Several weeks ago, I broke my neck in a bicycle accident. I didn’t realize how bad it was until the hospital staff told me I’d fractured my spine. I spent the next several hours trying very hard to stay perfectly still, and fearing that within a day I might be paralyzed or neurologically destroyed or dead. Fearing that some of those consequences might already have happened, in some way I couldn’t detect.

I try to live ethically. I also try to stay on top of my emotions, and to be there for the people I care about. Throughout my life, I have been incredibly lucky, privileged, and have seen more love and beauty than any person can possibly deserve. I feel as though I should give thanks, but I’m also trying not to enumerate all the gifts life have given me, because I’m afraid I might cry. Or sound like I’m boasting in some obscure way. Or never stop.

I reckon that at heart, I’ve got three goals. One is to have an interesting life and do some good in the world. One is to publish an emotional, interesting novel. And the third is to have moral, interesting children. So far, I have overwhelmingly succeeded at the first goal — well, I’ve succeeded at the interesting part; no one can ever really know how much good they’ve done, I think. If I died tomorrow, then I suppose I would regret never achieving the other two.

Regret is a strange word, though. It seems to me that the word “regret” implies that I’ve done something wrong, or done something avoidable. I’m not sure I have.

In that same I’m-not-sure-what-regret-means way, I think I’ve managed most of my potential regrets fairly well. Yet I do regret something else. Someone I’ve written about, very occasionally: I referred to him as Mr. Inferno. He meant a lot to me, and still does.

We haven’t spoken in a while. I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to.

I certainly don’t spend my time sitting in a rocking chair and saying, “I will never love again.” And I acknowledge that it’s impossible to know what happened, emotionally, after the fact. I acknowledge that my memories could be distorted. That I could have created narratives, after the fact, that would have made no sense to me at the time, or to him, or to any observer, even an omniscient observer. Maybe when I remember Mr. Inferno, I really am just being dramatic, but what’s the point of questioning myself further?

I’m pretty sure that I hold no illusions that, even if he wanted to talk to me again, it would be easy to relate to Mr. Inferno. I don’t imagine that we could necessarily retrieve any facet of our previous relationship: the conversations, the chemistry — even if we tried, it might be irreparably lost. We’ve both changed, I’m sure.

Still, still, I never imagined that we’d ever get to the point of not speaking, probably permanently. Not until we got here. And I think it’ll always hurt to be here.

In the emergency room, I texted one of my closest friends with silly, melodramatic, in-the-possibly-unlikely-I-have-no-idea-event-that-I-actually-die messages. I told her to pass them on if something happened. The first was to my parents; the second was to Mr. Inferno; and there were a bunch of others.

I told her, “Tell Mr. Inferno that I never forgot him.” Then I felt self-conscious and stupid and ironic, so I added in parentheses: “(I know.)”

I.

I played an off-the-cuff acrostic game with Mr. Inferno early in our friendship. A few of the acrostics I wrote stuck with me. When I think of our initial interactions, I think of this one:

I want to be sure, when I see you, that I
Nod and smile softly –
Frame my reactions, my heart with
Adroit disengagement and distance.
Tell me — I want you to tell me you’re seeking to
Understand everything I’ve kept
Apart. Say you can’t tell what I’m
Thinking, that
I am unknown and
Obscure, exotic and
New.

One might see my obsession with pickup artists reflected in that. I’m not sure.

II.

I didn’t initially write these acrostics for Mr. Inferno, not exactly, though he got me to create them. I’ve woven them through several of my unpublished fictional stories, but sometimes I think they say everything on their own. When I think of falling in love with him, I think of this one:

I
Need you like
Fear, I need you like
Agony, I
Thirst as if lost in the desert; I dream that I’m
Under you,
Agony,
Thirst drowns me, and you are the rain;
I
Only want you, I
Need you like sunlight and poison and pain.

What does it mean to need S&M, and to fall in love? I knew how it felt; I wanted to see if I could write it.

Sometimes I think all romance is inevitably S&M, and vanilla people are in denial. Not that I have anything against vanilla people. Like I always say, I love vanilla people just the way they are. Assuming they even exist. Assuming S&M even exists.

I didn’t write the above for Mr. Inferno. But after we started dating, I went on vacation and sent him a postcard that said only: “sunlight and poison and pain”.

