Dear Prudence, Dan Savage, and...me.

I'm not an advice columnist. This is probably a good thing. When I was in high school and college, friends frequently asked me for relationship advice and I like to think I was okay at giving it, but now that I realize how fucked up my own relationships were then, I'm not actually that sure.

Regardless of my advice columnist status, and the fact that no one actually asked my opinion, I'm really, really weirded out and upset by today's Dear Prudence column about a teenage boy with a latex glove fetish. The letter is written by the kid's mom, and she asks "Should I try to stop him [from looking at glove porn, wearing gloves, etc.], or should I just chalk it up to a personality quirk and worry no longer?"

Unsurprisingly, Prudie starts tossing around words like "deviant" and talks to a shrink, who "says your son needs a complete psychological workup." Seriously? Because he likes gloves? I would say on a kinky scale of 1 to fucking scary, rubber and latex gloves are, like, a 0.5. And, of course, even kinks that fall at my personal fucking scary end of the scale are still okay.

Dan Savage, who is in my opinion a much sounder source for sex advice, posted his response, and it's (also unsurprisingly) not crazy and alarmist like Prudie's. I certainly don't agree with Dan on everything (certainly not with his stance on pit bulls), but I agree with him here.

I'd like to add that I'm pretty sure most 13-year-olds, regardless of whether or not they're kinky, feel worry about whether the people they're interested in dating will like them. So, in fact, do most people older than 13. I feel like sending your kid for a full psychological workup (though I have nothing against psychological professionals in general) is not going to accomplish much except reinforcing the message that there is something wrong with them.

I really wonder if this had been another issue, not a fetish but something else that made a kid concerned about their possibly limited dating pool, would the advice have been the same? If my mom had written this letter when I was 13 and said "My daughter is worried that her interest in vampire movies is 'too weird' and is scaring away potential boyfriends," (and a dude totally shot me down when I was 13 because of this) would a psychiatrist have been called in? Well, maybe. Because vampires are scary and evil and I was 13 around the time of the Vampire Clan murders, but that's beside the point. What if it were an interest in "Star Trek"? Or video games? I feel like those would have a very different answer. But because it's a fetish, it must be dangerous and scary and a sign of a bigger problem. That is such crap.

So you know what? I eventually found and started dating someone who liked me despite my inability to talk about anything other than vampire movies and The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was 13. And all you people out there who are worried about finding someone--there are people out there who will like you and find you attractive and sexy and interesting despite (or better yet, because of) your interest in "Star Trek" or your obsession with Joan Crawford movies or even your weird freakin' fetishes, let alone your relatively harmless ones.

Worries.

I am a worrier. I've been a worrier for about as long as I can remember, and worrying runs in my family. My mom worries, my grandma is a seriously world-class worrier. I have had two small panic attacks, mostly because of being exhausted and in crowded places. I often say I have some anxiety issues, but I've never been diagnosed with anything.

One of the attractions of BDSM for me is that I don't have to worry while I'm in the middle of a scene. Especially when playing with Jack--I get to relax and put myself completely in his hands and trust that he'll take care of the worrying. It's actually pretty awesome that it works that way.

(I'm pretty sure lots of people would tell me that this is unhealthy, that this is just an escape like drugs or alcohol, that dealing with anxiety by getting consensually beaten up is sick. I would like to point out to those people that I think it's probably more healthy than frequent binge drinking, which is how I used to deal with my worrying.)

Regardless of how I think anyone would possibly react, it is a relief for me not to have to think. I have never been much of a physical person--I never really got into sports or working out or the other things people say makes them feel connected to their body. There's a line in Christopher Durang's play Baby With the Bathwater where Daisy talks about having innumerable casual sexual encounters because of the moment during sex when you forget everything, even who you are and just feel. Pain pulls me back into my body, makes my brain shut up. And that is really just freaking awesome.

There are lots and lots and lots of other reasons why BDSM and kinky play are awesome, why submitting and surrendering to your partner can be amazing and freeing. There are lots of reasons why I find this sort of thing sexy as hell. But for me, there's a delightful side benefit to be found in not having to worry.

Coming out of the kink closet...

Over the course of the past year-year and a half, I've gradually been telling people in my life that I'm kinky. Not everybody--my mom, grandparents, and fuckton of cousins don't need to know. But as I've started going to more and more play parties, and made more and more friends at said parties (hi new friends!) it's become increasingly more difficult to tell people I've known since middle school (hi old friends!) amusing anecdotes without going into detail. And the more people I tell, the more I feel like I'm hiding something really big from the people I haven't told.

Telling people can be hard. I think I actually make it harder than it has to be a lot of the time. But it always seems like kind of a big deal.

The first time I told someone I was interested in BDSM-y type stuff I hadn't actually realized it myself. It was the beginning of my junior year of college, I had been dumped over the summer by my boyfriend of two years, and I had started flirting with a cute freshman to...I dunno...take my mind off how shitty I felt. We were walking around campus one evening, talking about past relationships, and my emotionally abusive ex from high school came up. I believe what I said was "...I've realized since then that power games and stuff really need to stay in the bedroom where they belong."

On the surface, the conversation went smoothly along, but in my head I was freaking out thinking "WHERE THE HELL DID THAT COME FROM!? Did I really just say that?" I avidly read Savage Love every week, and usually Control Tower as well, so the idea of kink was not completely foreign to me...it was just that I very definitely thought of it as something other people did. Never mind that I fantasized all the time about being tied up...that was normal, not the sort of extreme stuff other people got up to.

After the ill-fated hookups with the cute freshman came to an end, I kept thinking about being tied up. I wore a corset in a show and loved how it felt, so I made my own (even tighter and sturdier than the costume-y one I'd worn before) and fantasized about being fucked while wearing it. I thought about being corseted and tied up. But still, I wasn't kinky. It wasn't until Jack broached the subject years later that I was even able to admit it to myself for real.

I'm still in touch with the cute freshman. We were in a show together, and we follow each other on Twitter. We're not close at all, though, and it's really weird to think that he's the first person I came out of the kink closet to. I doubt he even realized the significance that once little sentence has taken on in my life.

Orientation

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I'm sorry I've been neglecting the blog. I'm in the middle of transitioning between jobs, leaving the job that's been making me on-again off-again miserable for one that's really awesome that I'm really excited about. It's been stressful. And exhausting.

I'll be back to posting soon, I hope.