prideful, but I was feeling defiant inside.

Over the years, I've maintained a good relationship with sex and BDSM, but more than anything, I was compelled to share my story as a force for good. Growing up in a household that was essentially hypocritical made me want to do all that I could to help to remove the shame and stigma on women (and people on the whole) who enjoy sex, and thanks to movies like Fifty Shades Of Grey, we are now having those conversations much more. We are lifting the lid of female sexuality and talking about the many benefits of female plasure and BDSM like never before.

A lot of people think that my passion stops at sex and sexuality, but actually my passions and interests go far deeper than that. I am fascinated by the human mind and psychology, I am fascinated by why we have the kinks and interests that we have and why we think and feel the way we do. It's far too easy for these conversations to end at talking about sex, but in order to rid ourselves of the shame and stigma we still hold towards sex, we need to go still further. We need to get to a point that we as adults feel the same confidence about walking into Ann Summers or Victoria Secrets that we feel about walking into Walmart or Morrisons. We need to get get to a point that talking about our preferences in the bedroom carries no more shame than whether we would prefer to go to the movies or the theatre on a date. To put it simply, we will never reach that level of confidence if we refuse to talk, we will never reach acceptance of one another if we refuse to have these discussions and we will never end sexual assault, rape and accidental manslaughter if we aren't talking openly about safe (and sometimes kinky) sex. We need to have these conversations not just for ourselves, but also for the good of one another.

So why do I write about sex and BDSM then? Well, apart from demonstrating that disabled people absolutely can and do fuck too (and sometimes very well, in fact!), I want to use my experiences to help to shed some of that shame that we feel. I want my voice and experiences to be part of the effort to make sex and BDSM normal and safe in the same way that relationships on the whole should be. I didn't want to create a blog full of smut of oversharing and I try to be careful to only ever plant enough seeds (pardon the pun) to work towards my objective. Have I lost friends along the way with my apparently shameless goals and oversharing? Absolutely! But I have made many, many more.

That's it from me for this post! What is the topic of your blog? What inspired you to write about it? Why not give this post a like, share your thoughts in the comments or click here for more kinky posts!

Until next time!

Stay safe & have fun,

 

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