I’ve been taking notes on solitude/aloneness/and loneliness over the last several months. There is a lot more where this came from, and maybe you will get to read that, too.

i.

This is the scene—my future bedroom is the choir balcony in a completely open 2,000 sq ft one-room church house built in 1897. Roughly six feet from my back door begins a cemetery even older than the church with gravestones dating back to the early 1800s. No rooms, wide open space, complete silence, the bones of the dead stewing beneath my feet. 

I must have just fallen asleep, snuggled up to the dogs for warmth, when I heard footsteps clear as day downstairs. I looked at the clock and it was just after midnight. Of course I was alone. My first thought was that my realtor, Becky, who’s one of those moms who definitely looks like a dyke but is totally not, had a valid point when she told me to change the locks (I did not). Someone was inside. I pondered for a minute how it could be my contractor, the star of my cheesy porn-plot fantasies. My air mattress could hold us, but only because I didn’t yet have a cage to put him in.

Three or four footsteps landed, then a door slammed and clearly latched. Every door in the building was bloated beyond the jamb and took the full force of a body to close it completely. Whatever door I had just heard slam was not a door that currently exists in the building. Was I hallucinating? I pulled the blankets over my head, a solid strategy I employed as a kid to make the scary things go away, and eventually fell back asleep.

ii.

I always say that I don’t get embarrassed but then again I’ve never felt the need to admit to absolutely anyone that my most listened song of 2022 was Taylor Swift’s All Too Well (10 min version). Let me explain. This song was the star of my carefully crafted breakup playlist I made this past summer after, well, Thee Breakup. I played it any time I went anywhere, sometimes starting over immediately after it finished. Because the song is so long, it cut down on me listening to much of anything else. I’m far from a swiftie, in fact, I’m incapable of naming any other song she sings. Driving down Bushwick Avenue alone, rage-screaming “never-needy, ever-lovely jewel whose shine reflects on youuuuuUUUUU” 300 times in the span of a few months really did something good for me, and for that I am grateful.  

iii.

I started watching this show called The Story of Home where a couple restores an old farmhouse upstate. They do everything themselves including building furniture and storm windows. The man appears to do 90% of the actual work while the woman does things like mix homemade paint. As someone who’s watched hundreds of home renovation shows, I can expertly say that no one does this shit alone. It’s always a We. How delightful to have two sets of hands, two brains, someone to trade jobs with when your body is begging you to do something else. Two incomes, even! How wonderful to be twice as productive, move twice as fast. To be honest, this is a lot of what I think about when I am alone. When I’m tirelessly scraping glue off antique quarter sawn Doug Fir in a remote mountain town four hours from Brooklyn I’m thinking, “this was absolutely a mistake,” and “how much faster would this go if I married a useful, heterosexual man who knows how to use power tools?” But in my case We is just my gay ass and the six hundred muscles in my little body that I have enraged in the process.

iv.

I have always been a workhorse. I’m embarrassed of my love for productivity. What I mean to say is that my church is dangerous for me. I’ve spent an unnatural amount of time on my hands and knees—just me and my angle grinder, baby! I have a routine where I start on all fours, shift to one knee, and then the other. Once I’ve run through all my positions, my body begs for a break. It’s not in my nature to oblige but I’m trying to take better care of myself. “What would Davey do?” I whisper as I attempt some half-assed yoga poses. 

On several occasions I have considered how much I could get done if I simply did not sleep. I look at my insurmountable to-do list. Surely my body would be fine. I am very strong and I have working-class blood. I picture myself collapsing from exhaustion like the celebrities of the early aughts. Except instead of being dehydrated from lots of drugs, I’m dehydrated from eating only chips and iced coffee for several days straight. I’d be whisked away by my publicist, Biz, to recover at some spa in Arizona, securely tucked away from the paparazzi. Except that’s not how it would happen—I’d be alone, of course, with no cell reception and no one to find me but my dogs. 

v.

After the Dyke Show event, on an unusually warm February night, I decide to take my time strolling through the West Village on my way to the train. There’s something sensual about solitude and the way it allows you to hone your attention, it feels almost vampiric. Padding over cobblestones with puffy eyes, I notice everything. I write the following list in my phone:

-Real gas lanterns
-Spider web transom
-Carriage houses
-Dozens of people crowded around to watch a movie set
-Everyone is outside eating in February
-Rich people with no curtains in their fancy homes with plaster ceiling medallions (most likely original) and god-awful modern light fixtures
-The street suddenly turns very gay with a men’s spa and trashy sex shops
-It is better to be alone than to not be seen by someone you love

vi.

