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.

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.

See, I told you guys Catholicism was kinky.

The Lives of the Saints

I swear, I went years without really thinking about Catholicism until I started this whole over-analytical "Why am I kinky?" quest. But now I think about Catholicism all the time. Catholicism is HOT.

People say stuff about Catholic school and kink kind of a lot - it's a cliche, the naughty Catholic schoolgirl getting disciplined. But in all honesty, I grew up in the 90s. The nuns didn't hit me - that would be abusive and illegal. Catholicism influence my kinky self on a purely mental level.

Have you ever looked at the Lives of the Saints? My mom was really into saints when I was growing up, and I read a lot of the entries in her Lives of the Saints book when I was choosing a confirmation name. And the saints are all about suffering. When you do a search for the word "suffering" on the site I linked to, you get 124 matches. There's St. Alice, who suffered greatly (though leprosy isn't very sexy) and was known for visions and ecstacies. St. Rita, who prayed to suffer like Jesus and spent her days praying, fasting, and doing penance. The whole concept behind stigmata is that of ecstatic suffering as a show of devotion to God, and there are countless other saints and martyrs who were tortured and murdered for their faith, proving their unwavering devotion.

This idea of ecstatic suffering definitely got into my head and rattled around. As a kid, I had a coloring book biography of Blessed Kateri Tekawitha which detailed her fasting and painful penances (I want to say she did some self-flagellation, but I can't find a link supporting this). And there was that movie about St. Bernadette of Lourdes (Song of Bernadette, I think it was) where Bernadette is sweet and pure and devoted and has visions and becomes a nun, and at every turn people (often people within the church) look down on her and think she's crazy. I just remember the scene where the mean old nun who never believed in Bernadette says to her "What do you know of suffering?" and it turns out that Bernadette had horribly painful cancer the whole time and never said a word about the pain, instead just smiled serenely and worked and prayed. That's devotion. And Catholic imagery definitely influenced my concept of devotion.

A girl I was sort of friends with in high school once said to me "I wish I were ignorant, so I could be Catholic, because they have such beautiful ceremonies," and because I was a teenage goth girl at a Catholic high school who'd been dragged to mass every Sunday since age 8, I think I rolled my eyes. But now I kinda know what she was talking about (though without the weird, condescending part about ignorance). I went to church with my family on Christmas, and before communion, when everyone said "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed," it struck a chord with my submissive little self. I thought "That's beautiful." And the idea of redemption through suffering, an idea I learned in church and Religion and Theology classes, is kind of an idea that I took with me into relationships.

I lost my faith, and I don't really believe in God anymore. However, I feel like suffering to prove love and devotion is a huge part of who I am. If I'm bad, if I misbehave, if I sin, I want to do penance and be forgiven, and to prove how really and truly sorry I am, I want that penance to hurt. And when it's over, and I've suffered enough, I want to be redeemed.

On sluttiness...

At this point, pretty much everyone knows I went to Catholic school. Catholicism has been a pretty heavy influence on my kinkiness, what with the penance and forgiveness and the saints and martyrs and their ecstatic suffering and so on and so forth. But Catholic school had a different influence altogether--all because of the idea of being a slut and the practice of slut shaming.

Despite the best efforts of abstinence only sex ed, pretty much everyone at my high school was having sex left, right, and center. It was also a small school, so everyone knew each other's business. And when a girl crossed some invisible, undefinable line, by performing the wrong sex act, or the right sex act on too many people, or with the wrong people, or in the wrong place, or did it and admitted to enjoying it too much, she was labeled a slut.

I was mostly a good girl. I had my (emotionally abusive) boyfriend and no one knew what we were doing in bed because he isolated me from my friends and he hated "sluts" and "sluttiness." I though his us-against-the-world, no-one-understands-our-love take on things was romantic, but really it was awful...but that's for another post. We had our quiet, dramatic, devastating, awful relationship and effectively hid what was really going on. And I was miserable for obvious reasons, but also, secretly, I was really jealous of the girls everyone else thought were slutty.

On the one hand, I didn't really want to be a good girl. When I heard about someone's ill-advised threesome or the girl who put on a sex show with her boyfriend at a party, taking requests for positions...everyone else acted disgusted, while I was secretly frustrated and turned on. I wanted to have adventures, I wanted to feel overwhelmed and taken over by sex. I wanted to lose control. But I was stuck in an awful relationship and vaguely terrified at the thought of the girls whose names were written on the bathroom walls.

I've gotten over a lot of that stuff. The boyfriend dumped me, I came to terms with the fact that I do, in fact, want someone to control me sometimes--but I want it to be consensual and sexy and not scary and abusive. I'm in an awesome relationship, I'm having those adventures I wanted. It's great.

And the results of watching other girls get whispered about and laughed at and slandered in graffiti stayed with me. On the one hand, it gets me incredibly hot when I'm called a slut in bed. I do the things the bad girls did in high school, and the leftover shame makes it super sexy.

On the other hand, I still have moments, even on websites designed for kinky people (where I'm pretty much 100% sure that no one cares) when I have a hard time talking about things I'm into, things I enjoy. It took me months to admit online that I enjoy anal sex, because on some ridiculous level I was sure someone, somewhere would be judging me for it. And after the first few play parties I went to, I spent days wondering if I'd done too much with too many people, if someone was laughing at me behind my back.

I've gotten over some of that fear...but now I want to make more of a conscious effort to get rid of the rest. I'll hang onto the hot remnants of slut shaming. I'll keep getting turned on by the thought of being a bad girl, a dirty girl, a slut. But I don't want to let those stupid girls in high school control me to the point where I'm dishonest anymore. I don't want to care what people think of me because of what turns me on. It's ridiculous and it's time to stop.