Roles and Performances: The Fun In Finding Your D/s Persona

You’ve educated yourself on the pleasures, and possible perils, of BDSM play.

You’ve equipped yourself with a gloriously kinky assortment of toys. You’ve found the perfect place to play.

You’re found a consenting and enthusiastic playmate, one who’s also extremely well-versed in the pros and cons of what you’ve mutually agreed to do.

The stage is set, the toys are cleaned, the participants excited to begin. But before the first act begins, you find yourself facing a severe case of D/s stage-fright.

How, you ask yourself, can I use this gear, all this knowledge, a consenting submissive to create a cohesive, dynamic, creative, and even erotically powerful scene?

The answer could very well be trying on a new persona: a scene-self that’s one part theatrical performance and one part controlled manifestation of your most rooted, darkest pleasure-hungry Id.

Read: Making a Scene: How to Create the Hottest BDSM Encounters

Say Hello to Your New You

Let’s take a moment to get a little more in-depth on why assuming a different persona can add an extra-special something to your D/s play.

Top of the list is: creating a character can be an entertaining, and arousing, glue to help hold your scenes together. Instead of just going from one toy to another or each separate element of a domination session, you can use your persona to structure whatever happens, including juicing things up with some provocative language, mannerisms, and the like.

Next would be a parallel to this: A role can bring a level of creativity and even spontaneity to your play. If, for example, you’re mutually agreed to a bondage and light flogging scene, by adding a kinky tea party aesthetic—say with one of you being Alice and the other the Red Queen—you can not just set the stage, but make it a playfully erotic wonderland, where exciting things can happen at any time. As long as they’ve been negotiated beforehand, of course.

Read: BDSM 101 Tutorial - What Is BDSM?

Know Yourself—and Your Other Selves

As with anything BDSM-related, safety should be your first and foremost thought. In the case of forging a new dominant role for yourself, the most common concern is losing control: when this persona takes on a life of its own, sometimes to the point where physical and emotional limits may get tossed out the window.

Another crucial universality about kink is to take things slowly and carefully. In this spirit, you not only can get familiar and comfortable with your new self by easing yourself and your partner(s) into but can also help develop an awareness of when you might have let your leash on it slip.

A great way to do this is to take your persona out for a few initial spins in a controlled environment. Trying it on all on your lonesome—just yourself in your home or apartment—is a great way to start. Then, as you get more and more used to it, let it come out with a friend or partner—but not in a play situation.

Back to safety for a moment, I heartedly recommend a goal of a role that compliments your personality rather than overrides it. Again, the significant risk here is that who you think you should be, or want to be, gets in the way of staying in constant and non-obscured communication with those you play with.

If you find a new persona questioning things like negotiation, limits, safewords, or emotional and physical safety, then tell it to take a hike and develop one that does play well with others.