I Am Not Kinky Because of My Trauma (and please don’t romanticise it).

There is an endless discussion to be had first about what came first, the kink or the trauma. It’s the chicken and egg situation, in that even when I know the answer is the egg, I cannot explain the science behind it to anyone’s satisfaction, much less my own, because I don’t fully understand it. While I cannot show my work, I am fairly confident about my answer, I would have grown up to enjoy pain and romanticise suffering, with or without the trauma. I don’t mean that rape and abuse don’t influence my sexuality, they do and that influence manifests in specific ways, but that is not who I am. Who I am is what I do outside of the circumstances that govern my experiences, who I am is made up of my choices, not of things that happened to me. It exists outside the scope of my traumas and for the most part, in my life, I operate as that person. In some ways, what I mean is that I am somewhat unemotional as a person, I don’t mean at all that I don’t have emotions, I have them. I have my emotions on the binary happy-sad scale and I don’t take them so seriously. I don’t repress them at all, I just have them without acting through them. Sometimes I am not sure exactly what is causing me to have an emotion but I usually figure it out, sometimes with help, and while I factor my emotions into my decisions, I don’t ever make my decisions from an emotional space.

The reason I mention that is because that mechanism is the reason why I am able to fetishise my trauma without harming myself any further. The reason I play with and in trauma is because I am detached from that trauma, and it is not because I am evading it, it is because I have dealt with it. I have seen how it impacted me, in what parts of me it settled, how it changed over time; I have decided and implemented the solutions I needed and wanted to implement to restore myself to a state where I am able to feel free of the trauma. I can play with it, because it actually has no power over me anymore. For me, it wasn’t the wisest path to resolve my trauma through kink or sex. I mean, I tried okay? I tried the reclamation through choice route, but the problem is, even in that, I couldn’t answer why choosing the horrible thing makes it better than having the horrible thing done to you when you are still defining your worth by your relationship with the horrible thing. There were several things that genuinely helped me to resolve my trauma.

The first and possibly the most important was to stop taking responsibility for it, in any way, even when it was tempting and I didn’t believe myself when I exonerated myself. This was easier for me to do once I put myself inside the statistic. A friend of mine said to me once when I told him I was stuck in traffic: “You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.” It’s a similar thing, in wake of gendered violence and rape, it is natural to start being more vigilant of the environment that enables those things, but for years when I said the terms “rape victim,” “victim of domestic violence,” or “victims of chid abuse,” I wasn’t viewing myself as part of those groups, I wanted to do things to protect those groups but not myself because by my very biased math, I did not qualify. When I realised most victims/survivors feel this way, I became more comfortable including myself in those terms, and that enabled me to apply the same principles I believed would help others to myself. The second thing I did was to stop believing that you never get over it, you can and you will, it may change things about you, but it’s not insurmountable. It also helped to develop a relationship with my body where I did healing things for it and enjoyed them. Of course, the other thing that helped, and the first thing I did in wake of the first rape, was to wake up to the reality of women in this country, and dedicate my politics to it.

I know rape-made feminism is a bit of a cliché, but I would argue, much like kink, we would all have been feminists even if we hadn’t been raped. For me, the rape just came much younger than nuanced understanding of gender and politics, and being in a position where I felt like the worst thing that could happen had already happened, I believed I could liberate myself from the clutches of fearing it. This is perhaps the least discussed aspect of sexual trauma, the fear of it happening to you, which is much worse in countries where sex crimes are rampant and protecting yourself from them is part of your daily routines. For me the strange and certainly unintended consequence of knowing that the most fearful thing that could happen had already happened was that I became very confident as a person in asserting my stance against the sexism, violence and misogyny that exists in society. Feminism isn’t a label to me, it’s not something I just practise, it is the very essence of my existence, I live for it, it applies to everything I do, I will go to prison for it and should it ever come to that, I will die for it. Given that the sexual assault took place at an age where I was powerless, helpless and disbelieved, I had no way to liberate myself from it, but I had means to start working on the system and rape culture that enables predators to rape “girls like me.” That is the choice that gave me back my power and eventually led to being able to recover from the trauma.

