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The Past Is... Well, Something.

I'll be honest and say I don't remember the last time I mentioned Sunshine, my former sub. She's popped up here and there in the blog, but I hadn't actually talked to her in more than a month and a half - since October 17th - until today. She sent me an e-mail yesterday saying she'd seen one of my old messages while going through her mailbox and wanted to say hello.

We didn't part on the best of terms. She was, in fact, incredibly upset at me. I had told her I was not prepared to take her as a submissive; she felt betrayed; I was not in a mood to deal with the additional stress in my life; and she stopped talking to me. I'm not about to go back and analyze what happened. I could go into a lot more detail justifying my side of it, but it just doesn't matter - I was not willing to handle the way she was acting, she took exception to my deciding that and how I presented it, and there's not much more to it.

So we talked a bit today. She explained part of why she acted that way, told me she doesn't want to not talk to me forever... And then she asked me what had happened to our contract, the copies of which I had when we stopped talking. She had demanded of me, at the time, to send them back or destroy them, and I'd never responded to her; and she wanted to know what had happened.

What had happened is that I'd totally ignored her. Both copies are still in my correspondence in my bedroom. There are two very good reasons why I still have them.

The first isn't complicated; they're memories to me. I value my past a great deal. There are huge swathes of it which are sad, unpleasant, or extremely painful... And yet it's very important to me. I don't always like everything about myself, but I'm proud of who I've become. My past is a part of me, and every terrible event, every memory that makes me sad or cry or ache also brought me closer to who I am today and the place I am in life right now. I keep a lot of small things like that because of the memories they evoke, and I have no interest in losing that small tangible connection to my past.

The second is both very simple and far more complicated; those contracts are proof, tangible proof, of both of our involvement in case a... Problem arises. It's a sad truth, but there is enormous precedent for D/s relationships to end badly. It's a terrible idea to get into any such relationship if the people involved don't trust each other; but as my marriage proves beyond any reasonable doubt, you can go into a situation in good faith and absolute trust and still have it end far worse than you could possibly imagine. A contract written in no uncertain terms involving a discussion of BDSM, signed by her, in an envelope addressed in her hand and return-addressed to her, is about as strong a defense of at least original consent as you can have without multiple witnesses to support you.

I don't even mean defense necessarily against a legal dispute - an accusation of rape or assault, though obviously that's a concern; I mean just as much defense against the accusations of a loved one (a husband, a boyfriend, whatever)... Or against her.

My assumption, when she asked if I had, was that she was afraid I'd use the contract against her; and though I never would use it against her, it's not an unreasonable fear in general. She says, rather, that she asked at the time because she "didn't want me to have the part of her heart she put into it".

I can understand; that's part of why I kept them... And I'd do it again.

Now *I'm* the one in the majority...!

As anyone with a social media account has noticed lately, the word "privilege" has been thrown around a lot -- unfortunately, a lot of people who have some specific form of privilege often are completely unaware of it. That's what happens when you come to expect something as the standard and assume everyone is on the same page.

Privilege is sneaky like that.

On paper I'm a white, married, middle-class female, and I know I've had advantages in life (thanks for Catholic all-girls school, grandpa...*sigh*). In between the lines on that paper, though, I'm a queer-type person who falls somewhere in the space between cis and trans, who happens to be in an open quasi-companionate marriage with my best friend. I've felt varying degrees of "outside an acceptable range" in regards to almost everything for my whole life, which is why it was so strange to realize there are things even I take for granted.

A few months back, I was looking on FetLife (trying to find somewhere to fit in...which didn't quite work) and kept seeing ads on the sidebar featuring a heavy amount of ball torture. That was only one of many graphic pictures littering the site, but it was one that made me cringe the most -- I'm all for people doing things that work for them, but it'd be lying if it didn't squick me out a bit. It's just not my thing, and I'm okay with it being of interest to other people.

But to get away from the ball torture -- what about the other ads? Why did only that one bother me?

Oh. Because I'm more okay with the other images because they cater more to my interests and desires.

Oh.

Well, shit.

