If you don’t understand or respect enthusiastic consent, do not attend.
Two things about me: (1) I am uncomfortable with ideological ambiguity, and (2) I am always in a sexuality crisis. This past year I have been caught in the collision of these topics and this is my attempt at detangling things. I have been talking in circles and I do not know what is true.
This summer I went to my first techno-optimist hacker party. It had the markings of adult exclusivity: the mysterious email invite, the Burning Man crowd, the promise of designer drugs. I was there through a tertiary invite, tagging alongside a friend's coworker, and the anticipatory excitement was beginning to buzz throughout me. Come in clothes from your childhood, the coworker had instructed. Obedient as we were, we formed a matching set of three, squeezed into schoolgirl skirts and tights, hair bows and stuffed animals spilling out into an older crowd. At the entrance I adjusted my braids and reread the invite. Tonight we return to our childhoods, tinkering with toys and ideas.
My childhood? I grew up believing I was a sinner bound for hell and bought wholesale into the ideology that would save me. My natural inclinations were not to be trusted; I was queer in a distinctly unqueer place (Catholic school) and learned to hold my desires at a distance. Occasionally I would allow them to surface in the form of silent crushes and the lesbian fanfic of chronically online youth. I was a sexual bulimic; consuming the rogue materials and regurgitating my shame to a 37 year old priest in a confessional. Seven fanfics purged with two Our Fathers.
In college I grew tired of Catholic guilt and swapped it for third wave feminism. It seemed more than a fair trade: fire and brimstone for freeform hedonism. Sex positivity was great at first — it made sex cool. It allowed me to talk about vibrators, female pleasure, kink. It allowed me to write this all down with only a vague sense of unease at the crudeness. Untethered from my shame, I began to experiment. I explored kinks and fetishes with varying degrees of enjoyment. I read smut with friends. I tried sleeping with people I didn't care about. I engaged in sex that was neither pleasurable nor psychologically healthy because I saw everyone doing the same. And slowly I began to see the cracks in my newfound belief system. I had traded kneeling at the altar for kneeling at the feet of my partners, but I still craved the sensation of worship, the bliss of self denial. I still playacted my sexuality for my partners the same way I playacted a straight girl in Catholic school. For my first partner I performed the untouched virgin, letting him talk about his fantasies and pretending masturbation was foreign to me when I was 8 when I first discovered how to explore myself. I had made it out of the church but remained firmly embedded in a patriarchal system where my body was not fully my own.
Maybe I would have stayed loyal to sex positivity had I not tasted its extremes. The catalyst was this: I played with power and lost, submerged myself in an abusive relationship and emerged with a lifetime of lust extinguished. When I came out of the fog I needed to piece together everything I had once known. I took a two year break from sexual intimacy and emerged the most stable (read: isolated with no one to trigger me) I had ever been. For a while I believed my desire had died with the relationship.
I was in this state of psychological stillness when I entered the party. It was exactly the sort of high budget you'd expect from VC money and tech stocks; I counted 20 rooms and an entire apartment complex of blanket forts and plushie rooms, ball pits and bouncy castles. A woman in a bandana and denim cutoffs stood guarding the Playpen and Kennel, the two orgy rooms. Rooms were plastered with signs reading NO FUCKING IN HERE and ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT ONLY and TIME OUT YOU MISBEHAVING CHILD. On the walls were paintings of women in bondage and tangled limbs in vivid colours in a way that reminded me of the people there: straddling between liberation and exploitation. Intent can be hard to gauge from impression alone.
I had not expected sex and child themed to be compatible and was beginning to feel uneasy. Suddenly aware of my body, I pulled on the edges of my skirt and wished for a hoodie to hide beneath. To distract myself I accepted the proffered 2cb and hastened its ascent with weed. Soon the hallways began to warp and tilt. The colours grew painfully loud. So surreal were the scenes unfolding before me that I began to doubt my vision. I passed by a woman crawling on all fours, leash in her partner’s hands. I lined up for the bouncy castle only to discover a couple grinding atop one another in the center. I encountered a man shaking his sobbing partner, him stiffening as I approached them. Everything's okay, he insisted, his partner nodding mutely. I entered a room with a screen full of brightly coloured dildos, was pushed into the gaming chair, grew mute with discomfort as I was instructed on how to interact with the phallic 3d printed joycon. Grip the penis. Why hadn't I said no? No one had touched me all night, but I'd felt dirtied all the same, passing through the hands of such strangers. For two years I'd scrubbed my parts clean of sexualization but there was now rot where my seams met. I stared past a painting of a woman hanging from a rope and sadness began leaking from my eyelids.
My friend noticed the leaking and accompanied me to the plushie room as I cried. Arms around a hedgehog, I cried about the woman I witnessed being assaulted. I cried about bad memories being wrenched to the surface. I cried about every time i willfully self destructed. I cried when a man came into the room and ripped the NO FUCKING sign off the walls, his laugh echoing across the walls. I cried about the people drinking and laughing and fucking amongst people dressed like children, the way they closed their eyes. 2cb had opened my eyes.
