Tag Archives: sexual dysfunction

Just keep swimming

Last night Noah was being a sensitive new age guy and he checked in if the current level of increase in meanness/friction on my cunt is a problem. He said he knows it is a lot compared to what had been happening and he just wants to make sure I’m ok.

I said, “Well I did tell you I’d be ok with you fucking me pretty much whenever and I’m still mostly initiating all of our sex. So mostly I’m thinking that you aren’t fucking me enough…. loser.” (We are having sex pretty much every day lately.)

He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Well! Ok then!” Then he ripped his pajamas off real fast and started poking at my clothes. So I undressed and we, like the fully mature people we are, proceeded to spend about 40 minutes rolling back and forth naked telling stupid jokes and not getting around to having sex.

Finally I said, “This is my downfall. I am too funny. You can’t bear the seriousness of fucking someone as funny as me–it might ruin the mood.”

Really it just felt like we were young again and we had all the time in the world to just enjoy being naked together and of course eventually we will get around to sex.. it’s inevitable. Also inevitable: when we did it was of course very fucked up roleplay about how to manipulate a child into not having the right vocabulary for even reporting sexual abuse. After all, he is just having me pray every night and giving me a relaxing massage.

I met Noah when he was 26, we spent his 27th birthday together. I was 22 when we met. On one hand I felt so very worldly when we met but now I look back on it and I giggle. What does it mean to be worldly anyway? I was in such a rush to gain “experience” as if that would somehow make my life better. In some ways it was a good thing.

I have friends who settled down permanently with the first or second person they ever dated or had sex with. Most of them have told me that they have mixed feelings about the fact that they have little or no sexual experience outside of this primary relationship. They feel like they don’t know as much about what they do or don’t like.

I’m sure there are people who are completely content with their one lifetime partner, but those folks don’t talk to me about it.

I have never had a moment of pause where I have thought “Oh no if only I had more experience with other people.” Sometimes I miss the hunt because I was good at it and it was fun, but that’s not the same thing. Really I’m not even sure if I would hunt the same way going forward in any case. My life is so different and the Jenga tower is somewhat precarious. I don’t have much time to give anyone and the community in Scotland is so small that hunting with my normal voraciousness would very quickly create a challenging situation. Even if you are being honest and up front, not as many people are happy to be part of a truly extensive network as you think.

It’s a rare person who appreciates the sort of woman who can cheerfully pick up 8 new partners in a weekend. Daddy James you are always and forever the best first date of my whole life. I love you so much.

When you are fucking a lot of people you find out very intimately about peoples’ prejudices. I firmly believe that anyone gets to dislike whatever they want. Depending on how you say that people often assume that you end up on the side of disliking something they are on and they freely explain in great detail.

I asked about whether the older people I know remember a time when things were less judgmental because I saw a comment on a buddy’s post from someone I don’t know (who is ironically, younger than me) who said that they are old enough to remember a time when people in the community didn’t judge and they accepted everyone.

People judge whores. People judge women who use the word whore for themself in complicated ways. I remain grateful for the sex workers in my life who were close friends when I was working through some of my really intense trauma who told me that whatever associations other people have with that word are not my problem. My experiences are mine and no one can take them away from me or say that I am not allowed to experience the world as I am. It’s really weird that my biological father gave me that gift. Apparently whore is a title that a man is allowed to gift to a small child and she can keep it absolutely forever no matter what anyone else thinks.

I think about the judgment that people pass because despite the press releases that the bdsm community likes to put out about how people in the bdsm community tend to have slightly higher than average EQ and they are not significantly more traumatized than the normal population…

I am a traumatized motherfucker. Much of what drives me to seek out predatory and vicious partners is not some abstract “I was born this way”; I was shaped by a monster. When I was young and in the scene I would occasionally hear outlandish stories about how the younger you were when you started being inculcated into “slave life” the better you will be for the rest of your life. There was a woman who claimed her family sold her into a bdsm slave family at 14. This was treated like a hot/good thing?

Yet in reality if the core of your sexuality is formed around extreme trauma and abuse and, frankly, brainwashing you make people fucking uncomfortable. The average person (even in the scene) you want to go play with and fuck is not able to handle even being too aware of the extent of extreme abuse that people like me live through. Because yeah I do want you to act that out with me. Yeah. I do want you to be that fucking evil.

My biological father held a gun to my head while raping me. If Noah wanted to do that we would have to do the scene on top of a Princess and the Pea pile of towels to catch the river of squirting I would do.

Because to be clear if you do to me what I like having done to me… you are going to have to sit real hard with the idea of whether or not you are a bad person. You are going to have to be ok doing fucked up shit to someone who has a documented police record of having incredibly fucked up shit done to them. You have to face it head on. You have to embrace it and really own it and be ok with the fact that other people are absolutely going to judge the fuck out of you if they find out what you do.

I am trickling out stories, yo. I know I have a new audience and I know that is pressure. I know that the Scottish people will get to know what I put out there in writing far faster than they will get to know me in person because I don’t leave the house that often. Nobody sees me week after week at a munch to get used to me slowly over time. I am going to be very much on the fringe for a long time, perhaps forever. Will I ever play publicly here? I don’t know.

I don’t particularly enjoy playing in the safe zone that I used to specifically inhabit in public play spaces. Well, I enjoyed it a lot more in the past but I don’t think I could get back to that headspace. I want to play for me now, not for advertising for the maximum number of potential partners. And I am fucked up.

I watch the age players defend that it isn’t about sex. Oh. Well sometimes it is. And sometimes it is about specifically degrading a little and making it very bad for them.

I watch pet play folks get upset about people bringing up bestiality. Oh. Well… I don’t think I could cross the line with an actual animal for all kinds of very good reasons but the stories are fucking hot. Roleplaying it? Fuck yeah. The more humiliating and disgusting the better.

