politics/philosophy

Sometime in my late 20's I said to myself "fuck it; the only people I'm hurting are figments of my imagination". I decided that I deserved sexual satisfaction as much as anybody else, even if my fantasies WERE exactly what my feminist peers hated most. I decided that I was an honorable, ethical person, and that I did not need to live my life ruled by the moral exhortations of people who obviously cared more about controlling my thoughts than about my actual well-being. I decided that I wanted to fucking well enjoy my fantasies for a change.

And that was when understanding began to dawn on me. Before this point I would have insisted that I viewed these scenes from outside, as if watching a movie, and that I wasn't in any role. Now I could see that I was MUCH more interested in the aggressor's perspective, imagining in minute detail what they said, did, & felt. I realized first that I was not, in fact, ever interested in mentally playing the part of the victimized girl, but that I totally got into the part of the raping man. Or, more accurately, the role of the men. ALL of them, simultaneously. Which is impossible in the real world, yes? And so the second thing I realized was that the sheer physical impossibility of my fantasies was important to me. It was significant that my role in the scene was as the sort of big, hairy, masculine guy that I had no interest in being (or shagging). It was significant that I often mentally played the part of a whole GROUP of these guys. It was significant that I also loved things like Japanese tentacle porn which were equally impossible.

It would be easy to assume that my rape fantasies have male aggressors and female victims because we live in a culture where women are shat on. That IS the feminist party line, isn't it? Nowadays the dogma goes so far as to call this a "rape culture". (And that assumption was a HUGE part of why I felt unable to talk about my fetish with anyone. A huge part of why I still avoid talking about it.) But that explanation just doesn't ring true for me. As I said I grew up in a household headed by a strong woman who ruled over us all, including her husband. I was taught that girls could do anything they wanted to, including have free & satisfying sex lives, and that equality between the sexes was the order of the day. And I lived by that teaching too. For instance, in 99% of my relationships I've been the one who made the first move toward sex. Heck, I'm accustomed to making the first move even in asking for a date. And maybe I've been freakishly lucky but I've had dozens of male lovers and never yet encountered one who was NOT greatly interested in my pleasure. In my world women have always been free sexual agents.

So yeah, the idea that my mind fixed on these archetypes because of some underlying belief that woman=victim simply does not hold water. But we also live in a culture where MEN are presumed to be victimizers. Even the 'good guys' are supposedly only a hair's breadth from turning into predators at any time. That is the message sent by things like the ubiquitous falsehood "1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted". It's the basis of the entire "rape culture" theory. And women, according to this dogma - the dogma that I grew up with, remember - are supposedly so morally superior that they would never, ever be sadistic rapists.

Take that message - that only men are capable of being sexually sadistic, and women are never rapists - and layer it with the usual prohibitions against ANY violence, and it hardly seems surprising that I might have had difficulty coming to terms with being a sexually sadistic woman. The funny thing is, I haven't ever really felt any of the agonizing guilt about 'abusing' people I like that seems so common with other doms. I figure its because my subconscious did this neat little trick, and turned my darkest fantasies into something that relied on it's own impossibility. I don't want to be a big, hairy, brutal guy. I don't want to be any guy. And thus on a very basic level I never worry that I'll go too far in realizing my dark dreams, because I never could!

This all makes even more sense when taking into account my disposition. If I had a D&D orientation it would be 'lawful good'. In a way you could say I play the role of an impossible villain because I can't imagine myself as the villain.

Now if all this sounds like I'm anti-feminist you've got the wrong idea. To repeat what I've said several times already - I grew up believing very strongly in the ideal of equality among all sexes/genders. I STILL HAVE those ideals. I think this sense of justice is at the heart of at least one part of my kink. But I've also had a pile of life experiences that've led me to doubt some of the feminist dogma I was taught. And in this case it makes a whole lot more sense to me to think of my fetish as being a response to negative messages I absorbed about men rather than negative messages I absorbed about women.

A self-protective twist of my subconscious elegantly accounts for the gender oddity in my fantasies. But I believe the core need expressed in them is a need for CONTROL. In many ways I was not in control when I was growing up. I guess this is true for every child, but perhaps more than usual in my family. And knowing the extent of my drive to control things (including non-sexual things) nowadays it makes perfect sense. My fantasies in the end are all about control.

And this final realization illuminates yet another facet of my fetish. You know how they say 'rape is not about sex, it's about control'? (Another one of those items of dogma I grew up with.) Well, in a way the girl in my fantasies IS also me, even while I consciously inhabit the role of the man/men. They are all symbolic figures constructed by my psyche. And the dramatic enactment of the rape itself symbolically represents me controlling my own sexuality.

That about sums it up for an analysis of my fetish. But it's really only the beginning of analyzing my sexuality. This entire essay has been about what was going on inside my head though the years; it says very little about my behaviors. It doesn't explain, for instance, how I got into sex work...how I became a domme...what I get out of forced feminization...or a lot of other things one might wonder about. This fetish is like the keystone of an arch: it's central to my sexuality but it's meaningless without all the other building blocks. I aim to try putting all the rest into words as well, but considering this bit took me weeks to compose I recommend not holding your breath in waiting for the next installment. :p

Tia's recent bout of self-analysis has prompted me to try doing the same for my own kink(s). I have so far avoided doing so because I feel like it's just too complicated to be able to express. I'm sure that people will focus on one thread of what is really a big tangled mass and miss the larger picture I mean to convey. And frankly, I don't feel like the general public has any claim to this kind of intimacy with me; I'm very comfortable sharing my body but the deep, dark corners of my mind belong to me alone.

