The Bad Thing and Some Other Things

Jack cheated on me.

There are people out there who are going to say of course, that that's what happens--open relationships are doomed to jealousy and failure. And there are people out there who are going to be very confused as to how anyone can cheat in an open relationship. That's the point of open relationships, right? That no one can actually cheat because they're open.

Those people can seriously just stop reading this blog.

About six weeks ago, Jack went out to a party. Not even that kind of party, just a gathering at someone's house. I was invited, but I was tired from working all day and had to be up early for work the next day, so I went home. We argued over the phone, about how late he would be out, and he told me I was "being really immature." I hung up. I called back a little while later, and he refused to talk about it, and acted like everything was fine. I was really upset. I think I talked to him again at some point and apologized, but I honestly can't remember. Maybe I just left a message?

He didn't come home until really late--really early the next morning, actually. 5 or 6 or something equally ridiculous. Again, I don't exactly remember. we were both tired and out of it and something was...off. Something felt weird. And then Jack admitted that he'd made out with a girl at the party.

Whatever. He'd always asked before making out with anyone new, but a few kisses are just a few kisses, right? We talked about things, we were both annoyed and irritable, I went back to sleep. I got up and went to work the next day. No big thing, felt a little icky but I knew it would be fine.

Of course it turned out it wasn't fine at all. It turned out a lot more happened than kissing, though I won't go into details here, I actually had to sit down across from Jack and interrogate him for every detail. It was kind of awful. I haven't been completely okay since. So he did stuff I wasn't comfortable with, with a person I didn't know well, and then he lied to me about it and that, violating the rules of our open arrangement (we had always asked before doing stuff with new people) and, most importantly, lying about what happened to cover your ass, well, that's what we call cheating.

I am currently drinking many wine coolers. Things were actually getting to be close to back to normal, and then yesterday my friend who I was supposed to hang out with completely blew me off and today, through a series of sitcom-like mishaps, I discovered Jack still has this other girl's number in his phone, well...I feel like shit all over again.

I acknowledge that this was not even a little bit the other girl's fault, as she had no idea any of this was against the rules and really it was Jack's responsibility to tell her and so really it's all his fault but I'm still not in a huge rush to be her new bff. In fact, for the first week after The Event, I had a mild panic attack when her name came up in conversation. It doesn't help that she is one of those always very put-together girls, with her hair always done and her makeup always perfect and her perfect fucking pictures on facebook (which I no longer sign onto if I can possibly avoid it, for fear of running across a picture of her) and I'm sitting here paint-stained jeans and one of Jack's nasty t-shirts with unwashed hair and the ten extra pounds I've gained back in the six week since this happened. Who wouldn't choose her over me?

But mostly, at this point, I just feel exhausted and like it's all unfair. You know where Jack is right now? At a motherfucking party. And I'm at home, drinking ALL OF THE WINE COOLERS by myself, in my one pair of paint jeans that are the only jeans that fit watching old episodes of "Friday Night Lights" and writing in my motherfucking blog. I've mostly been too upset to go out or want to see anyone so my friendships are maybe falling apart and I'm bored out of my mind and I don't know why I'm the one who's suffering when I didn't do any goddamn thing wrong. And my back is killing me because I've done nothing but angrily crochet for the past two days.

So yeah. I haven't been going to parties or playing with other people or even been dealing that well with masturbation because half the time I feel like my body is so repulsive. And I thought I was over all of this but all of a sudden it just came back today.

So you see why I haven't felt much like blogging lately.

Links and Stuff--the Sexademic

I knew I'd be back sooner than I expected. I'm really just here to talk about one of my biggest pet peeves when talking to people about sex. I'm really, really tired of hearing about "vaginal orgasms."

See, the only thing I have ever heard about the mythical vaginal orgasm (that somehow supposedly more valuable orgasm that is achieved through straight up in-out-in-out penetration alone) is that people aren't having them. Seriously. I have heard this from friends, I have heard it from strangers, I have read it in countless anonymous confessions on the internet. It's making me exhausted.

Which is why I love these two posts by the Sexademic. I love most of her posts, actually, but I refer to those two in particular a lot in my conversations about sex. So go read them!

So yeah...this is my little blog homage to the Sexademic. I wish I were as smart and levelheaded as she. But before I go, I would just like to say: Ladies, if you don't come during penetration, but you come when you touch yourself on the clit, touch yourself on the clit during penetration. Or get whoever's doing the penetrating to touch you on the clit during penetration.

Thank you. That is all.

Bad Things

I'm sure I'll be back to posting again sooner than I think right now, but I figured I should post this rather than just disappear.

Some things have happened between me and Jack the past few days that have left me less than enthusiastic about...well...our relationship, BDSM play, sex with Jack, sex with anyone else. You know, pretty much everything I blog about here.

Consider this notice of a possible hiatus.

Victim

I was reading Amanda Hess' wonderful blog at TBD the other day, and she's been doing this feature where LGBT victims of hate crimes in the D.C. area tell the story of their assaults. And reading this one, well, I guess how I felt is best described by the word "triggered"--for whatever reason, all I could think about for the rest of the day was The Day I Got Jumped. I was trying to run errands in Manhattan, shopping for books for my one year old niece, and I kept expecting someone to just walk up to me and punch me. By the time I got home, I was freaking out a little.

I started wondering if things would have been different if I'd tried harder to get the girl who jumped me arrested. I started thinking about the first time something like this happened to me, thinking about my personal history of victimhood. Breaking down why I always feel so helpless when something like this happens.

It was sometime in the first few weeks of my sophomore year of high school--I would've been 14. My (horrible, abusive) then-boyfriend and I would go to the park after school and make out. That day, we were approached by four guys from the neighborhood, one who lived on my street hung back. They demanded my boyfriend's watch, a tacky knockoff his dad had bought him in New York. He refused. They asked if I had any money, and when I said no (because I didn't) they turned their attention back to him. He kept refusing to give them his watch--they took his glasses, then punched him in the jaw and took the watch off his wrist.

I didn't want to tell anyone, not even my parents. Technically, I was only a witness, as I hadn't been touched and they hadn't taken anything from me, but I was terrified and shaken up. We went back to the school, where it turned out something like six kids had been mugged by the same group. The police were called, we went and gave statements, they arrested the muggers.

I didn't go to school the next day, I was too shaken up. When I did go back, a girl who was friends with the muggers threatened me. People made fun of all of us for talking to the police, for making such a big deal out of basically having our lunch money stolen on the playground. When one of the muggers plead not guilty and his case went to trial, we all had to testify and the defense attorney tried to make me look stupid, tried to make me out to be a ditzy girl who couldn't keep her story straight. There was a story in the local paper where the reporter talked to the mugger's family, who called us racists and whiners, said it was ridiculous to make such a big deal out of nothing. They didn't talk to any of the victims (at least one of whom was the same race as the muggers).

Years later, when I got groped on the bus, I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to stand up and yell, punch the guy, make a scene--but I looked around the bus, and all I could think was "no one will think this is a big deal. They'll think I'm freaking out for no reason. They'll think I'm a racist." So I didn't tell anyone (except, later that night, Jack), especially my mother, who I knew would want to call the police.

When I got jumped six months after that, and my mother did call the police, all I could think was "Oh, no, not again." I was actually relieved when the officer couldn't find the girls or any witnesses, glad that I never had to deal with any of it again.

And while it seems like I can't shut up about my victimhood here online, I almost never talk about these things in real life, except maybe sometimes to Jack. I'm scared that if I mention them I'll be brushed off, because I'm making a big deal out of nothing. I'm whining. In a world where something like 1 in 4 women has been raped, who cares that some guy grabbed my leg and ass, tried to touch my genitals? It's not a big deal, right?

A friend of mine asked for help online figuring out how to deal with street harassment yesterday. She said it wasn't something she'd ever really encountered before and she didn't know what to do, and she was worried that she was making a big deal out of nothing. I keep wanting to say that it is a big deal, it's not nothing, and if we don't make a big deal out of things like this, they continue. But that makes me feel like a hypocrite.

Shameless Bandwagon Jumping

I signed up for Formspring. On the one hand, I doubt anyone will even use it or ask things, on the other I'm vaguely worried because encouraging any sort of anonymous commentary makes me nervous. I'll probably delete my account when I get bored with it. But for now, go ahead, ask me anything.

Happy Birthday to one of my Favorite Organizations...ans also, sex party.

So last night was the one-year anniversary party for NYC TNG, the organization that changed the way I go to parties.

For folks not in the scene, TNG stands for, well, The Next Generation. Yes, just like "Star Trek." TNG groups exist to introduce younger kinksters (usually between the ages of 18 and 35) into the public scene. Our own TNG group here in New York runs munches before a lot of the major parties, providing a chance to meet people in a diner and actually talk in a fairly low-pressure environment. It's so much easier to have a for reals conversation in the diner over pierogies than to try to talk to someone in the club at the party, over the music and the other ambient noise.

I actually hadn't realized how much NYC TNG has changed the way I interact with people in the scene until I was listening to the most recent Freedom of Fetish podcast. In answering the question of how to meet people in the scene, the host (the fabulous Raven Lightholme) and her guest say not to try to meet people at a party. Go to munches, they say, join groups on FetLife, talk to people. And I realized that before NYC TNG, meeting people at parties, playing with them far sooner than I would now, I blundered into lots of awkward situations. I've made most of my friends through TNG--not just scene friends, but friend friends, people I go out to dinner and to bars with.

