Hi! I still exist! I got a new job as a nurse and I was very busy for a while. I'm still busy, but I have some actual free time now.
And I spent that free time reading Fifty Shades of Grey, because dammit, there's only two chapters left now and I've already left you hanging for like four months.
When we last saw our heroes, they were in Georgia, because Ana went there to get away from this confusing relationship and clear her head and talk things through with her mother--and Punch ThunderMeat stalked her there and totally prevented any head-clearing by taking her away from her mother and monopolizing her time. ROMANCE.
Content warnings for this chapter: Stalking, gaslighting/mindfuckery, graphic sex and BDSM, and do I even have to mention emotional abuse.
First order of business: is anyone going to the Geeky Kink Event this weekend? Rowdy and I will be there and would love to meet people in person. We will also be hosting a Pervocracy room party Saturday evening--I'll post about this when I know specifically when and where. (UPDATE: 7-11pm, 5th floor. Look for the room with "PERVOCRACY FIELD HQ" sign on the door.)
Also, I'm officially an RN now, so that's cool.
Onto the book. When we last left our heroes, they were... you know what, I could write one of these that would work for literally every chapter. When we last left our heroes, Ana was all "I want you, but I don't enjoy anything about your actual personality or sexuality," which was understandable because Ralph ChunderStorm's personality was mostly obsession and manipulation, and his sexuality was mostly violent coercion.
But in this chapter... well, all that is still happening, but in Georgia!
Content warnings for this chapter: Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, of course. Forced eating. Murder reference. Child molestation. Dog bites. Another long-ass chapter.
The trailer for the FSoG movie is out, and here's my mini-review. (And one more thought on it.) I have a weird mix of glee and sorrow that they're making a movie out of this. I am looking forward to it being so-bad-it's-good, a Showgirls for our time--but I'm also terrified that it's going to give millions of people the idea that BDSM is "abuse but they're perverts so it's okay." I don't want that.
Based on the trailer, it seems like it will be very faithful to the book, which might work in my favor. The audience consensus might end up being "wow, when you see this stuff actually acted out it's miserable," and then the whole thing will sink beneath the murky waves from which it arose. I can hope.
Anyway, we still have four chapters left in this book. Let's get slogging. As a reminder, when we left off, THE EMAIL WAS COMING FROM INSIDE THE BAR!!!
Content warnings for this chapter: Emotional abuse, do I even have to say it? Stalking, bigtime. Weirdness around drinking. Child molestation, molestation apologism, and implied (?) physical child abuse. Period sex.
Day 18: Any kinky/BDSM pet peeves? If so, what are they?
Most of the things I dislike about kink rise above the level of "pet peeves," like the fact that we as a community still lack a workable consensus action plan for what we do when we find out that one of our buddies might have committed physical and/or sexual assault. That's not really an "aw man, this has anchovies on it"-level complaint.
But for a pettier peeve--you know what, I'm going to say the color black. Like, there's nothing wrong with black clothing or black toys or black dungeon walls or black website backgrounds. But goodness there are a lot of them. It gets monotonous, and sometimes has a really cheesy "kink is spooky like Halloween, boo!" feeling to it. I own green and blue rope, a gray flogger, and wear various colors to parties, because sometimes I'm not Halloween, dammit.
(I also own a shit-ton of black stuff, for reasons ranging from "that was the only color I could get it in" to "I'm not actually that much of a brave iconoclast and sometimes I kind of like being Halloween.")
Day 19: Any unexpected ways kink has improved your life? If so, what are they?
It's inspired me to do a lot of writing which has, in turn, vastly improved my life. I also met Rowdy at a kink event, and knowing him has improved my life tremendously, because he's a wonderful partner and I completely love him and he has cute freckles.
But honestly, the main way kink has improved my life is... that I get to do kink. I enjoy it so much more than I first thought I would, and in so many different ways. It's an integral part of my romantic and sexual life. Which makes this question a little like asking "how has chocolate cake improved your life?" Oh, I can think of stuff like "it looks nice on my table, I hear it has antioxidants or something" if I have to, but the real answer is because it's chocolate cake.
Maybe the biggest unexpected way kink has improved my life is that I've learned different and much better ways of looking at consent. Because while kink definitely isn't a magical consent haven, the kink community has popularized some pretty cool concepts around negotiation, safewords, limits, the idea that agreeing to one thing is not agreeing to everything, and the idea that who you are does not imply what you're willing to do. Even when I'm not doing kink, these are useful. It's helped me to structure my statements about what I want based on what I want, not on what I think I'm allowed to ask for. It's helped me put trust in my own limits.
I have not purchased an extended warranty since I started doing kink.
Home stretch, you guys. And a tough stretch it is. This chapter is almost entirely composed of emails. Here's that bug-eyed guy graphic again.
It's originally meant to illustrate "how can I ever live up to this sexy, sexy book?" I have to assume he'd opened it to a section that wasn't forty pages of grouchy emails.
Content warnings for this chapter: Do I have to say emotional abuse? You know there's emotional abuse. Jealousy. Stalking, SO MUCH STALKING. Homophobia. Physical abuse. Kidnapping. Slut-shaming. Child molestation. Excessive drinking. And other sexy romantic things.
Also, this chapter (and hence this entry) is loooong. FYI.
Day 17: What misconception about kinky people would you most like to clear up?
