Tuesday, October 21, 2008

It's so lame when you call it that.

Shove me to my knees, piss in my face, make me call you Daddy, beat me til I cry.


Let's engage in humiliation, watersports, role-play, and corporal.


I hate fetish labels. They distance and categorize everything that's supposed to be nasty and messed-up and visceral. It's like eating pizza with a knife and fork. Labels give a weird sort of legitimacy to things that are only hot because they're illegitimate. They're useful for detached third-person discourse I guess, but trying to "engage in corporal" when you want to be fucking hit is a miserable thing.

6 comments:

  1. It's curious that people who have to be open about sex adopt fig leaves similar to the Cosmo crowd. "Corporal" and "humiliation" aren't very different from "suggling" and "va-jay-jay."

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  2. Bruno - I think I also have a tic that requires me to put "fucking" in front of all words before I can respect them. Fucking humiliate me. Let's engage in some fucking corporal.

    Or, I dunno, some fucking sergeant.

    I got distracted?

    I'm typing while distractable.

    Anyway, um, you have a good point, and fig leaves are all very well I guess when you're writing about it in the third-persony sort of way. But they need to stay the hell outta the bedroom or anywhere else I'm taking my pants off.

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  3. I don't really see the problem myself. This seems to fill the same role in sex as Swahili does in Africa. You need some sort of common baseline to get the ball rolling, or there's every possibility that you'll miss out on a whole bunch of possibilities because there are 90 million variations and dialects, and no one speaks them all perfectly.

    After you establish some baseline, say "humiliation" you can then work out some specifics like "I want you to try and open this fire hydrant with your pussy during rush hour," without the other person working with a misconception that they just weren't supposed to pee until they had to do the dance or something.

    Ok, not the best example, but you get the idea. Start with your fucking baseline then negotiate the closest fucking dialect that's appropriate.

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  4. Stingray, I think you've got it backwards. Saying "I want to be pissed on/piss on you is *much* harder to misunderstand than "let's do humiliation." Why begin with the ambiguous phrase? At worst, "I want to be hit" is only as ambiguous as "let's do corporal." Of course some clarification and negotiation is required, and that's why I find it strange that these people use euphemisms at all.

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  5. Stingray - What Bruno said. "Open the fire hydrant" etc. is much more clear than any codewords.

    Bruno - Certain segments of the sex-positive/BDSM community seem to greatly prize the ability to negotiate sex acts in the same vocal and emotional tone you'd have when booking a plane flight. Hm, does that have a stopover in Houston, I see, can I get a discount on the hotel, and if you're comfortable with it I'd enjoy some light knifeplay.

    I guess the idea is that you're demonstrating that you won't get emotionally overattached to a casual play partner, but it makes me uncomfortable when people overdo the no-feelings act. If this were really so damn neutral to us we wouldn't be bent over a sawhorse in a cinderblock shack in the bad part of town at 3 AM, so can't we have a little... y'know... lust?

    This probably needs to be its own post, but I think that the "I have so little shame about sex that I can talk about it so super-casually like it was a haircut!" attitude is rooted, deep down, in having assloads of shame about sex.

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  6. Starting with generic baselines and working to more specifics makes sense to me in that it allows for more negotiation and a greater chance of finding an acceptable common ground. If the opening gambit is "I want you to start my lawnmower with the pull-cord in your ass," that sets a rather lofty bar for the general plan and may well lead to "Yeah, I'm just gonna go over here. And never fuck again." reactions. On the other hand, if you start on the low end with "things in butt y/n" you can negotiate up more easily.

    Basically it seems easier and more logical to me to start the dial at 1 and ramp up rather than kick it straight to 11 and try to ease back.

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