I am at a weird stage of thinking with regards to bdsm. I feel like I am slowly migrating into thinking that it’s pretty broken and fucked up to be pining for people who will let you hurt them a lot. I mean, I get it as an urge. But it’s broken.

What these people is for there to be more people who are broken inside who want to be hurt. Not every masochist is broken–but honest-to-dawg masochists are rare in my experience. Mostly if you want to be heavily beaten or made to bleed you are pretty broken. Sometimes it isn’t directly related to any specific trauma–many masochists come from reasonably great homes. But they got broken somehow.

I don’t feel equally about all kinds of pain. I’m thinking specifically about the heavy players. The ones who have less of a “let’s play a game together” and more of a “I’m going to put you in your place.” Traditionally I don’t play very well with the “let’s play a game together” people. I’m not playing a game. I think I should be hurt.

I feel very confused when someone “gives me a spanking” that doesn’t even turn my ass red. I feel like, “Well there is an hour I can never get back.” I feel compelled to hunt for the bruises. I’m not a stoic bottom so it takes someone who really wants to make someone cry for me to get there.

I want to digress and give a disclaimer: I use very heteronormative language most of the time. This is because I have had an easier time finding guys to play and/or have sex with. In my experience women and transpersons (going in either direction, with or without surgery) take a lot more energy from me to woo them. They want to be sure I like them before they give it up. I often go hunting with very low energy because I want the hunting to replenish my energy. Guys just need me to show up and not say no. So my language is very heteronormative. I don’t know what to do about that. By the numbers I have slept with ~125 (+/-5ish?) people. I lost my excel spreadsheet years ago so yes it is approximate. I have slept with 5 glorious people who fell somewhere not on the binary and with 40-ish women. If women and people not on the binary were easier for me to pick up I don’t think there is any chance the numbers would skew so high towards men. Anyway!

So when I talk about feelings about predatory people I am talking about my experiences with men and why those experiences bother me.

I wish it didn’t come with a general distrust of men too. I truly do. But whether you like it or not I need to keep me safe. It is a slow and gradual process for me to trust a man. Mostly the harder I try the further away from trusting them I get. Very few men actually strike me as non-threatening. There are very few men I will cheerfully leave alone in a room with my kids.

Want to know the weird thing? I am ok sending my kids on a walk with someone I know to be a tremendous pervert because I know they will never be alone inside a private space and I know my neighbors are watching and I know my kids know their routine and Shanna is not ok with deviating from it. But I feel mixed about the conversations inside.

Every few years I have to drop a lot of balls. I think that is ultimately how I keep from killing myself. I just walk away from relationships and communities. I feel guilty for culling the bdsm community and I’m not sure why. Am I doing it because I think I’m better? I don’t think so. I don’t want my daughters to learn that women should be hurt at home. Including because my friends think it is fucking funny to insinuate all the fucking time.

But I’m too sensitive. Maybe so. Maybe I just can’t accommodate your issues because I have to deal with my own.

I don’t want to do the polarizing thing. I need this specific characterization of women to disappear from my life and that doesn’t mean that all of the people who do it are terrible people who deserve to die or anything dramatic like that. What does rejecting/pulling back from the community even mean?

The vast majority of people involved in the bdsm community like to play games while having sex. Most of them are perfectly normal, happy, well adjusted people. Why am I tarring them all with the same brush? Why am I being like that? Because you still follow the trope that says it is fun and funny to hit people.

My kids don’t hear that shit. In our life you learn how to hit people because you will, unfortunately, at some point need to defend yourself. There are bad people in the world who are not interested in respecting you or your body and you need to be able to handle that.

She can find out if she likes being spanked once she can kick the shit out of somebody who ignores her “no”. And I feel weirdly like I hope she feels ok with talking to me about the experience and like I hope I never hear about any part of her sex life. I think that is a normal dual thought process and I can live with that discomfort.

I am having a hard time with how often conversations come up with some people. I feel like it is “my fault” because I bring it up. I don’t think I always or even usually do. Sometimes I am stupid and I make the joke because I fell into feeling like I was one of them again. I am so institutionalized it’s kind of ridiculous. I think I should be hurt.

Noah describes himself as being calculatedly self-interested. He isn’t like the people who genuinely want to hurt people. I mean, we have done some fucked up shit–don’t get me wrong. (And honey–don’t try to prove you can ok?) You don’t pursue doing that to the point that it drives people from your life over and over. You were overly aggressive and intense for a lot of the people you dated, yeah, but not because you were beating the shit out of them.

It’s different.

