Thoughts on the Iron Pentacle: Sex, Birth, Ancestors, and Age Play

Orange rose – A dark orange-red rose in full bloom, surround by green foliage. Photo by Sabina Bajracharya, via Wiki Free Images.

So it’s October. Samhain is coming. And I’ve started listening to Pavani Moray’s podcast, Bespoken Bones (also linked in my Blogs And Pods list, on the right).

It’s a podcast about (1) sexuality, sexual healing, and sexual pleasure, but also (2) ancestors, transgenerational(?) sexual mores, and practices like ancestor veneration. I find this just an absolutely fascinating combination for a bunch of reasons. So I thought I’d just use this as a jumping off point and talk about this stuff for a little bit.

First thing, you may have seen on my instagram a few days ago that I posted a cover shot of Jane Meredith’ and Gede Parma’s book, Magic of the Iron Pentacle: Reclaiming Sex, Pride, Self, Power, and Passion. In the post, I mentioned that I wasn’t too deep into it yet. What I didn’t say was that the reason I wasn’t too deep into it yet was that I got part-way through the first chapter, the Sex chapter, and just started balking.

And I was balking, for the most part, at Jane Meredith’s essay about birth as part of sex.

And, like, yes, part of that was that there was some biological reductionism going on there which, particularly in a book with at least one queer author, I found more than a little disappointing, but I want to try and unpack what else was bugging me about that chapter.

So, to begin: My understanding, such as it is, of the Iron Pentacle, is that the whole point of having those specific five things as its elements is that they are things that are often demonized (literally or not) by Christianity, and as such by cultural-Christianity, particularly when it comes to marginalized people who are expected to feel shame around their own existence in the world for their (our) “failure” to be Real Human Beings (cis, het, abled, neurotypical, white, men).

And, I mean, I do realize that I’ve spent a long time conflating Feri – the magico-religious tradition where the Iron Pentacle comes from – with the Radical Faries, who are a queer new-age-ish, contemporary-pagan-ish, secular-spiritual-ish bunch of loosely-affiliated counter-cultural groups that reject homonormativity and the idea that gay people are Just Like Everybody Else (Everybody Else meaning straight, monogamously-married, would-be parents).

Like, yes there’s definitely overlap between those communities.

But also my long-time assumption that Feri came from the Radical Fairies is (a) maaaaaybe not actually the case, but also (b) kind of colouring my expectations for what I’ll find in a book on the Iron Pentacle.

Secondly: I’m a cis lady. More specifically, I’m a cis, white, middle-class-raised, university-educated lady. Which means I spent the first 28 years of my life under the expectation that, between the age of 20 and 30, I would get pregnant and give vaginal birth, ideally 2-3 times, and that if I failed to do this I was somehow both failing to Gender Correctly and letting a bunch of people down whose own identities, for some reason, were heavily invested in my reproductive capacity.

At twenty-eight, I came the conclusion that (a) I didn’t actually want to have kids, (b) my bisexuality was way gayer than I’d initially thought, and (c) I would be better off in non-monogamous relationships. So I got the heck divorced and started dating other polyamourous women and, while this didn’t mean I got to stop being vigilant about avoiding pregnancy, my various girlfriends and other partners have never seen my intentionally-child-free status as some kind of a deliberate afront to their own life goals or gender identities. Thank all the gods.

What I’m saying is that, while having my own sexual desires (let alone acting on them) was, for a long time, something that I was taught to keep my mouth shut about and to sort of go along to get along, if you will, my early belief that I did want to birth babies and raise children was always treated by others as a part of myself that I should embrace, and it was my rejection of that belief, when I realized that it wasn’t true, that was “radical” or “subversive” or otherwise pushing outside of what Gayle Rubin calls the Charmed Circle of Acceptable Human Sexuality.

Seriously. Dating women, and being fairly loud about it, is probably the main reason I’m not getting any questions from random co-workers and/or relatives about “So… why don’t you have kids yet??” because being a big homo also puts me outside of that Charmed Circle AND, up until very, very recently, would have meant that any children I did want to have would have been forbidden to me by the state due to lesbianism making one an unfit mother.

So, for all of these reasons, I was surprised and frankly put off by seeing “Let’s reclaim birth-giving as part of sexuality!”

And yet.

My culture tends to go really hard on the idea of separating “mother” and “whore” or – to put it more broadly – “virtuous woman who genders properly” and “unvirtuous woman who breaks femininity through her unladylike behaviour”.