I asked Mike a few days later, "Do the ads on FetLife bother you?" and without any hesitation or need for me to explain further, he emphatically responded, "oh, yeah."

It was the first time I really sat down to think about how unfriendly the world is to the asexual crowd, to say nothing of non-straight white folks. Never before had I felt so much a part of the problem.

I had previously recognized that my own sex drive and interests caused some stress for Mike, which I handled mostly by stopping things like dirty texting and sending risque photos to his phone -- the timing was never right so it just seemed to be a waste of time -- but it had never occurred to me that society in general did a far better and more pervasive job of keeping my own partner outside his comfort zone than I did. So while I could apologize and take action to stop "forcibly rubbing my vagina all over him from a distance" (I'm great at saying I'm sorry), society just can't "take it all back" and stop making everything boil down to the state of one's erogenous zones.

The realization that I was one of the people these marketing traps were for certainly knocked me down a peg or two, and I wish I could do more than watch what I talk about or do. I mean, I *did* make sure to thumbs-up petitions on Fetlife to have better options for ad-choices...but it was just before I deleted my account, possibly negating the whole thing.

I don't know.

To everyone in the world more like Mike than me, I'm sorry that life in a lot of societies can sometimes make you feel like you're being slapped in the face by a sentient man-sized penis with breasts. I know what it's like to not be a target audience, and I'll do what I can to get people to stop assuming we all think about sex the same way or with the same frequency. It won't be much, but every little bit helps.

I hope so, anyway.

I read a lot of strange articles online...

I read a lot of strange articles online. Between blogs, Tumblrs, and the occasionally insane people I work with I get numerous strange links every day. And when my random online travels brought me to this article:

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/11/electric-shock-study-suggests-wed-rather-hurt-ourselves-others

my first instinct was to laugh. Still, I saved the link because I wanted to think more closely about it.

The article is about a behavioral study. Many people are familiar with Stanley Milgram's experiment about obedience to authority (a subject I clearly never think about... *cough*), and this was apparently at least partially inspired by those experiments. One Molly Crockett, a psychologist, set up an experiment where volunteers were randomly paired, and then one of the pair was chosen as the decider. One of the two was designated as who would receive a series of electric shocks; and then the decider got to pick between between two deals, each presenting some number of shocks for some amount of money. The money stood in as proxy for how much they valued harming themselves vs. harming others and varied from $0.15 to $15, and the shocks were calibrated to be "mildly painful but not intolerable".

Based on previous experience they expected people to be averse to shocking themselves, and this was correct; people were on average willing to take $0.30 less per shock to experience fewer shocks. But where they were expecting people to be far less caring about inflicting shocks on the other person, the study found that people were willing to lose twice as much - $0.60 less per shock on average - to give the other, totally anonymous, person fewer shocks.

This is fascinatingly counter-intuitive to me. It's very easy to picture people as being immensely selfish, and that would imply people would be willing to hand out as many shocks as were necessary to get the highest amount possible; instead people were going out of the way, "suffering" monetarily to save anonymous, unknown people from pain they'd signed up agreeing to endure.

And I mean, that isn't a bad thing; as a rule a willingness to be restrained on causing pain to others isn't a bad thing. I'm not sure if I'd hold back or not. I'm incredibly big on consent, but it's hard not to take their having volunteered in the first place as consent.They knew what was expected to happen; it's not like it's against their will. So why not?

People are just so scared of causing pain to other people, and it's... Adorable. In my experience, most people have some level of pain tolerance when it comes to sex. Not everyone likes being spanked; not everyone likes having their hair pulled; not everyone likes having nails run down there back; certainly not everyone likes needles or whips or hot wax... But most people enjoy some level of it. And on the other side, people who actually like inflicting pain? They're harder to find.

How much of that is because those people really aren't out there and how much is just the fear of being exposed? There's not much stigma in enjoying a little rough sex... But the stigma in being rough is endemic. I suspect that's what happened in the study; and it's certainly what happens day to day in the BDSM community.

On Doing Things (You Know...Things)

Everyday there come more new examples of people making bad choices based on desires they are told to ignore. Sometimes it's society, or parents, maybe peers -- even ourselves -- and the end result seems the same: 

We want to do The Thing.

