La Phalene

McGill is a very pretty campus, in which I am more or less invisble. There is constant construction work and a non-stop battle between various activists for attention, and multiple medical clinics that only service the student population. I have a big comfy McGill hoody to curl up in when I study, a membership with the athletic centre to ignore, and like many McGill students, mild to severe problems with anxiety. I’m basically invisible, not very bright compared with my fellow students, and not very driven. This is a new one for me, on the other hand I’m pretty sure this is called ‘fitting in’.

Mental health demons, purging the Swede from my system (screw love in the ear, it’s over rated), and ambition. I feel like I’m in some sort of demented inspirational fable: every time you fall off the wagon, get up, dust yourself off and climb back on again!

I’m supposed to focus on the positive, but with the looming work load I feel an overwhelming urge to slam my head in a car door a couple of times. However I really should put my happy face back on and go back to work, because belly aching never got the skut work done.

I’ve reached that level of maturity where song lyrics are starting to speak to me. I’ve never done that before, but ‘Revenge’ perfectly encompasses how I feel and this makes me feel very small and insignificant, because I know it means that I’m dressing up in a costume of other people’s drama.

My mother had a good piece of advice about killing my father, being that Oedipus inherited his father’s wife, and I think it’s a good metaphor for taking on the mantle of unsatisfied parental resentment he wears, and not the adoption of the lovely Jocasta. I have to examine my motivation to defeat him, and I think I have to realize that it’s basically because I want him to appreciate me. By blood or shared madness I recived that delicate issue of a huge, fragile ego. I feel inclined to compete and care all too much about how others see me. Somehow the idea of him spitting teeth at my feet makes me feel like he’d both stop mattering and realize I’m tough and strong and smart.

It bothers me that I can’t shake off some emotions. I can’t stop loving my father in a selfish way. I can’t stop being deeply distressed by some of the family drama I grew up with. I can’t completely excise Mothboy IV from my life, even as I have intensely mixed feelings about him and his behaviour. I hate feeling helpless and fuzzy and lost. Listening to ‘Revenge‘ in repeat makes me feel understood, but not really productive.

So why do I feel so deeply bothered by my father? Am I scapegoating onto him, all my anger at how other father figures failed me. Is this a deep wounded little girl reflex? Is it just because he’s so dismissive of me? What do I want?

So that was a last busy weekend with puppy and I’m not sure what exactly I’m doing with my ex, mothboy IV. So much in my life is ambigious. Ambigious is a pretty good word, you know?

So much is undone and confusing. I don’t feel like I’ve got a handle on anything, which is pretty insecure. I also don’t feel like I want half the stuff that’s being offered to me, but I don’t know what I want.

My ex has implicitly promised I can have him back in a fingersnap. The cost is of course, that I give up everything I’m doing with anyone else. I’ve got two fears- one that as soon as he gets what he wants he’ll go from courting me to using me, and the other, that it’s commitment and I’m terrified of something that limits my choices. I think that’s what I want… choice.

Pro-Dommes. It’s way too easy to attack prostitutes or to otherize them as victims. So I feel sort of guilty saying things that might interfere with their liveliehood. But I think the Gor recreationalists are silly too and I’d never try to stop them, so please take my ranting not as an attack but using my free speech rights to comment.

I’m really uncomfortable with the fact that my orientation means that I am required to take sex work for granted. Not just the clueless idiots who tell me that I should take the glee I feel in in hobby and turn it comercial, but the casual way it’s assumed that pros serve a valuable exploration service for men learning about their kink, or getting their needs met.

It sounds nice – get a secret, slightly taboo desire taken care of by a responsible service worker. The number of people in the scene who are one half of a vanilla couple is pretty high, and it’s discreet and has clearly negotiated boundaries. He gets laid, she gets paid. Granted ‘laid’ may mean ‘whipped’, but we all go home happy, no? Hell, you could even argue it’s no different than going to a massage therapist and it gives sub guys something they really, really need to feel happy. It’s sexy, it’s fun and it puts her through grad school and lets him discover his fantasies.