Rand went down a list of things that most people would reject and it was a challenge for me to find a true hard limit on any of it. Much of it I want to be verbal/roleplay–there are no actual children involved in my sex life and there hasn’t been since I was the child and there never will be again.

I remember saying, “No children, no animals, no dead people other than that let’s talk.” But really if you want to roleplay any of those scenarios… ok.

I don’t find bodies off putting. I don’t find bodily functions to be deal breakers. I don’t have many limits or reasons I will tell someone to stop something in the abstract. There are days when I can’t do a certain thing for a transient reason and there are tons of obstacles to my having space and safety for most of them but that’s not the same thing.

When people get very upset about wanting to get rid of all predators in the scene I can’t help but wonder… but do you really want to? If you do then who are people like me going to play with?

Neither Noah nor I would be as good at crossing social more lines and being degrading and violent and vile as we are if we had never gone too far.

I always say that you learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing things right. I have made a lot of mistakes. A tremendous number of mistakes. I am sure that there are at least a couple of people who think of me and feel really bad sometimes. I know Noah has at least one woman who saw him in her nightmares. She came to me to process it because that is exactly the sort of thing that someone would do, right? I told her that I would support her in any way I could. She was entitled to say or do anything she needed to do to communicate to Noah how badly he fucked up. If she wanted him to pay for her therapy that would be completely legitimate. She wrote some very intense letters. I read them with Noah because he needed to understand fully how he fucked up. I am still friends with her and she says things are much better now. She’s happy.

You learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing it right. I know how badly I can hurt someone. Noah knows how badly he can hurt someone. Hell, he knows how badly he can hurt me. He fucked up really badly in the first six months of being married by the choice of when to rape me. It caused an extra layer of trauma that had to be unpacked.

Do you know how hard it makes me come when he hurts me and tells me that he is so glad that he gets to rape me decade after decade? It is literally completely fucked up. This is vanilla-land “You should run, not walk away from this man.”

Instead I am no longer allowed to say “Jesus Christ” because the only God I am allowed to worship is Noah so it has to be his name I say.

“The difference is consent” except when there is no consent and sometimes that is far better.

“We evaluate the risks to make safe choices” except when we totally fucking don’t and we flail and we hurt people and we traumatize them and then we put our finger on that trauma and push down a little harder because the bruise was starting to fade and we can’t have that.

I don’t do safe things. I do things that any reasonable therapist would tell me is a bad fucking idea and I am totally risking cracking my psyche wide open. Yes. The best orgasms live there.

Bdsm is not therapy. Bdsm is a place where fucked up people can do very fucked up things. I treat the bdsm community like the sea and I am a shark looking for a bigger shark. When I encountered stingrays and eels and angler fish I wished them well and kept looking until I found someone who could appreciate the kind of fucked up I am. Someone with just enough training in mental health to be able to properly enjoy fucking with someone who is as damaged as I am. I found a megalodon; just think of all the nice people I am keeping safe by keeping him off the market.

Noah didn’t pick someone who compulsively cannot say no to sex even when I really should because of physical damage by accident. He is a fucked up person. I mean that in the very best of ways. He is brilliant and he can hold many contradictory truths in his mind at the same time. He deeply respects me and he wants me to be a big person in the world taking up space. He is the reason I have most of the self confidence I have to just go do whatever I want. I used to doubt myself so much. I don’t have time anymore. He also wants to hurt me emotionally in ways I won’t shake off. He wants to specifically drill down on damage created by my father.

I can’t wait until he can go back to cutting on me.

In many ways it is much better for everyone that Noah put the choke chain on me. Scotland is a small sea and we are very big sharks.

Like a monster uncurling from hibernation

For most of the time I have had children my sex drive has been utterly wrecked. I have no way of knowing how much is purely biological (for much of history it’s been “normal” for carrying parents to have a new child approximately every four years) as I have started pulling out of the dip when my body is around 4.5 years postpartum both times. Of course I do have a smaller gap in between my oldest kids, but that wasn’t about “whoops I’m pregnant because I was just having sex I wanted”. Naw. Despite my outrageous whoring around I have only ever been pregnant when I intended. I consider myself both A) a stringent user of birth control and B) a completely lucky bitch. [I tell my kids: if you are not ready to be a parent each person participating in sex needs to have birth control in use every single time.] I mean, let’s be real that I was stupid a few times and I just got lucky. But it was a very few times out of a really lot of times of being stringent.

Anyway. Yeah. I think there is a lot of basic biology. Did you know that your body is not 100% postpartum for four years because it takes that long for all of your organs to fully get back into a non-pregnant state? Fucking wild.

There was also a really strong emotional aversion when I was newly a parent that I don’t think was just part of the biological. It took a long time to unpack all of my trauma around sex in a house with children. That was really hard for him and me and getting through it just about wrecked us. I really struggled with it being ok to be touched in any kind of romantic way if a child I was responsible for was even in earshot. I was too deep in abreaction to find any kind of enjoyment there.

So as I was saying I seem to be in an uptick, by which I mean occasionally Noah is all “Yeah….. I literally can’t more.” I feel victorious. It’s reminding me of all the reasons that Noah is my person even though we still have challenges. His cock is fucking amazing. Like, he has the Baby Bear of cocks. Just big enough to hurt when we want it to but it doesn’t have to hurt. Fits nicely in all of the places. Incredible stamina for someone who has been in an almost complete drought for about five years.

Not to mention that he knows exactly how to be mean to me. When we started dating I told him I was looking for an abusive relationship with an on/off switch. He has been really freaking careful to stay in the off position for a long time.

He knows how to dance around my trauma like he is doing a polka on the head of a pin. He trusts me as an authority on a great many topics and he is openly deferential. He also fucks me raw and calls me every filthy name and he loves seeing me cry. He doesn’t use just any filthy names. He knows exactly which parts of my historical trauma will get me off instantly and which parts will get me off the bed and into the bathroom to curl into a ball and sob.