III.

A couple months after we broke up, I sent Mr. Inferno one more:

I wanted to believe it was
Nothing, though my dreams
Framed me cutting out my heart. There weren’t
Any tears, only blood. I
Tell myself I’m stupid to starve, to drown.
Undone, I must hide: you bore and
Annoy me. But. Call me
Too fragile, weak. Stereotypical. Lost. I meant what
I told you — can tell no one else. You
Own me. I have
Nothing left to say.

I started the email by writing, “I shouldn’t send this. Don’t answer.” I shouldn’t have sent it, and I was mostly glad he didn’t answer. I get self-centered when I’m heartbroken. I also get boring. Even with a fractured spine, I’m not as boring as I am with a freshly broken heart.

It took months for my interactions with Mr. Inferno to deteriorate, toxify, fall apart. Until I finally concluded that we might never be on speaking terms again.

By now, I’ve said all the words I said to him to others. I love you. You own me.

I saved a few words for a while … but what do words mean? For a writer: Only everything.

To everyone who’s passed on good wishes: Thank you so much, again.

I’ll be wearing this giant head-brace for quite a while — at least another two months. The accident has obviously disrupted my autumn plans, but I am lucky enough to have a stable living situation, as well as amazing friends and family who have been incredibly willing to help out. And, yes, excellent health insurance. Aside from the broken neck, I am unharmed.

I’m working on polishing the first draft of my upcoming eBook, Confessions Of A Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews With Hideous Men. Then I’ll go into the consent and edits phase of Confessions, and that’s when I’ll start posting here again on my “usual schedule” (ha!). That should be soon.

That’s why I haven’t been around the Interwebs for a while. Because I broke my neck in a bicycle accident.

I’ll tell the whole story another time. For now, I just want to reassure everyone that I’m alive, and — miraculously — there will probably be no permanent damage. There are no signs of neurological issues or paralysis. I was in the hospital for a bit less than a week, and I have been outfitted with a neck brace called The Halo:

Yes, it was actually screwed directly into my skull. With screws. I feel like a cyborg. Or possibly a China Miéville character.

I’m not sure when I’ll get back to writing regularly. Right now I’m too loopy on both pain and painkillers to be very effective. But it probably won’t be too long. In the meantime, thanks to everyone who sent good wishes via Twitter, email, etc.

Oh! And also? The only reason I survived this accident with nothing more than a fractured spine is because I was wearing a helmet. If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet, I would be dead right now. Wear a helmet!

Much love to you all.

This piece has basically nothing to do with sex and gender. I originally wrote it a while back, pondered trying to get it published, made some desultory attempts at doing so, failed, and then forgot about it for a while. I still like it, though, and I’ve got no idea what else to do with it, so here it is. Maybe I should set aside one post each month for Random Non-Sex, Non-Feminism, Non-Gender Tangents.

My friend Ryo Chijiiwa turned down an offer from Facebook to work at Yahoo, and later moved to Google. Then, in 2009, he bought an isolated plot of land in the northern California woods — 6 hours by car from San Francisco — and built his own small house. His property, which he calls Serenity Valley, is positively covered with gorgeous trees and attractive outlooks onto the mountains. The nearest Internet access is in a town half an hour away, where Ryo occasionally goes for supplies.

Ryo has shoulder-length hair and wide dark eyes, and he wears no-nonsense clothes full of pockets. I first met him in August 2010 at the San Francisco meetup known as Burning Man, but I already knew him by reputation. Our mutual friends spoke admiringly of his intelligence and — unusually — frugality: his apartments had always been Spartan, and he built his own bedframe, even when he was receiving an excellent salary as a software engineer. (Ryo later insisted he’s not actually that frugal: “It’s just that I spent all my money on easy-to-miss things, like travel and guns.”)

Burning Man, in all its chaotic artistic glory, was my reintegration into America. I’d just returned from working in rural southern Africa, and I was a bundle of confused emotions. [1] I loved the brilliant lights, libertine community, and sheer creative energy of Burning Man — but sometimes it was a bit much to deal with. Sometimes I wanted someplace more peaceful and less self-consciously hedonistic. If I hadn’t been drawn in by Ryo’s good-natured intelligence, then the minute he spoke about living quietly in the woods I would have been hooked. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I thought he was cute.

