I’ve always thought about my masochism and the desire to be enslaved in great detail, but over the past couple of years I have started to think more and more about the other side of the slash. I don’t mean that I am becoming sadistic or that I am interested in exploring my dominant side, I don’t have any interest in doing those things, that’s not what I mean. I’ve done a lot of thinking, analysing and writing about where my leanings towards violence, pain, degradation and control come from and how they impact things in my life, and I am often able to find a lot of perspective from this side of the slash from other people. Masochists write. I don’t know if there’s a connection between art and suffering, but those that suffer appear to be more inclined to talking about it. There has been no dearth of information about the thoughts, experiences, motivations of bottoms, but there is much less information on the other side.
It’s not that tops don’t write. It’s that most often the information I get from sadists or dominants is either designed to arouse bottoms, educate one another on how to be better tops or talk down to the world from a pedestal of imaginary honour. The ethics posturing is heavy with them, and you know what, I don’t blame them for that. Well, not entirely. I understand why the need to be Kink PC rests heavily with the tops. Essentially, when I tell a person who is about to beat me to fucking kill me, it’s extreme and hot, when they describe how they would do it, it’s premeditated intent to murder. There are two sides to every kink and the reality of one is more socially abhorrent than the other. There’s a conversation I have frequently had with people who fuck a little weird but don’t feel the need to make a discipline out of it. I don’t know what to call that. Sometimes I wonder if the people who are on this website think of everyone who isn’t as vanilla, but let’s pretend for a moment that the social media of kink isn’t the price of admission, and there are people in the world who get off to weird stuff but don’t feel the need to form a community around it. I mean, that’s okay, right? There are people who like to run and there are people who like to be part of a runners group, both approaches are valid, they both have their own merits and pitfalls.
The pitfall of the “fuck weird sans community” approach is that you may not get to experience the acceptance of your sexuality. In that vein, the conversation I have frequently had with them goes like this:
Top: I hit them once because they asked me to and it was a huge turn on for them.
Me: And did you like it?
Top: I liked their responses to it.
Me: Did you do it again?
Top: It’s a frequent part of our sex life now.
Me: So do you enjoy it?
Top: I like that they like it, I love pleasing my partner, their pleasure is the turn on for me.
On the face of it, I believe this absolutely is true for some people, but for some other people, it’s easier to attribute your sexual behaviour to the pleasure of your partner than your own. Very often, even within the ranks of people whose fetishes are legitimised by this black background, the discussion about the pleasure of inflicting pain/violence/degradation (which I shall henceforth refer to as just pain for ease of typing) is focused on the pleasure of the bottom and their responses. Very rarely do I come across a discussion where I am privy to the pleasure and experience of the top but most importantly the internal ongoings on the top. Especially sadists who play with a great deal of intensity.
And I get it.
It was explained to me in great detail, a decade ago, by my friend Jay. I sometimes talk about Jay for shock-value because he had a(n) (unrealised) fetish for boring holes into the bodies of his partner and then fucking them. He couldn’t and wasn’t ever really going to do this, but he liked to pretend. Besides that he was into some pretty intense CNC, force, violence and some rather extreme sadism. One day while discussing why he never openly discussed his fetishes and where they came from, he told me that I wasn’t looking at it from the right side of the slash.
Jay explained,
“When you talk about wanting to feel like you are being raped, it may be disturbing to some but ultimately you are the only victim you take, real or imagined, but if I talk about wanting to feel like I am raping you, one immediately wonders what I did that made me discover that. I may have done nothing, but my potential backstory is more serious than yours because I am not the victim I take.“
I paraphrased Jay because while he was a very smart man, he was none too articulate. I do understand what he meant, though. I am not saying everyone who is into forced fucking is necessarily operating out of the experience of being raped, but I definitely am, nor am I saying everyone who wants to perpetrate that necessarily comes from the experience of raping but some of them could. And even when they don’t, some of them have fantasised about it. What do you do with that information? Honestly, I don’t know. Jay used to talk to me about his fantasies of raping people, and while he never acted on them outside of controlled, negotiated settings (and I do believe that), if you talked to him, and he genuinely opened up about his fantasies, you would believe him capable of actual rape. For me, the fact that he was aware of the problematic nature of his fantasies and acted on them only with the expressly willing was enough in terms of ethics, but that may not be true for everyone. When I listened to his fantasies, which essentially are the same as mine, but told from the internal perspective of the person on the other side of the slash, they sounded different and way more disturbing.
