On the surface of it, keeping my freaky sex life a secret seems reasonable enough. There's no reason to tell family or coworkers or unhip friends what I do in bed, right? They don't tell me that they like it doggystyle with clit stimulation, and I don't tell them about getting beaten up; that's just decorum.
The problem is that if anyone is at all prying, they ask questions I have no good answer to.
"So where did you go out last night?"
"Um with friends."
"Oh, how did you meet them?"
"Off the Internet."
"What did you do?"
"Just hung out."
"I've never met these people! You should introduce us sometime."
"Uh, maybe, sometime."
Admittedly imaginary-person there is being a little pushy, but their questions aren't unreasonable--and certainly aren't sexual--and yet I can't answer them honestly without digging way too far into the details of my sex life. I'm either a liar spinning stupidly elaborate webs of "oh yeah, so then we went bowling and my score was terrible, ha ha", a petulant teenager saying "we went places and did stuff, okay?", or a very petulant teenager screaming "that's none of your business!" All so I don't have to tell everyone in my life that receiving pain makes my pussy wet.
The worst part is when I go to a purely social kinky event and we end up talking about sharks or linguistics the entire time, ass-beating barely gets a mention, but I still have to skulk around with a Dark Secret. Nobody can know I was at Denny's talking about sharks, or I'll be ruined!
"Hangin' out" is a good, casual, non-lying, non-exposing phrase.
ReplyDeleteThe worst part is when I go to a purely social kinky event and we end up talking about sharks or linguistics the entire time, ass-beating barely gets a mention, but I still have to skulk around with a Dark Secret. Nobody can know I was at Denny's talking about sharks, or I'll be ruined!
ReplyDeleteYou must have at least one reader unfamiliar with munches who's thinking "kinky events at a Denny's? Boston's hipper than I thought!" ;)
Chi - "Hanging out" is indeed what I say, but depending how interested the questioner is, it can come off a little bit like "What did you do at school today, honey?" "Stuff."
ReplyDeleteThere used to be a sizable crowd of us (10-30) who would go to a Denny's in RI after hitting the local fetish danceclub each Friday night; we'd be there from 2am-5am or so, being loud, eating large amounts of unhealthy food, inserting silverware into the girls occasionally, and getting Jen The Awesome Waitress to bring us canisters of whipped cream, which would also be put to ill use.
ReplyDeleteThe best nights were when the busload of Baptists from the deep south would stop by for a middle-of-the-night meal break on their way to whatever revival thingie they were headed for. Those nights happened maybe once every six weeks, and were especially fun.
Denny's (along with IHOP, etc.) probably sees a higher percentage of kinky folks, at least from 11pm-onward, than anywhere else.
Just out of curiosity -- did the sharks engage in rough assfucking?
It's impossible to be the weirdest person at Denny's. I don't care if you're being serious about the silverware thing, you still weren't the weirdest person at Denny's.
ReplyDelete(The weirdest thing that ever happened to me at Denny's was I was eating with a friend and a total stranger walked in the door, sneered at me and flipped me off with both hands, then just walked away. Huh?)
I think sharks only have cloacae, thus in a sense they can only assfuck.
I tend to be extremely open about everything I do, but that may be because I'm in a position where my reputation is largely irrelevant. I'm self-employed, so no co-workers. I also almost never meet my customers in person. Friends? I'm taking care of my mother, so no time for those. Relatives? Most of them I rarely see and none have any sort of power or influence over my life. I just don't give any details unless they ask for it, out of respect.
ReplyDeleteThe only issue is my mother. She tends to get all panicky if I'm gone and doesn't know where I am. So she gets all pushy about knowing where I'm going, what I'm doing there, and when I'll be back. (She even called the police once when I left while she wasn't around and forgot to put the note out where she could easily see it.) On the rare occasions when I'm out doing anything with a social component, she gets pushy afterward about the details of what happened. Apparently to make sure I was "safe".
Now none of that would be more than a minor irritation if that's all that it was, but she tends to throw a fit on the occasions when I do anything "adult-oriented". (Her reason - being afraid that someone "might do something weird" to me.) Interestingly enough, she apparently doesn't consider going to a clothing-optional beach to be adult-oriented, even though she's not comfortable with the idea of going to one herself.
For several years I went and told her everything anyway, in hopes that she would eventually get used to it and mellow out. It didn't work. And she's not the type to take "none of your business" or a vague response for an answer. So now I resort to "creative editing". That is, everything I tell her is true, but I leave out key details so it sounds very different from what actually happened. (I managed to give an extremely detailed account of the party I went to this New Years Eve without ever mentioning that it happened in an S&M dungeon. That was an interesting challenge.)
[Again, she's planning to move out in December, so I'll hopefully be free of her then.]
Sometimes, when someone's being pushy like that with me, I tell them the truth (or a made-up thing way more crazy than the truth) - with a deliberately deadpan face. The pushy person chooses to believe I'm kidding and generally doesn't pry anymore.
