cw: assault
at what age do you start listening to your intuition? you’ve known about it for years, it’s that voice you’ve been rudely ignoring at no service to yourself. the nagging voice that invites you to perhaps have better boundaries. the thing telling you someone is a bad idea no matter how good they are at meeting your needs right now. somewhere between action and stasis there’s that comfortable spot where you allow things to happen that don’t feel wonderful but that aren’t so bad. as my friend jade always says “it’s fine.” well, when do we finally learn that it is not, in fact, fine?
for me - it was only about two years ago. i’ve done this thing up until recently that is fairly common. i continue dating someone even though something feels off. i make excuses like “it’s not that serious” or “i’m having fun” or “literally any reason.” - when i could actually just not. some of the questionable dating i’ve done has even been polyamorous, so it’s not that i’m afraid of being alone. my self-worth has always been great, but my boundaries - not so much.
to thicken the plot - the thing about me is that i haven't even dated that many people. first of all, i hate dating. it’s awful and exhausting and it’s hard to tell if someone likes me for me or is just using me to get their kinky fantasies fulfilled. i need to date people i’m very sexually attracted to and i’m actually not that attracted to many people. on top of that, once i am attracted to someone, i need to know them fairly well before i even want to have sex with them. what if they have bad politics? what if they’re vanilla? what if they don’t like dogs? what if they’re... an abuser?
if bdsm has taught me anything, it’s that we need to vet our partners. being involved with an abuser is a very real fear of mine. while it has happened to me several times, i’ve walked away with only a scratch or two (physical or mental). among my friends and partners, i’ve been one of the lucky ones. i would go so far as to name this fear a preoccupation and also tell you that it started after i entered the kink scene and met/played/fucked people who i found out later were abusers. it’s scary, and how i interact with people now reflects both my experiences and the experiences of people i know and trust. there are many unanswered questions like - should we warn others? should we tell stories that aren’t ours? what is gossip and what is potentially life altering information? would people even listen or do they need to find out on their own? (more about this perhaps at another time)
it is quite frankly unconscionable that i have yet to deliver on any of the dyke drama this newsletter promised. the thing is, i don’t like telling stories about other people, and i haven’t had much of my own drama since i got good at boundaries and stopped letting a certain chaotic energy into my life. this story is important, though, in thinking about intuition, trust, how we allow not so bad things to happen to us and tell ourselves it’s fine (and by “we” i mean me).
it was 2015 and i was freshly out of a long and tumultuous relationship just trying to have some slutty fun. just a side note for any interested parties that i was working hard to manifest romantic relationships with femmes at this time in my life, which unbeknownst to me was a firehose that opened just a few months later. i met r on okcupid, a self identified “dainty prince” masc, very hot, a party animal, and several years younger than me. the universe has a habit of sending me extreme, life-of-the-party extroverts at specific times in my life when i need to be brought out of my shell. r was that person. i had seen him around at parties, he was a queer model, he was smart, and extremely charming.
i was a very different person then - this was at the tail end of my being ok with dating people brand new or unsure about polyamory. i was much less jaded, and much less busy. around this time i also met a lot of people who lied about how kinky they actually were. he was apparently “very kinky,” and said that he was a “boy” to his ex girlfriend/domme (read: actual child projecting mommy issues onto dates). to my credit, i was a lot less experienced at this time and didn’t know what to watch out for. while i was top-leaning and dominant-leaning, it wasn’t a fixed part of my identity.
on our second or third date we went to a show at silent barn and decided to leave early to get pizza across the street. we took our pizza to my car parked outside and started making out- our first kiss! about a minute in to making out, he stopped kissing me to reach across the seat and slap me across the face. it was the kind of slap i would give to someone that asked for it. it wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t not hard. i was wide-eyed and startled. up until this moment, the only person who had slapped me across the face non-consensually was my mother. he reacted to me reacting but before i could speak he said something like, “oh wow, i’m sorry, i don’t know what came over me, sometimes i get so passionate and lose control! i thought you said you were into that, though. right? you like it rough? ...”