So happy birthday, NYC TNG, you and your moderators kind of changed my life.
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The other night, Jack and I went to a sex party. Like, a for reals sex party at an apartment where people were fucking as well as getting beaten up. It was very fun and friendly and there were cookies and dildos and I saw a girl actually get DPed right there in the room and I was naked in front of people I'd only just met, which was new and scary for me.

The main thing that stuck with me from the sex party, though, is how awesome everyone was about using barriers. There were gloves and condoms everywhere, and toys and hands got covered before they went in on on anyone's genitals. It's something that I am not always that careful about. It's very different watching everyone conscientiously putting on gloves and condoming toys from hearing from my friends in college "Well, he put on a condom before he came..." I'm resolving to be more diligent about barriers.

Sometimes, after an intense scene or something new and exciting that I haven't done before, I feel...icky. Emotionally wrung out, but also weird and nervous and like people somehow will magically know exactly what I've been doing and will judge me and won't respect me. I used to almost always feel like this after anal sex, I felt like this after I got Eiffel Towered that one time, and I'm feeling kind of like that right now.

Jack and I just had a fairly intense scene. He made me cry and grovel and beg and it was wonderful while it was going on, but now I feel kind of gross. It's like I'm slut-shaming myself inside my head--nice girls don't do this, if people knew it'd be all over, they'd be so disgusted. It's like the end of 9 1/2 Weeks, the horrible, shaming end sequence that I hate. I feel so exposed and all I want to do is hide. Even with lots of lovely aftercare, even with hugs and kisses and reassurances it happens.

Getting dressed again helped, but I'm still a little icky-feeling. I kind of just want to be alone. Jack went out and I'm making mac and cheese, because comfort food seems like a good idea. But I really, really want to know if anyone else ever feels like this. Hey, fellow bottoms, does this happen to you? If it does, how do you deal with it? I could use some advice.

So last night I went out for a few drinks with some friends. Jack had an appointment early this morning, so he stayed home to go to bed early. I knew he wanted me to polish his shoes for said appointment, but wasn't sure if I should do it when I got home or just go to bed.

I came in at around 2:00am, still a little bit tipsy. I unlocked the door, went down the hall towards the bedroom and there, in the middle of the hall, were the shoes and the shoe polish kit, with a post-it note attached that read "<3 ATTN: PET <3" Apparently I was still expected to polish the shoes. I went towards the living room, to plug in my phone which had died while we were at the bar. As I reached to turn on the light, I happened to look up at the ceiling. Before even turning on the light, I saw it there on the ceiling--a centipede.

Now, as a kid I was utterly terrified of any sort of invertebrate creature--ticks, spiders, and any and all bugs. Terrified. Even a closet moth would flip me the fuck out. These days I'm usually pretty calm, but there are two things I am still completely, ridiculously, unreasonably afraid of--black widow spiders and centipedes. Black widows, of course, are fuckoff huge and creepy looking and full of hemotoxic venom that can kill you, so I feel like my fear of them is pretty reasonable. And, of course, I've never seen a black widow in person. Centipedes are really creepy looking, but the kind that live in New York are not at all harmful to humans. Centipedes, however, appear in our apartment all the goddamn time and I am so scared of them I can't cope with it at all. One time, when there was a centipede in our bathtub, I went to the library to use their bathroom. i am unreasonably terrified of them.

So there's a centipede, a creature of which I am terrified beyond all reason, on the living room ceiling. And it's 2:00 in the morning, and Jack is sleeping, and I'm a little drunk and I have to polish Jack's shoes.

I did what any reasonable adult would do--I ran into the living room, grabbed my laptop to protect it from the centipede, then grabbed Jack's shoes and the polish and went and hid in the bathroom (which is roughly the size of a closet, since of course this is a New York apartment) and polished the shoes.

I feel like the Allie Brosh of consensual D/s.

My life is so difficult...

Eve, who I mentioned in the previous post, is having a party tomorrow. Eve's parties are always awesome, filled with amazing food and awesome beer and attractive, smart people and I always have a really good time (well, except for that one time with the tequila, but that was an anomaly). Also, we haven't hung out with Eve in a while, because she's been out of town.

Tomorrow night there is also a play party, and through the magic of modern technology, I just got a message from a friend who is super hot and also gives awesome spankings, saying that her hand misses my ass.

Damn. What do I do now?

A Whole Bunch of Stuff

I know, worst post title ever.

I haven't blogged in a while. A lot has been going on, I've been cranky, Jack has been around the house more which is less conducive to writing, and since he's been on a less regular schedule we've both been partying more. Basically, I am full of excuses.

While I was busy not blogging, a new Carnival of Kinky Feminists came out! And they included one of my posts again! And lots of other peoples' posts that are far more interesting than mine, so you should go and read them!

While I was reading the various posts in this second Carnival post, I came across one entitled "What We're Expected to Be" over at Beyond the Hills and found it really fascinating. Roles are so complicated, and they get more complicated (for me at least) all the time.

You see, Jack has a bit of a masochistic side--sometimes he likes some pain and attention. And I have no problem providing pain, but I tend to freak the fuck out if I perceive a power shift. Basically, if a scene is going on, I am submissive. I do not want to be in control, I don't want to have the power. Order me to hurt you, and I'm game, but don't put me in control, that makes me really uncomfortable. Once, while discussing this, Jack said "The role of submissive, of being owned by me, so comforting that you don't want anything to threaten that." And it's true.

A story: So Jack and I have this friend, let's call her Eve. Eve and I once went dildo shopping together, and later I fucked her with a strap-on. While said fucking was going on, Eve told me to spank her. "What?" I said, thinking I'd misheard her. "SPANK ME!" she repeated, slightly more emphatically. So I did, while fucking her from behind, grinning from ear-to-ear the entire time while Jack watched. It was fun!

Now, it's possible to see all of this as me switching. I fucked a girl, I spanked her, clearly the roles here are obvious. But in my mind, I spanked a girl because she told me to, and that makes all the difference. I like taking orders, I like doing what I'm told. I will totally hold someone down, or hit them or bite them, but I'm not topping them, I'm helping or following orders. I like helping, but I have no interest in topping.
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Jack and I have been working on reworking the nonmonagamous aspect of our relationship. The break down of our rules has been, for the past year and a half or so, that I get to have sex with women, either in threesomes or by myself. And Jack gets to beat people up. Which...um...kind of wasn't that fair to Jack, despite the impressive mental contortions I kept going through to explain why this arrangement was totally fair and fine and anyway it works for us so it's really not your business and why are you questioning me and grrrrr.

You may have detected the confrontational tone there. Obviously I was having some trouble with things. But we talked the other day, and re-drew some boundaries (Oral sex for everyone! YAY!) and established a compromise in which, well, we both get to have sex with other women, for certain definitions of sex, but we'll also be doing more D/s stuff together.

We used to do a lot more D/s and service-y type stuff before we moved in together. Have I mentioned that here before? It was fun and hot and made me feel close and connected to Jack even when we only got to see each other on week-ends. I had lists of things to do! I kept a journal! And a lot of my fantasies have been D/s oriented, even before I knew I was kinky. But when we moved in together and actually shared a living space, lists of household tasks that I'd thought were super hot before abruptly became anything but sexy.

It also didn't help that I, not knowing about FetLife had fallen into an unfortunate Maledom/femsub community online where 24/7 was kind of viewed as the only real, authentic way to do D/s. It was kind of like how things were with my college boyfriend, when I was convinced we needed to get engaged because that's what people did and that's the next step and so why haven't you proposed to me yet? I (in my naive, deluded state) thought 24/7 total power exchange was the direction in which our relationship must inevitably go!

Now I realize I don't have to get married if I don't want to, and that D/s and service can be a part of our relationship without my being confined to a cage or not allowed on the furniture. Not that there's anything wrong with relationships where someone is confined to a cage or has to sit on the floor, it's just not for me. Like how marriage and 2.5 kids and a house in the suburbs aren't for everyone.

Actually, that's why actually being on FetLife and being part of a live-and-in-person kink scene and having kinky friends is so great--because you get to know people who have all different type of relationships that work in all kinds of ways and it's easier to avoid falling into the trap of reading one group on the whole internet and thinking everybody does it this way, so I have to do it this way, too.
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More stuff about body image: I have gained back some weight. I realize this is not supposed to bother me, and I actually thought it didn't. I'm working on eating better, not out of a desire to lose weight but more because I've realized I'm a grown up and I need to stop eating like a teenager whose parents aren't home. Also, I got tired of my coworkers making fun of my Hot Pocket addiction.

Like I said, I thought it didn't bother me. Sure, I've gained ten pounds, but don't my tits look great? I was feeling pretty awesome...

...until I found myself in bed with a friend who is totally conventionally attractive (which is to say, attractive in a way agreed upon by most of society, not necessarily conventional-looking), and she kept telling me I was pretty. Every time she said it, I felt awful and embarrassed and like I might cry. I wanted to shout "Stop saying that!"

So yeah...so much for being totally over my body image issues. I need to work on this.

THIS! So much THIS!

So, um, this post on the Pervocracy. You should totally read it! You should read it RIGHT NOW! Because everything it says is true and perfectly put.

And then you should read this grouchy quiz post. Because these two posts basically say everything I've been trying to say with my kinky Miss Manners posts, only they sum it up way better and less angry-to-the-point-of-incomprehensibility than I do.

The thing is, I'd been kicking around the idea of doing little posts about the people and blogs I link to over on the sidebar there for a while, and hadn't gotten around to it, and then these two posts came along and I just had to link to them.

Reconciling the Guilt

Since moving to New York, I've discovered that I really enjoy scratch baking and cooking.

