switches:
The Bisexuals of BDSM?
People love tidy little boxes. They crave labels that fit on a shelf, neat categories they can point at like specimens in a museum: Dom here, sub there, Top to the left, bottom to the right. It’s easier to believe the world makes sense when everyone stays in their lane. But then you meet someone who refuses to play along—who doesn’t sit still in the box, who plants one foot in dominance and the other in surrender and grins at the contradiction. That’s the Switch.
The lazy metaphor is that Switches are the bisexuals of kink. Not because it’s entirely accurate, but because it irritates the people who need the world to be simple. Switches don’t pick a role and stick with it—they savor the whiplash. Some nights they’re the one with the rope in their hand and the smirk on their face, and other nights they’re the one tangled in it, moaning through the loss of control. It’s steak and lobster on the same plate, and they don’t apologize for being greedy. Why would they? Choice is a prison. Both is freedom.
For Switches, the power is in the fluidity. They move with mood, with partner, with the shifting weight of the day. Dominant on Tuesday, on their knees by Friday. They don’t see contradiction—they see honesty. Because no one is just one thing, not all the time. Locking yourself into a role might look consistent, but it can be a lie. A Switch shrugs at the script and writes their own lines. If that makes people uncomfortable, maybe it’s because it exposes how rigid their own boxes really are.
And the dungeon is too damn big for tribal flags. BDSM isn’t a war with sides—it’s a labyrinth with doors everywhere. The Switch refuses to swear allegiance to one door forever. They walk through all of them, sometimes twice, sometimes backwards. They’re not “either/or” people. They’re “both/and,” and that’s the quiet revolution.
Of course, just like bisexuals, Switches get shit for it. People whisper that you can’t really be a Dom if you kneel, or really be a sub if you’ve cracked the whip. They want purity, not complexity. But maybe the Switch is the one who understands power most deeply—because they’ve held it and given it up, tasted both sides of the coin. They know that control and surrender aren’t opposites. They’re two faces of the same hunger.
The beauty of the Switch is the refusal to be pinned down. It’s not rebellion for rebellion’s sake—it’s freedom. It’s saying, today I am this, tomorrow I might be that, and it’s none of your fucking business. It’s choosing the role that fits the moment instead of the role that pleases the crowd. Life, like BDSM, is a constant negotiation. And sometimes the best negotiation is flipping the table, tossing the rulebook into the fire, and seeing what happens when both sides of you are finally allowed to breathe.