BDSM has been officially mass-ified. Fifty Shades of Grey has spawned a bookshelf full of copies for under the sheets reading. You can probably find them in your local library.

The BDSM community has been dragged into this commodification of the culture. What used to be whispered about is now discussed openly around the dining table. The only problem is, sometimes these discussions are full of myth and misconceptions. When no/little communication has existed, misconception becomes truth, false interpretation becomes real, and it grows and grows, sometimes into hegemony within the culture itself.

We see this phenomenon happening in non-hetero normative communities. In Malaysia, for someone who doesn’t understand homosexuality, it equates to anal sex to them. They jump to the conclusion that being gay means ONLY unnatural sex, without thinking of the complexity and diversity of homosexuality and homosexuals.

Now, if you talk about bondage, or spanking, or the whip, it’s likely to conjure up Fifty Shades images of pleasure and sex, reducing BDSM to some kind of naughty sexual adventure.

So, what is pain, power and the BDSM?

Pain, isn’t just some way of getting pleasure. For many people in BDSM it is about love, trust and commitment, the sacred and the spiritual. The kind of intimacy that we oared on our boat of pain, is beyond anything i experienced before. It was colours, mental energy of two people becoming one, souls merging. It’s certainly never been as simple as “sex”.

Here’s how i imagine it. your lover is facing a robber who holds a big baton that’s beating him/her violently. Would you, move forward and use your body as a shield for him/her? BDSM allows this to happen. We allow our imagination to go wild and we dance in that imagination. Master, swinging His whip, inflicts pain upon His slave, and the slave takes the pain from Him and, biting his teeth, echoes “Yes please, i love You” in the back of his head. As the pain goes deeper and deeper, the real world fades away, and pain cuts open the barriers, break down the walls. In that space, we don’t need to say any words because we’re connected in an absolute intimate way.

Pain=/= Sex. It never is that simple.

Yes, I am a kinkster and I belong to the BDSM community. But the label of “BDSM” that many people perceive, is not what it truly is.