My big plan was to spend an entire week working at the church while everyone else was doing the things they do for Christmas and New Year’s. I was going to be productive, finish the floors, get a real feel for country living. In between sanding sanding sanding, I listened to approximately 56 different playlists and talked to myself and the dogs at an alarming rate. Have you ever gone to Lowe’s hoping the cashier would strike up a conversation with you? Horrifying! By the end of the week I felt like I was losing my mind. As someone who loves being alone, I learned that I had never felt lonely before. Being alone had always been more of a choice and I could very easily choose company. Feeling lonely was heart wrenching, a feeling I decided I don’t care for at all.

vii.

I have been casually reading my own tarot cards for almost a decade. However, this past summer I decided it was time to get my very first professional tarot reading. Feeling raw and looking for anything to ground me, I met with S. She gracefully consulted the cards on my behalf. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of Thee Breakup the cards had a lot to say. One of the highlights of the reading was that I would spend the next sixteen months mostly alone, tending to my own nourishment. I nodded my head at S on our zoom call, knowingly. You will be softening, loosening your boundaries that no longer serve you. You made the right decision. You’ll never get what you need from them. The mystical cardstock reminded me that I’m completely responsible for my own peace. Peace often must come in the form of solitude, a trade-off with chaos.

I don’t talk much about my history as an insatiable succubus because that version of myself is lifetimes away, an unrecognizable specter howling for painpleasure in the rearview mirror. I was much younger then, in pain and greedy for the novelty of feeling something, anything. I’m different now, right?

A horror filmmaker, she said, as she sipped her mezcal, chunky silver rings on each finger clinking against the glass. She was so sure of herself and spoke slow and intentional. She had that look in her eyes that I recognized from years of being a woman—she wanted to fuck/kill me and she wanted me to know it. I knew deep down that half of everything she said to me for the next two years was not true but, because she she was my first lover who obliged my request to be tied to the radiator and fucked into the seventh circle of hell, I pushed it to the back of my mind. She had basically no furniture in her room except for a vintage medical chair and a thin mattress on the floor (“minimalism”). Today they eat men alive on the internet for this sort of psychopathy. It was the perfect set up for relishing in our depraved appetites.

June 2015

I remembered her today because of the book I’m reading—page by page the words cutting me like razor blades. Desire and grief, grief and desire. Suddenly I’m sucked back into her vortex. My first and last top, although we didn’t really use that language back then. I begged her to hurt me and I begged her to smack my clit and I put her hand over my mouth and nose to slow my heart rate until I came/died. I was always begging her and mostly it felt humiliating to need something so badly from another person for the first time in my life, so completely out of my control, but she eventually gave in to me.

She would take her giant rings off one by one, never fast enough, while I salivated like a dog in heat. On one rare occasion she pushed me into the back door, face pressed against the cold metal, and when all my holes were satiated I cried like an absolute baby. I thanked her for the strenuous labor of shooting electricity from every single fiber of muscle from her toes to her tongue straight through me like a goddamn dyke Furfur.

But she tore through me like a maelstrom. I felt it coming from the second she first looked at me in that bar with those fuck/kill eyes. It was worth it—the intoxication of finally feeling seen.

Something about the power she had over me and how dangerous it was to need someone that much just so I can feel my toes tingle. I fantasized about it, about being that for someone else, to have a plaything that begged for it, a sweet girl that said, “Please Daddy, I’ll simply die without it!” Except I wouldn’t be wrong, withholding like she was.

One of my many mistakes is that I insisted on being a chaos demon of vulnerability while she lied and lied and lied. I could change her with my softness, my wetness. I didn’t know any other way. I still feel her in my bones all these years later, reminders surfacing in unexpected places. Except now I know that it’s a demon called grief and I know how substantially it changes you. I know so much more now, but never enough never enough. She was part of my transformation while I didn’t even know her real age. She gave me nothing of herself but the electricity.