But there are other things I want very much to say that will make a lot more sense after I fill in this backstory. So {deep breath} here goes..

I think I need to begin by talking about my fetish. I have a rape fetish. And I don't mean a fetish in the sense of 'something I like a lot that gets me really turned on'. I mean in the CLINICAL sense: something that I cannot achieve sexual satisfaction without. Something that has to be there for me to have an orgasm.

(Complication #1 - I don't know how common this is, but I know I'm not the only woman who has different sorts of orgasms from different kinds of stimulation. I have at least four kinds of orgasms. But my clitoral orgasms are like steak while the others are more like strawberries: they're all tasty but one leaves me satiated wheras the others aren't really filling unless I have a whole bunch of them, and then I'm hungry again soon.

When I speak of not being able to achieve orgasm without my fetish involved it's clitoral orgasms I'm talking about. And while I enjoy the other sorts very much, it's the clitoral orgasms I need to have to feel truly satisfied.)

I hope it goes without saying that I do not need to actually rape anybody to be satisfied. But I do need to be mentally focused on a certain kind of fantasy. The exact elements of these fantasies varies, but they generally involve some poor, helpless, innocent girl being sadistically raped and tortured by one or (more often) a whole gang of vicious men. And here we come to complication #2: the gender kink.

My fetish is something that has been a part of my sexuality for as long as I can remember, from the time I was a pre-adolescent dressing my Barbie dolls up in clothes made of paper towels so that Ken could tear them off her. But I didn't figure out until I was almost 30 that when I played these scenes out in my mind I was always in the role of the man.

It's not that I was sexually unsophisticated or inexperienced either. I was often the most lustfully adventurous person among my peers. In fact, sometimes I look back and wonder how the heck it took me so long to figure this shit out. But on the other hand, considering all the societal factors that come into play I suppose it makes sense.

Perhaps the single biggest obstacle to my understanding was the cultural assumption that one's sexual fantasies directly correlate with what one wants to make real. This assumption is SO prevalent it's difficult for most people, in my experience, to even grasp the idea that some of us are not wired that way, that for some of us the very impossibility of the fantasy is a necessary part of the thrill. It seems pretty obvious that this assumption is what's behind people's objections to "extreme" porn; it is certainly true that this assumption permeates discussions about porn ethics. So just imagine how it was for me as a girl, having grown up in a woman-headed family with STRONG feminist ideals, to be inescapably fixated on sexual fantasies that could not have been any more opposed to those ideals.

I couldn't talk to anyone about them because dude - violent rape fantasies? That I could not reach orgasm without? Yeah; you can imagine how most people would react to that. And I completely didn't understand that I saw myself as the big bad raping MAN either. I'm not only female, I'm femme. I'm very happy with my womanly body and not at all interested in becoming a man. I don't even want to look butch. That meant I MUST want to be the girl in the scene, right?

Right?

Of course not, but a decade or so of hearing about how porn - even ordinary vanilla porn - "objectified" and hurt women, well, that was plenty enough indoctrination to fuck with my ability to know myself. And MORE than enough indoctrination to fuck with my ability to communicate this shit to anyone. So I was left in a state of perpetual guilt, unable to share my whole sexuality with my lovers, unable to talk about it with my friends, unable even to discuss it with the several therapists I saw at various times during those years. I tried, more than once, to exorcise this dark part of myself. To stop 'giving in' to these thoughts that I was convinced were harmful. Which was useless of course.

{to be continued..}

I recently had a little bit of drama over at one of my tumblr blogs. I might write more about that later, I don't know. But it has definitely inspired me to start writing on a subject that I've been thinking about for a while: sissies.

The word "sissy" was first used as an affectionate synonym for sister. Which is a meaning it has in common usage even today. Its first published use was recorded in 1846 but by 1887 it had gained the additional meaning of "effeminate man or boy". It's not hard to imagine how the shift happened: even today some boys will emphasize their masculinity by denigrating those who are more feminine. The leap from calling your sister 'sissy' to calling the odd boy down the road who liked to wear pretty clothes and hated fighting a 'sissy' is an easy one.

I personally find this origin deeply satisfying. Because although it started out as a pejorative when applied to males* I think it also expressed a fundamental truth: sissies are akin to SISTERS.

I think that's a wonderful way of seeing sissies: not necessarily as fellow women**, but definitely as my sisters. I love the thought that every sissy out there is, in some sense, my sister under the skin.


* Sissy was considered pejorative because it denoted that the boy or man was not sufficiently masculine; i.e. he liked wearing pretty clothes, he had polite, gentle manners, he didn't like to fight, etc. Proper boys were simply not supposed to be like that. But we have grown past requiring that guys act like brutes lest they be sneered at, haven't we?


** Of course, some people who start off wearing the label 'sissy' later conclude that they ARE women.

I just finished reading Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. (You know, the fellow for whom masochism is named?) And I was surprised by how fascinating I found it. It's a bit slow to start, and of course there's the flowery archaic language to get used to, but once it got going the story itself grabbed me.

The tale involves a man (Severin) who dreams of becoming the slave of the woman he loves (Wanda), and what happens when they agree to make his dream a reality. I won't give away the plot, but much of the fascination of reading it was seeing just how many of the themes and ideas that run through modern femdom fantasies were present back then. (This book was first published 140 years ago!) There's bondage, physical punishments, humiliation, domestic servitude, cuckolding and object fetishes. Even the language is familiar; he speaks eloquently of cruel and strict Mistresses dominating adoring slaves.

There's also a very interesting thread of period morality running through it, preaching against sexism as it was understood in those days.

The novella is quite short, and for anyone with an interest in male submission/female domination I think well worth a read.