Neck-breaking! It happens. It happened to me, and people keep asking for the details, so here’s the Definitive Story of Clarisse’s Broken Neck.

The Accident

I’ve always been terrified of both biking and driving; I never wanted to learn either skill. One could blame this on the fact that I was in a car accident at a very young age. Or on the fact that I tend to live in my head a lot and I’m not great at staying 100% aware of (or interested in) the physical world around me. Or on the various nightmares about biking and driving that I had as a kid. I kept dreaming that I was in charge of a vehicle that went out of control.

I ultimately learned to drive when I was 21 for work reasons, and also because — while I try to make sure that my risks are very careful and well-considered — I also try not to indulge myself when I’m scared of things. Age 26 was when one of my friends finally managed to teach me to ride a bike. Many had tried before, but I just couldn’t get it until age 26. I gritted my teeth, I learned, and I practiced.

And then, in August 2011, age 27, I fractured my spine in a stupid accident. Maybe the fear itself was what screwed me up. Or maybe my fears were extremely rational; maybe I sensed something about myself and my balance and my own physical awareness that other people couldn’t see, and maybe I should have listened to myself …. Oh well.

Basically, I slammed headfirst into a lamppost late one evening. This would have been much more hilarious if it hadn’t almost killed me.

The accident happened while I was practicing on Chicago’s lakefront path. Other than the broken neck, I was almost completely unharmed. I was wearing a helmet, which is presumably why I survived. I didn’t even know my neck was broken at first. I hit the lamppost, fell back off my bike, landed on my knees, and realized that my neck hurt a lot.

I remember being relieved that my glasses weren’t broken.

I lay down on the path and caught my breath. The pain in my neck didn’t register so much, as long as I lay straight. Then I thought: I’m not in a safe area of the city. I should get home. So I stood up — fuck, my neck hurts — I stood up, took a few deep breaths to power through the pain, and picked up my bike, which was unusable. I decided that I ought to go home and sleep; I figured I’d feel better in the morning.

After walking maybe a hundred feet, I knew something was wrong, like seriously wrong. My body felt dulled and my movements felt uncertain. I ruffled through my thoughts and decided that although I felt like I could remember everything important, something was fuzzy. Maybe I have a concussion, I thought. So I called one of my flatmates and asked him to come get me. When he found me, I was throwing up into a garbage can, and he insisted that we go to the hospital.

I vomited four more times while the hospital kept me in the waiting room; I also started shivering and crying uncontrollably. After maybe an hour, they took me back into the Intensive Care Unit and laid me down on a table, where some doctors gave me morphine and informed me that I’d fractured my spine. I was told to lie very, very still and to quit doing things like standing up and walking to the bathroom. Some doctors were very reassuring, but others were like: “Um yeah, we don’t really know the extent of the damage and you could still accidentally sever your spinal cord, so just lie still, would you?”

That was when I got really scared, and started composing messages for people I loved in case of my untimely death.

I thought about calling my parents, but I knew they’d freak out way more than I was freaking out, and I didn’t want to upset them until I had some kind of solution to the situation. And I updated Twitter, which is ridiculous, but I guess that’s what bloggers do when we break our necks, especially if we only have a text-capable phone rather than a smartphone.

I lay on that table for many hours, until well past dawn.

The Choice

I had texted my in-case-of-death messages to my best girlfriend, which was sort of a mean thing for me to do, I guess, but I wasn’t sure how else to go about it. Obviously, as soon as she woke up the next morning, she got the messages and freaked out. She was out of town, but she sent her husband to keep me company. As the news got around, other friends of mine came to visit or called or texted. Some of them brought me vegan food, or actually stayed with me in my hospital room on cots, or argued with health care professionals who didn’t seem to be listening to me. The guy I’d broken up with several days before came and fed me smoothies all weekend, which was incredibly nice of him.

Later, word spread even further, and people — some of whom I haven’t talked to in years — sent me cards and candy and all kinds of amazing things. Codename Zach Lash sent me prism glasses and a spectacularly useful nosey cup with a dip in the side, that allowed me to actually finish whatever I drank without tipping my head back. The church where I grew up sent me some Tibetan prayer flags, which is about par for the course for a Unitarian congregation. There is no way I deserve the incredible people in my life, or the compassion they’ve given me during my recovery process. I don’t know how I could have managed without so much support. I feel like I’m going to be paying back this karmic debt for the rest of my life.

Anyway, so finally, in the afternoon of the day after my accident, a neurosurgeon came and told me that he saw two options for me. He said that either they could do surgery, or they could put me in a very unpleasant and uncomfortable apparatus called the Halo brace (pictured at the top of this post).

Option 1: The Halo brace would be screwed into my skull, with actual screws, and would attach to a fur-lined vest that I would wear nonstop for months. But if I chose the brace, then I might eventually gain back almost 100% neck mobility — after months of recovery and physical therapy.

Option 2: On the other hand, if I chose surgery, then I’d be back on my feet sooner and I wouldn’t have to deal with the brace. But I’d lose quite a lot of neck mobility, permanently. “However,” the doctor added, “nothing is certain. We might still have to do the surgery, eventually, even if you choose the brace.”

I chose the brace. My memory of actually getting the Halo installed is patchy, but I can tell you for sure that it was extremely unpleasant and I hope I never have to have anything screwed into my skull ever again.

Afterwards, I had to get an X-ray, so a few of my friends accompanied me as I was taken downstairs into the bowels of the hospital. It is alleged by one friend that the following occurred:

Clarisse was lying there, totally blitzed on morphine, and we were all feeling terrible for her. I was wheeling the gurney and desperately trying to make sure that we didn’t go over any bad bumps, because those caused her even more pain. Then Clarisse opened her eyes and said in a thin voice: “Guys … I’ve been thinking all day … that I need to go to karaoke … and sing … the Beyoncé song ‘Halo’ ….” And then she started to sing. And her voice kept getting stronger. I had no idea she had a voice like that. It was beautiful! She was lying in this gurney, jamming her own a cappella version of “Halo,” for three full minutes as we traveled the hospital hallways. It was amazing.

I do not remember this, but I appreciate the vote of confidence.

I finally called my parents a few hours after the Halo brace was installed. Both of those conversations started with me saying very carefully, “Hey, I’m sorry to call so late — um, so — I’m in the hospital, don’tworryIfracturedmyspinebutI’mokaypleasedon’tworry.” My parents were understandably upset that I hadn’t called them sooner. My dad took a plane to Chicago the next day, and switched off with my mom the next week. I don’t deserve my awesome parents, either.

Apparently I have a resting heart rate that is usually associated with athletes. The hospital staff kept asking what kind of sports I do. Fuck yeah S&M.

The Halo Brace

Halo braces are not fun. They are basically the opposite of fun. Especially during August in Chicago, because Halo brace-vests are lined in fur, and Chicago August is extremely hot. I was unable to shower or swim for the duration of my several months in the Halo, which was indescribable. The brace was heavy, though eventually I got used to it. The screws in my head required daily cleaning, with which my intrepid friends and parents sometimes assisted me despite the fact that it was completely appalling.

I lost a lot of time and energy to painkillers. (I can’t believe people take Vicodin recreationally. It’s so dulling.) For a while, I set alarms so that I wouldn’t let the painkillers lapse. The worst part of my day every morning was waking up, taking more painkillers, and then lying there convincing myself to sit up. Sitting up hurt more than most things I can think of, even with all the painkillers.

I couldn’t really move in my sleep while I was in the brace, and I had to learn to sleep on my back. I’ve always preferred to sleep on my front, and I’ve always had trouble sleeping in any other position. Due to how this injury eventually played out, I’m never going to be able to sleep on my front again.

Accessories that my friends and I discussed bolting onto to my Halo brace:

* antlers, or triceratops horns
* giant bike helmet
* kite
* rearview mirrors
* tassels, or fringe
* little bells

The brace-vest covers much of the torso but leaves one’s nipples bare; therefore, one of my most hilarious friends mailed me sparkly nipple pasties. It was nice to feel sexy in a Halo brace. Actually, a few of my friends seduced me into a foursome while I was in the Halo. I’m not normally into group sex, but I really like those folks, plus when I told other friends about it later I got reactions like: “You rocked a foursome in spinal support?! Have I told you how I idolize your ridiculous lifestyle?”

Seriously though, I’m not that into group sex. I always feel like I might as well try it again and maybe I’ll like it this time, because I know so many people who like it, but …. Eventually, that evening, I concluded the thing that I always conclude during group sex, which is that my best approach is to leave everyone else to it while I go read a book. So much for my ridiculous lifestyle.

On the other hand, an S&M partner of mine dragged me off to make out while I was in the Halo brace, which was definitely very hot. He took full advantage of my limited mobility.

A lot of people didn’t recognize the Halo brace when they first saw it, but when people did, reactions varied. An acquaintance who works in medicine dropped by one day, saw me, and stopped dead. “Oh, my God. Madame,” he said, “please … please tell me this is just some kind of bondage role-playing you’re doing.”

I laughed. “No, but I’ll be fine in a few months.”

It was hard to stay philosophical. I did my best. I do recall one night when I finally snapped and wailed to one of my flatmates, “I just want my body back!”

Throughout this process, it has also been continuously hard for me to tell when I’m being reasonable and listening to my body … and when I’m being lazy or self-indulgent. One evening: “I’m tired,” I fretted absently, while working on my computer in the living room around 12am. (I usually stay up very, very late when I’m writing.)

“Go to bed,” a flatmate said.

“I want to work.”

My flatmate pointed her finger at me. “Did you, or did you not, recently sustain a severe spinal injury?”

“I …”

“Shh!” she snapped. “Did you, or did you not, recently sustain a severe spinal injury!”

“I want to work,” I protested. She wagged her finger. I hung my head (metaphorically speaking), and I went to bed. Well, I went to bed at 1.

The way I interacted with people on the street while wearing the brace was really different. Guys didn’t hit on me, except for one middle-aged dude who said to me, “You in that brace, but you still look good!” But it was more like a friendly thing, a kind of buddy-buddy thing, than the usual mildly-invasive sexualized tone that attends such interactions.

A child once asked her mom if I was Darth Vader. It was awesome.

One day, when I was walking home from the public library, an older woman caught my eye and then looked away. I smiled at her, and she looked back with a mildly distressed expression. “Be careful,” she implored, as if I were her daughter. I was touched.

A lot of people openly stopped me in the street to say that I was fortunate. Strangers told me stories of their own accidents, or people they loved who had died in accidents. I heard over and over again from strangers: “You’re here for a reason. You survived for a reason. Make the most of it.”

The Surgery

After I got out of the brace, I spent a month in physical therapy. I got a big crush on my physical therapist, partly because physical therapy is basically S&M. I mean seriously. This guy would be standing in front of me, holding my shoulders, looking directly into my eyes, and ordering me to turn my head while saying compassionately: “I know it hurts.” Sometimes I’d automatically turn my body as well, to spare myself the pain, and he would tighten his hold on my shoulders to keep me in place, and he’d tell me gently: “Don’t cheat.” I’m just saying.

I became hyper-aware of my body language. I’ve been thinking that I should get better at non-verbal communication, especially body language, and being unable to turn my head provided an unexpected crash course in certain things. I realized very quickly that people often perceived me as snubbing them because I couldn’t look at them when sitting beside them, for example.

After a month, the neurosurgeon took a look at my latest scans and said something was wrong. (Some quick technical details: the original fracture was a Jefferson fracture to my C1 vertebra. The vertebra healed fine, but there were problems with the transverse ligament.) He took me out of physical therapy, at which point I seized the chance to ask my physical therapist out. Alas, he was seeing someone, but he was sweet and awkward about it, so I didn’t feel bad about it at all.

There was more time, more scans, and ultimately surgery. I got second and third opinions of course, but it was pretty clear to everyone that without surgery I was in danger. So I got the surgery last month. As it turns out, major spinal surgery is also the opposite of fun, and I hope I never have to do that again, either. It involved basically bolting together my top two vertebrae to the base of my skull. I lost about 50% of my neck mobility and I will never regain it.

When I was in the Halo brace, people didn’t expect me to move like most humans, but now that I’m out of it, I’ve been having to reconfigure my body language so as to come across like a human does. I really miss some of the expressions I used to have.

The worst moment, emotionally, was when I realized that a numb patch on the back of my skull might be permanent nerve damage rather than temporary damage. It made it uncomfortable for me to lie on my back, and it made it weird for people to touch my hair, which is like the single most comforting thing that my close friends and partners can do for me. My hair is kind of a big deal to me. When I thought that the numb patch might be a permanent problem, I cried in bed for a while. Either the numb patch is healing or I’m getting used to it, though; I’m not sure which. So that’s good.