All that ways that Black and Indigenous women are hypersexualized by white people, have their sexual consent ignored, have their children stolen from them in a million directly and indirectly lethal ways, have their motherhood disregarded or else treated as pathological or even parasitic. All the ways that poor women are characterized as slutty, how deliberate sexuality is cast as “low class”, how the lives of sexworkers of every gender, are treated as utterly disposable, how women with a history of sexwork, or sexual voraciouness, are often fired, or won’t be hired, how they lose class mobility and economic security if their sexuality is seen as not belonging to one specific male individual. How sexworkers have their kids taken away. How little girls are held responsible, and characterized as sluts, when grown adults rape them. How a million, zillion “sex after parenthood” books have to address the “but I’m a mom, I’m not supposed to want that…” element of getting your (monogamous, vanilla, hetero-married) sex life back once there are kids sleeping down the hall. The way that birth is sanitized in pop culture, having all the (vast, vast) sweating, bleeding, shitting, bodily messiness of it airbrushed right on out.

So it’s not entirely weird that one might want to write, or build into one’s spiritual practice, a reminder that “birth is part of sex”.

And it’s not weird that “Sex”, when defined as (among other things) the Creative Power of the Universe, would include the actual creation of other lives.

But it still felt really weird to run into this so directly.

 

Sliding back to Bespoken Bones for a bit, and the way that sacred sexuality can be related to ancestor veneration.

So, this is kind of two things.

Like, we have our ancestors of biology – the literal human, and otherwise evolutionary, lineages that resulted in our respective living human bodies. The story that Starhawk tells, in Earth Path about The Oldest Ancestors, and they way they shared breath, green to red to green, and the way we still do that with out plant-kingdom cousins every time we, ourselves, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. The way I wonder how my pre-Christian, and even just pre-Reformation (pre-machanized worldview) folk-Christianity-practicing, ancestors related to and with the other lives around them. The way my wife told me that she could smell the earth on my maternal grandfather – not in the sense of literal dirt, but in the sense that my mom’s dad, even after he stopped farming in his mid-60s, spent his whole life in a relationship with the ground under his feet. The way I can see my ancestors faces in my own reflection and in the ways people paint and draw me in their art classes.

That I wouldn’t be here if not for these specific chains of birth and sex and birth and sex and birth that have resulted in me, that continue to result in my nibblings and second generation cousins.

But there’s also our ancestors of spirit, to use (iirc) Lee Harrington’s term. What Katheryn Payne is talking about, in her Brazen Femme essay, “Whores and Bitches Who Sleep With Women”, when she asks “Do you know your lineage?”

The queer femmes who came before me and gave me words for what I am. The leather dykes and the femme dyke sex workers who kept a space for me to step into when so much of the rest of feminism was trying really hard to make us disappear. The second wave feminist, lesbian goddess worshippers whose writing – so much of it published right around when I was born – I found in my local public library and read over and over again in my teens. The poets, almost all of them queer as hell, who taught me how to be a poet. The kinky spirit workers and ordeal facilitators whose work introduced me to the whole realm of sacred sexuality that exists beyond the chalice and the blade.

Ancestors who I trace through communities of sexual affinity as much as I trace them through anything else.

So these are two ways that sex and ancestry are related to each other.

 

And then I listen to Lee Harrington’s interview with Pavani on this podcast, and he talks about making explicitly sexual offerings, on a regular basis, to spirits and deities who have traditionally watched over queer people or who have been called to in queer ritual and queer mysteries.

And I wonder if my own lady of sexual sovereignty would enjoy something like that (and then I get an immediate answer of Yes flashing through the back of my head, more than once, so… apparently I have something to add to my practices).

And then I wonder about my lady of queerness – who for Reasons that I’ll get to in a second – would also want something like this. And then I think about the ways that I recognize her as sensual, and recognize some of my interactions with her as sexual or sexually charged, but haven’t tended to think of her as explicitly a Goddess of Sex, even though she is both a goddess of queer desire AND a goddess of birth (and aiding in birth), which kind of does bring me back to that whole Iron Pentacle situation again. Oh, hai.

So that’s something to think about.

 

To take things (maybe?) a step farther:

Back in… late August, iirc, I got to take an online workshop with Lee Harrington about sex magic. One of the things that came up, however briefly, in the discussion was the possibility of using sex magic specifically as a battery for destructive magic. For letting go, for releasing (hahaha…) people or events or emotional/physical/somatic Stuff. Storm Faerywolf describes the point of orgasm as the moment when we enter into constant dance of creation-and-destruction-and-creation[1], so I can see how that would work.

And I think about this, and about the ways that sexual trauma can be intergenerational whether or not incest is a thing in your particular family.

I think about how, after a particular relative died, my grandmother felt at liberty to tell my mom The Family Secret (in-so-far as it was a secret, which apparently, not so much). And my mom told me.

And I thought: That explains a LOT.