I like making delicious things from basic ingredients. I like knowing that I can make these things, that I can produce buttercream frosting as good as the buttercream frosting served at overpriced cupcake shops. I like how old fashioned it feels, how pretty desserts can be, how it feels like making order out of chaos. I like that it makes me feel close to my great-grandmother, whose kitchen skills were locally famous in her small hometown.

Sometimes, I worry about my kitchen proclivities. Are they regressive? Are they anti-feminist? Is my desire for yummy food made from scratch, food like my great-grandmother made, a sign that I secretly want to return to the times when a woman's place was in the kitchen? Is the pleasing, desirous feeling get while looking at the Joy of Baking somehow a sign of creeping, covert sexism? Because I swear to god I feel something like lust when I see that picture of the vanilla cupcakes on that site, with their perfect, perky paper wrappers and charming blue frosting. And feminist women aren't supposed to lust after the ability to make perfect cupcakes, are we?

And then I realize I'm being a jackass. My obsession with perfect, pretty baked goods or extra-delicious mac and cheese made from scratch is because...I like baking, I like cooking. I like making things. It only becomes bad if I decided that all women have to love making perfect baked goods. Actually, in my parents' house when I was growing up, my dad did most of the cooking and was really into making things from scratch with fresh ingredients, and my mom and I would bake bread with dark beer on her days off from her various interesting jobs. Also, um...I like food? I love eating, most of my best friends are really into food, and eating and sharing delicious things is one of my favorite social activities. And if you're a lady who doesn't love baking, that's awesome. It's totally your right and choice to bake or not.

It's all about choices. Feminism is about having choices. If I want to bake things, I get to bake things. Baking is not inherently sexist just because it's sometimes reminiscent of a time when women didn't have choices. If I don't want to bake, I can do any number of other things...like go bowling, something my other great-grandmother loved to do. When she wasn't busy riding motorcycles, that is. And if you're a woman, you should totally have a choice to bake or bowl or sew or ride motorcycles if you want to do any or all of these things.

So why is it so hard to apply these things to sex? Much like I know lots of dudes who like cooking or baking, I know plenty of guys who are submissive or masochists. Like cooking, BDSM only becomes a problem when someone decides all women everywhere are inherently submissive and should bow before all the inherently dominant men. It's also all about consent. If I'm not in the mood to cook, Jack can make dinner or we'll order take-out. If I'm not in the mood for a scene, or decide I don't want to play, I can safeword and say "Hey, not right now."

Sometimes I think that saying all BDSM everywhere is inherently misogynist is just as silly as saying that about all baking.

Failure to Communicate

This is my 50th post! Woohoo! 50th post!

Anyway, I'd been feeling really smug yesterday, thinking of writing an entry about how good Jack and I have been at negotiating in-scene. It can be tricky to do that without dropping roles, and I have a serious tendency to just drop things and go "NO! Nothing in my ass right now, thanks, I'm not really feeling that today!" or whatever. And since Jack and I are both actors, and the sort of self-congratulatory assholes that actors often are, it feels like a special accomplishment when we can cover stuff like that without breaking character, as it were.

We had a really intense thing going on the other night. He threw me around a lot, and I was really deliciously scared, and when he asked me what I was afraid of I had a moment where I realized that I could decide exactly how this could go based on what I said I was afraid of. I squeaked out "I'm afraid you'll kill me--please don't kill me, I'll do anything." and that set the scary tone for the rest of the scene. I communicated, essentially, "You can be really fucking scary right now and I will find that hot."

Another night, I was feeling really ultra-submissive. It wasn't even something I completely realized I was doing at the time, but when I was calling Jack "sir," which is usually what I call him during that kind of scene, it didn't feel right at all, it didn't really express the ridiculous depths of my eagerness-to-please at that moment...so I shifted to calling him "Master," not something I do very often--not actually trying to communicate anything, but just because it felt right and seemed like the proper form of address at the time. Jack, knowing that I don't usually throw around the m-word, was then able to figure out where I was mentally. And hotness ensued.

Then, last night, when we were both sniping at each other and kind of cranky and out-of-sorts and play-fighting a lot, he waved his fist at me. I said "Fine, whatever, just don't hit me in the face." He punched me in the shoulder a few times...then slapped me in the face. I thought I'd clearly communicated that I didn't especially want to be hit in the face right then, he thought I just didn't want to be punched in the face. He apologized.

Sometimes, when everything is going well, you can communicate subtly. Sometimes, when you're cranky and annoyed even seemingly explicit communication isn't clear enough. Also, there are all sorts of other situations and scenarios where either of these things might work or not work. I need to learn to not be smug and self-congratulatory. Maybe this blog needs a "Lucy is an asshole" tag.


(Note: I think this entry maybe is the first where I've written this much about major scenes Jack and I have done that include possibly scary stuff. I feel a little weird about posting it, especially so soon after that entry about guilt and pop culture images of violence against women. It's kind of like "Oh, hai, here I am acting out those scenarios I wrote about in that other entry." I feel a little creepy. I might post more on this later?)

First Time

So this week-end I fucked a pretty girl with a strap-on for the first time.

The harness was a little uncomfortable, and it slid and shifted around a lot. It was the kind of harness with a pocket for a little bullet vibe and the vibe felt both good and painful when it was in the right spot. Also, it turns out all that thrusting is really hard work!

But forget those minor complaints. Seriously, forget them, because it was really, really fucking awesome. To watch her completely delicious body from those angles, to hear the noises she made as I fucked her--so completely hot and awesome. According to Jack, who was hanging out on the edge of the bed watching everything, I had a maniacal grin on my face the whole time. It was so much fun. I can't wait to do it again, and I keep thinking up all sorts of hot fantasy scenarios involving lucious, curvy girls who are also very mean and like making hapless innocents fuck them with strap-ons.

I totally want a Feeldoe now.

Another Post of Small, Random Things

- Hey people with OpenIDs--one person e-mailed me saying they were having trouble commenting. Is this true? Are OpenID comments not going through? Because I hate to think that comments aren't happening because of some glitch. If you're having trouble with comments, email me at lucyjweston@hotmail.com--or comment anonymously. If there is something wrong, I'll try to work it out.

- I'm really disturbed by a lot of the stuff that's been going on in the Catholic church. I've written here about being raised Catholic kind of a lot, and while I don't particularly believe in God I still tend to think of myself as culturally Catholic. It really disturbs me when the Vatican does extremely fucked up stuff, with this latest proclamation equating the ordination of women to child rape just being the latest in a long line of fucked up things. I also hate that I wrote a lot of my posts about Catholicism right around the time a lot of the recent child abuse things came to light.

-In related news, Mistress Matisse's column in the Stranger this week has a bunch of stuff about blood, vampires, Catholicism, and kink. Matisse and I apparently have more in common than I previously realized.

-There were other small, random things I was going to post about, but I forgot what they were.

Guilt and Awkward Confessions and Weirdness and Guilt

You guys know I'm fairly kinky and generally all proud and vocal about it--I'm usually the first person to get upset and insulted and angry when BDSM is portrayed negatively in the media or dismissed as weird or creepy or wrong. If you've been reading here, you've read lots of entries where I've done just that.

But then, as a woman and a feminist--a woman who has been sexually assaulted, a woman who is freaked out and disgusted by our sometimes rapetacular culture, who gets upset and offended by song lyrics and TV shows that imply blurred lines and lack of consent...well...a song came on the radio the other day, a pretty standard, unremarkable blues song, with lyrics that pretty much boiled down to "If you don't give me what I need, woman, I'll take it from you." And it bothered me, kind of a lot. Jack and I sat there in the car talking about rape culture and sexual assault statistics to a third party who kept saying things like "I don't think you're supposed to take this seriously."

I once read this book called Citizen Girl (warning: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!). It's a pretty simple little book about a 20-something EveryGirl struggling in the Corporate World in New York City. She gets hired by a sketchy company that lies to her, she gets used by them, she faces a world in which all other women are beautiful and vapid, or beautiful sellouts to the patriarchy, or (in one scene) butch, unshaven feminists. There are no in-betweens in Girl's world, no shades of gray.

Girl goes to a burlesque show, and it is Horrifying and Wrong! Girl goes to a woman-friendly, woman-run sex party, and it is A Phallocentric Tool of the Patriarchy in disguise. I don't think the authors ever actually use the term "patriarchy," but the attitude throughout the book is that everything either puts women down, brutalizes them, objectifies them in the worst way, or it is good and true and holy and pure. Penises are Bad. Dildos are Worse. Burlesque is the Enemy. Mascara also may partly be the enemy. Actually, kind of the only thing that isn't the enemy is Ms. magazine.

The climax of the book is a double-whammy:

1. Girl's boyfriend nonconsensually ties up her hands with some silk bondage rope from the goodie bag they gave her at the aforementioned Evil Sex Party.

2. It turns out her job was all kind of a scam, and the website she was working for is being redesigned as a rape-fantasy porn site where men can watch actresses dressed as high-powered business executives get fucked. Roughly. They even talk about men choosing the clips with the actress who looks most like their boss. Because women don't ever watch porn.

I cried when I finished this book, and I felt screwed up about my whole life for days afterwords. And this was years ago, before I moved to New York or started going to kinky parties or got especially educated or informed on feminism beyond the 101 level. I still feel kind of screwed up about it, even though I can tear it apart now as simplistic and devaluing the voices of sex workers and sex-positive feminists and women who wear make up for being the wrong kind of women.

But it still bothers me.

