on kink and BDSM

"HANDSHAKE WITH MORTALITY

Which is what it is, and that unnerves the Immortals (with their bodies whole and perfect health and bubble of faux teenage invulnerability inflated to the point that it absorbs their entire lives (attempts,Blobbishly, to absorb everyone else’s, too.))

The prevailing narrative has to be that kink is a corrupt response to trauma, rather than a fairly obvious means of articulating, to one’s self, to one’s partners, what it is to live in a Universe that, by its nature, permits trauma. Beyond its interaction with the social signifiers we’re entrenched in, it examines consciousness itself, the experience of existence as an organism, and the negation and affirmation of each.

Engaging in play with fear, pain, and negation/death violates their sanctity, threatens to dilute their cultural currency in Binary Land (where there is light, and there is dark, and where we have the ability to cast you from the former to the latter at any time.) More directly: the problem with incorporating bondage and “torture” into sexual contexts is the suspicion it casts on our motives for binding and torturing humans at home and abroad. Stop making us feel weird."

http://jchastain.tumblr.com/post/31733903259/handshake-with-mortality

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a month ago i made a post talking about my sexuality that i titled "the puzzle world". i couldn't really use a better title to describe how i've been trying to approach my sexuality, particularly since transitioning. my need to improve my emotional health, have some sort of basic confidence in myself, and be able to somehow make some sort of living without becoming a homeless, drug-addled mess has meant building a complicated network of methods for shaming myself for any time i felt like i've succumbed to feelings. i felt like those feelings were just weaknesses created by abuse, and that it was my job to either overcome them or die. i've felt like the only way for everything to make sense is to have some sort of optimal partner that i completely and utterly trusted. but i haven't been able to trust anyone. i've thought loops, and then loops around those loops, and loops around those loops, then loops that return me back to the first loops - repeat ad infinitum.  but, of course, i still wasn't any closer to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. i thought there must be an optimal solution to the puzzle, and that i wasn't looking hard enough.

a couple of days ago i was bored and downloaded some cheesy lesbian BDSM comic about two girls meeting and eventually falling in love (which served more as a thinly veiled basic FAQ for BDSM than a real story). no, i'm not going to link it because it's not important for this story. in the back of my head i was saying "this ought to be really hot" but admitting that might have meant also admitting that the only stuff i was finding myself drawn towards (and finding myself REALLY drawn towards) to any degree was all based around themes of dominance and submission.

my earliest memories of sexuality are hazy but tend to all revolve dark, witchy, villainness sort of women and the themes of being taken control of or being kept in a box or being tied up...you get the point. i've always known this, but thought that they were sort of relics of an abusive childhood and me feeling immensely uncomfortable with my body pre-transition, and that i'd eventually "get over" them and move on. but as i've dealt with the abuse i've only felt the desire to indulge in this grow larger and harder to obscure.

i tried to laugh off reading the comic as a curiosity, like "haha look at me looking at this corny porn". that usually works pretty well. this time, though, i wasn't very far through that reading that comic and that defense wasn't really working. i started to panic and tried to go back to my old standby of "no, you're ok, it's fine, it's just a cheesy thing, you're fine". but i wasn't fine - i broke down and burst into tears. all the walls and things i had built up were collapsing all at once, and at that moment it was obvious to me that i've been hiding what i've really wanted all along, and that the only way for me to ever be happy was to confront all of it head on.

i guess i didn't want to be yet another transwoman who was into this stuff. yes, that's a weird stereotype you might notice if you're around a trans community for very long (along with the "transwomen like videogames/computers" thing). it seemed like every other trans person i met was into kink, and it seemed all like the same boring stuff  to me. i even felt the urge to make fun of them, i guess out of some sort of jealousy i couldn't articulate. my former roommates and good friends anna and daphny are a couple who are very much out in the open with basically anything and to do with their relationship, and i thought that was cool and i was happy for them...but i had to constantly shut my own feelings down and laugh to myself bitterly, saying "look those crazy ladies" whenever they did things with each other. and then all the other people i've met around the bay, i feel like i come into contact with tons and tons of queer, transwomen subs. i didn't want to just be another person like this. in the back of my head i was saying "these people are all messed up, not like me". i wanted to be strong - i didn't want to let someone to walk all over me, because i knew (or at least believed) that in the end they wouldn't understand or accept me, and just leave me by myself again. and if they weren't doing that, then i'd do it for them and cut them out. this has been a continuing theme of my life and my friendships.

i don't understand why i feel such a weirdly, inexplicably intense desire to engage in the kind of game of dominance and submission. i can say it strikes me (hehheh, get it) as a way to close the barriers between myself and the world around me, and get closer to another person (or multiple people, i suppose). but i'm still pretty afraid. where all of this comes from, i have no clue, nor do i really have any interest in figuring that out. i won't pretend like i know that much about it or have really any substantial experience, because i don't. but it's still there, the little unquenchable monster, and it's not going away any time soon.

after a night of no sleep, i decided that this is a big part of my life and a big part of how i see myself and i can't deny that any longer. any hope of me returning to the land of normal human beings is gone completely, disappeared into the ether. i am a freak, i am a mutant, hallelujah.

i've been crying while writing this post. this is an extremely hard subject for me to talk about, especially on a public blog like this. i felt i should share this - that it was only fair to share it, given my previous post. but do i really have that much of a desire to share these intimately personal things with a bunch of internet people, those strange steel cubes of people, i don't know who only want to read about videogames? not at all. but it's my blog. go be your steel cube selves somewhere else if you don't like it.