I think about how, years and years and YEARS later, the ritual I did using sex magic to “puncture my tank” in order to free up space for a better relationship to my own sexuality unexpectedly, wound up including me making a heartfelt phone call, if you want to call it that, to my maternal great-grandmother (who at least knew me in life) and to her mother, my great-great-grandmother, and telling them:

This shouldn’t have happened to you. I’m glad I’m alive, and that I’m the person I am, and that I have you as ancestors, even though it means I also have a rapist as an ancestor, but that doesn’t make your rape your fault, it doesn’t mean you deserved it. And it doesn’t mean you deserved to have your mother-daughter relationships fucked up all the way down our whole family line. None of us deserved that, and that includes you. That shouldn’t have happened to you, and I’m sorry it did.

I really hope they heard me.

And I really hope they believe me.

 

… So.

Not exactly sex magic. But a ritual that involved it, and also involved talking to my biological ancestors. So… they can be combined. Apparently.

And then.

And then I take this a step farther. A step farther in a different direction, maybe, but still a step farther. And I think about age play. How being a Mommy, in the D/s sense, is having a net-positive effect on my own attachment Issues when my relationship with my Actual Mom was pretty fraught for about 3/4 of my life-to-date and has only recently started feeling comfortable after decades of feeling anything but. How, too, being in this explicitly sexual – and spiritually-sexual – relationship with someone who calls me “Mommy” is also potentially a path towards understanding and better-relating-to my Fetch, which is to say the part of my soul who is my inner child, my sexual self, and my shadow (all the parts of me I reject or keep hidden) all wrapped up in one gangly, adolescent-looking being.

Not entirely sure about that last bit, but… it feels relevant. It feels likely.

So I’m going with it.

 

Anyway.

Obviously this is all rambling Things And Stuff. But it was on my mind, and I wanted to talk about it. Maybe I’ll talk about it more later on.

But, for the moment, thank you for listening.

 

Cheers,

Ms Syren.

 

[1] Now I’m thinking of Neil Gaiman’s Endless, and how Destruction went off to build stuff, saying that every act of creation is also an act of destruction.

How Does One Define “Partner” as a Kinky, Polyamourous Person?

Twitter folks, I'm curious about how other polyamorous people define the word "partner" – esp. if you're kinky and/or have FWB. What makes your partners partners? What is, for you personally, the difference between a romantic partner and a play partner, FWB, close friend, etc.?

— 🏹 Thista Minai 💀 (@thistaminai) September 5, 2020

 
So this tweet crossed my feed, and I got to thinking about it. Because I am kinky, and I do pick-up play (at least occasionally), and I’ve sometimes had partners who I wasn’t “dating”, and… clearly I’m using the term “partner” to describe this, so… Here we go, I guess.
 
Part of my own answer basically hearkens back to a whole tweet-thread I did – I dunno, a couple of months back? – about being allosexual and alloromantic and what that means for me in relation to a question someone tossed up going “Okay, but… isn’t it supposed to ‘take a while’ to decide whether you want to be in a relationship with someone? What else is dating for?” (Or something to that effect – it was long enough ago that I’m not going to scroll through 8-12 weeks of random twitter yammering to find it).
 
Basically, I was explaining that, even by the standards of someone Allo, my heart tends to move pretty fast, and the development of emotional attachment (e.g.: romantic feelings) can be sped up(?), for reasons I don’t entirely understand but that probably have to do with oxytocin or something, by physical stuff like kissing or hugs or sex.
Which, in the context of Thista’s tweet, above, is basically a long-winded way of saying “I don’t really do Friends With Benefits”. I tend to wind up wanting – and wanting in some pretty unhealthy, self-destructive ways – Long Term Relationships with anyone I have casual sex, or an intense and transcendent kink scene, with more than once. Sometimes once is all it takes. It’s part of why I’ll top a friend at a kink party but try not to arrange topping the same friend more than, say, twice a year, in the interests of keeping the Feelings from turning up uninvited.
 
So. I think part of how I define “partner” is “Am I getting together with this person on a basis that is not only regular (I’ll beat you up again, next Harvest), but that is also fairly frequent (let’s have a weekly standing date where we do Power Dynamic Stuff over Zoom), and where the context of these get-togethers is mutually acknowledged and agreed upon.
At least that’s the theory.
 
Like, goodness knows I’ve been in situations where what we’ve agreed upon out loud is “We are friends, who are having a “with benefits” fling, and seeing how it goes!” but what’s being going on inside my head, and possibly theirs, has been… something other than that.
Or we’ve both been using the word “partner” to describe each other, but when I say it, I mean “Someone I’m in a romantic relationship with, that I hope will be permanent” and, when they say it, they mean “Literally anyone I’ve stuck at least one finger in, on more than one occasion”.
Right?
 
