Tonight I saw an incredibly weird play about the first feminist queen of Lapland. When I came home, I closed my CollarMe account. Strangely, these things do have something to do with one another. In the play, the queen is called “swashbuckling”. I had forgotten how much I love that word, swashbuckling. I realized there was a part of me that used to ache to inhabit such a word, and that the ache is still there.

And when I came home and signed online, looking at the messages in my inbox and the words coming up on the screen, I also realized that there is no place for swashbuckling women on CollarMe. There is some potential there, but most of it is buried and I don’t care enough to go digging. There is too much shit in the way.

When I clicked the button to close my account, this is the message that appeared, letter for letter:

http://collarme.com
Perminantly close your account?

Really, that about sums it up. And I would laugh, if it wasn’t just so fucking pathetic.

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?

As I mentioned a while back, I have found FetLife to be primarily a good resource, although the site occasionally regurgitates the problems of the kink macrocosm into my email, which drives me mad. I have yet to really gain personal (distinct from professional) value from any social networking site, mostly because I end up being more annoyed than amused.

So I don’t read the digests, and I don’t browse the groups, and I don’t join the discussions even when they do drive me mad. XKCD brilliantly illustrates my view of the inherent futility in this sort of argument.

But I’m still on Fetlife. Why? Because I still hold the at-this-point-very-tenuous hope that through FetLife I might manage to find someone to date.

Because FetLife is designed for social networking rather than dating, I don’t have the patience to try to find possible partners through it for more than half an hour. I can’t, for example, see everyone who lives in New South Wales, is under the age of 35, queer, and into having sadistic women beat on them. Who is funny enough to make me laugh, and smart enough to make me think, and sexy enough to make me come, and honest enough to make me comfortable, and honorable enough to make me trust.

I sort and sort, and then I give up. Half an hour is not enough, and I don’t really have the time for a full-blown campaign.

I don’t want to imply I am content with (or politically aligned with) sitting back and trusting that the presence of my sexy young dominant vagina will bring in dates. I think I should do some work in the dating process. But I don’t know if I want to do that work on FetLife. I’ve seen nothing to imply that my efforts would be rewarded.

I debated, for a long time, advertising here on this blog that I’m looking for dateable folks. Once upon a time I did mention this in my contact page, but I’ve since taken it down. I’m still not sure about that decision. I’m not sure how I feel about advertising my availability at all.

But while I figure this out, I still get messages on FetLife all the time. I am privately messaged about twice a week, and although I have made a few new friends, I don’t see dating in the cards any time soon.

Most of the messages aren’t bad, persay. But at the same time, these messages consistently betray their authors as unsuitable dating potential. For example, I won’t respond to people with empty profiles. And (sorry, anonymous man I’m about to criticize), I won’t date you if you’re trying to cheat on your wife. While it’s nice of you to put that in your messages up front, it’s just not going to happen. And I find it a little insulting, but how were you to know that?

How were you to know I won’t be the other woman? Or that I won’t reply to one-liners, or that sexual advances from strangers freak me the fuck out?

Do you see where this is going? I am debating becoming one of those people with guidelines. I am actually debating whether or not I should spell out a number of suggestions to people who are interested in speaking with me.

Look, call me crazy, but I think if you’re interested in my profile you might click through to my blog. And I think that my blog might give a pretty clear picture of who I am. And I think that once you’ve got that picture, you might be smart enough to figure out how to approach me on your own. I don’t think you need a guidebook to my brain. Although I suppose if there’s an interest, I could write one.

I have to admit that the practice of outlining dating guidelines on a website or a profile is one of my annoyances. It annoys me that people do this. It annoys me that I’m considering this, because it implies a kind of arrogance I don’t appreciate.

And most of all, it annoys me that this is even necessary. Because yes, I can see how it might be necessary. It saves time on both sides. It heads off the cycle of hope and disappointment. It would stop that little pang of sympathy and guilt when I get a polite, sweet message and all I have to say is, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Or if I have nothing to say at all.

So is it ruder to give guidelines up front, or ruder to never respond to the messages I receive? Should I head the hopefuls off at the pass? I’m wary of this idea, because honestly, how am I to know who might read those guidelines and decide not to contact me? I could accidentally end up cutting out someone who’s genuinely interesting.

Keeping the nebulous possibility of that person alive is worth dealing with a bit of stupid guilt and a lot of random messages. But I do wonder about the hopeful people on the other end of the wire, waiting for my words to appear in a little black square. I wonder who they are, and what they’re like, and what brought them here, today.

I am having some trouble sorting out changes in my perspective upon the world, and myself. And my New York friends, the lot of them, are trouping off to Floating World this weekend, an instance that has produced a welter of nostalgia as I reflect on the truly marvelous experiences of last year.

