I bought my first black dress for the occasion. It was one of those dresses that wraps around you and you tie into a bow at the back. It was shorter than most clothes I wore at the time and cut low enough that my mother wasn’t sure whether she should let me wear it. I was convinced that no store would ever make clothes that fit me well enough because whenever my mother took me to one she never asked for the clothes she thought I would like, she always asked for the biggest clothes in the store, and they were always huge and unflattering with strange patterns fit for hospital gowns or old ladies who put those berets in their buns that come with fake, curly hair attached to them. So I asked to have the dress tailored especially for me. It took two weeks and when I finally got it, I was excited, despite my own reluctance to care about things like dresses and femininity, to try it on. I didn’t like anything about it except the colour, not even the material, but I wore it to dinner anyway because I hoped that I looked nice, and I wasn’t able to see it because my eyes were clouded with social judgement when it came to my own appearance.
It was a big dinner, not in the sense that there were many people in attendance, it was just the two of us, but in the sense that it was a big event. It had been a year since I had started seeing him. Retrospectively, I think of that year as the worst one of my life, but at the time, I didn’t know that. There weren’t many good examples of love or relationships around me. My parents made love seem like an optional, but discouraged, part of marriage, opting instead for relationships built on strife, domestic and financial symbiosis and compromise. My friends were in relationships with boys who took naked pictures of them to control their behaviour as an accepted form of romance. One of them was with a guy who had sex with her and then dumped her for being the kind of girl who would have sex with him. My relationship with my boyfriend wasn’t physically abusive at that point, it would soon get there but I didn’t know that, it was emotionally exploitative and abusive. In fact, to this day, I am more comfortable alleging that he was emotionally abusive than physically, mostly because I cannot completely accept that you can enjoy being punched in the face even when it is against your will. I always feel like I signed up for that, but I know for sure that I didn’t sign up for being emotionally extorted, blackmailed, gaslit and shamed for being who I was. It was just easy not to see those things back then.
We were going to an Italian restaurant. It was one of the oldest Italian restaurants in our city and I had never been there before. He picked me up at my house and we drove there late in the evening. When he saw me, he didn’t say anything, but halfway to the restaurant, he ran his fingers over the fabric over my thighs.
“Don’t you think this dress is too short and deep?” He asked, “What exactly are you trying to prove?”
I hadn’t considered that I was trying to prove anything. I had just always been afraid of my femininity because when I was a kid I was told repeatedly that I was “tomboy” because I liked swimming and talked about all the jobs I would have, when I grew older I was told repeatedly that elegant, dainty things weren’t my style because I was fat and outspoken, and so I became convinced that if I ever tried to be feminine, I would look like a clown. I pretended not to feel the desire, and I dressed in black t-shirts and jeans most of the time.
“I thought it looked nice,” I told him, disappointed, “I’ve always wanted to wear a black dress.”
“That’s fine,” he said, adjusting his glasses, “But a person should not wear things that don’t suit them.”
I told him that I was sorry, I was used to doing that, he’s the one who really taught me to apologise for joy and pleasure, and the lesson sunk in so deep, I still spontaneously apologise when there’s a cock or joy in me. I like it now, and I am pretty sure I liked it then too, it’s just hard to understand why it hurts me so much despite that. He didn’t accept my apology.
We never made it to the restaurant.
Instead, he turned the car around and took me back to his place. Once we were there he spent several hours berating and beating me for flaunting my body, and as he fucked me, with every thrust, he reminded me my body was just his.
“Your nakedness is just for me,” he kept saying, “I own your fucking body.”
It was fucking hot as hell.
The reason I am telling this very long, and maybe even uninteresting story, is because of the danger of that sentiment. Given that I am wired a certain way, and prone to seeking eroticism and sexuality in control, consequence and pain, it was so easy for me to take my complicated history with femininity, body image and autonomy and reduce it to merely a thing that turns me. And it does, the idea that someone owns my body, and gets to tell me what to put on it (or what not to put on it) is still very attractive to me. Even then, even after I learnt that his desire for control had less to do with the eroticism of power exchange, and more to do with him enforcing his ideas of womanhood, I couldn’t resist it. I built myself an identity in his ownership and I was okay with it. I was okay with it because the delusion that controlling me in this way wasn’t his personality and had more to do with our sexual relationship was a very comfortable one. It enabled me to put off confronting my own ideas of sensuality and womanhood, and it also enabled me to have to illusion of the kind of relationship I had always wanted.