I’m still not sure how I convinced Ryo to take me to Serenity Valley, but here we are, driving out. Rather, he’s doing most of the driving, and I’m asking questions about his childhood across three countries. Ryo was born in 1980, and his family moved from America to Japan when he was 7. When he was 10, they went to Germany, and there he stayed until age 18. The family always spoke Japanese at home.

“Come back,” an S&M partner said softly, the other day, pushing my hair out of my eyes. I blinked and shook my head in a futile attempt to clear it.

“That’s weird,” I said. “Someone else used to say those words to me when I was coming out of subspace. I … that’s weird.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “It’s a natural thing to say to you. You go under so fast, and so deep. You’re so far away.”

“Not all the time,” I said. “And not with everyone. You’re good at putting me there.”

He smiled. “You bring it out in me.”

Subspace is so hard to describe. I’ve written about it before, in passing, in multiple posts, because it’s so important, but I’ve never come up with a good description for it; and when I Google for it I can see that other people have the same problem. When I’m starting to go into subspace it’s just soft and dark and slow. But when I’m really far under, I’m totally blank. Falling. Flying.

Somewhere else.

Come back.

What is it, where do I go? It’s just submissive, masochist headspace. But I don’t always get into subspace when I submit, and I don’t always get into it when I take pain either. I’m not sure what the other ingredients are: some amount of trust, of course. And strong feelings about my partner make everything more intense … way more intense. Orders of magnitude more intense. Still, I’ve had new partners put me under with surprising thoroughness.

It’s a lot like deep sexual arousal — hard to think, hard to process, hard to make decisions — but the deepest sexual arousal does not put me anywhere near deep subspace. Deep subspace is. More. Than anything else.

Some S&M teachers tell people not to drive after an S&M encounter, not for a while; not until you’re over the subspace. They compare it to an altered state, like being drunk. Some S&M teachers caution that it’s dangerous for the dominant partner to suggest a new activity in the middle of an S&M encounter — something that wasn’t negotiated beforehand — because the submissive may not be able to think clearly enough to consent. (And because in those moments, the submissive will have a harder time than ever saying no.)

I sometimes think that when I was younger and less experienced, I abandoned myself to subspace more easily. I’m better at pulling myself out of subspace now, but I think the cost may be that it’s harder for me to really get into it. (Safety first?) I trained myself to be able to say, “Don’t stop,” when I wanted my partner to keep going. (Sound easy? Trust me, it took a while.) Playing with unfamiliar partners, I trained myself to be on guard. (One of my sex worker friends told me once, “I don’t care how deep the subspace is, I can always come out if the client tries to fuck me without a condom.”) I got better at calling my safeword before I had to — asking my partner to do something else or give me a break, rather than suddenly stopping everything once I hit my absolute limit.

I am nowhere near perfect, of course. In particular, I can rarely answer complicated questions, and sometimes my partners literally can’t get me to answer any questions when I’m subspaced. Sometimes it takes me a long time to come out, and partners may get nervous while I’m surfacing. But I’m not sure these aspects can actually be eliminated from subspace. And I’ve gotten better.

I’m sure that in an emergency, I could talk and function straight out of heavy subspace. I doubt I would be optimally intelligent and thoughtful, however.

The following meditation on anxiety about “sluthood” first appeared in December 2010 on the women’s site Off Our Chests. I’m reposting it here today because San Francisco loves me and I love it.

Since I was small, I’ve loved the Van Gogh painting “Starry Night”. I loved the cypresses in particular: winding spiral trees, hallucination trees. They were so unlike other trees I’d seen that I thought Van Gogh made them up, and so when I first saw cypresses years later, I was stunned: the hallucination trees had been imported into my world. I’d like to think that my world turned a little bit sideways forever, when I first saw cypresses, but I’m probably being melodramatic. (I’m good at that.)

San Francisco has cypresses, and a lot of other hallucinations, too. The city is full of angles, vantages, transitions, unceasing changing views: it feels, at times, like an unsolvable puzzle. A forested path leads darkly under a bridge, suddenly opens upon a manicured lawn with a white lace conservatory. A cement staircase rises through a narrow outlet, resolving itself step by step into a slice of brightly painted Victorian façade. I walked once with a friend alongside an ocean road, pacing through thick fog, and arrived at a dirt path that I insisted on following; thirty seconds later we stumbled upon extraordinary ruins.