Sexually, I play with trauma outside of a healing space. I don’t bring my trauma to bed so I can recover from it. I don’t need a cock nor a whip to heal me. I mean this as no judgement on someone that does that, we all have our own ways to do things, but for me, I cannot play with anything I don’t understand. If I am actively dealing with something, it’s neither up for discussion nor sexualizing, absolutely no one, not even the person who loves me most, gets the right to take charge of my trauma from me, not even to try to fix it. I also play with trauma outside of a damaging space. There is a titanium coating around my trauma, it cannot be made worse and what is inside is pretty functional, almost believable as a real part of my body, so I know that I can toss it around a little bit without worry. There is, undoubtedly, something erotically alluring to me about the state where suffering approaches trauma. It’s a space where something about me changes each time, in it I find an almost un-human measure of resilience, an unbearable measure of vulnerability and overall just a state of being that is outside of human understanding of our own minds and bodies. However, I wouldn’t play with trauma unless I had learnt how to harness just that from any trauma-based play. It’s what CBD oil may be to people who don’t want to deal with the harmful effects of smoking anything, because much like smoking, the harmful effects of trauma are fucking terrifying.

I wouldn’t write about this part, maybe, but the past few months of my life have been a little strange. I have had my work plagarized a little. I have had my words and experiences reappropriated and discussed by people who have absolutely no understanding of me or my life. I have felt infringed upon by people I did not consent to or invite into my life. I have had people treat my life experience “aspirationally,” and strangely this has included messages and requests from several male dominants to groom and guide their submissives to be more like me. I have experienced invasive attempts to control my narrative and have it explained back to me. I have felt watched and studied by people who were attempting to replicate my life (through my trauma as well as other things) into their own. I have felt something I never knew possible, a sense of having my life robbed from me and used as justification, credibility, something to blame or adorn. It’s one thing when people steal your words, it is another when they try to requisition your experiences and who you are. For a long time I just said nothing about these things, mostly failing even to notice them, because it seems like a smug problem to have? Of late, though, I have worried a little about contributing to the romanticism of trauma.

There is nothing romantic about trauma in and of itself. Please, don’t romanticise my trauma. Don’t romanticise trauma. You may not realise it now that while there are women who are genuinely traumatised, we also live in a strange and complex world, so there are also young girls or women who with incomplete information may believe lying about sexual trauma makes them interesting, makes kink more real or that sexual trauma is a prerequisites for kink. I know I am not supposed to doubt victims, and I have never questioned one in my life nor really will I, but it would be naive not to see that trauma as an adornment is a trend that has caught on a little bit. Trauma is not cool though and pretending to it adds to the trauma of others. The problem is when we contribute to it in even a seemingly innocuous way, we just say someone made us feel violated because we are mad at them and then when we are not mad anymore we pretend that didn’t happen, we add to the narrative where it is easier for the people who don’t want to believe women to justify not believing us. When I see someone regard me as a function of my trauma and believe it is the trauma that should be aspirational, I feel like I add to that environment then.

I am a romantic person. I see romantic symbolism in everything in my life. That would have happened with roses and giant rocks instead of violation and violence in different circumstances. When I write my trauma into stories of eroticism it is because symbols of romance litter my life, not because I am “special”, only because I am always looking at things like a romantic. The reality of trauma is harrowing. In my writing, which I try to keep as clear and expository as humanly possible, the trauma is a symbol because in my sexuality it is a symbol, it is not an active state of being. It is the romance of ruins, not of destruction. I do not design my life to maximize and accentuate my trauma. I design my trauma, actually. The sexual space is curated, much like a power dynamic sets the conditions for the interaction, and I dabble in it because I know I built it out of familiar scenarios and benign lumps. I play with embers not the roaring fire, because all these years of my life, it was who I am that saw me through what happened to me. Who I am came before the trauma.

The trauma is not who I am, don’t romanticise it, it didn’t make me. The trauma is not who anyone is. It won’t make you. It’s not interesting. It isn’t cool. It is something that happens to people and the choice of who it happens to has nothing to do with them, it has only to do with predatory intent. You are not responsible for the trauma. You are complete and interesting, with or without it. That came first.