Worries, Wishes, and Resolutions, Post-Heartbreak

Sweetie says it’s not always the same story, but the last year is really looking like a pattern to me—girl meets dom, dom breaks limits, girl panics and feels unplaywithable. It takes so much to rebuild myself after each breach of trust, and it’s very hard to live with the fact that these kinds of things are happening all the time, that he’s out there ready to dehumanize the next girl.

I don’t want to be using words like “dehumanizing.” I want to have fun. I want to be the brave naked girl with a well-spanked behind and ropes in various shades of Hello Kitty, but that girl seems really far away. So I’ll start with the worries:

--I am worried that there isn’t a dominant guy in the world who doesn’t secretly want me to just shut the fuck up. No matter how clear I’ve made it that messing with my voice is a hard limit, I always seem to end up with a hand across my throat, literally or metaphorically.

--I’m worried that I’ll never be able to tell the difference between red flags and just fears. Since I’m a fairly anxious person anyway, I tend to dismiss intuitions and deal-breakers until it’s too late. In the case of the last guy, so much of my psyche was like a horror movie audience hollering DON’T GO IN THERE but somehow I always end up in there. It would save me a lot of trouble if, as Sweetie suggests, my intuition could please speak in complete sentences.

--I’m worried that I’m just someone who can’t gain respect for some reason. I worry about this a lot in my classroom, as well, on the days when the first graders won’t simmer down long enough for me to finish a sentence.

--I worry that submission is just something that I try to exchange for love, but I don’t think so. After a good, connected scene, I feel clearheaded and centered, closer to my better self. It’s only when I play without connection that things go off the rails.

Now for the wishes:

--I wish for a man who’ll be happy to belong to me, no matter who else he belongs to, no matter who else is at the table. I would love to sit there and know that he loves me, even as he gazes lovingly at his wife. I want to feel cared for and secure enough to enjoy the love between him and his other partner(s). I don’t mean belonging to each other in a M/s sense, only in the Breakfast at Tiffany’s buy-some-furniture-and-give-the-cat-a-name sense. This is the hardest thing to believe in.

--I’m trying to figure out a non-hurtful way to say I wish for a guy with a regular-sized penis that works most of the time. But it’s not really about the size or hardness; it’s more about having the depth of character to handle mishaps and insecurity with aplomb. In my somewhat limited experience, there seems to be a connection between frustrations in that department and misogynist tendencies.

--Speaking of depth of character, I wish for a man who is as good and careful with knots as my wife is. Learning ropes takes discipline, practice, and patience, all things that I need to be looking for in a partner.

--I wish to be able to make mistakes, talk things through, ask for compromise. It keeps getting to a point where I’m afraid to ask questions, and by then it is certainly too late.

--I am not a unicorn, and I do not want to date or bottom to his wife, girlfriend, friend, other sub, or anybody else, unless I expressly say so. I wish for a man who can have healthy boundaries between relationships and who can even (Do I dare wish for this in modern times?) PUT THE FUCKING PHONE AWAY on date nights. (Except for check-ins and emergencies, of course.) It’s not that I don’t want to know his people; I just would like a chance to know him first.

--I wish for a man who can see me broken and sobbing, who can see me at my ugliest and still think I’m beautiful. I know this is a possible thing because my wife has been doing it since 2001.

And the resolutions:

--I will not ignore red flags. If something in me says “RUN!” I will run as if Matt Smith himself were telling me to.

--I will not do things I don’t like. Even if other people seem to like them. This seems obvious but I need to tell it to myself.

--I will not date men whose other partners have “Veto power.” I will gladly meet folks but I won’t be vetted. I want to be treated like a potential friend, not a potential employee.

--I will not date anyone who makes me feel secondary or tertiary. I have room in my heart for a real second partner, and I want a man who does as well. This doesn’t mean I would need equal time, but if I see him once a week, I want the time to mean something.

--I have friends with whom I will happily play casually, but when I am on a date and someone asks me what I am looking for, I will not give some wishy-washy answer about “Oh, well, I’m open to however things turn out…” I will say “I’m looking for someone at whose house I could eventually leave a toothbrush.” and if he seems toothbrush-averse, I’ll move on.

Triggers and My Voice: The Story of a Hard Limit

Note: If you’re someone who gets triggered by mentions of non-consensual sexual violence, you’ll want to skip this one.

