Debating

I totally want a binder of woman, but I'm just not masochistic enough to listen to another Mitt Romney debate.  This is so very painful.  In a not good way.

Who would have thought that pure vanilla could be so twisted?

Discipline and Punish

The systemization of consumption may be parsed as the eroticization of the gendered body, thereby enabling Foucaultian paradigms to (re)inscribe the inherent hierarchical taxonomy of the pain-pleasure continuum. 

(Just in case google sends any Foucault po-mo grad students my way.  Maybe I have a touch of sadism after all....)

Now to discipline and punishment.  

I finished Fifty Shade of Grey.  It was a quick read (obviously). 

I'm struck by several things in the book.  First of all, Ana communicates much better via e-mail than in person, which is so very true for me too.

Second, the book does a good job externalizing a central conflict that I have internally, which is he wants all kink and she wants all romance. How do you combine the two for a life?  I was quite surprised at how the first book ended and it will be weeks before I get the next one from the library.  

However, it brought up the unresolved issue that I had over the summer.  In it, she is punished, hard, and hates it.  "He has needs that I cannot fulfill. I realize that now. I don’t want him to hit me like that again, ever. ... I did follow my heart, and I have a sore ass and an anguished, broken spirit to show for it."

And, honestly, that happened to me this summer.  Except MaxEarnest didn't punish me hard. My ass wasn't that sore, but my spirit broke and took some real time to mend. 

Part of me accepts that MaxEarnest has the right to punish me.  But it was horrible for me.  Flashbacks of bullies beating me up.  It was the first time I ever purposefully tried to ignore what was happening to me with him and just sign songs to myself to make it through.  Whenever I was beaten up as a child, I was told I was 'fun to tease.'  Not, "fight back" (that wouldn't be attractive in a girl, duh!) but, essentially, 'don't make it fun for them to hit you.  And I just went right back there.  The girl everyone hated in elementary and middle school. 

I had no idea how badly I would take it.  Actually, that's not true.  I had inklings.  If I look at what I wrote around that time, I knew I didn't think it was fair and didn't want it to happen.  I didn't talk about it, even when I wrote about it.  Why?  I was scared.    I wasn't sure that he was going to punish me, and I thought the transgression was so small that if he did, it would be a very quick punishment, and when I tried to talk about it, it seemed to make it worse. We had talked about my tendency to sort of leave my body early on, and he never pushed me to that place before.  And I wanted to please.  And maybe part of me was rebelling.  I can't articulate it, but I think part of me was.  After it happened, I felt so despondent.  I just cried and cried.  And he held me.  He was SO good to me.  In some weird way, it heeled some of the damage from being beaten up as a kid.  But it took a long while to get over.  Weeks before I was hungry for his touch.  And I can't go through that again.

I know I have to talk to him about this. But it is much easier for me to blog than to talk. I don't like hiding behind the blog, but the fact that I'm writing this will mean we will talk.  (Hello MaxEarnest.)  I wish I could just talk to him.  I feel like hiding behind my blog keeps us a bit apart.  I wouldn't like it if I had to find out how he was feeling from a blog.  I'd say "why can't you just tell me."  But when I've tried to take my blog out of the equation, it hasn't worked as well, and he has never said that to me.  I can be far more articulate here.  

Even if I e-mail him directly, I want to please him.  I can't say the things that are hard to say.  Here, I have to be honest.  That is a requirement of this space.  I can choose what I talk about, but if I talk about something, it has to be honest and complete. It is very easy to hit publish, and even after I hit publish, it is very easy to e-mail it to him. But even e-mailing him directly, I tend to say what I think I should say. The thing he thought I did wrong happened because I was trying to communicate in the moment and be sexy instead of hide behind my blog, and he didn't think it was sexy.

I can't imagine he would do something like that again.  He knows I have this trip wire.  I think if I'd understood how deep it ran and been able to communicate it, he wouldn't have done it the first time.  But I also need to be strong enough to start this conversation and every time I try and start it, I don't.

So here is what I should say to him: I don't want to be punished again.  

I can't handle it.  I know I know you know that on one level and I know you also want the right to punish me on another level.  Maybe I could handle being made to stand in a corner or to write lines, or something like that.  But I can't handle being hurt as part of punishment.  I just want to be your good girl.  I promise you that I will try very hard to be your good girl.  

We've been together for 10 months now, and you've only punished me once.  You know that I try to obey you.  I want to be your good girl without fearing punishment again.  Just obeying you because I want to obey you, not because I feel hysterical that I will have to endure that again.

Spoiler about 50 shades ahead:

This other part of me is wondering if I should even try and be a submissive when I'm not with him.  That seems to be the only way my sense of eros is engaged.  But I don't know if I'm strong enough, and I wonder how important fabulous, mind-blowing sex is, anyway?  I could just have my fantasies and a vanilla sex life?  Don't women lose interest in sex when they get older?  According to 50 Shades I am older.  Of course, exclusively vanilla sex would hasten my  loss of interest in sex quite rapidly. At the end of Fifty Shades of Grey she leaves him.  Decides, after being punished, that it is too fucked up and she wants a vanilla, romantic relationship that is far less complicated.  (Of course, there are 2 more books, so I have a feeling that something else happens--after all they're making a Hollywood movie about it.)  I'm not going to leave MaxEarnest over this, a;though there was a time when I think he was ready to leave me and I couldn't see another way through it.  I love him. I love that he stuck with me when it was hard.  And we have much better communication than the 2 do in the book. But I don't see how our lives will fit together.  And if, at some point, we actually see other people (instead of saying that we can and not doing anything about it) I have to figure out if I want to continue to identify as kinky, or if I want to let that live in my fantasies but not my life.