And yet, it creates a special class of fantasy meeting service workers that somehow does not encompass my own gender as a client. Somehow, despite plenty of budget for luxury, just as male escorts make a tiny niche, women aren’t buying pro-doms or pro-subs. I think this is also part of why conventional pornography is so lousy at serving my slice of the market.
Why is it okay to turn a sex act into a transaction? I mean consenting adults can do whatever they want, and I’m all for legal protections of that statement. But practically speaking this alienates a fundemental part of who a group of people are, removes the idea that a female might find it inherently rewarding, and removes the motive to develop your sexual identity outside fantasy
The poor, pissed on pro-domme, in her corset and high heels- She’s not creating the stereotype, she had it handed to her as the shortest route between A and B. There’s a distinct sort of uniform for kinky women that is now so divorced from anything a real powerful women would wear, that while I’m not personally opposed to goth duds, is a big blazing beacon to how the dominatrix is a commodity. She’s not the problem, she’s a symptom of the problem.

Let’s look at that uniform -shiny fabrics, a corset, high boots. Bitchy Jones observed the dominatrix in bondage herself, and I’m not challenging that. I think that a lot of us wearing various orientation hats are a teeny, weeny bit switchy, and if you combine that with a tendency to shove high status females into body mutilating clothing, you can see how something so stupid evolved.

Bring in a dominatrix costume and out goes the real female dominant as a person. Unless one of her fetishes specifically is putting on a silly costume, she is indulging her audience by dressing up that way. When I was goth, being a dark princess worked for me. Plenty of people like being dressed up like that, and more power to them. But the dominatrix shtick is as cliche and close binding as the people who’d love to see women dressed as a Gorean Kajira, those sterile fantasy women who make filling sexual desires their source of fufilment. Just like sexy slave girls can’t exist in reality, the dominatrix is so divorced from real life that it’s no wonder that being her is often the role of trained, expert professionals. If we accept that dominant women are subject to desire and there’s a shortage of motivated providers, the dominatrixes become a nessary evil.

I hear men talk about the lack of dominant women, and I’m mostly struck by how quick the polite and not so polite requests come in when they hear about me- can I put my hair up into a high ponytail so my face looks cruel? Paint my nails? It’s better when I sound like I’m disgusted. Would I mind? Can they buy me high heels? Do I ever paint my toes? Can they paint my toes? People interested in me as a dominant woman often seem to be peering fiercely through my cheerful persona to see if there’s a painted ice bitch beneath. That horrid hag, the dominatrix of their desire and their platonic ideal of dominant womanhood.
The most alienating part is the desperate relief from guys my own age announcing that at long last there’s a women their age, who likes this stuff. And I’m smart and slightly revolted at the idea of getting paid. “Thank yoooooou!” This leaves me feeling more indulgent than fierce. How the hell am I supposed to feel like an exploitive villain when the guy is waving banners because my first response was not to reach for his wallet? Jeeze, have some self respect, man!

One has to have some sympathy for the problem, though. Every I have a laundry list of kinks, so we’re all laboring under the same problem- we’re fetishists. Paraphilia means over specific interests. In my case it’s a very particular kind of violence. When I want a guy to be curled up sobbing and shivering, I’m as much asking him to occupy a role for me as he is when he wants a victimizer who happens to be inclined to look hyper femme and cranky. I get pretty bored with being asked if I paint my toenails (the most common question, actually, foot fetishes being constantly co-morbid with sub leanings in men), but that doesn’t stop me from asking him to put his arms above his head and look sad and hopeful so I can roll around making little ‘weeble-weeble’ noises of pleasure.
I sort of wonder what would happen if I met a guy who matched my kinks perfectly. Would I start asking him to fill the things I want in a vanilla partner. (Here, put these glasses on and read. Have interesting hobbies. Be more imaginative, damn it! What do you mean, ‘Noooo mistress, I’m a dumb jock who likes beer and Jesus’?!)
But being a package deal is greatly damaging to female sexuality, and I think the professional sex bitch makes the problem of dominant female availablity worse. I can’t rail at anyone in particular, so don’t assume I’m blaming pornographers, pros or clients specifically, but I speculate that life would be a lot better if sub guys who are my age didn’t greet me with glad cries that they were so thankful I wasn’t a pro.
An arguement I hear a lot is that pros are a safe outlet to learn about kinks. This is like trying to learn about sex from a prostitute. It’s a fantasy that comes up in sex postive social engineering, a utopia where expert companions guide neophytes into the realm of pleasure. Except that outside of seedy sci-fi and the sordid human mind, if you have sex with a pro there’s no garuntee that their vast experience will teach you anything than what a woman faking orgasm looks like. It also sets up the expectation that something so common should have an exorbatant pricetag attached, and that it’s reasonable to trade money for complete compliance. The compliance, in her PVC catsuit and Wicked Wanda persona, becomes the new standard and there just isn’t room to be normal kinky people.