Last week I talked a lot about being protective of my voice and being subject to panics. I’m unsure if these facts about myself disqualify me from experiencing BDSM in the ways I want to. I guess I thought there would be failsafes or at least compassion in case someone’s triggered, but that doesn’t seem to be the case so far. I’m trying to not judge the whole “lifestyle” based on one group of people.

A lot of things contributed to me being an anxious girl with shaky self-worth. I had both a happy childhood and a terribly abusive one. Both my mother and father were physically and verbally abusive to myself, my siblings, and each other. They often fought loudly about sex. One night, I’m pretty sure I heard my dad rape my mom. I got it to stop, in fact, by crying loudly. “Now you made (me) cry.” she said as the action simmered down in there.

But the biggest factor in me being protective of my voice was something that happened when I was seventeen. I’ve been telling the story in the same stupid way for twenty years: I was promiscuous in high school and it lead to an inevitable conclusion of rape and assault. That is a bullshit way to tell the story—it’s sad that I only realized recently that there was no cause-effect relationship. It was a terrible, evil crime, not a path I put myself on.

What happened was, my friend Sheri and I lied and said we were going to each others’ houses so that we could hang out with her boyfriend and his friend and get laid. That didn’t take very long, so after the guys were done with us, they dropped us off in the park three doors down from my house. We were considering sleeping in the park when a pickup truck full of hooting and hollering people we vaguely knew pulled up and asked if we wanted to go to a party and we said sure—I thought of how mortified my mom would be if she knew I was riding in the back of a pickup truck.

They either put something in my drink or I drank way too fast. I don’t remember drinking very much at all, but we were playing Quarters around the time that the guys started asking, “So which one of us are you gonna fuck?” I was woozy and tired and I didn’t want to fuck anyone, no matter how known for it I was. But I knew I didn’t really have a choice—I wasn’t in any condition to stop anybody, and this was kind of who I was now. So I chose Willie, the cutest guy at the party. He was a tall, skinny African American guy, cute but with kind of a dismissive face. I chose him partly because he was there with his girlfriend, I think her name was Lisa, a blond in acid-washed jeans. I thought he couldn’t do anything with her there, but he sent her home.

Willie took me to the party host’s bedroom and told me to get undressed. “All the way,” he said, and I did. He got on top of me and put it in, humped quickly and mechanically. I opened my mouth to cry out, not for help, but to moan so I’d be doing a good job. He put his hand over my mouth and I shut up. When he was done, he left the door open so that the whole party could see me scrambling around for my shirt.  

That’s when I started to get sick, just throwing up copious amounts everywhere, so, so much. I must have passed out then and when I came to, I couldn’t see, and they were hitting me with something hard. (I found out later it was tennis rackets) and yelling at me for throwing up. They were screaming all kinds of names at me, but I just remember them saying I was bad. I’m not sure how many people were doing the hitting, but Willie and Lisa were two of them.

I screamed and screamed and screamed and some angel neighbor called the cops. When they got there, Lisa or some other blond girl took me into the bathroom to try and clean up the blood that had spattered all down my shirt. I remember she was talking to me so sweetly.

So far we have three reasons why my voice (which includes these paragraphs) feels like a lifeline that could get taken away: “saving” my mom by crying, Willie’s hand over my mouth, and the screams that maybe actually did save my life. But the fourth reason is much guiltier: I didn’t tell the police the sex part of the crime. They couldn’t get it out of me. Everyone knew, but I refused to say it on the deposition. I’d been drinking, I was a slut, I didn’t know how to prove I didn’t deserve what happened.

I didn’t know how to prove I didn’t deserve what happened. I’ve told this story so many times, but never understood it quite that way.

I felt like I couldn’t really say it was rape because I’d chosen him, I didn’t try to stop him. The Accused had somehow become embedded in my consciousness, having the opposite (?) of its intended effect. I knew the danger of being “put on trial” for it and I wanted no part of that. So I lied my face off and told the police the assault story without the first part. A few of them, including Willie, did some jail time for the assault, but the fact that I didn’t tell the truth about the rest of the crime makes me feel like a co-conspirator, like I didn’t do enough to protect myself or my fellow women.