San Francisco. Halcyon city, heartbreak city. Cypress city. The place I come to recover from being torn apart and, it seems, sometimes the place where I get torn apart again. This is okay with me, because nothing is more fun than overanalyzing strong emotions. I am not even kidding.

I returned from Africa recently; paused briefly in my adopted city of Chicago to collect my thoughts; and then went to the Burning Man Arts Festival, thence to San Francisco. This is my version of emotional decompression, and it worked! I feel much more centered now. But part of decompressing, for me, was specifically going out to a lot of dates and BDSM parties and pushing my own boundaries, which carries its own potential decompressable risks.

At the time of this story, it had been a couple of months in San Francisco, and I was leaving soon. I’d had an assortment of adventures, but there were two guys in particular who I was excited about. Not necessarily in a long-term way — I’m not in this for the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids (or at least, not yet) — but definitely in a wow-I-have-to-control-myself-or-I’ll-come-off-as-kind-of-puppyish way. New Relationship Energy: it is such a mind trick, such a delicious head-trip. You are the perfect drug.

In the wake of my last post, which was basically a meditation on one relationship with bad sexual communication, I want to offer some positive examples of sexual communication from my life. [1]

1) Low pressure and leather belts. Years ago, when I was pretty inexperienced in the community, I had a single BDSM encounter with a gentleman in his home. We met at a BDSM discussion group, arranged to meet later at a café, and went home from there; as we exited the café, I took his driver’s license and texted his full name and license number to a friend. (I think more people should do this, frankly — in fact, more non-BDSM people should do this when they go home with strangers from bars.)

We sat together on the public transit and quietly discussed the upcoming scene: he asked me many, many questions about what I was okay with and not okay with. Questions like: “What do you have experience with?” “Could you go into that more?” “What do you like?” “What makes that fun for you?” “Is there anything you really don’t want me to do?” He asked a lot of the questions twice, too, which I think is a really great strategy especially with new partners. People don’t always have their heads together enough during these conversations to answer an S&M question properly the first time, especially if it’s a broad and open-ended question like “What are the things you really don’t want to do?”

I made it clear that I just wanted a BDSM encounter, that I wasn’t up for oral sex or vaginal sex or anything like that. He’d never had a BDSM encounter that didn’t involve orgasm, so it was a new concept for him, but he was cool with trying it.

After our long discussion of boundaries and limits, we made it to his apartment and settled in. He got out some equipment, including a collar, and he said: “While you’re wearing this, you will obey everything I say. Do you have any final boundaries to set? Anything you really want me to do? Anything else you don’t want me to do?” I said no, and he snapped on the collar. (We did have an agreed-upon safeword, though — so I had a way of interrupting the proceedings if I really needed to.)

This was cross-posted at Feministe.

A reader recently sent me an email in which they said:

i know you have always had clear boundaries with yourself (at least how you have described yourself)

Well.

I guess I’ve had a pretty good sense of my boundaries, historically, but there have been times when I have not set them well. This is hard to write about, because it happened years ago, and the memories aren’t fun, and I don’t like writing negative things about people I know unless I think there’s a good reason for it. But there are few people in my life, now, who are likely to identify the person I’m discussing. And I’ve asserted before that we should be more willing to write about our screwups; I was writing about BDSM at the time, but I think it’s true of all kinds of relationships.

There was a gentleman in my life, lots of years ago, who I was extremely in love with. We had an on-again, off-again relationship that lasted a very long time. We had an extraordinary mental and emotional and creative connection. We understood each other very well. There is zero doubt in my head that he loved me too.

Our sex life was really terrible, though. (It was not a BDSM relationship. I hadn’t yet come into that part of my sexual identity.) And there were some emotional boundaries he simply wouldn’t respect. At first I was too inexperienced to really recognize how bad it was, though I knew some things were messed up — then, as I got older (and dated other people in the interstices of our relationship), the problems became clearer and clearer to me. Want some examples? Here’s a blatant one: he never went down on me, though I regularly went down on him; he never even offered to try and figure out something else I might enjoy equally. Oh, I knew that was messed up from the start, but I didn’t have the vocabulary or the self-esteem to negotiate something different.

