Tristan Taormino - The Ultimate Guide to Kink - BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge

Rough sex is not one person deciding desires and limits. Rough sex is not one person accepting whatever is done to them or when it stops. Rough sex is not polite. Rough sex is not abuse. Rough sex is not payback or punishment.

Rough sex is consent and desire.

Rough sex treads on taboos, giving them a wink and the finger.

Rough sex is the clear permission to take and give power.

Rough sex doesn’t care about what gender you are, how you look, who you fuck, or who others say you’re supposed to be.

Rough sex is release, dominance, resistance, objectification, humiliation, imagination, role play, giving in, giving over.

Rough sex is connected, laughing, loving, silly, growling, playful.

Rough sex is awareness, calculating, tender, self-confident, respectful.

Rough sex is primal, raw, spiritual, animalistic, unruly, breathless, ruthless, famished, predatory, ecstatic.

Rough sex is unfolding and claiming your desire.

Rough sex is using your hands, genitals, mouth, heart, toys, and brain.

Rough sex is passion and ache.

In this chapter, we will explore how to find and express your own desire, push through fears, communicate, negotiate, and define your physical and emotional limits and release. Plus, I’ll let you in on a compelling assortment of techniques, ideas, and safety tips so you can get busy expressing your brutal affection.

There are lots of reasons why people want to have fierce, power-imbued, consensual sex. Say you lead a complicated life that requires you to make endless decisions and keep control of your home, work, or school. The opportunity for someone who respects you, likes you, or loves you to come in and “relieve you” of your power by running the show for a few hours is liberating. Maybe you’ve always been a scrappy kid—wrestling with your sisters and brothers and the kids at school. To feel the force from someone aching to be pounded into by you, or they into you, feels like being put back into your flesh in a most exquisite way. Perhaps, for you, gentle is only part of your story. Expressing physically the power, passion, and heat you carry is what links you to your lover and connects you both in a spiritual, emotional way that tenderness doesn’t always reach. Maybe it’s more primal: you like to slap people while fucking them with all your strength. You get rock hard and slippery wet fantasizing about being tied spread-eagled to the kitchen table, gagged and blindfolded. Like other kinds of BDSM, rough sex releases endorphins—chemicals from the brain which block pain and create feelings of euphoria; many people thrill at the rush and high they feel from intense physical sensations.

Something shifts in me. Something shuts off—some internal voice is silenced. I don’t see my stretch marks, or the dirty clothes on the floor. No, I’m aware of something shoving the critics out of the way, displacing them. To think this is only about body parts is a mistake. It’s like my brain gets quieted by the roar of my hunger, ache, need. I take what I want knowing she wants me to take her again and again. I become so tall and strong—like a mother pushing a car off a baby stuck in a stroller. It is absolutely a spiritual undertaking. Not like god but yes, like god. Tapping into an essence that only comes when you let go—when you are relieved of your life in its everyday trappings and wrappings.

Mainstream society delivers a constant barrage of restrictive, prescriptive, and often conflicting messages. Although ads and movies are filled with images of rough sex, it is still considered deviant behavior. We’re taught confusing lessons like Have, desire, and love one partner forever; Make yourself sexy to your man but don’t be a slut; Desire what everyone else does; Strike out and be an individual—but don’t deviate too far from what is acceptable.

None of these precepts translate well to the bedroom or to creating an arsenal of fantasies. Even the powerful, long sought after achievements of feminist equality that must be intrinsic in a society committed to equality can sometimes wreak havoc in our sex lives. When you first get together with someone, the unknown newness of the other creates an erotic tension that is the cornerstone of sexual desire. Over time the ease, equality, and comfort we strive for in our intimate relationships can be the very undoing to this necessary positive tension. Add roughing up or being roughed up by this person you love and with whom you derive comfort, and it’s easy to feel confused.

Rough sex demands respect and equal voice—even if that’s not how it looks when you’re in it. Fantasizing or craving to be “raped” by your lover does not make you a sick person. You don’t need to be cured of anything. You might need therapy for other reasons, but getting off on someone calling you “a filthy set of holes” doesn’t necessarily signify deep, unresolved psychological issues. On the other hand, being belittled or denied the things you need and want at the hands of your lover is not foreplay—it’s abuse . Being violent with someone who has said no in any form is abuse. Actual rape is an invasion and a crime.

The biggest challenge in the search to discover and name your desire is keeping an open mind. Do not judge yourself or think that what you want is perverted or wrong; silence the voice in your head that tells you you’re alone in your desire, or that your lover (or potential lover) will reject you. Don’t apologize for your desire. And don’t confuse fantasy with reality. As long as your fantasy of seducing the newspaper boy is acted out with another consenting adult, you’re lucky to be in touch with your desire. And no, you’re not messed up.

For the past decade I’ve taught and worked with thousands of people across North America who occupy radically different places in the world: in their experiences, in their proclivities and repulsions, in how they look, who they like to be sexual with, and how they get off. (Long ago, when I learned that one of my then new kinky friends worked as a flight attendant, my world shifted on its axis. Now every time I fly I assume there is a raucous lover serving me my peanuts.) But regardless of class, level of education, gender, and orientation, one question always comes up: How do I figure out what I want?

Start with what you already know you like: being pinned down while being fucked, say, or squeezing your balls to the point of pain when you come. Let your mind wander. In a fantasy, what might come before and after that? Do not edit or censor yourself. Write it down.

Go to your local sex toy store in person or online and peruse book and DVD titles that you find intriguing. Remember, there is an inexhaustible flow of bravado and misrepresentation online and in porn. Get ideas, be turned on or horrified—just don’t think you are supposed to be that bendable, invincible, or stretch that wide! Check out the resource guide at the back of this book to find a plethora of smart, reliable websites and educators filled with intelligent, responsible, sexy ideas and information.

Do any of your friends talk about or allude to being into rough stuff (whatever that means to them)? There are far more “naughty” people out there than you might imagine. When you find chat rooms and like-minded people, don’t only lurk—engage, ask questions, answer queries, challenge, listen. If you are trying to suss this out in tandem with your partner, the process is similar: each of you discovering and revealing what makes you squirm is half the fun. Share links and images (I’m a fan of “I want this” images sent via text or email, or left in the medicine cabinet). Read erotica to each other, or using different-colored ink, take turns underlining passages in a shared book. This idea works because you don’t have to say out loud what might feel too embarrassing at first. Ask your partner to write a list of turn-ons—from the benign to the hard-core. You can compare notes or just certain parts if revealing the whole list might be too scary.