Some people spend their spare time knitting, while others prefer more dangerous hobbies – abseiling, base jumping, exploring tiny dark caves that they might get stuck in – the kinds of activities that get their adrenaline racing. The same is true of kink. While many will be satisfied with a little light bondage and some occasional role play with a safe word, others like to dive deeper and kink things that others find far more scary. There aren’t many people I’d commission to write a guest blog about consensual gaslighting, but Jenby – who’s tackled things like surveillance, tongue-stapling and Total Power Exchange with extremely enthusiastic consent – is right up there. So! Today she’s here to talk about gaslighting as kink. And although I know it sounds like a cliché to tell you ‘don’t try this at home’, I’m going to say it anyway. As a general rule, the darker and more potentially harmful a kink is, the better you need to be at playing safely and communicating and all those important things. I would no more trust a stranger to write this post than I’d follow a stranger into a dark cave without safety rope and proof of competence. But Jenby’s written so much before from her eagerly submissive perspective that I rate her as an expert spelunker of kink’s darkest and twistiest caves, so if anyone can talk gaslighting as kink, it’s her.
Note that this piece does exactly what it says on the tin: discusses gaslighting as kink play. It also features ‘Daddy’ as an honorific – everyone in this story is over the age of 18.
Total re-scrawl – gaslighting as kink
This bank holiday weekend began like any other.
I opened my kitchen cupboard and fished out two boxes of cereal, one for me, one for my Daddy.
I make my Daddy’s breakfast every morning, then all things being equal I kneel for head scritches and a ‘good girl’, but on this occasion I was bemused to see a fresh box of coffee where I was quite sure there’d been none before. So certain was I, in fact, it was on my mental list of things that needed replenishing the next time we went shopping. And even though I didn’t immediately recognise the brand, I reasoned we must have bought it at the same time as the previous box, and I just hadn’t been paying attention. It had clearly been sitting at the back of the bombsite that was my food cupboard, and slowly working its way forward as things got used up.
Daddy will be pleased, I thought. Last she’d heard we’d run out. So I grabbed the box and skipped to the bedroom.
‘Guess what,’ I sang happily, ‘I just remembered we got more of the coffee you like!’
Daddy just stared at me, and smiled. It was a more muted reaction than I’d been expecting, so I was a tad wrong-footed and just a little bit unsettled.
‘You’re so cute,’ she said eventually, ‘I put that there yesterday.’
To my knowledge Daddy has never replaced something in my cupboard before, but that’s not the thing that struck me as strange about this interaction. It’s the fact that, rather than assuming that’s what had happened, my brain called into question my own recollection of events, and persuaded me that this unfamiliar brand of coffee which most definitely hadn’t been there a few hours before had, in fact, existed all along.
I blushed at the assuredness of my words, which seemed so foolish in retrospect:
‘I just remembered…!’
Not ‘I’d forgotten…’ or ‘I didn’t know…’ but ‘I just remembered,’ I just remembered something which never happened, because of the merest hint of a suggestion that my Dominant had placed there.
‘That’s really hot,’ she said, biting her lip and blushing a little herself.
Years ago, when we first got together, I gave my Daddy permission to gaslight me to her heart’s content. In a previous dynamic I’d had a girl ask me to do it to her, but so magnificently unconfident was I that I just didn’t, then claimed I did, which seemed like the most elegant way to give her what she wanted without having to do something with which I wasn’t entirely comfortable.
I still think it’s a solid play for anyone indulging in recreational gaslighting: tell someone you’re going to completely undermine their reality piece by piece, then watch them tie themselves in squirmy knots when they can’t detect any evidence of any such thing. Such subtlety.
But in this instance, that seems to be exactly what has happened. I haven’t been aware of Daddy doing anything until just now, and the only reason she came clean was because she found it too amusing to keep up the façade. What else has she done in the intervening years, of which I haven’t been even remotely cognisant?
I dread to think, and that dread makes me drip.
Why should this particular facet of mindplay be so intoxicating? Well, at its heart, it’s psychological bondage. Its effect is twofold: it binds you in place, unable to trust the evidence of your own senses, and it binds you to another, your D-type, the only one who seems to know with any certainty what’s going on from one moment to another. And the effect of this is also twofold: it fosters dependency, and it makes my girldick rock-hard just to think about, much less type.
My Daddy and I are in a total power exchange dynamic. We have enthusiastically consented to everything that entails, but obviously the massive caveat over this particular aspect of the relationship is that there are things being done to me I may never know about. If that ever becomes an unattractive prospect, I can withdraw that consent in a heartbeat, but for the foreseeable I am deliriously happy with the occasional, knee-trembling reminder that, as well as the play I can see, there’s a whole other world of control bubbling along just beneath the surface, of which I am entirely ignorant.
And, of course, you know what they say.
Ignorance is bliss.