I tried — believe me, I tried to discuss our sex life, in a hesitant and confused way — but he found ways to shut me down, every time. Sometimes the shut-downs were blatant and aggressive and involved shouting. Sometimes they were very subtle, like the time he told me sadly, “You know, occasionally I get worried that you don’t really like having sex with me, but I know that’s just insecurity on my part and I need to get over it.” What a masterful way to say: “Part of me knows you’re not getting what you need, but please don’t bring it up, because that would make me feel bad.”

Today, I would reply: “Sorry if it brings up insecurities. I’m here to talk about those if you like.  But it’s also true, and we need to address it.” Back then, I accepted what he’d said, and felt roiling confusion and pain, and stayed silent.

I’ve got sexual-emotional baggage from that relationship to this day. And yes, I do resent it. Still. Despite knowing that he loved me, and despite valuing many memories from that relationship — when I look back on my time with him, it feels clouded and toxic. I remember that one night, years after I broke up with him, I had one of the worst nightmares of my life: merely a dream that he and I were back together. I woke up shaking, almost in tears.

During an argument, he once said to me, in a voice both angry and wounded: “I just want to feel that you love me more than you love yourself.” And my reaction was not to walk away. My reaction was not to laugh incredulously. My reaction was not to dump him on the spot. My reaction was to cry, and tell him how hurt I was. Hurt: because how could he think I didn’t love him more than I loved myself? Of course I did. What did I have to do to prove it?

For the record — just in case it needs to be said — that is ridiculous. Anyone who demands that you love them more than you love yourself does not have your best interests at heart. My reaction was just as ridiculous. I should not have been looking for ways to prove that I loved him more than I loved myself. I should have been out the fucking door already.

This was originally posted at Feministe.

I haven’t been on a lot of capital-D Dates. My relationships tend to develop through friendships and mutual interests, mostly because I am a huge nerd. My first on-purpose Date took place when I was seventeen; it was with a local boy who I barely knew — most of our contact was through brief chats on AOL Instant Messenger. (Am I showing my age?) He’d heard a lot about me, I guess, and for some reason he was impressed by my reputation for being smart and weird. He took me to a pool hall and gave me adorable lessons on how to hold the cue, how to break, etc. I don’t remember much of what we talked about … except for one exchange that is burned into my brain forevermore.

Prostitution had entered the conversation, and he said something about how it’s immoral.

“Immoral?” I asked. “What makes you say that?” I had not yet researched sex work or evolved the complex opinions that I have about it today, but I still knew there was something extremely weird about dismissing prostitution as “immoral”. I’d felt fairly bored by the conversation thus far, and was genuinely curious about how this would go; I remember smiling and thinking, hey, this could be interesting.

He was across the table from me, leaning over his pool cue, lining up a shot. He glanced up — looking surprised, like it was totally weird that I was challenging such a fundamental thing as prostitution being immoral (gasp!) — and he gave me a heart-melting smile. “Oh,” he said casually, “I know you’re smarter than me, so let’s not get into it.”

I blinked. I shut up. I think I might even have smiled, out of confusion if nothing else. We chatted about whatever he brought up next. He took me home and dropped me off without a kiss; there was no chemistry (at least not on my end, I certainly can’t speak for him). No second date. But “I know you’re smarter than me, so let’s not get into it” … that line, and the friendly way he said it, stuck in my head. It was an amazingly complimentary, amazingly condescending, amazingly effective way of shutting me down.

Feminism matters a lot to me, but when I started blogging in 2008, I didn’t picture myself doing it as a specifically feminist blogger; I wanted to write about sexuality and, especially, BDSM. I attached the word “feminist” when I described myself because I wanted people to understand where I was coming from; because it had been such a weird and complicated process for me to come to terms with BDSM while prioritizing a sense of feminist independence and integrity, and yet feminism has simultaneously been such a useful influence on me, for claiming my own body on my own terms.

Another reason I didn’t want to blog specifically about feminism, when I started out, was that I saw so many amazing feminist bloggers out there already. I wanted to say things from a feminist perspective that I didn’t see other people saying; I felt content to leave what I see as “straight-up feminism”, like pro-choice arguments or anti-rape analyses, to other feminists who are much more brilliant about those topics than I.