The problem is, how can I be upset by rape culture, by objectification of women, by images of brutalization, when I am sometimes aroused sexually by these images?

I mean, where do I draw the line? Clearly it's not okay to just say that whatever turns me on is okay. I mean, I delight in the clips at the end of Kink.com previews where the model smiles and talks about what a great time she had--yay! Consent and sexy times! But what about things like...The Story of O, which I've read and found hot and also pretty fucked up most of the time? Or stuff like some of the Wonder Woman art posted here, which I agree is creepy and fucked up in many ways, but I also find kind of hot?

It gets to a point where I start to wonder if there's something wrong with me.

I don't hate myself. I have some body image issues, I was in an abusive relationship for a while where I really did hate myself, and it took me a long time to get over it, but these days I mostly think I'm pretty awesome. I don't actually think that when Jack ties me up (which he does with my explicit, enthusiastic consent, because negotiation and communication are awesome, authors of Citizen Girl) it inherently makes him a misogynist and me a helpless collaborator with the Patriarchy to oppress all women everywhere.

But sometimes, while I'm simultaneously railing against people who treat women as objects and for my right to sometimes think of myself, a woman, as a sex object in certain situations because I think that's hot...well...I know that it's all about consent. I know that consent is the thing that makes all the difference in the world between rape fantasies and real rape, between kidnapping scenes and real kidnapping, between SM and actual torture...but sometimes I still secretly think I'm maybe a little bit fucked up.

The problem, for me, is fiction. Fictional things--movies, books, what-have-you--in which BDSM is depicted often don't bother with explicit and continuous and enthusiastic consent. It's a fantasy, is often the argument, so why does it matter? I mean, the scene in 9 1/2 Weeks where Mickey Rourke convinces Kim Basinger to stay with him by raping her squicked me the fuck out, but I've heard it described as hot and defended this way--it's fantasy. It's fiction. But I'm turned on by the idea of extremely bad things, so does it make me a hypocrite to also think that these images can be damaging to our view of women on the whole?

I think I'm really worried that something may be wrong with me after all. I sometimes am scared of the Patriarchy, I sometimes feel so hopeless because of rapey song lyrics or upsettingly sexist movies that I feel like the whole world is against me and nothing will ever change and we'll never win. And then I worry...is the enemy in my head, too? Is the Patriarchy so completely in my thoughts and my brain that it controls my sexual preferences, my responses, what turns me on? Am I kinky because I've internalized the world's fucked up view of women in general?

I don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know.

I do, however, think that it's probably really good to examine and talk about this stuff. I actually feel less fucked up and filled with guilt and confusion for writing this.

Lucy is an Asshole

When I was in college, I participated in some major victim blaming.

There was a party, which I did not go to. A girl I was friends with, in that small-social-circle, person-I-tolerate, frenemies kind of way that happens in school, was in a room alone with her exboyfriend (who I also didn't like) at this party. The next day, people were saying he raped her.

Actually, people were saying she said he raped her. And because the girl in question was kind of a drama queen about other things, and because I was friends with her roommate, who didn't believe her, and because I'd been told over and over that sometimes women cry rape for attention--I didn't believe her.

I realize now that this was an asshole move, and I was an asshole for not believing her, and I'm still an asshole for making whatever awful thing happened to her about me and my reaction to it now.

Years later, when I was sexually assaulted (which, I realize, I talk about incessantly here, partly because I'm not over it so please cut me some slack) I found I couldn't tell anyone. Why would I want to tell anyone, when in the past I hadn't believed other victims' stories of assault? I'm still trying to sort this out in my head, but mostly I just feel really shitty for all the times I heard about someone being raped or assaulted and I dismissed it.

I'm pretty angry at myself, actually. I'm angry at any of us who've been assholes like this, who've decided that women who don't speak up about their assaults are cowards, but then attack the ones who do as inappropriate drama queens. We're damning ourselves here, folks--if you didn't report your assault, you must not have thought it was real enough to report, but if you talk about it openly, you must be lying to start drama and rumors. What the hell is anyone supposed to do with that?

I just...I'm getting so angry that it's making me inarticulate. I feel pretty disgusted with humanity on the whole.

Edit: Oh, hey! This post on Tiger Beatdown sums up pretty much exactly what I was trying to say, only in a much more eloquent and less choked-with-rage and awkwardly personal way. So you should read that.

If Only...

If only the rest of the world were like the BDSM scene. Seriously. This is something that lots of people have written about, and I can't even say emphatically enough how much I wish it were true this weekend.

Yesterday was the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Jack and I have gone for the past few years, but this year a friend and I decided to put a marching group together. It was really fun and exciting to be a part of the Mermaid Parade, with all the amazing costumes and floats and whatnot.

What was not so fun and exciting was dealing with the photographers and random people wanting pictures. It's pretty traditional to, well, not wear much clothing in the Mermaid Parade and this tends to draw some attention from both professional and hobbyist photographers, as well as random people with cameras. It's all part of the experience, posing for pictures, but by the end of the day it gets a little wearying. A lot of the photographers were really considerate and asked before taking pictures, but a lot weren't, like...

-The guy who butted into the middle of a conversation I was having with Jack and our larger group of friends, trying to figure out where to go get food. He stepped right into my face to ask for a picture, then when I said no he yelled at me for "not showing any love."

-The guy who tried to touch my breast. Yes, I was wearing pasties, but for Christ's sake, ASK BEFORE YOU TRY TO POKE SOMEONE IN THE BREAST. He poked and then asked, and as a result I think he got a picture of me yelling at him.

-The many, many people who did not ask to take pictures when we were standing around with our friends who were not in costume, just hanging out. Some of our friends had no interest in having their picture taken and just happened to be standing next to those of us in costume.

At the play parties we regularly go to, shit like uninvited, nonconsensual touching and taking photos without permission (taking photos at all, in some cases) will get you thrown out of the party. And sometimes it's hard to remember that the rest of the world doesn't operate that way. It's actually really nice to know that at a party, you can be as scantily clad as you'd like (provided that you at least have your nipples covered and wear a g-string as per NYS liquor laws, if you're somewhere where alcohol is served) and the majority of people understand that it's not an invitation to touch you.

So yeah...I really wish it were like this everywhere. I wish that dressing however you wanted didn't warrant unsolicited comments stronger than "Wow! I love your outfit!" or get interpreted as an okay to touch. Can someone find me some bouncers to enforce these rules wherever I go?

On Re-Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer

So guys, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." I've been re-watching the TV show from the beginning, because it's on Netflix instant and I'm bored and I really liked this show when it was initially on TV. And, well, since I can apparently only blog about things that are not at all new or relevant, I'm blogging about it.

The thing is, I watched this show pretty much religiously for the first two years of high school. And now, re-watching the early episodes, I have to say that a lot of the stuff with Angel and the boys-will-turn-evil-if-you-fuck-them thing is annoyingly heavy-handed, and Buffy's super powers are annoying in their lack of real world practicality and things are simplified and sometimes almost preachy.

But here's the thing...watching the early episodes of this remind me so clearly of what it was like being in an abusive relationship. Not so much the actual relationship part, as, well, to paraphrase what my lovely ex said, my ex wasn't possessed by a demon or put under a spell, he was just a dude who treated me like shit. No mystical, magical excuse needed. The stuff Buffy deals with after killing Angel, though, is like the writers looked into my head and wrote down exactly what it was like to get over my ex. Buffy's nightmares, the fear that Angel will come back mixed with wanting him to come back is like seeing myself on screen. I remember feeling that! Lonely and scared at the same time! My ex may not have actually been an evil demon-type vampire, but the nightmares I had about him for years afterwords turned him into one sometimes.

What's even weirder is that these episodes were on before this happened to me. I was, in fact, either not-yet-dating that guy or still with him when this stuff was on TV. How on earth was I so completely oblivious? At the time, I saw all these things and they just didn't connect at all. Now, I see these interactions, these moments where I can't trust Angel even when he really does get his soul back and it's deeply scary and awful. How could I not recognize then that the same thing was happening to me?

Also, I find it interesting that I can't deal at all with Angel anymore. The first time around, I watched this and I had no difficulty suspending my disbelief that Angel lost his soul, got his soul back, and so on and so forth. Now I see David Boreanaz on screen (I swear I don't actually have anything against David Boreanaz as a person or an actor, he just gets cast in some roles I find unfortunate) and my abuser-radar is pinged and I'm afraid of him. Like, I have an actual, visceral reaction to seeing him and it's all I can do not to yell "Don't trust him!" at the screen. I don't trust him, and I feel like he's making excuses with the whole soul/soulless thing, and it creeps me the fuck out.

I guess I'm still angry with myself sometimes. Actually, I'm angry with myself a lot of the time. I should be smarter than to get hurt, I should be cooler than to let things bother me. And I don't know why it should seem so bizarre that the 25-year-old me can see things the 15-year-old me couldn't while watching re-runs of a TV show about vampires. But it kind of does.

Carnival of Kinky Feminists

Hey, guys! After a comment from one of the admins, I submitted the first entry I wrote about "Bones" to the Carnival of Kinky Feminists. And they accepted it! Woohoo! I'm excited to be a part of this brand new blog carnival.

I'm reading through the other blog posts that are in the first edition, and most of them seem to be much more interesting and well-put-together than my angry little post. So go check them out--if you're reading me, you'll probably enjoy them much more.

What Upset Me About "Bones"

So I wrote a post about that episode of "Bones" with the pony play and the murder and stuff, and I mentioned at the end how completely enraged I was and how Jack kept saying he didn't understand why I took it so personally. I always take stuff like that personally, and I'm trying to figure out why.