The weirdest thing is that I can’t open my mouth as wide I used to. I just can’t. I asked the neurosurgeon about it, and he said that although he has a couple theories he’s not sure how that happened, which is kind of how it goes with spinal surgery, I guess. This made eating unexpectedly difficult for a while, but I’m learning. I also suspect that it will reduce my singing ability a little bit. That’s a shame, but I decided many years ago not to pursue singing seriously, so I guess I haven’t lost anything major there.

After I gave oral sex for the first time post-surgery, it was a bit awkward, but my partner seemed to enjoy it. I used to be able to almost-flawlessly detect when a partner is about to come; that’s one thing that’s become more difficult, but there are others. When we were done, I asked my partner about it. “Could you tell?” I asked.

“Hmm,” he said. “I did notice more teeth than before.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that,” I said. “That was probably unpleasant for you, huh?”

“You figured it out,” he said.

So hopefully that will end up fine. Oral sex is a definite priority for me, so maybe I can just view this as an exciting challenge to my skills! Yes!

And! I have an awesome six-inch scar on the back of my neck. (I’m missing some hair, although the missing hair is under other hair, so it’s not obvious unless you’re trying to, for example, pull my hair, ahem.) I also have two small round scars on my forehead from where the Halo brace screwed in. They’re kind of cute.

In Conclusion

I’m doing fine. I’ll continue having followups for a while. I’m kind of learning how to live in my body again; I feel awkward and inhibited, but it’s not so bad. I can still do everything that’s most important to me, such as typing. My mind wasn’t damaged, and that’s the most important thing. Sometimes something will happen that makes me worry that a nerve got crossed somewhere — like, I’ll smell something unusual, or something — and I’ll quietly freak out a little bit because I’ll imagine that it’s the first sign of serious neural decay. But the worst seems to be over.

This has really made me appreciate my life. It’s cliché, but it’s true. I’m so lucky.

Wear a helmet, folks.

It’s been a while since I felt simultaneously very into someone, and very sure about him. It’s a strange feeling. I’ve been playing with theories about how “flirtation is basically an exercise in strategic ambiguity” and “insecurity is an integral part of romantic intoxication” and “uncertainty is an emotional amplifier“, and I do think that those ideas are true in many ways. But I got so wrapped up in theory that I forgot how it feels to be way into someone … and only a little bit scared.

I met Mica at a Saturday night party. When I left the next morning, he said he wanted to see me again as soon as possible. “Monday?” he asked. “Tuesday?”

“Monday,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

He’s a smart, creative thinker. There are layers to him, and he practically shines: so why not call him Mica? I would love talking to him for those reasons alone. But there’s also a kind of certainty to him; a calm presence; an extraordinary quality of attention. Once he’s focused on a partner, there’s a rhythm behind everything he does. He’s so precise that when I’m kissing him, I feel like an awkward puppy.

I observed this very quickly, and something else: that the quality of his attention — often overtook him. Controlled him. In a sexual interaction, it’s difficult to distract him from catering to me. And since he’s excellent at reading my desires, I usually don’t want to distract him.

It made me think of what I was like, years ago, before I understood my submissive tendencies. Mica hadn’t done much explicit S&M before, and when he’d done it, he was dominant. I didn’t want to project too much, or make any assumptions about him … but I couldn’t help noticing.

The second night I was with him, I asked him to inflict light pain on me. Very light. I didn’t want to go further with him, yet. But his instincts for delivering pain and watching my reactions were, as I suspected, beautifully calibrated.

The third night I was with him, he touched my face and kissed me. I felt my eyelashes flutter and my body melt, and he smiled. Then he said, “I’m feeling really gentle tonight. I don’t know how much I’m up for.”

He doesn’t want S&M right now, I thought. Sometimes guys date me and get anxious that I’ll be disappointed when they don’t want to do S&M. This is understandable, given that I’m an S&M writer. But I hate that, because the last thing I want is for one of my partners to feel obligated … and besides, even I don’t want all-S&M-all-the-time. I smiled directly into Mica’s eyes and told him I was fine with it.

In bed, I watched him. Watched his extraordinary attentiveness. Eventually we got to a point where I was leaning over him, kissing him. I watched him give up his body to the kiss. He doesn’t want S&M right now, I thought, … except that his main experience with S&M, so far, is being in charge.

“Do you trust me?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”

I clenched my nails into Mica’s side, and his back arched. It was the clearest invitation I’d seen from him and, I suspected, the clearest invitation he knew how to give. If he even knew that he was giving it. It can take a lot of time and experience for a submissive to learn what they want well enough to give good feedback for it. It’s one of those submissive skills that people don’t think about enough, because for some reason we’re always too busy teaching dominant skills.

I kissed Mica again, and tore into his back.

He was ready for it. His breathing fast became irregular; he gasped; he shook in my hands. After a while, I pulled back and simply observed the intensity flooding through him. His body undulated like a wave.

“I knew you were dangerous,” he breathed. “In exactly the way that I want.”

“Dangerous,” I repeated. I hesitated. “What do you mean?” His eyelashes flickered, and I saw that he was too far under to answer me. He probably barely knew what he was saying. (In S&M, we call this state of mind subspace.)

I pushed him a little farther. I only used my nails, but you can do a lot with your nails. I said his name, over and over. He struggled, he fought his own body. I observed the struggle and saw myself in it. “I know,” I told him.

Eventually Mica said, quite seriously, that he wanted to stop. I was certain that he could take more. A lot more. I might have been able to convince him to continue, and had him thank me for it later. But he needs to know that I’ll respect him when he says to stop. Also, in a somewhat self-interested way, I don’t want to set a precedent where his boundaries are entirely nonverbal; where his limits depend on my capacity to see through him. Maybe someday, when we know each other really well. Right now, it would make it too easy to seriously harm him … and for him to hate me afterwards.

So I stopped.

“No one has ever touched me so deeply, so fast before,” Mica said, later. And, later later: “This changes everything.” I lay still, kept my arms around him, listening. “That was total catharsis,” he said. “I mean –” a note of doubt crept into his voice. “Do you actually like doing that?”

“Yes,” I said. I said it fast and hard, because he needs to believe it. I understood why he was asking: I’ve been there. When I was first getting into S&M, the first time I felt that way, I had a hard time believing that my partner actually liked doing that for me. It felt so incredible. It felt like I couldn’t possibly be giving back as much as I received. Sometimes, I still feel that insecurity.

“I’m glad you like it,” Mica said. I felt his body relax next to mine. “Because I’m going to want that again.”

“I know,” I said softly.

I tried not to be afraid. Not only because I like him so much, and it’s easy to be afraid. But because someone like Mica, who wants so much to give, can be seriously damaged by a partner who isn’t careful to offer him space to be exactly who he is.

And, most of all, because S&M is a complex and fickle mistress. Because I knew that if Mica expected me to be able to do that regularly, he was bound to be disappointed. His tendencies are there, and I can learn them, but this one “total catharsis” depended on a confluence of factors: there had been something close to his surface, something he’d practically begged me to pull out, and it had been his first time.

Plus, S&M also depends on self-maintenance and reasonable expectations and respecting our own failures. An S&M relationship will be much less stable if the people involved can’t accept imperfection.

I was scared, scared, scared that Mica believed me to be more amazing than I could ever possibly be.

The next day, Mica was thrilled by his scratches, and showed them off to me. I was pleased by how he eroticized the marks — I do that, too — but I also felt a moment of piercing guilt. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have been more careful, before leaving marks like that. I should have asked.”

Mica met my eyes directly, insistently. “No,” he said. “Don’t be sorry. Last night was amazing. You knew exactly where I needed to go.”

I pushed back my fear — he expects too much of me — and answered quietly. I ended by telling him, “S&M can’t be that, all the time.” He nodded. I hoped he was listening.

Fortunately, he was. The next time we did it, Mica was slightly disappointed that it wasn’t mind-blowing — as I knew he would be. But he dealt with it. He articulated the disappointment to me, and he remembered that I’d warned him, and he said that he was prepared to take things as they came. And then, lying on his side next to me, watching me, he asked: “Do you want pain?”

I felt my eyes widen. I felt a spike of fear. I was already so into him. I knew that if I allowed him to get me to subspace, there’d be no going back.

“Yes,” I said.

And again, that attention. In a way, sometimes, Mica’s attentiveness can be strangely inconvenient. He’s almost over-attuned to my desires. Even when I tell him to close his eyes, he can’t lose himself that way; he can’t make himself keep them closed. The quality of his attention is, however, quite remarkable when he hurts me.

“This is where you could take me apart,” I said afterwards, as I surfaced out of that terrible vulnerability.

Mica looked at me, rested his head on me. “I just want to take care of you,” he said.

When I was younger, it took me a while to get around to taking the dominant role. And there’s still something I can reach when I’m being submissive and masochistic that I’ve never reached when I’m dominant. Still, I think of myself as a confirmed switch now: someone who can take either the submissive or dominant role. Yet it’s such a strange binary, isn’t it? If he rips me apart and then says, “I just want to take care of you,” then which of us is in charge?

Mica told me recently that, “When you’re hurting me, my favorite thing you say is ‘I know.’ Because you do know. You know exactly what it’s like.”

By now I’m barely scared. It hasn’t been that long, and I’m trying to allow for New Relationship Energy. I know this could still go up in smoke. But we’ve talked about expectations, and we’ve talked through what we’re both looking for, and we’re both thinking of each other in a long-term way.

If I had to point to events that “proved” Mica has serious potential, two things would top the list. First, in the aftermath of his first incredible S&M experience, when he dealt with the disappointment of realizing that S&M can’t always be that — dealt with it quietly, sensibly, without drama, by talking to me. And second, when he said, in defiance of most aggressive stereotypical dominant roles: “I just want to take care of you.”

The image of several mica layers at the top of this post came from a ScienceDaily article about how life might have originated between undersea mica layers.

This editorship is a bit of an experiment for me, and I’m interested to see how it will go. It’s an opportunity to highlight some work that I think is both excellent and accessible. I don’t choose every piece that is published in the Sex + Relationships section, but I choose a lot of them. Here are some of my favorites from the last six weeks:

* Mica: A Strange Binary, written by me! This is a storytime-type article in which I talk about how it feels to start a relationship with a gentleman who’s new to submission, and isn’t sure how to talk about it. And in the end, he and I switched BDSM roles, too … (I later reposted this article to my blog under the title, “The Strange Binary of Dominance and Submission”.)

* Virginity and Sexual Realization, written by Nahida Sultana Nisa (who blogs at The Fatal Feminist). Nahida is a really interesting writer whose main focus is the intersection of Islam and feminism. This piece is about her understanding of Islam and female sexuality, and her feeling that her Islamic culture is fundamentally more sex-positive than the Western culture in which she grew up.

* Born This Way: Black Box Sexuality, written by Noah Brand (who’s part of the blog team at No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?). This is an exquisitely constructed, hilarious piece about why we should treat sexuality as a “black box” — we don’t know why personal sexuality is the way it is, and it arguably doesn’t matter. (I’ve covered similar ground in my old piece on BDSM as a sexual orientation.)

* Picking and Choosing from the “Act Like A Man Box”, written by Charlie Glickman. Charlie is one of my favorite writers on issues of masculinity. This piece follows his earlier piece, The Performance of Masculinity, and it’s a wonderful discussion of the narrowness of our conceptions of manhood — plus ideas on what it means to create a “new masculinity.”

* Awesome Casual Sex for Single Girls, written by Adaya Adler (who blogs at My So-Called Polyamorous Life). If you’re a lady interested in trying casual sex, you couldn’t find a better place to start than by reading this article. Which is not to say that I think you “should” try casual sex; I’m not too interested in it myself. But if you want to, you know where to start reading!

If you’re interested in pitching me your own work, or you know someone who is, please do get in touch with me: clarisse at rolereboot dot org.

A month or two ago, I published a piece called A Unified Theory of Orgasm. In that piece, I talked about my own history, and how long I took to learn how to orgasm. Basically, learning how to orgasm took a long time and a lot of angst. And I’m really glad that I eventually figured it out — and that I have many years of experimentation still ahead of me.

That piece was really well-received, and a lot of people have thanked me for writing it. As always, though, there’s some mixed feedback too. And I’ve been worried about one thing in particular: it seems like a lot of people missed the part in my article where I said that, now that I’ve learned how to have orgasms … orgasms aren’t even my favorite part of sex. It’s a long article, and I can see how people would miss that, but I did say it and I think it’s important.

Specifically, I wrote:

[It may help some people] not to prioritize orgasms. I am not saying orgasms aren’t important; I just don’t want the importance of orgasms to wound you, the way it wounded me. For me, it is helpful to imagine sex as a journey. For me, it helps to focus on having fun throughout, instead of doing what it takes to reach the “goal” of orgasm. If you’re not taking pleasure in the journey — or at least indulging some curiosity — then why keep going? Why not stop and try something else?

