In the first of his Tales of a New Kinkster, E.B. Hill talks about his introduction into the world of BDSM.
Every summer a good friend of mine and I would work as camp counselors. I’d do the creative activities, and she’d take the kids sailing. On my free periods, I’d find myself going down to the beach and watching her deftly work the knots comprising the sailboat riggings. I didn’t know it at the time, but what was developing here was a desire for rope bondage, a kink she is now well known for in her community and others like it. What seemed an innocent activity was fostering deep in her an urge to be dominant, both over partners and the materials needed to bolster that dominance.
The kink world is a curious place. Dress code required. My first exposure to it was a good year or two into my friend’s rise to her current reputation, at a rope bondage class she was teaching. I arrived knowing next to nothing about bondage, and wasn’t even sure I’d enjoy it. The workshop was being held in a conference room of a hotel, and was filled with a myriad of different types of people, all of them much friendlier looking that I’d expected. Since I didn’t have a partner at the time, the head teacher assigned me a single woman to tie up.
Half an hour in I was still struggling to wipe the bored look off that woman’s face. “Tighter!” she would say, politely but also impatiently. So I tried and tried, but the ropes wouldn’t listen. The craft itself was much more difficult than expected, and I had the bitter task of asking a childhood friend, “Hey, can you help me tie up this woman?” By the end of the class, though, when the ropes finally got tight enough for the lady’s liking, something sparked. She adopted a content, pleasured expression, eyes closed and moaning softly, and suddenly I thought, this is control. And I liked it. I could look at my work and see the intimate potential.
After the class, I went to dinner with my friend, her current partner, and a couple. Strangely, the conversation over beers and bar food was not focused on the class nor on kink. We chatted politics, mostly. Later, I learned that the couple was into kinks far more intense than conventional rope bondage, but having met them, it didn’t phase me out. Because I knew what sweet people they were in the world outside private life and kink events – no doubt they were also equally charming in those places as well – their kinks were just part of full, engaging personalities. What most of my generation, and definitely the generation before mine, would deem perverted and strange became for me artistic and an example of excellent sexual and emotional communication.
So, just a novice in the community, I set about to learn what I could and hopefully enjoy the practice intimately along the way, discovering what made kinksters do what they do and why this creative community has had to live in the shadows.