We are told not to do The Thing.

We agonize.

We stamp it down.

We forget, maybe.

The Thing comes up over and over.

We want to do The Thing.

We agonize more.

At the least opportune time, we do The Thing.

Everything goes to hell.

Self loathing comes into play.

We still want to do The Thing.

Everything is still hell.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I was raised Catholic, so this is normal. But should it be?

About a year or so ago, I started listening to a podcast focusing on serial killers and other assorted deviants, mostly in the form of interviews with authors of books on the topic. I find these things fascinating because I don't understand the motivation people have to do awful things. (I can hate people, but never enough to go on a rampage or to maim anyone.)

I only listened for a little while because the sound quality was atrocious and the interviewer mostly talked about himself, but in the process of listening,I heard the word "sadist" thrown around frequently.

So they would lay out these situations, and I would find myself thinking that, if there wasn't so much stigma about wanting to do things that most people would consider bad or evil when done non-consensually, a lot of people could be saved jail time if they could get their interests out in more healthy ways.

When you deny yourself something, it stays at the forefront of your mind. If people suggest treating yourself in small ways when attempting to diet, it makes sense that the same idea can be applied to other things with more importance. Want a dungeon? There are people who would clamor to fill it. Are you a fan of bloodplay? There are people who would love to share their blood with you.

You get my point.

I just wish people could be better at accepting themselves. I wish it were more acceptable to be oneself and it were easier to fulfill features in healthy ways. There are people into so-called "bad things," and there are people into having those "bad things" done to them. It's possible to get needs met when you take time and effort and sanity and patience and mix them all together instead of shoving down explosive material until it has no choice but to burst and take out nearby people at the same time.

Be careful, be good to people, but be yourself and don't ignore desires just because not everyone understands them. Or else you'll do something drastic and far worse than initially intended, with far more extreme consequences than would've come from just doing The Thing in the first place.

A Little Bit Backwards

There've been a number of times I've listened to a Savage Lovecast and gotten an idea from it. I mean, he does advice and news day in and day out and it's hard to go through one of his podcasts without hearing something I feel is worth commenting on. This time, though, it was the other way around; I started writing about a topic and then listened to a Savage Lovecast that talked about the same topic. It was a funny turnaround, and almost made me feel like I should change it... Which I suppose doesn't make much sense. But either way.

I spent last week visiting family. Quite a lot of people did; it was, after all, Thanksgiving week. I mean, the day before Thanksgiving is one of the busiest travel days of the year (apparently its being the busiest is a myth? It's still in the top ten) as people scurry to their parents' or childrens' or siblings' or in-laws' houses to eat to much and watch ridiculous things on TV (If you're curious, we watched a bunch of Cutthroat Kitchen; turns out I'm a sucker for Alton Brown.). You play games, you talk, you reminisce, you argue and get grumpy over stupid things... All the things families do.

Thanksgiving is really the beginning of what is the biggest family season for a lot of people. There's Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, New Years, make-up or alternate holidays for split families, various school breaks, massive amounts of shopping... It's not uncommon for this time of year to be the only time you see more distant family members. The thing is, though, that you don't have just one family. Everyone has the family they're born into, but there's also the family you choose... And when the two groups aren't out to each other, that can bring conflict.

Most people have a chosen family separate from their biological family, even if that isn't how they define it. It consists of their friends, significant others and loved ones - the people they surround themselves with intentionally. Another term people use is "intentional families", but it really amounts to the same thing; the people you choose rather than the people you were handed.

The biggest conflict comes, like I said, when the two groups aren't entirely aware of each other. The common scenario is when you haven't come out as non-straight, and haven't introduced your family to the fact that your significant other is the same sex as you. Coming out as gay or lesbian or bi to your family can be traumatic; and yet from my own (probably selfish) point of view, coming out as poly or - the horror - kinky is easily as bad if not worse.