It’s also worth noting that our definitions of “orgasm” are fairly narrow. Some research indicates that there may be other ways to conceptualize orgasms than the stereotypical genital-focused approach.

And now I want to talk about it some more.

It may be ironic that I spent so much time feeling terrible and broken and depressed because I couldn’t figure out how to have orgasms … whereas now I prefer not to focus on them. In fact, I estimate that most of my current sexual encounters don’t include my orgasm, and very few of my most pleasurable sexual encounters have included my orgasm.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t know everything about sex, and there’s a lot that I haven’t experienced. Anything might change. But seriously. The best sex I’ve had in my life has been connective and emotional and, for me personally, has frequently involved intense BDSM. My favorite sex so far? Has also mostly been orgasm-free.

Some people in some sex-related communities have asserted that for maximum amorous power, it’s actually best to limit one’s orgasms, because then the contained sexual energy ends up channeling into a deeper connection with one’s partner. I can see that. For me, another way of thinking about it is that I’m really into being teased — and I’d rather experience hours of being teased without an orgasm, than have a quick encounter that ends in orgasm.

And …. (Oh no, I can already tell this is going to get complicated … but hey, sex is complicated, so I’ll give it a shot.) …. Especially when I’m doing BDSM, it can actually be hot sometimes if I don’t have an orgasm. For example: if I go to sleep so turned on that I can’t dream about anything but my partner, and then I wake up in a damp mess, and then my partner makes my life difficult all morning, it’s pretty awesome. (Although it’s very nice that I know how to give myself orgasms now, because that means that if I’m really feeling overwhelmed by my own sexual energy, I know how to give myself release if I have to. You know, like … if I need to get some work done.)

Aaaaand … here’s the most painful, ridiculous, circular irony of all. Ready? Here goes: now that I’m capable of having orgasms, I’ve found myself occasionally having orgasms only to satisfy my partner. How absurd is that? Plus, I know I’m not alone, because I’ve talked to other women who do the same thing!

I’ve written before that in the past I’ve felt trapped by fake plastic ideas of “what hot girls look like during sex”; I’ve written about how the pressure to “perform” my sexuality can hurt. What has amazed me, as I’ve gotten older, is just how pervasive that pressure can feel with some partners … and how little pressure there is with other partners. The question of how to create a low-pressure environment for sexuality to flourish is big and complicated, so let me just say here that although I’m all about people giving each other orgasms … it’s no good if my partner’s desire to give me an orgasm turns into pressure for me to have an orgasm!

Scarleteen, my favorite sex education site, has a great article about “squirting” orgasms and how some women feel pressured to “squirt” for the sake of the sexual “novelty”. On a similar note, I’ll close this post with an anecdote about a guy I dated a while back who was very focused on giving me orgasms. To his credit, he figured out how to make me come very quickly. But the problem was that — I soon realized — the biggest reason he wanted to make me come was because he wanted to feel like he could. Fundamentally, it wasn’t about my pleasure; it was about him feeling like “the man”.

Let me be clear: he was a great guy, and I was into having sex with him. But it became very obvious to me that if I didn’t have an orgasm every time we had sex, then he would be really bothered. So there were definitely a few encounters where, although I wasn’t especially interested in having an orgasm, I still closed my eyes and flicked through fantasies with a kind of panic … until I managed to kick-start my body into coming. Isn’t that messed up?

One thing I’ve learned, in years of writing about sex and gender, is that anything — anything at all — can be a tool for limiting or stifling sexuality … just as much as it can be a tool for releasing sexuality. Turns out, orgasms are no exception. Even orgasms can become a difficult duty. I’m so glad that I know how to have an orgasm now; for me, that was an important step for my sexuality and my self-esteem. But now that I’ve learned how to do that, I find myself questioning why it’s such an important and destructive issue in the first place!

Sex is a journey. There are so many directions, so many forks in the road, so many stops along the way. There are so many speedbumps and roadblocks, uphills and downhills, free and easy open stretches. Sometimes people stop to rest. Sometimes people double back. Everything is evolving. A lot of people find it most awesome to simply … enjoy the road.

When I was in my late teens, I had a couple straight lady friends who did this thing where they took a year of chastity … although they had already had a fair amount of sex. It wasn’t that they thought sex was bad. It wasn’t that they especially disliked sex. It wasn’t that they regretted choosing to have sex previously. But these women felt powerfully drawn towards taking a year away from sex, a year where no sex happened in their lives … and I instinctively understood because I felt the same urge. In fact, I came up with the idea of deliberately taking a year of chastity on my own, before I heard that anyone else was doing it.

I’m not telling you this because I want to sound like one of the “cool kids”; I’m not trying to say anything like, “I was into chastity when it was underground!” As it happened, I never actually went through with my chastity urge. But I thought about it a lot, and I thought about the fact that other girls I knew were doing it. We didn’t have backgrounds that one would normally consider anti-sex. We had liberal backgrounds, liberal parents, liberal educations. Why were we so attracted to the idea of taking a year without sex?

I thought about it a lot, and I concluded this: We felt like we didn’t own our sexuality. We felt like our sexuality wasn’t for us. Or at least, that’s how I felt.

Even though on the surface it looked like I was totally in charge of my sexual decisions, there were social pressures and expectations that made me feel overwhelmed and confused. Not always, and not all the time! But enough that there were plenty of times that I just felt like all I wanted to do was stop and be done with it … “take my body back” from a world that seemed intent on constantly telling me how I must look, how I must dress, how I must have sex.

I’ve written about how much easier it was for me to learn how I ought to look and “perform” while having sex, than it was for me to learn what I actually wanted from sex. That, I think, is where the chastity urge came from for me. That, and the way I kept finding myself making out with guys who I had zero interest in because it was “too awkward to say no”. Or the way I didn’t feel like I could decide not to have sex with my boyfriends; not because I didn’t think my boyfriend would listen if I said no, but because his potentially hurt feelings seemed so much more important than my bodily preferences.

So many things about the way I was having sex seemed to have nothing to do with me. And if sex had nothing to do with me … then why was I doing it? I guess I wanted to reassure myself that I could take control of at least one thing: saying no.

Eventually, I got a better handle on my sexual preferences and began to learn how to talk about them. It was a long process, and my sexual journey is far from over (yay!). There were people who showed me what it meant to have a low-pressure sexual relationship; there were people who made it easy for me to talk about sex; and there were other people who made it easy for me to turn them down, sexually, which was just as important.

But one interesting thing during the beginning of my learning process … especially given that I now really emphasize and encourage talking directly about sex … was that I felt like a couple of my boyfriends really, really didn’t want to talk about sex. And while sometimes this was clearly terrible and toxic, sometimes it felt good. It felt safe. I wanted to be sexual, but I also felt so much pressure to be sexual that it sometimes felt like a huge relief to just … “not worry about it.”

In retrospect, though, I think that the “safety” I felt when I didn’t talk about sex with certain partners was a mirage. It was a false safety, sustained by a carefully crafted mutual fiction of the relationship. When we ended up talking about sex later, “giving up that safety” just made the conversation unnecessarily scary and weird. And the independent illusions we each had about our sexual relationship flourished and grew strong within our silence. Those illusions were so much harder to release after months of self-reinforcement than they would have been if we’d dragged them into the light from the beginning!

Occasionally, I wonder how it would have felt if I’d taken that deliberate year of chastity. I wonder which of my early experiences would have changed; I wonder whether a year of chastity would have made me feel more comfortable with my sexuality sooner. I’m very happy with how I feel sexually now. I sometimes feel confused or overwhelmed, but I think I’m okay at handling that and even talking about it. Yet I do wonder how it would have felt to draw such a strong boundary; to say such a strong “No” to the world and its messed-up sexual expectations.

In the wake of recent conversations, I’ve been looking around for further resources on transformative justice. I haven’t been able to do a lot of intense follow-up on the topic lately, because in mid-January I had major spinal surgery (after breaking my neck in an accident back in 2011); this obviously has involved many painkillers and a lot of sleep and not-working as much as possible. However, I have been able to do some reading, and I want to share some of what I’ve found most compelling.

Since I’m in recovery, I may take a while to moderate/participate in comments on this thread.

* The most thorough overview of community accountability issues and strategies that I have found was created by INCITE!: Women Of Color Against Violence. Here is an awesome Community Accountability Working Document: it’s full of important principles, incisive questions, organizational ideas, and references to groups that are doing this kind of work.

* Over and over, for the past year and especially recently, people have directed me to Philly Stands Up:

Philly Stands Up is small collective of individuals working in Philadelphia to confront sexual assault in our various communities using a transformative justice framework. We believe in restoring trust and justice within our community by working with both survivors and perpetrators of sexual assault. We believe that sexual assault comes in many forms and we are doing what we can to actively combat it.

We work with people who have assaulted others to hold them accountable to the survivor(s) and restore their relationships within their communities. In dealing with perpetrators, we seek to recognize and change behavior, rather than ostracizing and allowing future assaults elsewhere. We support their healing process, and challenge them on their behavior in order to prevent future assaults.

We also work to educate ourselves and others on issues that contribute to sexualized violence. To encourage awareness building, we provide support for other groups and collectives as well as host workshops in Philly and elsewhere.

On the Philly Stands Up site, here is a post about their Points of Unity; here is a more detailed post called “Our Approach, Our Analysis”.

And here is a personal testimonial from a member of the collective. I personally found these paragraphs especially powerful:

We do not have a magic “perpetrator-free” stamp that absolves someone from whatever pain they have caused another person or community; we work to build an honest and accountable space with perpetrators. This demands a good faith effort from both directions. I have friends who upon finding out about the subject of my Sunday night meetings, are like, “What the fuck are you doing? why perpetrators? none of those programs ever work.” Valid response. But PSU isn’t a program. No one is more aware than we are that we can’t work with every perpetrator. In some cases, perpetrators are also survivors of other situations. We try to see the whole person and the whole situation, however complex, and remain aware of our limitations.

My commitment to PSU is the healthiest relationship I’ve ever experienced with an activist collective. I don’t have to feel guilty about my time limits — for example, at the time of this writing, I haven’t been able to go to an actual meeting in at least a month because of my work schedule, but my ability to commit to write this article and pull together resources for this zine is internally embraced as a valid part of our work. My emotional boundaries are respected — and furthermore, my efforts to even articulate my boundaries in the first place are appreciated as necessary. People step up and step back on a week-to-week basis. Literally. I was a little dubious that this function of the collective was actually the truth, but I personally have been proven wrong multiple times. I have learned that working with PSU demands a lot of honesty. I have to be honest with myself about my own triggers, limits, boundaries, needs. I have to trust my friends in PSU to help me both identify and respect what I can and cannot do. I have to be able to hear each of their own capacity for our work. I think our commitment to healthy activism works because we centralize it at our meetings (by framing with personal check-ins and check-outs), we have pre-existing/outside-of-PSU friendships and shared/local social networks that are incredibly powerful, and because there is a shared common and radical analysis of power and oppression — which informs not only our Points of Unity, but also our ability to just be there for each other and create a safe space (which isn’t to say that we don’t work to develop that space and challenge ourselves). I can only speak for myself, but I know I approach relationships (whether platonic, intimate, or somewhere in between) in a fundamentally different way since I joined PSU.

* Back in April 2011 I wrote a Feministe post about rape culture that drew (mostly) interesting and intense discussion, including some excellent commentary on transformative justice.

* Tangentially, one of the people who recommended Philly Stands Up told me that she met representatives of the group while attending a cooperative conference run by North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO). NASCO is a really great nonprofit, whose work I recommend to anyone interested in participating in cooperatives. (I’ve mentioned NASCO before, in another post where I talked about about cooperative housing.) Apparently Philly Stands Up ran a Transformative Justice Action Camp last year, in conjunction with NASCO; although I’ve found some references that tell me the event went well, I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who attended about what the experience was like, and what lessons they took away from it.

* A commenter on my blog noted that Creative Interventions is planning to release an accountability toolkit in 2012. Also, their website says that they are in the midst of a long National Story-Collecting Project and asks people to get in touch:

Do you know anyone who has intervened in violence within their family — friend — or social network? Was the intervention successful? This is the first documentation project on community-based interventions to family, intimate partner, and other forms of interpersonal violence. The collection of these stories from diverse communities across the country will help us better understand what makes interventions successful. These stories will also inform and inspire others who want to do something to end violence in their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

* Here in Chicago we apparently have a group called the Transformative Justice Law Project: “a collective of radical lawyers, social workers, activists, and community organizers who are deeply committed to prison abolition, transformative justice, and gender self-determination.” The website hasn’t been updated in a while, and I didn’t hear much about them through other channels, but I’m hoping they’re still around. From what their site says, they take a somewhat different tack from other groups because they specifically try to make use of their experience as lawyers:

LEGAL SERVICES
We provide free, zealous, life-affirming, and gender-affirming holistic criminal legal services to low-income and street based transgender and gender non-conforming people targeted by the criminal legal system.

