BDSM and Eating disorders
I once wrote a grad school application essay that included a whole bit about how I used BDSM as a tool to recover from an eating disorder.
Was I completely sober when I wrote that essay? Haha nooooo. But did I get into the grad school program? Umm yes.
And I think it makes for an interesting space to discuss the ways that sexuality and body image have intersected for me over the years.
So let me back up a bit. If you have read parts of my website or spent too much time on my socials, you may have noticed the brief places where I mention that for a large portion of my teens and early twenties I struggled with an eating disorder, and part of my working through it and coming out the other side of it was a practice in taking photos of myself. I spent much of my life starving myself to be a better runner, to have a thinner waist, to look like a Victoria secret model (before they rebranded y’all). But I think more than anything, because I was afraid to grow up.
There is a common refrain in the eating disorder community when talking about young girls getting eating disorders. It goes something like “Young girls often get eating disorders because they don’t want their bodies to changes into women’s bodies.” To which I respond, no shit. If you’re a young girl and you look at what it means to be a woman today, what do you see? Impossible beauty standards, a removal of bodily autonomy, a society that says our worth is based on our looks and the ability to reproduce. And once we have the body of a woman, we are expected to protect it from being assaulted by shitty men. So no shit as a young girl we don’t want to become woman. And it a desperate attempt to control something in a society that we feel like we have so little control over, a large portion of young girls develop eating disorders. Of course this is a simplified explanation for a very complex and personal mental health issue, but I think it’s a part that is worth thinking about and worth discussing.
So, something that started as an attempt to not grow up, to keep myself innocent, to desperately hold onto childhood, became a twelve year struggle with the little voices in my head. If you have ever had an eating disorder, you know these voices all too well. And I am sending you all the hugs and strength that I can to help you battle those voices. For me, these voices left me very detached from my body. When you spend all of your growing up years fighting your body, ignoring body cues, only to decide that you’re fucking done with it at 26, you have a lot of learning to do. And it isn’t even relearning. It’s starting completely from scratch. Because all of those things that I was supposed to learn as a teenager and young adult, I simply never learned. I never learned to how to listen to my body. To listen to hunger cues, to listen when it was tired, to listen was it wanted to experience pleasure, to listen when it wanted a milkshake and not another 10 mile run, to listen when it wanted to bask in a lovers touch. And I very much doubt that I am alone in this experience. Society has taught us that our bodies are not to be trusted. So I taught myself to distract myself from bodily needs. Whether that be to eat food, to take a nap, or to enjoy sex. And now I had the exhausting task of unlearning that coping mechanism. I had to stop having control. I had to learn to give my body the space to simply experience things without me always controlling them. Without me trying to distract myself from those things.
So in comes BDSM. Eating disorders, and other mental health issues, often convince us that we are not worthy of experiencing pleasure, that our bodies are not good enough. And being submissive is all about giving up control. Embracing being submissive as a part of my sexuality meant feeling worthy of receiving pleasure. In the depths of an eating disorder there is no space to trust your body or trust the people around you. In BDSM, trust is what makes the experience possible and beautiful. If eating disorders are all about control, submission is all about allowing yourself to to give it up. And if I wasn’t quite to the point of giving up control to myself, this space allowed me to give up control to someone else. It gave me a controlled environment with someone who I trusted deeply to give up small pieces of control. In a way it was a baby step to being able to trust my body again. And it was a way of learning that I was deserving of pleasure and how to experience it. I would say ‘again’ but honestly it was for the first time.
We too narrowly think about mental health issues. We too narrowly think about how they effect people and we too narrowly think about how to treat them. Am I a certified therapist? NO! Please don’t take this as professional advice. But I do think that we owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to get curious about our bodies and our sexualities. To think about creative ways that we can challenge what we think we know about our bodies and pleasure. Maybe that’s trying something a little spicy in the bedroom. Or maybe that’s taking photos of the parts of you that you don’t like. Or maybe its simply learning to sit in your body and breath into it. To relish the way it feels to live in your body. Because in the end, your body is your home, and deriving pleasure from life is an inherit right.