In my case – if the examples I just gave aren’t a total indicator – when I say “Partner” I mean “Someone I am romantically involved with, with some mutual expectation and desire for it to be an on-going thing, wherein we have both agreed that that’s what’s going on”.
 
Which… seems pretty straight forward?
 
So, okay. This brings us to the question of where the lines are between “a romantic partner and a play partner, FWB, close friend, etc”?
I mean, a friend-with-benefits is… not going to stay that way for long. I’m either going to wind myself up into a mess of attachment anxiety and break off the “with benefits” part for the sake of (a) my own sanity and, hopefully also (b) the continuation of the friendship part OR we’re going to end up dating because the Feelings are mutual. (…Reader, I married her).
A close friend is basically someone with-whom I have an attachment bond but no romantic or sexual relationship. Although given that every time I level up in emotional intimacy with my Close Friends, I reliably go through a period or wanting to date and/or make-out-with them. So it’s not to say that I don’t ever have romantic or sexual attraction to people who fall under the heading of “close friend” but, as I’ve said to one such person, “You have a room in my heart. It has a single bed, and it’s going to stay that way, but you have a room in my heart”.
 
With all that in mind, and recognizing that “friends with benefits” is generally an uncomfortable position for me to occupy, while a “close friend” periodically comes with a side-order of uninvited pining, AND romantic desires can be increased by significant sexual kinky interactions, especially ones where I’m feeling vulnerable… What, then, constitutes a play partner, when it comes to my own personal definitions?
 
I’m kinky. I don’t identify as a swinger. So let’s get this out of the way first: When I say “play” I’m specifically talking about BDSM, and I’m specifically talking about BDSM where I top in a… stone-adjacent(?) kind of way, and where I don’t do stuff to anybody else’s genitals, even when I’m doing stuff to, say, their nipples.
 
By virtue of the word “partner” and my own definition there-of, above, I would say that a play-partner is someone I do kinky things with on an ongoing basis.
BUT
Because of all the things I mentioned about how (quickly) I attach to people, a play-partner is also someone who I do kinky things with on only an occasional and time-bound basis. “Oh, hey, we did that scene at that event. Yes, I’m up for coming over and doing something similar again”… but, no, I don’t want to do it more than once every six months or so, or I’m likely to start wanting more than what’s being offered, or start thinking I want more than I actually do, or can handle if I were to receive it.
 
So that’s my answer.
Partner = Romantic dating + sex + (pretty much always) kinky stuff
Play-Partner = Kinky stuff + actively avoiding romantic dating & sex
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] This is embarrassing (or at least was until I figured out why it was happening), but at least it settles down after a couple of weeks once I’m used to the new normal.

Sacred Power, Holy Surrender – Some Thoughts

So, I’m most of the way through Sacred Power, Holy Surrender (Ed. Raven Kaldera), and I thought I’d post some thoughts.
As a kinky witch who does power exchange, magico-religious sex, and – on occasion – gets to do the doing a religious ritual involving body modification[1], this book is very much in line with my interests. Raven’s one of the few folks I know of – the others being Lee Harrington and Thista Minai – who’s putting books out on this subject, so I was happy to have the chance to read it. I was also fairly unsurprised to find pieces from Lee’s “Sacred Kink” book included here.
 
So. Let’s jump right in:
As much as I love finding books that reflect my own experiences back at me, in a niche market like this, I’m unlikely to find something that matches me to such a degree that I Feel Seen while reading the majority of it. Which is fine, and to be expected. Reading this particular book is, instead, serving as a jumping off point for sorting through my own wants interests, and blank spots when it comes to the intertwining of kinky sex, D/s, religion and spirituality.
 
One of the things that comes up in this book, and others like it, is the question of “Do you want to make your sex more religious? Or do you want to make your religion more sexual?” Or, in the case of Why Not Both?… which contexts are better suited to which approaches?
Years ago, when I read Dark Moon Rising (likewise Raven Kaldera’s work), I found it was mostly, if not entirely, geared towards the “making your religion more sexual” end of that dial. And I find that now, as then, I seem to fall at the other end of things, wanting to make my sex that much more religious.
 
I was chatting about this with my wife/Horse/voluntary-property a while back, and her take on it basically boiled down to “Just because you geek out about both religion and bdsm doesn’t mean you have to combine the two”.
And she’s not wrong.
However as both someone who geeks out about both of these subject and someone whose more profound and fulfilling kinky experiences have been ones where I’ve actively cultivated ritual (head)space and/or a mix of emotional-physical and energetic/spiritual connections between myself and the people with-whom I’m engaging? This is kind of my jam, and I’d like to do/have more of it.
 
