consent and sexual experiences

trigger warning for discussion of BDSM

I am a member of the BDSM community. My current boyfriend is a masochist. He gets off sexually from me beating and scratching him. He also likes tying me to bedposts and screwing my brains out, and I love each and every minute of it. I've never really done this sort of thing before, even though there have been instances when I wanted to, for multiple reasons. One of them being my own hang ups about sex brought to me by years of christian guilt and thinking that sex and sexuality were dirty and wrong. I've gotten over that for the most part but my sticking to vanilla sex was a left over side effect of that and of consent issues. When your body has been violated it is very hard to get over that control to someone else, to just let go and be in that moment with someone else, but I've trusted my boyfriend enough to do that. We have a mutual respect with each other. We use safe words, A LOT. There are people in the feminist community who don't believe that BDSM can lead to feminist friendly relationships. I really really don't like that frame of mind. The thing is that you can be in a BDSM style relationship and it can be borderline abusive and it can be as far from egalitarian as they come. However, they can also be extremely respectful of each other.

The thing is that when you engage is any form of BDSM consent becomes paramount. You are dealing with situations where one or both of you are potentially in very dangerous situations and when one person says that they've had enough, or that they are not feeling up to it that day, it's not just your relationship and your partner's emotional health that could be at risk if you don't listen well enough, but their physical health could be at risk too. You learn very quickly what boundaries are and how important setting boundaries and respecting your partners boundaries are. These are the kinds of things that we talk about when we are talking about enthusiastic consentual sex. And that is dare I say it? a feminist model of a relationship.