Authorities

I have noticed a certain reluctance among people who declare their interest in anything kinky, for explaining or understanding the interest. I can understand that this has to do with a refusal to be regarded as deviant or, even worse, perverse. We know that kinky people are like any people; jealous, petty, evil, loving, nice, caring, cautious, intelligent and generally wonderful.

If you, like me, are blessed and cursed with an enquiring mind, you can't help asking the questions. Why? And how? What's behind it? And that is not confined to kink. Most things pose questions, make you wonder.

I thought I would share a thought that is very personal and maybe an answer to some of the whys of my imagination.

Tying people up, stripping off their clothes, and whipping them have a lot to do with power, the uneven distribution of power. This leads me to think of authorities. We have all been faced with people with power, teachers, parents, coaches, clerks and officials.

Our experiences of people with authority may be varied. Except my parents and a few others I have always been suspicious of authorities, scared of people with power, and especially if they have power over me.

I didn't grow up in a time when those people had the power to deal out the kind of punishments I so happily include in my fantasies. But I have always been aware of being quite powerless before some of those people.

In addition I have a history of disappointments in authorities, of teachers who taught me things I knew were wrong, and who wasn't adult enough to admit it, and the arbitrariness of some of them. I would have loved to have had a good teacher, one I could trust and whom I believed was right, who was able to teach me something of the world, about living in it.

The very thought that one of those people would have been given the power to punish me with, for example, a spanking, is terrifying. I could think of few things as humiliating and abhorrent. There is not even the slightest fascination in it, the idea is really terrible.

So, there is it, a person with a profound distrust for authorities, and a similarly overwhelming dislike for the idea that they should be given any power over her. And yet this person is obsessed with punishments and the unfairness of it all, the very difference in power between people.

Could it be that fantasies are, somehow, fuelled by the unfairness of childhood, the fear of humiliation and that sense of helplessness, and that one way of dealing with it, is to take control over them and approach them in an environment where they can do no harm, any more? To turn it into something good, something you enjoy?

Some people seem to have similar experiences but take another path, they want to be the ruler, the one who punishes and decides. It seems logical. I still struggle with the fact that I tend to go there on another path, let myself be humiliated and punished. I am still not sure why I so want it in my imagination.