The Power of Self-Acceptance: Embracing My True Identity After a Life of Suppression

“What is masturbation?” I asked my mother. I was 8 years old, sitting in the back of our car, on the way out for our regular Saturday morning session of knocking on people’s doors to tell them about Jehovah, our god. I’d been leafing through the most recent edition of The Watchtower magazine, published by the Jehovah’s Witness organisation, and the ‘Young People Ask’ column was entitled ‘How To Avoid Masturbation’.

My mother looked pained. “I can’t get into that today”. I wondered how I was going to avoid masturbation, without knowing what it was.

This was one of the problems with being a Jehovah’s Witness child. We were kept with the adults during services, rather than being sent out to Sunday School. Consequently, when very adult subjects were addressed (crucifixion, adultery, torture of christians in China) we were exposed to all of it, and left to work out what it meant for ourselves. I knew oral sex was wrong, well before I found out what oral sex was, and I knew lesbianism was wrong too, though I’d received the impression that it meant working for the CND, rather than being anything to do with sex.

By the age of 16, I was firmly indoctrinated.  Acceptable sex was married, heterosexual, holy and conventional.  I didn’t think much about it — it sounded rather dull, and I had much better things to consider. Whether my gymnastics coach might make me stay behind after class and whip me with his belt, for example. Whether I should join the army in hopes of being shouted at by a cruel sergeant major. It wasn’t until the newspapers broke a story about a politician found dead, the victim of an autoerotic asphyxiation episode gone wrong, that I discovered there was a sexual orientation known as ‘sadomasochism’, and that if you were a sadomasochist, everyone would laugh at you all over the press, even if you were dead.  I was glad I’d never told anyone about my gym coach fantasy. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who didn’t accept gay people, would certainly not accept a sadomasochist, and neither would wider society. I’d be a sinner, and a joke.

In any case, even if I’d had the courage to tell a prospective partner about my fantasies, what sort of man would welcome them? Not a good one, I was sure. It felt safer to pretend not to be submissive, so that’s what I did. I did such a good job of this, that I attracted a procession of men who seemed to have the exact same deferential instincts that I was trying to conceal. Being attracted to authority myself, I thought that a display of dominance would attract men. It did. I hated it. I wore my new feminism, learned in college, as a disguise. 

At 25, during my first week as a professional model, I was invited to an exhibition.  I didn’t know it until I arrived, but the theme was BDSM.  Paintings, photographs and sculptures, all depicting the activities that played on the endless reel inside my mind. The artists who’d made the work were there, and some invited me to model for them.

My first experiences of actually doing the activities I’d longed for, was at photoshoots. I discovered that being tied up was everything I’d hoped for. Being introduced to pain felt like coming home. Whips, chains, and ropes stopped being my secret words and became my working props.  It wasn’t exactly real, but it was closer than I’d ever expected to get, and spending time with my new peers, who didn’t think of their proclivities as a sin, or a joke, began to change my view of what sort of sex was acceptable. I was creating pornography, and it felt like healing myself.  I started to hope for a romantic relationship within which I didn’t lie about my tastes.

Being brought up to be instinctively judgemental of my own sexual desires along with everyone else’s had made me paranoid.  I wondered if the sort of man who’d be attracted to the real, submissive, me, would of necessity be monstrous. Exposure to my colleagues gave me hope that perhaps he wouldn’t.

Just as sex without consent is rape, BDSM without consent is just violence. And of course, I found men who knew the difference. Decent men who treated women as equals, except in the bedroom, for pre-negotiated, ritualised inequality. I married one of them, and what we did in the bedroom didn’t feel like a sin, because it wasn’t a sin. And it didn’t feel like a joke. It felt like all the freedom the Jehovah’s Witnesses had wanted to ensure we never felt, even in our own bedrooms, with our own partners.

I never expected pornography to teach me anything good, but working in a field where almost any  act’s acceptable as long as consent exists between all participants, taught me that sexual shame is not inevitable, even after a childhood spent in a cult. Our desires, whatever they may be, are legitimate, and best when shared.

—

Ariel Anderssen is one of the most recognized fetish models in the UK. She is a multiple award-winning British BDSM model with a lifetime’s interest in submission and masochism. Playing to Lose is her first book.

The daughter of a nuclear physicist, Ariel was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness by her devoutly religious mother, and to a lesser extent by her father, who was busy with the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the wake of the 1986 disaster. 

Ariel has a reputation for honesty and frankness about her sexual identity, career and personal life and focuses on creating BDSM-themed work that shows other people they are not alone. She has been featured in The Guardian, Daily Mail and HuffPost. Ariel lives in Wales with her husband. 

CONNECT WITH ARIEL ONLINE
Official Website: ArielAnderssenAuthor.com
YouTube: @ArielsTwilightYears
X / Twitter:  @ArielAnderssen

 

PLAYING TO LOSE

In this bold and intimate memoir Ariel Anderssen charts her journey from a strict religious upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness to her current position as one of the most widely recognised BDSM performers in the world. Her route between the two includes a period as a wretchedly miserable, teenage political activist, a phase touring with a Christian theatre group, and accidentally discovering a talent for posing for art nude photography. This surprising and unconventional career path led her to a life-altering introduction to BDSM-themed erotic artwork and a whole world she never imagined existing.

This is a book about BDSM, and about sexuality, but most of all it is about one woman’s struggle for self-acceptance and the rewards that come from confronting who you are with honesty and compassion.

TRIGGER WARNING: this book contains descriptions of sexual violence that some readers may find upsetting

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers