Happy International Fetish Day!

I don’t have time for a proper post, but I did want to mark the occasion. The Guardian has more.

Kink For All!

If there’s anyone who reads this blog who doesn’t read Eileen, I’d like to point them to her post on Kink For All, a brilliant “unconference” about gender and sexuality that’s hopefully going to occur in NYC in March. I’ll be there, and so should you—check out http://kinkforall.org for more info.

lol 19th-century romantic poetry

I enjoy finding references to the covertly salacious in the canon of great Western literature:

And Julia sate with Juan, half embraced
And half retiring from the glowing arm,
Which trembled like the bosom where ‘t was placed;
Yet still she must have thought there was no harm,
Or else ‘t were easy to withdraw her waist;
But then the situation had its charm,
And then—God knows what next—I can’t go on;
I ‘m almost sorry that I e’er begun.

O Plato! Plato! you have paved the way,
With your confounded fantasies, to more
Immoral conduct by the fancied sway
Your system feigns o’er the controulless core
Of human hearts, than all the long array
Of poets and romancers:—You ‘re a bore,
A charlatan, a coxcomb—and have been,
At best, no better than a go-between.

And Julia’s voice was lost, except in sighs,
Until too late for useful conversation;
The tears were gushing from her gentle eyes,
I wish indeed they had not had occasion,
But who, alas! can love, and then be wise?
Not that remorse did not oppose temptation;
A little still she strove, and much repented
And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’—consented.

Am I part of the patriarchy?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my private fantasies, which I rarely discuss even with people I know are cool with BDSM, and how they fit into notions of privilege and patriarchy and buzzwords like that which I’ve started, inexplicably, to throw around a lot more these days.

So here’s the problem: the most potent of my fantasies, as I’ve discussed, exist in an explicitly gendered context. I don’t know what you’d call it—a fetish? a kink?—but undeniably there’s some part of me that gets off explicitly on the notion of men dominating women. Of sexually reinforcing the patriarchy and traditional gender roles, in a dehumanizing context.

Of course, all this is couched in notions of consent and, most importantly, fantasy. I think that, for the most part, I do feel okay with the fact that I think about things like this, and that I don’t see it as inherently amoral or objectionable to fantasize. However, I’m hesitant to think that I’d ever let these fantasies see the light of day, and if I ever did, it would definitely be in private and I’d have to really fucking trust the person with whom I were to act them out. There’s something too dangerous about playing with patriarchy, to my mind.

I worry about my desires, though, because they’re still quite potent, no matter how I bury them. I’m worried that I subvert the kink community’s aims to not be seen as tools of the patriarchy, and to emphasize that BDSM activities are safe and healthy and do not, of course, strictly take place in an M/f context. As a proud feminist, I want to reconcile my feminism with my kinkiness. But I can’t help wondering if I am, in fact, a tool of the patriarchy. It wouldn’t surprise me if, on a subconscious level, I developed my desires in response to real-life M/f dynamics that I’ve worked so hard to overthrow. Maybe it’s a way of letting go and not trying so hard to work outside of that paradigm. Or something like that. Maybe there’s just something sexy about being subjugated that is easy to contextualize in power dynamics that already exist in real life. But whatever it is, am I playing neatly into a radical feminist assumption that I’m only into BDSM because the patriarchy wants me to be?

Subversive Submissive noted in an excellent post that certain groups which promote “gender essentialism” (good phrase) are not representative of or even always condoned by the kink community. I think that’s a great thing to emphasize, though I wonder still whether what I think is, well, PC. I know it’s difficult for kink to be politically correct at all, but I feel like I’m straying into forbidden zones.

I hate this feeling

I hate having a crush on someone. It makes me into a person I really find very irritating. I have only contempt for the girls I interact with in classes and whatnot who are always mooning about some boy. I hate it when I get fixated on a person and I end up doing the same thing. But I’m so easily obsessed! I’m thrown into depression by every moment I can’t spend with the person; when we’re hanging out and they leave I silently wish they’d take me with them. I’m too shy to start up conversations with them; I’ll stare at their green dot in AIM and hope to see the icon that they’re typing. Of course, I think about them all the time too, both fantasizing them doing lovely unspeakable things to me and just imagining spending time together (I have a vivid imagination, and my fantasy is quite often totally non-sexual).

I had a boyfriend once, and I made a mistake with that for a variety of reasons. But one of them was that I was crushing on someone else at the time, and I couldn’t put that person out of my head. I said yes to the boyfriend because I knew the crush would never have me—we’d worked that out between us—but all the while, in my head, it wasn’t my boyfriend I was making out with.

It consumes me and it’s so ridiculous, and I can’t get rid of it. I hold these crushes for long periods of time: I’ve had only two major ones in the past eight years or so. I go back and forth to other people sometimes—but I always think that if I were to get together with someone else, I would be emotionally unfaithful to them—I still couldn’t get the crush out of my head.

You know what’s fun?

Being able to click the “I am over 18″ buttons in all honesty. Whee, I am actually allowed to be on the adult Internet!

Oh Oscar, you’re so witty…

We were reading this passage from Lady Windermere’s Fan in English today — it’s a play by everyone’s favourite late Victorian writer, Oscar Wilde. Three characters are talking about a party one of them is having, and Lord Darlington very much wants to go:

I may come tonight, mayn’t I? Do let me come.

It never ceases to amaze me the times in which I’m the only person in the room giggling uncontrollably.

Tarot reading…

I got a tarot deck as a gift recently, so I’ve been trying to learn how to read it. Even though I don’t have patience for spiritual mumbo-jumbo, it’s kind of fun. So I did a layout while thinking about what I should do to address the issue of getting laid. The card I got in the “outcome” position was the Devil, and the first meaning my handy-dandy tarot website reference gives for the Devil is “experiencing bondage”.

I think the tarot is trying to tell me something…

I was playing dress-up this evening

… as is my wont. Usually it’s so that I can try to look pretty in the slews of femmey clothing that I can’t afford to buy and will never wear in public, but that look so attractive I can’t resist. From the neck down, I think my body is attractive, and it’s fun to see what I could look like if I wore clothes that displayed it. 

Of course, I also have a head that doesn’t look like a pretty girl’s head, and the head more usually fits the outward, butch, not-at-all-attractive appearance. So tonight, after I paraded in front of my mirror in a couple dresses, I decided to see just how butch I could look. I was going for butch woman, not cross-dressing. I put on a black men’s dress shirt, black men’s dress pants, a black belt and this women’s brown leather jacket I’ve got, one of the few expensive clothing items my mom bought me in an attempt to make me wear women’s clothes. But weirdly enough, I looked in the mirror and for a split second I saw a guy’s face staring back at me. Of course, it quickly evolved into my own face, but it was distinctly bizarre to see a face that was not mine.

This is interesting, how what I see from the neck down influences what I see from the neck up. Between my usual clothes from the Target boys’ section, my dress-up girly clothes from Charlotte Russe and my “butch” outfit, not to mention my naked self, I’d managed to make my face look like four different people’s faces. However, it’s only in my standard attire that it looks like me. In the butch clothes, it looked like someone else’s face, but a face that “matched” — when I’m naked, with my female figure, or in clothes that fit the figure, I see a face and haircut that look like they’re on the wrong body — it just makes me feel that much more keenly how much I regret not being attractive in the conventional sense.

I think once or twice I’ve been told by a woman who likes women that I am attractive, or that a particular set of clothing makes me look attractive, or something like that, and I get all excited because it means that I could be sexually appealing to someone. But for all intents and purposes, I am bisexual — it hurts my feelings ridiculously that no straight man has ever told me I am attractive. (I firmly maintain that the only boyfriend I’ve had is in the closet.) And as much as it would be wonderful to have a girlfriend who thought I was hot, or something like that, no matter how hard I try I can’t just pretend to be gay. The opinion of guys matters to me too.

As my mother would say, “You can’t have it both ways.” If I want to be attractive to men, I need to play the game, like so many women do. I need to wear makeup, style my hair, wear clothes that show off my body, fuck, even wear underwear that’s not the most conservative style Target sells. And I don’t want to do these things, because I can’t be a feminine woman any more than I can be gay. Going through a day in lipstick and hose, pretending to be a different person, is more agonizing than thinking I’m ugly.

As I once said jokingly to someone, I think I need to develop some really weird fetish and film myself indulging in it and put it on the Internet so that there will be some subset of people who think I’m hot. (Which brings me to the topic of how the Internet has taught me how vanilla I really am, despite all my masochism and submission and whatnot. But that’s definitely another post.)

Masochism?

My hormones have been going like clockwork for years. Once a month I menstruate for 5-6 days. And once a month, in the couple days before menstruating, I’m awash in a sea of despair, disgust and depression. Once a month the only emotion that I can conjure up is self-loathing, and all anyone who has a real conversation with me at that time will hear about is what a fucking idiot I am.

Okay, that was a bit melodramatic. But it’s true that my PMS does manifest myself as depression more than anger or irritableness, and it’s true that when I’m depressed my greatest tendency is to beat myself up ad nauseam.

I’ve been bleeding for two days now, so last Thursday I had a fabulous meltdown, aggravated by exhaustion, in which I cursed myself for being ugly, stupid and a variety of other things. My mother, noticing that I was crying, attempted to note reality, namely that I’m reasonably intelligent and that I’m not ugly, but I had to choose between being myself and being popular/conventionally attractive, and that, as always tends to be repeated on such occasions, “I can’t have it both ways.”

Yes. True. But when I’m sobbing, I won’t listen to reason. I just won’t. I hear myself repeating this litany of my failings and people tend to get quite frustrated with me.At some point in this “conversation” my mom said something like, “I give up. You enjoy this, don’t you? Well fine, beat yourself up. This is ridiculous.” Well, she was exasperated — but ideas like “enjoying beating yourself up” set off little alarm bells in my head, and I have been thinking: there may be some truth in my mother’s comment.If I’ve gotten myself down, I certainly do tend to wallow. There is a certain release in saying over and over again what a failure I am, how I will never have a sexual or romantic partner, how I will never be able to do the things I want because I’m so stupid, how I’m sure everyone hates me, because I certainly hate myself. I writhe in my chair when I write this in my journal or say it to a friend, because I can feel it consuming me, and pushing a more balanced form of reality out of my mind. And I don’t want to stop at all. I can’t quite explain how this is that self-hatred is a desirable emotion, but I think that when I act like this I am wanting it to consume me. And I think, in some way, I am enjoying it.

This, in turn, sets off alarm bells. It’s too much like all that stuff they spent years warning teenagers about in school, how fucked-up you were if you had low self-esteem, how that led to physical self-harm and how fucked-up that was; all these specters of my days in health class are screaming at me that if I act like this, I need professional help. But I see myself as being relatively in control; I know reality exists. When I’m in this sort of mood it just suits me not to acknowledge it.

Vanilla people use “masochist” to mean someone who does difficult or ridiculous or soul-destroying things for pleasure, like taking calculus or intensive Latin, or applying to university. And sometimes they use it to describe behaviours they find perverted and bizarre. Kinky people use “masochist” to mean someone who enjoys receiving pain or being otherwise degraded, humiliated or dominated, in a sexual context. Well, perhaps this is a bit of both meanings. My sexual fantasies do not involve being told what an ugly idiot I am (because at least in fantasy-land I am attractive, I mutter bitterly), and the perverse pleasure I may gain from putting myself down is not a sexual one. But I’m finding a lot of difficulty seeing something inherently wrong with it — because if I acknowledge this behaviour as masochism, to me I’m acknowledging that it is normal. When I use words like “masochism” now, I’m so used to discarding all the preconceptions the rest of my world has fed me¹, and going with my gut instinct about what feels sane and appropriate to me. And I harm no one by my own detraction.

Then again, I could also be completely and utterly wrong.

[1. What's telling about these preconceptions is that I've been having some form of BDSM-y fantasy more or less since I can remember — but the first time I learned about BDSM I thought of it as something gross that I would never want to take part in.]