I mean, Ash and I currently do not have a third, and yet what if we did? What if I did have a slave who I did not want to leave behind?  I was having a conversation with Persephone the other day about what I want out of a submissive, and the comment that stuck in my mind was that I don't want someone bound to me by a collar; I want someone who loves their collar because they love me. And it may be totally alien to someone who doesn't feel the same way, but that type of situation isn't one where I would want to leave my sub - part of my family - when I went somewhere for the holidays.

It's complicated, of course, by their family. With my family I could, if I needed to, bring along a sub or a girlfriend as a "friend", and whether or not my parents were suspicious they would at least not say much. With Ash's family, I suspect it'd be rather harder; I can't think of a graceful way to bring a friend along with most of them, though we probably could if we talked fast enough. And with this hypothetical sub's family... Unless they were remarkably open-minded, unless you're out to them, it would be hard to explain her bringing a *married couple* with her to her family at the holidays.

Honestly, in some cases there's just no good answer; no matter how it's handled someone is going to be uncomfortable or upset.  Some families will turn it into a choice - your give family or your intentional family - and that choice is never good. It's not fair to you or your loved ones. To me, it comes back to that they are trying to love you for who they want you to be, not necessarily who you are; and that's an unsustainable situation in the long run. Dan Savage's advice is always, when you aren't dependent on them, simply tell them the truth; give them the ultimatum that they can either love you for who you are or hate you for not being who they wanted you to be. I agree with the advice... But it's scary. And it's advice that, for better or for worse, I haven't followed as of yet.

In this season, though, remember your families - both of them - and take comfort in them as best you can. My families - my given family and my chosen family - are both small... And I regret that most days. I miss them, and they should not be taken for granted... No matter how much stress they cause.

Coming to terms with things

Had I been aware of websites like Fetlife five years ago, I would've labeled myself submissive: I appreciate knowing explicitly what is expected of me, having certain things I am responsible for, and I have a habit of keeping track of my partners to make sure they are as taken care of as possible.

Flash forward a few years to when I met Mike. Here was (is) a man who had had submissives and slaves, knew what we wanted from them, and looked forward to having then again. It made me want to complete him; it gave me the challenge of being his perfect and ideal partner. Like with most of my boyfriends, I wanted to meet his needs and be better than all the rest. I wanted him to love me and treasure me above all else. I wanted to be magical. I wanted to be irreplaceable.

I wanted him to keep me.

For a long time, I felt like a failure because he pushed that side of me away. I would try to engage the part of him that he admitted he wished came out more, but he would shy away. On top of that, my sexual advances were equally useless, which left me feeling like I was treading water but never quite going anywhere.

From me, Mike wasn't looking for a sub. I didn't have what it took, especially because I couldn't drop the need for sexuality in these potential scenarios. It was confusing and stressful, but I focused on what I could provide in his life instead:

Understanding. Support. Encouragement. Love. Friendship. Laughter.

It took dating someone who actually actively wanted a completely submissive partner in their life to realize I wasn't actually naturally submissive. When I could get his dom side to come out, I kept being uncomfortable with the ideas he Mike was suggesting. I could go for bits and pieces, but he couldn't get into things piecemeal like that, and I couldn't just jump in completely like he needed. It was frustrating on both ends because we were both invested in him being happy and fulfilled. 

Then it hit me:

Thanks to my mother, I was raised with the idea that you did whatever you could to convince your partner to stay with you, since clearly no one would stay of their own accord otherwise. I was raised with the idea that oneself doesn't really matter, especially if being yourself means being alone.

So while the part of me that wants to take care of the people around me still exists, it isn't my main character trait anymore. For the first time in my life, I can basically be myself instead of doing what I can to twist myself to be good for someone else. It's still awkward at times, to be honest, and there's still that part of me that feels I'm letting Mike down by not being able to meet his needs entirely... But he isn't looking for me to do that, and I have no real problem letting him find someone else who can pick up where I left off. It takes some pressure off the part of me that still lingers from before, the part inherently feeling like a failure who worries so much about being abandoned.

I am starting to recognize my worth beyond my willingness to do anything for the people I love. It's difficult and stressful and painful at times -- and it's a long road to walk down on top of that. Thankfully I've got a pretty fantastic travel companion, so it's worth the trouble.