I have to pick just one?
I think what I'd most like to clear up is the single image I feel like most people have of kink. I think there's an idea that all kink is super-serious, heavily sexual, involves both dominance and SM, involves a lot of trappings and props, and is between a man and a woman. And everyone's got a collar on. Even the doms.
When... there is no one image of kink. But here's a couple images I'd like to mix in with the black leather:
- Me, fully clothed, cheerfully folding and sorting Rowdy's laundry. He hits me afterwards, not as a punishment, but as a reward.
- At a party, a woman demonstrates how she uses a urethral sound on her partner. She's wearing gloves and using surgical lube. She's joking around a lot and everyone is laughing, including the guy with the sound in his dick.
- Cuddling with Rowdy, I ask him to bite me, and he does, still cuddling me.
- Kinky people gathering in a mall food court, not to do anything kinky, just to socialize and connect in an atmosphere where they don't have to hide who they are.
- A bondage workshop held in someone's living room. Some people are clothed and others are in underwear, mostly just for freedom of movement. People are passing around books with bondage diagrams and instructions and trying them out. Other people are in the kitchen nibbling on the cookies someone brought.
- A different party. I went with Rowdy planning to play, but the energy just sort of feels off to us, and we're more tired than we expected, so we just cuddle and watch people play.
- A friend playing as a puppy. He's not doing anything kinky or sexual, he's just going up to people who pet him and fawn over him, as you do with puppies.
I could go on forever. I'm still missing lots of stuff here--my experiences are really just one little corner of Kinkland. But you get the idea. There's a lot in kink that you don't see in images like this. I don't want to say "it's not black leather, it's t-shirts," because that's just reductionism in another direction. It's not black leather; it's black leather and t-shirts and pink latex and nice button-down shirts and people running around with no shirts at all going "wheeeeeeee."
There's only 25 chapters in this book. We're gonna make it.
I have to admit, it's all starting to blur together for me. In the first part of the book, things were already horrible, but at least they moved a little. Ana worked, went out with friends, graduated school, moved to a new city. Now we've entered this vague Timeless Zone where the pacing becomes an undifferentiated dribble of "we had really icky un-fun coercive sex... and then later we had some more." I don't know the month, much less the day of the week, and the relationship isn't developing one inch past the "I want you to submit to me but I don't actually like you" point we were at a hundred pages ago. Trying to enjoy this book as a piece of fiction is like trying to paddle a canoe through gravel.
Content warnings for this chapter: Emotional abuse and manipulation, bigtime. Workplace sexual harassment. Trying to help an abused friend. Sparkly GIF.
Day 15: Post a BDSM/kink activity you’re curious about and would like to try.
One I've wanted for a long time is sensory deprivation. I have a fidgety mind; it's hard for me to sit quietly for more than a few minutes without reading or doodling or pacing or reciting facts about sharks.
("We now rise for a moment of silent prayer." "......" "......MALE SHARKS HAVE TWO PENISES.")
I already use physically intense play to shut that down in one way, by overwhelming myself with so much sensation that my mind is absolutely swamped with it and doesn't have any processing power left for fidgetyness. But I'd like to address it another way through BDSM, the opposite way, by giving myself absolutely no opportunity to avoid my own mind.
So I'd like to be locked in a closet for as long as I can stand. Preferably a whole weekend, but honestly I think I'd probably only last a couple hours. I would like to be stuck in there with my thoughts and absolutely no way to shut them down. I'm not even sure what that would be like. My fantasy is that being forced to face my own mind would lead to some breakthrough that made me permanently less inclined to avoid my own thoughts, but even if that doesn't happen--I still want to know what it's like.
On the more sexy-fun side of BDSM, I would love to bottom in an interrogation scene. I'm fascinated by the two kinds of power I'd have in that scene--both the power to spill the beans and stop the torment, and the power to not spill the beans and endure. The push-pull between "I'm so tough and stubborn" and "I can stop this at any time" feels fascinating. Plus I just want to be tied to a chair by someone in a uniform.
Speaking of uniforms... another thing I haven't tried but have been contemplating is topping in medical play. I have all these skills from my nursing education, and a powerful desire to misuse them. Although I wouldn't want to be a Naughty Nurse. Maybe an extremely authoritative and straight-laced nurse in scrubs and a labcoat. Or an EMT! I would be a Naughty EMT and wear a crisp white shirt with shoulder straps and combat boots and tie people to my backboard! YES.
Day 16: What are the most difficult aspects of having a sexuality that involves kink or BDSM for you personally?
(note: little bit of sexual assault talk)
The secrecy. It's gotten to be much less of an issue as I get older, but it still bites at me sometimes how much conscious effort I have to put into "who can be trusted with what?" about things as basic as "how was your weekend?" or "so I hear you're a writer."
It hurts when I'm hurting and can't seek help. A big part of the reason I told almost no one (and still haven't told my parents and a lot of my friends) about being sexually assaulted is that it took place in a scene. I don't want to change that story to make it more acceptable, but I also don't want to have to preface it with an hour of BDSM 101 where I explain what a "scene" is and how "tie me up" doesn't mean "do anything you want to me," really it doesn't. So silence becomes the path of least resistance.