I used to be really, really goth. I was a clove-smoking, Cure-listening, dressed-like-Stevie-Nicks goth girl...and then Columbine happened. And being a goth kid in high school in a post-Columbine environment was really scary sometimes. Because of the rumors, the media information that said the Columbine shooters were goths themselves, (rumors that have since been refuted) you got the feeling people viewed you with suspicion, that people were scared. And not in a superficial way, in a way that made me think of witch hunts and the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

I got yelled at by the principal for wearing my long black raincoat to school on a day when it was raining. Kids who didn't fit in, like the one cool punk guy, or me and my asshole then-boyfriend, got singled out for punishment for things that the "normal" kids got away with. Eventually, there would be mandatory five-day suspensions and the police showing up to search your house if you made an offhand comment at school that contained the word "kill." One dude got this treatment for saying "I'd kill for a lollipop right now."

I know now that, being a cis, white, mostly-het (perceived as het, anyway) chick, that my life has really been pretty full of privilege and free from oppression, but at the time, I felt pretty persecuted. 15 and 16 year old goth girls are not exactly known for a lack of dramatic reactions to things. I wrote research papers about bullying and school violence, about McCarthyism and in defense of media that's been blamed for various violent incidents. Eventually, I got the hell out of high school and went to a liberal college where no one even noticed when I wore a cape to class. It was a huge improvement.

But what I took away from that whole mess was that news stories and dumb movies and poorly-researched TV shows affect people's perception. It may be just a silly TV show, but if that's all someone sees of goth kids or kinky folks or sex workers or furries or whoever, then that will affect their perception. If your only frame of reference for bondage porn is how frequently it turns up as evidence on Law & Order: SVU, then you're probably not going to have a very high opinion of consumers of bondage porn.

It's one of the things that I was trying to get at when I was angsting about coming out a while back--if people only see portrayals of kinksters as freaks and murderers and rapists, or as pathetic targets of humor, as something damaged and twisted and abnormal, then that's what the perception of us will continue to be. How could I not take it personally when it seems to me that the writers who penned that speech at the end of that episode of "Bones" were saying to me "This is what we, the normal people, think of you and your friends and your relationships."

Street Harassment

So guys, let me tell you about street harassment. It's really, really shitty. It happens a lot to the women-folk (and to the LGBTQ folks, but I think maybe in a different way sometimes?), and it doesn't get talked about enough, and it very often gets dismissed as not a big deal. After all, they're just words, right? It's not like being attacked or anything.

Here's the thing, though--words can be used in awful, scary, hateful ways. And, I'm saying this as someone who has been attacked by a stranger on the street, it's pretty awful. Back when I was in high school, I was sometimes uncomfortable leaving the house because I knew some guy on the street would say something to me. The summer that I was 17, a guy looked at me and said "I'd like to get my cock up in that," while I was walking to the bus on my way to work.

But that's harmless, right? It's not like he actually tried to touch me, so I (a 17-year-old) had no reason to be scared of him (an adult, male stranger). He was just saying I was attractive--it's practically a compliment!

Today, Jack and I went for a walk. Actually, I went for a walk while he ran ahead because he's doing this thing where he's running. And while I was walking, I passed these guys in a green van. Not a mini-van, a big, industrial-looking, no-windows-in-the-back van. And they said something. I actually didn't hear what they said, because I was on the phone and not paying attention. A few minutes later, they drove past me pretty slowly, making kissy-noises out the window.

Now maybe it was because the street was deserted, or maybe it was because they were driving a van, but I got really creeped out. I was really relieved that I was on the phone and had an obvious reason to ignore them. I caught up with Jack, and we walked around a bit, and there was a lovely park and some roses...but when we were going to head back, Jack said he wanted to run back. I said (kind of forcefully) that I didn't want to walk back alone because of the van dudes. And, well, we had an argument. And Jack, who is a really awesome feminist dude who's usually really understanding about things, who was in fact the first person to say I was sexually assaulted when I got groped when I was reluctant to put that label on it, said that he didn't really understand street harassment, that it didn't seem like a real thing because it doesn't happen to him and he doesn't see it happen to other people.

The thing that's scary for me about street harassment is that you never know where it's going to stop. If a guy would say to me that he'd "like to get his cock up in that," it already seems to me that he's not seeing me as a person, that he's seeing my body as public property to comment on--so how can I know whether he's going to take that idea further? And some guys, unsurprisingly, will just not take no for an answer--"I was just trying to talk to you," they say, "can't you even say thank you?" And if a stranger would grope me on a bus, if a strange guy would follow me down the street late at night, is it really so surprising that some stranger on the street talking about fucking me would ping my defense system and read as "Danger!"?

Jack got angry with me for being creeped out. We talked about it, and I pointed out that his "street harassment doesn't happen to me so it's not a big deal or concern" view is pretty much the definition of male privilege, and he said he really needed to examine why my being street harassed made him angry with me and his other feelings about it.

What I took away from this conversation is that we're not talking about this enough. Clearly we need to talk about this more, need to make this more visible. If you think street harassment isn't a big deal, or that it's not happening, go read a few posts over at Holla Back NYC and then tell me it's not a real problem.

So...um...for some reason, I decided to watch the pony play episode of "Bones" the other day. It was on Netflix instant, I'd read a brief mention of it at Tiger Beatdown (which is an awesome, awesome, extra double plus awesome feminist blog that you should totally read) and I was bored and casting about for something to do.

For those unfamiliar with it, "Bones" is a police procedural type TV show involving...unsurprisingly...a lady who is a forensic anthropologist and studies bones. And she solves murders by examining the evidence found in/on said bones, with the help of David Boreanaz, whose character's defining characteristic seems to be that he's kind of a douche. I've tried watching this show a few times, because I love a good police procedural, and mostly have found it boring. But when I heard there was an episode about pony play, well, of course I had to watch it.

Pony play, for those unfamiliar, is a variety of animal-type role play. Since it's not one of my own, personal kinks, I'm vaguely terrified that if I try to explain it I'll horribly offend any pony players who happen to stumble across my humble blog. My main exposure to pony play has been in Anne Rice's erotica, so I'm inclined to take it with a pinch of salt. That, and I really like the snazzy boots.

That pony play was specifically the focus of this episode was kind of beside the point. The pony scenes were very...well...tame. Mostly conventionally attractive dudes (almost all the ponies seemed to be dudes) wearing a huge amount of insanely expensive specialized leather gear being led around by ladies in sexy riding outfits, prancing and making horsey noises. I was pretty disappointed that no one got smacked with a riding crop or pulled one of those little pony carts Anne Rice was always going on about.

But aaanyway, this was the worst example I've seen in a while of the "kinky people are freaks and murderers" trope that is constantly infuriating me in my consumption of mysteries and police procedurals. Brennan, our forensic anthropologist heroine, is basically the only cop-type who's even slightly non-judgmental towards our pony players, but she still comes out with gems like "Fetishism is a way of indulging in sexual activity, without actually engaging emotionally with the other person as a fully formed human being."* Which, um, even if you're using the hyper-judgey definition of fetishism that turns up in places like the DSM-IV-TR, is not necessarily a technically accurate definition. She then goes on to talk about "masturbation fetishes," to which I can only say LOL WUT?

So the show goes on with its unsurprising plotline of "one of these weirdos must be a murderer" and, surprise! One of them is, in fact, the murderer! Just to make it extra, extra hackneyed, it's the victim's play partner/toppy person. Because that's an original plot line.

It's seriously gotten to the point where I've become so desperate to see some sort of TV show where there's a murder and kinky people are involved and one of them isn't the murderer that I got really excited about that one episode of one of the innumerable "Law & Order" spinoffs where the domly dom dude turns out to just be a Lord Master Domly Asshole type who nonconsensually smacked the victim with a riding crop and not the guy who followed her out of the party to rape and murder her.

The last straw for me with this episode of "Bones," though, came at the very end. Douchey special agent David Boreanaz is sitting in a diner-y place having coffee with Brennan, when he unleashes this lovely speech:

Why? I’ll tell you why. Here we are. All of us are basically alone, separate creatures just circling each other. All searching for that slightest hint of a real connection. Some look in the wrong places, some, they just give up hope because in their mind they’re thinking ‘Oh, there’s nobody out there for me.’ But all of us, we keep trying over, and over again. Why? Because every once in a while, every once in a while, two people meet. And there’s that spark. And yes Bones, he’s handsome. And she’s beautiful. And maybe that’s all they see at first...But making love? Making. Love. That’s when two people become one...Yeah, Bones. A miracle. Those people- role-playing and their fetishes and their little sex games- It’s crappy sex. Well, at least compared to the real thing. *

This speech is mostly done as a voice over, played over shots of the other characters interacting with their partners. All the couples shown are 100% heterosexual, which is so full of issues and so angry-making on its own that I could write a whole separate post just on the fact that these are the couples being shown as "right" and "real" and how icky and homophobic that is.

But I seriously couldn't get past my blinding rage at this show that would not only characterize kinksters as freaks and murderers, but that would end with a speech dismissing all non-heteronormative, non-vanilla sex as "crappy" and not "the real thing." How dare you, faceless writers of a dumb TV show, tell me that my sex life is crappy!? How dare you dismiss the best relationship I've ever had as not being a real connection? The vast majority of the people I know who are into some form of kink are incredibly close, connected, and communicative with their partners. Negotiating issues that come up in kinky, BDSM-y relationships takes tons of effective communication and trust (which is not to say no vanilla people ever communicate or negotiate effectively, just that I think it's much less the norm to negotiate as much in non-kinky encounters and relationships.) I'm still ragey just writing about this, their explicit condemnation of my own relationship and my friends' relationships...which makes me think harder about their implied condemnation of non-hetero relationships...which makes me even more ragey! It's an unending cycle of rage.

