I write a lot of BDSM, also known as D/s, Dominance and submission. I’m wary of referring to it as D/s (though I do for convenience’s sake), because that can imply superiority and inferiority between the participants, which I don’t think has to be part of it, an important issue I’ll get to in a minute. More on this later though. First the problems of a BDSM writer:

BDSM is the stuff with the chains and the whips, of course, and I’m loathe to tell people this is what I write because I get a lot of raised eyebrows and people slowly backing away from me and giving me unsavory looks. I understand this, because most BDSM is pretty unsavory stuff. Most of what I’ve seen is more or less overtly misogynistic, and involves obvious hostility towards women, which sometimes gets quite nasty: humiliation, degradation, rape, and outright sadistic torture. It’s not all written by and read by men either. There’s a sizable female market for this kind of thing.

In any case, it’s natural to associate D/s with degradation of women, with female inferiority, and most of the BDSM writing I’ve seen is embarrassingly crude and macho. It reads like it was written by some pretty severely damaged male egos. Women are treated as less than sex objects. They’re just organs with people attached, there to be whipped, abused, tortured. The Marquis de Sade set the tone and is himself the worst—just nauseatingly cruel and an awful writer to boot—but the genre hasn’t improved a hell of a lot since his day. It’s still mainly misogynistic and women are considered an inferior species. A lot of women who read this kind of BDSM–and as I said, there are female fans–are troubled with feelings of guilt at seeing their gender treated so shabbily, and the whole genre is notoriously sexist.

I don’t deal with misogyny, though, and I don’t deal with inferiority. I happen to be fond of women—too fond, probably. For me, D/s isn’t about male superiority and female inferiority. It isn’t about degradation and humiliation. It’s rather an expression of inexpressible passion: the man is forced to abduct the woman out of desire. It’s his desire that makes him bind her and ravish her and take the whip to her, and it’s her innocence and her own answering desires that make her succumb and yield to him. BDSM to me is a little microcosm of the whole mating dance between male and female, exaggerated and caricatured to be sure, but with all the elements still there—man as the aggressor and pursuer; women as the prize and the pursued—and they conduct this dance, whips and all, without the demeaning and degradation of “mainstream” BDSM. Their passion keeps them human rather than making them inhuman.

I was led into BDSM by the hunt for extremes in my writing. I wanted to know what was a more extreme form of the kiss, a more concentrated version of the caress. What was a more intense overall sexual experience my characters could have, one in which their passions and emotions would overwhelm them? My search led me naturally to the controlled violence and simmering emotions of BDSM, where desire is so strong it breaks down social taboos and leads one person to actually take another captive and make her yield herself  to him by force. BDSM as I write it is what lies beyond the limits of human desire.

So in that sense, I’m dealing with the ultimate in romantic fantasy. My version of BDSM is a take on the old fairy tale of being spirited away by the handsome Prince on the snow-white charger, but in my version the Prince rides a black horse and has a dungeon waiting where he’s going to do unspeakable thing. Dark, unspeakable, terribly delicious things.