Age play can be healing and therapeutic for some people, but it is not the same as therapy.
Knowing people’s individual triggers helps you avoid pushing the wrong buttons in a scene; however, you cannot always prepare for what might come up. During age play, people can regress to a much younger age that can bring up intense primal or instinctual feelings. It can put both top and bottom in a very delicate head space, so you must keep that in mind. Even when you plan ahead, all scenes have the potential to go south. Be open to that. Accept it. Knowing this can allow you to be more receptive and as ready as you can be to react to a situation you did not plan on.
Age play can be a highly emotional and challenging journey for survivors and their partners, for those who love us and those who play with us. Age play can be healing and therapeutic for some people, but it is not the same as therapy; this is especially important to note for survivors of childhood incest, sexual abuse, or trauma. Age play, accompanied by therapy, the support of friends, and artistic outlets, has been extremely healing for me. This will not be the case for all survivors. We find what healing paths work best for us.
When you combine age play with incest play—scenarios like Daddy/girl, Mommy/boy, Sister/brother, Uncle/nephew—it can take your play to a whole new level. It can be based in nurturing, caregiving, letting go, emotional exploration, trust, tapping into your inner child, reliving, and more. Think about some of your core truths and you may discover some of your core fantasies. Is it to feel the undeniable love of a mother? The sexual taboo of incest? Mix in consensual coercion, fear and terror, rape and abuse fantasies, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a very intense scene. This kind of age play is not for everyone. It can be exciting yet explosive. Exploring taboo subjects can open up emotional floodgates. So it’s key to negotiate, renegotiate, and check in. Checking in directly after a scene can be enough for some, but others may need hourly check-ins, maybe a check-in days later. This type of play may bring to the surface sadness, anger, fear and hatred—in yourself and your partner. Navigating the root of the feeling and dealing with it appropriately can be a challenge, but it is an important part of understanding the responsibilities of playing on the edge. We have a responsibility to ourselves and those we play with. This is why honest, clear communication and negotiation is key.
One thing we can plan for is aftercare: what takes place after a session. It’s the attention you give one another emotionally and physically. Aftercare is for both tops and bottom. Like other BDSM activities, age play can drain us, especially emotionally. Aftercare is a wonderful way to be taken care of, revitalize, and come back to embodying you again. Aftercare looks different for many people. It can be minimal, or as detailed as the players want it to be. I know people who just want a cup of water and to be left alone for a while. Others need constant touch and affirmation. Still others want no verbal communication, just to be held tight. Whatever your aftercare needs, remember to discuss beforehand.
I’ve laid out some tools based on personal experience, conversations, and writings on the subject that I hope will help you and your partner(s) understand and navigate age role play. Experimenting with age play can be scary but it can also be extremely fulfilling. Sexual age play is vast, dirty, and desired by many. Take time to figure out what turns you on about it. Sit with it. Fantasize about it. Jerk off or touch yourself to the possibilities of it. Decide whether you want to take your desires from fantasy to reality. Communicate openly and as honestly as possible with your fuck buddies, lovers, play partners, or spouses. Play to your heart’s content. Listen to your inner voice and concoct all the sexual age play you desire.
CHAPTER 18
DIGGING IN THE DIRT: THE LURE OF TABOO ROLE PLAY
MOLLENA WILLIAMS
Author’s Note: I recommend that you read Chapter 11, Stop, Drop, and Role! Erotic Role Playing, before reading this essay. It will help provide context. Okay—let’s rock.
Naughty is nice. Bad is good. Evil is better. Violence is love and fantasy is a secret passageway into a reality gone deliciously, dangerously, erotically haywire.
You with me? Good. It only gets darker from here.
One of the aspects of role play that I love is taking responsibility for abdicating responsibility. How is this paradox possible? By enacting a scenario where you take or relinquish control, you inhabit a sexually charged world of endless possibility. By negotiating your scenario including your limits and boundaries, and mapping out expectations and outcomes, you create a matrix into which you can insert your dreams, fantasies, and darkest desires. This liberates the role players, giving them the freedom to explore some of humanity’s darkest impulses, and to explore them without the limiting trappings of guilt, apprehension, and fear. Sound intriguing? Want to jump right into that hot-and-heavy rape fantasy? Ease back there, my friend. There is a lot to dig up, uncover, and sift through before you jump into the deep end.
Uncovering the roots of your desires can truly assist in your explorations, especially if you are experiencing guilt around wanting to ravage—or be ravaged by—another human. It is not easy to get to the point of being comfortable even thinking about some of the darker fantasies that many people entertain in the recesses of their hearts. I know that, for me, it was a multistage process and remains an ongoing one.
One of the earliest sexual memories I have is the fantasy of being overpowered, ravaged, taken against my will, and forced to submit to a power I cannot resist. Every captured-princess tale whispered to me of secrets behind the gauzy veils and pointed hats. The creaking wire bookstands in the supermarket were packed with racks of romance novels. The covers of these pulp fictions depicted heaving-bosomed and wild-eyed women resisting, pushing, straining against broad-shouldered, thickly muscled men who smiled arrogantly, seemingly impervious to the willowy resistance of the heroine. One of my favorite Star Trek episodes, “Space Seed,” included a rather evocative scene in which the villain, Kahn Noonian Singh (played with smoldering sensuality by a young Ricardo Montalban), seduced, overpowered, and dominated a crewmember of the Enterprise into crawling, pleading, abject submission. I looked to those fantasies, told over and over in different forms and narratives, as confirming my desire to be overpowered, to be ravaged. Until reality hit me and I became convinced that my desires, my fantasies, were wrong. Very fucking wrong.
As a child, watching the miniseries Roots was a major event for me, and everyone I knew watched it. It was especially gripping, as a black kid, to see the story of people who looked like me, people with a similar ancestral history, unfolding in epic glory night after night. I was swept away in surges of emotion: pride at their bravery in the face of oppression, rage at the evils of enforced slavery, fear at the pain and suffering depicted, rather graphically, in the story. But the biggest conflict for me came up in the scene where a white man forcibly rapes a black female slave. This was not the sexy ravishment of those Harlequin Romance novels. This was not a whispered fairy tale, where allegory and wistful gasps and sighs gave only hints of secret lust. This was brutal violence, horrible and horrifying, and I couldn’t understand how something that looked so much like my fantasies left me sick and terrified. And fascinated.