A Place To Draw Blood Laughing » Money

In Giving Gifts, Attitude > Activity

Eileen — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 05:15:13 +0000

There’s a new post over on Axe’s blog that has pulled out some immediate, visceral, negative reactions. I suggest you read his post in order to put mine in context, but as a brief overview, he relates a story about a dominant woman who expected him to take her shopping, and assumed he would pay for her. The comments condemn this woman as an asshat, a dishonest prat, and a whore.

Okay. I think this deserves another look. I want to talk about the giving and receiving of gifts.

What’s the issue in Axe’s scenario? Is it that she wanted him to buy her presents? Because I have to admit, I love being bought presents. I have expensive tastes, sensual obsessions, and gifts give me the warm fuzzies. In the right context, gifts turn me on. The idea of tribute turns me on. The idea of making Maymay pay for his orgasms definitely turns me on.

Don’t worry, I will not be offended if my blog stats have halved when I wake up tomorrow.

But is that really the issue? Or is it that she assumed he would buy her presents, bullied him and attempted to coerce him?

Let’s be absolutely clear. I don’t think there’s an intrinsic problem with giving presents as a form of submission, or receiving them as a form of domination (or tribute). And making the logical jump, I don’t think there is an intrinsic problem with financial domination, when done responsibly. I do think, however, that the attitudes surrounding these kinks are far too complicated to leave it at that.

Sometimes I make Maymay buy me things. It gets me off. I think it gets him off as well. It also causes me a welter of confusion, guilt, worry and self-doubt, the likes of which not even sadism can rival. Seriously. There is no other kink I claim that can make me feel like shit.

I suspect that giving money to fiercely independent women is a recipe for disaster. It’s certainly provoked some personal shipwrecks for me. Being paid for, given gifts, or being financially spoiled makes me feel weak. And ashamed, and dirty. And all sorts of other crap that I don’t think I should have to deal with. I know that I am not these things: weak, shameful, unclean.

I also love giving gifts, but I have never stopped to consider that giving Maymay a gift might make him feel bad. There are some deeply gendered issues in that statement. And I have managed to ply arrogance from its negative connotations and embrace it as a tool and a perspective, but I cannot seem to do the same with being spoiled. I can’t get through the issues to find the guilt-free good.

When we talk about financial domination, or the giving of gifts, there seems to be a feeling of general distaste. There is talk of advantages taken, and services exchanged, and it’s all layered over with the still-lingering residue of the dirt that has been culturally ingrained into the concept of prostitution. Money is too dirty an issue for us all to play nice.

We can talk about the exchange of power, and of control, and of pain. But we can’t have a conversation about the exchange of money without that knee-jerk distaste. And where does that leave women like me? The stigma of money has influenced my life in so many directions that I can barely speak about financial exchanges coherently.

And frankly, that pisses me off. Not only because it messes with my potential enjoyment of a kink, but because it messes with my future as a professional in any field of business.

What if, in some possible future, I quit my job and am financially supported by my partner? Should I feel ashamed? The way I am right now, I couldn’t bring myself to be supported willingly by someone else. And I think that’s a pretty crap attitude, on my part. I don’t like that my intrinsic worth as a person is so wrapped up in how much money I can make, or my ability to pay off my debts. I find the perspective short-sighted, and self-damaging.

Let me bring this back on track. I will say spoil me. That’s right. Buy me gifts. I love gifts. (If you can manage to spoil me and not make me feel like shit, you’re probably a miracle worker. Or Maymay.)

But I will never, ever expect that of anyone. I can barely accept gifts as it is. I have worked very hard to be gracious when people give me things, and honestly, I’m not very good at it. Gifts make me feel indebted, because for me, feeling indebted is safer than feeling spoiled. Feeling indebted and uncomfortable is a better place for me than feeling like a silver-spoon, rich-kid brat.

This says realms about me, and my relationship with money, and my relationship with myself. This is a terrific example of how my personal problems fuck with my sexuality. It’s probably the best example I have, because it is the most irrational trigger.

Taking money from others makes me feel like a bad person. It makes me afraid I will turn into the woman Axe wrote about.

It’s not just my personal hang-ups that keep me from embracing this kink. It’s that we rarely take the time to acknowledge the distinction between taking money as a kink and being a spoiled bitch, or a whore. Because if you go play in the comments over on Axe’s post, you’ll notice that no one explicitly condemned that woman for trying to pull a non-consensual scene. They condemned her for expecting to be bought gifts. Those are two different things. The first one is the real problem. The money clouds the issue.