It’s not an adventure until someone is crying!

He knows me at my core in a way no person ever has or ever will. He has spelunked into every twisted corner of my deeply depraved brain. When I no longer have small children hopping into the shower with me on the regular he will go back to carving on me. The absolute hottest sex is the kind where one or both of you is dripping blood onto one another. Taking my blood and wiping it on his cock before putting it inside me is the best fucking feeling. And the taste! chef’s kiss Perfect.

Strange that I don’t like period sex. The friction is just utterly terrible and I end up with jagged awful tearing. Thanks you piece of shit motherfucker who wrecked my cunt before I could even go to fucking primary school. May your name be forgotten.

Anyway, Noah. He has studied me like I am his PhD topic. As my memory degrades he often remembers my stories better than I do. I only believe him when I wrote it down somewhere and I can go check. It was very useful that I wrote so many things down. He has read my entire archive I think 6 times? It isn’t obvious here on Fetlife but I used to blog a lot, including about my kink adventures. My whole archive is in the millions of words. The word count massively went up as I went through college. I can write a 20 page paper (including putting together all the bibliographical information) in about 10 hours once I’ve done the research. I had some stretches where I hit over 100,000 words in my blog in a couple of weeks.

And now my hands are shit. Whoops.

What I like about writing is that it allows me to think through my priorities and go back and forth dithering about what matters.

Noah has supported just about every crazy thing I have ever done. He is the reason I have written books and painted giant murals and created hundreds of square feet of tile mosaics inch by inch. Noah has kissed me goodbye cheerfully every single time I have wanted to run off and have an adventure, whether it was for a few days or weeks or half a year. He holds down the fort and makes sure that things in the house keep going the way I prefer more or less entirely because deferring to my preferences is so automatic at this point.

I met him almost 19 years ago. He was the first person who said, “What happened to you that made you end up like this?” He is the reason I have any coherency in my internal narrative, because he is always my assumed Primary Reader.

He wants to read all of it. No matter how cruel or angry or bitter or nasty I am being. If I keep a separation between my thoughts and my behavior he is happy, and even prefers, to know all the shitty thoughts. My thoughts do not define me; my behavior does. He wants to know how many shitty thoughts I have on the way to manifesting the behavior I do. I haven’t been telling him lately for a whole lot of reasons.

There is this thing about kink. I cannot be a closed box and do this in a healthy way. I tried having an M/s relationship that did not allow for navigating around my trauma. That went pretty poorly and while he was absolutely the best/most healthy relationship of my life at that point I have some deep sadness about some of the permanent harms he caused my body.

So if I want to do this, if I want to let the monster out and fight and lose and hurt and still be ok at the end of it I have to start writing again. He has to know what I am holding on to control of by tip of my fingernails. Following my brain is like trying to binge a new Netflix series every day for a month. It’s really hard to keep all the storylines straight.

He will do it. He will draw fucking diagrams if he has to. He thinks I am worth it. I see the overwhelming magnitude of work he puts into being in a relationship with me. His online organising system is kind of terrifying and he archives everything. He manages his own neurodiversity through a rigid knee jerk response to the system he has in place. He has scripted himself. And he manages me like he manages when to go check the oil in the tank.

It’s kind of overwhelming looking at just how much work he has put into me. He has iterations of the recipes he has refined over the years based on feedback because he wants to cook for my palate. I think he even has lists of gifts he has given me for holidays with how I responded. I’m not fucking kidding when I say I am his PhD.

I may miss the hunt but Noah is my heart and my soul and the only happy family I have ever had.

Did I mention his dick is perfect? And when I tell him that I want him to turn on the abusive switch he barely hesitates. I am enjoying life a lot more recently.

M/s, sexual dysfunction, and healing

When I showed up in the bdsm scene as a fresh shiny 18 year old I was still reeling heavily from my childhood. My primary childhood rapist had been dead for less than two years. He and my brother killed themselves in a 3 month span when I was 16-17. I had been out of my abusive home of origin for less than a year.

I spent a lot of time cutting myself and I liked to burn myself and I hit my head on concrete. I engaged in extremely risky promiscuous sex. I would let almost anyone who asked politely hit me even if I didn’t think they would be safe.

I entered into my first M/s contract when I was 20. My Owner had been my boyfriend/Dominant for a while. My Owner wasn’t what I would call an emotionally supportive guy. He was not up for talking about my trauma or mental illness much. That was supposed to be kept off screen. Mostly he wasn’t even aware of my self harming because he didn’t want to be.

There were a few aspects of our relationship that were really important for my life and development. I think I have most of the executive functioning I have because he trained me. He taught me a lot about following through and executing on plans. He taught me a lot about financial solvency. He taught me about boundaries and agreements and ONLY saying you will do exactly what you will follow up and do.

I believe with all my heart and soul that my relationship with him was my first significant non-abusive relationship. Even though he spent a lot of time hitting me and objectifying me. He did it in ways we talked about very carefully and he absolutely never crossed a stated boundary. He’s a really good guy and I’m going to be grateful for the rest of my life that I got to spend the 4 out of the first 5 years of being an adult with him. I’m in a much better place now than I could have been without him.

What he couldn’t help me with in any way shape or form was my enormous dissociation problem nor my extreme sexual dysfunction. Mostly he didn’t have sex with me much… I think in part because he isn’t all that motivated by sex and in part because he damaged me internally almost every time we had sex (he had an absolutely enormous cock) and I think that was something he felt bad about but we didn’t really talk about it.

Fast forward to now. I’ve been married for 11 years. About a year ago my husband and I decided it was time for us to move forward with the M/s part of our relationship. When my husband asked me to marry him he asked me to be his wife and to be his slave. I told him I could be his wife but neither of us were ready for M/s together and we needed to figure out a bunch of shit together before we did that.

So we waited 10 years. I like to pretend this was us being responsible and trying to get to know one another. In reality it’s more complicated than that.

My husband doesn’t have a lot in common with my former Owner. He’s intensely interested in helping me emotionally process. He has training as a hypnotherapist and I would say that in the past 11 years we have spent hundreds of hours talking about my various psych problems and my history. He’s the only person who has ever been all that interested in me or in why I am so fucked up. He makes me feel seen and valid and important in a way I haven’t ever felt in my whole life. My husband is awesome.

But sex has continued to be complicated. I’m still very damaged internally. My cunt was shredded over and over throughout my life starting when I was a baby. My cunt isn’t in great shape. Two vaginal births have… strangely helped and hurt at the same time. A lot of scar tissue was broken up in the process of delivery. But I almost died because my cunt was not real able to function the way it was supposed to and I hemorrhaged very badly.

For a lot of our marriage we have both tried very hard to make one another happy. We are in what psychologists like to call a “repair marriage” where we both showed up intensely fucked up and we are trying to consciously help one another become healthier, more whole people. Mostly this is going pretty well. Except when it blows up like a fucking wild fire because we are both damaged people and that shit happens.

For many years I have operated under the assumption that my husband married me in large part because I spent my childhood with my parents actively telling me that marriage meant you were a permanent whore and you never got to say no to sex again.

I have a hard time believing anyone would want me for anything else.

But my cunt is uhhhhh damaged. Severely. That damage is a constant problem and it always has been. Sex that is barely too rough can cause significant re-tearing and sometimes bleeding. And I don’t mean rough sex. I mean if I am .00001 ounces too low in moisture for lubrication.

I’ve spent the vast majority of my life with my cunt burning like fire every minute of the day and night. Because I chase sex like my life depends on it. Because what else am I good for?

Last year I hit a wall with my husband where I couldn’t continue to do what I had been doing with him to manage. I don’t do most of the forms of self harm I used to engage in. I don’t cut myself, I don’t burn myself, I stopped beating my head… the only drug I use is pot and that’s with many doctors telling me that I MUST KEEP USING IT. It’s the most effective medication for my complicated array of mental and physical issues. I need medication. It’s not optional.

So I have worked hard on getting rid of most of my dysfunctional coping methods. That’s good! But what do I do now when I feel completely flooded and unable to cope? Well last year I tried to lean more heavily on my excellent dissociation ability and I asked a bunch of my nice friends to hit me and fuck me a bunch. They did. It was fun and I thank y’all for that.

My husband flipped out. That was… not a way he was ok with me coping and we’ve had a rough year since then processing all the damage I did to our relationship. Damage I did in part because I was trying to figure out how to twist myself into pretzels so I could meet needs of his that were hurting me really badly.

Now we’ve had over a year in a row of a lot of screaming matches. It’s been hella festive and hard. Why did we pick this fucking year to be like, “Fine. It’s M/s now or never?”

Because making optimal choices is not my strong suit.

Frankly having the first rule in our M/s contract be that I have to prevent him from damaging me is… quite the head fuck.

It means I am having to talk very explicitly about the extend of the damage I have sustained over 34ish years of harming my cunt. It means that I have to get very loud and aggressive about I CANNOT JUST BE AVAILABLE FOR SEX WHENEVER YOU WANT IT. THAT IS NOT OK.

Because I can’t. I am not physically not emotionally capable of doing that in a way that is even remotely healthy for me.

I have been struggling to carry the amount of pain I feel for my whole life. I have wanted to die for more than 30 years. I try year by year to reduce how much pain I’m in so it is less of a burden, so I can carry it longer. But it’s very hard.

Before some fucking asshole tells me to see a therapist… I’ve been in therapy for 33+ years. I’ve seen more than 35 counselors/psychologists/psychiatrists. I currently have a large and complex medical team who all talk to one another about my shit. My kids are in therapy. We go in and out of marriage counseling. My husband has seen therapists. We see a family therapist. Keep your obvious unhelpful advice to yourself, m’kay?

Suicidality is a coping method. It’s not an ideal one. It sucks. It hurts me and it hurts everyone around me. But I’m coping as absolutely best as I can. My medical team tells me constantly that the amount of progress I have made and continue to make is just about miraculous. People like me usually just die. I’m doing really well for where I started. Even if I do still feel like a festering pile of shit.

My husband wants to keep me for as long as he can. That means helping me figure out how to be ok with being inside this brain and inside this body because that’s the path my life just has to take.

That means we have to figure out how to have sex without hurting me. As a submissive masochist that’s a very hard thing for me to demand. It feels like a very wrong thing to ask for. It feels like I am bad and selfish and cheating him out of what he deserves for putting up with my stupid self.

But I have to change this. No matter how hard it is. Because this right here is a serious problem.

Some day I have to decide that the health of my cunt matters or all the work I’m doing to try and convince my body that I am safe and I should stop the hypervigilance and constant paranoia about who is going to hurt me next is wasted time and energy.

I don’t have so much time and energy that I can afford to waste it at this point. I’m so tired.

Not to mention how fucking expensive this god damn medical care is. I feel like such a waste of resources.

I like to be hit. But there are a lot of limits around what I can bear and still function.

I like sex. But there are a lot of limits around what I can bear and still be functional.

It is very hard to believe I am worth this much consideration and effort.

But he keeps telling me he wants to keep me.

Pieces of dysfunction.

Mostly I keep my crazy ranting on my blog. I figure the few people who want to know my wackiness follow me over there and writing on a more public site is… I don’t know… forcing my insanity down peoples throats. But the thing is, the stuff I have to work on changing next is stuff that is rooted in my sexuality. That’s a journey that has been highly shaped by folks who hang out here. So once in a while my insanity will leak out a bit here.

I’ve worked pretty hard on changing my perception of myself over the years. I no longer believe I am worthless. I have substituted the belief that I am an incredibly effective tool. I know how to do a lot of different kinds of work and when I show up to do work… I get a lot done. I have developed quite a bit of pride in how effectively I can get work done over a broad swath of types of work. I’m not a one trick pony.

