For those who experience the world only on a scale of vanilla to vanilla, the bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism scene can seem over the top. But, as sex aficionado and teacher Kim Anami can tell you, broadening your erotic palate to embrace the full-bodied, nuanced flavors of BDSM will not only add spice to your love life, it can expand the limits of your libido event horizon, deepen trust in your intimate relationships, broaden your sexual self-awareness, help you better understand what makes your sex partners tick, and open yourself up for some of the most mind-blowing sex you’ve ever had.
For the uninitiated, according to WebMD, BDSM is “a term used to describe aspects of sex that involve dominance, submission, and control. The practice typically involves one partner taking on a more dominant role during sex, while the other is more submissive.
(Of course, you don’t have to be a cisgender woman or cisgender man to experiment with BDSM. Any consensual willing partners who want to take things to the next level, can learn more about the discipline and explore the process to see how it can improve their dynamic.)
“While these are the broader categories, there is no one way to practice BDSM — different types can include power play, role-playing, pain play, bondage, wax play, edging, sensory deprivation, or humiliation.”
Kim Anami on Embracing Classic Male/Female Archetypes via BDSM
“I think that when done consciously, BDSM is an excellent tool for couples to use in their intimate explorations,” says Kim Anami.
“At its essence and its heart, BDSM is an exploration of dominant and submissive energies. And those are very erotic, very charged, and very archetypal,” Anami explains. “If we look at the feminine and masculine archetypes, archetypal feminine energy is about surrender, opening, flow, letting go. Archetypal masculine is about taking charge, being assertive, getting things done in the world — and we have both those energies within us, but in BDSM, we get to play with those.” (In Asian culture, this sexual power dynamic is represented by yin and yang.)
Anami defines archetypal feminine energy — or the goddess archetype — as “softer, open, receptive,” embodying the spiritual notion of surrender, whereas in the masculine archetype — aka the warrior — “energy is more active, achievement-oriented, driven, takes charge, makes things happen.” While we all have these energies at play, Anami says that for the most part, “women inhabit feminine energy and men, masculine energy.
“The beauty of conscious BDSM play is that we get to reimmerse ourselves in those energies and those dynamics, and that makes for the hottest sexual attraction we have. I mean, in the concept of sexual polarity, which is masculine and feminine energy or a positive and a negative charge attract each other. Two positive charges repel and two negative charges repel, and so, when you have these very gender-neutralized couples, they’re not having [good] sex.”
Kim Anami maintains the societal movement away from traditional gender archetypes, rather than expanding sexual perceptions, has actually resulted in a negative trend with regard to sexual pleasure and fulfillment between men and women. “Really, I think in the modern day, men and women have been neutralized, and so men have been discouraged from really inhabiting their masculine energy and told that they’re really toxic and dangerous and bad,” she says. “And women have been discouraged from really inhabiting their feminine energy, as though it’s kind of useless in the world.”
According to Anami, denying or burying a deep understanding of this particular dynamic is limiting to both understanding and pleasure. Kim Anami holds that superior sex happens only when the most electric polarized, extreme feminine and extreme masculine energies are present. “That’s what leads to dynamic attraction. People who have sanitized all of those energies out of themselves, they might be good buddies and good partners, but there’s no way that they’re having good sex — or any sex at all.”
How the Fifty Shades Phenomenon Reveals What Couples Really Want
According to Kim Anami, the reason Fifty Shades of Grey and its follow-up books became international bestsellers that spawned hugely popular film adaptations is obvious. “On a primal level,” she posits, “women want their men stronger than them. They want a man who can be the protector, who can stand his ground, who exudes power and confidence, is dominant and can take the lead.” Conversely, in the archetypal male/female relationship, men desire women who are capable of going with the flow, opening themselves fully, and accepting true surrender.
Anami believes the massive number of women for whom the book tapped into a reservoir of longing, in which they found an erotic message that truly resonated with them, speaks for itself. She notes that untold scores of women who got off to Fifty Shades were subsequently begging their male partners to forcefully take charge of the sexual dynamic in their relationships. “[That] tells you exactly what’s been missing between couples for decades,” Anami affirms.
BDSM Role-Play: Rediscovering the Male/Female Pleasure Dynamic
BDSM offers a return to the primal energies that we, as animals, naturally inhabit. And that can be a huge turn-on. “BDSM gives us a chance to explore and play with these themes, to experiment, try them on, and bring dormant parts of us to the surface,” Anami explains.
Citing the growing acceptance of shadow work, a seminal modality based on the precepts originated by Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Anami asserts that by inviting our “shadow selves” out to play, we can shed light on parts of our sexual personalities that are no less real or meaningful for having been hidden.
“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries,” is a quote widely attributed to Jung. While fear might prevent us from exploring our darker fantasies and bringing our secret desires to the fore, liberating the suppressed elements of our psyches enables us to integrate them into a holistic truth and embrace the hidden gifts they bestow.
One of the ways couples can shed light on their inner desires is through BDSM role-play. Anami advises engaging in these mental sexercises with gusto. While role-play might seem challenging at first, Anami says the longer couples engage in the practice, the more reality-changing it can be in real life. Whatever part you assume, play it to the hilt. “Dive into being über-dominant or über-submissive, and let all of the things [you] dare not do in real, polite society, emerge.”
The best approach to take is to be playful, stay in the moment, and let it happen. “This is your arena and opportunity to let things and parts of you out that you generally keep caged up,” says Anami. “Be outrageous. Have fun with it. Let yourself go wild.”