However, this issue is a complicated one. Theoretically, it is very easy to say that consensual sexual objectification and exerting controlling over the image of women are completely separate things and in a healthy relationship they would not intersect, but in my experience, this is a comfortable lie. When he used to tell me that my nakedness is only for his, it was because he believed that he owned, not my nudity, but my choices. However an experience involving a different man, one who may say the exact same thing to me, may read exactly the same way and feel completely different. Alternatively, the same experience with a different man, who may say the same thing without the same sentiment of control may rub me the wrong way even if he didn’t mean it in the same toxic way as my previous partner. I may view him as a sexist pig, even though he was coming from a purely erotic place. That’s because our life experiences play into our experiences of power exchange and kink, and simply saying that something is perfectly healthy doesn’t make it so. Believing that every form of sexual expression is uninformed by social trends, or even the patriarchy, is being deliberately myopic.
This sentiment, the one of — “I own your body and especially your nakedness” — is a very common one when it comes to d/s. I do not condemn it, but my life experience causes me to distrust it at the outset, even when it turns me on. I distrust it because I know that for my previous partner, and several other men that I have been with, these sentiments had a lot to do with enforcing not their idea of erotic power-exchange, but stereotypical social expectations. I grew up and live in a country where the patriarchy, misogyny and violence against women is extremely rampant (and if you are tempted to project any first-world butthurt over the women’s movement onto this please, just don’t, you do not get it, I don’t think you get it in your country either but you definitely don’t get it in ours), and in that environment I cannot, as a feminist (just resist the fucking urge to say whatever shit you want to) remove the social experience of womanhood from sexual aspects of d/s when they intersect, especially when it is often so difficult to tell from where a man who may submit to is coming.
I am not saying that there was a sinister, premeditated plot by the patriarchy to use kink to teach women how to behave in “womanly” ways, but I am saying that if you are tempted to use you your control over a woman to necessarily (and often only) reinforce the fundamentals of traditional (and oppressive) femininity then your sexuality may be more informed by your place in the patriarchy than you are willing to realise. Mine is. I crave things that resemble domestic violence, rape and objectification, and I wouldn’t want them delivered in exactly these ways if it had not been for my social (and sexual) experiences. The thing I didn’t realise with my previous partner is that allowing the wrong person to do those things to you, sends the wrong message not just to that person, but also to society at large. For a while, I dressed conservatively because of my partner, and it brought me no joy, it delayed my exploration of femininity and cast a shadow of fear over it because of him, and that had more of an impact on my agency as a woman than I noticed at the time.
Which is not to say I am not still turned on by the exact same thing. I relish the notion that my partner owns my body, and in the right circumstances, even his entitlement to my nakedness but to be able to do that now I have to have a much deeper understanding of his motivations. I have to know his beliefs about womanhood, the feminist movement and women’s rights in general, and I have to believe his behaviour is governed by the sexual dynamic between us and he would absolutely never do that to a woman who is unwilling.
Because ultimately that is the difference between him and my previous partner.
Well, there are two differences.
The first one is that it’s not how they treat me, it’s how they treat partners who aren’t me. In sheer words the things they do to me can be described in very similar terms, they can often read in an eerily similar (and often disturbing way). My current partner was in a relationship with a woman who was not into any of this stuff at all, and while he was sexually unfulfilled, he never tried to sneak it in under the garb of anything else. He never tried to control her in any way because that was not her thing, and he didn’t need to enforce his gender-based ideas onto her because the sexual allure of control had nothing to do with enforcing the womanhood of a woman. My ex on the other hand went on, almost immediately, to abuse another (completely unwilling) woman. With me, a lot of his behaviour was easily camouflaged because I was such a willing, enthusiastic and participative victim. It was hard, even for me, to tell whether he was doing something, or I was making him. The woman he saw after me, is not like me at all, and her response to everything was not psychosexual, it was pure trauma, but that did not deter him. He had to have total control over her, not because it got her, but because, fundamentally, he believes that is how gender-relations should function.
The second thing is awareness of your actions. For my ex, the d/s was an excuse to justify every toxic thing he believed, and for me it was a cushion to avoid confronting the glaring issues in our interactions. For my current partner, it is an opportunity to explore our sexualities and learn about ourselves. We can talk about the problematic roots of some of things we like, and ensure it never influences our social behaviour or how we represent out genders.
Ultimately, it was just a dress. It didn’t really matter but the fact that I couldn’t find the courage to wear it again for five years wasn’t because it was sexy that I wasn’t allowed to, is far bigger than a dress. It wasn’t because he wanted to own my body, or even control my sexuality, it was because he wanted to control my freedom and my identity, and that is bigger than just a dress. That is much more dangerous than playing blades and violence. Submission can be a wonderfully erotic thing, but not when it is being used to have you conform to something bigger than the thing that throbs between your legs. It may be hot when a man tells you he owns you, but it’s not a standalone statement, I will assess your entire life to decide whether you are allowed to say that to me, because context doesn’t just matter, it’s everything, and kink does not exist in a vacuum. Things can be both hot and problematic, and it is important to consider both those things while playing with them, and if you can’t do that, you can’t kink. Not with me, anyway.
Ancillary Kink Support 
Leave a comment