"So, if I behave…" She trailed off, moving onto the bed.

 I decided to go with two gray 25´ lengths.

"If I behave can there be sweaty half-naked men later?"

 I smiled. "I can be convinced."

It doesn’t have to be words, mind you, I like drawing as well. Thursday I got to draw a pentagram on a particularly pleasant demon of my acquaintance.  (I really do need to practice drawing circles on flesh, and the brush pens I bought for this recently really don’t work too well.)

  I’m not sure where or when I developed this particular interest. It certainly predates me seeing The Pillow Book, although that movie may have helped solidify it.

 I think I like being drawn on both because I like being decorated by my lover, and because I am a sensualist. I like touch and sensation, and pens/fingers/brushes are all interesting sensations. I have many friends who like to be marked, and while I sometimes enjoy it, I like to be decorated more. (Decorating me with markings is certainly a clever approach I do not dislike.) That may all boil down to the simple element of attention - I like my lover paying attention to me. This is not a surprising attitude.

As for decorating my lovers… I’ve thought about it. If I was an artist of any ability, it would be about the work, but I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler. There is rarely enough room on skin to write much, and I don’t have the calligraphy skills to make the writing itself visual art. I think therefore that I mostly like it just because it is a different way to touch my lovers. It is sensual, toys with being permanent while remaining ephemeral, and has a soft kind of intimacy that I enjoy.

 I find having something non-permanent to be decorated with makes things easier. People are intimidated by things that might last too long. I had a lover once who decorated my head with henna from time to time. We both liked that (and as she was an artist, they were lovely) but most people will not do it for fear of it not looking good for 2 weeks or so. The artists brush pens I have are a variant of the ones an ex-lover carries so people may draw on her. Sadly, the version I got is a little too brushy, and doesn’t give a good line. Nonetheless, I have 5 colours, and plenty of skin. I really do need to try and find more excuses to use them. Perhaps I will encourage people to draw on me on my birthday.

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.
 

 On a side note, I will likely try and change this template again in the near future, as I would like to have a sidebar listing of the most recent comments.

This Week’s Picks
Debauched nothings
“You promised me you’d give me your cock.”

Sex Trophies
“Inside the drawer are two pair of panties.”

Who gets to talk about sex?
“I was thinking the other day about who gets to talk about sex and sexuality.”

Mr. Sugasm Himself
Cashback

Editor’s Choice
The houseboy’s rebellion

More Sugasm
Join the Sugasm

See also: Fleshbot’s Sex Blog Roundup each Tuesday and Friday.

(Sugasm participants should re-post all the links above within a week. The following links may be excluded as long as you include all the above links.)

Erotic Writing and Experiences
About Chantal, now…
CyberGirl goes beyond amazing
Lady Chatterley’s Ruf
My New York Indiscretion
Off on the right foot
Table Top
Tonia (Part 2)
The Train
Valentine.
Walking Home In Her Panties

Sex Humor
A joke

Thoughts on Sex and Relationships
Because.
Bragging rights and the name game
Circumcise Me
An Eco-Sexy New Year
I mean this in a caring way
A Time For Sex Ed Innocence
An unexpected sexy anniversary
The Way I Like It

Sex Work
Keeping It In The Family II
What Do You Look Like, Rose?

NSFW Pics & Videos
Aradia Ardor
The Cam Lover is lonely and needs rough sex with a new doll
Crystal Klein super hottie
Kyla Cole
Missy Nicole - I’m Bored

Sex News, Reviews & Interviews
Adult Entertainment Expo 2008
Dana DeArmond Submits To The Training Of O (Bondage, Forced Orgasms)
Fetish Fair Fleamarket recap
Harmony HotMovies Interview
Jamye Waxman Wants You to Find Your O Face

BDSM & Fetish
Effervescent
Flavours of Pain
Half-Nekkid Toe Licker
The houseboy’s rebellion
LA Story: the night I learned to f-u-c-k
Padme amidala: My history of blowjobs
Recovery
Sexy porn turns into a sexy mental fantasy
Spanked Her Off to Work. - The Husband
Trick or Treat
(The Worst?) Profile of the week

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.  

And that is, of course, very true. (really, just go read her post)

 Of course, there are times you just really want to be all twisted steel and sex appeal. Everyone wants to be desirable to those they want to be desired by. And it is insidious sometimes, how our minds will latch onto a certain self image and not budge.

 For instance, not long after this post, I ended up in a long IM conversation with a friend about my sex drive and my insecurities about sex, sexual performance, and my perception of myself as desirable or not. 

I do not think of myself as someone who people just instantly find pretty and hot and desirable. Charming, yes. Fun, yes. Eventually sexy because sex appeal is by no means limited to simple aesthetics, yes. But I tend not (for various reasons) think of myself as "see across the room/dance/fire/what have you and go YUM, must have" hot. It always confuses me some when anything like that happens.

 My friend asked me, "You do know there are people who think you are just pretty and hot, right?"

And yes, I do know that. And no, I do not base my entire self-worth on that. But to show you how insidious these kinds of things can be, even as I acknowledged that as true, and felt somewhat better about it, my brain could not help but notice that she constructed it in passive voice - thus excluding herself. Messed up, I know.

 We are a mass of contradictions, we humans, and we do live in a society that insists being pretty (whatever that might be) is of such importance. As if pretty and desirable were the same thing anyway.

 I have a coffee with my ex to go to, and am feeling introspective.