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

One thing we can plan for is aftercare: what takes place after a session. It’s the attention you give one another emotionally and physically. Aftercare is for both tops and bottom. Like other BDSM activities, age play can drain us, especially emotionally. Aftercare is a wonderful way to be taken care of, revitalize, and come back to embodying you again. Aftercare looks different for many people. It can be minimal, or as detailed as the players want it to be. I know people who just want a cup of water and to be left alone for a while. Others need constant touch and affirmation. Still others want no verbal communication, just to be held tight. Whatever your aftercare needs, remember to discuss beforehand.

I’ve laid out some tools based on personal experience, conversations, and writings on the subject that I hope will help you and your partner(s) understand and navigate age role play. Experimenting with age play can be scary but it can also be extremely fulfilling. Sexual age play is vast, dirty, and desired by many. Take time to figure out what turns you on about it. Sit with it. Fantasize about it. Jerk off or touch yourself to the possibilities of it. Decide whether you want to take your desires from fantasy to reality. Communicate openly and as honestly as possible with your fuck buddies, lovers, play partners, or spouses. Play to your heart’s content. Listen to your inner voice and concoct all the sexual age play you desire.

Author’s Note: I recommend that you read Chapter 11, Stop, Drop, and Role! Erotic Role Playing, before reading this essay. It will help provide context. Okay—let’s rock.

Naughty is nice. Bad is good. Evil is better. Violence is love and fantasy is a secret passageway into a reality gone deliciously, dangerously, erotically haywire.

You with me? Good. It only gets darker from here.

One of the aspects of role play that I love is taking responsibility for abdicating responsibility. How is this paradox possible? By enacting a scenario where you take or relinquish control, you inhabit a sexually charged world of endless possibility. By negotiating your scenario including your limits and boundaries, and mapping out expectations and outcomes, you create a matrix into which you can insert your dreams, fantasies, and darkest desires. This liberates the role players, giving them the freedom to explore some of humanity’s darkest impulses, and to explore them without the limiting trappings of guilt, apprehension, and fear. Sound intriguing? Want to jump right into that hot-and-heavy rape fantasy? Ease back there, my friend. There is a lot to dig up, uncover, and sift through before you jump into the deep end.

Uncovering the roots of your desires can truly assist in your explorations, especially if you are experiencing guilt around wanting to ravage—or be ravaged by—another human. It is not easy to get to the point of being comfortable even thinking about some of the darker fantasies that many people entertain in the recesses of their hearts. I know that, for me, it was a multistage process and remains an ongoing one.

One of the earliest sexual memories I have is the fantasy of being overpowered, ravaged, taken against my will, and forced to submit to a power I cannot resist. Every captured-princess tale whispered to me of secrets behind the gauzy veils and pointed hats. The creaking wire bookstands in the supermarket were packed with racks of romance novels. The covers of these pulp fictions depicted heaving-bosomed and wild-eyed women resisting, pushing, straining against broad-shouldered, thickly muscled men who smiled arrogantly, seemingly impervious to the willowy resistance of the heroine. One of my favorite Star Trek episodes, “Space Seed,” included a rather evocative scene in which the villain, Kahn Noonian Singh (played with smoldering sensuality by a young Ricardo Montalban), seduced, overpowered, and dominated a crewmember of the Enterprise into crawling, pleading, abject submission. I looked to those fantasies, told over and over in different forms and narratives, as confirming my desire to be overpowered, to be ravaged. Until reality hit me and I became convinced that my desires, my fantasies, were wrong. Very fucking wrong.

As a child, watching the miniseries Roots was a major event for me, and everyone I knew watched it. It was especially gripping, as a black kid, to see the story of people who looked like me, people with a similar ancestral history, unfolding in epic glory night after night. I was swept away in surges of emotion: pride at their bravery in the face of oppression, rage at the evils of enforced slavery, fear at the pain and suffering depicted, rather graphically, in the story. But the biggest conflict for me came up in the scene where a white man forcibly rapes a black female slave. This was not the sexy ravishment of those Harlequin Romance novels. This was not a whispered fairy tale, where allegory and wistful gasps and sighs gave only hints of secret lust. This was brutal violence, horrible and horrifying, and I couldn’t understand how something that looked so much like my fantasies left me sick and terrified. And fascinated.

Unable to make sense of this dichotomy, I internalized the idea that there was something profoundly wrong with me, that I carried a secret I could never, ever share. I knew that there had to be a difference between the fantasies I had and the reality depicted in this scene of brutal violence, but—they looked the same. What was the difference?

The deeper and darker a secret feels, the more likely it’s a common one. When I became old enough to take control of my own fantasies and let go of my initial fear of being “sick” for having these thoughts, I discovered that not only was I not alone, but these fantasies were common. My first boyfriend and I played with resistance in our sex: “You want it, I got it, I ain’t givin’ it to ya without a fight!” Sometimes he would let me overpower him, and I would exert my own power, with much delight. And sometimes I would find myself overpowered, taken, and ravaged to my heart’s content. This was still not something I felt I could share with anyone but him, but it was a delicious secret that we shared and we thoroughly enjoyed its transgressive energy.

These early explorations might never have blossomed into a deeper, darker journey save for a brief incandescent affair I had in my mid-twenties. Previously, any rough sex I’d had was playful, contextualized, and something both parties had to agree to for any play to begin.

Then I encountered someone who did not ask, did not negotiate, took what he wanted with no preamble. And I found that…irresistible.

It was a revelation to have an encounter with a man who was effortlessly dominant, sexually aggressive, and able to read me so well that even my stunned responses and token resistance did not slow his roll. Previously, any sexual aggression I’d absorbed had taken place after explicit communication. This was not so clear. He pushed, I acquiesced. He pushed harder, I retreated. He demanded, I crumbled. He took what he wanted, I gave it up with a delicate blend of relief, fear, and confused arousal. Here was exactly what I had secretly craved: someone who knew, just knew, my deep, dark secret who took one look at me and reached inside to that dark place and exploited it for his own pleasure. And ultimately for mine.

Fantasizing about acts that are manifestations of nonconsensual encounters is one thing. Deciding to consciously explore them is another.

As I unpacked this experience and started sharing it with trusted friends, no one chastised me for my fantasy. Friends nodded, a gleam in their eyes, asked for details, wanted to know what happened next. And next. I realized I wasn’t on the fringe. Not by a long shot. And I wanted more.