Over the last couple years, I’ve written a lot about BDSM (but trust me, there’s a lot more where that came from). Enough to know that I’ve struck a huge chord with lots of female BDSMers: I regularly get emails and comments like “Thank you so much … me … too … me too … thank you for writing this ….” I’ve also ventured into the fraught territory of masculinity and feminism and I’ve started getting emails and comments from pro-feminist men, too, men who feel incredibly grateful for my attempts at parsing their experience. Although I’ve gotten some feminist flak for some stuff I’ve written on these “edge” topics, the net effect has been to make me feel closer to the feminist movement.

To some extent, it’s brought me further into feminism because I’ve thoroughly recognized how important my initial feminist assumptions were in terms of both sex and BDSM: my body, my choice, damn it, and a big “screw you” to our entire patriarchal culture for making it so unnecessarily hard to figure out and communicate my sexual needs. But it’s also brought me closer to feminism because no matter how clear I’ve thought I was being, a lot of my writing (especially the masculinity writing) has been co-opted by people who use it to say anti-feminist things. Which, needless to say, fills me with rage.

So in short, blogging as an “edge feminist” has really brought me face-to-face with how important those “straight-up feminist” analyses are. I guess I’ve taken them for granted because I’ve got so much exposure to them, but when I pull back and re-examine my perspective, those feminist concepts — examples include various types of gendered “privilege” and “rape culture” — are clearly the backbone behind everything I write. It makes me want to sit down and parse out Clarisse Thorn’s Feminist Ideology.

Note: This entry is more explicit than my entries usually get. You have been warned. Also note: In all of the following anecdotes, I arranged a safeword in advance, and I would have used my safeword if I’d wanted my partner to stop.

BDSM is a 6-for-4 deal of an acronym: Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and/or Masochism. These 6 activities are somewhat different from each other, though they’re intertwined, which means that individual BDSMers tend to really like some things more than others. For example, some people are masochists (who enjoy pain) but not submissives (who enjoy, well, submitting). Some people are really into discipline (with lots of punishment) but not bondage (rope, cages, etc). Some people are sadists (who enjoy inflicting sensations) but not dominants (who enjoy being in control). Some people are switches, who find that they can switch between roles — they can be dominant or submissive; sadistic or masochistic … I am an example of a definite switch.

Me, I get positively bored if someone takes a long time tying me up. For other people, 45 minutes of elaborate knotwork = really hot foreplay. I don’t understand this, but that’s cool; plenty of people don’t understand my preferences and we all coexist quite happily anyway.

So yeah, “bondage” — rope, cages, etc. — is not so much my thing. But there’s one phrase I absolutely love: “predicament bondage”. Predicament bondage is usually presented in a very elaborate way: for example, a submissive might be tied up with ropes binding him such that his arms are in pain — but if he moves his arms then his legs will be in pain. It’s a predicament! And it’s bondage! Whee! Predicament bondage!

However, it doesn’t have to be elaborate to be predicament bondage. I’m not into rope obstacle courses, but I started loving the phrase “predicament bondage” after a friend went to a workshop run by Fetish Diva Midori and reported back. He said:

Midori had two pitchers of water, or maybe a pitcher and a glass. She told us, “This is the simplest form of predicament bondage,” and she had the demo submissive hold his hands straight out at shoulder height. Then she placed the water in his hands. The submissive had to keep holding the water; if he failed, he knew he would be failing Midori. But there was never any threat of “Midori’s wrath” if he failed her. In fact, she spoke as if she was on his side, part of his team. In many ways, her sympathy for his plight made it all the more cruel, because she was the one doing it to him.

She explained this. She knew that his sense of disappointment in “failing” her was worse than anything she could actually do to him.

So, the predicament in that case was the submissive’s increasing arm agony vs. his fear of failing Midori. For me, that concept is infinitely hotter than a rope obstacle course. Although for me, in practice, I’d also want the pain to be a bit more … um … personal.

The first time someone flogged me, I had no idea what he was going to do beforehand; he and I had the strongest dominant/submissive dynamic I’ve ever felt, and I put myself in his hands with almost-total trust. A night came around when I felt that itch under my skin, the dark burn in the back of my mind … I knew I had to go see him. I wasn’t hugely experienced, but I knew exactly what that slow burn meant.

