Blogging from A - Z Challenge: April 2 B

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B is for Bondage

I confess, I have shared in a small amount of Bondage play. It’s tricky to work it into a marriage, especially with kids; its takes a lot of setting up and the commitment level is high. To make it really work there is research into both roles required and a level of intellectual and emotional freedom that is difficult to replicate when you have kids you are accountable for. I’m not saying its impossible, just that its a lot more work and fairly low on the priority list. 

However, the small amount of play I did indulge in was thrilling. It is a very creative form of intimacy that has varied outcomes to determine success. 
What I mean by that is, orgasm is not always the primary goal of bondage, and therefore it can be very erotic, with little pressure to feel anything. Often the external constraints are symbols to assist with “letting go” on the inside, as if the subject has a chance to feel safe, and therefore doesn't need to carry any barriers within. This was my experience, and It ended up teaching me a great deal about myself. 

For one of my favorite experiences, sensory deprivation was included, so I was unable to move, see or hear anything, left in the dark alone with the most terrifying monster of all - me. Pushed to the very edges of distress, it was when I chose to let go of my discomforts and accept that my situation was out of my hands, that I experienced the strongest results. I experienced indescribable feelings of warmth, safety, security and visions of journey’s I took that are as vivid to me now as they were then. 

It was an experience that I recommend, although I was in the hands of a person who knew very well what they were doing. Perhaps if you and your partner are feeling like a new sort of sexual adventure this year, you can consider having a bondage expert tie you together. One can only guess at the astonishing experiences that might come out of that idea. 

George Bataille

B is for Bataille

I only intended to do one post per letter of the alphabet, but it’s difficult to go past ‘B’ without adding a Georges Bataille quote, one of the original men of intellectual eros. I love the two quotes below, one from the start of the chapter and the other from the end of the same chapter. I like the idea that eroticism is silence, and I like the idea that it is close to sanctity in terms of intensity. 

Some very nice food for thought here. 

Appropriately, these two quotes are from Eroticism, part two, Chapter six:

“Erotic experience will commit us to silence. 

This is not true of an experience possibly very close to it, the experience of sanctity. The emotions felt in that experience can be expressed in a speech or form the subject of a sermon. Yet erotic experience is possibly close to sanctity.

I do not mean that eroticism and sanctity are of the same nature, and anyway that subject falls outside my scope. All I mean is that both experiences have an extreme intensity. When I speak of sanctity I am referring to the life that the presence of a sacred reality within us informs, a reality that may completely overwhelm us. Just now I shall be content to look at the emotion of sanctity on the one hand and at the emotion of eroticism on the other, in so far as each has extreme intensity. My meaning is that with these two emotions, one brings us closer to other men and the other cuts us off from them and leaves us in solitude.”

“Eroticism is silence, I have said; it is solitude. But not for people whose very presence in the world is a pure denial of silence, a chattering, a neglect of potential solitude.”