To that end, I find myself asking: “In what ways can I, or do I, make my sex (and my power exchange dynamics) more religious?”
Some of it… isn’t religious, per se. It’s energy play. Striving to deepen the effect I have on my scene-partner by actively pouring my energy through the vessel of her body. Sometimes this is through breath, sometimes this is through song, sometimes it’s through the palms of my hands. Seeing a given partner react to that energy – an arched back, a return to earth, a shudder, a high note – is gratifiying, for sure, but it’s also reassuring because it’s confirmation that I’m Actually Doing Something, that I can potentially Actually Do Something, cause an effect through energetic direction, in other contexts (like, say, spellcraft). But it’s also a really lovely way of topping people, and claiming them, that isn’t going to damage their bodies and that, when it’s Actually Doing Something, leaves me feeling more deeply connected to my People.
(This is where I get all Religious Studies 101 on you and enthusiastically point out that “Religion” comes frm “re-ligio” or “to re-link”. Religious ritual is all about fostering and strengthening connections between people and their communities, deities, and environments! Isn’t that so fucking cool???[3])
 
Tied to this, while technically being a different situation, is something I’m increasingly understanding through a vaguely-Feri-informed lens. The ideas of “Fetch” and “Godself” as aspects of myself that aren’t the part that speaks in sentences and thinks it knows everything about everything. I do things to reach out to those aspects of myself. (Realistially a lot fewer things than I personally think I should, but that’s a whole other essay for most likely a different blog). And one of those ways is through sex and s/m. The aspect of myself that I describe as “Godself” is what [a friend of mine] describes as Your Personal Union of Opposites: All of your “good” (easy to like, valued by society, etc) bits and all of your “bad” (uncomfortable, difficult, overwhelming, hard-to-fit) bits.
My godself is basically a nurturing predator. So maybe it’s not surprising that she comes out most easily and most readily during intimate, violent S/M interactions.
There’s a passage in one of the last essays in the book that says “Let our work be our offering” and, while I’m not sure that my own experiences on this front are what I would think of as an offering, per se, they are very much a means of communing with, embodying, or allowing-out-to-play my personal aspect of the All That Is.
Which is pretty great, and I’m glad I get to do it.
 
But that isn’t necessarily how my D/s becomes more religious, or even more mindful.
And, when I say I want my power dynamics to be more “religious”… I think that’s what I mean. More thoughtful. More deliberate. More imbued with intetion in both the literal and magical senses of the word.
 
In terms of the book, itself, I found a lot of the writing contributed by folks speaking the the s-side of the slash to be really thoughtful. Meditations on the spiritual nature of surrender, for the most part. A lot of the writing contributed by people speaking from the D-side was… Look, I’m not sure if it was “less thoughtful” so much as it was just… You know that thing? The thing where [“the top ‘facilitates an experience’ for the bottom” https://xanwest.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/i-talk-a-lot-but-not-about-that/%5D? A lot of the essays in this book kind of lean into that space, albeit through a spiritual lens, and talk a lot about being some variation on the theme of a “spiritual guide” for their s-types.
 
And, I mean, sure. Nothing wrong with that. And gods know I do it too:
I was overjoyed when my Horse came to me asking for resources to help her deal with the fact that a deity had gotten in touch. That my weirdo-DIY polytheism had something to offer her. Similarly, when my Little Girl and I first started chatting and getting to know each other, a significant thing that we talked about was ordeal work and how it fits into her particular (also polytheist) religious path and her work with/for her patron goddess.
As I mentioned, above, I’ve occasionally had the honour of doing ritual cuttings or brandings for people explicitely within the context of their respective faiths.
This is all very meaningful for, and important to, me.
But.
It’s also very much within the realm of me as a top (or a domme) facilitating, or at least encouraging, the religious and spiritual explorations of various people who are bottoming for, or submitting to, me (two very different things, particularly in this context).
 
While there were one or two essays where a D-type wrote about their direct spiritual experiences, it seemed like a lot of the D-types were writing from the perspective of someone who acts as a spiritual guide for their s-types. Even in situations where the D-types felt called to be their Best Selves through their D/s relationships or the faith their respective s-types put in them, that was mostly treated as something self-arising, or brought about via the gods or the universe, rather than through the idea that an s-type could be a spiritual guide for their D-type.
Which.
Folks, I am here to tell you explicitely that s-types can provide spiritual guidance and religious education to their D-types. You can think of it as a type of service, if you want to, but you don’t have to. Knowing the small rituals my Horse does to honour and acknowledge her Other Lady, and talking about Good Witching together. Talking shop for an hour or two with my Little Girl over Skype. These are interactions that I learn from. I hope I can bring as much to both of them.
 
So that was a thing.
 