I know a large number of men and women who feel they cannot be happy unless they have many people in their life to beat at a moment’s notice. I kind of feel live and let live about it. I mean I don’t think they need to stop wanting what they want because I have issues with it. But I don’t want to stand near it right now. It makes me feel intensely bad about the world and the people in it.

My masochism springs from a very deep self-hatred. This isn’t true of all masochists so my opinions and experiences are far from universal. I want people to hurt me because I believe I should be hurt. I can come up with dozens of people in under a minute who would agree that I should be hurt. Just knowing that makes me want to walk in front of a truck.

I think I hate that they want me to be hurt even more than I hate myself. I am running out of feelings of compassion. I am running out of feelings of trust and friendliness and love. I can’t keep ignoring how much this hurts me.

I don’t think it has always hurt me like this. I think this is part of this whole identity crisis thing. Being a mom is very all encompassing. I can’t model how to be a healthy whole person while nurturing the constant desire to experience pain. In order for me to figure out how to stop hurting myself I need to stop being around people who tell me continually that I should be in more pain. That really my life is not complete unless they get to hurt me. Preferably while I am sucking their dick.

I can’t do this any more. Maybe I would hate men less if they fucking talked to me differently. If I am not supposed to generalize to all men then I do not understand how I am supposed to keep myself safe. How am I supposed to go out and figure out who the problematic people are? How am I supposed to identify danger if I am not allowed to talk about it or address it as an issue?

The bdsm community is very broken. And I can’t fix it. I have other shit to do. That’s not my battle this lifetime. Unfortunately it is a kind of broken that is a specifically delicious poison for me. I want it. I miss it. I am not willing to model this kind of life in front of my children.

What does that mean? Does that mean I will never go to parties? No. I will probably go to parties with Noah. We like to play games. I can’t make much noise in our house because at this point we know all the neighbors and I get embarrassed. It’s hilarious. And I do like having sex in public.

I showed up in the bdsm community looking for sex. I found something different and went with it. I ended up in a relationship with someone who would far prefer to masturbate while thinking about fetish items than have sex. Noah says that one of the reasons he married me is because I instituted a quota for sex in a previous relationship. After my long-term bdsm relationship I told my next serious relationship, “If you want monogamy that is fine. But I need to have a lot of sex. Either you do it or someone else will.” Noah thought he could live with that.

All community, all family is a mixture of good and bad. If you throw out the bad you throw out the good too. But the ratio of good to bad has changed a lot for me. I need to keep my energy and my intentions to people who actually are part of my life. I need to stop waiting for people to care more and find time and… I don’t know.

I am busy enough. I have a full enough life right now. I deleted my facebook account because at least once a week I end up sobbing about something from there. I feel minimized or dismissed and it’s my own fucking problem. I read things wrong. I put half-assed stuff on there and people snap back. If I could shrug it off then it would all be fine. I can’t. That means I need to be a grown up and stop putting myself in that situation.

I want to keep my friends. That means I need to keep them in the size and shape of container I can handle them in. I am over-sensitive to things I read in text. I pretty much always put the most hostile spin conceivable on anything I read. When I listen to someone speak I am not able to overlay their words with the hostility in my head in the same way. It makes me like people much more.

I’m mostly up because I’m basting the turkey soon. Noah has to do the next shift because I need the sleep.

It is not anyone else’s fault that I hear a nasty, hostile track when I read things on the internet. I need to limit what I read on the internet. It’s not about people being mean to me. This is a consistent problem I have.

I already limit my social life a lot. I think that I need to stick with how limited it is. I need to stop listening to the people who believe I should be hurt a lot more. What that means, exactly, I’m not sure. Does that mean severing contact? Ending relationships? I don’t think I need to be dramatic about it. No one has done me wrong. I don’t put a lot of energy in that direction already. I am not sure that anyone will notice if I drop what I still put in that direction.

Noah is the only one who gets explanations about this sort of crap. I don’t tell other people that certain topics are off-limits. I just stop hanging out with them. I can’t change anyone. I can just choose to be around people who are appropriate for my kids.

I don’t want to be a grown up that bad it seems.

I think that when someone’s words and behavior show me that they think my life would be “better” if I was less happy and in more pain then I don’t have space for that any more. Is it mean of me? Maybe. But I need to matter some year.

I’m trying to stop wanting to be hurt. It is hard. I need to not be around people who tell me I should be hurt. If that bothers you, well, uhm, not to be an asshole or anything but go suck an egg.

That’s the line. If people have these urges about other people that’s not really my business. If it is kept away from my kids–whatever. Once you start talking to *me* about what I should do for *you* then I’m done.

I don’t owe any one any more god damn pain.