Jack didn't get why I was so angry, why I took it all so personally. I had a hard time explaining, but I'll try to go into it in more detail about why it always feels so freaking personal when I watch or read stuff like this in another entry.

*Direct quotes are lifted from a transcript of the episode that I found here.

So Jack and I were traveling this week-end, with friends who we're not out to. Somehow, I found myself with a group of friends of friends making all sorts of comments where I would basically say "I'm into BDSM! Only I'm JUST JOKING! Hahahahahahahaha! I'm being scandalous and funny!" It was a very weird situation for me.

And I realized that this is something I used to do all the damn time. About kink and about being attracted to girls and sometimes even just about liking and enjoying sex. It's a defense mechanism. It's a way of gauging reactions, testing the waters, and of being kind of confrontational without actually risking anything.

It's kind of cowardly. It's something I haven't done in a long time because I've mostly been around people I don't feel the need to shock and then hide from. It's nice. Unsurprisingly, I like myself a lot better when I'm just being honest than when I'm telling the truth to provoke people, then pretending I was joking. I like myself a lot better.

Becoming Sally Bowles: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Me

When I was in high school, I saw the 1972 film version of Cabaret for the first time.

Like probably every other teenage musical theatre geek and outcast, I was immediately seized by an overwhelming desire to be just like Sally Bowles. Only maybe without the cocaine and the unplanned pregnancy.

Sally is flashy and dramatic and decadent, and flashy dramatic decadence was incredibly attractive to me (my other film obsession at the time was the Rocky Horror Picture Show) and I wanted to be just like her, to be flashy and dramatic and decadent and maybe just a little bit doomed. But how, exactly, does one go about being just like Sally Bowles? Especially if one wishes to avoid the cocaine addiction and unplanned pregnancy. It's difficult, since, well, Sally the character actually admits to the fact that she herself is attempting to deliberately cultivate a projected image of mystery and glamour.

Also, we, the audience, never get to find out what's going on inside Sally's head. She's kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in that she is quirky and strange and sexy and lifts Brian/Christopher/Cliff/whatever-the-hell-his-name-is out of his dudely doldrums. Of course, Christopher/Brian/Cliff is asexual or gay or possibly bi, and so is not entirely won over by Sally's Manic Pixie charms, but still...she's empty. She's all style and no substance, all frosting and no cake. What the Hell is going on in Sally Bowles' head? We don't get to find out, because Sally is only dealt with through observation, from a distance. She's not a thinking, feeling person, she's a decoration, a glittery butterfly. The only time we maybe get to actually hear Sally's own voice is in the song "Maybe This Time," and then I would argue that it can only be interpreted as her voice in the 1997 stage musical, in which she sings the song outside the Greek-Chorus-otherworld of the Kit Kat Club stage. In the film, it's more of a projection of what she should be thinking, a comment on female loneliness and expectations of couple-hood.

Sally Bowles has been one of my only ongoing female role models. All the other film characters and celebrities I've wanted to be just like have been male, from David Bowie to Frank N. Furter to Sir Percy Blakeney to Adam Ant. And I think this is because they have that same flash and drama and glamour that I want combined with an actual voice. That's the thing about Manic Pixie Dream Girls, about female characters in movies observed through the male gaze, is that they don't have voices, or thoughts. They're a sparkly, completely empty construct that men get to put they're own ideas and feelings into. Christopher/Cliff/Brian may be a camera, but his observations of Sally Bowles come uncomfortably close to making her an object.

This makes it hard to figure out who you are as a girl. I remember years of writing stories in high school in which someone else observed the character who was supposed to be me, and rhapsodized for pages about how pretty and charming and fascinating she was. I also clamored for friends to use characters based on me in their stories, so that I could read someone else's observations of me and use them to figure out who the hell I was.

The closest I ever came to being Sally Bowles was my sophomore year of college. I was actually not especially tormented about this at the time, was just sort of bumbling along, being myself, doing dumb, quirky shit like leading around a female friend on a leash (I totally didn't know or acknowledge that I was kinky at the time). And then, second semester, I started hearing rumors that one of my male friends, we'll call him...Cliff, had a crush on me. No, wait, he was in love with me. There were livejournal posts that were unsubtly disguised, rumors and weird conversations and even weirder conversational pauses around me. And suddenly, without any regard for what I actually felt or thought or the fact that I was, in fact, already in a relationship, it seemed like all our mutual friends had decided that Cliff had found the perfect girl for him and that perfect girl was me, though when I heard about it all, the girl they were talking about didn't actually seem to share my thoughts or feelings or much else. They had decided I was Cliff's Magical Pixie Dream Girl, and that he and I should be together, with no actual thought or regard to the fact that I wasn't interested.

It felt creepy. I felt violated. I told my dad about the whole dramarama, which ended with Cliff awkwardly confessing his love for me via IM, and he said "Yeah, Lucy, that's kind of what 'objectification of women' really means." I felt like my friends had tried to shove the thoughts and feelings and personality they wanted me to have inside my head, inside my body, with no regard for the thoughts and feelings and personality I already had.

I don't want to be Sally Bowles anymore. I may paint my nails green, or sing "Maybe This Time" at karaoke, or ask Jack "Doesn't my body drive you wild with desire?" but it's a pose, a character I play at sometimes. Being Sally Bowles is being empty inside, a flashy sparkly package with nothing in it. It's not being a real person. Instead, I'm looking for female role models who are real, for female voices. They're hard to find sometimes, but they're out there. And I want to be a real person, like them.

The Submissive Vampire: A kinky reading of Interview With the Vampire

I kind of simultaneously love and hate Anne Rice.

When I was 10, the film version of Interview With the Vampire was released and there I was, already with an interest in vampires and (people tell me) a slight resemblance to Kirsten Dunst, just starting to figure out this whole "attracted to people" thing that was starting to happen in my body and head. I was attracted to the idea of vampires, the power and sophistication that vampires implied, the idea of being more, being better than humans, being special.

I was also, it's worth noting, completely terrified of sex. I had only just recently learned about that whole penis-in-the-vagina thing that was apparently sex, and I was horrified. Also, in my not-knowing, sex had mostly been something that older kids made fun of me for not knowing about, something that was a cause of humiliation and shame and jokes that I didn't understand and would later get in trouble for repeating to my parents. Any mention of vampirism as a stand-in for sex in the nonfiction books I would occasionally read made me intensely uncomfortable, but vampires were also my own personal sex stand-in. Being interested in vampires, being completely obsessed with vampires in general and Dracula and Anne Rice in particular made it okay to be interested in sex--because I wasn't interested in sex, I was interested in vampires.

When the film version of Interview was released on video and Pay Per View, I watched the preview guide all day while my parents were at work, hoping to see commercials. I wasn't allowed to see the movie. It was rated R, it was full of nudity and sex and my parents did not think I was old enough. I saw it on the sly at a friend's house and was actually kind of disappointed, so I secretly got out the book from the library and read it late at night and hid it under the bed.

I'd buy my own copy in high school. Now, from the wise old age of 25, I can say that I think Anne Rice is guilty of serious over-writing. Her prose comes in many shades of purple, and "savage" and "exquisite" are to her what words like "eldritch" and "gibbering" are to H.P. Lovecraft. But in the depths of my high school gothiness, Interview seemed hot and dark and lush and swoony. I felt Louis' pain, understood and wished for his weird, dark fantasies and hallucinations, wanted to be under Lestat's power. Until midway through my freshman year of college when I tried to re-read the book for the umpteenth time, said "Wow, this is overwritten and wanky," and put it right back down.

But it had a huge influence on me, both the book and the movie. Seriously, if you looked at a line-up of the guys I've dated (with the possible exception of Jack) they look like an Anne Rice casting call. And while I mention above that people tell me I look like Kirsten Dunst, and have since that movie came out, I've always claimed to not see the resemblance--not because I have anything against Kirsten Dunst, but because I really dislike the character of Claudia. I'm not like Claudia at all, so how can you say I look like her?

In criticisms of Interview, people tend to talk about the "vampire family" idea. It shows up in lots of modern vampire fiction, the idea that vampires change humans into vampires out of loneliness, to create a blended family, in The Lost Boys and lots of children's vampire fiction (Nancy Garden's books like My Sister, the Vampire) it's a major plot-point. But it never connected for me when people have said this about Interview With the Vampire, mostly because they usually follow this up by saying that Louis is the mother figure and we have a nice little conventional nuclear family here. Even though the Lestat-Louis-Claudia group is referred to as a family in the text, it resembles an actual family much less than it does a leather family (though still an unhappy one), a triangle in which dominant Lestat and Claudia butt heads and power-struggle over who gets to control submissive Louis.

Louis is not so much a mother as he is submissive, to both Lestat and Claudia, and I'm uncomfortable with the reading that says his following Lestat's orders and wishes, even when he doesn't want to, makes Louis feminine and mother-like. Ick. Also, it disregards how thoroughly Claudia has Louis wrapped around her dainty fingers (or, if you like the image better, under the heel of her little slippers). One of the main ideas of the book is that, while Claudia looks like a child, she quickly grows out of this role and has the mind of an adult woman--so why are critics so quick to stuff her into a child-box when talking about the "vampire family"? Louis is the least forceful, the least commanding of the three, and he transfers his loyalty, his submission and willingness to serve, from Lestat to Claudia as Claudia changes from a child-doll to a, well...woman trapped in a child-doll's body.