Related to said thing is this: There were a number of essays in the book that talked about the s-type Seeing The Divine in their D-type. Like, quite explicitely and deliberately. And I found that to be largely, if not completely, lacking going the other way.
Which, like… fuck right off?
We’re talking about spiritual BDSM here, people. How many literal gods have sacrificed themselves, suffered and died, for the benefit of others? How many have gone into the depths to learn and grow and return?
Like, come on. Don’t tell me you can’t see the divine in someone’s submission, someone’s willing offering of pain and fear, someone’s receptivity, someone’s bending and shaping of themselves to your will.
“Holy Surrender” was part of the title, but I would have liked to see more acknowledgement of that in the writing included in the book.
Anyway.
I gnash my teeth and get on with things, right?
Right.
 
Okay. Returning to the idea of my “Best Self”.
Maybe there’s a key there. To be more aware of how my Best Self – my Godself – comes out in my D/s dynamics, to ask “How is my controlling-and-caring Best Self best-manifested through this context?”
A question which, in itself, has me concerned about how much the idea of “best-manifested” is tied to “being a guide for someone else”.
So let me chew on that for a bit.
 
Late in the book, there’s an essay called “The Yin Yang and The Tree” which talks about two different ways a spiritual D/s dynamic can function, two sort of underlying structures that they tend to take. The “yin yang” is one where the energy moves cyclically. This is the kind of structure that deepens your connections with and to each other really directly and that makes me think of a really good S/M scene in terms of one person feeding into the other person who feeds back to the one, in this lovely, spiralling loop of mutual fulfillment, and it’s great.
I like those.
But when I think of a D/s dynamic where “bringing my best self to the game” doesn’t – or doesn’t ONLY – mean being a “gods-mother”, if you will, to my Little Girl, or guiding my Horse towards doing The Work set to her by her Other Lady, but means being supported by my People when I do my own Work… I kind of wonder if the “Tree” structure might, at least occasionally, be beneficial.
 
Another pair of structures that I’ve seen Raven, specifically, talk about are the “care-giver” and (vs?) the “rock star” styles of dominance.
A dominant who likes to exert a lot of control might skew towards “care-giver” in dominance style (but so might someone who’s inclined towards a yin-yang style of power structure, so… these aren’t either/or and they don’t map directly onto each other), picking out, or approving, their Person’s daily attire, specifiying which eggs to boil, and handing out expectations about how much time one’s s-type is to spend, per day or per week or what-ever, doing meditation, physical exercise, or specific household chores.
Whereas someone who leans towards a “rock star” style of dominance might prefer their s-types to be more proactive – “See a task and do it” – towards how household maintenance is done, specifically with any eye to being able to leave that stuff to The Minions and get one with their own tasks without having to micro-manage their s-type’s self-care or what does and doesn’t get made for dinner. Someone who leans towards a “rock star” style of dominance might find themselves also leaning towards a “tree” structure in their power exchanges.
 
Maybe.
 
I mean, realistically, people are going to be a mix of both styles and are going to find both “tree” and “yin yang” structures beneficial in different contexts. But having these different styles and structures laid out as options and starting points can be a big help.
They’ve certainly given me ways of thinking about, and articulating, How I Want Things To Go, and for getting an idea of where tripping-points are cropping up in my various Dynamics.
 
So what does it mean?
What does bringing my Best Self, my most powerful/empowered Self, to my D/s Dynamics, actually mean?
I had a lovely conversation with my Little Girl the other day about what “deepening our dynamic” might potentially include, and I find myself mulling over her thoughts on the subject and wondering how they relate to this question I’ve posed to myself.
 
My Most Empowered Self is unapologetically sensual, is playful and joyful, and is at least a little self-centered / self-absorbed.
In the context of D/s dynamics, this means that my Most Empowered Self is unapologetic about directing her s-types to do things specifically for her pleasure. Anything from “make me tea” to “rub my feet” to “wear thus-and-such-a-thing because I like how it looks on you, specifically” to “accept my ministrations because I want to brush your hair or enjoy your skin”.
It can potentially look like asking my s-types to learn things (a recipe, a piece of music) or do things (cook me a romantic meal with flowers and candles and the whole shebang, do the errand-running that would facilitate my ability to make a particular thing for myself), or dedicate time for things (shared dance lessons or regular opera outings or scheduled at-home spa days) that feed and support my sensual self.
 
