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(this will be rambly as it is 2 in the morning and I just can’t seem to wrangle my thoughts) 

People might have guessed it would be a consent post that brought me back.

I am, in the words of one of my lovers, a "consent fetishist". By this she means that my interest/obsession with consent goes to such lengths that she will point out people wearing t-shirts that say "consensual sex is hot", find me consent quotes, and I get to check off "consent" as part of my Fetish Bingo card if someone we’re in bed with goes out of their way to be clear about gaining consent.

 It’s a big deal to me.

 So, unsurprisingly, I was pointed to Calico’s post "Grey is a Kinder Color" - inspired by Debauchette’s post about how hot the time she was raped in Italy still makes her- about the ambivalence Calico feels concerning certain types of sex/fantasies that make her hot.

I couldn’t parse that. In the world I knew, pleasure and violation were mutually exclusive. To go from hot sex to abuse, you needed to shift the carpet, declaim your experience with a revisionist history. Abuse wasn’t sexy. If you thought you’d liked it, you were deluded.

Maybe, just maybe, a belief system that holds me (us?) to be stupid and blind is not an accurate one.

 The post by Debauchette is an excellent read, and she describes what she labels a "faux-rape". It seems people are very conflicted about being able to find rape hot. Of course, this is only one kind of rape. This wasn’t rape being used as a terror weapon or anything.

 I could discuss the consent issues in play in Debauchette’s tale (she specifically mentions "there was a moment when I knew I could’ve made myself clear, in any language, but I chose not to. I wanted to see what would happen.") and the very interesting comment section it has generated, but mostly I want to discuss people thinking you aren’t allowed to find something that is wrong hot.

 Why on earth not? We’re fucked up, complex creatures, we humans. We find all kinds of things hot. Finding something hot does not make it a good. It is perfectly possible to find the thought of being ravished/forced hot and find the reality of it ethically horrible. Many, many people’s bodies respond erotically to rape - this often ends up as a mind fuck for people because how could they have had such an intense orgasm from something wrong? (People, we have orgasms in our sleep sometimes - the body does what the body does, it doesn’t change the ethics of a thing.) Marcelle Manhattan touches wondefully on how ambiguity makes us uncomfortable in her response to Debauchette here. (However, she does bring up the "Second Wave Feminists say all sex is rape" myth which just drives me nuts. No, that’s not what Dworkin was saying.)

  The sex can be clearly hot and still be abuse. Orgasms aren’t a magic wand that makes things better. Dear lord, people have been having hot sex throughout recorded history, were all those people and sex acts in contexts of perfect spiritual equality? Of course not. We humans are capable of eroticizing just about anything, so what? Erotic != good by definition. (Erotic is a slippery enough slope as it is; would that rape have been hot to her had it been anyone else at any other time? Or even if it was him at another time?)

 Now, defining and judging abuse is a tricky thing and one shouldn’t ignore the subjective interpretations of people in this matter, but you can’t believe in inalienable human rights and not think it is possible to find some objective way of judging these things.

It’s three in the morning, there are too many good comments on just those three or four posts, and I don’t have enough brain to deal with them now. Hell, I don’t even have an ending for this post.
 

 

 

This past weekend I had an interesting insight into how I process pain.  I was having knives run over me by two lovely women. They were playing an interesting game of "find the buttons on Victor’s body" (most of mine seem fairly obvious and close to bones - there a couple that are dramatically more effective than others, though) when one then raked my torso with her nails. Raked might not be the best word, it may have been a bit more of a digging into the flesh and pulling.

It hurt.  A lot. It hurt in a way that made me scream ow, and flinch in the ropes. It made me unhappy.

I like sensation. A lot. It makes me happy, and makes me exclaim noises that seem to amuse those who enjoy making me make noises. This applies on both sides of my switchiness, as I also like making others exclaim those noises as well.

I am not a masochist.

I know masochists, I have played with masochists, and let me tell you, I am no masochist. (Nor am I an algophiliac.)

She apologized, and going back to knives I started to feel overstimulated. At least I thought that at the time, and asked for no more than 10 minutes; but in retrospect it was not so much overstimulation as the way I was processing the knives changed. My tormentors agreed to 10 minutes, intending to take full measure of that time, and then about 30 seconds later, I got bit, hard, in the leg. This was also Unpleasant Hurt.

I reacted badly. 

I kneed the biter in the head.

I was tied, so got no solid contact. But that was it and I wanted out. I normally like being bitten. Or rather, I like having been bitten, especially big meaty bites like that. (I tend to like the after effects of having been bitten more than the being bitten itself - this is similar to how I like being pierced.) But while usually bites are a good thing, and indeed I have a run of pretty bite marks down my back from that evening - this was simply intolerable.

I can only chalk it up to something about the way I process pain. It seems pain is like a menu of flavours, and some go together in my head and some don’t. Knife on top of piercings? - A fine match of strong red with a full-flavoured main course. Biting on top of knifing? - Chocolate milk poured in my soup.  

As I said, I am neither an algophiliac nor a masochist. I don’t process pain as pleasure and hurting me doesn’t want to make me fuck you. (It doesn’t mean I won’t want to fuck you afterwards, but it isn’t a button that makes me "hot".) That wasn’t new for me.

What was new was learning I combine different pains differently. Interestingly, I have heard (and have played with bottoms for whom this is true) that switching a sensation helps some people process better, shifting from one type of pain to another prevents them from being overstimulated.  This was specifically mentione for sting and thud.  Since it has been a long time since I was hit, I really don’t know how that would work on me. Perhaps sting/thud go together well in my case. But knife/bite didn’t. Really didn’t. It is something I am going to have to remember to keep in mind next time I am topping someone.

Of course, I shouldn’t assume everyone is wired the way I am, as I know some who a bite after that would be bliss. Indeed, assuming people are wired the way you are is almost invariably a recipe for disaster. And maybe another day in another way that combo would work. But it certainly seems that this weekend I am not someone who likes different styles of pain layered on top of other pain.