Intimacy is a lot of things but you know what it mostly boils down to people making themselves knowable to each other. It may sound easy to you, but the pain can be unbearable. Here’s what happens—people take turns cracking open and you each throw your bleeding pink guts at the other person’s feet like an offering at their altar. You’re disemboweled, and it feels absolutely horrible, but the bright side is that you get to peek at your lover’s meatstuff all fucked up and delicious. You learn some things. If you’re lucky, they help to sew you back up. Some even say the more you do it the easier it gets. 

In time I built a shiny life with someone new who needed painpleasure just as badly as I once did. I got so much power from being the giver, holding the path to salvation in my hands. It was serious business. They took it and took it and I gave it with such pleasure, they never even had to beg for it. We danced together over the fire falling deeper through each circle of hell. Every loving stroke from my deliberate hands to their body had a current passing through it and I saw it in their eyes that they felt like I was lightening. I learned to be a top but it seems that I did not learn my lesson.

Our parents would roll over in their graves if they heard us praying together, speaking to our demons in tongues. While they never said much, at least they told the truth. This is different, this is different, this is different. We created a vessel—my lover poured themselves into it and stretched to the edges. Fall apart baby, fall apart, I’ll catch you, I’m here. I would have gathered all the magic in the world to feel supported like that, but it wasn’t about me. They lost sight of me and I become a projection for what they wanted me to be. Giving, loving, lightening doesn’t have needs. You can’t build a family with desire alone.

I clawed at their skin, gnawed at their inner thighs, my desire to consume them was a desire to know them. I drank their blood straight from the vein, burned my initial into their flesh, it was all the same. I did everything to try to get closer closer closer but none of it made a difference. I was starving to get a taste of what was really inside. How close can you get without language? What space can you fill between words? I don’t know but I fucking tried and I was always left hungry. You can’t build a family with desire alone.

Things were different now and I couldn’t be as vulnerable as I once was, but in time there was a tender place and I was able to crack open. I threw my guts at their feet while I, again, had to beg for what I needed. I stood there bleeding while they did not even peek at my raw insides unfurled on the floor, and I got no assistance sewing up my belly. It was terrible and it did not get any easier. 

For months I could feel a new demon growing inside me, I carried it around with a heavyness. Everywhere I went there were people just walking around alive who didn’t know that I was without a heart. The barista handed me my coffee. Why does this keep happening to me? I ran into my neighbor down the street. I’m always just a projection of everyone’s greatest fantasies or worst trauma. I was teaching a class. Why is it so hard to find someone to sew you up? I went to dinner with friends. You’d think drinking blood was was more intimate than having a conversation. I was just trying to piece it all together, keep it together, but I knew very well what failing looked like.

Then I woke up in a cloud of ash, my guts sprawled out on the floor. I was in a fever dream and nothing made sense. I was in a fever dream and everything made sense. A small demon crawled out from inside my festering wound. The demon pointed a long finger nail directly at me and said, “The things you desire the most are just distractions for what’s hiding below the surface.” The demon turned its back to me and slowly walked away, the ash cloud following closely behind. I scooped up my insides, carefully jiggled them back into place and painstakingly sutured myself up. I stared at myself in the mirror fingering the wound and wondered if I should take something for the infection.

In COVID isolation and very sad, I decided to re-read X, Davey Davis’ new novel. They had generously sent me an advance copy months ago that I read with anticipated fury as soon as it landed at my doorstep. I didn’t have the energy then to give it the proper review it deserved. I don’t know if this is the review it deserves (I know my strengths), but do I hope my earnest excitement will suffice!!

If you’ve been following along, you may already know that Davey is my friend. We met during Folsom years ago when they still lived in Oakland. I have fond memories of that weekend—swarming Gayle Rubin like she was Justin Bieber and we were twelve year old girls after an arena concert in 2012. Except it was a small event at The Stud about The Catacombs. Dr. Rubin, who has written extensively about The Catacombs, was both the keynote and DJ. She was wearing a red paisley necktie and was gracious about us praising her like some kind of a dyke rock star. She even took a photo with us youngsters, fisting hands in the air.