My Most Empowered Self is… artistic and generative, I think is how I would put it. “Creative”. I remember, long ago now, when I first received the gift of an s-type’s Service and was trying to trick my brain into not feeling like A Horrible Person just because someone else (reader, I married her) was voluntarily doing my dishes for me, I made a deal with myself that I would use the time her Service was giving me to do creative work.
With the idea of the Tree Structure in mind, could I go back to this?
Because as much as I (and my sensual self, tbh) enjoy watching my People do labour on my behalf while I lounge around, sipping tea and reading novels, I kind of do need to ask “Is this a good use of this time that I’ve been gifted?” Even taking into account the whole thing where my worth is (also) not determined by my Productivity. I mean, I could spend my leisure time knitting or blogging instead of looking at internet memes, amirite? So that’s something to consider, even if my “work” is my hobbies as opposed to a personal betterment project, can I use the time I’ve been gifted to do more of it?
 
My Most Empowered Self is confident and a little entitled. She expects to get what she wants – because experience has shown that this will be the case – and so has an easy (or easier) time expressing her desires through both words and actions.
When my desires are prioritized and my requests followed-through-on in a timely and consistent manner, I am able to cultivate that entitlement and exert more control (while managing my expectations and being aware of my People’s capacity and availability) in my s-types’ lives because I see that control being accepted and responded-to in positive and encouraging ways.
Bringing my Most Empowered Self to my D/s dynamics means Being Explicite about my expectations and about the consequences of not meeting them.
(Which I haaaaaaate because it means Saying Something when I’m disappointed, or laying out specifics when I’m afraid the response to my Specifics is going to be defensive or rejecting or some other thing that is definitely not a gracious and grateful acceptance of my Will… but here we are).
 
I still have two more essays to read in Sacred Power, Holy Surrender. So there’s a little left yet, and I may come back to discussing it here, in case something else comes up.
But, for now, this is where I’m at and what I’ve been able to chew on as a result of reading this book.
 
 
Cheers,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] I’m not priestessing in these situations. The role is a lot more like “handmaidening”: Making sure things happen in the right order so that the person talking to, or doing for, a deity can focus on that.
 
[2] If you know of anyone else? LET ME KNOW! I want Moar Books – theory and practice books, in particular – written at this particular interesection of the kinky, pagan, and queer venn diagram. Subject me to your faves in the comments, svp.
 
[3] It is definitely so fucking cool.

Expectations, Emotions, and Self-Awareness (Ish…)

So! I just watched Ten’s first youtube video in their I’m Having A Feeling series. It’s a good time. It’s a short vid about, basically, Using Your Words. It’s a good video, and I’m looking forward to more.
I’m also using their video – or a specific part of it – as a jumping off point for my own ruminations. Because, guess what? I’m having a feeling, too!
 

“Undine” by Arthur Rackham (1909, based on the story by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué)
Public Domain via Wiki Free Images
A Watery Tart in romanticized Medieval garb stands by a river (her own, one presumes) in a dark wood, her hands pressed to her face and her expression distressed.

 
Something my lovely wife and I periodically have discussions about is that I don’t tell her when something is bothering me.
Which, like, obviously this is not ideal. She loves me and would rather know when I’m getting upset about a thing that she is doing, or not doing. Which is part of why she is great.
It’s also part of why she is unusual if you look at my dating history. Whether for reasons of being selfish assholes or for reasons of unexplored and definitely unresolved traumas/Mental-Health-Stuff of their own, or for reasons of A Little Bit Of Both, most of the people I’ve developed attachment bonds with, over the course of my life, have been people who wanted me to just shut up and stop having a problem with Whatever It Is. See also: “Why are you so sensitive/needy?”
 
Now. Because I’m human, and I have this pattern, perhaps it’s relevant to ask: Hey, Ms Syren! What are you getting out of these relationships? Because it’s obviously something, or you wouldn’t keep repeating this pattern!
 
Good question!
I don’t know the answer. Though I have some theories:

1) Mommy Issues. One of the people who pulled the Why U So Sensitive on me, for the better part of 30 years, was my own mother. Which sucks. At this point, I’m pretty sure that my mom has the same kind of fight-response-oriented generalized anxiety crap that I do, so most of her jerk behaviour is/was probably due to her own undiagnosed and unmedicated weasel-brain winding her up into a state of anything from “twitchy and irritable” to “lashing out pretty harshly in order to bleed off the excess panic”. So I don’t hate my mom over this (uh… any more) BUT I do recognize that, since our first attachment bonds are generally with our adult care-givers AND since those bonds tend to set our expectations (<– see what I did there?) about what attachment bonds look and feel like, there's a solid chance that my relationships with both my frequently unavailable (he worked in a different city and was home on the weekends) Dad and my reliably available, but frequently (and somewhat randomly) emotionally-violent Mom maaaaaaaaaaaaaay have some effect on how & why I develop attachments to people who, surprisingly often, are both (a) not around that often, but also (b) can't really be trusted not to treat me like crap and then tell me it's my fault that I feel bad about it.
 
