Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

I like to pre-negotiate my sex far more than I like to pre-negotiate my play.

The main reason for this is that I find it easier to have the safer sex/STD talk before the heat of the moment. That way I can be sure that we’re all on the same page, and I can trust that there will be no arguments about barriers. Plus, having the negotiation early allows me to sound out people’s general feelings about safer sex. In general, if people aren’t as into barriers as I am then I probably don’t want to sleep with them… no matter how attractive I find them. It’s easier to find that out in advance. For the record, it doesn’t matter if a person is willing to compromise their feelings to use barriers for oral sex with me. If they think it’s a strange request, then I’m far less likely to want to have sex with them after the negotiation. People who are rigorous about safe sex with all their partners are a turn on. People who look for any excuse to drop the barriers… I have to think a lot more about.

However, another reason I like to pre-negotiate my sex more than my play is I am fine asking for pain, but I have a lot of trouble asking for things sexual. I get extraordinarily shy when talking about the sex I might like to be having with the person I might like to be having it with. I can pull myself together and do it in writing, but in person? Terrifying. This all came up when I was in the middle of writing a piece about my inability to count how many people I’ve had sex with because I can’t come up with an acceptable definition of sex (It might still happen, you never know… the post that is, not the definition. I’ve accepted that as hopeless.) Basically, I flashed back to recent events that contributed to my counting problem and realized that I wanted to talk about them instead.

There are many reasons I have trouble being forward about sex. One of them is that I really am very sexually submissive (and like being told what to do,) another is that I’m very insecure sexually (and like being told what to do,) and still another is that I’m worried about doing something wrong and am afraid to make a move (without being told what to do - are we sensing a trend here?) Twice recently I have been in sexual situations with men, for some reason I don’t have nearly as many problems with women, where rather unidirectional sexual contact was occurring and I was not sure how to reciprocate or if doing so was appropriate.

In one case, things were relatively straightforward in my head. I was fooling around with someone to whom I was attracted, and who I was pretty sure I wanted to have sex with, but I didn’t know him that well and I did know I was too tired to do a good job of negotiating safe sex… so one way fondling turned into mutual masturbation and lots of attack biting in both directions. Fun! Also, realistically, exactly what should have happened. I mostly just had to get over my insecurities about “doing it wrong,” and also over my overwhelming fixation on blow jobs anytime I am near a sexually excited man* since in my world those require negotiating condoms and… I was not in the mood to have The Talk.

In the other case, things were slightly more complicated. Some of the same factors were in place - exhaustion, lack of pre-negotiation - but there was an additional factor, a power differential. Well, sort of. I had been playing with the person in question as a bottom, and I have even more trouble showing sexual initiative than usual when I’ve been bottoming. I can ask for more pain, that doesn’t feel uncomfortably forward, but asking if I can touch the top sexually… is really hard for me. I feel like I’m not allowed, no matter how much I might want to, and then I end up feeling bad that I didn’t. On the other hand, if I can establish up front what sorts of sexual reciprocation are appropriate, then I am more comfortable acting on my desires. Plus, although there had been no power differential negotiated, the combination of sexual arousal pain happen tends to make my brain go a little subby. So I had to give my brain a firm talking to about not going there without permission (I have an utter horror of offering someone submission without it being explicitly requested. I think of that sort of assumption as beyond rude,) and by the time I was done sexual assertiveness felt even more inappropriate. It also didn’t help that by that point I was way too out of it to form coherent language.

I’ve gotten over most of my sexual issues, I really have, but clearly some of them are still in force. Having trouble discussing what I want, and asking what my partner wants, while things are in progress** is a big one - and one that I am working on assiduously. It’s not as though when I’ve gotten up the nerve to ask things have ever gone badly. Honestly, the worst thing that might happen is that they say “no,” and given how I’m wired that’s often, in and of itself, something of a win***.

I was submitting to someone a while ago with whom I had (quite unusually for me, but SO SHINY) pre-negotiated sex (it was a great negotiation too. Totally made me want to … Sorry. I’m getting distracted,) and somewhat late in the scene he commented**** on how happy I seemed to be about finally getting to suck his cock, and I allowed as to how it was one of my favorite things, and he said that if he’d known that, if I’d told him that, it could have happened much earlier… or possibly he would have made me beg. And I would have begged - happily, sincerely, and enthusiastically - I’d even thought about it, but I didn’t feel like I could ask for what I wanted sexually. Which, I seem to recall being pointed out at the time, is really lame, particularly when the person I was asking would have felt perfectly comfortable (and possibly even enjoyed) saying no.

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*I’m sorry. Sucking cock turns me on. Sue me. Mutual masturbation is very fun too, but… I have an oral fixation. It’s where my brain goes.
**Given that I’m talking about situations where some sort of sexual contact is already in progress, I know the underlying fear that they will be offended by my thinking they might be interested in me sexually is largely ridiculous - even if it was rational at some point in my past. I’m no longer in junior high school. I control my own social circle and am reasonably competent about not filling it with people who enjoy setting others up for non-consensual humiliation and emotional abuse.
***Mmm. Denial. Nothing like not getting what you want.
****This may be not be entirely accurate, because it was a while ago, but the gist is true.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s one of those eternal truths. Kissing is an experience that brings me great joy. Last night I went out on a second date with someone, and at the end of the evening we were standing out in the freezing cold air talking and kissing was all I could think about. He’d continued to grow on me, a lot, over the course of the evening, I’d been restraining myself from touching him for hours (we were not alone on the date and people were already making uncomfortable assumptions), he looked warm and approachable, and I thought to myself to hell with it and said to him “I’m going to kiss you now, if you don’t mind.”