SUPPORT COMMUNITY SURVIVAL AND ORGANIZING ON THE INSIDE
We use our attorney access and attorney-client relationships on the inside to listen to the wisdom of and respond to the needs of those locked up. We help distribute resources and connect people to their peers, friends, family, allies, advocates, and the larger prison abolition movement.

* Finally, on another tangent, Jill at Feministe recently linked to an awesome “New Yorker” article about prisons in America. I’m linking to it again. An anthropologist I know also recommends a book called Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison, “a theoretically sophisticated meditation on what incarceration tells us about who we are as a society.”

UPDATE: In the Feministe comments there has been some discussion about my role in the previous controversy. It was suggested that I add a note highlighting my apology for my role in what happened before, so here it is.

UPDATE: I am out of the hospital and everything went fine! But comment mod will still be slow because I have no inclination to do anything but take Vicodin and sleep for many days.

In the meantime, I encourage you to enjoy this Twitter screencap, which brought me close to tears of mildly-bitter and ironic laughter:

(Image description:

The image shows the Twitter feed belonging to the user @JoeMande. @JoeMande has retweeted 5 tweets. In order, these tweets are:

Image via the risingtensions tumblr.)

I write a lot about my experiences with BDSM — that’s a 6-for-4 acronym that covers Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and Masochism. I have a fair amount of experience engaging in BDSM; I also have a fair amount of experience in the BDSM subculture. The subculture consists of meetup groups, educational workshops, dungeons where people practice BDSM, a set of well-reputed books and resources, Internet social networking sites, etc. The subculture also has its own norms and pitfalls.

Many BDSMers use the word “bottom” to refer to a masochist and/or submissive, and “top” to refer to a dominant and/or sadist. I am a switch, which means I feel comfortable in either the top or the bottom role. I haven’t observed every BDSM group in the world, but in my experience, one BDSM subculture pitfall is that we don’t explicitly teach very many “bottom skills”. In fact, a lot of the time, “bottom skills” aren’t even recognized as skills.

But bottom skills are totally the skillsiest skillz you can imagine. Let me start by describing my ex-boyfriend who was most in touch with his bottom side. When I met him, I was much less experienced than him at BDSM, and I was basically unaware of my top side. I think there are probably a lot more women than we think who would be up for being BDSM tops, but since cultural norms tell us that women aren’t dominant, lots of those women simply don’t recognize those feelings. My ex-boyfriend agrees, and as a result he’s specifically trained himself to surreptitiously draw out a woman’s dominant desires.

With me, he started by giving me the gift of his fear. We saw each other around the community a few times, and I guess he took note. Then one day, we were both at a BDSM meetup, and from nearby — while he was speaking to someone else — he remarked that I terrified him. He knew that I’d overhear.

I looked at him. He avoided my gaze. Eventually he worked his way around the crowd so he was actually speaking to me, and that was when he actually met my eyes and said directly to me, straightforward, in a charming and casual tone: “I’m terrified.”

Of course, this is vulnerability on a silver platter: it’s confident vulnerability. You scare me. Yet I’m still talking to you, even though I’m sure you could hurt me real bad. He was being so obvious, yet there were still so many tacit dimensions to what he was doing, and I had never quite seen anyone like him before. I was intrigued, and felt myself gain a predatory focus.

He was like that throughout our relationship. Throughout the flirting, throughout the BDSM encounters. He communicated very directly when there was a need for direct talking. But he also showed me so much of what to do. When I put my nails in certain places, he’d arch his body directly into them and groan. When I did something that was difficult for him, he’d get quieter and less responsive in an extremely obvious way while he dealt with it. He’s the only man I’ve ever seen who knew how to tip his head back for a kiss (he was also tall, so most women would have to be in very particular positions for this to work, ahem). A lot of this was instinctive, of course; many bottoms would recognize themselves in these tendencies … but he’d learned his own instinctive responses and fine-tuned them.

I want to make it clear here that I don’t want anyone to “perform” a type of sexuality that they don’t like; trust me, I know just how much a person can feel responsible for “acting out” their sexuality. I’ve been there. But that’s different from a person taking their own desires and reactions, and honing them for maximum communication power. That kind of thing takes experience and self-knowledge. Which is one of the things I value most about BDSM — the inner exploration it can enable. I just wish we taught about it better.

I definitely think the BDSM subculture is great at teaching certain topics: for example, how to perform certain activities safely. In major USA cities, there are often workshops on how to safely hit people with whips. Communication also gets a decent amount of airtime; for example, everyone in the community knows what a safeword is (indeed, a lot of people outside the community know about safewords, too). Sometimes, tops are even “judged” on their “dominant skill set”. But bottoms are usually seen as just being “along for the ride” — or are merely judged for “how far they’re willing to go”, which is even worse, because it discourages some bottoms from setting boundaries.

(As a side note, here’s a pro tip on looking for tops. If you’re talking to a top who can’t stop bragging about how awesome and experienced they are, I advise you to walk away. Or perhaps I should merely say that I, personally, would walk away from that. My favorite, most respectful dominant partners have all had a hefty sense of humility and been very willing to learn — even if they were very experienced.)

So why sub skillz got no respect? I think it’s partly because a lot of them are subtle and hard to see. In general, any “receptive” social role is going to get less credit in an interaction, because lots of people think that the “initiating” social role “does all the work” — but the truth is that the “initiating” social role simply does more visible work. You see this happening with mainstream gender roles, too; for example, some men complain about how women expect them to do “all the work”, like asking women out on dates. But the truth is that for any role played by one gender in the usual heterosexual mating dance, there is an opposing or matching role that takes its own kind of work. For every man who has trouble asking women out, there is a woman who has trouble appearing approachable … or who wants to ask men out but thinks that she will freak men out by doing so (and indeed, she might well be correct). Things are tough all over, baby.

Communication — any kind of communication — is not just explaining one’s desires out loud. There’s also a ton of non-verbal feedback and non-verbal reading that goes on. Everyone communicates, but because a lot of bottoms communicate primarily by responding, bottom communication is often invisible. There’s also a whole nother level of bottom communication sometimes achieved by people who are really good, which involves tacitly running the encounter from the bottom side. Like what my ex-boyfriend did in my anecdote above.

Other bottom skills have to do with bottoms monitoring their body and taking care of themselves. Some of this is physical. One thing I would absolutely love to see is a BDSM workshop on body chemistry: I’ve written about it and I try to keep an eye on how it works in my life, but I’ve literally never seen a class on the topic. My experience is that all kinds of things — from sleep to intoxicants to the quality and amount of food I’ve eaten — can drastically alter my experience of BDSM (and, for that matter, sex). But I’m not a nutritionist or a doctor, and although some things are obvious — like: it’s easier to take pain when I’ve had enough sleep — some things are not obvious at all.

And then there’s breath control. I am definitely a novice at this, but I’ve got the feeling that understanding how my breathing intersects with my pain tolerance could lead to a whole new level of BDSM. The one thing I’m sure of right now is that it’s easy to reflexively stop up my breathing when I’m in a lot of pain, or to breathe irregularly. But if I can force myself to breathe more regularly, then it gets easier. So the only advice I can offer bottoms here is for them, too, to watch their breathing and look for patterns.

Of course, taking care of oneself isn’t just physical; it’s mental and emotional too — setting boundaries and understanding oneself. It’s important for a bottom to know what they won’t do, will do … or what they want to do, but suspect will be complex and hard to deal with. In fairness, it is also important for tops to know these things about themselves, but the risks bottoms take tend to be more intense and direct than the ones tops take. Also in fairness, the BDSM community has developed some tactics for talking about this: for example, I often write about BDSM checklists, which list a huge array of BDSM activities and encourage people to rate their desire for and experience with those activities.

A lot of taking care of oneself involves a self-aware learning process. Calling a safeword is absolutely a skill, and it’s a skill that gets easier with practice; but sometimes I’m still not sure whether I actually want to safeword, and I’ve been doing BDSM fairly regularly for years. (For this reason, a lot of BDSMers use the “stoplight system”, whereby “red” means “stop definitely for real!” and “yellow” means “I’m not sure about this, but I don’t think I want to stop, so let’s slow down or switch activities”.) A lot of bottoms enter an altered state of consciousness we refer to as “subspace“; understanding how to navigate subspace is its own highly personal thing that deserves multiple stand-alone articles. Plus, I’ve learned a lot about which types of pain I like and dislike, but my tastes (like everyone’s) can and do evolve over time.

In short, processing intense sensations — and understanding where a person’s brain is at, and what they want even when they’re processing those sensations — is its own constellation of BDSM skills. Again, most relevant for bottoms, but also relevant for tops.

Sex work is a controversial and polarized topic, and there are many perspectives on it. My position is complex — but for me, when it comes to how we actually interact with sex workers, one important factor is whether or not they consent to and enjoy their jobs. I am absolutely in favor of giving better options to sex workers who do not enjoy their jobs, and I am horrified by the idea of a person being trafficked or coerced into sex that they don’t want to have. But I also know people who have sex for money 100% voluntarily, and I do not want to deny their experience.

My friend Olivia, a 25-year-old graduate student, recently started advertising her services on a “Sugar Baby” site called SeekingArrangement.com. I think it’s important for more people to understand these kinds of experiences, so I asked to interview her. Many people have pointed out that once a person starts thinking about the definition of “prostitute”, it’s a bit difficult to define what exactly a prostitute is. Some of my sex worker friends have asked the question: what exactly is the difference between a person whose partner buys her a fancy dinner after which they have sex — and a person whose partner buys sex with money? Olivia has thought at length about this, and I’m grateful to her for sharing her perspective on that question, and others.

Please note that Olivia is exceptionally privileged. What you are about to read is a portrait of what the sex industry looks like for a person who is very privileged: she comes from a white upper-middle-class background, she is not desperate, she is being paid a lot of money, she does not have a drug addiction. Many other peoples’ experiences in the sex industry are very different.

The interview went long, so we posted it in two parts. Part 1 is available if you click here. In Part 1, Olivia told us that she usually uses the site SeekingArrangement.com to find clients; she described the nature of a “sugar baby” site, and she talked about some things she’s learned about gender roles. Now for part 2:

Clarisse Thorn: In Part 1, you mentioned that you feel powerful in your relationships with these men. But there are issues of your safety, right?

Olivia: I think there are issues of safety anytime a person meets someone they don’t really know, especially if they plan to spend time in private. And especially if you’re dealing with topics as sensitive as sex or money. There may be more issues of safety with this because some people really do believe that money can buy them anything. But for the most part, when I meet people they seem very respectful.

Things I do to increase my safety are that I tell my husband and my friends where I’m going to be, I tell them exactly where I am. I’ll do things like take down a client’s license plate number and text it to my husband. I’ve been thinking maybe I should look at each client’s driver’s license too, and text the client’s name and driver’s license number to my husband. I think some clients might feel threatened by that, though.

The most important thing for my safety is that I’m willing and able to walk away from situations. I’m not desperate — I won’t starve or die if I don’t do this work. I meet all my clients in public first for a meal, and if someone sketches me out, I leave. I’m not so desperate that I’ll get into a situation that scares me.

I guess I am at risk if I meet a really crazy person who wants to chop me up and put me in a dumpster. But I could meet a person like that during a normal night at a bar, too.

The major risks that I see include that I might catch an STD — but I use protection. I might end up alone with someone who believes that the money he’s paying actually gives him the entitlement to do whatever he wants to my body, but I’ve never encountered anyone like that. The thing is, as I said before, I haven’t met anyone who I think would actually describe themselves as paying for sex. The terms on which I continue to see these men are probably less explicitly negotiated than an escort’s terms would be. I don’t have flat rates, for example.

I’ve heard escorts complaining that people who use sugar baby sites are unprofessional, and I think that from an escort’s perspective they probably are.

Clarisse Thorn: If people are unwilling to actually talk about sex for money, it must be hard to negotiate your encounters. Do you have a set of steps for negotiation?

Olivia: I haven’t been doing this for very long. It’s varied so far. Usually, I meet them for some kind of meal, and we chat. We have a perfunctory conversation, like — “How was your day?” Then one of us will say something like, “Tell me a bit more about what you’re looking for. Why are you on the site?”

Then we’ll explain our deal to each other. Like, he might say: “I’m divorced, I’m looking for companionship.” At some point, money comes up. I am always extremely vague when I talk about money. I’ve found a good deal of variation in how squeamish people are about money.

