How did you get started in this lifestyle?

[Desperado]

This discussion took place in the chat room earlier today and thought it might be helpful to share our experiences and lessons learned.

My first exposure to this lifestyle came from a cheesy romance novel my girlfriend found on her mother's bookshelf when I was 19. The heroine in the book got kidnapped and was tied and held in a room somewhere. This piqued her interest and when she mentioned it to me, it did mine as well. I had similar thoughts and fantasies going back as far as I can remember being attracted to girls.

We experimented with some rope.. but frankly neither of us quite knew what to do after that, but, it lit a fire inside me that still to this day has not been quenched.

It wasn't till I was 22 or 23 and discovered the Internet in its early days, beyond the local bulletin boards. The early days of AOL and Prodigy and bdsm chat rooms and Q&A forums like this one. I learned that I wasn't the only one that had these thoughts and that there were words, labels and such for what I was and what I liked.

After that, I moved to Dallas and was very lucky to start working with a young woman who turned out to be submissive. She introduced me to her Mistress and I got to be friends with them and I learned quite a bit from her, but I also was fortunate to be introduced to some older men who had been in the lifestyle for quite a while and were willing to talk with me, show me techniques, and try to pass on some of the lessons they learned.

Over the years I have matured and grown and learned that just because something worked in the past, especially with a different girl, it does NOT mean it will work again. I have learned that patience, common sense, honest communication and going slow at first are keys to happy experiences. One of the biggest lessons I have learned is to NEVER assume. Always ask. If you as a dominant ask, it is the submissive's responsibility to answer openly and honestly. If the submissive does not do that, they have just assumed responsibility for things not going as planned at some point. If you, as a dominant do not ask, its on you.

Having said that, things still happen. Accidents happen, adrenaline happens, the rush of being in control of a sexy, beautiful woman happens, and the only way I can describe it is that the beast within takes over sometimes. Its up to you to remain in control of yourself enough to know what is going on, and judge how your submissive is handling whatever you are doing. Always, Always Always err on the side of caution and do NOT depend on a safe word. Most submissives, if they are sincere in their desire to serve, will go to great lengths to keep from using their safeword out of fear of disappointing their dominant. And, if she or he is in subspace, they may have no idea how their body is actually feeling or reacting, and are in no condition to judge. You have to judge for them and stop before something bad happens. Of course those topics like that could be written about in volumes and should have their own posts.

Hopefully others will add their thoughts and 2 cents worth and we'll have some useful information out there for those new to this lifestyle to think about and perhaps even make use of.

-D

[shyslut]

I met a guy on a sexy chat forum. He said he was sure I was submissive and for 3 weeks we chatted and I did research and research assignments. Then we had our 1st and 2nd play date. Then he disappeared forever. Even our first play date I was in subspace in first 5 minutes and crawling and begging. Super hard flogging and I was hooked!

[littlebitofabind]

When i was 15 i started reading Harry Potter fanfiction and came across a Remus/Sirius fic involving bondage (good lord i've never actually typed it out i was a weird kid lol) and i found it really interesting. Unfortunately, the guy i was dating at the time was a senior and popular and i couldn't figure out what he was doing with a nerd like me, and it turned out what he was doing was exploiting my desperate desire to escape the bullying and feel accepted. He would remind me pretty much constantly that i was lucky to be with him and took my virginity while he was apparently still seeing another girl. When he found out about my kinks he used them as blackmail against me and said that if i didn't submit to him he'd tell everybody what a freak i was. So for a year i was his unwilling slave until he left for college and left me broken and with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome. i didn't tell anybody about it until i was 18 and in college myself when i decided to try again. i played with a couple Doms and Dommes casually for a while, then got with my last Dom who i was with for a year. He's the one who taught me that submission and self-respect went hand-in-hand and i'll always be thankful to him for it. i still have a road ahead of me in that department, but i'm working on it with my current boyfriend/Dom-in-training :P

[Spankedprincess]

It all started when I was 19 and in a long term relationship. The exact point was when he had me on all fours fucking me and slapped my arse a few times and it made me wetter than I ever had been.

From there we continued to experiment and ended up learning about the lifestyle together and developed a lovely D/s relationship and well my love for the lifestyle has just continued to blossom.

[deigja]

I was 17 and watched a documentary on the art of bondage on tv... that got me very exited. while researching bondage on the net i found so much mor. in retrospective i had bdsmurges as far back as the age of 12.
my fascination with the lifestyle grew and i started chatting, reading and selfbondage.
by now i am married with someone who is happy to do as he likes with me in the bedroom but still indulge in a lot of erotic literature.. because my mind takes a big part in this...

