Quotes from Dossie Easton

The Holocaust, African slavery, the Spanish Inquisition, the rape of Nanking. These scenes are more than merely hot.

Good communication is based on identifying our feelings, expressing them, and getting validation that our partner hears and understands what we are saying, whether or not they agree. Emotions are not opinions, they are facts—truths about what people are experiencing.

We think that this thought does a nice job of expressing the tension that often happens in good S/M – the "oh-my-god-this-is-terrible-please-don't-stop" energy that we all know and love.

One of the wonderful things about building sexual friendships is that, while past relationships and smaller affairs may come and go over the years, each pairing has its own characteristic and unique intimacy.

the opportunity to meet our internalized abuser. We all have one: it's not if you discover your precious inner bully, it's when.

nipple tug-of-war," in which two people both put on nipple clamps with chains running from one person to the other and lean backwards so that both sets of tits get a nice steady pull, is a good example.

In any S/M exchange there is a sharing of power – the bottom lends his power to the top for the duration, the top adds power, and together they make a lot of voltage. The top gets to wield all this power, a form of extreme empowerment that is exciting, thrilling, hot, erotic, and, as we said before, very, very sexy.

If I truly believe in some other people's inferiority, is it okay for me to play this out in scene? We hope not. Ideally, the top is pretending to be an oppressor that she doesn't identify with.

Nurturing. Janet remembers some of her childhood fantasies in which she was doing really terrible things to very small people, so she could cradle them like dolls afterwards.

Bullying. In BDSM we get to act out from parts of ourselves that could not be described as nice: the bully, the villain, the inquisitor, the brute, the betrayer. Wicked, wicked, wicked. And popular. Check out mainstream movies, or fiction from best-sellers to classical mythology, for verification that everybody adores a really good villain. Those bad guys are big. Big enough to carry all the world's ills, and create all the pain and trouble a hungry bottom could want to suffer.

Many people view almost all relationships as interactions between victims and oppressors

Why would a person want to be beaten, humiliated, ordered around and otherwise inconvenienced so that you can feel big? Well, because bottoming is very, very sexy too. There is tremendous luxury in giving up responsibility and power to a top, in being small, possibly childlike, in having your behavior controlled, in getting nurtured while being subjected to all kinds of intense stimulations. Fear can be arousing…

Sex is for pleasure, a complete and worthwhile goal in and of itself. People have sex because it feels very good, and then they feel good about themselves. The worthiness of pleasure is one of the core values of ethical sluthood.

Other rewards of bottoming include getting lots of attention, as well as acting out fantasies of helplessness and other forbidden emotions (needy, pathetic, dependent, guilt-ridden) that, like their toppish counterparts, would cause lots of trouble in the real world.

and isn't embarrassment one of those hot forbidden emotions we love to play with?

We explained how we use S/M to explore our darkness, illuminate it with our clear awareness, and reclaim forbidden territory as psychological healing, a way of becoming whole.

For these reasons, and because we know that wanting to hurt, control or humiliate people is not OK, we may feel very ashamed or embarrassed about our fantasies. But once we overcome that embarrassment, and discover how many other people have similar feelings, our fantasy world becomes a hot and happy playground.

As our relationships blossom all over the rainbow of possibility, each one may inspire different feelings of love. When we learn to recognize and welcome love as we find it in our hearts and in all of its many and marvelous manifestations—sexual love, familial love, friendly love, passionate love, gentle love, overwhelming love, caretaking love, and millions of others—we discover a river of nourishment that can flow through our lives in a constantly replenishing stream.

We have all been afraid to ask, we have all failed to ask, we have all been irked with our lovers when they didn't read our minds and offer us the reassurance we crave, and we have all thought, "I shouldn't have to ask." Let's remember to honor the courage it takes to ask for support, to share vulnerable feelings. Let's pat ourselves on the back when we do the things that scare us, and then let's do them some more.

Many of us find that the more we play, the closer we want to come to the gray area between "enough" and "too much," between consent and nonconsent. These desires may grow so strong that we feel that we're craving genuinely nonconsensual play – that we really do want to kidnap a stranger or whip a slave or punish a child.

If you can't understand these paradoxes – the ways in which symbolic powerlessness can empower and symbolic cruelty can sensitize – please sit down and think them through carefully.

To truly know yourself is to live on a constant journey of self-exploration, to learn about yourself from reading, therapy, and, best of all, talking incessantly with others who are traveling on similar paths.

This hard work is well worth it because it is the way you become free to choose how you want to live and love, own your life, and become truly the author of your experience.

Knowing, loving, and respecting yourself is an absolute prerequisite to knowing, loving, and respecting someone else.