I’d really honestly intended to have this blog talking about dull things like cooking and pretty clothing, but it’s a cheese toast blog and what I’m doing is learning about the very satisfying part of me that wants to do mean things to men.
I’m a sadomasochistic control freak. One of the awkward things about this is that it comes with a hell of a lot of baggage. So does normal, vanilla sexuality, or for that matter, being human, but lately it’s been all about the weirdness that comes with exploring what my orientation means to me. And a lot of time saying no to things it doesn’t mean to me.
There’s a few problems with being a straight woman into seeing horrible things happening to men you care about even beyond the obvious ethical one. For one thing, all the porn about your sort of pairings is directed at men, and tends to be created from the premise that you want to see attractive domme women. One finds oneself furtively ogling torture scenes from movies and peering through fashion magazine spreads, while feeling guilty that the guys in Men in Pain shoots aren’t hot (I mean I’m sure to people who love them they’re beautiful, but most of the models seem to be just sort of lying there like a trussed chicken or serving as a blood supply to the body part being tortured).
Then of course there’s the non-fantasy world of other humans. For the longest while I stuck to age appropriate partners: boys my age. They tended to be pretty amenable to messing around with fluffy handcuffs, and my own flexibility helped. I also explored in the safe anonymity of the internet more or less un-chaperoned. Now I’m older and in a bigger city, so it’s munches and blogs on feminist-kink.
So far meeting the kink community has gone something like this: “Hi! Umm… Yes. Sometimes. No. No. No. FUCK NO! Ew. No. No. Yes, oh god yes, yes! Yes! Yaye! Nope. No. No, thank you, but thanks for asking. Maybe. No. How would that even work? Yes, please. Nice to meet you. No. No. No. Not on your life. No.”
First impressions show me that kink culture is full of old people and has the drawback that it tends to allow creeps to join. That and I’m spending a lot of time telling people that I don’t sub. Which I don’t, beacuse I get angry if I try, and the older I get the less patience I have for faking it. It’s starting to be worrisome, when even a guy you’re trying to top is regarding the languid pose you’re lounging in as ‘vulnerable’. I mean, rawr! Being vulnerable doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see you on your knees, crying.
This gets to the crux of the problem. People are socially ranked by the positions they take due to some involuntary quirk of their orientation. Subs go gah-gah over the moon putting doms on pedestals. Doms dress themselves up with symbols of authority. The most hardcore are the 24/7 life stylers, and people who inflict or take bloody injuries, either being held as the ideal or called crazy.
My point is that kink tends to get treated as a costume, and the length of time in which you’re willing to wear it and its tightness on your body determines your seriousness. I’m trying to imagine ranking say, gay people that way or people with an object fetish, or even normal vanilla loving. It really doesn’t compute. Maybe it’s because so much of this is furtive and underground or maybe it’s because people who share my cluster of kinks are getting off on power imbalances which are only ethically possible with a lot of negotiation (thus leading to the on/off business) and simultaneously something that makes people desperately horny, so being able to rank people by which end they hold the garden gnome for the yodeling garden gnome sex is intensely emotionally satisfying for them.
Only I don’t fit the uniform for a dom. I’m hardly the only one to complain about this, there being a wealth of writing on the subject of thinking fetish heels and latex corsets are all too common. But I’m thinking about the dilemma I have getting dressed to go to munches. I want to look pretty, but yet unavailable. Attractive and approachable, but unbreakable. I got so frustrated with this sort of game that last time I went I said screw it, and arrived with my hair in pigtails with enormous red bows, the sort of thing I’d wear every day if I could get away with it.
The other big piece of icky is that I’m traveling in a circle so sexually open that people who would normally never say boo to a goose proposition me for sexual acts so explicit and inappropriate that covering my mouth to keep the puke in is becoming a reflex. I don’t mind having a conversation with a man old enough to be my father (which is early forties by the way), but kink doesn’t remove the creepy exploitive subtext of an older man hitting on you.
It’s hard juggling having sexuality with a degree of restraint. It’s also interesting to be jumbled in with all manner of perversions. I think I’ve met seen naked or scantily clad more transgendered and transvestite people than ever before in my life in the past few weeks. I’ve been hit on, insulted, hit on and insulted.
And a lot of people have worked very hard to define me. For some reason ‘innocent’ is the first adjective that most people seem to use, as well as ‘vulnerable’ and much is made about my mischevious smile. I wonder if I were older if I’d be fearsome or if this is part of my personality. Even my mother calls me a ditz-domme. So yes, that’s what kink in Montreal is like.