For example, one client was saying that he wanted to get married again, but not yet. I said, “Huh, well, if you’re interested in a more emotional relationship, how do you feel about involving money?” The way he explained it to me was that people are attracted to each other for all kinds of reasons, probably including money, so why not be up front about the fact that money is attractive. He seemed almost confused about why I asked. With that guy, I ended up sleeping with him before we even talked about money — which was a huge risk, but I thought it might work, and it did. We had the money conversation immediately after we had sex — at some point when we were taking a break, I asked what he was looking for more specifically from this relationship, and he said that he wanted to see me again, maybe once a week. I think I asked him his preference for a monthly allowance as opposed to every time we meet, and he said he’d rather do something monthly. Then when we were getting dressed, he pulled out $1000 cash and handed it to me, and said, “I’ll give you the balance next time we see each other.”

With other people I can be more straightforward. Maybe they aren’t sure how to set up the relationship, so maybe I talk about another client, like: “I have another client I see 3 times per month for $3000,” and they might say, “That sounds good.” But some guys will just negotiate it per encounter. One guy brought it up very quickly after we’d exchanged some emails. He said that he prefers to do a “per meet” of $300 — he called it a “per meet” — I told him that was too low and quoted him $1000, and he said he’d meet me in the middle. Another guy told me that he would just slip $400 into my purse when he saw me, and that’s exactly what he did.

I have one client I’ve never explicitly discussed money with at all. I had lunch with him, and we didn’t negotiate anything, though we talked a little bit about our reasons for being on the site. The next time I saw him — we were deciding where to meet, and he asked if he should get us a room. I said that I would like that, so I met him and we had sex. He knew it was my birthday soon, so as we were getting dressed, he said, “I know we haven’t talked about money, so I got you some birthday spending money,” and he handed me an envelope with $400. The next time I saw him, he asked about my plans for the evening. I said I was having dinner with a friend, and he handed me $400 in an envelope and said, “Maybe this will help pay for it.” I’m lucky that I’m willing to accept $400 — it’s my lower bound, but I’m willing to accept it. Imagine if I hadn’t been willing to take $400 — that would be super awkward. Probably I should have negotiated that situation more clearly, but it worked out okay.

I’ve heard about situations where unclear negotiations did not work out okay. There was a “New York Times Magazine” article about the site published in 2009. In that article, there were some examples of unclear negotiations that didn’t work out well. But it sounded like that woman didn’t really know what she wanted, and didn’t really enjoy the work. But I do. And I know other women who do, too.

I have a new client who paid me $3000 up front to see me 3 times a month. But I haven’t heard from him since our first meeting. If I were his girlfriend, I’d call him, but he asked me not to call him. So I don’t really know what the deal with that one is. Maybe he’s gonna flake out on me, but he already gave me $3000, so that would be weird.

Clarisse Thorn: So, your husband. You mentioned him briefly. How does your husband feel about this?

Olivia: He does not seem particularly threatened. We already have an open relationship. I think he sometimes feels very visceral jealousy, but that’s just like any other time one of us has sex with somebody else. We just have to talk about it.

Part of the deal here is that I’m doing this because I’m broke. My husband really wants to be able to support me financially, but he can’t right now, so I’m supporting both us doing this. I think that’s a real blow to his ego. To the extent that he gets bothered, I think it’s because I’m allowing other men to support me and give me money; he doesn’t care about the sex. Even though I see this as work, he sees this as “here’s this rich successful guy who just gave my wife a bunch of money, and she slept with him — so probably she’s attracted to him.”

I am kind of attracted to my clients, and I kind of get off on making them happy, and I happen to think that the age difference is kind of hot. I like having sex with them; it’s not unpleasant. I like hearing about these guys’ life stories. I think it’s interesting. But these guys would never be a threat to my husband. I would never be sleeping with any of them except for the money. And I love my husband. I’m always very up front about the fact that I’m married and I love my husband. My clients accept that.

Sex work is a controversial and polarized topic, and there are many perspectives on it. My position is complex — but for me, when it comes to how we actually interact with sex workers, one important factor is whether or not they consent to and enjoy their jobs. I am absolutely in favor of giving better options to sex workers who do not enjoy their jobs, and I am horrified by the idea of a person being trafficked or coerced into sex that they don’t want to have. But I also know people who have sex for money 100% voluntarily, and I do not want to deny their experience.

My friend Olivia, a 25-year-old graduate student, recently started advertising her services on a “Sugar Baby” site called SeekingArrangement.com. I think it’s important for more people to understand these kinds of experiences, so I asked to interview her. Many people have pointed out that once a person starts thinking about the definition of “prostitute”, it’s a bit difficult to define what exactly a prostitute is. Some of my sex worker friends have asked the question: what exactly is the difference between a person whose partner buys her a fancy dinner after which they have sex — and a person whose partner buys sex with money? Olivia has thought at length about this, and I’m grateful to her for sharing her perspective on that question, and others.

Please note that Olivia is exceptionally privileged. What you are about to read is a portrait of what the sex industry looks like for a person who is very privileged: she comes from a white upper-middle-class background, she is not desperate, she is being paid a lot of money, she does not have a drug addiction. Many other peoples’ experiences in the sex industry are very different.

The interview went long, so we’re going to post it in two parts. Here’s part 1:

Clarisse Thorn: Hey Olivia, thanks so much for being willing to talk about this incredibly complicated topic. Could you start by defining a sugar baby site? What is it?

Olivia: I use the site SeekingArrangement.com. I don’t actually know how many sugar baby sites there are, but I get the sense there’s more than one. It’s very hard to pin down exactly what it does. I guess it connects people, usually with a big age gap, who are interested in exchanging some kind of material goods or financial resources for some form of companionship that is often sexual — but not always.

As far as I can tell, the site’s founder is very against the claim that this is prostitution. He puts out a lot of publicity claiming that this site has nothing to do with prostitution. At first I thought that he was trying to evade legal consequences, but I think he actually probably believes that. The site has a blog that he controls, and you can look at it to get a sense of what he’s thinking. One post I think is really interesting is called “Sugar Baby & Sugar Daddy: The Modern Day Princess & Prince?“, which compares being a sugar baby to a kind of “happily ever after” princess fantasy.

So far, no one I’ve talked to seems remotely interested in hiring what they see as a “prostitute”. They seem to want to be having sex with someone they find very attractive who is also someone they feel like they can respect, whose intelligence they respect. For example, someone I see occasionally — the last time I saw him, he gave me money at the end and he said that he felt good about giving me the money because he knew I wouldn’t spend it on, quote, “a designer handbag.” He seems to think that I am reasonably ambitious and have my shit together, and he seems to feel more comfortable giving me money because he knows it goes towards my grad school costs and credit card debt. My ability to write with proper grammar, without overusing emoticons, appears to be my biggest sales point. Men have told me this outright.

That guy also mentioned feeling more comfortable because he thinks I’m from the same social class as he is. There are a lot of class issues coming up in these encounters, I think. Being white and from an upper-middle-class background may help me get clients. My background has also given me a ton of confidence that puts me at an advantage when negotiating. I do not think I radiate “take advantage of me,” and I (nicely) tell guys who start doing that to go away.

The guy I was just talking about — he also mentioned that he feels like he doesn’t want to have sex with someone that he doesn’t feel at least a little bit connected to. There’s a distinction between meaningless sex and casual sex. I think these guys want casual sex — maybe they aren’t at the point where they want to deal with having a partner, or they’re really busy at work, or they already have another partner — they want casual sex but not meaningless sex.

In my encounters with these men, the money does two things. Firstly, it enables them to have a relationship with me that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to have. Secondly, it puts them in this position where they can give me something valuable and have that be appreciated. The guys I see really want to feel appreciated.

Clarisse Thorn: Do you feel like this has given you any new insight into gender roles?

Olivia: Hmm …. It’s made me feel more powerful. I definitely feel like I am the one with the power in this situation. When I show up, I don’t feel like — here is this rich, powerful person who is about to bestow wealth upon me. I feel like — here is this person who is a bit sad and lonely, and maybe I can make their day better.

A lot of the men who are on this site want to feel appreciated, so it’s important to them that the woman they’re with give off the appearance of appreciating them. So for example, on the website there’s a lot of talk about sugar daddies being “mentors” or “benefactors” rather than clients. They seem to want some combination of me asking them about their day, and they also want to feel like they’re bestowing knowledge upon me about the world. One of the men I see will always talk about his opinions about money. He has complicated feelings about himself having money because he doesn’t come from money, so he’s trying to work those out. But he also keeps telling me in a very serious voice that money will not make me happy, that nothing I can buy will make me happy. I tell him that I can buy security and he says yes, that is one thing I can buy.

Other men seem to be having issues with their age. One mentioned that he’s just turned 40, and that’s really bugging him. Then he flaked out on me a couple times — I don’t think he was completely okay with his own decision to be seeing me. But anyway, often, another thing these men seem to get out of it is access to someone who has a bunch of youthful energy and optimism and just plain new ideas. A lot of them have mentioned feeling stuck, or bored, or cynical, or intellectually constrained. So in this sense sex is only one thing I’m offering them — I’m also offering them optimism, hope, energy, and so on. Firstly, the sex is good in and of itself, as most of them aren’t getting laid otherwise. But the sex is also a symbol of them getting access to my youthful energy or whatever.

I think the archetypal image of a mistress involves a woman being “kept” so that she doesn’t have to work, so that she can be available for sex basically whenever. But I don’t think this is what the men I see want. I am more valuable to them because I have other work that I am seriously invested in, and am having sex with them anyway. Again, these men are interested in a woman who they see as more “equal” to them — in this case, defined by earnings potential — and they seem gratified by the idea that they could help me enter their income bracket someday. This is, of course, still kind of patronizing; like I said, they keep using words like “mentor”. It’s also presumptuous. But I think a lot of them being patronizing and presumptuous can probably be attributed to age and wealth, and only some of it to gender.

I think I’ve learned more about class and money than I have about gender. It turns out there are people to whom $1000 versus $3000 doesn’t matter that much, and I finally understand that on a visceral level. $1000 doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to most of them. I knew this, but now I really know it.

Another thing I’ve been struck by is exactly how much romantic relationships are worth. I’ve had several clients tell me they don’t feel wealthy, and they feel like they worry about money a lot. I think they were sincere. Of course, my first thought was: don’t you think that your $2000-per-month prostitute is part of the budget that could be trimmed? But I think that maybe it’s not, actually. I think they think that investing a lot of money in me is a good investment for them if it gives them a release valve so they can deal with the rest of their lives. They’re probably right.

Thanks for reading! Click here to read Part 2 of my interview with Olivia, in which she discusses how she negotiates monetary exchanges and how she manages her relationship with her husband.

I saw “Tangled”, the 2010 Disney Princess flick, over my Christmas holiday. Where to start? I don’t know, so I’m gonna do one of my all-too-rare open threads. (Also, I have concluded that I should catch up on work and email and past comment threads and make sure to thoroughly enjoy New Year’s Eve before I write another of my famous long posts. Also also, happy New Year, folks.)

Feel free to post things that aren’t about “Tangled” too. But like … the movie is a freakin’ goldmine. Here are some discussion prompts:

1. I guarantee that “Tangled” has already birthed many, many BDSM fantasies. I mean, see above. But recalling my frequent injunction that BDSM can be “love sex” too, I like this picture much better:

Disney’s always been good at that sudden, sweet, swoon-inducing moment of intimacy.

2. Obligatory gender roles analysis! How do we feel about these in “Tangled”?

3. Did we learn any lessons about manliness (or even pickup artistry) from Flynn Rider?

Why, it’s almost like the guy is both cocky and funny! But you know what else he is? Vulnerable. Flynn’s character kinda made me think of the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliché.

P.S. That “Blade Runner” reference towards the end. This isn’t even a question.

I am just saying. They can deny that they intended to reference “Blade Runner” all they want, and I’ll still be here, just saying.

(Images above show various characters from “Tangled” — including two in which Rapunzel has tied up the male hero, Flynn, using her hair. Please note that the image of the “unicorn moment” from “Tangled” is here via the fuckyeahtangled tumblr. Because there’s a fuckyeahtangled tumblr.)

Do we actually believe that people can change? If so, how do we want them to show us they’ve changed? Is absolution possible? Who decides the answers to these questions?

I very rarely weigh in on Internet Scandals. This is partly because I’ve got lots of stuff to write that I believe has longer-lasting value than the latest flavor of the moment. It’s also because I have much less time and patience for internet flamewars than I once did. I seem to recall that at some point flamewars were kind of … fun? But these days they just feel predictable, tiring and unproductive.

As it happens, though, I unintentionally found myself in the middle of one this week. I feel exhausted and trapped by the whole thing. But I hope I can dim the flamewar into a lantern to illuminate issues that actually matter.