And it hurts when I'm proud. I mean, I've been published in some cool places, I've flown across the country to speak at colleges, I've been cited in academic papers for chrissakes... and there's so many people I can't tell. I just submitted a story for publication in an erotica anthology and if it gets accepted I can't make the "omg guess what" phone call home. Boo hoo, I know, but it does hurt (especially in a family that values academic success very highly) that I've done all this cool stuff and there's so many settings where I can't tell anyone about it.
The "your world is now the same twelve people and no matter what happens you'll keep running into them" factor in the BDSM community can get a bit trying at times, too. It can be charming and comforting sometimes, but if there's someone who's very active in the scene who you don't like (or who's seriously hurt you, for that matter), you're going to spend a whole lot of time awkwardly avoiding eye contact.
Call Mara Wilson a "sad fuck", will you, E.L. James? Well, I've got some news for you: all of the fucks in your book are sad.
In fact, we're heading into a particularly sad one right now, as when we last left our heroes, Gaston Von RockThrust was angrily dragging Ana into a boathouse in his parents' backyard to punish her for offenses consisting of:
A) Making plans to go visit her mother.
B) Having drinks with a male friend.
and
C) Not letting him finger under the table during dinner with his parents.
And don't worry, she's genuinely terrified and trying to deflect or escape him the whole time. Now that's how you make a fuck sad.
Note: all Christian Grey names in this entry are automatically generated by the Manly Name Generator, courtesy of Spencer Dub.
Content warnings for this chapter: More or less outright rape. More detailed emotional abuse than usual, including some real-life stories.
Day 14: How would you say real life BDSM/kink varies from fantasy BDSM/kink? If you haven’t experienced real life BDSM/kink how do you think it might differ?
There's three main differences: consent, commitment, and clumsiness.
Which are all part of one main difference: in fantasy everything works out. That's what fantasy means. It may not work out for the best necessarily, but it works out in a way that's satisfying somehow to the fantasizer. Real life is full of randomness and accidents and disappointments and plot threads that never properly resolve. Fantasy is the realm where man plans and for once God plays along.
So in fantasy, it's okay to do things without consent, because you can be assured that either the person secretly likes it, they secretly like not liking it, or they don't like it but the author of the fantasy likes it just fine. Any time you assume consent in fantasy is fine, because you wouldn't be assuming it if the author didn't want you to. In reality, trying to guess which of someone's "no"s are secretly "yes"s is an excellent way to become a sex offender.
In fantasy, it's easy to make big commitments at the drop of a hat. Become someones 24/7 live-in servant who never wears clothes and is so high-protocol they can actually pronounce the capital letter in "Master"? Heck yeah! Never goes wrong! In reality... I don't want to say "it always goes wrong," but it requires a lot more thought about financial arrangements and family relationships and what if the servant needs a day off. And--importantly--how are you going to handle it if either partner decides they don't want to be in this arrangement anymore? It is possible to do BDSM full-time in real life, but you still have to deal with real life.
In fantasy, nobody ever falls on their ass, slips out of their ropes, or farts at a truly inopportune moment. In reality, oops.
Finally, one more difference that I didn't list above because it doesn't start with a "C": art design. Fantasy BDSM often comes with a lot of trappings, a lot of black leather or latex outfits and custom-built toys and lavishly equipped, literally underground dungeons. And everyone around is either a slinky sex kitten or a muscular sex... lion? Not sure how that works. Sex tiger, maybe. In reality, leather shit is expensive, lots of kinks can be done without any toys,and kinksters have roughly the same distribution of body types you'd see at your local bank office. We're a motley bunch of scruffy sex alley cats.
Day 13: Explain as best you can what the appeal of kink/BDSM is to you? Why are you drawn to what you’re drawn to?
I went swimming in the lake today. The water was cool and clear and I floated away from the children splashing by the shore, away from the noise of the road, drifting alone with the trees and the sky. Out in the deep water, I swam laps for a good hour before paddling back to shore. I found a comfortable sitting log among the shade trees by the lake and sat with my toes dangling in the water, resting and communing with nature. (Nature was mostly spiders.)
My muscles were sore from the effort of swimming. It was a little achy, but overwhelmingly it was a feeling of comfort, like my muscles were better settled on my bones than usual, better able to relax. In a way they almost felt virtuous, like they had earned this comfort.
Sometimes being hurt in kink gives me this same feeling. It's the good hurt, the hurt of strong muscles and days in the sun, a hurt that brings pride as well as comfort. It's a little pain mixed with a lot of endorphins.
Of course that's all well and good, but there's a whole lot of stuff that "oh yes, endorphins, just like a good hearty workout, totally understandable" doesn't actually explain. My interests cluster around humiliation and control as much as they do around endorphins, and that's harder to explain with wholesome workout metaphors.
The appeal of those things is... complicated. But for me, it's often about freedom. Submission frees me from guilt and uncertainty about how to please others--I just have to do what I'm told, and I will be pleasing. Humiliation frees me from impossible expectations--nothing is expected of me but to have receptive flesh. Roleplay frees me from being myself at all. And a violent scene frees me from thinking about anything but here and now and ow.
When I say "when I'm bound, I feel free" I'm not speaking in baffling contradictions or engaging in willful denial. I mean it takes a huge freakin' load off my mind.
Day 11: What are your views on the ethics of kink?
The long answer would require reposting about 75% of everything I've ever written.
