I've found that most new people who want to get into BDSM want to do it in the bedroom. Sex is the first thing people think of when they think of ropes and floggers and dominance and submission. It was the reason I started looking into it myself; I'd been interested in kinky sex as long as I could remember. But it wasn't one-on-one encounters I came across, it was an entire community, which offers something very different and, in the long run, offers things more rewarding than sex.

At the BDSM play parties I attend, sexual activities occur, but they are rarely the focus of the night. The focus is pain. As I've been trying to drag my vanilla friends along, I have found that it is this focus which turns them off to the idea. Unless they are already masochists, pain is not sexy - it just hurts. I was the same way; I was drawn to the image of a slave kneeling at someone's feet, rather than the image of someone being beaten by a flogger. In fact, the first night I attended a play party, it was that very flogging that broke me down; seeing someone I loved moaning in pain was something I couldn't handle, and I had to run away from it for a little while.

I've come a long way since then. Power play is still my personal focus (it's what's turned me on since I was a young kid), but I've found that power exhange and pain are intimately connected. In bed, you can run your fingers over a lover's skin, stimulate sensitive areas, and if luck is with you, you can give them pleasure this way. It's very vanilla, but it's also an act of dominance - by making them feel sensations you want them to feel, you gain a little bit of power over their nervous system and the chemistry in their brain. But like I mentioned, it's not always a sure thing - I'm sure most men (and some women) know what it's like to try and turn on a lover with no result. Engaging in foreplay carries the risk of failure. But pain isn't like that; when you cut someone, for example, you sever nerve endings, you make them bleed, and it hurts - always. There's no risk of failure here; your command of their nervous system is secure. The power exchange is heightened and intensified. And when the person on which you're inflicting pain interprets that pain as pleasure, that's when the fireworks start happening in their body's chemistry. They can achieve euphoria at your hands - and that's the best thing I can think of to inflict, when someone has submitted their body to me.

I didn't like pain at first, and there are plenty of kinds of pain I don't like still, but the kinds that I have come to like are goooood. It takes quite a mental shift to feel pain as pleasure; part of that is consent (I still curse up and down when I stub my toe, for example, but I moan in pleasure when someone is drawing a sharp knife blade across my back) and part of it is the willingness to mentally explore the very sensation of pain. To enjoy it, I can't ignore it or try to think of something else; I have to quiet my head and "listen" to the things my body is feeling. Sometimes I can't, and it ruins the mood, but more often than not, the power exchange involved in pain is rewarding and leads to some amazing connections with other people.

So I'm developing my pain tolerance, but also my skill in inflicting pain (since it's good to give as well as receive, right?). Things like knives and paddles are easy to use; I've also recently learned how to do a more specialized play, like needles and cell popping. The next thing I'll seek out instruction for is flogging (provided I can get up the courage to ask the person I want to teach me), and then perhaps fire play. That's another thing that the community has given me - instruction and guidance that I would be able to find nowhere else. Not to mention, the sheer amount of love I have for so many people I have come to know is almost overwhelming at times. And to be quite honest, that's the only reason I came to my second party, and probably the reason I will remain in the community: it sounds cheesy, but it's love that makes it all worthwhile.

So for those of you on my friends list who were wondering, that's what I've been getting up to for the last several months, and will likely continue to get up to. I'm an open book about this, so if you have any questions, just ask away.