Kink Week: The Brutal Honesty Edition

(xposted from my personal blog)

Since Ren christened this week kink week, I wanted to talk a little bit about my own. I've spent a lot of time over the past few years getting deeply involved with feminism and writing academically, and a lot of that has involved defending BDSM as healthy and harmless. But I'm going to talk about stuff that, well, might just "come from patriarchy," and holy shit! Not care.

For as long as I can remember, the kind of sex that attracted me the most is the kind that felt like use. I want to penetrate people because I want to get inside them, possess them, claim them from the inside out. And there's plenty of theory that says that seeing penetration that way is all about patriarchy. Maybe it is. I have to say I really don't know, even after years of "examination", of reading MacKinnon and Dworkin, of listening to other female tops, like Bitchy Jones, talk about how penetration of the submissive partner is sold to us as the one true way of doing dominance, and how that's not "really" what "women" want.

But, and this is where I'm going to get in trouble with the people who don't like people who go with what feels "natural" rather than examining why things feel "natural" in fucked up cultures (or the people who think fucked up dynamics feel natural to survivors because they associate abuse with love):

I never really experienced it that way. I experienced the idea of me penetrating people as what seemed natural, what seemed right, what flowed easiest for my personal feelings. To try and think of myself getting penetrated meant thinking of myself distantly, disconnected from my body. It meant thinking abstractly, using my mind to reason about what certain bodies were "intended for."

And I'm a geek, but puzzling out body-purpose-thingies? SO NOT HOT.

It's not even that being penetrated is unpleasant for me. When done right it feels GOOD. It just also feels like being turned inside out -- like wearing your shirt backwards all day because that particular shirt looks cool that way, strangely enough, and then having people notice and get rabid about telling you you're supposed to do this all the time, because you have the sort of skin that goes with backward shirts, and everyone knows it. Even though wearing your shirt backwards feels wrongish because the damn thing is ON BACKWARDS.

It's not really that I'm uncomfortable with being female. It's that my clit's not big enough to fuck people with, and I don't like that. I don't care that it's a clit. I care that it's TINY. Autoandrophilia? Penis envy?

Sure, but I'm getting tired of almost all of the words for that sort of thing being demeaning ones.

I've wondered for a long time whether it had to do with something like testosterone levels. I remember in some years ago about freemartins, and having the thought "Everything makes sense now. Some female organisms are just like this. I'm not a mistake."

Granted, as far as I know freemartins are only interested in females, so it's not a one to one mapping, but it's, well… "Hey, that's me!" I'm not a "woman" in Bitchy's sense, so even if she's right about them (and I'd say she isn't, anyway) whatever they want has nothing to do with me anyway, even though my gender identity isn't "man" either.

Culture? Sure, the culture has told me what males are "supposed" to do in sex. But I really don't think it's the culture that told me I was supposed to be what a girl isn't. I always thought I was crazy, because I knew what girls were supposed to do: get fucked. Submit. Be sweet and soft.

And it really is something that can easily conform to that stereotypical idea of masculine and feminine roles in sex, just with the genders reversed. I strongly suspect that one reason I'm more attracted to men than to women is just because it's more exciting to dominate (including to feminize; yes, weepingcock members, I am that supposedly mythical person who likes the word "boycunt") a man.

It may also be I'm just genetically "more straight" (if straight even has any meaning given how weird I am anyway…), but it may be just that it's more like use. It's taking someone who, given the culture, claims that I'm a usurper and I don't belong, and turning that on its head in a sexy, forceful, emotional and obvious way. It's more humiliating. It's more intense. It turns more on its head.

Tell that to the people who think women are desperate to please men.

If I'm a woman in any robust sense at all, that is.

But I like that. I like physically overpowering someone. I like ramming into them. I like digging into their skin with nails and teeth until it hurts. I like feeling their body open, hearing them gasp because I'm hurting them and they like it.

Funny how, while I totally see how that looks like patriarchy to some, it looks different from the dynamic they always pick on to fuss about.

And I like other things too, that don't make nearly as much sense. I like knives. I like hurting people with sharp things because, well, the blood is the life. I like the idea of digging in their body for treasure, bringing what they are out of the depths of them and into the light. Seeing it, claiming it, tasting it -- I don't much do these things in the era of HIV (though Monkey and I have been together a while so perhaps we will), but I certainly do things that mean the same thing to me symbolically.

And that's the idea. Digging through the prison of the body for the spirit, and making it mine.

No, it's not fair. It's not supposed to be.