The crying, the hand over my mouth, the screams that saved my life, the guilt over not telling, they’ll always be in my body. Sometimes they make me very hard to be close to, but they also make me brave, protective, and they make me try to be transparent.

I guess what I want people to get out of this is that you never know what stories can be inside someone’s body. Every single person you touch, even in the most casual way, sitting next to her on the bus, tying him up at a play party, or hugging them on a first date, has a body full of stories. Give up the idea that enough negotiation can make those complications got away. The stories inside us, even the screams, are beautiful and deserve to be treated with care.

Please, Sir, Part Six: Censorship and OMG I Heart His Penis

***Note: Sometimes the most liberating characters can also be the most repressive. I have one hard limit, at least one that would be relevant on the first date: Don’t try to take my voice away. This applies physically, to things like gags and breath play, but also to other ways of limiting expression. Ever since our date, Fireguy has been harassing me about this blog. The day after, while I was fragile and trying to piece things together, he told me I couldn’t post about it until the following week. That was a trigger that sent me into a panic. After almost a week of feeling anxious and threatened (but still posting) I explained to him again about the limit, and he apologized. Yesterday he called, expressing all kinds of worry about my writing and cruelly triggering me again. He was specifically worried about Varga Girl reading it. Fuck those two. Seriously. I don’t know how I got in the middle of their mess, but I wish I had run away screaming when I first had the chance.

What had been a freeing, complex, and loving experience has turned into a nightmare. I feel angry and betrayed, but I refuse to be ashamed. I refuse to compromise my point of view so that his and hers can be more validated. Fuck that. And fuck him.***

Back to the fun! So there!

I wish I could spell the moans out well enough so you could hear them. I watched inside myself closely, waiting for when it was time to ask Sir if I could come. They’re hard to predict, I learned. I’d feel pulse start inside me and start to ascend, but it was hard to tell when the peak would come. I felt self-conscious and tried really hard to predict them. I tried to do a good job and ask permission, but my orgasms on the inside are just an ebb and flow, a tide. For a pronounced peak, you’ve got to get me on the outside. Which he would do, soon enough. It’s tempting to draw a parallel between getting permission to come and him trying to control my writing.

“It seems like there should be more hair pulling…please? Sir?”

He obliged and what happened next was my favorite part. Did I already call something my favorite part? Oh well. Lots of favorite parts.

He gathered me to him and just sort of went to town on me, pulling my hair just insistently enough, biting my neck and shoulders, growling-I felt deliciously ravished, still all tied up, maybe blindfolded, I don’t remember. I love feeling like things are all wildly out of control but safe, attacked and protected at once. I felt as adored as a favorite toy, a favorite friend, a favorite girl. Of course my egalitarian poly self wants to qualify that, but it’s how I felt while I was being so nicely mauled.

We settled back into being gentle and my not-favorite part happened—he kept narrating the things he wouldn’t/couldn’t do, and it made me acutely aware of the Relationship Agreement and my own STI status. He said things like “I want to put my face between your legs so much, I’m saying that even though I can’t, I don’t want you to feel like I’m teasing you.”

It wasn’t so much the safety measures as the fact that he kept MENTIONING them—every time he did, it took me out of them moment and back to the email that made me cry, the one denying me “Special” Level 2 status.

But also! I trusted him to TIE ME UP IN HIS BASEMENT! I trusted him to SET ME ON FIRE! And he couldn’t believe that I didn’t have anything that could be transmitted that way? That seems a little unbalanced.

And! Oral sex seems pretty far to go on a first date anyway—if nothing else, I think I’m going back to a one base per date policy. And restraint with a romantic partner? That’s like EIGHTH base.

At some point I did something bratty and had to be turned on my side and spanked again. I felt so cute, still all roped up, giggling, adored.

Then it was time to take off the ropes—he needed my hands, he said. I felt a little sore from my arms being smushed behind my back for so long-there was a pinch in my shoulder.

He said, “Oh, I won’t make you lay like that next time.”

“Nono! I liked it! It’s okay!”

Then I met one of my favorite penises of all time. He told me to take it out and I was so happy to do so—pulled down his underwear and was delighted to take it in my hand. It’s hard to say what I liked about it so much—it just fit. It was friendly, likable, charming. He apologized that it was a little shy at first, but I loved making friends with it, teasing it to life.

Next: Okay, So I’m a Rebound Redhead