My family wanted me to perceive myself as stupid but all of the GATE testing when I was a kid and grown ups going “Holy crap this kid is SMART” means that their attempts to make me think I was stupid just kind of failed. I’m brilliant and I’m comfortable with acknowledging that. The rate at which I read complicated non-fiction books helps me not ever succumb to the belief that I might be stupid. But I have to keep working consciously on expanding what I know or I would start chanting this at myself. I view smart as something that has to be constantly worked on or it doesn’t count.

I could go through a long list of specifically triggering things I’ve worked on, but the problem that keeps coming up and I just can’t fucking deal with it in a rational way… is what I was born to be.

Let me explain. My father raped my mother when she knew she was fertile and she didn’t want to have more kids. He wanted to make another kid to rape. He was already raping the children they had. Like a true pedophile, gender wasn’t that important to my father.

So from when I was a tiny baby the story I was told about my existence is that I was made so that men would have more holes to use and how I felt about that really didn’t matter.

This is the problem I keep coming back to. This is the core belief I have not been able to shake or move or change in years of trying. This is what I am here for. It doesn’t really matter if it feels good to me or if I like it or if I want it. That’s why I am here. It is literally why I was made.

I don’t know how to alter these wires in my brain so that I stop giving a shit what my father’s intentions were and start feeling like I get to define what I am here for.

This piece is just sticky as hell and I have not figured out how to change it. This is what brings me to my knees over and over sobbing and feeling like I need to die to get away from the terrible burden of being responsible for taking more and more and more pain inside my body.

Even when my partners (my husband most of all) have tried to figure out how to fuck me without hurting me we always run up against this strong limitation that I can’t really talk in the moment about sex hurting my cunt. I dissociate away from that so fast I am literally physically incapable of talking when it happens. Even though I’ve done decades of work on trying to fix this.

I’ve fixed a lot of pieces of this. But this spot still persists and I have not yet figured out how to rewire this in my brain.

I can write about it when it’s not happening. I can barely speak out loud about this topic without melting down into tears or screaming swear words like FUCK YOU FOR HURTING ME. Which is not all that productive.

I continue to be impressed with my husband’s persistence in wanting to help me deal with my laundry list of problems.

I sabotage efforts to make sex not hurt me. Because I have this internal motivation that I have to be providing a lot of sex, even if it is damaging me and I have to initiate even when I’m in pain and….

I know I create a lot of this problem with my utter unwillingness to act like pain in my cunt is worthy of acknowledgment in the moment. There were a few times when I was very young when I mentioned that it hurt to partners and the response was a solid wall of “So?” and I just completely lost the ability.

The kinds of 25 year olds who like to fuck 12 year olds really don’t care.

This internal belief, that fucking is literally why I exist, is why I push so hard for sex with so many people. I have an internal programming that dictates that I must ask for sex. Because this is why I exist. To give this experience to people who want it.

This has gotten more complicated as my partner has gone through a shift from actively wanting polyamory when we met to very actively wanting mainly monogamy with very rare occasions of group sex.

Fitting into the expectations that are currently held for me takes a lot of work. I’ve adapted as best I can. It’s not always easy. But the good I get from being part of this family is so breathtaking. I get to belong somewhere. People care when I’m crying. People care about me in this house. I am important to them. It’s worth a lot of pain and suffering to try and deal with more layers of my mental illness to try and stay here for more of this.

Recently I went through a multiple month period where I genuinely didn’t want to die. That is the longest I can remember feeling like that in my entire life. I have always wanted to die. That has been the drumbeat chasing me through life for just about 30 years now. “I should die because this hurts too fucking much.” I want more of the not-wanting-to-die feeling. And I have to change this belief to get there.

This is tricky because I partially married my husband because he has the highest sex drive of anyone I ever seriously dated. He’s been the only one who wanted to keep up with what I wanted to initiate.

But a lot of what I initiate hurts me. And then there are waves of consequences.

This is so unfair.

It is desperately unfair to my husband and frankly it isn’t fucking fair to me either. It is fucking shitty being in my head and in my body. It isn’t anyone’s fault at this point that it sucks so much to be inside of me… but it’s a fact.

One of my buddies idly mused that I get a lot of self esteem from my interactions with my children.

Children are the only people I know how to interact with without feeling like I am failing in not offering sex. That’s the only time I feel like it is completely appropriate for me to not be offering sex. It’s safe in a way nothing and no adult ever is.

I don’t ask everyone for sex all the time for a variety of reasons (I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be asked, I’m pretty sure my husband would flip out, etc) but I have had to grow up and work on my boundaries to get to this point. It took a fair bit of maturing before I understood that my father was lying and not everyone wanted that from me.

Thanks to all the folks who have skillfully and tactfully turned me down over the years. I’m glad you didn’t follow that up with refusing to know me because I was so rude/tactless/gross/insert word of choice.

I’ve tried to grow up as fast as I have been able. I’m a lot closer to my goal of “grown upness” than I actually believed I would make it to… but I’m not there yet. I’m hoping I manage around the time my 9 year old makes it to adulthood.

What am I here for?

That’s this huge existential question, right? I’m super partial to the work of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist who went through the Holocaust. He wrote the book Man’s Search For Meaning. His general hypothesis is that folks can survive any horror in life if they have something they believe in and it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be “I want to see my wife/husband again”. That kind of belief is enough. If you believe that your love for someone else is your reason for continuing to be alive then you can make it enough to see you through anything.

I can’t control why I was made. I can’t control the intentions behind my makers.

But why do I stay alive?

Maybe that needs to be the focus of the next stage of work. I can’t change what I was made for or whether I did my best to live up to that for the first few decades of my life.

But why now?

I feel really guilty that a lot of why I’m staying alive at this point is a science experiment. Will I be a good enough mother that my children will want to know me when they are adults? Am I capable of treating them in a way that will cause them to want to know me?