The short answer: the ethics of kink are the same as any other ethics. If something is okay in other contexts (example: hitting someone who's agreed in martial arts practice), then it's okay in kink. If it's not okay in other contexts (example: hitting someone who didn't agree because you hear that they do martial arts sometimes), then it's not okay in kink.
Kink doesn't happen separately from "real life." It's not a special case. There's some kink etiquette that differs from other areas of life, but the fundamental ethics are the same. The presence or absence of consent can change whether something is ethical, but not the presence or absence of kink.
Day 12: Tell us about a humorous BDSM/kink experience you’ve had. If you haven’t had one, talk about aspects of kink/BDSM you find funny.
I once had a play partner tie my arms up to my chest with my elbows bent and set me free to wander around the party with my hands stuck up near my chin. I think he meant it as a "you can walk but you can't use your arms" bondage thing.
I made my hands into two-fingered claws and stomped around making tyrannosaurus noises.
[Note: due to the nature of the question, this one briefly visits a wide variety of unsettling places.]
Day 10: What are your hard limits?
Not many.
I've got loads and loads of things that don't turn me on, things I don't want to do right now, or things I don't want to do in certain ways, but as far as things that I categorically don't want to do at all, ever?
It mostly comes down to stuff I think is unethical. I'm not doing anything with animals or with people who don't or can't give informed consent. I'm not doing stuff with someone behind their (or my) partner's back. I'm not doing anything where real-life sexism/racism/etc. is part of the play. Basically, if I don't find something ethically acceptable outside of kink, I'm not going to make an exception for kink.
Other than that, there's not much I find "ethical but too icky to ever consider." I'm an almost-nurse and roadkill-pokingly unsqueamish, so things involving bodily fluids and functions fascinate me more than they disgust me. Permanent marking doesn't necessarily bother me either--I don't want obscenities tattooed on my face or anything like that, but the idea of picking up some incidental scars suits me fine.
Oh! Gunplay! Gunplay is a hard as hell limit, at least in any form that violates the "all guns are loaded, all guns are real, do not point a gun at anything you are not willing to destroy" rules. Although knifeplay is fine with me--I've had a genuinely sharp knife right up against my neck--so I'm not consistent or anything.
And of course there's a whole pile of things I won't do that don't come up very often in kink, so I'd feel silly enumerating them one-by-one. I mean, I won't eat a brick? If anyone ever asks me to erotically eat a brick, I will not do that.
Maybe the ultimate hard limit for me is emotional pain. I don't ever want play to hurt my heart. I don't want a scene to ever intentionally make me feel worthless or abandoned or repellent. I want my play to hurt, but I don't ever want it to truly hurt me.
Last chapter Our Heroes had an ooky gynecologist appointment and a bunch of sex, and that was about it. I always feel so indifferent and unaroused by the sex in this book. It's like trying to read a sex scene starring Ted Bundy--even if the scene itself were great, the outside knowledge I have about these characters spoils any chance of it being erotic.
Content warnings for this chapter: Physical and emotional abuse, as always. Child molestation, and Ana being a shit about it. Eating disorders, somehow. Horror movies, if that's a thing I need to warn for?
Day 9: Post a kink related song or music video you enjoy.
I'm gonna have to go with this one (NSFW, obviously):
I like it because it's so goofy and unpolished and real. The people and setting are what a lot of BDSM really looks like--a bunch of geeks in a building that looks more like a black box theater than a scary dungeon, mixing a lot of laughter and fun in with what they do.
I didn't want to just grab some porn image, so instead I went for the Overachiever Olympics and did an entire photoshoot of self-bondage. Honestly, it didn't come out all that sexy-hot (to my tastes), but I'm still pleased with the results.
Is that cheating? I feel like I'm trying to out-clever all these questions. If it asked me my name I'd probably start into "does naming things give us the illusion we understand them? is a name a real part of a thing? if I have more than one name, am I still one person?" instead of saying my goddamn name.
A hand really is my favorite toy, though. There's other toys I like, but this one is an impact toy, a sensation toy, and an insertable. It's very easy to carry for travel and always ready to use.
I have a pretty formidable collection of floggers and restraints and dildos and evil sticks and whatnot. They're lovely. There's a lot of craftsmanship in them, the underground artistry of leather and steel and silicone. These toys are beautiful and carry a lot of personal meaning and I'm very proud of them. But when I feel a hand on me, I know it can feel me too.
Day 6: Describe your weirdest/most interesting sexual fantasy.
I've only ever had two sexual fantasies in my life.
Okay, I've had thousands, but they've all been installments in a long-running series, and I've only had two of those. I switched around age 21; I don't remember the exact time or why I did.
The first one was softer and sweeter. It was about a couple, a man and a woman (I can't tell you their names; for some reason that's one the part that feels too personal), who could travel between parallel universes. They had found a little pocket universe that was all their own. It was just a house, a big fancy villa with a courtyard and a pool and all the fixin's, and that was the entire universe. And they fucked their way across the universe.
Their sexual discovery tracked with my own; they started off with just the glee of "we can touch these parts of each other? that's a thing we can do? WHOA" and then moved into more elaborate scenarios. They were kinky, of course (the woman was dominant), but it was always in a soft sort of way. It was a way they played around, but they were also in love and ended their scenes gently holding each other.