This continues and is heightened when Claudia and Louis meet Armand. Louis gets all swoony and strange in the pull of Armand's age and power--he's pretty much in subspace when they interact. Weirdly, Armand is also able to subdue Claudia, in a domlier-than-though display that seriously creeps her out, because she doesn't want to lose Louis or lose control over him. Louis is always kind of a passive figure--he doesn't really decide much for himself, or do much because he wants to. He does what Lestat wants, then what Claudia wants, then, Armand tries to take him away to do what he, Armand wants. Louis doesn't seem to want much, except to make whoever his current dom-figure is happy. Or, in the case of Lestat, who Louis doesn't really get along with once the honeymoon period of their relationship is over, not actively angry.

I can see how this eager-to-please Louis can be read as feminine, as a mother-figure, but it makes me uncomfortable to read it that way. I don't like Louis being cast as feminine because he is passive, especially when Claudia an actual female character is there being all strong (and sometimes crazy and obnoxious and demanding) for contrast. I would instead argue that submission does not equal femininity or femaleness, and that Louis and Claudia's relationship much more closely resembles a femdom/malesub relationship than that of parent and child, at least once Claudia "grows up."

And while the "vampire family" idea comes up again when Claudia brings Madeleine, her chosen mother-figure, into the equation, Claudia is still in charge and Madeleine's characterization of Claudia as "'a child who cannot die'" seems creepy and wrong because Claudia is not a child at this point, except in appearance. Claudia wants a family, wants an appearance of normality, but she also wants to control her "parents." Also, Louis has no attraction towards Madeleine--and why would he, when he's clearly attracted to dominant personalities? Madeleine is more like his co-sub than any sort of interest for him. He doesn't want to "curse" her with vampirism, but he also knows her view of Claudia as a child is incorrect and, I suspect, resents her competition for Claudia's attention.

This also explains why, despite being a girl, and blonde, and looking maybe a little like the actress who played Claudia in the movie, I've always related far more to Louis than Claudia. In my reading, the book and movie were not about a vampire family or Louis' loving Claudia like a daughter. They're about Louis, and his transitioning from an uncomfortable relationship with Lestat (who would have him be subservient, but also mocks him for his "weakness") to a fulfilling one with Claudia (in which most of his actions serve to please and serve the object of his affections) to losing Claudia because of being drawn to a similar relationship with Armand. For an oblivious submissive girl like me, Louis was a far more relatable character than the one who was superficially more like me.

Note: This is not to say that Claudia and Louis have an ideal relationship, or that the whole Claudia-as-a-woman-in-a-child's body thing isn't kind of creepy, or that all people who identify as submissive are doormats like Louis who need to or can be taken away from their respective dom(me)s by force. No one should base an actual relationship on anything Anne Rice has written ever, and that's doubly true of her porn, which I'll probably write about in another entry.

Another Note on Ettiquette...

I would have posted this as an addendum to yesterday's post, but I had to run out the door. A friend and I were talking about this the other night, and it's something that really annoys me, that I really just can't believe people do.

So generally, it's a rule that when you're at a play party, you don't interrupt a scene in progress. It's really, really rude and inconsiderate and, if you do it the really wrong way, it can be dangerous in an accidentally-getting-hit-by-stuff kind of way. The thing that people sometimes don't realize is that a scene is not necessarily over when the hitty part stops.

See, there's this thing called "aftercare," which most people need at the conclusion of a scene. Different people need different things, different versions of it, and it may look different from person to person, but you really shouldn't freakin' interrupt it!

I know I sometimes get dizzy and/or emotional after a particularly intense reaction. And when I do, I just want to sit and process and maybe have someone hug me and tell me I'm a good girl. Maybe drink some water or a Coke. What I really don't want to do is make smalltalk, especially with a stranger or someone I don't really know well.

So if you see someone being cuddled or stroked or wrapped in a blanket, or even if you see someone who was just being spanked or caned or otherwise played with sitting with a slightly dazed look on their face, for the love of God, WAIT a little while before you strike up a conversation with that person. Seriously. And if you do start chatting with someone, and they say they're a little out of it from a scene still, back the fuck off. Seriously.

And don't offer people foot massages immediately after a scene, either. That's freakin' creepy.

Pain Tolerance and Other Stories

I used to think pain tolerance was completely relative and subjective and there was no way to know what yours was relative to anyone else's, as it's impossible to know if someone else is experiencing it the same way you are.

Then I started going to parties and playing with other people, and it became apparent that I am, in fact, a huge wuss. While it's arguably a completely different situation than, say, accidentally cracking some ribs, it definitely puts things in perspective to get hit by someone in a way that makes you squeal and squirm and say "Oh, my God, I can't take anymore!" and then watch that same person hit your friend the same way and get almost no reaction.

One of the earliest entries I wrote in this blog was about going through a thing where I wasn't enjoying pain like I had been. Well, oh boy has that changed. Lately I've been wanting more, wanting to push myself, to see what I can take...and it's pretty awesome. There's a palpable release that I'd heard about and read about but had never really experienced firsthand until very recently. It's really an amazing feeling, and I really like that I'm not too afraid to get there anymore.

So yeah...kind of like the post I wrote about fireplay, I feel really good about trying things even though I'm scared. Trying new things, expanding boundaries. It's scary, but I like the way things are going.

Toys

This is what I found on the couch when I wandered into the living room this morning. Jack is going out of town tonight, and I guess he packed the bag we usually use as a toy bag.

I saw this tangle of stuff, and my thought was "Wow. Is this really my life? Awesome."

(It's worth noting that this doesn't include any vibrators or insertables, which have taken over my nightstand. Or things like the long riding crop, which don't fit in the bag.)

So I keep trying to find a way to build a big, important post about this framing it within lots of meaning about trying things I'm afraid of and being brave and adventurous and what I've gained from that...but that post kept coming out really pretentious. So I'm just going to skip to the part I want to brag about...

...Guys, I got set on fire this week-end.

Actually, the fire was burning just above my skin and only felt uncomfortably hot when left to burn for more than a second or two. But still, I was pretty much scared to death and I did it anyway and it turned out to be really awesome.

so yeah, thanks to the friend who set me on fire, I did something scary and I was okay and that's awesome.

So writing about the creeper ex in my last post, I touched upon the fact that I'm scared he would find this blog and recognize the events I've written about...and then two seconds later, I brushed it off and said something about hoping he'd be scandalized. He probably would be scandalized--either that or dismissive, he'd read about my wonderful adventures and say "I knew she was a slut all along."

But what I didn't really go into is how afraid of him I still am.

It's definitely not as bad as it used to be, back in the days when I would actually jump when I saw a car that looked like the one his mom drove, but it's still there. He broke up with me nine years ago and I am still afraid of him.

For years I had nightmares. I dreamed we were at a party and got in a fight, I dreamed he was leading a cult and his followers kidnapped me. In college, I dreamed he appeared backstage during a show I was in, dragged me offstage and raped me in the basement of the theatre building. The nightmares only stopped within the past year or so.

I have a hard time talking about the whole situation. I tend to dismiss it. I tend to try to blame myself. A few months after the break up, he read my livejournal and was furious. He hadn't abused me, he claimed, I'd been a willing participant in everything. I'd wanted it all...and it's true, at the time I wanted nothing more than to prove my love, to please him. But that doesn't mean it wasn't abuse. It's hard to talk to my friends about it, because some of them were there. My college boyfriend just didn't understand at all what I meant by emotional abuse. "What exactly did he do to you?" he asked.

He manipulated me. The first few months were wonderful. I was perfect, an angel, his salvation. He was prone to extravagant romantic statements and it made me feel desired and loved and wanted. He had been so alone, and now he had found me and I was his first and only love and we would be together forever and it would be perfect.

The first clue should have been that I was terrified of him when he was angry--he would punch things, slam things around. When I did something "wrong," something like not being around to talk to him on the phone at exactly the right time every night, he would hurt himself, cut himself. There were certain things I couldn't say, things I couldn't do. Commenting on anyone else's appearance was forbidden, was hurtful and would make him jealous. He was only interested in me, so why should I think anyone else was attractive? Going anywhere without him would make him feel left out and upset. Saying things like "I can't imagine ever being with anyone else" implied that I wasn't 100% sure, and expressions of doubt made him feel like I didn't love him as much as he loved me. Didn't I want him to feel as loved and valued as I did?

I followed all his rules completely, but it was never enough. I stopped going anywhere with my friends, my friends stopped talking to me, but I still occasionally went places with my parents and that made me unavailable for phone calls. I started faking headaches and sickness when my parents wanted to do family things. I didn't look at other guys, but I still occasionally had dreams about them, and that made him upset. I stopped having sexual dreams about other guys. Don't ask me how that's even possible, but I did. If a dream crept under my defenses, I would turn it into a rape dream...which resulted in him telling me that if I was ever raped, he'd leave me because "I couldn't bear anyone else being inside you." He didn't even want anyone else to see my bare shoulders or arms or calves, so I wore long skirts and long sleeved shirts and shawls year round.

Even when I did all of these things completely and perfectly, he would find fault. I had hurt him in the past, and he couldn't trust that I wouldn't do it again. I begged for his forgiveness--literally begged--and apologized until the words "I'm sorry" didn't sound like words any more. I swore I'd be better, I'd do better, I'd be perfect. Things would be perfect. I wrote angsty poetry and short stories where my character was cursed or part demon and was redeemed by love. He said "You weren't cursed, you chose to hurt me."

