RESCUE ME: ESCAPING DECISION-MAKING, RESPONSIBILITY, AND TEDIUM THROUGH BDSM FANTASY
RESCUE ME: ESCAPING DECISION-MAKING, RESPONSIBILITY, AND TEDIUM THROUGH BDSM FANTASY
By: Headmistress Shahrazad
Kids, left to their own devices, may fantasize about becoming teachers, firefighters, astronauts, or rock stars, imagining a glorious adulthood of adventure, prestige, service, or success. They reach adulthood, however, and for many the fantasies begin to tarnish. Where once a career field seemed exciting, work has instead become stressful and exhausting. Where once getting married was a fairy tale, the relationship has eroded to become routine and boring at best. The experiences that many of us were told as children would be fulfilling have left us empty and searching for meaning and purpose. As adults, it is not uncommon to want someone or something to rescue us from the messes we’ve created, the expectations we’ve failed or don’t want to fulfill, the feelings we don’t want to feel, or the responsibilities that we want to avoid.
For some, the rescue comes in the form of frequent travels to new and exotic locations. Others make extravagant purchases of sports cars or motorcycles, believing that the acquisition will somehow improve their lives. Still others have affairs or compulsively exercise or drown their pain in a haze of alcoholic beverages. What I encounter most, however, are the ones whose erotic fantasies come with underlying tones of “Make all the decisions for me so I don’t have to make any.” Or, “Take responsibility for me so I don’t have to take responsibility for myself.” Or, “Force me into situations where you surprise and thrill me because I need to feel alive again.”
If you consider the kinds of power exchange fantasies that are most popular within Femdom literature and imagery, they can inevitably be sorted into at least one of those types of themes. Take the following familiar scenarios:
A white unmarked van pulls up next to you while you’re walking down the sidewalk. The door slides open and two women wearing balaclavas jump out and grab you, throw a canvas hood over your head, and toss you into the back of the vehicle. One of them sits on you to prevent your escape while the other throws the door closed. You don’t know where you’re being taken but you don’t care. You know there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
You are owned by a Mistress who has a reputation for strict training and high expectations. She places a collar around your neck and tells you that from this moment forward, you are hers and will submit to her accordingly. You are to take no actions of your own accord but instead must redirect your will to serve her ends. You do so happily.
She holds a paddle in her hands and stares at you intensely. You know you are going to get the paddling of your life for those bad things you should never have done. She explains that you’ll take 300 magical strokes, with which you will be absolved of your poor choices and forgiven for your questionable behaviour. You can’t wait to have a clean slate, no matter what ordeal is required to get it.
You are naked and restrained, spread-eagle and totally helpless. She’s holding your phone hostage in another room. She has injected you with truth-telling serum and explains calmly that soon she will have all your banking and credit card information, that she will drain everything out of your account, and that you won’t be able to stop her. You feel ecstatic at the prospect.
To be clear, this is not to say that there is anything wrong with having or engaging consensually in these very common fantasies for the enjoyment of it, only that it is curious that they all revolve around the concept of being rescued in some way. The desire for escapism is harmless, but you might also ask yourself why it holds such an attraction for you. Where are you avoiding responsibility, procrastinating on decision-making, stuck in a rut, or avoiding being present with your feelings? Are there any small or large changes you could initiate to make your actual life more pleasurable or reflective of your inner truth?
Those on the Dominant side of the slash are not exempt from this either. Underlying many unchecked fantasies are such themes as “I will rescue you because I can’t rescue myself”, “Controlling you makes me feel less out of control”, and “I will feign self-importance, so no one knows how much self-doubt I really feel.” Here too, we see the unconscious desire for rescue, but rather than the submissive desiring it from a Dominant, the Dominant desires it from their role and from the power exchange relationship. In actual reality they need it from the submissive, without whom they could not express their Dominance, though few would readily admit this.
Even the kind of person who professes to have had these kinds of fantasies since they were young might reflect on what was going on in their life at the time that they started appearing. Before some of you tell me that you had a perfectly fine childhood, thank you very much, know that it needn’t necessarily be any kind of major trauma either. Even deep, abstract, existential, or philosophical thoughts about aging, mortality, unresolved grief or anxiety, or the feeling of a lack of meaning and purpose can spur a desire to escape, if only from the predicament of being human. And sometimes, we just want to be rescued from ourselves.
This kind of reflection is important on both sides of the “slash” because many people, often unconsciously, seek out power exchange thinking that it will somehow fix or erase our core challenges. The problem is that wherever you go, there you are, and sooner or later the part of yourself you were trying to escape from by engaging in BDSM will turn up in BDSM. For example, if you struggle with insecurity or lack of self-worth in the rest of your life, you will eventually feel them in your consensual power exchange. If communication is not your strength in your marriage it will also eventually show up in your kink negotiations. If you are bored easily by your day-to-day reality, soon the realm of BDSM will get boring too and you will be forced to look for the next exciting thing to lift you back out of your tedium.
You may be wondering how to work to mitigate this, and the answer is both simple and difficult to execute. If you know what your challenges are, be courageous enough to face those parts of yourself or your life that you would rather not look at. Instead of putting your head in the sand, take responsibility for them and take actionable steps to make things different. Even if the situation is one you cannot change, you can always change your attitude towards, and therefore perception of, that reality. Accessing the services of a professional therapist can be a tremendous support in this regard – you don’t have to make those shifts alone.
If you perceive yourself to have no troubles or problems but notice that you keep receiving the same reflection from those you interact with in your everyday life and/or power exchange, it could be that the arena you are not wanting to take responsibility for is in your blind spot. As with driving, a blind spot is an area that you would not see if you were just going about your every day life – you need to make a conscious effort to look there. Sometimes those around us can see our blind spots better than we can. If you are getting the same feedback repeatedly from different people about a character flaw, those are likely to be accurate reflections. As much as it may pain us to be honest with ourselves about it, doing so will give us back our agency and allow us to make changes for the better.
Although it can be transformative, therapeutic, intense, interesting, and exciting, kink is not a miracle drug, and it is not an excuse to avoid personal growth within the arenas of your life/facets of yourself that are less than satisfactory to you. Staying aware of this fact and working actively on your self-awareness and self-improvement will ensure that you don’t lapse into thinking that power exchange will be the panacea for the problems you least want to look at or deal with. That way, when you play, it will be exactly that.