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By: Sindred

In our star-spangled land of democracy, all citizens are fancied to have equal rights under the law. This equality is even encouraged to extend to the realm of sex and love. Marriages are supposed to be 50/50, give and take. Sex is idealized as an erotic extension of the Golden Rule: do your partner as you would have them do you. BDSM seems to be a complete departure from this mindset, a whips-and-chains autocracy. In reality, BDSM scenes or relationships are just as much of a give-and-take as vanilla sex. Both people in a BDSM relationship are there to have their needs met.

Kinky folk are, perhaps, a bit more realistic than their vanilla counterparts. Americans are all free and equal...really? In a country that still hasn't passed the Equal Rights Amendment, that exploits immigrant workers, that wants to pass a symbolically hateful ban on something that isn't even legal (gay marriage)? A major factor in BDSM play is the exchange of power...and sometimes the biggest thrill is to insert a social or political taboo into the scene. Sometimes the imagery is subtle and unintentional: a femsub shrinkwrapped in black latex, her face covered by a hood, is suggestive of a woman in a burqa. Sometimes the point is to drag taboos kicking and screaming into the light of day: a maledom in a black leather trenchcoat and an SS armband.

Our men and women in uniform have pledged to fight for our freedoms...what better way to celebrate that than by putting on our own uniforms? Military fetish is extremely popular; the relationship between a wet-behind-the-ears recruit and a hardass boot-camp sergeant is one of the purest examples of erotic discipline and control. Even the hot-button issue of waterboarding has its BDSM counterpart in water-bondage porn: trussed-up girls in prison cells are blasted with hoses and dunked in tanks.

Military fetish can be controversial even within the BDSM community, because of the frequent appearance of Nazi imagery. Accessories such as SS armbands are used to convey the ultimate in cruelty and dominance. In fact, Nazis first appeared in pornography in the stalagim of the 1960s: illustrated porn comics produced in Israel that featured gorgeous and vicious female SS guards beating and sexually dominating their prisoners. Controversy is often avoided by adopting the general design of the Nazi uniform, while leaving off any offensive insignias.

When you join the military, you voluntarily relinquish some of the freedoms you enjoyed as a private citizen. If you're sent to jail, however, all of those freedoms are stripped away. This is why the prison cell is another popular feature of BDSM scenes. The butch cellmate bullies and sexually overpowers his/her new-fish roomie. The guard has his evil way with prisoners who are powerless to resist. In a BDSM scene, it is not your eventual freedom or release that is the gift...it is imprisonment itself.

This is the paradox that makes BDSM so appealing. Subs are set free by completely giving up control to another. When one is powerless, one has no responsibility. You are stripped bare, physically and mentally, and it is no wonder that subspace is nearly a place of near-meditative serenity. Everything is simplified into the pure sweetness of stimulus and response. That simplicity, that ultimate freedom of slavery, is one reason why there are fewer natural doms than there are switches and subs. Many kinksters feel most fulfilled when they can escape through submission. Doms get the thrill of the power trip of course, but with that power comes an awesome responsibility. A dom who won't switch is one for whom the responsibility doesn't lessen the pleasure of being the one in control.

From an anthropological standpoint, it could be argued that only in a society that is relatively free from oppression, could imprisonment, torture, and punishment be so fetishized. I disagree. These fetishes have existed since humans could weave rope and tan cowhide. But it is true that only in a free society can such fantasies be so openly expressed. After all, the ultimate expression of freedom is freedom of choice. America's got a long way to go yet, but I must admit I'm glad I live in a country where vibrating cock rings can be purchased at the corner drugstore, and a man in a leather trench is more likely to spawn titillation than fear.