Like me, Davey also appreciates SM scholarship of both the academic and corporeal kind. It will be obvious to leather queers that X was written by a brilliant writer who also happens to be a heavy player. The first time I read X, I couldn’t put it down. In my recent den of plague isolation, I was able to slow down and savor my second reading. Highlighting paragraph after paragraph, I found it even more captivating this time around. It’s an incredibly romantic, nihilistic mystery novel full of sadomasochism and extremely specific queer humor—still laughing over the protagonist calling themself a Dobermxn. A novel written for leatherdykes, by a leatherdyke. I’m trying to think: When was the last time this happened? 

SM fiction, non-fiction, and even academic studies are almost always centered around masochists. We all love the pain sluts but let’s face it, they are over-represented. I’ve written about this before. X drops a large weight on the sadist side of the scales. This being my lane, it’s a big deal and the focus of this review. The fictional protagonist Lee is probably someone you’ve met before if you’ve been in the scene long enough. They’re a perfect caricature of the Brooklyn-white-masc-sadist-asshole that gets a lot of play. Lee is kind of a terrible person who uses their charm and top appeal to get what they want, but yet they still have lines they won’t cross. They reminded me a lot of Dexter in the way that sure he kills people, but he abides by the code. 

I can picture Davey clicking away at their laptop thinking to themself, What are all the hot things a sadist who is bad for me might say to me? Thus, Lee is a sadistic romantic who constantly says things like “I bet she has a nice scream.” Completely relatable! For Lee’s one year anniversary with their girlfriend, they give her a vision board of how they would plan her funeral, something they decided on shortly after they met. After they give her the gift, they cut their initials into her. There’s an entire paragraph of them talking about how beautiful her blood is. The romance! Why hadn’t I thought of this?!?!

The novel follows Lee as they hunt through the Brooklyn queer scene for X, a “femdom nightmare” that they let top them. The problem is that X, along with all other undesirables, is being asked to “export” or leave the country. Even though Lee is a strict top, we can assume that their hunger to reconnect with X is based on her skill and ability to make nihilistic Lee actually feel something. Throughout this main plot we are also transported to Lee’s childhood with a neglectful, alcoholic mother, and given a tour of past sadistic exploits and present day relationships. 

The text is sprinkled with tales of ex-girlfriends that are both extremely sexy and give the reader insight into what kind of a person Lee really is. Davey writes Lee with this code so it provides readers like me, also into SM, a level of ambiguity that gives pause and almost manipulates, “Wait a second, is this top actually that bad?” While the novel never explicitly mentions consent as we have come to expect from truly responsible SM media*, the subtext is everywhere. The scenes are written in a way that I understand (most of) what Lee does to be a consenting part of their SM relationships. “You know your word,” Lee says to their girlfriend, reminding her to use her safeword. The bottoms Lee hurts also give away that they are totally on board with being hurt. One lover, admiring the backs of her legs covered in bruises says, “I look better this way.”

So, what exactly is their sadist’s code? It’s never explicitly defined but we are given glimpses through Lee’s extremely messy hookup history. Lee’s introduction to SM is with their first girlfriend, before they know their desires have a name or even a sociality. Like many of us, they used to hurt each other without knowing what they were doing. Lee narrowly escapes manslaughter during a rope scene where their girlfriend stops breathing. Later, they meet a domme named May who teaches them everything they know, including the very important skill of keeping bottoms alive. “We hurt, not harm,” May councils. 

Lee’s code includes the most basic: do not fuck with people who are too intoxicated to consent. They teach a humorous life lesson to a brat in how to ask for what they want. They never do anything they don’t want to do. They take vetting seriously, “I never cut up someone I can’t trust.” And lastly, it’s very important to them that the fear is genuine. “Personally, I prefer it when they struggle. I like to see faces and hear sounds. If a girl faked an orgasm with me, that would be one thing; if she faked a scream, it might break my heart.”

X was a delight to read, both times. I’ve never read a book where I felt so seen and understood as a sadist dyke. Davey weaves gothic romance into the sadistic and perverted, almost reminiscent of classic vampire horror. The characters engaging in SM aren’t conflicted by its violence because it gives them life; they know what they want and go after it. This is when I get emotional thinking about creating the types of media that need to exist, the things that make queer perverts feel less alone, showing that this lifestyle is possible. 

I had this fantasy of twenty or thirty years from now, Davey is invited to a leatherdyke event at a dive bar during Folsom to talk about the influence of their novel, X. I hope that after they give their talk, a gang of screaming leather clad fangirls rushes up to them asking to take photos and, most importantly, thanking them for the legacy of this work. 