But hey, he didn't hit me, right?

His brother did. His brother did not like me, and would do things like twist my arm behind my back until I had tears in my eyes. I would, in fact, provoke his brother to hurt me on purpose so that he would have to step in and save me, because that proved he loved me. I cried every day. It was a goal of mine at one point to go a week without crying, and it seemed like an impossible one. I often didn't know why I was crying--we were blissfully happy, right? Everything was going to be perfect someday, right?

So yeah...I'm still scared of him. I'm not sure why, as none of this would possibly happen again, but the thought of running into him somewhere ties my stomach up in knots. Every time I think I'm over it, something will happen to remind me of him and I'll freak out all over again. I still have a hard time saying his name.

I actually thought I was over it. Jack has been really wonderful and patient over the past two and a half years in helping me break out of the last few remaining behavior patterns I was stuck in because of this. But a few weeks ago, I read a lot of the archives over at Quizzical Pussy and her posts about her abusive ex scared me so badly I stayed up half the night. At one point, I actually was convinced she had dated the same guy as I had.

Clearly, I need to talk about this more. I need to talk about it until I'm not scared anymore, if that's even possible.

Only tangentially related to the main post: The evil ex definitely needs a pseudonym, but all the ones I keep coming up with make him sound too interesting. Need to think about that some more.

The Last Time I Had Sex

I've written here before about my creepy abusive ex from high school, and I've written about being groped by a stranger on the bus. And since April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I've been reading lots of other people's assault stories. For some reason, what reading these stories reminded me of was not my own assault story, but...well...the last time I had sex with my creepy abusive ex-boyfriend.

It was consensual. It was, in fact, probably what I wanted almost more than anything else in the world at that time, because I was convinced that if we had sex again he would want me back. But I'm getting ahead of myself...let me start over.

He broke up with me. He broke up with me in April for unclear reasons (I was convinced it was my fault, because everything had always been my fault) after at least a month where he was increasingly distant and strange. Later, I would remember the IM conversations with my "best friend," a girl we knew only online, that he had finished by saying "I love you," and it would all add up, but for the time being I was devastated and confused and spent pretty much all my time either begging him to take me back or deciding when, exactly, I was going to kill myself.

The day it happened was the day of his graduation. After the ceremony, I went out to dinner with his family and back to his house. We were kissing, making out in his bed, and I think he asked me what I wanted. I told him I wanted to have sex. We left his room and went into a closed-off room that no one used for anything except storage. He kept asking, over and over, "Are you sure you want to do this?" It seemed like things were going so well, he had been so attentive, so affectionate, so nice to me, that I was thinking I had passed the "temporary break-up test" (because up until this point, everything had always been a test) and that we were going to get back together. I was very, very sure I wanted it.

I laid down on the floor and he got on top of me. It was brief, in my memory it seems like it only lasted a minute or two but I'm not completely sure. I remember being confused about where the condom had come from, as he'd said a while before that he was out of them and that's why we weren't having sex any more. And then, after he came, he got up and went back to his room. I followed, and sat on the bed. I don't know what I was expecting--that he would say we were officially getting back together? That he would come sit on the bed and cuddle with me? Instead, he picked up a cheap plastic bracelet off his dresser and tossed it to me. Then he went to sit down on the floor and play video games with his brother. He pretty much ignored me for the rest of the night, until I went home.

I didn't have penis-in-vagina sex again for six and a half years, and for that time this was an event of huge, terrifying significance in my life. It was "The Last Time I Had Sex."

It would hit me a few months later, the awful symbolism of the bracelet and the way he ignored me. I ended up tearfully telling my next boyfriend the story, concluding it by saying "he thought I was just a worthless whore."

The creepy ex didn't speak to me for about two months after graduation, after the last time we had sex, and over the course of those two months I woke up. It was that sudden. I got up one day, and I wasn't in love with him anymore. I wasn't devastated. I was, well, me again. And I slowly reconstructed my life, figured out who I was. He and I were in contact for a few months after, on and off, with me telling him to leave me alone and him convincing me we could be friends. Eventually I stopped replying to his e-mails.

I'm still scared of him sometimes. Part of me is scared he'll find this blog post and read it and recognize it (there are enough details here I feel like he would) and then he'd have found me again.

Part of me hopes that if he did, he'd be scandalized by what I'm up to now, since he would constantly say that he "hated sluts" and that open relationships were wrong and cheating.

But today, thinking about this, I'm really unnerved by how many times he asked if I really wanted to have sex with him that day. I'm convinced he knew it was a bad idea, he knew I'd look back and regret it, and he was really just obtaining clear consent over and over to cover his ass. I'm so creeped out by that thought.

Easter

I keep forgetting about Easter. In college, we didn't get any days off for Easter or Passover, so Easter stopped being the big family holiday it was when I was little. But it's still kind of lurking around the edges of my brain.

It's hard for me, as a lapsed Catholic, to talk about Easter without thinking about Lent and holy week. In fact, at this point, the whole not-believing-in-God thing has turned them into completely separate things in my mind.

Growing up, Lent and holy week and the Triduum and the sacrifice and darkness that lead up to Easter always kind of seemed like a bigger deal than Easter itself. Advent, the lead up to Christmas, totally made sense--who doesn't want to count down until Christmas? But Lent is 40 days long. That's, like, forever when you're in third grade. And as you grow up Catholic, going to Catholic school, you learn that Lent is about sacrifice and abstinence (not necessarily that kind of abstinence--just general abstaining from things like booze and anything else that might make you happy) and fasting. You can't eat meat on Fridays, when you're an adult you're supposed to fast as well, and, if you grew up in my house, you go to church, like, 50 times during holy week for confession and to pray and for Easter Vigil and it all feels very Medieval and ancient and strange.

I never really got how all that enforced suffering (though I love fish fry, so that no meat on Fridays thing wasn't very suffer-y for me) was connected with Easter itself. I knew intellectually from probably third grade on what the connection was--we're suffering because Jesus suffered for us, we're celebrating because he rose from the dead, the butterflies and bunnies and eggs are signs of new life (new life, the nuns stressed, definitely new life). But most of what I got out of Lent was that we're supposed to suffer and Easter seemed like a weird follow up.

Now I know that part of the reason for the disconnect is that the bunnies and eggs are co-opted pagan fertility symbols, something I now greatly enjoy explaining to other people. But this is still a time of year I can never seem to really make sense of. But yeah, Lent and Triduum and sacrifice and spending what felt like 60 hours in church are definitely the things I think of when the conversation comes around to "why I'm kinky."

Even though I'm a happy atheist now, and I started brushing off all this "Lent" stuff when I was in seventh grade and told Sister Frances that I was giving up human sacrifice that year, I'm really attracted to the idea of fasting and suffering and sacrifice. Even when I was trapped in that awful relationship in high school, one of my favorite tactics to prove my devotion was to not eat--look what I'm doing for you, look how I'm suffering to show you my love. It turns out fasting is not a great idea when you're hypoglycemic. But anyway, this year I'm thinking maybe I could do with a little more structure and sacrifice in my life. Because it's kind of hot.

Coming out of the kink closet, pt. 2

So Jack is thinking about coming out to his mom.

I totally understand this, as I think we're feeling a lot of the same things in respect to people who know/people who don't know.

I know I feel kind of cut off from people I'm close to but don't talk to about this sort of thing. My best friend from college, someone I used to talk about every single thing with, doesn't know. And I feel like I'm isolating myself from her, even though I know I can trust her and she's seen me crying over dumb stuff and falling down drunk. I know I need to talk to her about this, but I'm having a hard time finding the way.

What makes me even more upset than the few close friends I haven't gotten around to telling yet is that I believe in kink. I know that sounds really silly when I say it like that, but I believe in being sex-positive and talking about sex and that talking about kink is part of that. Whenever I see a movie that portrays BDSM in a negative light, or read infuriating, biased blog posts on the subject, it makes me want to tell everyone that I'm kinky. Because I feel like the best way to counter all the misconceptions and stereotypes and shaming is to actually talk about things.

The problem, of course, is that I'm terrified of my parents finding out. My parents are generally pretty liberal, and don't generally get upset over sex-related stuff...unless it also involves me. Their take on sex seems to be that everybody does it, except their little girl. And beyond that, they seem to think that a lot of kinky stuff is, well, kind of silly. And the thought of my parents knowing and judging me and possibly disapproving makes my skin crawl. I love my parents, I think they're really cool most of the time, and while I don't think they would disown me I can't help but think of the people I know who haven't spoken to their families in years because they came out or were outed as kinky.

So that leaves me feeling stuck. Because you can argue that while BDSM is something between you and your partner and, like your favorite sexual positions, not necessarily something to share with anybody and everybody, that argument doesn't work as well when...well...it's not something you do in your bedroom with your partner. What if it's something you do in a bar twice a month with your friends? What if it's actually how you know most of your friends? I may have gone to a sports bar for beer and wings, eaten at an Ethiopian restaurant for the first time, and gone to a Korean bakery in the past week (as well as going to a play party) but I did all these things with friends I made in the scene.

So yeah...I pretty much don't know what to do. I'm lucky in that I'm not at risk of losing my job or my nonexistant kids or anything like that if I did decide to come all the way out of the leather-lined closet, but I still cringe at the thought of my parents finding out. I just...I want us to be in a world where this wouldn't be a big deal. But if it weren't a big deal, I wouldn't feel as much of a need to talk about it, to try to counter the misconceptions.

I don't know what to do.