Desire, pleasure, consent and BDSM
I am currently reading the Traité du fouet, the “Treatise on the Whip”, by François-Amédée Doppet. The title alone is enough to frame the question.
In the eyes of the world, the whip is an instrument of punishment, discipline, domination, even torture. And yet, little by little, it has also found its place in certain erotic imaginations. The object has not changed its function. What has shifted is the meaning we give it, and that is what makes all the difference.
This opens a much wider question: what makes a situation sexual?
The obvious answer looks to the body, as if sexuality were defined by a particular gesture or a particular part of our anatomy. But isn’t that reductive? Contact with the genitals can be strictly medical, while a situation with no nudity and no direct contact can become intensely erotic. We must look elsewhere.
Sexuality resembles a vast colour chart far more than a list of acts. A chart in which the body meets imagination, desire, representations, pleasure, our relationship to the other, and sometimes power and pain as well. In my practice, what interests me is no longer so much which gestures are sexual, but how a situation becomes sexual.
Meaning: when a situation becomes sexual
An act can carry several meanings. It is the context that gives it its full sense.
Kneeling before someone can be a religious gesture; in another setting, the very same position can become erotic. This shift in meaning also passes through our imagination. We are capable of eroticising a situation before it even happens. Anticipation, the scenario we build for ourselves, the meaning we attach to a way of being can be enough to transform how we perceive what is taking place.
This is probably where the notion of eroticisation takes precedence over that of the sexual act. We lend a sexual dimension to something that could belong to an entirely different register.
The sexual, then, does not lie solely in the action. It begins in the way that action is lived, interpreted and invested.
This first distinction allows us to go further: if meaning makes eroticisation possible, what drives us to seek it?
Sexual pleasure: what we are really looking for
Reducing sexual pleasure to orgasm would mean ignoring much of what makes sexuality desirable. What we seek is often far more abstract, more emotional: intensity, a sense of surrender, distance from everyday life, a new way of perceiving ourselves, or simply the chance to play with a version of ourselves we never express anywhere else.
This is also why sexual desires differ so much from one person to another. We do not all seek the same thing in sexuality, because we engage more than our bodies in it. We engage our history, our imagination and our relationship to the world. We bring who we are.
Pleasure then becomes a precious indication. It tells us less about some supposed sexual normality than about what produces desire in us.
But it does not yet tell us what we truly wish to do with that desire.
Consent and sexuality: from desire to will
Consent is not what makes a situation sexual. It comes into play when sexuality meets the freedom of another.
This is a fundamental nuance, because desire, arousal, pleasure and will can diverge. We can be drawn to an idea without wishing to act on it. We can cherish a fantasy precisely because it remains imaginary. We can also decide to explore something without knowing in advance whether it will bring us pleasure.
Consent therefore raises another question: do I choose to take part in this sexual experience?
This distinction also guards against a dangerous confusion between reaction and will. The body can react without that reaction expressing a choice. Felt pleasure never entitles the other to conclude that there is consent.
From there, sexuality is necessarily relational, with oneself or with others. But as soon as it involves someone else, my desire meets a will that is not my own.
This question becomes particularly important in a D/s relationship, where yielding part of one’s power does not mean giving up one’s capacity to choose. I explore this dimension more closely in my article on conscious submission, where consent remains central, even when a person chooses to surrender to a dynamic of power.
And it is precisely in this meeting of desire, freedom and choice that the question of power becomes interesting.
Power and sexuality: when desire meets the other
Power is often presented as something unhealthy when it is part of sexuality. Yet it is already present in many forms.
Seducing, arousing desire, choosing to be seen, taking the initiative, letting go, agreeing to be guided: each of these shifts, for a moment, the balance between two people.
The question, then, is not whether power exists, but what we do with it.
This is where the difference between desiring someone and disposing of someone becomes essential. Desire can be intense while leaving the other free. The problem arises when it treats that person as a slave to our own satisfaction, as if our arousal granted us a right over them.
This distinction also offers another way of looking at sexualisation. Finding someone attractive is not yet turning them into an object. Objectification occurs when the person disappears behind the sexual function we assign to them.
It is a nuance I also explore in my reflection on conscious domination: power can be desired, embraced, staged, without erasing the other as a subject.
And this question becomes especially compelling in a world where power is no longer merely implicit, but deliberately staged.
BDSM and consent: making visible what sexuality already holds
BDSM makes explicit what conventional sexuality sometimes leaves blurred.
Power becomes an acknowledged part of the experience. It can be shared, ceded, reclaimed, ritualised. This staging reveals something important: a dynamic of domination does not carry the same meaning when it is imposed as when it is chosen as a space of exploration.
This may be the most fertile paradox of BDSM. A person can decide to yield part of their control without giving up their freedom. On the contrary, the decision to enter this dynamic belongs to them.
This is also what structures my own practice of female domination. The power relationship exists only within a frame that is understood, chosen and accepted. Power is not merely exercised there; it is built together with the other.
BDSM thus shows that we can play with meanings that, taken out of their frame, would be something else entirely. It is not their appearance that defines the experience, but the way they have been transformed into a shared erotic language.
This transformation of meaning runs through many BDSM practices and fetishes. Bondage, for example, is not simply about being tied: what matters is also what immobilisation produces in the relationship, in the body and in the imagination.
BDSM acts almost like a chemical developer: it reveals the links between desire, power, imagination and limits that every sexuality contains, to varying degrees.
Sexuality: a playground, but not neutral ground
Which brings me back to where I began.
What interests me in sexuality is precisely this capacity to transform. An object can change meaning. A position of the body can become erotic. A relational dynamic can become a source of pleasure. A fantasy can remain imaginary or become a chosen experience.
This is what makes it such an extraordinarily vast playground.
But “playground” does not mean the absence of rules. On the contrary, the more possibilities there are, the more worthwhile it becomes to understand what we seek there, what we agree to share and what we prefer to leave to the imagination.
This is where “Oser sa sexualité”, daring to own one’s sexuality, takes on its full meaning for me.
Not always going further.
But understanding more.
Understanding what turns a situation into a sexual experience. What nourishes our pleasure. What we truly want to live. And how our desire can meet another’s without ever claiming to speak in their place.
Sexuality then becomes less a matter of practices than a way of giving meaning to what we desire.
And perhaps that is the ground truly worth exploring.