Oh, but it pays to be bold. It’s always a good sign when I’m comfortable enough with someone to ask them for what I want, and he was warm indeed. Willing, too, and a very good kisser. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not really sure what makes a kiss good, but there are definitely certain things that make a kiss better. Laughing into each others mouths. Hands fisted in your hair or your clothing. Being pulled back again and again for just a little bit more.

The Bush administration is at it again, trying to stealthily pass a rule that would allow providers to class contraception as abortion and extend the aggravating mockery of “moral” legislation known as “conscience clauses”. Please consider signing the Planned Parenthood campaign, or otherwise speaking out. Want to know why this is an issue? Here’s what I wrote about it the last time they tried to sneak this under everyone’s radar.

***Note: This piece has plot spoilers about the show Spring Awakening. If that is going to upset you, don’t read it.***

A kinky friend and I went to see the Broadway musical Spring Awakening the other day, and I was reminded both about how mainstream some BDSM is and how little that means people actually understand it. There is a scene in the play where Wendla, a young woman, talks about how she fantasizes about being beaten and then begs her friend Melchior to beat her with a switch so that she will “feel something, anything.” He eventually acquiesces and hits her. When he does, she repeatedly begs him to hit her harder until he ends up beating her with his fists and then, filled with horror at his actions, running away. This, by the way, is the controversial scene that got the original play banned for many, many years, although in this political climate I think that an earlier scene where the mother refuses to teach her daughter where babies come from may actually ring more true. But I digress…

What I found really fascinating about the scene was the audience reaction to it. A small minority of the audience - including my playmate and I, as well as the gorgeous pair of British queens sitting behind us - spent the scene giggling in recognition. We’d had that conversation, that experience, from one direction or the other. We’d fantasized about pain, understood that desire before or after we grasped our bodies’ longing for gentler sensations, and seeing it on stage was a revelation not because it was unfamiliar but because it was so completely on target. “For every masochist, God makes a sadist,” indeed. The vast majority of the audience just seemed vaguely mystified or uncomfortable, which was what I expected. Then there was the other group. The group, like the couple in front of us who were so disgusted that they talked, loudly enough for us to hear, about whether or not they should get up and leave.

I forget, sometimes, that this is often the reaction to my sexuality. Horror, disgust, derision, and an unshakeable belief that there is something wrong with me because one of the things that most profoundly sexually excites me is pain. It is bad enough, to much of society, that I am a woman who admits to liking sex, that I am aggressive about it, that I approach men, and women, with prurient intent. Still, for most of them, there is something about that they can at least understand. I may be improper, in their eyes, not womanly, not genteel, or whatever, but sex is a sensation they can generally understand desiring. The quest for the holy orgasm is sacred, or at least comprehensible. Seeking out pain, however, must be a sign of some fundamental deviance or flaw. It is proof that I am broken, and allows those who would find other reasons to despise me an easy nail on which to hang the less acceptable placards of their disgust (too smart for her own good, too loud for polite society, not pretty enough to get a normal man, too fat, too weird, too…)

The thing that sometimes makes it difficult to argue is that I am broken, and in the past I have used my masochism as a way to handle it. For a long time I found vanilla sexuality far more stressful than BDSM when it came to addressing my issues of risk vs. reward. In addition, I felt prettier, sexier, and more accepted in the kink community than I did among my more vanilla peers. I had discovered a community that valued differences, girls who were smart, loud, alt-pretty, weird, and ridiculous as much as those who were quiet, beautiful, normal, and sane, and I liked it. It was a glorious place to be, in part because of my flaws. But the counter-intuitive thing is this: in no way has my masochism ever rendered me broken, or wedged itself into little cracked pieces of my soul and forced them open the way that mainstream expectation has so often done. If anything, it has made me stronger, more self confident, healthier, and closer to whole. Still, the fact that I am broken makes it harder to convince people that my being a masochist has nothing to do with flaws in my character or my upbringing, holes in my psyche, active abuse, or benign neglect. It gives them an out from believing that I am just wired to like pain. That, for me, being beaten so hard I can’t sit down comfortably for three days is simply a remarkable amount of fun.

I was listening to the Spring Awakening soundtrack and thinking, earlier today, about how joyful masochism can be. Reminiscing, really, about recent experiences, playing masochist-in-the-middle, ending up in a pile of giggling, writhing, screaming biters and bitees on a floor, laughing hysterically from pain, and grinning shamelessly while cursing my head off. I don’t think most people get that - that for some of us, at least, there can be a connection between a love of pain and the possibility of simple joy (to quote another musical.) I don’t like stubbing my toe or walking into a wall* any more than anyone else does, but the skillful application of pain or other intense sensations is often the most direct neurological highway to a grand old time.

Submission often comes from a darker place in me, a place of untamed longing or restless discontent, but pure masochism is usually straightforward, light, and untainted joy. It’s transporting in the same way as getting caught up in beautiful, intricate music - some small amount of which I experienced when listening to Spring Awakening**.

*Shut up. I know it happens to the rest of you too.
**Full disclosure, I enjoyed the show a lot, but I do not think it was the brilliant masterpiece that so many reviews have implied. It was a good show with some very good music and some very strange staging and choreography - one really annoying bit of which was explained by a remarkably useful review. Since I should not have to rely on written analysis to enjoy directorial choices, I actually think I may like the soundtrack better than the performance, but I am very glad I got to see it before it closed. I have access to cheap enough tickets that I might even be convinced to go again. Especially since I now know to think of it more as a play and concert than as a standard musical, something which will drastically change my experience and expectations.