Sexuality in bondage (2019)

You can listen to this musing here, or read it below.

I never wrote a text on bondage and sexuality, probably because I see them so obviously intertwined. Still, I meet many people that are confused about the topic. Why are we turned on by being tied up?

Polarity is my best way to explain it. Polarity (in this case) means that two people take on fundamentally different roles that have strong synergies together. In bondage, it is primarily the roles of tying and tied, but also the parts of dominant and submissive, and masochist and sadist, and many more. By indulging in their differences, they grow together. It works because of the roles can provide the other with something they can’t provide for themselves. It might seem simple, but we spend so much time trying to be equal today, and that kills sexuality. Thus bondage provides a well-defined frame to be different. I want to point this out clearly because many people fall into the trap of doing bondage “together” instead of doing it “to each other”. Of course, all the different roles have equal value, but they create magic together in their differences.

Love and desire and how they relate is the next concept. Love is safety. Love is to know. To know that we are not alone in this life. And love is in polarity to desire. Desire is to want. To want the thing we do not have. And it fuels sexuality — our eros. The role of the tied person wants to be in the bondage, but they can’t tie themselves. Hence they desire the person that is giving the bondage, and the other way around. (There is a whole subject on self-bondage, but I won’t cover that here). What desire does is that it creates the tension of not knowing. It is both physical and emotional. It is the butterflies we feel in the stomach when we are falling for someone. The body gets activated, the heart is racing, and we start to sweat. The mind also awakens, the fantasies run wild, and we start dreaming. It is the tension before the release of an orgasm. The physical bondage deepens the tension by twisting, extending and locking the body. And the polarity between the roles, adds emotional intensities. If this is stressful or exciting, that depends only on how we intellectually interpret the situation, but the built-up tension can later be released.

Orgasm is in french known as the little death, and it is the release of tension. Since the bondage is slow, it helps the tied person to accept the tension that amasses and becomes much stronger compared to regular sex. So in a way, from a sexuality perspective, the bondage is one long session of foreplay. However, the orgasmic release can trigger in many more ways than what we experience in regular sex. The key to the orgasm lays in another aspect to bondage – in the surrender. In the letting go of control. The polarities at play can significantly help with this – the polarity between the dominant and the submissive, is per default, encouraging the submissive to hand-over control. The same is true for the sadist and masochist, where the masochist is letting go of control and tension to enjoy the pain from the sadist.

Fantasy is the final touch to sexuality in relationship to bondage because one of the most common sexual fantasies is to be tied up. It appears with many different intensities, all the way from being held down during wild animalistic sex, to full-fledged gang rape and kidnapping scenarios. However, remember that fantasies live alone in our mind, so everyone in action is a fraction of ourself; hence, their behaviour decided by us. On the opposite, when acting out a fantasy, together with another human being, as part of a polarity play, they might behave very differently. So imagination is a great guide when looking for other people, but a poor director in actual action. And the fantasy will still be a part of our subconscious; hence, it is always there anyways, when we play with tension and release in a polarity.

Photo by Joakim Erixon Flodman.