After about seven years of this, I abruptly switched tracks, and things got darker. The couple in love went away, and instead, I imagined a single character at a time, very alone in their world. There are several characters like this, male and female, and they're all sort of impersonalized. Their names are just letters of the alphabet. Jay, Kay, Elle, Em, you get the idea.
They live full-time in a computer simulation created for the purposes of kinky sex. Basically the Sex Matrix. It allows them to do anything they want, with outlandish scenarios constructed on command, and without fear of harming their real bodies. Some of the people they encounter in the simulation are other users, some are NPCs, and it's not always clear which is which.
The sex they have is extreme, ludicrously anal-focused, and... running up against that "somehow this is the part I find too personal" wall again. But none of it is happening to their real bodies, and they can unplug themselves whenever they want, and... that makes it all okay, right?
Day 4: Any early experiences that, in retrospect, hint at your kinks?
Day 5: What was your first kinky sexual experience? If you haven’t had one yet, talk about what you hope to have happen.
I'm putting these together because I think I answered Day 4 pretty well in the last entry.
Although I'll add one more: student films. I got a film degree at a point in my life when I knew about kink, had already had kinky experiences, but at that particular point in my life I was mostly celibate. (Not out of kink-guilt. Partly because I'd just had a terrible breakup from a terrible relationship, partly because I didn't turn 18 and "legal" until halfway through my junior year, and partly because I had approximately zero social skills.)
I had no intention to make my final project kinky in any way. It wasn't about my kinks. It was just a horror film about a guy who joins a cult to try and raid their ill-gotten riches. But the cult "initiates" him by torturing him. A lot. Creatively. For most of the film. There's an entirely excessive number of "wait, we have to initiate you some more" scenes in the film. I figured I was just ramping up the horror, right?
...Oops. In retrospect, oops.
(Content warnings for the next bit: Statutory rape, emotional abuse, legal system fuckery.)
Day 5 happened when I was 16 years old. My boyfriend's parents were out of town for the weekend and we had the whole weekend and the whole house to ourselves, which is whoooa when you're 16. (Well, I don't know about you. It was for me.) We walked around the house naked the entire weekend, which was amazingly sexual at the time, even if nowadays it usually just means I'm feeling lazy as hell.
We had sex a bunch of times, but the last time on Sunday night, I asked him to spank me. I was all shy and stuff about it. And he did. He started out with little tippity-taps. "No, I want you to spank me," I said. So he wound up and did it for real, smacking me hard on the ass, over and over. I went from "um please just a little um you know um" to "FUCK YEAH FUCKING SPANK ME THAT'S FUCKING RIGHT." It was fantastic. I didn't want it to end. But when it did end, I tackled him and fucked the hell out of him.
That was the last time we had sex.* The next morning the police were there. My mom had reported me as a missing person, filed a restraining order against my boyfriend, canceled my scholarships and withdrawn me from my school. (The first two because I hadn't come home when commanded so she told the cops I'd disappeared for a week, the second two because I had a B average. GOD I LOVE BEING AN ADULT NOW.) My life utterly fell apart and wouldn't be back together for more than a year, the abuse at home peaked from "bad" to "how did I survive that?", and even though the restraining order was not upheld in court, my boyfriend decided I was not worth this level of trouble.
In retrospect, he wasn't worth my trouble either--he was way too old to be dating a 16-year-old and didn't exactly make up for it by treating me well. But that spanking. I don't regret that. That changed things. Forever.
*We did have sex one more time a couple years later, but it was thoroughly mediocre and rekindled absolutely nothing. I'd kind of caught on that he wasn't such a spectacular person by that point.
I masturbated for a long time before I understood it was masturbation. I knew that such a thing existed, but it was dirty and sleazy and desperate. I didn't do anything like that. All I did was touch myself between my legs and it felt nice, then felt really nice, then I didn't feel like doing it any more that night.
It was the same with kink. There were things I knew fascinated me far before I could say "that's a sexual feeling." I was eight years old, maybe six, way pre-puberty, and I would lie on the floor with my action figures making them play erotic games of capture, torture, and submission.
This goes back as far as I can remember.
(The mental image gets much better when I point out that I didn't have any matching sets of action figures. So this generally involved Commander Data making an off-brand Power Ranger his slave, with the assistance of a Tyrannosaurus and a sentient pickup truck.)
I was about fourteen or fifteen when I started having unrestricted private access to the Internet, and more or less instantaneously I discovered kink and BDSM. Of course, at the time I thought it was this fascinating but disreputable thing other people, disreputable people, did. It took about a year for me to realize that my fascination was not academic and my fantasies were not unconnected. So I guess that's when I discovered I was kinky? But it's really just when I discovered the name. I already knew.
When we last saw our heroes, Stud BeefThud had arranged a really weird gynecologist exam for Ana at his house, because he is rich in the creepiest possible way.
Content warnings for this chapter: Emotional and physical abuse, as always. Casual misogyny. Graphic BDSM and sex--I guess I'm pretty inconsistent in warning for that, because that applies to my entire blog and much of my life, but anyway, there's some in here.
With that out of the way... this one is difficult for me. I've never really experienced sexuality as an itemized list of fetishes. I can't say, like, "rope bondage, feet, having my nose tickled with an ostrich feather by a man dressed as my third grade teacher." There's nothing so specific.