[denuseri]

I got my first taste of bdsm when I was fresh from high school living on my own away from my family at a nursing school. A lifestyle Gorean couple I met in a bar; I was not old enough to be in, took me home with them one night. I learned a lot from them both but as he was in the military and getting stationed off overseas made my time with them too brief. They had no formal connection to the community at large having largely only started getting kinky several years into their marriage at her suggestion. Completely self taught. Their little Gorean library was to him at the time just a collection of men's adventure novels he alone enjoyed. She apparently read some of them in her free time and was thinking at first just to spice up their relationship. I don't know what you know about Goreans and such...their are some freaks out there I've heard of and even met some, but in real life they seem to be the exception not the rule, so don't believe the hype saying all Goreans are a bunch of misogynistic rapists etc. They were very loving, he was never mean, no one got hurt. Most of the others into the philosophy side of it who also get kinky were the same.

I had vanilla boyfriends and sometimes girlfriends before them and after...none of those relationships ever did more then end in total disaster.

Took me a long time to figure out why.

Once I knew something about kink I tried turning my partners on to bdsm but it just never seemed to take after we got going. In hindsight I realized years later I had always been sexually speaking submissive but Ive noticed that a lot among submissive s in the lifestyle. I was looking for the fetish community but didn't know how to find it, I knew it existed somehow at some level...back then it wasn't the simple click or two of a mouse to find it. I struck out the first few times I looked online but then I didn't even know what a munch was or any of the seemingly elaborate codes used by community at first...so I had little recourse and I looked then into the types of clubs that I met the couple in, goth/rave venues and the like. I dragged my current gamer boyfriend around with me like a male submissive (even though he was supposed to be topping me lol). I even started going to the porn shops there in Charleston (which btw are scary and nasty looking places) just to try and find anything to read about it in their dirty book section. My poor vanilla boyfriend must of had it bad for me to put up with that for sure. Odd he didn't complain when when I was sucking his dick later in the movie booth.

Eventually I learned what a "munch" was and I had found that information online.

They had one that met in a jazz playing coffee shop ,on a Tuesday night, I couldn't make it due to work to the start time and when I did get there finally, it was long over. I was disappointed to say the least. I got angry even, I thought maybe the information I had gotten was total BS or something, the coffee shop clerk had no idea what I was talking about when I asked him if the had a munch meeting there.

I went to start drowning my sorrows at a little bar just down the street. I met my first dominant there (though I didnt even know he was in the lifestyle till a while later). He was a much older man then anyone I had ever considered dating before. He swept me right out from under the guy I was with and subtly topped me from the get go. It was like he had submissive radar or something because I had never seen him before to my knowledge, he couldn't possibly know I was looking for what I had experienced before. At best he may have saw me go and leave the coffee shop idk. We didn't even talk about sex that night. I was more then surprised at how easy he charmed me into agreeing to meet him the next day for lunch. It's in some ways where my journey down the bdsm highway really began and all the more kinky for me since I was only 19 and he was in his fifties.

I found out later he attends the munch regularly looking for new girls and occasionally extends to them if they are found suitable (after a few getting to know you dates and introductions to the other people in their group that I must say got intoxicatingly, progressively kinkier) an invitation to become one of their submissive s. Sounds predatory I know and easy to abuse, they did not recruit dominants the same way at all, and it did to me seem like I was going down a dark scary rabbit hole at first. The journey since then has had its ups and downs to be sure. But at least its almost always been a kinky one.

[slaveboy 6]

When I was around 18 I used to read a lot of "FuckandSuck paper backs. I used to jack-off to them. But one day I read a story of a man who whipped a woman with a belt, before he fucked her. The woman was totally turned on and so was I. Then years later, after my divorce to my first wife, I read an ad in an underground paper about a dominant female, who was interested in submissive men. I wrote a letter to her P.O. box, hoping she'd answer. To my surprise she replied with a phone number, which She said She wanted me to call collect. I did. We set a date. I drove to her apartment on a Saturday afternoon. I admit I was nervous, when She ordered me to strip naked and get on my knees. She asked me why I was there. "To get dominated by You Mistress." She ordered to bend all the way over with my forehead on the floor, where she spanked me hard. I took it pretty well. She then had me lie on the floor on my back. She bent both ofmy legs back over my head and tied my ankles to something sturdy behind me. I was totally wide-open. She then whipped my cock, balls and ass. She then strapped on a dildo and fucked me in the ass. That hurt the worst, because I was a virgin. She released and we had great sex on her water bed. That was my first session, and one I'll never forget.

[cgeldof]

my first bf used to tie me up and i guess i'd do anything he wanted basically. he's like the only guy i listened to and i never exp anything like that afterward

so i always think about it now.

[Luha]

I started dating a man who is into bondage. He recognized some "tendencies" in me. The rest is history...

[BdsmLifer19]

To be honest I bet I could write a book on what goes thru my mind regarding the BDSM scene (nothing derogatory or insulting). Just how it all started to where it's evolved to now for me. When I was in my teens I was fascinated by women that were into the goth scene whIle at the same time I was also mind blown when I'd see a woman wearing high heel boots....started looking around the Internet and ended up serving a domina in my local area when I was about 19 or 20 years old. Since then...my interests have evolved and matured to the point where there's no looking back. I embrace the scene and have a big appreciation for it.