A month ago, I had a basement-date with Fireguy that went
(consensually) a lot further than it should’ve. It wouldn’t have occurred to me
that I could end up restrained and at third base by the end of a first date. It
was a LOT of fun buy it was also certainly too much for me.
The next day, I was feeling good but overwhelmed, a little
shaky and unsure. I figured I’d give it a few days to let it sink in, then
write it through and consider what I wanted to do about that budding relationship
or acquaintanceship or playpal arrangement or whatever it was supposed to be.
Fireguy, however, went into damage-control mode, quite unbidden and unnecessarily.
He texted and said that if I wrote about it that day, it wouldn’t be the “one
handed read” that he wanted it to be, but if I wrote about it the next week,
then “that would be fine.”
It isn’t that I dislike being jerked off to, either in
person or in written form—in fact, until that moment, turning people on had
been one of the big joys of writing this. When Fireguy sent those texts, I felt
the bottom drop out from under me, both because he was taking ownership of
something that’s creatively mine and because he’d reduced this complex personal
journey or whatever to something that existed just for his enjoyment. I wanted
to handle it properly, so I called him up to talk about it, but I was so
panicked that I ended up blubbering and unable to finish my sentences. He
seemed irritated: “You just don’t understand what’s going on with me.”
What was going on with him was that he and Varga Girl broke
up but were trying to continue as sub and dom, that’s a big deal, admittedly.
But what he’d mentioned in the texts was, this guy had embarrassed him on
FetLife, and he was very concerned about his reputation. It still makes me so
disgusted that he was:
A. A grown man that concerned about his online reputation.
B. Willing to compromise my well-being about it.
C. A dominant man trying to squelch a submissive woman’s
point of view.
What I kept asking him, and what I still keep wondering, is
what about what’s going on with me? All of that stuff that happened was a big
deal to me, and I still wish I could’ve gotten anybody to acknowledge it. I was
completely unable to convince either Fireguy or Varga Girl that I was a person
in the story, that, for better or worse, something had happened to me, and I
had a right to write about it, I had a right to a point of view. I’ll never get
them to acknowledge me as a human being, and that is really scary.
I eventually managed to get it through to him that trying to
control me creatively was crossing a limit. He apologized for that and for
breaking my trust. We had a pretty good conversation (even if he did try to
rewrite the meaning of the phrase “one-handed read”) and I was relieved that I
didn’t have to stay mad at him.
AND THEN HE DID IT AGAIN.
Paranoid and still trying to Smeagol his precious ex, he tried
to convince me again to stop writing about our date, trying at first to shame
me about the sex parts, but eventually admitting that he was afraid of his sub
reading it. He tried to convince me to take out the sex scenes or “make it more
anonymous” even though I already don’t use names or locations. He even
suggested switching the entire blog to private. “Everyone knows it’s me,” he
said, he said he didn’t want his family to read it.
I was beyond livid, I still am. First of all, I had made a
clear limit about trying to control me creatively. Breaking a limit once can be
seen as an accident, breaking it again is torture. He knew that what he was
doing would have a triggering effect, and he kept doing it anyway. When I got
upset and panicked, he told me I was too angry to be in his family.
What I heard in all those attempts to control my writing:
“My point of view is more important than yours. Nobody in the scene knows who
you are, so you don’t matter.”
So right now, I’m still scared. I’m having trouble getting
back to the feeling I had before that night-the feeling of being free and loved
and starting to accept myself. I really worry that I will never be able to
trust a man again, that I can only find men who embody a secret inner wish to
be erased.
Part of me want to jump up and down and say “Why don’t you
see, what happened was important,” both the experience and the paragraphs he
squelched. After all, he did succeed in fucking up the writing process—I was
too disgusted and humiliated to finish telling the sex part of the story.
One part I didn’t get to was, toward the end of the scene
that night, I did get to try the “Please, Sir, may I come” thing—he was playing
with my boobs and I was finishing myself off down below, and I started to feel
the wave crest, so I found just the right moment and asked: “Please sir, may I
come.”
“Sure, go ahead,” he said, and I did.
Sometimes you don’t know that you don’t like something until
it’s too late. There’s some connection there between his wanting a say in the
deeply intimate rhythms of my own body and wanting a say in the way I write
about the experience—to me, those things are not separate. If you’re keeping
score, that’s “”Come for me, you greedy little brat,” yes and “Please Sir may I
come?” no. It’s complicated.
As much as I enjoy the feeling of submitting, it seems very
difficult to find a guy whose dominance does not spill over into everyday life.
Both Bill and Fireguy refused to let me belong to myself after I left the couch
or scene. Both experiences were about losing my point of view, and I am very
scared of letting that happen again.
