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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.
 

 

 

Rona has an interesting post that discusses the fact that her "primary sexual identity is kinky". It is when I read something like that that I remember why this blog is titled as it is, and why I identify as vanilla. Sure, I can enjoy someone raking me with knives, caning someone, or ordering someone to show up in this dress and opera gloves, with the knowledge her choices are limited to "against the wall or on your knees" the moment she walks in the door, but none of that is essential to my sexual identity. It’s just fun.

I agree with her that it isn’t something you need to reveal on a first date, but of course I "pass", and it "when I come out" isn’t going to haunt me as much. Privilege makes things seem easy, I am aware of that. And, like Rona, I don’t think a shared interest in kink (or poly, or any other single identity) sufficient reason to date someone. But there is a consequence of her sex/kink split.

I can play at the drop of a flogger, but for sex… I’m extraordinarily picky and in non-intuitively obvious ways. (There are, for example, lots of people who I’m madly attracted to and like quite a bit who I would never fuck. Strange but true.) Which sucks for me because DEAR LORD am I horny most of the time. If I had a local partner who I was sleeping with they’d probably have to chain me to my bed and run away to keep me off of them.

…

This is why I can not be allowed to have casual sex. Given permission to jump someone, I will want to do so at every possible opportunity - appropriate or not. And then, underlying every conversation there will be a little argument going on in my head "Can I jump her now?" "Not yet, you’re talking." "Now?" "Shut up, you don’t have to be thinking about sex all the time." "But she’s so pretty and I wanna see her naked." "Would you go take a cold shower already?" "I bet she tastes like cookies." Alternatively, maybe what I need is to date someone who has exactly the same urge to drag me into back alleys for heavy petting just because we’re walking down the street and the wind is blowing past with the scent of cupcakes.

And this is what I talk about concerning my lack of sex drive.  That simply isn’t a problem for me. I can think of one person who if she crossed my line of sight my brain would do nothing but spend time calculating what surfaces in the immediate area I could have sex with her on. I didn’t even really like her very much.  I can think of one other who never failed to give me a thrill of sexual desire every time she brushed against me. In her case, I think that had as much to do as never having her as anything else. (We shared two kisses, one of which I don’t remember and the other which was years later and full of all the unfulfilled potential of what might have been. Bittersweet works better in chocolate than in kisses.)

That kind of constant low-grade buzz of horniness is just something that I don’t have. I get horny, sure, but that kind of intense sexual distraction? Rare, even with the people who I do find sexually desirable.  

I should point out that despite the interesting new insight in how I deal with different types of pain, this was in no way a bad weekend.

It isn’ t even as if that ruined the scene. It was delicious up until then. And these things happen, something doesn’t work and snaps a headspace and then you take a breather and do something else. And after that there was a more restrictive tie, and some more knives which were fine since I had been… reset by then. 

 And the weekend included getting to cane someone (and it is always flattering for a masochist to tell you that you have more of a mean streak than she expected) and having someone give me a blowjob with my knife at her throat. (Which is more logistically difficult than one might expect, but still better than the cake I baked.)

 And, interestingly enough, of all the bites I received, the one that remains most noted by my body, and provokes a small smile of endorphin-fueled grinning whenever it gets bumped by something in my pocket, is the one I have on my thigh. Thus the one that "broke" me lingers the most sweetly.

All in all, I am not TOO torn up I missed the Flea (although there are reasons I am disappointed).

 She thrashed again, sharp breaths coming ragged between her teeth. I felt her fish around for something in her pocket. She has a history of keeping things in her pockets that poke her endlessly while making out. She pressed a shiny object into my hand. I glanced at the small folding knife.

"A nuisance?" I asked.

 She fought her eyes into focus. "A hint," she hissed.

 I snapped the knife open and smiled.

 I didn’t get to cane someone today.

That, in and of itself, is not that surprising. Most days I don’t cane anyone. Today was supposed to be different however. I am visiting a town where I have a lovely sometimes playmate and this mischevious pixie had sent me a Christmas present - The Toybag Guide to Canes and Caning. The clever young woman had heard about how excited I was over my new cane, and decided to help. (I do so like the helpful ones.)

However, I have been leveled by a rather nasty flu while here, and while better, am far from recovered. Additionally, this was not purely set up as a play date, and fooling around, snuggling, and sex were on the menu as well.

 Thing is, I barely felt up for any of it save the snuggling. I’d like to think my body was warring between "cute naked girl snuggling me" and "still feeling achy and sick" but I sometimes wonder if it is just that I don’t really think I have a sex drive on par with most people’s. I rarely ever have that kind of consuming desire to take someone, that need to throw them against a wall and ravish. It just… isn’t that common. To hear my friends talk, though, I am something of an exception. Passion is a rarity for me. I can enjoy, and I do, playing with people I like but lust… lust seems something I am only fleetingly accustomed to.

So in a desire to connect, we used up all our time we could have played with canes with. To be honest, I am not sure how disappointed I am with this. It is possible I was just not really up for anything intense at all, and caning would have suffered the same sort of dispassionate interest.  I don’t really know. I have felt somewhat disconnected this whole trip, having little interest to play at any of the parties I have gone to. I may just be stressed from my current state of unemployment.

But in the end, I didn’t get to cane someone today, and I think I am in fact somewhat disappointed.