I'm more like "confronting the physicality of my own flesh," and that's great for poetry readings, not so much for actually figuring out what the fuck I'm going to do tonight.
I also say "I don't know yet; I'm still discovering" a lot. I've been in the scene for, shit, seven years now, and I still feel like a newcomer when I see just how much is out there. Or a kid in a candy shop, and I'm too caught up in "I want to try one of everything!" to start narrowing myself down.
And secretly, part of the reason I get all "I like almost everything, really I'm just into this for the philosophy" is that I do have some specific kinks, but I feel weirdly embarrassed and shy about them. Like saying "I like to be dominated" is vague and sanitized enough to feel totally chill, but when I get too close to what really makes me squirm in my pants, saying "I like to get threatened that someone will shove a huge thing up my ass" gets uncomfortable.
Not so uncomfortable that I won't do it, though! So, in no particular order:
1. Biting, punching, wrestling, and other forms of no-tools SM. On a physical level I like flogging, but I liiiike skin-to-skin rough body play.
2. Things in my bum. Like, a lot. Like, I don't talk about this much because I know that if I get started I'm going to start sounding weird as it progresses from "oh yeah, anal sex, lots of people are into that" to "no, you don't understand, I would put a traffic cone in my ass if I could."
3. Related but not totally overlapping: the general concept of putting way too much phallic object in way too little orifice. Again, it gets weird fast--I don't just mean "big dicks," I mean "...maybe two traffic cones."
4. Being held down and forced to do things, assuming that the things are exactly what I wanted to do anyway. Inclusive of when I feel like doing them and who I want to do them with. This all hinges on a very generous interpretation of the word "forced," obviously, but once we've established what exactly I want to be forced to do, the scene can get plenty rough.
5. Humiliation, but only in a specific way. I don't want to be told that I'm useless; I want to be told that I'm useful, and the top will be using me now. I like the feeling of being used.
It's weird how shy I felt about saying those things, and how "oh, is that all? that's not so bad at all" I feel having actually said them now. Kind of a huge relief actually.
Next up: I'm finally getting back to Fifty Shades of Grey!
I live! I live! I graduated nursing school, am still waiting for a test date for my boards, and I live!
I live, and I want to write again. I've been writing every day on my tumblr, but that's not the same. It's a big mishmash of puppy pictures and askboxes and stuff. The Pervocracy is my real home on the Internet.
So, to get back in the swing of long-form non-puppy blogging, I'm doing a 30 Days of Kink challenge. You can read all the questions here.
Day 1: Dom, sub, switch? What parts of BDSM interest you? Give us an interesting in-depth definition of what that means to you. Basically define your kinky self for us.
I'm a bottom, an occasional switch, and harbor a deeply guarded but deeply treasured capacity for submission.
The kinky thing I do most often is get hit. I like getting hit. It’s such an OOMPH of a feeling, a sharp snap into the physical reality of my body, the tough meatiness of my muscles and fine-grained sensitivity of my nerves.
It’s also a challenge. Because although I like getting hit, I don’t have much pain tolerance. Sometimes that means we keep it light, more of a manhandling than a real beating, only hitting me hard enough to make a little noise but not enough to cause serious pain. (This kind of play usually involves a lot of giggling.)
Other times I go into a subspace trance and enter an ecstatic altered state where pain don’t hurt. This requires a lot of trust, because once I’m in that state my communication gets either garbled or absent, and I don’t have much sense of my own limits. Feels so good though.
And other times, more rarely… I go past my pain tolerance. I get to a level of pain that makes me think “I can’t possibly deal with this” and I deal with it. I look at the pain head-on and transform its image in my mind into heat, into cold, into red, into simply nerves firing. I find a moment when I can tolerate intolerable pain and I hold myself in that moment. It’s not as sexy-fun as the other two ways of dealing with pain, but when I’ve done it, man, I feel good about myself. Tolerating the intolerable, even for half a second, makes me feel like the champion of the goddamn world.
I know how to hit, too, and I get a little thrill, but it’s usually much less visceral. The best times have been when I’ve been comfortable getting really physically into the bottom’s space—hitting someone while we were skin-to-skin, pressed together so close that I could feel every gasp and flinch, every time their muscles tensed or relaxed, every deep or shallow or ragged draw of breath.
As for submission… there lurk the things that still feel wrong. Gloriously, tantalizingly wrong. These are the kinks, that for me, still hold the delicious flavor of taboo. The flavor, so hard to find as an adult, of sneaking out through the woods at night, of dirty comics under the mattress, of awkwardly sincere love poems hastily passed and quickly concealed. These are the things that don’t make me feel like “you know, it’s just another way of experiencing pleasure…”; they make me feel like a god damn pervert. I love them.
I'm not dead! I'm in the last month of nursing school. I haven't had much time or energy to write. I'm utterly exhausted, a bit demoralized, and so, so close to a new chapter in my life.
I think I'm at the point I was at when I left Seattle--of looking at my life and thinking there's nothing at all wrong with it, except that I can't see this being my only life. I want to reincarnate. There's so much stuff out there to experience, and I have the freedom and opportunity to go out and experience some more, and I intend to.