I am certainly not cut off from the kinky community. Sydney’s scene continues on around me. My internet connection continues unabated. But as I mentioned in my last post, a shared sexuality does not my community make.

So when we get right down to the nitty gritty, the reality is that I am isolated now that I’ve left New York City. I’m isolated from my kinky friends and my favorite spaces and my comfort zones.

My reaction to this is akin to exhaustion. I ask myself how much effort I want to spend on building a life here in Sydney? Aren’t I just going to pick up and move again? I had never envisioned our move here as being long term, and I know how quickly a year or two can pass. But “in an hour, there are many days.” I have great swaths of time I try to fill with work. I’m writing a novel. I could kick myself for being so cliche.

(As a side note, I have been stalwartly resisting the impulse to turn this into a blog about teaching, understanding, and perfecting one’s writing. I don’t think my readers would appreciate the switch. “What is all this nonsense on teaching styles, Eileen? Remember the kinky sex we come here for? Come on, kinky sex!”)

As a result of this general ennui, my kinky identity has been going through something of a hibernation. I can envision the kinky part of myself, curled adorably in a large fluffy blanket somewhere warm, sucking her thumb and cradling a singletail to her chest. I haven’t stopped having sex, I haven’t stopped thinking about sex in masturbatory ways. But I have stopped thinking about sex in community ways, about the connections in, and advantages of, communicating with others like me.

So, seeing this disconnect in my identity coincide with my withdrawal from public spaces, I ask: How much of my kinky identity is based not around what I do in the bedroom, but what I write and say and do in public?

I don’t actually know the answer to that question. Do you?

The kinky community consistently picks words to push back against. We’re cranky like that. Among the list that garners resistance is the word “lifestyle.”

But I don’t buy into that particular resistance. I like the word lifestyle, specifically because it implies that being kinky is not just a matter of freaks in their bedrooms. Being kinky crosses those boundaries; I am kinky all the time. My sexuality is a part of my lifestyle, and affects the decisions I make in multiple contexts, not just when I’m flipping through my porn stash looking for something juicy.

In my observations, one of the best ways in which queer communities have gained acceptance is the acknowledgment of queer identities as being connected to lifestyles. Having gay neighborhoods, gay bars, gay-friendly merchants, gay-friendly medical centers. Acceptance trickles down, slowly but surely, as we begin to insist that we can’t just leave our sexualities at the bedroom door.

So how do I maintain that lifestyle in a healthy way now that I’ve moved away from the community that supported it? And more specifically, how do I do that without spending four hours of my life every day surfing blogs?

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.

Here’s the situation. Maymay and I make a kinky friend or two. Perhaps we’ve chatted at a party. Maybe we meet someone new online, or we find ourselves in touch through an event or meeting. In any case, the lines of communication are open. All parties have access to all relevant email addresses, et cetera.

And then, a day or two later, I will get a sweet, polite email in my inbox. It will usually express how great it was to meet the two of us, and sometimes propose a date for coffee or extend an invitation. All seems well, yes?

Except I’ll go ask Maymay if he’d like to take that date, or act on the invitation we’ve been given, and I’ll be greeted with a blank stare. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he’ll say. “I didn’t get that email.”

What has happened? Does the Cc box not work for kinky people? Is Reply All on the fritz?

This has never, ever happened with correspondence to us in a vanilla context. It has happened several times with correspondence in a kinky context. And it is weird, annoying, and occasionally downright inappropriate.

Yes, it’s true that we live together, and we see each other’s emails. It’s true that we read each other’s blog comments and Twitter feeds. It’s true that messages for him will still find their source through me. But I find the method rather nonsensical, especially regarding events and invitations. If you have something to say to Maymay, say it to him. His contact info is so easy to find, you can trip over it.

Why does this happen? Sometimes, I suspect laziness. But frankly, how hard is it to type another email address?

Other times I suspect that although I’m the dominant one, Maymay is the more intimidating. I advise all parties concerned to get over this. He is intimidating, and abrasive. He’s also worth knowing.

And occasionally I do think this is a technical goof. Not everyone is email savvy: forgiven. Once. Email is not like the telephone. Believe it or not, more than two people can participate in an email conversation.

Most commonly, I fear, correspondance that should go to both of us ends up sitting in solitary in my mailbox because kinky people have this persistent, annoying tendancy to assume that because I am dominant, I am also the main point of contact in our relationship’s public face. (And yes, our relationship does have a public face.) This trickles down into all kinds of dangerous assumptions, not the least of which are:

That we’re in a 24/7 D/s dynamic. (Technically I’d argue we are, but we don’t advertise that fact, and we don’t suspend collaborative decision making.)