Of late I’ve been thinking a lot about that.
It started a few years ago when some “well-intentioned” white knight threatened to gut my husband to protect me from him in response to a piece about some cruelty or other. I mean, I get a lot of this, and while the accusations that I am a victim are at least somewhat laced with concern for me, the accusations that he is an abuser are not so. Let me add a little disclaimer though, I understand why this happens, abusers do actually slip through the cracks under the garb of kink and even when they are called our or exposed, a lot of victims end up bearing the blame for it or worse, end up blaming themselves. Nothing I say is in defence of that, I am talking only and only about informed, consensual dynamics between two knowing adults and within those dynamics, when they tend to extreme sadism, cruelty, violence and rape-play, especially the kind that causes real trauma, face-marks or bleeding, we tend to place the responsibility for the dynamic entirely on the top.
I see a lot of this on my writing. A lot of people have said to me that they wish they could punch my husband, kick him or expose him for the abuser that he is, and it’s because of me. It’s because of how I write, when I write him, and I do it often, I express as much of his mind as I am able to access, and in that, the potential for moral ambiguity that exists on that side of the slash shows. As explicitly as I represent my play as the victim, I explicitly represent his play as the rapist, and this is harder to stomach. The worst response to an “out there” bottom is toxic “concern”, but the worst response to the top-counterpart of that bottom is accusations of being a criminal, exploiting people, ousting and ostracism. I believe this guides a lot of the internal silence from tops, the trigger is much easier to achieve when you describe as the fantasy-kidnapper how you’d Stockholm the hell out of a person. I understand how this is a fraught area because it is genuinely hard, even for me, to tell sometimes whether a top describing a heinous fantasy is genuinely capable of doing that to another person, but silence isn’t going to fix that problem. Sometimes it just feels like I am saying that my side of the kink is okay, but your side of it is not. It doesn’t fix the problem.
Nor is it going to fix my problem.
Being a forever-bottom, this isn’t my issue, I am not bound by this moralistic silence. Outside of TOUs I am able to really stretch the limits of an emotionally-macabre exhibition, after all, what will you say to me? When I say that I am broken, bruised, distraught and crying, will you attack me for being a victim? It happens, but it is rare, most of the attacks are for my ethics as a content creator, and I kinda welcome those, it helps me evolve and learn to bear the right kind of responsibility. That’s not my problem. My problem is that I often feel like in the attacks on my partner for his “abuse” of me, I am not allowed to bear as much responsibility as I deserve for my relationship, and I mean deserve not as a punitive consequence, but as my right.
I tend towards an abusive-looking kind of BDSM, but there is a reason why I tend to BDSM and not abuse. It’s because bdsm allows me to take responsibility that really belongs to me. Abuse took responsibility away from me and left for me only snippets of blame that I tried to cram into the jigsaw of my life even though they didn’t fit. I could not be responsible for my own abuse if I tried but there is great power to feeling the ability to be responsible for my choices. I am responsible for the choices I make for my sexuality and within my relationship. I don’t like the environment where a top is responsible for the dynamic and in case of a breakdown, I can only be the victim of it. It’s unequal on a level I will not participate in. Consent bestows upon me not only the right to my choices, but also to responsibility for them. I want that responsibility. When my top is cruel to me in a way that stokes humanity in my reader, that’s not on him, it’s on us. They didn’t get there on their own, this dynamic wasn’t built like that. When there’s a mistake that leads to emotional consequences, those consequences afflict both of us, and both of us need to be there for the other, and ourselves. Just because they are holding the whip that accidentally struck my face (this is an example, don’t lose yo shit), doesn’t mean mistake was all theirs. Maybe I moved. Maybe I always move and I didn’t move this time and that is why their aim was off. In the absence of the intent to violate, mistakes are often made on both ends of the slash, but one side bears more blame, because as Jay said, they take more victims than I ever could when designing the massacre of myself.
