Another Book for the Kinky

BDSM people love books. For a lot of us, these books were our first windows into the weird wonderful world of domination and submission. Movies are nice but they lack the introspection that a book brings. Ultimately, every BDSM person feels a little freaky and we spend a lot of time wondering just how normal we are. Pictures, movies and even sex can excite us, but often it is the books that make us feel normal.

‘The Story of O’, Anne rice’s ‘Beauty’ books and nowadays, L. K. Hamilton’s endless tales of vampire domination appear in most kinky persons’ bedrooms. They’re gateway books for a lot of us. As we grow more mature we see some of the inherent flaws in those books but we still have a fondness for those delicious stories that made us both aroused and a little comforted. We are all kinky librarians, saving and treasuring books as they grow wrinkled and cracked.

Let me suggest another book for that secret library.

‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ was a book I read during a Victorian Novel phase and I was dreading reading it. I had little interest in a story about a man who accidentally turns into a monster. I based this knowledge on the movies, TV shows and musicals that have come out. Of course I was utterly wrong.

In the original book, Dr. Jekyll is an unhappy man. He wants to indulge in forbidden pleasures and yet he knows that his moral side will never allow him to really commit and enjoy himself. To cure this problem, he dabbles in chemicals with the goal of isolating his morality from his immorality. He succeeds and transforms into the fearless and selfish Hyde. Mr. Hyde enjoys himself and then changes back into Dr. Jekyll who remembers every detail. Not only remembers, he savors it.

That’s a little different from the movies, isn’t it?

The story of Jekyll and Hyde is not about good and evil, its about guilt over your own desires. Jekyll wants to indulge, enjoy and wallow in the pleasures that are never named in the book. He can’t do it, so he constructs Hyde, a fierce loathsome creature with no pity or empathy what so ever. What is key to me is that Jekyll remembers what happens when he is Hyde and enjoys those memories so much that he keeps changing back into him.

We never find out what these pleasures are. My personal guess is homosexuality but the beauty of the book is that you can’t prove one thing or another. Stevenson did this on purpose so we can plug in whatever vice we have.

For BDSM people though, it could easily be talking about Domination. Sometimes as a dominant, I have very selfish, greedy, cruel, ravenous, lusty impure thoughts about my subs that surprise and frighten me a little. It’s hard to love someone and deliberately hurt them even if you know it is what they want. I know that my urges come from myself and not some alter ego like Mr. Hyde, but there certainly would be a sort of freedom if I could blame those desires on some other persona. Like Jekyll, I sometimes look back on my BDSM experiences and think of them as happening to another person because I can’t imagine what drove me to do THAT to her.

I find comfort in ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ more so now that I am experienced in BDSM. I don’t see my Dom side as evil. In fact, I am a little cocky because unlike the cowardly Jekyll, I can embrace my Hyde and make it a part of my life. There are days I am not entirely comfortable with it, but when I think of the alternative, with unhappy Jekyll wringing his hands over the pleasures he wishes he was having, I am grateful that I am naturally more Hyde than Jekyll.

I think the last lesson we can learn from Jekyll and Hyde was the fact that Hyde had to be a secret. He existed off screen for most of the book, as the book refused to follow him into darkness. This creates an effect of isolating Hyde and turning everything he did into a dirty shame that can’t stand the light of day. I think bringing our vices into the light is the cure for Jekyll/Hyde Dom syndrome. The more we act on our Hyde impulses, and the more our loved ones accept and encourage it, the less the Jekyll in us needs to hide in shame.

So what is your personal Hyde like?