I feel guilty about this because I feel like I “should” pick something that is more oriented towards my husband and… that’s different. It’s really complicated that I already feel like I have failed at being a good wife and I feel like there is no walking back from that. He’s not leaving because I’m better than nothing but I will never make it to good. I can’t hang my hat on that in this life.

Ok, so “I am bad” and “I am a monster” are strongly tied in with what is causing me these eternal problems.

It is hard because my husband is having a hard time with how much the shift into being a mother has derailed a lot of the hypersexuality and a lot of my strong need to be hit so much. I’m boring now.

I feel like I am bad for even trying to work towards a future where my cunt will hurt less because that will mean I am not meeting his expectations for how often he wants to get laid.

And the cycle continues.

Evolving sexual dysfunction

I’ve been documenting the intense pain I feel in my cunt for over a decade and a half. It’s not… news. It’s a fact of my life. I’m 36 and I wasn’t aware for the first several decades of my life that it was weird that I thought cunts were supposed to burn and be in terrible pain most of the time. Oh. What do you mean your body doesn’t feel like it hates you all of the time?

I’ve had a lot of sex even though it hurts. Sometimes the fact that it hurts is part of the reason I seek out the sex, it’s a form of self-harm that people don’t question in the same way that they question me when I open myself up with a scalpel. Oh, you’re hypersexual? That’s fun! Sorta.

But I’ve hit this point in the evolution of my mental illness and suicidality where I need to reduce how much ambient pain I feel in my body. I can’t cope the same way I used to. And there are these people who would be devastated for the rest of their lives if I killed myself so I need to find some kind of way to be in less pain.

I see all the doctors and health practitioners to manage my fibromyalgia and other physical problems that can be managed.

How do I get my cunt to stop hurting? That’s… that’s going to be a big deal.

I’m not in the kind of marriage where declaring my cunt off limits semi-permanently would work out. I’m also not allowed to manage the pain in my cunt by doing the hyper-sexual thing so that my cunt becomes numb and it’s easier to dissociate. The more sex I have with lots of people the less I am capable of noticing the pain in my cunt. It’s not that it is gone… it is that my brain puts it in a compartment and I’m not allowed to look at it in the same way. It’s not a great long-term coping strategy because I cause physical damage as I use it.

Most of my life has been me flip flopping back and forth between various forms of self-harm trying to do slightly less damage with each change. I’m still not sure how to fix this problem without switching to something else that will cause a different kind of damage.

The intensity of my current suicidal jag combined with where I otherwise am in life stage events mean I have to make some progress on this issue that has haunted me since I was a toddler.

I have to make progress on this idea of my body being worthless and only existing for other people to hurt for their pleasure. Yeah yeah masochism/submission/whatever. I need some god damn limits. Only it’s hard to defend a self you don’t believe in. It’s hard to act like you have self worth when you are acting on issues where you have not been allowed to have the word no be effective.

It’s not that I can’t defend myself against anything. It’s that I have gaps in my sense of self where I can’t defend those gaps. Mostly I’m a wildly confrontational person. But not when it comes to defending my cunt.

I gave up that battle as hopeless decades ago. My opinion about what happened to my cunt mattered so little for so long.

But that has to change and it has to change inside of me before I can change how I let people treat me. I don’t know how to think of myself as someone worth defending, not like that.

This is really hard.

Reinventing yourself

People who have known me since I was a kid tell me that I don’t seem like the same person any more; I have changed so much. I changed a lot in my time in the scene, then being a teacher was a huge shift, being a parent has kind of forced me to complete a lot of huge seismic level differences in my life.

For the first few years I had kids I went through a Madonna/whore problem where my body stopped wanting sex or bdsm. It was the way that my brain managed to pick a path through my personal history of having no healthy boundaries around sex. It wasn’t a healthy response because it was bad for my marriage.

But I grew up watching all of the adults in my family have sex. I needed to have some kind of shift in my brain that ensured that my children would not see me have sex. My kids have still never walked in on me having sex and I’ve been doing this gig almost a decade. It is a huge accomplishment for someone with my background.

I think that my libido partially shut off because that was a lot of what I saw happen to my mom’s life. She had a few boyfriends (all of whom I saw her have sex with) and she realized that I was acting out a WHOLE LOT and she… shut it down and to the best of my knowledge has never had sex again. I think she stopped when I was around 10. That was a quarter of a century ago. I’m pretty sure my mom has been celibate because she decided she didn’t know how to have a healthy sex life.

She might be right. She picked some awful people.

I feel this kind of long drawn out pleasure and shock that the vast majority of people I slept with are really awesome people and they are still all invited to my house if I have a Christmas party. Only a few people have fallen off the list because mostly… gosh I picked good people.

I read in a book about postpartum recovery that it takes a body 4 years to fully reset after having a baby. My libido came back like a sledge hammer about 5 years after having kids. 4-5 years is a natural child spacing in nomadic societies so it isn’t that shocking that my body picked that window for saying, “Moar seks please.”

It’s been complicated since then. My poor husband has adjusted from the extreme hypersexuality I experienced when we first got married and before our marriage to me shutting down completely to me being a bitch and fucking lots of people as my libido exploded and… now I’m pregnant again.

What is going to happen next?

I don’t know but healthier sex has to be part of this experience.

It is complicated for a masochist to stop something because it hurts. But there are kinds of pain that are positive/emotionally expressive for me and there are kinds of pain where I shut down my brain and go to a bad place. There are kinds of pain that increase my general feeling that I should die because I have no other escape from pain in this lifetime.

My kids and my husband tell me all the time that they want me to live for A VERY LONG TIME and I’ve tried to change how I live to reflect the fact that they don’t want me to die young.