I don’t see it entirely that way and that’s because I cannot see from that side of the slash, and they may well be correct to see it this way, I just cannot do it, so I see it my way and my way is that what I want and what my tops want to deliver to me is equally disturbing. For every little maso who wants to stop pretending and admit that the arousal of mimicking symbols of domestic violence (like belts and being thrown into walls) don’t exist in a vacuum, there’s a sadist who is willing to do it, but unwilling to tactfully exhibit the same kind of honesty (which, again, is not to say all sadist-masochist interactions stem from the same place, it is only to say that the socio-sexual narrative that exists around is relevant to our sexualities in different but distinctive ways, the sexual is political). I am okay with that, so long as the people who love the idea of play-raping me, don’t ever go rape anyone for real, they can spin me their fantasies once they have all my consent and tell me their uncomfortable, horrible truths. They are no different from my own. I want to be able to exercise that parity between tops and bottoms. I want to be able to do that because I deserve the right to as much responsibility as they do.
The responsibility for my dynamic is vital to me and good for the empowerment of bottoms in general. You don’t have to be meek to follow. You don’t need to be indecisive to choose to have someone make your decisions for you. You don’t have to be demure to choose silence or endurance. You don’t have to be those things. I don’t like to be those things nor am I those things, I know exactly what I am doing, and when someone accuses my top of untoward behaviour in exploitation of me, they undermine my consent. In holding only one party of a dynamic responsible for anything that is unpalatable to a general audience, sometimes we create a fundamental inequality that need not exist. I understand the temptation to give into the simplistic reasoning of “if a top screws up the bottoms gets hurt therefore the top bears more responsibility” (and sometimes, especially in casual play, maybe that is more true than other times) but in general, mistakes (without intent to cause harm) often happen before anyone picks up an implement or they happen despite all the communication that has happened. Sometimes, in fact, they happen because there was so much communicaton, it became confusing and contradictory. I am willing to admit that sometimes I share so much context, no answer remains the right answer, and in practise, sometimes, all that creates is confusion that leads to mistakes. I can admit that because there isn’t so much backlash to admitting that, I can really only get myself hurt.
But that’s a lie too.
Bottoms can hurt tops as well. Maybe not so much physically, but definitely in shaking their confidence or failing to communicate pertinent details that led to them feeling like they violated you (or them actually violating you). Again, without the intention to cause harm, this is a mistake. A mistake that becomes abusive or not depending on how it is handled, I just wish my partners were able to say that too. It’s not about assigning fault, it’s about taking responsibility and in a relationship that works well, I believe all parties step forward to take the responsibility that is theirs, not find the fault that is the other person’s. I can trust that about my partner so when he tells me a sordid tale of rape and murder that features me as the protagonist, I am not worried they may actually do that or may have actually done it, I know that they have the self-awareness to consider and comprehend their sexuality, the ethics to make the right choices and the courage to be honest when they acted in ways that were less than perfect. Their side of the story is not more disturbing, it’s exactly the same story as mine, what would be disturbing is their silence on the subject. What would be disturbing is the mindless insistence that this theatre of violence was built for my pleasure alone. What would be disturbing is if only one of us were to bear responsibility for the things that we both do.
I wear the marks, but this game was built by both of us. I deserve a creator credit and they deserve to have someone to share the responsibility when something goes wrong.
……..
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