My experience as a Master and woman-trainer was unusual. Nearly all of the women who inspired Me on this path and with whom I had developed My Ways and views were very smart, highly educated women who "should have known better." From the beginning it was not a question of "playing" some kind of BDSM game. The fact is by carefully listening to, observing and "feeling" women I encountered, I realized that their "cover" narrative for their lives that emphasized their autonomy, independence and self-will was often not at all related to their actual views about Men and women and sexuality. Almost all the women I'd been involved with saw themselves consciously as feminists of one sort or the other, but deeper, in their heart of hearts, were views that were in very sharp contradiction to their feminist rhetoric.
I had a number of "D/s" experiences long before I had ever heard the term or idea.
In retrospect, I see them as Me beginning to claim a Maleness that was a deep part of Me, but which everyone pretended was a false construct. So it wasn't about "play" or some fad, it was about power and the urge to power that I believe is a natural Male essence. In My first such experience, a very bright, feminist-socialist girlfriend of Mine in college looked Me in the eye one day apropos of nothing and said, "Why don't you every rape me?" Now no feminist could be caught joking about rape in those days. This was the early days of the movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.