I've been going through my grandfather's slides lately. My grandmother died a few months ago, and I took the slides from her house. My grandfather loved to travel, and I'm not sure I fully understood that until I started going through these slides. There's wild leopards in them, and thousand-year-old synagogues, and million-year-old glaciers, and a stunning variety of things that look like penises. Just pages and pages of rock penises and wood penises and gourd penises, interspersed with all the glories of the Earth. I love my grandfather now more than ever. I want to travel as widely as him, to live as fully as he did, and to see as many penises.
And so I'm going to leave Boston. I don't yet know when or for where. I still love Rowdy dearly and the idea of leaving him breaks my heart--but I also know he doesn't want me to stay here just for him, and deep down neither do I. I'll visit often and I'll email and I'll always love him. But I may move away from him.
Anyway. Wherever I go, Fifty Shades of Grey will still be with me. Unfortunately.
Content warnings for this chapter: Stalking, mostly. Physical and emotional abuse, although the physical is not quite so intense as in some other chapters. And one sketchy-ass gynecologist.
I'm back! Unfortunately, I've been going through some bad depression once again, so... yeah. That's why. I'm getting treatment and hopefully will be on the up-slope soon.
(No, I'm not depressed from reading Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm depressed from the stuff that made me so good at spotting abusive behaviors in Fifty Shades of Grey.)
In our last installment, our Brave Hero threatened to rape the heroine, and then they went off and had consensual sex, or as consensual as it can be immediately after a rape threat. Making jokes about this book has become increasingly difficult. It's like, I want to write about things besides abuse, but literally nothing else happens!
Content warnings for this chapter: Kidnapping, extremely graphic physical abuse, sexual assault for the umpteenth time, homophobia, even more emotional abuse than usual.
ANNOUNCEMENT: I will be speaking at the University of Chicago Sex Week again this year! I'll be talking about "Sex Outside The Lines" at 7pm on Saturday, February 8, on the second floor of the Logan Center (915 E 60th St.) It's free and open to the public, and last year was a great time, so I highly encourage you to attend if you're in the area.
Well, here we are. Past the halfway point. Before I get into this one, I want to tell you a little bit about my weekend. (Graphic BDSM coming. FYI.)
On Saturday night, I went to a kink party with Rowdy and his girlfriend Artemis*. We walked around for a bit watching people scening, then I asked if they wanted to do a scene where they both topped me. They did, so I stripped down to underwear and we talked. I told them I wanted to be punched and flogged, mostly on the back over the shoulderblades, and we agreed how I would let them know if I was having a good time or a bad one.
And then they started hitting me. Rowdy and Artemis took turns, first bare-knuckled and then with leaden sap gloves, then with a heavy leather flogger. It started out slow with a lot of "how's that? harder?" and quickly got more primal. For a while I was laughing with every blow, then gasping as the pain built up. While Artemis punched me, Rowdy held me from the front, hugging me to his chest as I alternately giggled and moaned. Artemis dug her fingers deeply into my back, grabbing the bruised and tender muscles, twisting them. That's when I started to slip into a trance. I closed my eyes tightly and stopped laughing and everything turned inward. The blows stopped being "pain, but good" and started being "good, but good." Rowdy and Artemis took turns a few more times. They were holding my hair, kissing each other over my shoulder, biting my skin. I was less and less aware of time and of what specifically they were doing, and more aware of... flying. Just flying through endless inner space on a rocket made of endorphins and sweaty leather.
I came back to Earth on a plushy sofa, with Rowdy holding me and kissing me and giving me sips of water. "That was amazing," we both said. "I love you," we both said. "My back feels funny," I said.
*Oh, right. Rowdy broke up with Sprite like three years ago and he's been dating Artemis for more than a year now and she's pretty awesome. Probably should've mentioned this at some point.
So that's real BDSM for you. It's not the only way you can do BDSM, for sure--there's a million ways--but I think it's not a bad example. I asked for it, and I could have stopped it without fear of retaliation. My tops asked me--and gave me--what I wanted, not merely what I could tolerate. The whole thing was full of a spirit of fun and experimentation, not anger or bitterness. And I loved the hell out of it. I didn't come away thinking "that wasn't so bad" or "I had that coming." I came away thinking "I feel fucking fantastic."
So you can see why I'm completely appalled and disappointed by the way my beloved kinks are presented in Fifty Shades of Grey. It's one of the most joyous things in my life, and it's being forced on someone who hates it, and E.L. James is saying this is okay and sexy. It breaks my damn heart.
Content warnings for this chapter: Emotional abuse, you know the drill. Also rape threats and graphic sex immediately following rape threats.
When we last read Fifty Shades of Grey, our hero was threatening our heroine with rape and furiously badgering her any time she disagreed with him over petty little things. ...That could describe any chapter in the book. You don't have to read this one too closely to keep up.
I like this picture. It was originally illustrating a guy going "wow, I can never live up to this amazing Christian Grey fella, I'm just an ordinary man." But it is also, for very different reasons, the exact face I make when I read this book.
Content warnings for this chapter: The force-feeding thing, the child sexual abuse thing, the adult sexual abuse thing, the continuous rampant emotional abuse thing... boy has this book numbed me out. You know, the thing, with the horribleness.
This is not going to be a very funny chapter. I would not blame you one bit if you skipped it. I'm going to go through it, for the sake of complete commentary, but there's a point in this chapter where there's no hope of making any jokes.
Plot summary if you choose to skip: Ana "jokingly" breaks up with Christian Grey. He thinks it's real and breaks into her house and rapes her.