There’s so much more I could say about X, but it just came out and I don’t want to give any big spoilers. Do me a favor—when you read it please let me know if you’d let Lee top you (no judgment).

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*Noting my own sarcasm just in case! Not all SM media needs to teach or be the most positive representation of consent, we don’t expect that of vanilla sex! I do appreciate how these elements can be expertly woven in so that it’s not slamming you over the head or appearing to virtue signal. Needless to say, X does this very well.

I didn’t write much here last year. I’ve been eating my own medicine, or whatever. Being kind to myself and letting myself feel, respond to what I need, not forcing things – you should try it. The rest feels good but the self-worth tied to the production of things not so much. My creative juices all but dried up thanks to the pandemic. Do you know what that means for me? Let me begin to count the ways my entire life had been structured around my creativity and I honestly had no idea until it was gone. Suddenly when my source of creativity disappeared, the rug was pulled out from under me. I eventually connected the dots and realized how much I was inspired every day by the buzzing joyous filth of New York City. 

Creativity feeds my sex drive, it inspires my gender expression, it sparks my ideas for writing and making things, helps me be a world-class pervert, and it begs me to read furiously. This is all somehow quite cerebral. Reader, I had no idea!

Let’s start with gender. My femme ass used to say things like “I’m femme on purpose, I dress up for myself! No one else!” Well hey guess what happens when you don’t leave the house for weeks at a time because there’s a global pandemic? Suddenly there is no femme to be seen. It’s… social?! Thus began the longest stretch I’d gone without wearing a dress (or hard pants) or makeup or lingerie in my entire adult life. In sparks of “feeling myself,” I’d put on a dress and do a full face only to feel like a total clown. Who is she? Is she still femme? Why does this feel so foreign? The few months last summer where the world felt safe to socialize meant that every time I went out in public I felt like an awkward teenager who didn’t know how to dress myself. I brushed it all aside, assuring myself of my femme status and reminding myself that wide leg adidas pants and crocs are just my personal evolution.

I used to read like, one book per week? I absolutely loved devouring books and the more I liked a book the more invigorated and inspired I felt in other parts of my life. Most of my reading happened on my subway commute to my day job, which was a 45 minute ride each way. The more I read, the more I wrote. I would meet up with friends saying “OMG let me tell you about this book I’m reading!” It was a sweet cycle of creativity that completely disappeared as soon as I stopped riding the subway to work, or at all. I was too invested in doom scrolling twitter while simultaneously watching HGTV to read books and every time I tried I would simply fall asleep. So eventually I stopped trying because it made me feel really sad. I did that thing where I was kind to myself and I said Hey it’s ok you don’t actually have to read a book a week to feel smart or interesting. Do what feels good right now (you annoying overachiever), it will be ok! 

I have only read a handful of books (five?) in the last two years. It really fucking bums me out but ~radical acceptance~ or whatever!

When I was in my mid-twenties I read Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic and suddenly everything was erotic. What I took away from that essay was basically that mindfulness, intention and self-worth were powerful pillars of the erotic. When I say that my view of the world immediately changed, I’m not kidding. I think this is how I came to be endlessly inspired by New York City– its people, its rats, its trash! The vibrations from the energy of the city really breathed life into my sexual self. Some of my best scene ideas came to me while sitting in a park people-watching, or staring at a random beautiful person on the train. I can’t explain it other than she is my muse (NYC). 

Being effectively cut off from a social life for the past two years (I mean like not the kind where there’s gay people on my screen, like corporeal homosexual demons smashing their bodies together to loud music) has drastically changed the way my brain works. I truly had no idea how much of my grind was a result of my surroundings and attachment to others – friends, acquaintances, the hotties fucking at the play party, and even the people who I have never met that I shared energy with in public spaces.

I realized recently that while this definitely is due to the extreme sadness of the world falling apart and massive amounts of death, it is also a different grief that I’ve been trying to ignore. 

A few weeks ago, I attended a leather femme tea time over zoom. I was wearing my pajamas (silk and leopard at least!) and had hair still wet from the shower (at least I showered!). My friend and host Hannah asked all the attendees to set an erotic/kink related intention for 2022. As someone who dreads future planning (hello, trauma!) I spent the few minutes thinking about my lost desire/erotic imagination and got super sad. When it was my turn to share I wiped a single tear from my eye and told everyone that I just want to WANT TO do stuff again! When will my desire return from the war?

