It is funny to me the ways in which my autistic challenges around food land differently in different spaces. This has been an intense and complicated roller coaster since I was a tiny child. This is relevant to kink mostly in as much as almost all of my earliest strong positive exposure to conscious sharing of food among adults was in kink settings.
I stopped going to church when I was in middle school. Most of my foster placements didn’t take me out into the community because I was an explosive, very difficult child. My mother, during the rare periods that I lived with her, never participated in anything in any community that I can remember. She was isolated and lonely and poor so her life with me involved a lot of stories about how good things had been when she was married. Back then she had friends and community and there were potlucks and all the kids on the blocks wanted her to make their birthday cakes because hers were the best.
She bought me shitty grocery store cakes that made me vomit. But hey, that just happened because I was ungrateful. I couldn’t possibly be having a physical reaction that was entirely out of my control, no I was just being rude to her with my constant ingratitude.
All of my feelings about food are wrapped up in all of my feelings about my mother and the kink community is a very interesting place to be dealing with different personality dynamics around food. For the whole rest of my life I am going to be grateful that I learned food sharing with the people I did it with. I know about the subtle quirks and preferences of almost every person I have ever prepared food for. For all of the years I was super active in the scene before I had kids (when my palate changed like whoa) I was on a pretty restricted diet. The list of things I would eat was much easier to contend with than even trying to list all of the things I wouldn’t eat.
People always made sure there was stuff for me. Even if they weren’t planning to eat it because it didn’t look very appetising to them, devoid of flavour as it was. I have very distinct memories of approaching a food set up with great trepidation and having someone wrap their arms around me and guide me over to exactly what had been made for me. I cried so many times. That right there made me feel more loved than any sexual experience I have ever had. Those people (because gender was not a factor–folks were all over the spectrum) made it very clear to me: *”I see you. I understand you. I’ve got you.”
The recreation events weren’t like that. My other hobbies didn’t do that. The parenting people did a different sort of dance around accommodating all needs because holy shit do homeschoolers have a whole dance around food needs. That shit is Tetris on a level that made me have to develop whole new neural pathways. That was so hard.
In the kink community it wasn’t hard. I had to learn how to talk about my body in order to be a safe person to play with. It was not ok that I had learned to dissociate all the time and I spent most of every single day feeling bad all the time. I had no ability to imagine a time when I did not feel on the verge of death. The sheer vigour of youth was pushing me still but I was very near the cliff where that wasn’t going to help me anymore.
My community members made me feel safe. That was not a feeling I had known in my life up to that point. Now that I am an adult I can describe my IBS troubles with great eloquence and fancy-pants words like “HPA axis disorder”. For a few decades all I could say was that everything burned. Of course people didn’t take this seriously, obviously I was just melodramatic. A whiner. I sat in the bathroom all day because I was lazy, obviously.
It couldn’t possibly be that I was sitting in the bathroom on the toilet rocking and crying because it burned so fucking badly All.The. Time. When all of your hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and your adrenal system develop in your brain from infancy through all of your childhood in settings that are violent physically, sexually, completely unstable in every metric you can imagine then a body is going to have a completely fucked up digestion system. It’s kinda like how I can watch someone pop up to have to run to the toilet every 45 minutes and go, “Ahh, early childhood sexual assault? Yeah.”
You want to know how I can talk about this easily and without shame? Because of the kink community.
I suspect that this happening in the groups with all ages are part of the reason that I never became particularly drawn to TNG groups. I guess I definitely already understand it isn’t universal. I stayed with the people who were 20, 30, 40, 50 years older than me because my experience of those kinky friends were that they genuinely wanted me to be around in the long run and that means I needed to take it seriously that things were done to me and I had to figure out how to fix what was broken. It didn’t matter that it was hard and that it would take a long time, they would be there. And the thing is–it’s not like this was one person who was all shiny and magical. It wasn’t. This built over years and it carried me through more than a decade of my life as the only support network I had.
Noah has done the vast majority of the heavy lifting on expanding my palate. He asked me if I would like to learn to like more food and I said yes. I will flat out admit that a lot of it has been the privilege of being able to spend a lot of discretionary money on food. He has spent 16 years taking me to fascinating restaurants and traveling the world to find out what food really tastes like in other places. I am a lucky fucking bitch and I know it. Now I know how to put things in my mouth without risking a panic attack because a texture is unfamiliar and my body cannot process that this thing is safe. It took years and a very gradual expansion of trust. This was the stage with learning how to make my mouth believe that food wasn’t trying to kill me.
Noah paid for the nutritionists who worked with me over time to slowly acclimatize my body to absorbing nutrients from food instead of flushing it out as fast as possible with as much acid as possible. It took years. People who have been with me for many years probably remember my elimination diet challenges. I still have the Poop Book notebook. Wasn’t that a fun adventure. This was the stage where I learned how to digest food. I struggle with feeling like it is deeply pathetic that I had to spend my late 20’s/most of my 30’s learning how to digest food but such is my fucking life.
The process of digesting didn’t stop with how to stop having agonizing pain that left me writhing on the floor trying not to scream from the pain of having large bulky items move slowly through my scar tissue laced intestine. It was a god damn nightmare. Do you know who emotionally supported me through that? The friends I made in the kink community. Especially the people who were older than me and who wanted me to be alive in this body for a very long time. They knew that the sooner I went through this the more years I’d have with actual quality of life.
It isn’t that things were perfect or that there were no problems in the community. Despite how much of my heart I left behind I had to go. So the good of being in California didn’t outweigh the bad.
I think about these things and I want to write them here because my experiences of food culture were such a big part of what made the bdsm community different from other hobbies I had. That is how bdsm/Leather crossed from being “those people you hang out with sometimes” to being my family. They wanted to know me. Nosey fuckers, I love it. We have to care about how our bodies are doing or we can’t keep doing this. This is a high intensity fucking sport, yo.
So that’s why I ask you so so so many questions about food. That’s why I want to hear all your stories about food. That’s why I want to find out what kind of food culture existed in your life growing up. That’s why I want to know what you prefer to drink and how do you feel about spice? It’s why I am so intense about figuring out how I can get as many servings of vegetables in front of you that you find palatable because I am in this for the long game. I’m only 41, I might know you for 30 or more years past this. I want you to still be alive and feeling good and having fun. So I want to know how I can make you feel like your needs are seen. Like it is important that you attain the best health you can in this life so your body can carry you to all sorts of wonderful debauched adventures.
I want to see you out fucking 3 hot people when you are your 70’s. Oh my god. There was this particular woman in the San Francisco community when I arrived. I was young enough that while we had a few very passing conversations she really didn’t have patience for my bullshit. I would watch her saunter around parties in her black mini-skirt and her black lace bra and her sensible kitten heels with two dudes who were in their 30’s on a leash behind her. The dudes were ripped as fuck. She had the most salacious, glorious smile I have ever seen. When I was 18 I decided I wanted to be her someday.
I’d like you to be there too. So, what kind of vegetables can I serve you today? Food is medicine. Food is magic. Food is what gives us the nutrients to build the cells and the tiny invisible to the eye specks that form the entity that is you. Food matters. Food is part of community.
I would like to be in a community with you. I don’t want you to be a commodity or a notch on a bed post. I want your whole being. I know it is a little weird. I never claimed to be normal.