I fucked up my very first scene.

We played without communication, and that was the problem. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I knew if I ran my nails down his back just so, over and over, he sighed and hiccoughed and moaned in a way that made my stomach knot and my labia quiver. So I made him moan, and then I made him moan again, again, again, until he dropped to the floor and said “Please, please stop.” And I did stop, but I admit, not right away. He had no safeword and was too submissive (and too in love) to stop me. I look back now and wince at how stupid we were.

Afterward he pulled a shirt gingerly over his shoulders and we went downstairs and sat on a picnic table. He smoked a pipe and told me, slowly, how scared he was of me. That he wasn’t sure if he could ever trust me again. I’m not sure he ever did trust me again, not totally, not the way he wanted to. All through the thread of our relationship, for the next entire year, this was one of our defining questions: Do you trust me?

I cried at the time, and I learned fast and hard. I became a rabid communicator. I learned everything I could about power dynamics and safewords. I apologized to him. We laughed together and talked about how hot that scene was, once we’d both come down from the peak. And I was horribly, scarringly guilty. I still am. I keep that scene on the rotation, and there’s a part of me that knows I shouldn’t, that finds such conflicts wrong.

And he forgave me. I wonder, sometimes when I’m a titch on the tipsy side (like now), what would I be like if he hadn’t?

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I read a post by Calico this morning that is full of righteous anger. If you’re taking recommendations for reading material today, put this one on your list.

I have seen that righteous anger before, wrapped up around a subject so touchy that even skirting its boundaries causes flares in the firestorm. I had thought to not write about my fantasies and rape play scenes, out of what I thought was respect but I realize now is simply my dislike of confrontation. I commented to May recently that I am simply not controversial enough to make for riveting reading material.

So this is not quite the post about having rape fantasies. This is the post about why I’m going to talk about having them.

It is argued that involving rape in our fantasy life or acting out mock parodies of it in our bed trivializes the tragedy. It is said that my fantasy is disrespectful, and I should shut the hell up.

This argument is based on rage and pain, and it is false.

Saying that having or acting out rape fantasies trivializes the crime of rape assumes many wrong things:

It assumes that everyone involved, the fantasizer, the arguer, and the audience, is incapable or unwilling to distinguish fantasy from reality. It furthers the misconception that thought is deed.

Thought is neither intent, nor deed. Think about the myriad logical problems of equating thought and deed; if thought were deed we’d all be dead. Pulverized. Space dust.

This distinction needs to be made. Not just in BDSM; everywhere, to everyone. Teach a child that having a fantasy does not mean they’ve consented to the reality, and maybe that child will grow up able to recognize rape.

It also, in a related point, assumes that the fantasizer doesn’t understand or respect what rape is.

I have never been raped. In a world where the right to speak out is gained through suffering, I have no right to speak. But I understand what rape is.

Rape: a girl sitting in the vinyl booth of a restaurant explained to me with a smile on her face that she’s sexually frigid because she was abused by a family friend when she was a toddler.

Rape: a young woman crying on my shoulder, telling me the story of her date the night before. He fingered her, she said no, but she was too drunk to stop him.

Rape: a lover who wouldn’t let me feel his anus with my fingertip, because he was gang raped as a teenager and the reconstructive surgery left scars he thinks are ugly.

Rape is not what I do in my bedroom on Saturday nights.

I have spent hours discussing what consent is. I have an awareness of the concept of consent that is not echoed in the public consciousness. The existence and purpose of safewords, the very first thing any good BDSM educator teaches, crystalizes the concept of consent into a recognizable, vocalized issue.

Why don’t we teach all children and adults what safewords mean? We ignore the issue of consent, assuming that our children will grow up knowing their own rights and the rights of others. We assume that “no” is a safeword, when almost any kinky person will tell you that you cannot assume your safewords.

We ignore or eliminate everything about sex and expect people to just figure it out. Tab A into Slot B, how hard can it be, really?

I am consistently amazed that BDSM organizations do not teach sex education. Perhaps the argument is that we’re not the right place to be teaching about sex, as a specialized culture with specialized skills. There are other venues for sex education. Where? I have to ask. Where are those other venues? How many kinky folks can swing a flogger, but don’t know how to use a dental dam? How many kinky people get regular STD tests?

How do we close that gap, the space between what we can teach about sex and what we can learn about it? There’s knowledge to be had on both sides.

As long as we don’t talk the gap is only going to get bigger.

The reality is that saying we shouldn’t talk about the place rape has in our fantasies and in our lives is a dangerous, damaging fallacy. Calling an issue off limits is ineffective. You cannot stop people from thinking. Saying we shouldn’t talk about rape fantasies is the same as saying we shouldn’t teach teenagers about sex. It’s abstinence only education for the mind, and it does not work.

Eileen, um, you’re a top. You don’t have safewords.

Yes, I fucking do.

There is this consistent, repetitive argument that I hear all the time from people who want to pick into the nitty-gritty of power exchange. You must have heard it. It goes like this: Bottoms actually have the power in scenes, because they have safewords and can stop the scene any time they want to.