50 Shades

So, I finally started reading 50 Shades of Grey.  (MaxEarnest specifically told me it was OK.) And my first response was, 'that's it?'  I'm several chapters in, without so much as a kiss.  I remember the first time I read "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty" I was shocked that she had sex on, maybe, the third page of the book, or something.  Sex, I might add, without consent, or even consciousness. But somehow, the more I entered both the world of that book and the world of kink as it is currently envisioned  the less I saw of romance, and the less I felt entitled to romance.  Who needs romance when there's hot kinky sex?

I think the Beauty books shaped a lot of how I viewed eroticism.  I rebelled against the Story of O.  The version I read had her choose to be killed, which was so fucked up.  In a way, I found the Story of O to be anti-kink. A warning.  You will be used up and discarded and want to die.  But the Beauty books were hot and ended happily.  

But, assuming that 50 Shades gets hot at some point (it has to get hot at some point, right?  so far, he's bought rope and cable ties at the hardware store--I assume this is a harbinger of kink, but if I hadn't read about the book, I really wouldn't have kept up with it--I can't tell you what page I'm on because I borrowed and e-version from the library), maybe it would be good to imagine eroticism that doesn't involve sex on the third page.  

Panic in Stasis

My life has gotten smaller. Since I got back from Europe, I have lived almost entirely at home or work.  I've been OK with that, but lately I've been getting restless. For some reason, tonight, I'm fighting off a panic attack.  Well, truth be told, I've been panicky and restless since the first debate, but tonight it is worse than just election fears, and so I blog.

Maxearnest and I said we could see other people, but I haven't even turned my profile on CM back on.  And, honestly, I don't know if I want to.  I did go on the site.  But once I went on, all I wanted was to see if Maxearnest had turned on his profile, and he hadn't.  And I felt icky there.  A pop-up sex ad came on, which nearly crashed my computer and when I realized why, I was annoyed.  I didn't want to see that, and given that it made all these other things crash on my computer, I was annoyed.

But, honestly, I don't know if I'm actually submissive in the kink way.  I'm absolutely submissive sexually, but Maxearnest punished me once over the summer and it was kind of disastrous.  I just numbed out while it was happening and then cried and cried and cried.  There was a point where, I think, neither of us knew how we'd find our way through it.  Maxearnest stuck with me, even when it seemed really hopeless, and somehow we found our way back.  But it was hard.  I can't imagine giving someone else permission to punish me. I'm not strong enough to be punished and still find kink erotic.  I want to please, to be a good girl, not disappoint. And if I can't accept punishment, maybe I'm not really submissive. And I certainly don't know how I'd negotiate a kinky relationship with someone else.  I know Maxearnest wants the right to punish me, but I don't think he would do it right now.  Or if he did, he'd be very careful. (And, it should be said, I do my best to never give him any reason to.  I'm pretty damn obedient on the sexual realm.)

I would, however, like to read 50 Shades of Grey, and I can now.  But somehow, knowing that MaxEarnest doesn't like me thinking about other people when I get off, even fiction, makes me much less interested in it. I almost went to Barnes and Noble (not the sort of thing you'd want to buy from strangers off the internet), but, somehow, it felt like it would be a wall between MaxEarnest and I. And acknowledgement of the end.

And so, my life has just gotten much smaller.  Part of that is that I haven't been well.  Nothing serious, but minor thing after minor thing.  And, honestly, MaxEarnest came into my life just as Dotty left.  So I haven't figured out what a life without either looks like, even though there's a continent between Dotty and me and an ocean between MaxEarnest and me.  There's a reason that 'Oceans apart' is a metaphor. Part of me thought of joining eharmony, but I don't know how to date in the vanilla world.  I get bored with most people and eharmony seems worse than most.  Part of me imagines what life would be like in Europe, but I don't see how that is a viable option.  I did go out for dinner a couple of weeks ago with some female friends and the bouncer at the door asked to see my ID and my friends said he wasn't carding me, he was flirting with me, and I was shocked!  It was sweet to think that, but it just surprised me. But even if I wanted to have coffee, I don't know how, knowing I'm seeing Maxearnest in December. It makes it all very weird.  I seem to be in this liminal space, and not in a good way.  I'm feeling panicky today, which I haven't for a while.  I can't figure out why I'm panicky, but I think I have to figure out how to enlarge my life a little bit.  And I don't know where to begin.

Somehow, when I'm writing, the panic subsides, but when I go to something else, the panic returns.  It is too late in the day to talk to MaxEarnest and I've allowed my life to be too centered around him.  I can't go to bed at 5:30.  But I have to remind myself of that fact, because I want to.  Maybe I should re-read Pride and Prejudice, wait for Downton Abbey to be uploaded tomorrow afternoon and dream of simpler times with less choices.