Why Crying Is My Favourite Thing During Play.

Written by Ancilla.

Many years ago, back when negotiating scenes with sadists as a form of sex still felt like a novelty, there was one who insisted that we play until he was able to make me cry. Fortunately, I had the foresight to insist that I couldn’t guarantee tears (it’s kind of like guaranteeing an orgasm, can’t do it, don’t even know if it may happen) nor did I think it was wise to agree to ending a scene only when there were tears, but he seemed very confident that there would be tears. I didn’t think about it too much, I figured if I cried, I cried and if I didn’t, I didn’t. I didn’t. It’s hard to make me cry from pain, there are things that make me cry with ease when used sexually, such as a state of confusion (and some insist on calling it mind-fucking, but I can’t because it’s giving too much cringe). Confusion, helplessness of some kinds, will cause instant tears, though. If you tell me to get on the floor and also not to bend my knee in order to get to the floor, I will break the fuck down. Even thinking about it is making me want to cry, because I want to get on the floor because you told me to, but I physically cannot overcome the limitation of not bending my knee, and so I am stuck in inaction, and I will cry.

You know, I think that segue may have been a tangent. In any case, I did not cry in that scene because it was all-pain. I really enjoyed it, it was a great scene, and then later, he said he was disappointed that I had not cried for him. It irked me. Like, look, I understand genuinely having a fetish for making people cry, it’s perfectly legit and even if that means that you design your play in order to urge tears, there’s nothing wrong with that. We’re into what we’re into. I’m into patterns, though, and so over time, I noticed one. There is a certain type of sadist who wins by making you cry, and to correspond to that, there is a certain type of masochist who withholds tears as a point of pride. I can see how that can be hot — the push and pull of I’m going to make you cry/you can’t and the inevitability of crowning a victor sounds fun —but there is something about it that is deeply unattractive to me. I think, firstly, I just don’t like play that is overly goal-focused, I’m an explorer, I’m fine with incidental tears and marks, I’ll even enjoy them, but that is not where I am setting out to go. I haven’t a fucking clue where I want to go, let’s just go. Secondly, after being with a few of the “make you cry” sadists, I realised that their view of the tears was sometimes the satisfaction of having “broken” you, again, no judgement for your satisfaction being tied to that feeling, but I cannot quite bring myself to see tears as brokenness. A lot of this kind of sadism seemed to be designed to make you regret your masochism, to prove they could make you not enjoy the pain or take you to the end of your masochism, to the point where they would break you as a masochist. I don’t quite think of masochism as the kind of thing that is subject to breaking.

But I do enjoy the feeling of brokenness, truly, and the way that I define it is quite..literal and wildly presumptive? I only use the term broken in the sexual realm (or, you know, if it refers to a system or a vase, never people) and I use it to describe an erotic feeling. It totally turns me on to be accused of being broken in a derogatory sense and these are some examples of what makes me feel broken: Begging your top to be horrible to you during aftercare because you cannot stand the niceness, being a fuck-toy who cannot tolerate being fucked without breaking down, certain darker forms of age-play where as the regressed party you exhibit behaviours that are not conventional, and are probably disturbing, for a little. It’s an indicative list, not an exhaustive one, and it’s not an opinion at all. It’s just what turns me on. In no way, do I mean that enjoying darker forms of age-play means you are broken. I like being viewed as a broken little girl for wanting some specific things, it’s kind of like enjoying being verbally-abused with terms you could just as easily choose to view as empowering. I don’t wanna be empowered during sex, I wanna be degraded. I don’t want you to restore me, I want you to play with my fucked up broken pieces. Tis what it is.

