Did I get sought out because I was a masochist, and they could smell it on me? Or was I the one that sought them? And who do I mean by them?
Last spring, during a free-form discussion of her life and work, Dorothy Allison said it took her a while to learn that the “bottom could run the fuck.” When she said that, I looked around at the rest of the audience, and wondered if that statement kicked them in the belly too. For me, it was a similar revelation to my freshman Lit professor announcing that just because we fantasized about something didn’t necessarily mean that we wanted it to happen.
Maybe you’ve never wondered if you’re depraved, but, god I have. When I turned “Red Audrey and the Roping” in to my fiction workshop, I had to wait a week for the response of my peers. I’d dated several people in the class, and would date more before the end, but there was a palpable shift the night I walked in before our discussion. It was an experience that I’d have again when I was pregnant and my body became a public representation of a private act. The assumption, always, on the part of the reader, has been that I’m writing about myself. That I am Jane.
The most important shift in my thinking about my own sexuality came when I stopped thinking about normal and started thinking about comfort. Am I comfortable with this? Is this OK with me? Or, since sex is power, have I allowed myself to be powerless, or am I being made powerless? How assertive am I?
Where, in short, are my boundaries?
Turns out they’re in different places all the time, and dialogue is the most effective way to make sure they aren’t breached. Is that self-evident? For me, dialogue about boundaries was hard won—sexual boundaries and otherwise. I hope for you, it’s simpler. I hope, you’re one of those people who says, “Of course,” when you’re told that the bottom can run the fuck.
Whatever you test and choose with consenting adults, I want you to live without shame.
Masochism isn’t something I understand in its most traditional, sexual context. But it doesn’t originate there, does it? We all manifest it in one aspect of our lives or another. The patterns of my distant sexual history can certainly be linked to a desire for self-harm. Or the need to purge. Those two sensations are inextricably connected, I think, and they orbit around this elusive idea of control.
Yet emotional control with regard to sex is so uniquely human. It is not instinctual. Is it a means to lessen our vulnerability, or to magnify it? And I wonder if shame comes from the act or the asking.
Did the idea that the “bottom can run the fuck” make masochism more or less appealing to you? Did you lose some of the power when you realized you weren’t quite powerless?
I’ve had a few days now to think about your questions, and I’m still not sure about my answers. Vulnerability, for me, has always been about relinquishing control; later, I realized that giving it up was an act, just as taking it was. My shame has come from my need.
“The bottom can run the fuck.” I’ve thought about this statement many times since last spring. Victim and masochist aren’t synonyms. I had to learn that. Power and powerlessness have never bothered me, but fear has. Shame has. I will go here and no further. I had to learn that too. Submission isn’t a free pass.
Sometimes I wanted to be obliterated. That was a compulsion, and one it was difficult to consider with tenderness. So I wrote a character, and considered her with tenderness instead.