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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Orientation

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Hard to Offend?

It says in my profile that I like making people uncomfortable. This is kind of a throwback to my years in college, when we did lots of theatre that was offensive and in-your-face and often just...well...uncomfortable. Two of my favourite playwrights are Christopher Durang and Martin McDonagh. I had friends who delighted in saying horrible things in public just to get a laugh, and I always found it hilarious.

But lately I find myself really bothered by things that, on the surface, seem really innocuous. And I find that hard to reconcile with the hard-to-offend person that I thought I was.

The subtle things are creepier, though. And a play, at least, is not real life--though using the same sort of exaggerated language one would in a play to get a response offstage is a little more problematic--it's really different when a character onstage makes a sexist remark and when your friend does it. Durang plays in particular show us really horrible things framed by absurdity and humor to make a statement about what a weird, screwed up, sometimes horrible place the world is. And while I was not offended by the rape scene in Betty's Summer Vacation, I definitely was occasionally disturbed by the show on the whole.

Two of my favorite characters have been really, really unlikeable. An abusive mother and a violent, bullying teenage girl. Possibly the two most potentially offensive characters I've played, and I loved every second of being with them. However, when a critic referred to one of the characters as "sluttish" in a review, I was pretty upset--how is she a slut? Because she talks openly about her curiosity about sex? Because she swears and fights and takes charge of things? Because she isn't ashamed to talk about being sexually assaulted? That never seemed "sluttish" to me, it seemed strong.

This is kind of a disjointed post. Clearly it all has to do with context. A lot of media that I think people could characterize as "offensive" is wildly different from real life. There's a huge difference between Divine's speech about her beliefs in Pink Flamingos ("KILL EVERYONE NOW!") and my dumb friend from college calling a girl a skank. And as I write this, it becomes more and obvious why I'm offended by one of these things and not the other.

I think there was also something self-conscious in all the awful things we said in college. We were in on the joke, and it was like saying "This would be really horrible if it were true, but we know it's not so it's hilarious!" We were fucking with people, and that's not very nice, but there's a big difference between fucking with people on purpose and saying horrible things but not realizing they're horrible. But maybe I'm just defending it to avoid feeling guilty.

Making people uncomfortable at least gets a reaction. I'd rather get a reaction than never discuss anything ever and sweep everything under the rug.

A post about body image...

Like every other girl in the world, I have body image issues.

I'm not overweight. I have been in the past, but at present I'm supposedly a healthy weight for my height - about 5'2" and 135 pounds. My measurements, on a good day, are 35.5-27-38. That's pretty normal. I've had a couple jobs where I spent 40 hours a week (or more) going through people's measurements, and if I came across my own, I'd think I had an okay figure.

...but when I actually look at myself in the mirror, or go shopping for clothes, I make myself miserable. I hate my hips, I hate my ass, I hate my breasts. I feel fat, like I'll never be attractive. I hate my fat, jiggly arms. I hate that sometimes the only jeans that fit are a size 11, even though I know that women's sizes are completely arbitrary numbers and sometimes the jeans that fit are a size 6. And beauty standards change at random and are also arbitrary and have very little to do with what people actually find attractive, anyway.

The really crazy thing is that knowing all of that just doesn't help that much. And even crazier is that I'm not even especially attracted to the super-skinny girls that we're being sold as the current beauty standard. I think curvy girls are hot, I like hips and breasts and if I see one more picture of a size 0 model in a corset that's just sort of vaguely encircling her waist instead of cinching it in (because there's so little there to cinch), I'm gonna scream. And actually, more than anything else I'm attracted to people's personalities, so this whole conversation is really moot.

I think the thing that makes it hard for me is clothes. Pants suck, I hate buying pants. Every pair of pants in the world makes my hips and butt look huge, except for this one pair of cotton capris I own. When I iron those so they have a sharp crease and wear them with heels, I look (or maybe mostly feel) like a 1950s movie star. And I know how to shop for the things that flatter my body type, that are supposed to cover my flaws...but especially here in New York, I find myself insanely jealous of these rail-thin girls who can wear absolutely anything. Skinny jeans, bubble skirts, any garment made out of latex. I see them and I want to look like that. It's hard to tell yourself that you're perfect just the way you are when you pass an actual model on the street while fabric shopping.

Even if I work out every single day, even if I starve myself, even if I had a perfectly flat stomach and skinny arms, my hips and butt aren't going anywhere. Those hips are part of my bone structure, and I'm never going to be a size zero. My freshman year og high school, I weighed 115 pounds, I looked like a crack addict, and I still had wide hips and a big ass. I know this, and I know I should not let it get to me, but somehow it feels like a personal failing.

One of my goals this year is to get the fuck over this nonsense. I want to learn to love my body, as ridiculous as that sounds. I want to stop wishing for a "bikini body" and instead celebrate how awesome it is that 1950s dresses fit like they're made for me. And I'm going to wear my goddamn skinny jeans, regardless of whether or not girls with 38" hips are "supposed" to wear them. I spent so many years trying to lose weight, made myself crazy with impossible diets, and now I give up! I'm going to learn to love myself the way I am, and say "fuck you" to anyone who says the way I am isn't good enough.

Missing masochism...

So firstly, I'm completely wiped out by all this holiday ridiculousness. I just slept for, like, twelve hours and I still feel kind of zombie-like.

But here's the meat of the entry - I haven't been that into pain lately. It's kind of disappointing. It happens from time to time, but I don't think I've ever really thought or talked about it much.

I'm still totally up for rough sex, for dirty talk and being called names, and for other stuff as well...but I can't take a good spanking. It's really disappointing. I like being spanked, I like the idea of it. But right now the physical like just isn't there.

It's not that spanking or otherwise being smacked around ever doesn't hurt, but it feels different when I'm in the right headspace. I know this isn't news to anyone else into this sort of thing, but I figure it's worth describing what it's like for me.

I'm not what you'd call a pain slut, even at the best of times. And it's really hard to talk about pain quantitatively - how can you ever be sure anyone else is experiencing the same level of pain you are in the same way? I can take what I'd call a "moderate amount" of pain, but for someone else that might just be the warm-up.

For me...right now, even a spanking I know I would normally take and enjoy has me squealing and trying to get away. And not in a role play sort of "Oh, no! The mean man is hitting me!" kind of way - in a way that's close to genuine panic.

Usually I don't reach a panicky place. Usually it hurts, but not in an upsetting way. And then there's a magic hit, and it doesn't hurt anymore and everything goes tingly. Sometimes after a little while, it starts to hurt again and I know I've had enough, but it's not often a scary, panicky feeling. It's just an "Okay, I'm done now."

The thing now is that I miss all that. It's really disappointing to try to get to that tingly, intense, close feeling and instead just feel like you wish it'd stop. But talking about it is a lot better than just feeling it alone in my head, and acknowledging that it's just a thing that happens sometimes is kinda nice. And eventually whatever it is will shift again and I'll be back to normal.

So yeah...talking about things is good.