Content note: This essay talks about knife play (including surface-level non-bleeding cuts on the skin) and fear play.
This morning I woke up with shallow red marks criss-crossing over portions of my skin. They congregate on my arms, my thighs, my chest. They were given to me last night by someone I love, wielding a massive, heavy knife.
My interest in knife play phased into existence about 2 years ago. Maybe I’d been watching too much American Horror Story, but I’d begun to eroticize wild-eyed men wielding weapons and glamorous women who could cut you in two. The therapist I saw when I was in university – who I’m no longer seeing – would have a field day with this information, because she helped me work through recurrent nightmare-visions that I was being stalked by armed men in my own home. Prevailing anxieties crept into my mind from all angles at that time and one of their manifestations was this unfounded (?) fear of steeled invaders. For weeks-long stretches, I slept on my family’s living room couch instead of in my own bed, longing to feel centered in safety, convinced somehow that the middle of the house was more secure than its edges. I kept the light on and stopped watching horror movies and cuddled my cat close to my chest. With these measures (and therapy) to help me, I eventually set those petrifying visions aside. So it was odd when they came roaring back years later as – of all things – sexual fantasies.
Prior to last night, my only forays into knife play happened a year and a half ago with a fear aficionado in Long Island – a friend and then-beau who knew what he was doing when he traced an intentionally dull blade down the length of my limbs or pressed it precariously close to my cunt. But that trip was made specifically with knife play in mind; we barely knew each other before he brandished a butcher’s cleaver at me in his basement. I wondered how knife play would be different if and when I ever tried it with someone more known to me, someone confirmed not-scary who could nonetheless slip into scariness like drag.
So last night – following many negotiation conversations and a shared viewing of the Kink Academy series on knife play – my partner of nearly two years took me home after a night out, sat me on their couch, went to the kitchen, and returned holding an arrestingly large knife. My heart – so the cliché goes – nearly stopped. As they traced the blade teasingly along my thighs, I noticed I’d had just enough to drink that I could suspend my disbelief a little, and imagine that this person I loved had actually appeared out of the blue holding a weapon for no reason – no prior negotiation, no sexual motive, just: bam, here I am, with something very sharp. A creepy feeling tingled through my body, glints and hints of what I would actually feel if that happened: surprise, uneasiness, adrenaline, a trembling impulse to try to escape. It had been a long time since I’d done any fear play and I remembered, all at once, why I like it.
It might seem nonsensical to intentionally pursue terror when you live with an anxiety disorder as I do, like electing to eat pizza on the one night of the week you don’t have to work at a pizzeria. But, like so many other phenomena in kink, the reason a fearful person might be drawn to fear play is that it can feel powerful to play deliberately and consensually with something that normally only happens to you pointlessly or nonconsensually. Fear in its more normal habitats for me – first dates, new social groups, public speaking – isn’t fun, isn’t comfortable, isn’t sexy. My beloved partner dragging a knife along my forearm may not be comfortable, may not immediately register as fun or sexy, but it is chosen, unlike almost every other fear I experience. I know, ultimately, that I am safe. All illusions to the contrary are just a game of pretend, allowing me to practice walking the razor-sharp tightrope of terror so I can do it better when it comes up in other contexts.
I’ve written before about how roleplay lets us see sides of our partner other than what we normally witness – more charming and flirtatious sides, more authoritative and confident sides, or practically anything else we desire. Fear play can do that too; I reflected on this as my normally warm and gregarious partner coolly looked into my eyes with knife in hand, as though sizing me up and counting how many cuts would be called for. Relationship therapist Esther Perel often counsels couples that “psychological distance” is the key to maintaining long-term desire for each other; she says feeling too close or similar to one’s partner eradicates the sense of mystery and otherness that draws us to each other in the first place. By that token, fear play seems like a romantic “life hack” to me: what better way is there to continue seeing your partner as autonomously separate from you than to get swept up in the fiction that they are dangerous and unpredictable? I may know exactly which stories my partner will tell on a particular podcast or which drink they will order at a particular bar, but I certainly don’t know what they plan to do next when they’ve got a knife in my face. My faculties of that sort are blasted from my brain by fear.
Knives themselves can be incredibly sexy – I’ve admittedly often picked up heavy, shiny ones in restaurants and admired them through an overtly sexual lens. But really what excites me about their usage with partners is the way fear makes old things feel new and makes anything seem possible. Some couples ride roller coasters together, some watch horror movies; but some kinksters, like me, can get their equivalent kicks by lying starkly still while a partner draws red lines across their body with a weighty chef’s knife. Hey, it takes all types to make a world.