Or, that dominants make decisions, and submissives take orders. In social contexts, in scene contexts. What’s next? Shall I start ringing my boy at lunch to tell him how much sugar to stir into his coffee? Destroy this terrible, awful assumption before we all make ourselves out as assholes. I’m not our manager.

Or, that I speak for Maymay. Frankly, no. Just no. And I think that when meeting the two of us this should be obvious. But apparently it isn’t.

New acquaintances have no idea what roles Maymay and I play in our relationship even if they do know our dynamic. And really, it should be fairly easy to see that addressing mutually applicable emails only to me implies that you consider Maymay to be an unequal partner in our relationship.

Point the first: Maymay might be an unequal partner in some parts of our private relationship, but he is most definitely my equal counterpart as far as our public face is concerned.

And point the second: Unless we tell you otherwise, to treat the two of us as unequal partners of our own relationship disrespects us. Both of us.

Newsflash: non-consensually disrespecting submissives is still a shitty thing to do.

This behavior is a precise, miniaturized version of attempting to negotiate scenes with Maymay through me. I have said before, and I will say many, many times again: he does his own negotiation. Take it up with him.

Let’s dispense with the assumptions, and bring back the Cc box. I’m sick of playing messenger.

I miss New York. Tonight I tied May’s hands above his head and ran my finger up and down his body, and then up and down his cock. I did it over and over, for almost two hours, and I watched him twist and pull his arms to his face to bite at the tender skin. As I did, I pressed into him. I swung my leg up along his shoulder and put my foot in his palm, and he wove his fingers in and out of my toes as he gasped. And I thought how glad I am to have him with me.

I haven’t read it.

Really. Whatever it is, I probably haven’t read more than three pages. Unless it is the Kushiel series or something written by Stephen Elliot. Or a scattered handful of Jay Wiseman books. So if you have been getting the impression that I know something about kinky erotica, consider this the unveiling.
I don’t read kinky books.

There are several reasons for this.

The first is that I didn’t learn about kink by reading instructional books; I learned about kink by going to Conversio Virium, seeing educational presentations, and learning through experience. I’m not knocking this learning style one way or the other. My exposure was simply a twist of advantage and geography.

And I still tend to not learn by reading; I always prefer to learn by watching, doing, fucking up, and trying again.

The second reason is that I am chronically resistant to instructional, self-help, or disseminated psychology books. I suspect this is a hold-over from my upbringing in a do-it-yourself, anti-therapy attitude. So I didn’t read the books that “explain” kink. I have a copy of Bound To Be Free…somewhere. I never got around to reading it. While it might have helped me at some point in my life, right now it simply doesn’t seem relevant.

As you may have noticed, I am perpetually self-analyzing. I usually see reading as a break from self-analysis. Books are my vacation.

The third reason is that I don’t read erotic fiction as literary fiction. So I have not read The Story of O. I have not read Tipping the Velvet. I have not read the Marketplace series. I have not read Venus in Furs. I don’t like to pay for it, I would never carry it around with me, and I’ve seen no compelling evidence, from the few pages of each of these texts that I’ve skimmed through, that I cannot find material just as good or better, for free, online.

I spend my money on kinky photography books. They are prettier to look at and deliver much more long-term satisfaction.

I used to think I owed it to the kinky community and myself to read these books, because they were so obviously an integral part of kink culture. Eventually I decided that this was a bad reason to read books, unless a day came that I was genuinely interested in their historical impact. That interest has not yet surfaced. Perhaps someday it will.

In the end, I prefer literary fiction. I don’t put my energy into long erotic fiction, because it is never, ever as fulfilling as reading good standard fiction. I prefer dense, classic epics; I read a lot of Hugo, Dumas, Austen, Rushdie, Marquez, Allende, Clavell. I went and bought a few new books recently: Eco, Borges, Kundera. And when I want a popcorn book, I reach for the sci-fi: Bradbury, Stephenson, Heinlein, Asimov.

The erotic fiction just doesn’t do it for me. The day someone writes a kinky erotic epic with the scale and scope of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I will die happy. I simply don’t see that day coming.

So I’ve been asked many, many times for my advice on kinky books. I will keep recommending
Elliot, because I respect his writing and appreciate the balance of erotic/non-erotic narrative in his work. But other than that, I’m at a loss. I’m not the right person to ask.

If you want to talk non-kinky books, I’d love to. Literature is one of the very few fields in which I genuinely identify as a geek.

But lest you think I know the specific reference behind the Story-of-O ring, let me set that record straight. I have absorbed the reference through cultural exposure. I have never read the book.