MAJOR content warning: Rape. Not rape references or "that's kind of like rape"; outright graphic rape. Also home invasion, emotional abuse, child sexual abuse.
How could I have let Cosmocking slide? What has become of me?
Rather than stretch things out by doing the three (!) backlogged Cosmos I've got separately, I'm just going to make a mega-post with a little bit of the worst from October, November, and December.
Covers! "The Scary Thing 90% of Men Fantasize About" is having sex with someone who isn't their partner! "Weird Things Guys Do When You're Not Around" basically comes down to sometimes they're naked! I can understand the need to be shocking on the cover, but I can't forgive faking it, not in a world where "female kangaroos have three vaginas" is an actual fact! And then there's Miley! Wearing an otherwise see-through suit covered in rhinestones and encouraging us to "twerk your ass off"! Yes, dear, you're very scandalous. Good for you. We're all very scandalized.
The kind of woman who's really rising in her career in her 20s tends to be high in testosterone [...] High-testosterone guys tend to be more aggressive, tough-minded, and competitive--and not as compassionate or emotionally expressive. High-estrogen guys, on the other hand, have no problem expressing their emotions and are trusting and empathetic but can be indecisive.
And guys who are high in black bile tend to be dry and cold and associated with the element of Earth.
This would almost be interesting if it was validated with blood tests and not the author going on to speculate that Barack Obama is probably high-estrogen because he called his wife "the boss." As it is, it's just yet another weird attempt to go "oh no, I would never hold sexist and transphobic opinions, but you can't argue with science!"
Well, guess what? I just put on glasses and a white lab coat. Now I get to decide what objective truth is! And, using some very long and newly-discovered words, I can tell you that according to SMIM1 Vel antigen levels and dynamic computed tomography, you are a poophead.
Slick his fingers with shower gel, and have him reach around and give you some digital pleasure.
Ow. No. Ow. You know that feeling when you get soap in your eye? Transpose that south a little and let me know if it sounds sexy.
You wake up with 2.5 minutes to spare before your alarm rings. Rip off the cami you slept in, and tie it over his eyes. Now you can spin a fantasy using nothing but your words. Here, we'll get you started: "All the neighbors are crowded around the windows right now, watching us..."
Since "try springing BDSM on him when he's least expecting it" was a couple issues ago, Cosmo has now upped the stakes to "try springing BDSM on him when he's goddamn asleep."
I do want to use this fantasy, though, because I live on the second floor. "All the neighbors are crowded around the windows right now. They're hovering. Sickly green flames flicker in the places where their eyes used to be."
Q: My boyfriend is a unicorn. He's not into porn or strip clubs. But I am. I'd love to watch porn while we're having sex or have a wild night at a strip club together. Are we incompatible?
A: Guys who say they're not into porn are either lying or repressed... and lying. [...] suggest a girl-on-girl scene to eliminate the possibility of him being intimidated by porn penises. If he says no, you need to decide if you're okay being with a guy who's so closed off and unwilling to explore with you.
I'm not even explaining why this is wrong. I can't. It's like being asked "why wouldn't tinfoil make a good tampon?" There's so many different layers of wrong that I'm just going to trip over myself trying to pick which one to talk about first.
I've never come even remotely close to playing make-believe in the bedroom. The truth is, I've been too scared! It's challenging enough to feel comfortable being yourself during sex, let along someone else. Plus, what if my partner found my fantasy freaky? What if I bungled the dialogue? What if I started giggling... or worse, what if he started laughing at me?
Then you'd be just like people who do this all the time, because we fuck up all the time. What keeps the play hot is that we get good at rolling with it. We get the giggles, but we can laugh together or shut it down with an evil "what are you laughing at?" Our dialogue isn't perfect, but what we do is too intense to worry about critiquing the dialogue. The standard we aim for isn't "seamless" but just "fun."
(Credit where credit's due, by the way; this article actually did a decent job explaining negotiation and safewords.)
Q: During my internship in college, my boss and I flirted a lot but never got physical. I used him as a reference to land my current job, and now that we don't work together, he's been asking me out. [...]
A: [...] If you keep saying no, he could very well be so hurt or confused that he won't be able to serve as a reference for you (at least, not the kind of enthusiastic, professional reference you want). So if you really do like him and he likes you, then say yes.
The new, feminist Cosmo, you guys! Now with extra feminism! And the occasional barely-veiled threat to sabotage your career if you say no to a date!
The weird thing is that the letter writer doesn't imply anything about her ex-boss withholding references or blackmailing her. She just says he's asking her out and she's not sure if that's appropriate. The advice columnist (Ky Henderson) is the one who decided this needed a little extra spice in the form of explicit sexual harassment.
Lure his tongue into your mouth, and when he pulls it back, wrap your lips around the tip, sucking like you would during oral. It's an R-rated preview that will have him aching for the feature presentation.
Gluaghchkauh. (That's not my reaction. That's the noise he would make.)
Set up a movie night on the couch, and tell him he's only getting to first base. It's an innocent come-on that will make you both want more. Letting him try to "convince" you to go further is half the fun.
I'm going to let Louis CK take this one:
(NSFW and talks about rape)
Geese mate for life. Riff on this concept of eternal intertwinement and wrap your leg over his back, which gives him access to your clitoris.
