'The way I see it, there's always a certain element of power exchange in any given relationship between two people. One person is always yielding their power — for decision-making, for leverage, for argument-winning — to the other, who accepts this gift.' I am stared at blankly, and my audiences tend to shake their heads and walk away. I don't pursue the issue, and immediately regret having said anything at all.

I describe it as a guilt complex. It's what makes me password-protect blog entries, refrain from laughing at jokes and hide the books I read. It is because a subject that I long to discuss, one that forms a huge part of my identity and my vision of myself as a sexual being, is still taboo in a world that is now far more open to diverse sexual orientations and other modes of sexual expression. The most permissive of sex education websites will not discuss it, and shy as I am about exploring the more 'hardcore', adult internet world, I'm a bit lost in a sea of awkwardness and indecision, occasionally penning what can only be described as a 'confession' in an attempt to explain my thoughts, feelings and emotions.

I think of myself as a submissive, a characteristic that manifests itself both in normal social interactions and in my secret fantasies. I generally do not look at the people to whom I am speaking; I let someone else decide where we will eat or what game we will play. I read scenes of slavery, capture or torture in books over and over again, and I fall asleep at night fantasising about the opportunity to consent to such slavery. It's a characteristic that has been part of me from a very young age — I cannot date the point at which I developed a fascination concerning what I later came to recognize as the world of BDSM.

I've read enough — a good part of it here on h2g2 — to know the basics: 'BDSM' stands for 'Bondage and discipline, Dominance and submission, sadism and masochism', an all-inclusive acronym that describes sexual practices concerning the conscious, consensual exchange of power — for a single night or for many years. I know that the BDSM motto is 'safe, sane and consensual', a phrase that I have come to apply to many aspects of life beyond a basic understanding of BDSM. I know about safewords and 'toys' and dominatrices and 'dogs'. I know that people who don't have an interest in BDSM or do not practice it are 'vanilla', as are their sex acts, and I know that around the world there are many vibrant communities of BDSM-interested adults, many of them online. But there is very little in the way of resources for teenagers, and I've often wondered about this.

I can think of a couple reasons: first of all, 'sex education' is never really about sex. The information readily available to and geared towards adolescents mostly concerns protection, such as through condoms and other forms of contraception, or maybe more 'social' elements of sexuality, such as avoiding date rape or pressure from one's partner. But while little sex education focuses on actual discussion about sex and sexual acts, there is certainly a wide variety of information out there about people with sexual identities that don't explicitly have to do with sex. I am bisexual, and I have had no shortage of advice about what that means and how to deal with it. I have come out to my parents and my friends and have never had a single emotional crisis about liking girls as well as guys. But BDSM — and, in terms of what that means to me, submission — is seen as nothing if not overtly sexual, and also dangerous if not gone about properly, and thus it is avoided in educational discussion.

But where does that leave me, then? I'm lucky, actually; I have a few friends who have been remarkably patient with me, helping and supporting me as I continue to figure out my identity. Yet there is only so much one can talk about without feeling unbelievably awkward (which is, of course, unfortunate in itself), and I can't shed myself of the feeling that I am living a secret. I am generally a very open person, likely to describe my feelings and thoughts on just about everything in an essay or a blog post, and to be confronted with this boundary that cannot be crossed in polite society — unlike those concerning, say, sexual orientation — is incredibly frustrating and confusing.

I don't have a problem, really, with the fact that one does not generally discuss the pornography one views or the fantasies one has. I understand that there is such a thing as 'too much information'. But I believe my sexual identity to stretch much further than pornography or fantasies, and in this case the analogy between BDSM and non-heterosexuality is very apparent. It does not seem strange to me to hide pornography, but it does seem strange that I can discuss with my mother a novel with a lesbian heroine, but not one whose protagonist chooses to become the slave of her lover. This is not pornography, it is fiction — and my mother is an English teacher, very much opposed to the censorship of literature. And yet I buy my books in secret.

I feel as if I have had to 'come out' as a submissive, and as someone who is aware of her submissiveness. I consider myself progressive and enlightened, from a similarly progressive and enlightened family that supports same-sex marriage and a woman's right to choose and compulsory sex education — and yet it took me five years after puberty hit before I realised the meaning of feelings I'd had since I was seven or eight years old, and I'm still trying to understand those feelings.

If this has been my experience, there must be countless young men and women who share it — and who, perhaps, have not had so much as the support of friendship or the liberal background that I have. All of us deserve to be able to understand ourselves as sexual beings, the same right that 'vanilla' folks are granted. We need to be taught maxims such as 'safe, sane and consensual'. We need to be taught that what we imagine and experience is not disgusting or wrong or evil. Most of all, though, we need to realise that we are not alone in the world. I know that I still have a great deal to learn about myself and my identity, and I can only hope that I will have the opportunity to learn from real people, not from pornography, and that I will be able to grow beyond this phase of guilt and confession. All I ask is that the forward-thinking people of this world surmount their fear and their disgust and help to break down the very non-consensual walls that surround my mind.