I find it critical that we draw a perspective between the kink and the attitude. Attutide is greater than activity. I kink on gifts. I do not feel entitled to gifts. I consider inappropriate entitlement to be shameful, and non-consensual scenes to be wrong.

Only my attitude excuses me. Only my attitude separates me from her.

It hurts me that because of her, and people like her, and because of my issues regarding money, and because of the way the scene treats money, I can’t claim this kink in good conscience. It hurts me to have to say that a part of my sexuality makes me feel ashamed. That my work to act responsibly, consensually, and wisely is not enough to break that prejudice down in my bedroom, and in my mind.

The Price Of Entry

Eileen — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:18:45 +0000

Since moving to Sydney, my relationship with the public scene has drastically changed. On the one hand, because the scene I’m finding in Sydney is drastically different to the scene I know in New York. And on the other, because the things I want from the scene are now different than they were six years ago, or one year ago, or six months ago.

Let me break one factor of this change down. Hopefully with some delicacy. I want to talk about money.

Even though I should know it by now, it consistently shocks me how expensive it is to be kinky. Money is one way in which much of the public scene is privileged; there is literally a bar to entry open to a selected few. (Not to mention all the other ways in which much of the scene caters to a particular privilege: age, time, location, race, gender, orientation, able-bodied, to name a few. With a nexus of overlying, unspoken requirements, it’s no wonder the public scene is comparatively tiny.)

Now, I’ve come to realize that the Australian relationship with money as I currently see it is a little different than I’m used to. Namely, they spend more on their pleasures. It’s not just that Sydney is an expensive city, especially with food prices skyrocketed. NYC is also an expensive city; I’m used to this.

Rather, it seems a regular occurrence for the people I hang out with to drop $100 on alcohol in a single night. A weeknight. On a weekend? An American girl I met the other day told me, in hushed tones, that an Australian guy she knows spent $600 last Saturday, between clubs, cabs, and drinks. We stared at each other with our mouths open. $600 is my rent for a month.

So it doesn’t seem like a good enough reason, in this culture, for me to say that something is simply too expensive.

I have spent a lot of money on the weapons and gear of my sexuality of choice. I have spent a lot of money on events like Floating World and Black Rose. Thousands of dollars. Thousands of dollars that I, and others in my economic situation, cannot technically count as disposable income. And as half of a couple who travel together and split our expenses, for every dollar I spend, Maymay spends one too.

If we shall speak very technically, it is not too expensive for me to spend $40 to go to a play party. I do have $40 in my bank account, and it could potentially go toward such a thing. So let me be a little more honest.

Unfortunately for the good people I’ve met here in the scene, some of whom host simply gorgeous parties, I have a hard time getting myself out and putting down cash at the door. This, I should clarify, is not through the fault of their parties. This is because, as I mentioned, the things I want from the scene have changed:

Where I used to consider the possibility of pick-up play, I now play only with established partners and long-term friends.

Where I used to feed from the energy in kinky spaces, I now feel awkward and exposed.

Where I used to be willing to manage the social minefield of not knowing anyone on the room, I now feel more comfortable around at least a few people I’m close to.

And where I used to be able to make friends with people solely upon the common ground of shared sexualities, I now find myself unable to do so. This has unfortunately knocked munches off my list, as well as parties.

So the events are not at fault. But the events are no longer right for me. And the Sydney scene appears to be structured in such a way that these kinds of events are the first point of entry.

So when I say that something is too expensive, I am being a little unfair. What I should say is that I’m not, at this point in my life, willing to pay an entry fee in order to be exposed to a number of kinky people with whom I have a slight chance of becoming friends. Because that’s what these parties have become for me; the vapor of a possibility that one of the other attendees might be someone I want to make friends with.

In the end, having complementary sexualities has almost no value for me in forging new friendships. It comes below a laundry list of other factors that must first align: our humor, our interests, our intellectual inquiries, our attitudes toward society and life and ourselves.

Complementary sexualities become a real factor in maintaining a relationship once sex itself becomes a factor of that relationship. To say that I am more likely to find friends among the kinky is similar to saying that if I were hetero, I would be more likely to find friends among men. Largely illogical, consistently untrue.

I have been reassessing the return on my investments, so to speak. Unfortunately, if I go to a play party that does not yield me any kind of good feeling, friendship, or conversation, I don’t just shrug it off. I get upset at myself, a little depressed. And where I get a little upset, Maymay becomes angrily vicious and bitter. It is not uncommon for us to leave play parties that are unsuccessful (by our standards), go home, fight, and end up miserable and crying. So in many ways, an entry fee is not just an entry fee; it’s a gamble.

And as what I’m looking for diverges further and further from what play parties are designed to deliver, the gamble becomes increasingly bad.