“Are you the people who don’t have blood transfusions?” was the first thing most people asked if any of us mentioned our religion. We weren’t supposed to say “yes”, because we weren’t meant to allow our faith to be defined by what we didn’t do. We were supposed to emphasise the positives, such as the promise of eternal life on Earth.
But the inconvenient fact was that we weren’t allowed blood transfusions. Furthermore, we were known for not celebrating Christmas, Easter or birthdays, for not being allowed into school assemblies, and for knocking on people’s doors to evangelise to them at weekends.
These characteristics were easily spotted by outside observers. From inside, we knew that was only the beginning of the rules. Dressing modestly was important. I learned that masturbation was wrong many years before I found out what it actually was. Men were the heads of our households, and women weren’t allowed to pray out loud, address the congregation, or even handle the microphones we used at our meetings.
At nine years old, I knew that oral sex, gay sex and extramarital sex were all just as sinful as blood transfusions. My future stretched ahead of me, into eternity, hemmed in on all sides by rules. I dreaded an eternity of worshipping a God who’d never tire of being praised, but I didn’t know how to escape on my own.
Eternity was snatched away from me when I was 13, when my family left the Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs) and my new world spun with giddy freedoms. Skateboarding on Sunday mornings, my first pair of jeans, trying out swearing like my school friends. But with the freedom came uncertainty. If the JWs had been wrong, how could I trust anyone to tell me how to live? I sensed I should make my own mind up, but I’d had no practice; JWs weren’t offered any autonomy in decision-making.
When I read about the Hippocratic oath, I collected that rule, too. “Do no harm,” I thought. And: “If you make a difference to the world, let it be for good.” That one, I made up. I held on to these principles, and I grew up. I’d not expected to reach adulthood, given the JW promises of imminent Armageddon. I wondered – what was I capable of achieving? Could I find a job that would involve honesty, and making a positive difference to the world?
All this time, I had a secret. I’d gravitated towards games where somebody got tied up, or punished, or captured. At 16, I realised with horror that this was my emerging sexual identity, and thought I was alone in the world with my unnatural proclivities. Devastated by the idea that perhaps I might be harmful to society after all my hopes of doing good, I contemplated taking my own life, and tried to suppress my interests.
Then, nine years later at an art gallery, I stumbled upon evidence of a thriving BDSM community enjoying bondage, discipline, dominance and submission right under my nose. An artist asked me to pose for him and the following week I modelled for my first BDSM photoshoot. Twenty years later, I’m still a BDSM model; I found a way to express my sexuality truthfully through art instead of keeping it secret, and I never want to stop. I found a job that fulfils my need for honesty.
But what of “do no harm”? This career makes me an adult actor of sorts. My job is socially unacceptable to many, and creators in my field face discrimination from banks, PayPal, Airbnb, employers and educational establishments. Plenty of people see any kind of pornography as harmful to society, or at least without value. And as a submissive woman, the work I like to produce sometimes uncomfortably echoes the misogyny of past and present. In the age of #MeToo, producing images that represent male dominance could be mistaken for a sexist worldview.
But having grown up in a religion that stifled its members’ opportunities, especially those of women, I can no longer tolerate having my self-expression limited by others’ judgment. Representing my sexuality as it really is, regardless of other people’s reactions, is to me a feminist act. After all, the artists who were prepared to be brave enough, and honest enough, to represent their sexuality publicly through their work may well have saved my life.
Pornography gave me the self-acceptance I’d been unable to find elsewhere, least of all in religion. It also gave me a professional community and introduced me to my husband (a BDSM photographer). Now, I continue to produce BDSM-themed content, in the belief that the more evidence of sexual variety is available, the less isolated and guilty people like the teenager I once was will feel. I do a socially unacceptable job in the hopes of changing our ideas about what an acceptable lifestyle looks like.
I hope that people will stumble over my work the way I did when I visited the gallery, and that it will tell them they are not alone, that their desires are valid. If I make a difference to the world, I shall hope it is for good.
Ariel Anderssen is a BDSM model and author of Playing to Lose – How a Jehovah’s Witness Became a Submissive BDSM Model
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