ReplyDeleteYou kinda have to gauge your audience carefully for that manoeuver, though. :D
Of course you can never be the weirdest person at Denny's. Have you ever seen any of the Shambling Horrors that tend the grills slither out of the back for a moment to peer at the warm-blooded customers?
ReplyDeleteThe silverware thing actually happened; I think both my girls were there that night (observing, not providing the rinse cycle), and it's possible that the groom in a wedding you recently attended was there as well. It was a couple years ago, that club has sadly faded away.
Given the look of sharks it makes sense that their sex life is best described as 'bump uglies.'
But again -- is it a ROUGH assfuck?
I'd vote yes, having had a shark or two swim by and sandpaper my skin away. Noisome little fucks.
Knowing that you have just relocated to a new city, I can see how the situation is much worse. I'm in a quite different, yet very similar position (new job, same city, drug-addicted sister) There are a lot of new acquaintances/co-workers trying to make friends or just small talk, who you have to be guarded with. With the really chatty ones, "Well, last night I was bailing my sister out of jail. You wouldn't believe what some of those people did!." turns into "Last night I was volunteering at the shelter, you wouldn't believe what some of those people have done." And you feel a little bad, but you obviously couldn't tell the truth.
ReplyDeleteAnd you told the Denny's what you'd done with their silverware so they could probably sanitize it, right?
ReplyDelete--Andy
@Andy:
ReplyDeleteI made a few assumptions:
1) That Denny's washes all their silverware once it's used no matter what orifice people tell the waitstaff they've jammed the silverware in, and that said washing process is/was sufficient to sanitize it;
2) That the silverware wouldn't pick up anything much more virulent than what it would pick up when people routinely put it in their mouths (a similar warm, moist hole with assorted bacteria, tiny cuts, BBP exposure possibility, etc.);
3) That being in (name redacted to protect the guilty)'s vag not only blast-furnace sterilized the silverware, it probably emotionally scarred it for life; and
4) If we had asked, Jen would've taken it away and promptly re-used it to set up the Baptists' table settings, just without washing it first. Jen was good that way. Although we never harassed the Baptists, as they were always polite to us. Freaked out by us, but polite.
Sigh. Those were the days.
The things I never knew, wandering into Denny's because it was my grandmother's favorite place to go after church. Note to self: check the silverware.
ReplyDeleteI tentatively added a couple of munches to my calendar. I called them "social events."
ReplyDelete@ 10:05 am Anon: It was the Denny's in Coventry RI. Odds are you're safe (at least from that particular Vag Attack)
ReplyDeleteSo what would happen if you'd just tell you were at Denny's? In case the people know what kind of club that is, what would happen? I mean, really, in case they are into the same things as you are, you might get the chance to make new friends. If they are not into that, but know all about the Denny's, they might think: Oh well, THAT's what she's into, but I presume they wont ask any further questions, cause it's just to embarrassing for them... And if they don't know anything about the Denny's, they might ask whether you can recommend it and than it's up to you... shock them or just tell them not to go there, cause it's just too weird.. too expenssiv or else.
ReplyDeleteWell but maybe that is one of differences between the US and Germany: If you are likely to be shocked by what people are telling you about their whereabouts after work, you just don't ask them.. ;)
You hang in there and don't worry too much about what the people might think!
Oh man, trying to figure out how much to say - it always seems to be a recurring problem, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteI started to run into this myself, with some of the same issues, this past year in NYC, when my kink life started to merge into what before had been my 'regular' social life.
I had the same qualms - people who do vanilla things don't tell me the details of their sex lives, why should I do that to them. Once (like you) my friends from the kinky scene and I started doing social things together in NY, it seemed far enough out of the bedroom for me to be straightforward.
Now I'm just like, "oh, I was out with my friends from the kink scene here in NY', or 'oh I was at an awesome kink party'. If people want more details, they can ask, if not, well, I haven't described anything in graphic detail.
Anon - Denny's isn't (officially...) a fetish club, it's just an all-night restaurant chain.
ReplyDeleteInstead of a white lie ("We went bowling"), a brush off ("We hung out"), or a refusal to answer ("None of your business"), might I suggest... a whopper?
ReplyDeleteOne time I noticed a scar on my brother's shoulder. I asked, "Where'd you get that?" He looked at me and said, with a straight face and without a moment's hesitation, "Knife fight with a monkey."
That is actually a very clever strategy. It's clearly false (duh), but it also tells you it's false. It says, "I'm not telling" without being a jerk about it, because it gives you something humorous to put in its place.
So, yeah: the whopper.
To add to what Holly said, it's like a fetish club, but with lousier food.
ReplyDelete...catering to some sort of auto-masochistic commercial/retail fetish.
ReplyDeleteAte at one once. Never again!
The whopper is a good answer.
ReplyDeleteOr just "out with friends"
As an aside, this shows how big a pain DA/DT is for service members.
If I wanted to tell a whopper, I'd go to Burger King instead. [/lameass joke]
ReplyDelete