They say psychedelics strip you of your base ideologies and start you at a blank canvas. I went home in this state and tried to untangle my thoughts around consent but got stuck in defining the word. So I wrote about language, its mutability and inherent limitations. I wrote about related terms like gaslighting and trauma bonds and the way they had morphed into lying and bonding about trauma, how that reflected our erasure of victims. Trauma bond, the psychological addiction victims develop to their abusers following a pattern of love bombing and intermittent reinforcement. The eroticism of trauma. The reason people cannot leave. I wrote about the language we lacked because no one lingered on the ideas long enough to name them. Brain sabotage I coined, to illustrate how mine engorged itself on desire, grew fat and lazy, suspending logic for supply.
Everything between us sexually has been consensual, right? my partner had asked, the night before we separated. In that moment I was strangely resentful of the word and its position as centerpiece in the dialogue of sexual trauma. As if we could so easily cleave the range of sexual experience into this chasm of liberatingly consensual and rape. As if all we could ever ask for was a sexual experience where our vocalized consent was not obviously violated. As if our desires hadn't been extorted and mutilated beyond repair. From Girlhood: “Patriarchal coercion is a ghost. A specter that possessed me as a girl and possesses me still, that squeezes a yes out of my mouth when my body tells me no”. As my mouth formed the word yes I thought of the stories I had collected from myself and my friends and everyone I had loved. Every time she faked an orgasm. The way they feign consent to erase the possibility of violation. How he unwittingly slept with a homophobe. The time he hit her hard enough she couldn't hear for the next hour and wrote it off as kink. The way they used them for their body and their softness.
Safe, sane, consensual. My friend tells me foot fetishes are common because that is what's eye level to a baby. What was eye level to me as a child was pain and social ostracization and the desire to be picked by someone. When I think of kink and aftercare, abuse and reconciliation, addiction and withdrawal, I imagine which parts of us crave the sensation of being ripped apart and put back together and wonder how they got there and who is winning when we fall prey to them. I think of what sorts of fetishes do not deserve to be normalized. I think of the proportion of male doms and female subs, a dynamic so normalized in the community, the way it makes my skin crawl now, and contrast race play, widely denounced, and wonder why we do not condemn misogyny the same way we condemn racism. I think of how women are molded to be easy victims, to crave subjugation, to swallow your needs until you can't identify them. The Handmaiden: Women find more pleasure when taken by force, says the conman, to justify his attempted rape. I think of how this desire is bred in us, used to take from us, ultimately weaponized against us. I think of how different kink would look if all of us were healed.
I scoured the internet for answers to these thoughts. I found subreddits I had once browsed. I found a mountain of fanfic in the thick of AO3, the site that had taught me the terms watersports and knifeplay [*] when I was a child still hiding between the blankets. I found a thread on how to perform consensual abuse play on your partner and my lunch threatened to make an appearance right before me. I stumbled upon the sex-negative movement with its anti-kink rhetoric and peered inside for a moment. After two years of celibacy, wasn't I the most healthy I'd ever been?
The other day I was talking with a friend about her dependence on ideology, the way it simplified truth. As I was gazing into the anti-kink community I found I understood what she meant. The eight year old Catholic in me might have leaned into this, searching for the clearest path out of sin. But I had become smarter, wiser. I trusted myself to discern the truth and picked at the loose threads myself. This is what I decided: that we are molded by our pain, but we can become aware of this. That kink can be fiction used for catharsis instead of reinforcement. That kink can devastate you if you do not treat it with caution. That kink can be a legitimate mechanism for self harm if shared between people unhealed enough to engage it as such. Growth was making space for conflicting sentiments and finding personal truth through repeated interrogation of the self.
My attempt at personal truth: I have many fantasies, and I love tasting them in my head. I desire intimacy as much as I pretend to fear it. I like fixing and being fixed. I am incompatible with casual sex and am sex repulsed without intimacy. I enjoy experimentation and delight in the obvious fantasy of switching but my appetite has waned as I've healed. I still believe I can meet someone for whom I can hold these desires safely without spiralling. My greatest fantasy: taking the trust fall, holding my partner's gaze and stating, i am damaged, and i fantasize about all these fucking disgusting things, and seeing nothing but steady curiosity. Perhaps we are all still waiting to be liberated from shame.
But without ideology to simplify things there is so much I do not know. I write about awful things because I believe in doing so I can purge some of it. I write about awful things because I am fascinated by them. I write to find healing. I write to prolong my unwellness. I write to delude myself. I write to discover truth. The 2cb is wearing off. I have been talking in circles and I do not know what is true.
— [*] disclaimer: i am not interested in any of these things. the fanfic in question is a work of art though
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