Knowing what I know about grief, which is a lot, I’m shocked that I didn’t realize until now that I can’t move on and create a new normal or recalibrate my life if I’m not mourning the things that I lost. I have also realized that (in revisiting a Judith Butler fav) that grief is an erotic process. This is what I mean by reading is inspiring!! I will save the poetics about grief for another time, but it is erotic in that it forces you to feel things. Grief unrecognized in melancholy (I think Freud said that?) and you have to literally let that bitch in, and let her top the shit out of you, to be able to move on. 

Accepting that change is “fine” is one thing, but actually mourning what has been lost is quite another. 

In the spirit of looking upward and onward since this winter is already looking bleak – here’s where I am at the start of a new year. I have settled on a new version of my gender that is like, sexy construction worker who wears red lipstick? I don’t know, I’m still workshopping it. Winter’s hottest boot is platform crocs with thick socks. I wear a puffer coat now. I bought Carhartt overalls in which I actually do Carhartt shit. I am renovating a church that will hopefully have heat in the next few weeks! I am watching slightly less HGTV these days, which may or may not have anything to do with having already watched every show possible, and have been splitting my idle time between reading and stripping paint. I did 2 (TWO!) scenes last week where I was covered in blood. My plants are thriving. The best thing about winter is that I can snuggle my little heater dogs with reckless abandon. And lastly, I have been moisturizing like nobody’s business, which, as we all know, is extremely erotic. 

If you’ve learned anything from this, let it be that you should be kind to yourself, drink water, and process your grief! We all have mourning to do these days, some more than others. What has changed? Who have you lost? Grief, after all, is the deepest form of love.

Most of the masochists I know were the type of children who put their fingers in the candle flame, the ones who poked safety pins through the top layer of their skin in the back of study hall. They felt the effects of serotonin long before they had the words to describe it. It was only a matter of time and circumstance before they were writhing under the strikes of a paddle. Others discovered much later, usually at the hands of a more experienced lover, that they have an affinity for taking pain. A hand accidentally grazed their neck and, feeling a rush, they pulled the hand back placing the fingers snug to the throat, squeezing, saying please. Or, it could have been a slasher movie that made them wet—meat cleavers and lots of blood causing their heartbeat to rise into their mouth igniting the primal death drive. 

Culturally I think that at least those of us into BDSM understand the whats and the whys of masochism, while I simultaneously emphasize/scream that we don’t really need to pathologize our desires. BUT, nonetheless we ponder. Yes, pain can feel good. Our bodies release serotonin, a natural analgesic, which provides a biological explanation for why it feels good. It is an emotional experience. And, it’s sexy.

I recently read Leigh Cowart’s Hurts So Good, The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose. You guessed it, it’s all about masochism. For them, growing up a ballerina, pain was coupled with reward. You dance hard > your toes become “hamburger meat” inside pointe shoes > you become a better dancer. Suffering for a reward is usually what makes the suffering “worth it,” because it doesn’t make any logical sense at all to suffer in vain. In fact, did you know that giving your pain a purpose actually helps improve pain tolerance? Context matters! It’s true and it’s fascinating. (Read the book!)

My fellow ex-Catholics are probably familiar with the concept of pain with a purpose. It’s known in religious terms as redemptive suffering. As a child I was told that I could offer my headache to God as a gift. I always thought God was kind of dumb if he wanted my pain as a present, but nonetheless I prayed. I now realize that this very popular concept called “offering it up” wasn’t explained to me properly at all — quite comical when I think about my fuck-up parents. 

The ultimate suffering for meaning was when Christ died on the cross for *our* sins. If you are suffering, let it not be in vain. In trying to find the exact origin of “offering it up,” I fell into a deep hole of horny blogs talking about suffering. Focus, focus!  The Catholic blogosphere is chock full of stories of loved ones dying of cancer or enduring great illnesses and “offering it up,” praying every day for God to transform their suffering into meaning. Not as I was told, that God would accept your suffering as a present and take it away from you, but instead he accepts your suffering as a present but leaves you to martyr yourself for redemption. Talk about bad boundaries!

