Apologies in advance. This is going to be a self-indulgent ramble.
Writing my last post got me thinking about my interests as a child. As I mentioned there, when I was very young I liked model villages and dioramas. I remember how much fun I had building shoebox sized miniature gardens for competitions in the local village fête. When I got older – maybe 10 or so – I was really into creating my own board games. I used to make the boards and pieces and spend ages coming up with complex rules and figuring how they should all work together. As a teenager I loved computers and writing my own videogames. I learnt Basic and 6502 assembly and spent hours creating self-contained worlds full of sprites I’d plotted across many sheets of graph paper.
In hindsight there’s a common element to all these interests – control. Well OK, they’re also all nerdy and solitary activities. But control is the bit that’s relevant to this blog. I was the God of the miniature environments I created. Board games might involve other players, but they all had to adopt a defined role and follow the rules I laid down. With a computer – particularly the 8 bit ones of that era – I controlled everything they did. The game world would look and sound just as I made it. They were the ultimate rule followers.
I guess it’s therefore not too surprising that I grew into an adult that has major kinks around control. I never really made the connection before, but that underlying desire to control or be controlled was clearly manifesting in my childhood interests as much as it does in my sexual ones today.
Bondage is a kink closely associated with control and was the first kinky thing I can remember fantasizing about. Even when I didn’t know what kink or bondage really was.
This artwork is (I believe) by Junji Ito, a Japanese manga artist.
Lovely art work! She does exude control over the whole situation, sitting on her bed, observing her bound toy.
And thanks for sharing your insight; it made me wonder if indeed a desire for control and to be controlled is what got me into bondage and self-bondage. My earliest memories are of me wanting to get tied-up, asking my cousins to do so, and ending up tying myself up most of the time. Not surprisingly, I also was into programming at a very young age (on an Apple IIe, hazily remembering now PEEKs and POKEs …), but ended up becoming something other than a computer programmer.
Glad you like the artwork!
Desire for bondage and for control seem very aligned from my perspective. The first is a powerful way to manifest the second. Although these things are never simple cause and effect of course :-).
-paltego