My problem with broken is not about fetishising brokenness, it’s partly about how people define brokenness and partly because most sadists who want to get you there, to “broken,” don’t know what to do with brokenness and when they do view tears as the point of brokenness, they believe those tears to also be the end. After a while of playing with cry-sadists, I realised I had started to hate crying during play, it had become so fucking fraught with unnecessary meaning, so many of them were “disappointed” when I didn’t cry but if I did, it almost always led to them stopping and then taking a victory lap for breaking me or being overbearing in insisting I needed to be taken care of or making a really huge monumental deal out of crying. I hate climatic moments, and I think, maybe, tears are viewed as the climax of sadomasochistic interplay. When I cry, I don’t mean I am broken, it’s not a big grand-finale moment to me, what it means depends heavily on why I am crying. I will always cry during penetrative sex, so basically I will tell you not to fuck me if that’s not what you are into (and I am always upfront that it will likely happen). I will cry from pain if it’s spontaneous, just tears coming out of my eyes, no effort or emotion on my part. Pain-tears. Reflexive tears. I don’t need that to be viewed as final, climatic, brokenness or significant. I will cry for many, many others reasons too but I stopped being able to, for a long time, because I hated how the tears were being received, I hated the victory-based need to extract them, I hated the inability to understand them, I hated that they meant stop (even when I categorically said they don’t, but also, I get it, some people just don’t want to hurt you if you are crying, they cannot, but it would be nice if those same people didn’t play with making you cry as a goal).

I hated it until I met my husband. Oh, I also hate how often he gets to step into my story as a hero who did a horrible thing to me that made me love him. He did though. He believed me when I said that crying didn’t mean I wanted to stop, it felt like respect, and on his part, he is genuinely turned on by crying, not by the act of making you cry and the satisfaction of attaining that goal as part of the process of breaking you, he doesn’t see it as breaking at all, I think he sees it as ornamentation. The third or fourth time he saw me crying, he said that whenever he saw me cry, he wanted to hurt me twice as much as he was when he was doing the thing that made me cry just to make sure I wouldn’t fucking stop crying. Uff. It’s like the hottest fucking thing anyone has ever said to me. That’s what it took to create an environment where I was comfortable crying : I needed to believe the person making me cry was actually doing it for the pleasure of it and I needed them to believe that I wasn’t sending the message for them to stop via my tears, and like, love, probably.

It is because he wasn’t viewing my tears as brokenness, that’s not what they are to me. I cry when I am comfortable. I cry when I feel understood by the people around me. I cry when I feel safe. I cry when I know that the fact that I am turned on by crying will not be construed as “unhealthy” or shut down by another person deciding what is in my best sex-interest. I am not very good at expressing emotion, I express almost 100% of my emotions in words, the other methods are not so clear to me, but crying is a very explicit form of emotional expression and it can be sexually overwhelmed out of me quite easily if you know me well. I think I cry all my emotions. In the right environment. The right environment is so, so important, and it takes a good long while to get to it, and to understand why that is the environment that truly works for you, and how to distill it into points of negotiation so you may be emphatic and clear with all potential partners. It’s a process, one that I am still understanding.

In the last eight years, I have cried a lot. It’s the fortune of the right environment and as a result, I have had the opportunity to really understand what it is that is working for me. First of all, I am not looking to cry from (physical) pain, it doesn’t evoke the right thing, it may happen, but it’s reflexive not emotional, so it’s not as gratifying. However, brutality will make me cry, emotional cruelty too, deliberately hurting my feelings, confusing me, overwhelming me, being blatantly unfair and unjust. All of those will make me cry and I want them all. I realise that the peak of my pleasure actually lies past crying, I enjoy pain a lot more when I am crying, crying is like a catalyst to spring me into emotional reception, I want to start crying as soon as possible actually, and then the pain is not just physical anymore, I experience it in many different spheres of existence. In masochist terms, I suffer from premature ejaculation of tears, and they’ll always be caused by something disproportionate, whip me and then I’ll probably cry when you pull my ear or call me an orphan, but in the years past, I would never have been so comfortable admitting that or being that person, nor would I have been able to get to that state so easily or allowed myself to get there. It wasn’t just because they weren’t the right partners for me, it is also because I didn’t fully understand what I wanted either, and if someone wanted to prove to me that they could make me cry, I wanted to prove to them, that I wouldn’t, not because it was what turned me on, but because I was worried about potentially having my pride wounded too, and that’s probably why, even today, tears are the antonym of pride to me.

Crying makes me feel ego-less. It makes me feel free. It makes me feel emotional and I find I enjoy emotions immensely during sex, I always have. They’re the best, but they’re hard. They’re hard because they are sincere. Tears are too fucking sincere. They’re too honest. They’re too vulnerable. They reveal too much. They make you feel like you must be worthy of mercy and compassion. And that’s the hottest fucking state in which to truly fuck someone up, in which to deny compassion to someone, when they’re weeping at your doorstep. I have to cry because the best parts of sex, pain and love, come after that.