I have to figure out how to convince my body that I can be in less pain. (Fibromyalgia makes this super complicated.) I have to figure out how to stop shutting down my self-protection mechanisms during sex. Because the specific pain I have during vaginal sex sometimes (it’s not all the time) is a problem. It is directly tied into the abuse from my father. It is a mainline to my internal reaction that I was born from rape; I was born to be raped; that is all I should deserve to expect until I die.

I have changed so much about my destiny. I didn’t think I would ever have a forever home. I didn’t think I would ever be part of a family.

I have a really cool family. I mean, we are all flaming weirdos… but we like each other a lot and we spend a lot of time together and it is all so intensely positive…

I didn’t think someone like me would ever get this far, let me tell you. But I did it.

My current shrink is probably the most bdsm aware/positive shrink I’ve ever seen. They suggested that I’m going to have to face my dissociation head on and in their opinion I am going to have to do it within the structure of my M/s relationship.

Now that’s some awesome feedback to get from a shrink. I’ve never had a shrink talk so specifically about the difference between therapy and therapeutic and bdsm can be so very therapeutic…

I know. I used to not be able to set any boundaries at all with my body. Bdsm taught me how. My beautiful friends and play partners taught me how. Very therapeutic.

It is complicated on so many because having my husband hit me a lot is different from having my lovely friends hit me a lot. My husband is the only person on this god-forsaken planet who has given me any real safety. It’s complicated when he hits me. It isn’t that I never like it. It’s that there are so many layers of psychological events that happen around the physical events that… it’s hard to manage that and bounce back into my life.

My life is very constrained. I have to “behave” and project a kind of behavior that is very hard for me. I believe that children learn primarily through modeling and if I want to show my kids making good choices I have to make good choices and I’m really more inclined towards being a fuck up and doing everything wrong.

But the children. Sigh.

My kids are the reason I get up in the morning. My kids are the reason I put breathtaking amounts of effort into being a healthier person. My kids are the reason I’m trying to learn how to stop hurting myself so that I can handle being alive long enough to watch them grow up.

I haven’t cut myself in over half a decade. I have burned myself in longer than that. I haven’t beat my head on concrete in a bit longer than that. I have made a lot of progress on my self mutilation.

I really want to know what happens to my kids. I think they are so neat. I feel so lucky that I get to have another child. These people are the best people in my life. I wake up and go to sleep seeing their smiling faces.

I did not believe that my children would like me. I expected to be the recipient of contempt and apathy. Instead my children adore me like I adore them. It feels like magic.

Is it magical enough to propel me through figuring out how to stop allowing more pain into my body that damages me?

This is what you’re for.

I don’t think that many people have their earliest memories of their parent involve their parent telling them that they exist to have people put things inside their body… but I’m not alone. I’ve talked to a fair number of people in my incest cohort and I’ll talk to more. I’m not alone. I’ve learned a lot from my cohort. I’ve learned that my father’s play book was not his alone.

There are a lot of really messed up people in this world. They hurt other people. I’m not saying that “all people who are abused grow up to abuse”… that’s patently untrue. It’s something like 80% of people who are abused do not grow up to hurt anyone. Most of us realize that hurting other people (nonconsensually) is a problem and we try to avoid doing it. But it’s a journey.

I was what folks euphemistically call a child predator. What that meant is I pushed for sex with other children who were really not ready. I sexually assaulted and raped people before I was 10 because I had no concept in my mind that people might even want to say no to what I was doing.

I found the bdsm community at 18. I am so grateful to you all.

I was sexually assaulted by people in the scene. Some of them fairly “big names”. Folks that people trusted. I also had some of the healthiest relationships of my entire life because of the scene. I learned from people who could clearly articulate their boundaries and limits and interests.

I am so inspired by those of you who know yourselves and you know what you like and don’t like. I’m better than I was but I’m still not where I want to get.

I’ve been in and around the bdsm community for going on 18 years now. I started out being uhhh… highly reactive. I would scream and rant and flail at people who crossed my boundaries because I didn’t have a less reactive way to deal with that. Thank you to all the kind people who recognized that I was a traumatized fucked up kid and you were patient with me. I remember the long kind explanations I used to get about why my reaction wouldn’t get me what I wanted in a given situation.

Even though it didn’t seem like it at the time… I was listening.

You have to understand that I was coming from a background where most of the “advice” I had been given up to that point was designed to make me easier to abuse. Most of the advice I had been given up to that point in my life was working towards lowering my sense of self esteem and self worth so I wouldn’t complain as people hurt me very badly.

I wasn’t in a good place to accept advice.

But many of you persevered. You kept talking to me. You recognized that I was a scared, feral animal. Thank you.

I’m still working through layers of sexual dysfunction. I’m still trying to get to the point where I have positive emotional and physical reactions to warning signs in my body. It’s very hard. I still want to dissociate and shut down and just wait for it to be over.

It’s still a slow process. I hate myself for how long it is taking and I know that 18 years of damage will take a lot more than 18 years to completely unravel because life just isn’t fucking fair. But I’ve come a long way.

Yesterday I managed to stop sex that was hurting me. I haven’t managed to do that all that many times in my entire life. Usually when it hurts like that I just dissociate and wait for it to be over. Yesterday I managed to have an internal emotional reaction where I decided I didn’t want to be hurt like that and I spoke up. It’s a huge deal for me.

It’s funny how I can negotiate that I don’t like floggers–I like to be hit with hands and single tails and canes… but I really struggle with saying “Sometimes my cunt doesn’t want to cooperate and you damage me when we try to have sex and I really shouldn’t have sex under those circumstances.”

Even though my husband is a pretty damn good man who will stop on a dime if told to. It isn’t that he doesn’t care. It’s that I struggle with thinking I am worth defending.

I know what I am for in the marrow of my bones. I was made to be hurt by sex. I was told so from when I was a toddler.

But maybe that was just one more lie from a flaming monster.

Maybe someday I will feel like I am made for something else.

What does being kinky mean anyway?