in a brief, previous conversation around kink, i said that i liked rough sex. what i did not say, and what people who are well versed in kink and consent would know is that does not mean, “please, slap me across the face during our very chill first kiss in a semi-public location without asking me first.”
you can only guess how this relationship progressed. and yes, progress it did because of my aforementioned bad boundaries. there are juicy parts, and then there are juicier parts. let’s start with the juicy parts (shortened for newsletter). he was wildly unaccountable, which is how i finally solidified my profile of the tenderqueer. we had agreed that he was going to be my houseboy and every time i tried to give him chores to do, he would go mia and resurface hours later from some wild crisis- every single time! he would brag to me endlessly and in a misogynistic “bro down” type of way about all the femmes he was messaging or meeting while knowing that i was having trouble meeting dates. he would whisper really escalated and definitely never negotiated racialized dirty talk while we would make out (bbc stuff). i say make out because i don’t believe we ever really fucked - he wasn’t interested in getting me off but would come just from dry humping like a teenager. lastly, he would “borrow” my clothes and never return them.
we only dated for a few months, but ended up breaking up right before valentine’s day. he told me he wanted to hang out and take me out to dinner (i always paid for everything, so this would be a real treat). a few days before valentine’s day i checked in to confirm the loose plans we had made, and suddenly everything shifted. i was asking for too much. i don’t remember exactly, but i think my mention of an expectation caused him to tell me it was over.
the juicier part of this story is that maybe a year later, i heard from a friend that she overheard someone at a party talking about r and what an asshole he was. the friend connected us and we figured out that we were both dating him at the same time! he told me about them (as he always bragged about how many people he was dating), while he lied to them about being exclusive. he also slapped them across the face, used racialized dirty talk, and stole their clothes. in fact, he left one of the things he stole from me, a vegan leather chest harness, at their house!!
the juciest part of this story is that i soon discovered yet another friend who had also dated r. and we confirmed modus operandi - he slapped them across the face, used racialized dirty talk, and stole their clothes, too.
he has since left brooklyn. i heard he left town after too many people called him on his bullshit (surprise - there were more than just three of us). it is not the first time i’ve seen a serial abuser flee, as moving out of state is apparently easier than holding yourself accountable. last year i saw him on the street at art basel in miami, he was with a femme and he pretended not to see me. my blood boiled and i wanted so badly to warn her, i really wish i had. why would she trust the word of some scorned dyke on the street, when this babe on her arm is a seemingly stellar catch?
looking back at all the times i didn’t listen to my intuition because it was telling me he was bad - if i accepted that he was bad, that would mean that i would have to end it. if i ended it, i wouldn’t have the kind of fun i so desperately needed at the time. the trade wasn’t fair. there’s an excuse like this for every ignored red flag i’ve ever encountered no matter how small. i want to make it very clear that it is never our fault when people treat us badly, but i also believe that in many situations we have the power and the agency to not enable them. i didn’t know what boundaries truly meant until a few years ago, and i’m still learning every day. boundaries are how we protect ourselves from people like this. boundaries are why it takes me so long to decide if i want to date someone, the personal screening and vetting are ways i make it more difficult for someone to cause me harm. i call my dating style a “slow grow,” which lately has meant that i build trusting play relationships for almost a year before starting to date someone.
intuition and boundaries only take you so far. the bottom line is that no one is completely safe, and everyone has the capacity to cause harm. it’s both scary and also freeing to think of relationships in this way. scary because it makes it harder to trust people, but freeing in a way that’s humbling and humanizing to believe that no one is perfect, thus everyone is capable of redemption. there’s a lot more to be said about legacies of abuse, actual community, and what’s culminated into cancel culture. there are unfortunately more questions for which i haven’t found the answers. while we wade through nuance and try to hold our friends and lovers accountable for the harm they’ve caused, let’s keep in mind that the only person able to hold anyone truly accountable is ourselves.
here are some stellar resources by mia mingus on just that:
-the four parts of accountability
-the apology what and how