Specifically, I interviewed Hugo Schwyzer, a prominent writer on gender issues, who identifies as a male feminist and teaches gender studies in southern California. Hugo has a very complicated history that includes incredibly problematic behavior: drug addiction; compulsive and destructive sexual behavior, including sex with his students — and one attempt, over a decade ago, to kill both himself and his girlfriend during a drug binge. He has since, in his own words, “cleaned up”; chosen sobriety; recommitted to his religion; confessed his history; and attempted to make amends to the people he feels that he wronged.

Because of Hugo’s history, a lot of people really don’t like him. When I posted the interview at Feministe, one of the top feminist blogs, the comments exploded. Pretty soon, the comments had nothing to do with the interview at all. Some commenters were making amateur psychological diagnoses of Hugo, and other readers were emailing me privately to express shock at how ugly the discussion had gotten. So I closed down the discussion, making it impossible to continue commenting in that particular forum. As a result, I have now received more hate mail from other feminists than I ever have from anti-feminists. (Note: I have not received a small amount of hate mail from anti-feminists.)

In this situation, people seem to expect me to take a position that is primarily political. People seem to believe that I can either “prove my loyalty to feminism” by throwing Hugo under the bus — or I can “prove my loyalty to Hugo” by claiming that everything he’s done is A-OK. Like many political problems, neither of these options are fully human. Both of these options are stupid, limited, and do not get us any further in our lives.

I certainly do not always agree with Hugo, and I have occasionally pushed him to reconsider certain things. But, full disclosure: my experiences with him have been incredibly positive. Hugo was one of the first high-profile bloggers to promote my work — and occasionally, he took heat for doing so when I wrote about controversial topics. Hugo invited me to guest lecture in his class when I passed through Los Angeles, and he’s given me extensive feedback on and encouragement about my work. Even though I don’t always agree with him, and I believe that a lot of feminists’ critiques of his work are valid … a number of Hugo’s pieces make me want to cheer, like his article “The Paris Paradox: How Sexualization Replaces Opportunity with Obligation”. Perhaps ironically, when I once wrote an agonized post about moral accountability and how to deal with friends who have done really bad things, the most thoughtful and nuanced response came from Hugo. (He’s also written about the problem of how too many people will excuse some sexual predators, even within feminism itself, just because those predators do good activist work.)

Other feminists have been angrily emailing me, Tweeting at me, etc with things like “FUCK YOU FOR PROTECTING THIS WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING.” But I have seen no evidence that Hugo hasn’t made an honest and sustained effort at recovery and accountability. I have seen no evidence that Hugo’s religious re-conversion was dishonest. And I have seen no evidence that Hugo continues problematic behavior.

I am telling you this partly to explain where I’ve been coming from during this particular Internet Scandal. But more importantly, I’m telling you this to lend shape to the ethical problems I see underneath it — problems that are intimately intertwined with how I think about gender and sexuality. I’m actually not very interested in picking apart Hugo himself, whether positively or negatively. I believe that the politics of this situation are mostly a cheap distraction from truth and honor.

For me, the interesting and important questions that emerge in cases like this are:

How can we create processes for accountability? Feminists often discuss crimes like partner violence and sexual assault. Our focus is on helping survivors of these crimes, just as it should be. I personally have been trained as a rape crisis counselor, and I have volunteered in that capacity (if you’re interested in feminist activism, then I really encourage you to look into doing the same). And the history of feminism includes convincing people to actually care about and recognize the trauma of rape: Rape Trauma Syndrome was first defined and discussed in the 1970s.

But perhaps because of our focus on helping and protecting survivors, I rarely see feminist discussions of how to deal with people who have committed crimes. In fact, I rarely see any discussions of how to deal with that, aside from sending people to jail. Let me just say that problems with the prison-industrial complex are their own thing — but even aside from those, the vast majority of rapes and assaults and other forms of gender-based violence go unprosecuted.

So, frequently, jail won’t even enter the picture. Yet communities and individuals often know that gender-based violence is going on. How do we talk about the people who have done those things, and how do we talk to them? How can we create community structures and norms that enable people to change the behaviors that led to those crimes? How do we interact with and judge someone who has committed to change, as opposed to a person who has not?

“Accountability teams” are one way I’ve heard of for dealing with this: whether support groups of perpetrators who share their experiences with making amends and changing their ways, or groups of friends who assist a perpetrator with those processes. I would like to see more and larger discussions about those teams, and more acknowledgement that change is possible. If we can’t create this kind of process, then how can we expect to create real change around these crimes? How can we expect perpetrators of violence to work on themselves if we can’t give them the space to work? Why should someone work for forgiveness if they know forgiveness can never come?

On another note: are there crimes where we draw a bright line? Are there things we cannot or should not forgive? If some crimes are unforgivable, then how do we deal with the perpetrators? In some areas of the USA, sex crimes are punished legally by restricting the movement of perpetrators, but this law has had significant unintended consequences. And the legal question doesn’t even cover the dimension I’m most interested in, which is how friends and social circles can deal with these situations. If there are unforgivable crimes, then how do we handle the unforgiven people involved?

And: have you thought about these questions in your own life? I don’t mean abstractly, as an intellectual exercise. Concretely, and with intention. What would you do if, tomorrow, you found out that your best friend was a rapist? Your lover? What would you do if your sibling came to you to confess a terrible crime? To request absolution? To request accountability?

These questions are not just applicable to an individual like Hugo. They’re applicable to all of us, in all kinds of situations. And I think it’s wise for us to give them some thought before they come up … because in the heat of the moment, we can be overwhelmed by questions we could have thought our way around if we addressed them beforehand.

Do you believe people can change? And if you do believe it, then how would you help someone change?

Note from early 2012: This piece kicked up a huge controversy, and I learned a lot from the ensuing debate. If I were writing this piece today, then I would not write it the way I did above. My favorite response to this piece around the internet was posted by Maia at Alas, A Blog. It’s really good and I later requested that we be permitted to cross-post it to Feministe, a request that Maia gracefully granted.

Another update: In late January 2012, I posted about some stuff I’ve been reading on transformative justice.

So, I have this ex. I dated him for a long time, but we haven’t really talked in ages. I suspect that I hurt him pretty bad when he dated; he hurt me pretty bad, too.

I’ve written about him only a few times. For instance, I wrote about him when I discussed my history of figuring out how to reach orgasm, because he … was not a good sexual partner. He pressured me in a lot of unpleasant sex-related ways. During one fight, he even shouted at me that he didn’t care about my sexual satisfaction.

I know that he was manipulative. I know that he ignored my needs. And I know that he hurt me. But I also believe that he loved me. I know he understands me deeply, and respects me in a lot of ways. I know I was important to him, and I know I wasn’t always the most reasonable partner myself.

Where is the space for me to reconcile these things?

I once wrote a long post about him that got very different reactions from different readers. A commenter on one feminist website informed me that he had abused me; she told me that I “should” admit that I am a victim of abuse. Whereas a writer an an anti-feminist site wrote a whole post about me titled: “Another Sexually & Emotionally Defective Feminist.” The post described me as “histrionic” and “flawed” and “melodramatic”. This armchair psychoanalysis concluded that my sexual identity makes me “defective,” and that the whole experience arose because of my own failure to understand myself.

It seems that from the outside, some observers will conclude that he was “at fault”, and some will conclude that I was “at fault”. Obviously, I’d prefer to believe that he was “at fault”. But maybe “fault” isn’t the most productive way to think about this?

I know he hurt me. The relationship was incredibly problematic. I see some of the things he said to me in descriptions of emotional abuse tactics such as gaslighting. That post defines gaslighting like this:

For our discussion, I consider gaslighting to be a repeat, systematic series of lies that are designed to make the victim doubt her reality.

… Gaslighting can be intentional, such as … where a partner purposely moves or hides your stuff to make you feel forgetful and untethered to your memory.

Gaslighting can also be an unintentional side-effect, as a classic outcome of living with a narcissist, or with a partner who is trying to cover up their pattern of abuse, or with the addict trying to cover up their addiction. It is done in order to preserve the … [gaslighter's] vision of himself as an honest and upstanding person without actually doing the things that would make it so.

For example: after the fight when my ex told me that he didn’t care about my sexual satisfaction — after I walked out of the room, and walked around crying for hours before I finally had to come back because I was staying with him and had nowhere else to go — after that fight, he told me that he’d never said those words.

I know he said those words. I even said, “You can’t mean that,” and he repeated them. But I was so tired, after all the fighting and the crying, that I didn’t push when he told me that he never said it. All I felt was disjointed confusion and pain and … lack of words.

I let him create the reality between us — or he took control of that reality, with his subtle social violence. And our sex life remained bad. So bad that when I think of having sex with him today, all I can feel is shivering disgust.

Maybe he didn’t mean to do it. But it’s important for me to understand that even if he didn’t mean to mess with my head so much, he did it anyway. It’s important for me to understand that even if he didn’t mean to hurt me so bad, he hurt me. It’s important for me to understand those things because it helps me trust myself; it helps me value my own emotions; it helps me protect myself.

Late in our relationship, he gave me a ring. It was a valuable ring; an old heirloom. After we broke up, I tried to give it back. “No,” he said, “it’s yours, I gave it to you. I want you to keep it.”

I didn’t especially want to keep it — but I kept it. I didn’t know what else to do.

Years later, I was leaving the country. I found the ring as I was packing up my life. I called him and told him I wanted to give it back.

I left the call to the last minute, because thinking about calling him made me so anxious. We talked for a while about nothing important, and I remember thawing. I remember thinking, oh, that’s right, he’s smart and funny and he knows me so well. I liked him for good reasons.

It took me a while to bring up the ring; half an hour or so. I said that I knew it was an heirloom, that someday he’d meet someone else who should have it. I said that I didn’t want to wear it. That I didn’t want to keep it at all.

It was late at night and I recall standing, stretching, listening to his voice on the other end of the line.

“No,” he said. “It’s for you. I gave it to you. If you don’t want it, then you can sell it or give it away or bury it or throw it away. I don’t care what you do with it. It’s yours.”

But he knew I’d never throw it away or give it away or sell it or bury it. And as I stood holding my cell phone, I remember thinking that this was the last hold he had on me. I recognized how I felt. I was feeling disjointed confusion and pain and … lack of words.

I didn’t want the ring. I didn’t want it.

But, “Okay,” I finally said, and we said goodbye and hung up, and I still have the ring.

I don’t especially stay in touch with him. He contacts me sometimes and says we should hang out. I always find excuses not to see him (though sometimes I can’t avoid it). It’s been years, but I’m still keeping my post-breakup distance. And I know that hurts him. Sometimes I feel smug that I came out of the whole affair with no desire to see him; sometimes I feel a little angry, sometimes I just feel sad.

I wonder if I’d feel more okay seeing him, if he hadn’t convinced me to keep the ring.

I originally published the above in late November. A few days ago, my ex contacted me and said he’d be in town. Said he’d love to hang out.

I’m going to give him a pseudonym. I’ve never named him in my writing before.

I’ll call him Mr. Blue Sky. Because he and I both love the “Rocky Horror Picture Show”: I can see blue skies through the tears in my eyes. Because his eyes are sky-blue, and he loves that song by The Who. Because when he and I were together, I felt like saying I didn’t love him would be like saying the sky wasn’t blue.

It’s been a long time.

Mr. Blue Sky texted that he wanted to hang out, and this time I didn’t make excuses. I told him I could see him for lunch but I wanted to give his ring back.

He texted some potential lunch details, and added: “I don’t want the ring back.”

I wrote back: “If I can do whatever I want with it then I want you to take it back, and I don’t want to see you otherwise.”

He wrote: “Did that last message just tell me to meet you so that you could give me back the ring?”

I took a breath. I wrote, carefully: “I would like to see you and hang out. However, I don’t feel comfortable seeing you unless I can give it back. Giving back the ring is not the reason I want to see you, but for me, it is a prerequisite.”

“As you wish,” he texted. I chose not to think about the “Princess Bride” reference, and we finalized lunch.

When we met, I simply handed him the ring box. Mr. Blue Sky took it, pocketed it casually. Said “Thank you.” It seemed so easy that I was startled.

We talked easily, too. There were a few pauses, but no hitches. Traded details about mutual friends. Asked after each other’s lives.

I wasn’t vegan when we were together. I hadn’t been to Africa. I didn’t have a damn clue about S&M, and now I get paid to lecture on it. God knows I wasn’t a professional feminist writer, though gender issues were important to me. I feel very different from who I was when we were close, but I’m probably less different than I think. The same characteristics, just a little shifted around.

Mr. Blue Sky seemed much the same.

We talked about the bicycle accident I had this year, the one where I broke my neck. He asked for details. I gave them. I watched him catch his breath. He hadn’t realized how close I came to dying.

“If I give you a hug, will I break you?” he asked.

“No,” I said, and he gave me a fragile gentle hug.

Me being myself, I totally failed to change the subject to something less intense.

