To clarify: I'm not challenging the validity and suitability of many common elements in BDSM culture for many, if not most, people. It just seems to...grate on me?

Some context: I seem to be a 'natural' dominant (that is to say the natural urge has always been there, without any particular experience or notable cause besides it just being me). And so i can' not approach BDSM in an organic and natural way. I can't really divorce dominance and submission from things like care, protection, sacrifice, mental connection, desire, beauty, dedication, and hopefully, love. For me, because of how it's such a part of me and how I find it so inseparable from such intimacy, dominating someone is really a type of vulnerability; opening that private and deep part of me to someone. I'm sure there's more but that's plenty of talking about myself.

What's wearing me out...

CATEGORIES: Because of that organic form of my own dom personality, I also can't overly categorise. BDSM is about that connection with the person and how those people's kinky personalities come together and interact is different in every case (just like in every human interaction). The general BDSM community tends to do a fair bit of categorisation and I just find it difficult to understand and difficult to interpret.

EXPECTATIONS: To make it harder, the community not only has categories but also certain expectations of those categories. I suspect these aren't purposeful because the community is very open and accepting, but it's absolutely there. There's a bunch of assumptions about what's right, what's normal for that category, what practices go with those categories. There's even expectations and assumptions about wellbeing which frankly aren't necessarily the only safe way, it's just assumed. And we've all seen the small portion of people that do a bunch of 'gate-keeping' on all these categories. People can say what they like but when I see those threads it just causes an internal sigh.

TERMINOLOGY: Again, I'm sure it's great and important for many but for me the extent and specificity of terminology in BDSM can be so tiresome! Going back, because I see BDSM as natural and organically intertwined with normal life and personality, the idea of needing entirely new words is hard to compute.

There are other bits and pieces but I suspect no one's made it this far and I truly don't want this to sound like complaining! Just an off the chest for me personally :) feel free to ask questions if you do make it this far.

Be well friends.