Suffering like Jesus all comes back to Colossians 1:24 where Paul says, “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” This sexy divergence is all to say that in many cases suffering is spiritual. When pain is given a higher purpose it means something. In the Catholic sense, disgusting and delusional ideas about the meaning of human suffering have a redemptive purpose, a moral masochism.

Focus, focus! I wanted to bring this back around to examining why masochism and being on the receiving end of pain is much more accepted and understood(?) than sadism. I’ve thought about this for a very long time, as a sadist who lives in the world — as I have received weird Twitter replies about how I’m a sicko for enjoying hurting people, as I have read books focused on SM that seem to skip completely over emotional perspectives of sadists, and as those against SM frame masochists as the victims of evil psychopaths. Why does it seem like after all these years being on the sadist end of sadomasochism is still taboo?

Masochism as a concept seems to imply consent. As such, it is almost peripheral to violence. Even if someone is being beaten to a bloody pulp, they are asking for it with a smile on their face. How bad can that be? We can even talk about the healing and transformative aspects of pain on purpose, etc etc. Even if someone doesn’t want to be hurt, they may be able to understand, and can perhaps see this practice as one of empowerment by intellectualizing it.  As the book Hurts So Good suggests, masochism is everywhere! Thus, it may be easier for the average person who loves something as mundane as hot sauce to vaguely understand the sexual masochist. Masochists are practicing embodiment. Masochists are ritualizing pain. Masochists are perverting an apparatus of control. 

“Masochism takes control of the technologies that produce subjectivity as cultural stereotypes. It develops elaborate strategies for framing the collapse of socially sanctioned identities, and it performs this collapse as a pleasurable abandonment of identity. These strategies aim specifically to pervert the disciplinary technologies our culture uses in its everyday operation. Sadomasochism produces subjectivity through the performance of a sexual technology. It relies upon the pleasurable disappearance – and controlled reappearance – of the subject.”
-John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism

I find that sexual (I must keep saying consensual!) sadism, on the other hand, doesn’t ever get the social privilege of being on the periphery of violence. Consensually inflicting pain onto someone else means you are the violence, buddy! Unlike my painslut pervert friends who had masochistic tendencies from a young age, Sid from Toy Story usually doesn’t grow up to be a hot ethical dom top. Quite unimaginative and unfair, I do protest. Perhaps it’s the early psychoanalytic theories (Freud, which I will admit to only having read second hand) that posit sadism as a masculine drive and masochism as a feminine drive that have fucked us all up. I won’t say that aggression isn’t characteristically masculine, but also it doesn’t have to be. How do we get to a place of understanding (consensual) sexual aggression as neutral and, dare I say good, in the right context. 

When I Google sadism, I get a mix of results about murderers and sexual sickos, purely negative vibes. Aggressive behavior, sadistic aggression, inflicting pain for pleasure, The Dark Triad,  etc. I learned, just now, the idea of the everyday sadist. Sadists are not just serial killers, they walk among us and they get pleasure from watching others in pain! My innocent girlfriend who laughs for hours at videos of children face-planting, by definition, is an everyday sadist! Psychologically unstable! I’m honestly not sure what I expected given this niche topic of research, but I am still left disappointed.

Maybe I can’t explain with science what happens in my brain when I’m giving someone the pain they have asked for. It would be cool to understand more about why I find such pleasure in making hot babes writhe in pain, why I love sinking my teeth into juicy thighs until they bruise (ok we’re getting horny again!). To physiologically define the joy in the feedback loop of hand, to cane, to ass, to scream, to moan, to ears, to brain, to pussy, and back to hand feels like an impossible feat. I can only share my perspective on how fucking wild it is that people trust me to do things like put a knife to their throat so they can feel turned on by the possibility of death. Me, the death bringer! The smell of fear mixed with desire is intoxicating. In a way I get to play God, not the biblical vengeful version but a new type of deity who feeds off the loving offerings of screams and tears. 

Do sadists have a God complex? Is this all about ego? How do I explain to people outside of my insular community that consensual sadism is not an antisocial behavior, in fact it is intersubjective. Bodies in sync feeding into each other’s desires—I know that they know what my face looks like while I’m watching the first drop of blood exit their body, and no one else in the world but us exists. They know that I know that they know that this is an act of love.