I like pain. I like submission. What do these things actually mean, though? I don’t like it when I stub my toe, for example, and there are quite a lot of authoritarian situations I don’t like either. My emotional reactions, in particular, can get really complicated. So I need more precise words than “I like pain” and “I like submission.”

This is not a new problem, and around the BDSM subculture there are more precise terms that are frequently used. But when I was first exploring BDSM and didn’t yet have access to the community, I started coming up with my own vocabulary for what I liked and what I didn’t like. The primary words I came up with — words that I still use a lot in my own head, and that I sometimes try to explain to my partners — were “clean” pain and “dirty” pain.

I think of some pain as “clean” because even if it’s intense, I usually … like it. (For lack of a better word.) This is the kind of pain I fantasize about when I’m really craving BDSM. There are certain places on my body that take pain more cleanly — my upper arms, most of my back, my thighs. There are certain types of pain that are inherently more clean — needles come to mind. Wide, deep, blunt bites are good too. Heavy whips made of weighty materials, like suede. Pulling my hair right above the nape of my neck.

On the other hand, I think of some pain as “dirty” because it’s … harder to take. I don’t think of it as dirty because I see it as scandalous or perverse — rather, dirty pain is complex and hard to process. I never fantasize about it. Pain where my bones are close to the surface of my skin, like my collarbone, is dirty. Pain on top of scars is dirty. Pinches and small, narrow bites are dirty. Pulling my hair anywhere besides the nape of my neck is dirty. Electric shocks are extremely dirty.

But this whole “clean” and “dirty” thing, it doesn’t make any sense outside my own body, my own head. It’s hard to explain it. It helps that the BDSM community tends to frame pain in terms of techniques and less-subjective adjectives, using words like “sharp” or “sting” or “thud”. (A lot of people think of “sharp” and “sting” as the same sensation. I usually separate them a bit more, but I’m not sure how many other people separate them.)

Franklin Veaux defines “thud” as “sensation of heavy, dull impact” and defines “sting” as “sensation of quick, sharp pain”. These words are most often applied to floggers (implements for hitting people, e.g.: “this is a thuddy flogger”), but sometimes the words are used for other things too. I’ve found that I generally prefer thuddy-type pain, for example, but it took me a long time to figure that out, because there are so many specific sharp sensations that I love.

Okay. Now for emotions. This is the really hard part.

A while back I got an anonymous comment on my coming-out story that I absolutely love. Here’s a quotation from the comment:

When it came to it, very little about the reality [of BDSM] matched my fantasies. Oh, sometimes what we did matched the way a real-life even can match a fantasy. There were moments that were … Transcendental.

But there were many more moments that … were deeply, deeply conflicted. I NEVER expected to feel that much … anger … toward someone dominating me and inflicting pain. I expected it to be a relief. I didn’t expect to wrestle with hatred.

He liked to slap my face. Everytime he did it I would feel this burst of pure hatred. At one point he asked if I liked it. I said, “No. I hate it. But I don’t want you to stop doing it.”

I can’t remember right now if any other “coming out” story I’ve ever read included such a visceral description of anger. Of course, I think the last time I read one I hadn’t experienced it myself. Maybe I never noticed it before, but noticed it this time because it resonated with me. But mostly I remember those stories mentioning fear, shame, worry, and embarrassment.

The events in my coming-out story took place years ago, and my feelings about BDSM are really different now. I remember that I was conflicted, furious, resentful. But at the same time, I have often thought that much of my anger and resentment was due to the fact that Richard — my first intense BDSM partner — was not emotionally available. I needed support that he didn’t give me. (To some extent because neither he nor I recognized how much support I needed.) And, of course, much of that anger was due to the fact that I couldn’t deal with BDSM. That I was fighting back against, was unable to take ownership of my sexuality.

As I settled my feelings, reconciled myself to my sexual identity — my emotional reactions became a whole different ball game. (It helped that I dated a string of men who were more emotionally available and assisted me with emotional processing, too.) It turned out that the rage that I had suspected was inextricable from BDSM was, in fact, entirely possible to separate. I entered a stage where I learned how to avoid that anger. To work around it. I learned to sink myself into fear and desperation, which I love, and which are easier to work with.