“I was thinking,” I said, “after my accident, that if it had killed me, then I would have been the first from our university tribe to die.”

“Don’t say that,” he said.

“I mean,” I said. “Someone’s gotta die first. Might as well be me, right?” I laughed. I’m the kind of person who says uncomfortable things like that, sometimes, and thinks it’s funny.

“I don’t follow your logic,” he said dryly. He knows how to handle me, still.

It was on his way out the door that Mr. Blue Sky brought it up. He was putting on his jacket. “I gotta ask,” he said. His tone was faux-casual, taut underneath. “What’s the deal with the ring?”

I hadn’t been ready for the question. My pulse jumped.

“I just didn’t feel comfortable having it anymore,” I said.

There was a moment, so brief, super-charged. I almost said something else out of sheer anxiety, except I couldn’t think of what to say. I’ve been trying to give it back for years, I thought. Don’t act like this is new. Except I didn’t really think that. My thoughts weren’t really formed. I might have been holding my breath.

“Okay,” said Mr. Blue Sky. He smiled, in that way people smile when they feel like they should. “I guess that’ll have to do.”

Yes, I thought. It will. Except I didn’t really think that, either.

“Safe travels,” I wished him.

Mr. Blue Sky thanked me, and wished me well in return.

And left with the ring.

The image at the top of this post is of a human eye whose iris looks like a cloud-filled sky. It’s from the oeuvre of my favorite artist, the surrealist René Magritte.

(I use phrases like “failed encounter” and “gone wrong” and “mistakes” with caution, because I think these situations can often be viewed as learning experiences, and therefore they are successful for a lot of purposes! But certainly in the moment they feel like screwups, and a lot of the time they can make the whole relationship very difficult, and I think that most people who have been through them feel as though some kind of failure happened … whether it was a failure of understanding, communication, empathy, caution, or something else.)

Much of the problem, I think, is that people have such a hard time communicating after serious miscommunications and mistakes.

The following quotation is from Staci Newmahr’s Playing At The Edge, an excellent ethnography of the BDSM community. (I’ve changed a few jargon terms so I don’t have to define them for you, but I left two terms I’ll be using throughout this entry: “top” and “bottom”. A top is a blanket term for a dominant and/or sadist. A bottom is a blanket term for a masochist and/or submissive.)

Sophie had been engaged in a long and intimate S&M relationship with Carl, a friend whom she deeply trusted. During the encounter she describes below, Carl changed his approach, and Sophie subsequently felt that Carl was somehow not quite himself. Sophie and Carl never quite recovered from the incident; though they remained friends and tried to do S&M again, it was, according to Sophie, never the same.

Sophie says:

He was very much a rope top. That was his big thing, was tying people up. And he was excellent at typing people up. And our dynamic was always — I mean, yes, he would absolutely hurt me when the time came for that, but there was also always this element — even when he was hurting me, it was done in this incredibly, like, touchingly caring way. And especially when he was tying me up, it was this soothing, wonderful thing.

So one day … Carl starts an encounter with me. Carl had decided in his head, from all the things that he’s heard me say about how I play with another partner, that that’s what I really want from an interaction, in order for it to be the most gratifying and valuable. So we proceeded to have an encounter where Carl was not Carl. And I didn’t stop it because it was so like, I couldn’t understand what was going on. I couldn’t understand why it felt so horrible. And it wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, because I trust him completely. [ ... ] I just couldn’t figure out what the problem is, I felt horrible through the whole thing. And he was so out of touch with me that he wasn’t even aware of how horrible I was feeling. The encounter went on for some time … and the second it was over, I … was just, like, you know, traumatized. And he was like, “Oh my God, what’s wrong?” [and] he carried me into the other room. I said something like, “Where did my Carly go?” and then he started to cry. [ ... ] He’s like, “I was trying to give you this sadistic experience.”

In Sophie’s story, Carl’s risk backfires. … The risks were unsuccessful; each ended up emotionally distraught and distant. Ultimately, they sacrificed the relationship. (pages 179-180)

Man, that description is so intense. Let’s talk about it.

The Practice

The first thing worth noting about Sophie’s story is that, while she probably had a safeword, she didn’t use it: she says that she “didn’t stop it.” Sometimes, in really confusing S&M scenes, submissives have trouble using their safewords. This does not mean safewords are worthless … but as Thomas MacAulay Millar puts it, “Tops can never be on cruise control.” Non-verbal signals matter, and if an S&M partner — top or bottom! — starts reacting in an unusual way, it’s great to check in with them even if they haven’t used their safeword. Safewords are a useful additional way of communicating about sex, but they can’t replace all communication.

Note also how hard the situation was on the top partner, not just the bottom. Carl ended up crying afterwards!

Next, what I find myself wondering is whether Sophie and Carl could have communicated past this incident. Sophie obviously trusted Carl, and presumably he trusted her. Could they have talked it out and had a successful relationship afterwards? It would have been hard, but maybe they could have done it.

I’ve (rarely) had similar experiences myself — where boundaries were severely tested, and afterwards it was difficult for both me and my partner to work through it. It can absolutely have an immense impact on the relationship. I write about this a bit in my upcoming eBook, Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser. Here’s a quotation from a section in my book where I’m talking to a dominant partner, with whom I just had such a difficult encounter:

Sometimes, these things happen. One partner pushes a boundary, breaks it; maybe the boundary was unspoken; maybe the dominant misreads signals; maybe the submissive didn’t yet realize that the boundary was there. When it comes to S&M, these things can be so dramatic … yet sometimes they’re nobody’s fault. We find these mental and emotional blocks, and we call them landmines.

My partner didn’t hit the landmine on purpose. He wasn’t trying to push me as hard as he did. And I didn’t warn him off. So the important question becomes — how does one deal with such a situation afterwards?

… “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I never want to do that to you again.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “These things happen. But please do be careful. But don’t worry ….” I trailed off, trying to find words.

It’s so hard to know how to talk about this, especially with people who aren’t used to discussing S&M. When there’s a fuckup, sometimes both sides feel betrayed. The submissive might think: “Maybe I didn’t tell you exactly what to avoid, but sometimes it’s too much to think about, sometimes it’s hard to understand in the moment, sometimes I don’t know ahead of time. Okay, so I pushed myself too hard, but I did it because I’m so into you; I did it because, in that moment, I lost track of myself. And anyway, I thought you could read me. I thought you understood me. I thought you knew. You’ve read me perfectly well before; why not this time? Is it that you don’t care?”

Whereas the dominant might think: “Maybe I went too far, but I thought I could trust you to stop me. I thought I could trust you to tell me. I don’t want to harm you, I just want to push you; I want to break down walls with you. I want to see your eyes go deep and soft. It’s not fair for me to feel like I fucked up, because you fucked up, too. I thought you could take care of yourself. I thought you knew. You’ve communicated perfectly well before; why not this time? Can I rely on you?”

That particular relationship didn’t last, and I think that our most difficult encounter probably affected our trust for each other through the end. Still, I can tell you how we worked on it at the time — and I can tell you that it felt really good. We just listened to each other. And we both assumed that the other person had good intent. By the end of talking it out — which admittedly took a really long time; multiple days — I trusted him more than ever and I felt incredibly close to him.

I’ve been thinking a lot about classic feminist anti-abuse models, which describe how abusers accomplish abuse. One of the tactics abusers consistently use is Minimizing, Denying, and Blaming their partners. Abusers claim that the abuse didn’t happen; they claim it wasn’t important; they blame their partners for what happened. A partner who is willing to listen and change will respond openly to criticism and to mistakes: a non-abusive partner will not minimize, deny, or blame.

And those three things are what my ex-partner did not do. He never claimed that our difficult encounter didn’t happen; he never put the blame on me; he never insisted that it was no big deal. He didn’t even come close to doing those things while we talked it through. He took his emotions and dealt honestly with them, and I did my best to do the same.

Also, in BDSM, we often talk about the concept of “aftercare”: that is, what we say and do after a BDSM scene to ground ourselves, bring ourselves back into the world, and connect with our partners. Aftercare is a huge topic; here is an excellent page full of advice on how to give good aftercare. It’s important to give careful aftercare after any BDSM encounter, but if the encounter has been particularly difficult, it’s doubly important. I have personally had good experiences leaving Super Intense Conversations like the one I describe above until post-aftercare, when all partners have calmed down and dealt with any immediate emotional responses.

I’m writing vaguely, so here are some concrete suggestions for things to say during the conversation after a difficult BDSM encounter:

* “I’m sorry.”
* “I still like you and think you’re a good person.”
* “Do you want to talk about this now? If not now, then let’s set a concrete time for later.”
* “I’m feeling really vulnerable and confused right now.”
* “Why do you think that happened? How were you reading me, and what were you thinking as you responded to me?”
* “How do we feel about this now that we’ve discussed it, and how can we keep it from happening again?”
* “What have we learned about landmines? Are there any particular words or actions that are definitely off-limits from now on?”

I have one final super important caveat to add here: Not all “screwups” are actually screwups. Some are just plain abuse. A human-shaped predator will use words like “miscommunication” and “mistake” to cover up what they do. This post is focused on honest errors, but there are dishonest and evil people out there. In particular, if a person “keeps screwing up” … that’s a terribly bad sign. It is not an inherent part of BDSM to feel roiled up and confused and alienated after a BDSM encounter; most BDSMers feel more intimate and connected after successful encounters. (Here is a previous post that I’ve written about BDSM and abuse. I talk mostly about minimizing/denying/blaming again, but there’s other stuff too.)

I’ve had some iffy results splitting up my posts in the past, but this post is really long and I’m super busy, so I’m just going to post what I have for now. My next post will cover The Theory of “Failed Scenes”.

The above image is the cover of Issue #1 of “Vamps”, a short series of obscure comics from the mid-1990s. I came across it in my mid-teens and loved it. It was all about these gorgeous girl vampires who formed a gang and motorcycled around, seducing men and drinking their blood. The girls were turned into vampires by a male vampire who was a selfish, abusive jerk, and the series was partly about the way they defeated him and seized freedom.

One of my big takeaways from reading “Vamps” came not from the series itself but from the author’s afterword. The comic was created by a woman, Elaine Lee, and although I don’t have access to the quotation now, I seem to recall that she described receiving a ton of vitriolic hate mail over “Vamps”. Her theory was that vampires are basically a rape fantasy, and that readers were incredibly disturbed to see the “typical” rape fantasy “turned around” such that women were taking that kind of aggressive and violent sexual power over men.

Anyone who does any serious research about vampire tropes will find almost immediately that vampires are historically, consistently associated with “deviant” sexuality — meaning queerness and, of course, BDSM. (Hello to my fellow blood fetishists!) Vampires are some of the most hidden-in-plain-sight BDSM fantasies available, so it’s not surprising that vampires would also be affected by some of the gendered stereotypes about BDSM roles that get expressed in the BDSM community: for example, that men are the “natural” dominants/sadists and women are the “natural” submissives/masochists. People have a hard enough time accepting female dominants; it’s not surprising that female vampires might be considered more unsettling than male vampires.

That said, I think the cultural tide has turned a bit since the 1990s, though everything isn’t fixed by a long shot. The 2000s saw the wide release of “Underworld”, an action movie with a badass and aggressive vampire lady as the main character. (Which, by the way, blatantly cribbed from one of the best roleplaying games ever made: “Vampire: the Masquerade“. The makers of “Vampire” sued the makers of “Underworld” and settled out of court. In fairness, the game “Vampire” was both an excellent overview of vampire tropes and a significant influence on ideas about vampires, so it’s conceivable that some of the writers on “Underworld” weren’t familiar with the game.)

A couple of years ago, I wrote some fiction whose main character was a female, masochist, submissive vampire. Her master was a mortal, and I really enjoyed thinking about him feeding her his own blood as a gesture of power, or as a reward when she did what he wanted her to do. She only wanted to drink from him, and she loved him … despite her strength and predatory power, she ended up enslaved by her own hunger. I’ve thought about trying to revise that story and publish it somewhere, but I’ve never gotten around to it. (The original is incoherent and unpublishable.)

I found an original copy of “Vamps” Issue #1 in a comic shop recently and bought it ($1!) … I wasn’t as excited about it the second time around, but there’s still a lot to love.

As a side note, I must leave you with one of my favorite jokes. It’s kind of ridiculously terrible. If you are of delicate sensibilities, then it might appall you. Ready? You’ve been warned ….

Q: What did one lesbian vampire say to the other?
A: “See you next month!”

Actually, as a side side note, I must leave you with my personal vampire-related recommendations.
* The movie “Night Watch” (originally of Russia)
* The song “I’m A Vampire” by the Future Bible Heroes
* Neil Gaiman’s “Vampire Sestina”
* The novel Blindsight by Peter Watts (free to read online)
* The novel Agyar by Steven Brust (one of my favorites)
* The classic roleplaying game “Vampire: The Masquerade” (non-nerds need not apply)
* Feministe post and comments on how Twilight (which I have not read) is “a powerful cautionary tale about accepting traditional gender roles and conforming to expected societal norms“.

