Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Normalization of Kink

I'm reading Tiffany Reisz' books, which are great (although I don't like The Mistress as much as the first three).  But in them, all the characters are incredibly kinky (and ridiculously hot), and they are also a bit damaged.  But kink isn't the damage--that is the salvation--damage comes from denying who one is, or from other things.  Like the way the closet so badly hurt gay people.  And then I was reading The New York Times and came across an article on men who use date rape drugs that ended by saying:  "Often enough, therapists say, people with such sexual preferences can learn to integrate those into a healthy, consensual relationship — sadomasochism, for instance, bondage, or foot fetish."

WOW!  The New York Times is saying "hey--some twisted people are able to find a good way to handle it through healthy S&M relationships!" 

I was really enjoying Tiffany Reisz's books.  (I think I blogged about The Siren earlier this year.  I was being very good and just getting one at a time, as a reward, but (spoiler alert) the third one ended with our heroine kidnapped and the fourth one has her in jeopardy--I feel like the 4th one Reisz loses a bit of what I love about the books because although I'm sure our heroine isn't going to be killed, it has that stress running under it, and had almost no hot sex scenes.  The sex is more hardcore than I am, but deeply interesting.  In one scene, our heroine comes into her Dom's bedroom and sees black sheets, which means knife play.  I don't think I could ever be someone who could acquiesce to that with openness and excitement, but at the same time, I loved the ritual element of it.  Not the knife play as much as the black sheets.

In the books, the lead heroine is Nora, and she is voracious, kinky, bi, switch and totally without shame. In one scene, she's having sex with a vanilla guy and while I think of her as more submissive than dominant because her primarily relationship is with her Dom, she is so straight-forward about telling her vanilla lover what she likes. I've never been good at that.  I think I reread that scene about 5 times, noticing it is quite hot the way she does it, but also very assertive.  She does sometimes question if kink is necessary to her.  She always seems to come back to it, without shame.  Sure, she sometimes wonders what it would be like to have less bruises, but there is this joyous voraciousness.

It is funny, Dotty was here and she knows the guy I'm currently crushing on was from a kinky website, and Dotty is convinced I'm really not very kinky.  Of course, I think Dotty's years in an emergency room may have made her conflate careless (or horribly unlucky) with what she defines as kinky.  (Dotty is MOST definitely not-at-all kinky--had a lover 20 years ago that liked to spank her and she HATED it.)  But it was also Dotty sortof saying "Connie-don't apologize.  I know you're kinky--but you aren't going to be in the emergency room with a Statue of Liberty replica up your ass that you can't get out--you're well within a single standard of deviation of normal."  

The heroine of the books, Nora, could live a more glamorous life than she does, but both she and her Dom go back and forth between the normal world and the kink world.  They can pass in either.  They don't apologize for who or how they love, even if they have sensible regrets about other things. 

I feel like I'm close to grasping that.  I haven't written about my current crushing, in part because this man has made a place where he and I are already talking about things I would normally save for here. And so, I don't have that aching need to unravel knots here--I've already untangled things with him.  He has also shared incredibly personal stuff with me.  I haven't told him about this blog, but I wouldn't want to share anything about him that is personal, so I don't know how to write about it.  But I also don't feel the need.  Maybe because, in my opinion, angst is the foundation of good blogging and, at least for the moment, I seem to be feeling less angst.

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