This line of thinking indicates two things to me. Thing the first: There are some serious misconceptions about what a safeword is intended for. And thing the second: there are some serious misconceptions regarding the well-being of tops.

Safewords are not a way to guide a scene. They are a last resort for people who don’t feel comfortable not having a last resort. Plenty of people don’t have them. More often, as in the case of May and myself, we have them and never use them. We forget about them, most of the time. More on this later.

This idea that bottoms have the power because they have this one magic word that protects them from the badness is an incredibly strange all-or-nothing idea. Power shifts and flows; control has levels, variations. It’s sexy to some to think of giving it all up, every iota of control or power. The reality of the matter is that such things don’t work in consensual relationships. I’m sorry to burst that bubble. Get over it. Your fantasy is not reality. It’s simply very hot fantasy.

Perhaps this misconception comes about because people picture bottoms clinging to their safewords, like, hit me just the right way, I can stop this any second, you don’t want to make me pull out now, do you?

This is utter bullshit. If you do this as a bottom, you need to stop and consider how degrading and manipulative this is. And you need to consider what might happen when you play with a top who won’t stand for being degraded or manipulated. It’s a game people like to play, but it shouldn’t be played with safewords.

Safewords are not a sexy toy to play with. They are not sexy. If you think they’re sexy, I think you’ve missed the point.

I have seen people try to play around the idea that the goal of the scene is to safeword. I have seen people try to do battle in scenes, daring one another to safeword first. This never ends well. Sexualizing safewords is an insidious, dangerous, stupid way of getting off on non-consensual play. Safewords are not a fantasy. Safewords are reality.

A safeword is a way to communicate out of role. (I am not going to write about the intersection of role and real today.) A safeword does not indicate that someone’s won some stupid, imaginary prize. A safeword does not indicate a need to guide a scene. It indicates a need to stop. A safeword brings a scene to a jarring, screeching halt that is in no way arousing, in no way fun, but entirely necessary. It is a very handy thing to have around.

I take safewords to mean a person saying to a partner, “I need this to stop right the fuck now.”This is often followed by, “Because I’m hitting an emotional place I can’t deal with.” Or alternately, “Because I think you need to take me to the hospital.”

Safewords are almost never used before something goes wrong. That’s not what they’re designed for; they’re designed to indicate when something has gone wrong already. Someone is already hurt. Someone has passed their consensual limit.

Following from this, the misconception that tops do not have safewords is entirely fucked. It indicates a breakdown in the idea of consensual relationships. Do you know what you imply when you talk about only bottoms having safewords?

You imply that tops cannot be hurt.

I did not consent to a relationship or a role wherein I am expected to never be hurt.

You think I can’t get hurt if I’m on the handle end of the whip? What if I hit myself in the eye? (From personal experience, I can assure you this hurts. A lot.)

You think I can’t get freaked if I’m the perpetrator of an emotional trauma?

You think I don’t sometimes find myself in scenes that aren’t going the way I want them to? That I can’t have my needs derailed? That I don’t have emotional buttons like the rest of the world?

You think that I don’t have to consent?

I used to wig the fuck out when people touched my throat. I still squirm a little when people touch my hair. Once I wrestled with this guy at a party; through a crap communication session I didn’t establish this limit. He put a hand to the side of my throat, I got royally pissed off, and I lost my connection with the scene. I did not, however, safeword. I probably should have. It did not occur to me. I had not yet learned I could.

A common idea is that tops don’t have to safeword because they’re in control of how the scene progresses; that it stops and starts solely at their discretion. If you’ve ever topped a deeply intricate scene, an incredibly intense scene, a long-term scene, or hell, any scene at all, you know this isn’t always true. Scenes take on lives of their own. They grow organically, they establish rhythms and pathways that both partners follow. There will sometimes be moments when your head clears, you look again, and someone you love is sobbing and hurting because you made them sob and hurt. And it’s bad.

When this happens, you can’t just walk away. Call me crazy, but pulling abruptly out of a scene without explaining to my bottom that I’m having a problem, abandoning them in a sobbing, hurting mess, is irresponsible. It means I’ll freak them out, and I won’t get the care I need. And neither will they.Tops are not always the strong guiding forces that confidently lead bottoms to scarier and darker places. Sometimes the places we go are just as scary to us as they are to our partners.

I wrote earlier that May and I have safewords, but never use them. Sometimes they’re not available; sometimes May is gagged or I’m in the middle of a sixteen needle penetration that I can’t simply unravel. But in reality, we’ve never used them because we never need them. This is simply our style; a telling characteristic of how rabidly we demand constant communication. Of how much we trust. Of our mutual consent.

May doesn’t trust that I won’t hurt him more than he can stand. Sometimes I will hurt him more than he can stand. I don’t trust him to never ask for more than I can give. Sometimes he will ask.

We trust each other that no matter how one of us is hurt, or both of us are hurt, we’ll work it out. I can gag him and beat him six ways from Sunday and stage scenes of lust upon his body and mind, and in the end, we will be okay. We are too dedicated to each other and ourselves to accept scenarios in which we fail to work things out.

If he needs to, he can safeword.

And so can I.