Kink In Exile

I just finished reading yet another paranoid article about blogging and lack of privacy. This is something I have a hard time speaking to because I suspect a lot of other people are a lot less “out” than I am. I don’t think that’s wrong, but I also don’t understand it.

I am both very open about my sexuality and my beliefs, and very protective of my privacy and personal space. I was born into Netgen; as Design Debutante puts it “We share things that are intensely private and never reveal our real names.” I don’t understand why I see article after frightened article about how my boss will read my blog. I know my boss will read my blog, I gave him the url.

No, I will not give you my real name, but I know a lot of my readers personally so I expect my real name gets associated with this blog. I do not talk about kinky sex with my co-workers, but I take this to be a basic principle of professionalism. Do you ask about your co-worker’s sex lives? What about your mother’s? I worked in pornography for 2 years, and it was still strictly business.

I guess what it comes down to is that I don’t really have anything to hide. I have made life choices that allow that because I am both unwilling to give up my desires and dubious of my ability to hide them from the world. And furthermore, the worst violations of privacy I have suffered happened not through the accidental discovery of my blog, but through the old fashioned method of malicious, offline gossip.

P.S. You may have noticed that today is not Friday, and this week’s posts are early. This is because I am running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to teach Quark basics in a language I can barely communicate in, and get to a conference for my real job, but I didn’t want to leave you without posts. Stay tuned and I promise your normal posting schedule will resume shortly.

I am a product of academia.  I surround myself with words; naming, and writing are integral to my experience of a thing.  I find it really easy to write from the bottom’s perspective and almost impossible to write from the top.  Needless to say, I find this frustrating.

Perhaps we as a community focus more on the emotional experience of the bottom than that of the top.  I for one tend to process my experiences of bottoming in a more in-depth way; I almost have to in order to make them safe.  I think of bottoming in emotional terms, I think about the sensations I want and how I want them to make me feel.  I think about my fears too, and contexts in which it is ok to play with them.  I think of topping visually.  I see the scene before I feel it.  It is like photography but backwards…in photography I say “this is the image we are going for” and then I work to match accessories, backgrounds, and models to the image I want.  Topping kind of goes from the ground up…it starts with a person who makes something click in my head because I do not walk through the world wanting to slam people against walls, rip their clothes off, force them to their knees, tie their hands behind their backs, and shove their heads down to make them lick my boots before I beat them till they scream.  I really need to meet the right person before all that flashes in front of my eyes.  But as you can see from the above description it is still very visual.  I think of topping in physical terms; I think of bottoming in emotional terms, and the physical is harder for me to write. 

This visual thought process is somewhat misleading as well.  Don’t get me wrong, I get off on watching people process pain and it’s awfully nice if I’m the one causing that pain.  However, somewhere under all that imagery, I am looking to cause my bottom to feel a certain way on an emotional level.  I am not looking to break people, or to make them fall madly in love with me.  If anything I am looking to comfort them.  I don’t know where I got this idea, but somehow I have absorbed the notion that kinky sex should make us more at peace with ourselves.  It should make us feel loved and cherished.  Yes, between coming up with absurd role-plays requiring serious research into costuming and dripping hot wax on very perky nipples, and somewhere beneath wanting to see that moment of panic in a bottom’s eyes because they don’t know if they can take anymore and I don’t look ready to stop, I want to make them feel loved, and cherished, and safe.  I want to make them go through feelings of fear, humiliation, panic, lust, and submission first, but I always want to bring them to a safe place with pink fluffy bunnies in the end.  Funny isn’t it?

One of the things I have been thinking about a lot lately is the nature of being kinky. Is this a sexual orientation or a way of classifying what you did last night? If you were alone on a desert island would you still be kinky?

The first time I went to a fetish club was when I was 17, and backpacking through Europe. For me kinky sex has always been a communal event. It was about the clubs, play parties, conferences, classes, and groups. I had the benefit of coming out in a college town, and of having patient mentors and a supportive community. And of course I have been lucky enough to play with some amazing people who never cease to challenge and inspire me.

So what happens when you divorce kink from community? From context and availability? One of the questions that I kept asking myself when I moved from my supportive college town to a rural rice farming community is “am I still kinky?” Am I kinky if I haven’t been to a play party in six months? What about if I’m not even doing this in the privacy of my own home? (Come to think of it, I’m the only foreigner in a 20km radius; there is no privacy in my own home.)

I think what I am coming to realize is that I would, in fact, still be kinky on a desert island. I’m also realizing that kink is important to me for reasons that go far beyond “it makes me wet,” although I will say that “it makes me wet” is all the reason I need. Kink speaks to honesty about sex and a comfort with my body, my partners, and my desires.

One of my favorite approaches to play is to make my partner tell me their secrets, make them beg for it…I might already know that you like spanking, and foot worship, but I want to hear it from you. It turns me on for a lot of reasons not least of which being the fact that I know how hard it is to ask for these things. I think it takes incredible strength to do so, and that’s a turn on. Of course it’s always fun to watch a bottom blush too.

One of the rewarding things about the kink scene for me is that I can bring all those scary things I shouldn’t want, lay them out on the table, and people will appreciate my honesty even if they aren’t interested in playing with me. In this we share common mores. We understand each other. We have a common language, and we understand the importance of naming these things.