I do my best to maintain a healthy sense of irony about everything. Including death, taxes and breakups.

But breakups are terrible and soul-searing; I’ve been observing some breakups lately that make me feel gun-shy about ever wanting to be involved with another human being. Also, I’m never sure what to tell my friends in these situations. I find the above quotation to be a totally awesome description of how I feel after a nasty breakup, but it doesn’t contain much actionable advice.

There are two resources I’ve found that had the best breakup advice ever. One was aimed at women, and one was aimed at men, but both of them work for people of all genders. The one aimed at men is shorter, and I’ll reprint the whole thing in a moment here. The one aimed at women is more hilarious.

Here are those resources, plus some advice from me. And also, if you’re going through a breakup, then you have my sympathies. Virtual hugs, my friend.

Resource #1

The lady breakup guide is the book Exorcising Your Ex by Elizabeth Kuster. Here is one of my favorite excerpts. This isn’t one of the advice parts of the book; it’s solely funny. Even if you have broken up lately, it will hopefully make you laugh:

… This seems as good a place as any to share with you the best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) story about post-breakup stuff that I’ve ever heard. It came from a woman who initially professed not to have any post-breakup stuff. Naturally, I was skeptical. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

The process is expensive — freeze-drying a 9-pound pet costs $550, so freeze-drying a 200-pound ex would cost about $110,000 — but think about the possibilities. You could have them pose your ex so it looks like he’s begging for forgiveness. You could have them pose him in a sitting position, put him on the couch and tell your parents you’re married. (They’ll be none the wiser, especially if you insert a remote into his lifeless hands.) (pages 118 – 121)

I frequently quote Ms. Kuster’s line where she says “It would take a very sick person to find anything funny about this, so let me assure you that I am that person.” It’s kind of my favorite quotable quote ever.

Resource #2

Aaaand now for the dude breakup guide. It originated on the forums at the classic Internet dude site, SomethingAwful.com. The user who originally wrote this guide called himself Lushka16. Lushka16′s advice has been reposted across various nerd sites, so I might as well mirror it here.

Here it is:

~~~

Being dumped sucks.

It is rarely a good experience — no matter how long you’ve been going out, what the nature of your relationship was, or how it ended. The very idea that someone does not want to spend his/her time with you is a pretty big blow to the ol’ ego.

I have been dumped on many occasions for many reasons, for over nearly a decade. I understand that there are many who have never had a girlfriend, many on their first relationship, and many more with little experience with being dumped. Take my advice as you will, but I can guarantee you that when the day comes (and it probably will), you will be better prepared for it, and hopefully won’t end up being a huge whiny turd.

I give to you:
Lushka16′s guide to being dumped, and taking it like a champ

Rule 1: The relationship is over.

This is the most important rule of all. You need to go back to it at least once every minute in the aftermath of being dumped. It is the most difficult part, yet it is also the foundation for healing. The day you come to terms with it, is the day things start getting better.

In my experience, there are three basic parts to being dumped: Premonition, Dump, After-Dump.

Premonition

I have been dumped, and have dumped, lots and lots of times. There has never been an instance where it is random. For every single relationship, from shortest (2 days) to longest (3 years), there has been a period of time where the breakup is planned. For the person about to get dumped, this period is called premonition. I have always felt a breakup coming, and it is physically a worse feeling than the breakup itself. There is little communication between the couple, an intense feeling of uncertainty, and a strong desire to make it better. The longer the premonition stage lasts, the more apt you are be stupid.

Things to avoid:

Do not go beyond the bounds of your relationship. Don’t start saying, “I love you” if that’s not what you normally do.

Resist the urge to sulk. Do whatever it takes to get your mind away from it. Get the fuck out of bed, go to the gym, go for a walk, find some friends, smoke some pot, do whatever it is that you do to de-stress.

Do not start screwing around. The relationship isn’t over yet. You might get yourself into some serious trouble.

Don’t beat her to the punch, unless you had plans already.

Things to do:

Hey, here’s an idea — talk to her. “Hey, what’s going on with us, things have been kind of weird lately.” Sure, it might lead to breaking up faster, but that’s the point. If it’s going to happen, might as well not torture yourself.

Try working things out. I know, it’s easier to post a complaining thread on the SomethingAwful forums than to talk logically to another human being, but take it from me — it can work. If you really care for the relationship, and she’s not cheating on your sorry ass, there’s room for work. I’ve found that the best times I’ve had were after we’ve worked things out.

Dump

REMEMBER RULE 1

Get ready to go through the 5 stages of loss:

Denial
Bargaining
Anger
Despair
Acceptance

It might not happen in that order, it might not involve all the stages. Chances are you’ll experience at least 3 of them, the most popular being bargaining, anger and despair.

Denial — Try your best to avoid it. Denial doesn’t help resolve anything, makes the whole process very difficult. Remember Rule 1.

Bargaining — Might as well give it a shot. There might be some things that you can reasonably change in the relationship. Give it up after a good shot at it. If it’s over, it’s over.

Anger — Yup, you’re pissed. Get over it.

Despair — This is where the crying begins. Now is the time to not be pathetic. There’s nothing wrong with crying, but don’t make her feel bad for you or pity you. She’ll only be pissed. There is little sympathy when it comes to being dumped, so don’t play that card. More on this in the post-dump section.

Acceptance — Time to let go, man. Rule 1.

Here’s a quick scenario as to how the whole thing might look:

Girl: Things aren’t working out.
Boy: Are you sure? I thought things were fine.
Girl: No.
Boy: Well, is there anything we can do to make things better?
Girl: I just don’t want to be in a relationship anymore.
Boy: But you were the one who wanted to be in one in the first place! Who put you up to this? Is there another guy? I’ll fucking kill him.
Girl: [insert despair]
Boy: [insert despair]
Boy: Well, if this is what you want, and if this feels right, and there’s nothing I can do or say to change it, then we might as well let it happen.

See? That wasn’t so bad. This is a really good time for some Q and A, especially since you’ll want to know some of the answers in the post-dump phase.

Here is a short list of questions you should ask now, while you’re still communicating:

Is there anything I can do to make this relationship work?
Is there anything I could have done to make things better?
What made you decide to do this?
Is there someone else involved?
Is there anything I can do to avoid pissing off future girlfriends?
When did things start to suck? What caused it?

This is a very short list, and you should tailor it to your needs in the premonition phase. If you can get all your important questions answered, it will make life easier in the next phase. Also, be sure to indicate that you don’t want to see/talk to her for a while. This is key. More on this in the next section.

Post-Dump

Nearly a decade has taught me one important thing: This is a very long phase. You need to accept this.

Ok, you just got dumped. Let the emotion out the best way you know. Cry if you have to, beat the shit out of something, go for a run, post a SomethingAwful thread (maybe go for a run first). Be a man, and find someone to give you a hug. Talk it through with your close friends (not hers). Set some kind of time limit. Say to yourself, “I’m going to be a pile of emotional shit for the next hour, then I’m going to start picking myself up.” Stick to it, if you’re a sulking mess for too long no one is going to want to hear about it.

Inform your friends. People ought to know to be careful around you. If they care about you, they’ll help you cope. Put away blatant reminders of her – her pictures, her underwear, her lifesize blowup doll etc.

Go out, live life normally. Do not do anything rash. Joining the Army doesn’t help, running away doesn’t help, you won’t get her back if you get into a car accident/attempt suicide, you certainly won’t get her back if you vandalize her property. Don’t fuck her sister/friends, don’t go beating up some kid who you think might be her new boyfriend. Use Rule 1 folks, it really puts things into perspective.

Just go on with your life. That’s the only thing you can do to really take it like a champ. There’s a huge list of things you shouldn’t do, because they’re very annoying, and you’ll feel stupid about them later.

Spend lots and lots of time away from her. This is actually a strange situation. Say you spend 4 months away from her and are feeling great. The next time you see her, it’ll take you back about 2 months. Then you’ll recover, and the next time you see her it’ll take you back 1 month. Then 2 weeks. Then 1 week. See what I’m getting at? Recovery is a long process, and there will be setbacks. Don’t think it’ll be peaches and cream the first time you see her with another guy. Try to avoid her socially until you’re certain things are ok. This may take months or years. Rarely weeks. This is why avoidance is key. You don’t need to go out of your way to avoid her, just let her know that for a while, you don’t want to see her.

Don’t play the pity card. Yes, you’re upset and hurt and heartbroken. Tell it to your friends, not to her or her friends. Avoid putting up depressing away messages, profiles, blogs, or anything of the like. Understandably, you want her to know how much she hurt you. It does you little good to do that, remember Rule 1? Don’t go to the same party as her and sit in the corner looking all depressed. She’s not going to want you back, you pansy.

Don’t go visit her. First of all, it will hurt like a mofo. Secondly, girls are evil and will do shitty things like hug you, cuddle with you, tell you how much they miss you, or hit you with pepper spray. Rule 1 — it still applies. She doesn’t want to be with you, just wants to make herself feel a little better. If she wants to come back to you, she’ll call you up and say so. Being around her is most likely going to annoy her and make you feel really shitty. Girls have also been known to employ the use of a guy named Todd, who is only there to make you turn emo.

Don’t start looking for answers. If you’re smart, you already asked them when you two were breaking up. Don’t call / IM / email / fox her friends. Yes, they’re close to her and they know what’s going on. Chances are, they won’t tell you what you need to know. They’re her friends first, yours second. I’m letting you know now — if you do take this path, you will find out nothing of any use. Do you really want to know if she’s seeing someone else? Do you really want to know if she is in bed crying because she misses you? Back to Rule 1. She’s going through her own healing process, she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with you. Let it go, man. Her friends will report their findings to her, and she’ll hate you for snooping.

On a similar note — Don’t fucking stalk her! E-stalking counts.

The above is the basic foundation for taking a dumping like a champ. There are many little nuances that I can’t remember and didn’t cover, so be prepared for anything. Of course, I welcome and urge the advice and experience of other goons. The only thing I can guarantee is that life will get better and you’ll move on.

For what it’s worth, I got dumped and quite heartbroken 2 days ago, but I’m doing all right, thanks for asking.

Fake edit: It’s almost certain that anyone who has read this and is going to get dumped for their first time will not follow my advice.

~~~

In Conclusion

It’s me again, Clarisse. Those two guides are my two preferred go-to resources when I’ve been dumped. (Also when I’ve dumped someone! Which is not easy either.)

Note: I, Clarisse Thorn, have personally had okay relationships where I got back together with a partner after we broke up. So it is true that sometimes, you can get back together with an ex. Sometimes, re-dating an ex is not the end of the world. But in general, I still think it’s good advice to take some healing time apart after a breakup. Most breakups are for good. Plus … if your relationship is super solid, then it will still be super solid even if you take a few months without talking to your ex.

If you choose to take time to yourself after breaking up with a partner, then the next question is: When do I talk to my ex again? My answer: I talk to my ex again when I feel emotionally safe doing so.

Here is the way I measure the emotional safety of seeing my ex. It requires being really honest with myself, and sometimes that’s really hard … so a lot of the time I prefer to just avoid him instead of asking these hard questions. A lot of the time, I just avoid my ex until I feel mostly indifferent to him. Friendly, but indifferent. Then, if we’re going to be friends again, we can develop a friendship from there.

But if I think I’m not indifferent to my ex, and I still want to see him … then here are the questions I ask myself before I see him:

Question 1: Do I feel even the tiniest smidgen of desire to have sex with him? Or even just make out?

If the answer is no, then it’s probably okay to go see my ex. If the answer is yes, then I should move on to the next question.

Question 2: Will I feel okay if I have sex with him? Or make out, or whatever?

If no, then avoid him. If yes, move to next question.

Question 3: Will I feel okay if I don’t have sex with him?

If no, then avoid him. If yes, move to next question.

Question 4: If I have sex with him, and then the next morning he says something like “We’re not getting back together,” then am I going to be okay with that? Or am I going to feel like I’ve been punched in the throat? Am I going to feel used?

If I won’t feel okay with it, then avoid him. If I will feel okay with it, then move on to the next question.

Question 5: If I have sex with him, and then he seems to want to date me again, then will I be okay with that? If he wants to get back together with me, and I don’t want to date him, then do I feel capable of telling him that honestly? And … if we get back together for realsies, then what is my plan for dealing with the relationship … especially the factors that made us break up in the first place?

The bottom line is that if I don’t think I can be honest, careful, and kind with my ex, then I avoid him. And if I think he’s gonna break my heart all over again, then I avoid him.

Or at least I do my best.