Kinky people are everywhere. Tonight I went to a bar to meet a bunch of geeks. I drank cider, ate pad thai, and listened to them chatter away about things I only understand half the time, and never in context. The acronyms thickened and collided in midair. I distracted a couple of them briefly in a chat about the lack of magical realist texts in North America.

Across the table from me, one of these anonymous geeks was wearing a Story-of-O ring. I didn’t get his name, don’t know where he’s from. I know he has ginger hair and a cartilage piercing placed high along the curve of his ear. I spent most of the night glancing from the ring to his face, and wondering why he was wearing it, and who gave it to him, or if he gave it to himself.

They said:

The way you use the word “vanilla” in your blog is bigoted.

At the time I thought, Bigoted? Really? That seems like a harsh choice of vocabulary.

But as you may recall, I did not choose to rise up in righteous indignation after being censored by scallywags. I chose to take on some of the responsibility for what had happened, because I wasn’t defining my language or giving context for my actions.

When I got home that week I searched my entire blog for every time I’d used the word “vanilla.” Not counting the two vanilla gentlemen on my blogroll, it came up about fifteen times. Of those instances, one was a poetic comparison of May’s bum to the silkiness of vanilla ice cream. The majority were times in which I used the word to mean “not-kinky.” One was a bit of an arrogant statement about stupid, male, vanilla movie producers. I figured that the last instance was fair; I was being a bit of a snarky brat in that entry. Which, by the way, is an entry you’ll no longer find here. It’s one of the two that did not survive my great blogging purge and password initiative. The other one was about my mother.

But really, it’s all those tricky “not-kinky” instances that are the sinkholes.

I would argue that saying my use of the word “vanilla” here is bigoted is, frankly, absurd. To be bigoted means essentially to be intolerant of identities which are not my own. I work very hard to be tolerant, because that’s one of the best ways I know to gain tolerance for myself. I have spoken before about sneaky selfish motivations.

Currently the blogosphere has vanilla on the brain. Renegade Evolution has taken on the idea of vanilla privilege, while Trinity over at The Strangest Alchemy has opened up her blog for a discussion on the definition of this very tricky idea.

Also, closer to home and all of a sudden, I have some new readers. (Hello, ladies.) And from their conversations with me, their blogs, and their attitudes, I get the feeling that vanilla just isn’t cool these days, much in the same way Maja once used “het,” hilariously, as a neo-semi-pejorative. That seems a bit unfair to me. Vanilla is unfortunately conflated with sex-negativity in a way that is simply not true.

I was asked several times in my ACON group to define what kinky sex is. I found myself at a bit of a loss. I have spent so long just being kinky that to start defining what kinky means for a broader audience is insanely difficult. Like many other words that must be personally defined before becoming useful, I can only really speak about what kinky means to me.

For me, to be kinky is to enjoy sex or enjoy things I consider to be sexual while maintaining a deliberate power imbalance.

And going from there, to have vanilla sex, as I have had many times in the past, is to enjoy sex or enjoy sexual things without such a deliberate imbalance.

And yes, I know, that is a simply enormous definition. It’s also, you may notice, a definition that relies heavily upon intention and thought, mental perspectives rather than weapons and gear. It’s not what I do, it’s how I do it. That means that a lot of my kinky sex can look very, very vanilla. But it works for me. Maybe it works for you. If it doesn’t, I invite you to redefine.

I think there is such a thing as vanilla privilege, but it’s hard to pin down where my ability to access that privilege begins and ends. Similar to my access to straight privilege, I can pass as vanilla sometimes. Although curiously, it is much easier for me to pass as straight than it is for me to pass as vanilla. May and I still get funny glances when we walk down the street, my hand on his collar and his head bowed, that little-boy grin on his face, that lazy toppish look on mine. People do stare at us in restaurants. They do think we’re strange at parties. But it works, because we are essentially considered eccentric rather than threatening. I think it’s because we look straight.

And there is also a low level of bigotry in some corners of the kink community, as there seem to be in all communities. My new blog readers will probably run into that, unfortunately. Hell knows I have. I just wrote that the clothing I think is sexy looks vanilla. I have been called a vanilla tourist a few times. I have even been asked, by a very large man at the door to Paddles, if I was lost. I wanted to laugh at him. No, I responded, I am definitely not lost.

Attitudes like that are why I try to go places with people, when they’re new. They’re why I still appreciate having people to go with. That reaction is why having a group of kinky friends is an infinitely valuable advantage when trying to find one’s place in a kinky community.

And attitudes like that are why I also have vanilla friendships. Screw this secret-exciting-sex-club mentality. Really, my sex looks spicy from an outside perspective, but it’s just a way of having sex. Vanilla’s just another way of having sex. I’m wired one way. Someone else is wired another. It all works out, in the end.