“A desire that cannot be named or described is a desire that cannot be valued, acted upon, or used as the basis for an identity.”

Pat Califia in the introduction to Public Sex

“Basis for identity”…this to me is interesting because identity, or more importantly shared identity, is one of the things we use to form interest based communities, but then we use our participation in interest based communities to further define our identities. So I define myself based on my participation in the kink community, but I participate in the kink community because I am kinky. And now I have no community, so where does that leave me? I am clearly not a rice farmer. I am also a pretty poor bamboo broom maker; believe me, I’ve tried. But I am most decidedly still kinky. I still day dream about scary, twisted, bloody scenes. I still have long conversations with my friends and former play partners about the nature of BDSM. And I am involved (for some definitions of involved) with someone who attracted me because he has both an interest in bondage and in humanitarian aid work. This is what I mean when I say kink in exile. This is kink divorced from all the comforts and convenience of home, but it is still fundamentally kinky. I was born this way, and I am damn grateful for it. Welcome to my desert island.

I’m a switch. Right now I’m feeling very top-y, and perhaps because I haven’t visited this headspace in a while I am feeling particularly hungry in it. However, this is an issue I can only write from the bottom perspective because that is where I have experienced it…

I was reading Maymay’s blog and something he wrote struck a cord…

“When you beat me, I want you to like doing it. When you hurt me, I want you to want me to hurt. When we play, I want to feel us both acting from instinct, not from expectation. I will simply make no room for spurious things in my sex.”

I like pain, but I only like it when my partner truly relishes hurting me. I don’t want kink as a gift. I refuse to apologies for my sexuality, and I do not want to be loved in spite of my desires. A large part of why I play has to do with connections, with finding someone who wants this as much as I do and who understands why it’s so important to me. I need a partner who understands to some degree why I want to go into those scary messy places, and who actively enjoys taking me there. I appreciate that when my vanilla partners try something kinky they are doing it because they care about me and want me to be happy, but I’m afraid that misses the point.

I do this not just for the pain but because of the sense of belonging that comes with it. I get off on other people’s pleasure too – if my partner is hurting me out of guilt rather than an intense desire to watch me suffer it doesn’t work for me. And then of course there is context. Pain without context is scary. Bad scary. I know logically that my partners aren’t out to get me, but if I have not already put them in the context of kink in my mind I can’t relax and go with the scene. My play partners come to my bed with a lot of shared expectations and experiences. This is not a replacement for communication, but it is a basis for it. In my scenes there is a beginning and an end, there are guidelines, safe words, and more often than not, years of practice with those very scary looking toys. My vanilla partners come from a different place and with different assumptions. There is a difference between hitting me because I begged you to and hitting me because you know, in some abstract way, that I enjoy it.

These things are hard to say, and I’m not entirely sure why. It’s not often that expressing an opinion about my sexuality leaves me feeling small and vulnerable. Perhaps it is because I was raised to be grateful for all gifts, and I hate to turn down the people I love. Perhaps because it means I have to think about all those scary emotional things that lie beneath the sheer joy of masochism. In any case, I suspect that this post strays from the context of Maymay’s words, but that’s life.

I feel like maybe I should start this blog off with something fun, and titillating.  However, the splintering in the kink community is something that has been on my mind of late, and so I’m going to start with something political.  Next week I promise something sexy…

There is a phenomenon in the kink scene that I don’t understand.  We are a small, often times ostracized, community.  I expect there to be some kind of solidarity, and yet the scene strikes me as being incredibly splintered.  Naturally we have different interests, we have different groups too that cater to and support those interests.  But, why must we criticize each other so often?  There is a big difference between “that is not how I play,” and “that’s the wrong way to play.”  And the separation doesn’t end at our scenes.  We carry it through judging people by age, sexual preference, and group affiliation.  This person plays too hard, that other not hard enough.  Are we really so insecure in our own individual sexualities that we feel threatened by anything and everything that is different? 

I am not asking you to try things that don’t turn you on.  In fact, I think having respect for other people’s desires includes respecting their right to not participate in any activity they don’t desire.  Sexual liberation is not about every human being’s right to engage in the kind of sexual expression that you enjoy.  It is about the right of every adult to determine for themselves how they wish to express their sexuality.  It is about being able to say “thank you, but I’m not interested in this,” without saying “this is disgusting and wrong how could you ask me to do it?!” and still have your “no” respected.

Sure there are things that bother me.  There are things that make me feel physically ill when I see them, and there are scenes that challenge my spiritual and political beliefs.  But there are people who enjoy them, who have every right to enjoy them, and who do not force me to stay and watch.  So if it bothers me I walk away.  Because I have been lucky enough to have some really twisted sex and some pretty bloody scenes outside of the privacy of my own bedroom, and if you play in a glass dungeon you probably shouldn’t throw bricks. 

Well that seems like an appropriate enough title now doesn’t it? So welcome to my latest attempt at carving out some sanity and instilling some routine into my life. The idea of this blog is both to give me a space to do a lot of that sex geeking that is currently spilling over my personal journal, IM conversations, and otherwise not sexually themed political writing, and force me to come up with something constructive, and hopefully coherent, on a regular basis.

This Blog will occasionally feature erotic writing or photography, but more often than not I hope to post sexually themed non-fiction, and random opinion pieces having to do with alternative sexuality, and BDSM.