I feel like I’m in such a weird place in my body and in my mind. Yes, pregnancy is weird… but this predated the pregnancy. This got started over a year ago.

I still like the idea of being tied up and hit. When it happened last year I still liked the reality of it. But this is compounded by the fact that I don’t have a lot of childcare and when I did… it was not really during hours that were conducive to kinky play. I know that most of my friends have had a “Whoops the kids walked in during sex” story but I don’t. My sex life is off. fucking. screen. My children do not walk in on us having sex. And I don’t think they ever will. I have sturdy locks all the fuck over my house to prevent such a mishap.

Because given my background having my children SEE me have sex is a major violation and one I won’t be able to shake off.

If I could forget the sight of my mother and my sister fucking people maybe it would be different. My children will not learn from me.

Things with Noah are complicated for a lot of reasons. I have a strong sense of debt. Noah didn’t rescue me from the streets, I did that for myself thank you very much, but he did rescue me from being alone and that’s a big damn deal. Noah gave me a forever home that he’s serious about. If we divorced he would probably want me to have the house and he would leave. I’m a stubborn piece of shit and I wouldn’t accept but that’s different. Noah gave me a family. He didn’t share his family I’m still basically a non-person there (except with his grandmother and his aunties–I am glad for those women) but he gave me children. He helped me create a family where we both get to belong.

I owe Noah a lot. Noah has cared for me through several periods of time when I was all but nonfunctional. He feeds me. He makes sure I take my meds. He asks after my appointments and reminds me to go. When I express my overwhelming shame at stealing so many resources for my health he tells me over and over that keeping me alive and healthy is the point of us having money.

And the primary thing Noah wants from me as a demonstration of love is physical contact. Specifically, sex. The talking is awesome. The snuggling is great. He really gets a lot out of the sex.

My body is complicated though. I arrived at this marriage with sexual dysfunction in place. I arrived in his life with scar tissue and pain through my nether region. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t cause any of the damage. But it’s there and I have to cope with it.

In my brain I want to be available for sex at any moment because that would be hot and fun for him and it would make him feel really loved. I tried to meet that standard for years. I hurt myself in the process and I damaged the trust in my marriage.

It isn’t Noah’s fault that I did that. He was negotiating in good faith. I was doing the best I could and I fucked up.

The thing is… I’ve been hurting myself for almost 30 years. This was just the latest incarnation and in some fucked up ways it was a healthier way of hurting myself than most I have tried. I still need to change it. But I also need to acknowledge that I am not as pathetic and back sliding as I feel.

This is complicated.

I feel like I don’t count as a kinky person anymore because in my mind kink is associated with exhibitionism and public play. The fact that I call my husband Daddy when he’s fucking me is just kind of meh, whatever. Basically vanilla people do that too.

cough

I may have some weird assumptions here and there.

It doesn’t help that when I got into the scene there was a lot of nasty back and forth in email lists about how having a strong focus on sex instead of just the SM part of bdsm meant you weren’t really kinky. And I like fucking lots of people so I’m more of a swinger, right? Only at swinger parties I have to ask humbly for exceptions to the rules because I really want to make this person cry while I’m sucking his dick.

Ok I didn’t actually make him cry. He’s really tough. But he made lovely noises.

I don’t feel like I fit in a community. I’m too sexual to feel properly “kinky” and I’m too kinky for most of the sex-only spaces.

And it doesn’t help that my behavior in private is way more timid and unwilling to set boundaries than I am in public. In public I am responding to the crowd and crowds take rock solid boundaries. I have to protect myself. At home…. I don’t want to. I don’t want to say no. I don’t want to set limits.

Which is incredibly fucking stupid and creates problems all over the place. I know.

Playing at home is complicated because the kids are always god damn here and I don’t want them hearing or seeing anything. Ever. Period.

It isn’t that I will never be “out” with my children. It’s that my sex life will always be off stage and kind of a mystery. I’ll hint. I’ll answer some questions in broad ways. That’s it. I will never discuss my kinks with my children. They know I have not been monogamous all my life. They know I went out with a lot of people before I got married (How are you supposed to know if someone is right for you without trying out lots and lots and lots of wrong people first?!) and they know I’ve been on dates since getting married.

I think that’s plenty.

I’m ok with talking to my kids about sex in the abstract or in ways that will increase their future safety… they don’t need to learn how to have sex from me. My way is kinda fucked up. Like at one point my daughter asked if there is one kind of sex (or something very like that question) and I said, “Oh no! There are lots of kinds of sex. There’s manual sex (with fingers/hands); there’s oral sex (that involves a mouth and a set of genitals); there’s anal sex (playing with a butt–can be with fingers or a penis); and vaginal sex (can be with a penis or with toys).”

My daughter’s response was to raise her eyebrows and kind of say “hunh.” We didn’t keep talking after that. It wasn’t a conversation that needed a lot of in depth follow up at that point.

I just will never have a child who is talked into anal sex because it “doesn’t count”. What bullshit. Also: a huge swath of teenage girls these days are being pressured into oral sex because it “doesn’t count” and it’s a way to keep from having “more happen” and oh hell no.

My children will have language about sex and about their body. They will know what they are saying yes to and what they are saying no to. And I’m pretty damn sure my kids are growing up with the idea that sex is a super fun thing to do when you are ready and with the right person(s) but until you are ready it’s a problem.

And that all feels weirdly tied up in my kinky. Because I still struggle to set the boundaries I want them to have. I still struggle to say out loud “I want _____.” I can ask for abasing things very easily. Not affirming things.

I still struggle with the idea that sex is supposed to feel good for me. When the first several decades of your sex life is incredibly painful… that’s a hard thing to rewire in your body. It is hard to change my expectation.

What does being kinky mean?

I think it is funny that my current M/s contract has been going on for 9 months and I still don’t think I’m that kinky. Even though I have rules around my body and my sexuality that I follow.

WHAT IS BEING KINKY?