You know what scares me sometimes about being kinky? There are times when I think I'm not entirely enjoying something, when I'm starting to get really scared or feel real pain--not to the point of panic or needing to stop, just when my thoughts are less "oh yeah this feels good" and more "oh jeez I'm getting hurt"--and then I touch my vagina or have it touched, and I realize that I'm fucking dripping. Almost without me, from nothing but pain and humiliation, my vagina is soaking wet and relaxed and hypersensitive and completely ready to be fucked.
I don't think this happens in the "real world," although honestly in those--blessedly few--moments when I've experienced severe pain or fear in reality, I've never thought to check my vagina. Nonetheless it frightens me a little, that things could make my body tremendously aroused without checking in with my brain. It's one thing to think "I'm kinky," I'm used to that, but somehow it's weirder and scarier that I have a kinky body.
Then again, could just be Pavlovian. Could be that tendency my mind has to operate on several levels, so when 98% of me is completely blanked out on sex or hyperfocus or even sleep, there's always a little observer in there thinking "yep, I'm asleep now, how bout that." I can't expect the observer to always understand when the rest of me is blissing out on pain.
(Although at very rare moments the observer does go away. I've had sexual experiences that I literally cannot remember all the details of because they were that good. The beginning of the sex was super awesome, and then [???], and then I was lying in the bed next to him and he was telling me about how it went on about five minutes and my whole body was bright red and having some sort of seizure.)
It's all very hard to explain, to other people or to myself. I'm more or less at peace with "getting treated very cruelly turns me on", but it's a whole nother level of weird at the moments when I realize "getting treated very cruelly turns me on... apparently."
(Still unsure about the Benny situation. I think that I'm going to message him, because messaging the girlfriend feels kind of backstabby, but I'll be upset with myself if I say nothing.)
Yeah. I've gotten erections at depictions of cruel treatment that my conscious mind utterly rejects; and I really don't feel turned on at the time. Though obviously I am at some level.
ReplyDeleteIt's your body looking after itself.
ReplyDeleteThe vagina knows that forceful entry can happen so to minimize the injury it creates an environment that's most likely to cause less damage.
It can cause a lot of confusion amongst rape victims as to why they were aroused physically be an experience the didn't want to have.
Don't sweat it. Just be grateful that your vagina's got your back.
Whoa, way to make it creepy, anon. "Oh don't worry, it's perfectly normal and natural, it just means you think you're about to get raped."
ReplyDeleteanon, i just read in this http://enagoski.wordpress.com/ blog a description of a series of experiments; they were basically asking people to score their arousal levels while watching films, and the state of their genitals was measured. And the men's answers correlated about 90 percent with the actual hardness of their penis, but the women's answers were far less correlated with their status. It apparently has it's own mind, and trying to minimize a rape's effect was one of the possible reasons she mentions, too.
ReplyDeletethis doesn't mean that rape is good or moral, of course, and the idea that what my vagina thinks of the situation is not an expression of my REAL feelings, just something that luckily correlates with it, can feel liberating: ie. if you find yourself wet at a non-sex-related distressing situation and you don't feel otherwise aruosed, it's just what it is, and, more importantly, if someone gets wet while raped, it doesn't mean that she secretly liked it. oh, and if you're aroused and dry, use lube and not deep analysis.
holly, i know this is not exactly what you are talking about in this post, but anon mentioned it and i wanted to add this.
"...at very rare moments the observer does go away. I've had sexual experiences that I literally cannot remember all the details of because they were that good."
ReplyDeleteMe too! And in my case, they've almost all been bdsm (sub) experiences. It's almost a little frustrating later to think, "he did all those amazing, some fairly complicated, things to me and now it's just a blur" but it's a YUMMY blur.
flightless
I don't think it's necessarily an I'm-about-to-be-raped thing. It might be, but not necessarily (and how does your vulva being super-sensitized help you get through a rape, I wonder? :P).
ReplyDeleteI've had plenty of times when I've been turned on but sort of blocked it out with my conscious mind (so, wetness without the usual tingle and happy thoughts). If I'm doing a Domme thing that requires a lot of concentration; if I'm hanging out with a guy I'm attracted to but don't feel emotionally safe around; whatever.
I've heard a theory that there's no such thing as a completely unified self. The conscious portion of the mind is generally dominated by the language processing center, which is only dimly aware of the other conscious portions and not really aware of the unconscious ones at all. However, at least half of what we do is run be the unconscious mind. So basically the language center has the illusion of being the only real "self" (and it uses the voicebox to say so to other humans which it encounters) but basically ends up having to make up stuff to explain or justify a lot of the things that the whole person ends up doing because it doesn't really know what's going on - there had to be a good reason because it's the only one making the decisions... right?
ReplyDeleteIf there's any truth to that, perhaps the "observer effect" you described is caused by the language center being unable to process the experience as anything other than a set of words and facts, while most of the rest of the brain is just enjoying the ride.
I don't know about the whole rape thing, but lube resonse to pain sure makes sense if you're having a baby.
ReplyDeleteOops, resonse = response
ReplyDeleteOkay, the rape comments are really officially creeping me out and verging on evo-psych weirdness about how women's bodies are engineered by evolution for all rape all the time, which I do not believe to be true; just look at ducks, and how in many biological and social ways we are not ducks.
ReplyDeleteNot only do ducks have tremendously huge and elaborate penises and vaginas to facilitate rape and rape-evasion respectively, but more significantly, ducks rape each other all the time and think nothing of it. Humans may rape each other a lot, but it's a deviance, it's not "so I met a cute girl today and I totally raped her, also I have a paper to write" the way it would be if we truly accepted it the way ducks do.
Dolphin legs, man; if we were specifically evolved to naturally do a thing, we'd be doing it.
As for having a baby, that has its own very defined set of reflexes that are triggered by stimuli much more specific than someone pulling your hair and calling you a dirty fucking whore.
I'd rather consider my kink as kink than try to explain it away as something biological and universal.
Just so you know, dolphins have itty bitty leg bones. And dolphin embryos look a lot like people embryos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dolphin_embryo.jpg
ReplyDeleteHolly, I don't know about all the rape = lube stuff but I'm gonna agree with you on the kinky vagina. My vagina is a pervy little wench and, evidently, knows when I'm having a good time more than I do. Until recently, my husband didn't know that he also has a very kinky weiner. I had to point it out to him. One day I mentioned to him that the more he knows he is hurting me, the harder he gets. I said it in sort of a joking way, assuming he knew. He had NO idea. Now, granted, when my husband and I met he was about as "vanilla" as a person could get and it's taken 12 years to get him to a respectable level of kink for my liking. But, I thought he'd have caught on by now and figured out that he's enjoying himself as much as I am since he now so willingly goes right to the more enthusiastic play. Evidently he wasn't aware that both heads are enjoying it equally.
ReplyDelete