2) Shame/Low Self Worth/Indispensability. Call this one what you like, it basically boils down to “If so-and-so NEEDS me, they will never abandon me”. Which… isn’t entirely correct. They might never abandon me, but they will probably resent the heck out of me if I keep wanting to have a relationship based on mutuality and So-and-so really just wants me to endlessly take care of them without having any pesky needs of my own. (I may be a little bit bitter about some of my former romances). Basically, the idea is that For Whatever Reason, I secretly believe (have a personal cosmology that tells me) I’m unworthy of love and belonging, and so constantly need to be “earning my keep” by being necessary/indispensable lest I be cast out into the cold to die, frozen and alone, in the snow. (For real. That’s literally the end-point where all my fears are aiming. Dying, frozen AND alone, specifically in the snow).
 
3) Issues Around Vulnerability. This one is pretty heavily related to #2. (It’s also something that Ten talked about in their video. AND it’s something that Brenee Brown tends to talk about a lot as well). BUT it may also have some relationship with #1. If I need less than a given co-attachment-bondee, they will be leaning on me more often than I am leaning on them, which will mean I’m not being Too Needy (note: in situation #2? Needing anything is needing Too Much, so… this doesn’t actually work) and will – hahaha – not be abandoned or cast out due to being too much work, and similar. But also: If I need less, just in general, then when my co-attachment-bondee is… not available, or reacts with outsized anger at my expressing wants and needs, then I won’t have to deal with personal disappointment, or exposure to outside threats, nearly as often.
 
4)Saviour Complex. Otherwise known as: I actually get a lot out of looking after people, so maybe I fall for people who want/need a lot of looking after. I don’t know how much of that is due to items #2 and #3, versus how much of that is just, like, the Gender Programming just took really well over here, versus how much of it is actually me getting something genuinely fulfilling (Oh, hai, Cancer Moon) out of mending my partner’s dresses or bringing my friend a casserole. But let’s go with “at least some of it”.

 
So. Those are my theories about why I have this particular pattern going on.
But! That whole list is really just kind of a tangent because what I was saying was: It’s not typical, in my relationship history, for my bringing up unmet wants and needs to be met with a willingness on the part of my partners (mostly) to try and meet them.
Which brings me back around to those discussions that I have with my wife.
 
Long before I met my wife, I got to have “counseling in exchange for odd jobs” and, during these sessions, I started addressing my tendencies to lean towards martyrdom through Not Using My Words to express my wants and needs. So I’m better at expressing that stuff out loud than I was. I still have a tonne of fears around “asking for too much and thus losing everything”, and I still tend to get kind of choked up and… unable? to talk about stuff when someone asks me directly about what I specifically want, especially if there’s some kind of audience involved (because the only thing worse than being vulnerable in private is being vulnerable in public, am I right?), so I’m not exactly out of these particular woods. But I’m far better at it than I was.
 
Which brings me to the point of this whole post.
The reason (the other reason?) why I have a habit of not bringing it up when I’m having The Feels around something that… maybe?… pertains to unmet wants or needs, is this:

When I find myself experiencing feelings like resentment or consternation or frustration or anger or disappointment around A Thing that is or is not being done, I have trouble discerning WHY that feeling is happening.

 
Maybe I’m feeling those things because my liquid anxiety is sloshing around trying to find something to define itself by, and so I’m aiming my anxiety-derived irritability/snappishness/frustration A Thing because it’s conveniently available and I can tell myself “Oh. See? I’m not upset because my idiot brain is convinced that Some Nebulous Bad Thing is going to Happen. I’m upset because of This Specific Thing that pertains to one of my attachment relationships. I’m not a high-strung mess because I’m a high-strung mess! I’m a high-strung mess because Co-Attachment-Bondee is mistreating me in some way!
E.G.: Back when I worked for Rainbow Health Ontario, I generally had a couple of all-staff meetings in Toronto every year. This meant that I generally went traveling on my own while my wife stayed home. Around about the second night in TO, I would get ridiculously angry/frustrated with my wife over some dumb thing like “She says ‘um’ a lot on the phone”. This is something which I fervently hope never actually showed up in my behaviour, but which was definitely going on. It took me a few rounds of this to realize that this was actually a mix of (a) stress due to interacting with a LOT of people for many hours a day, and (b) anxiety around having deprioritized someone else (my wife) in favour of myself (by traveling and not being available by text for a lot of the day) which, as we know, is The Worst Sin according to my own shitty metanaratives/cosmology. This was 100% coming from inside my own head, a preemptive “Fuck you! I don’t need you!” born of a fear that Someone Will Be Mad At Me For Letting Them Down.
 
Maybe I’m feeling those things because I’m Hangry.
This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
See also: I need a nap, or a shower, or some introvert time, or to know for sure that I’ve got enough money for the heating bill this month.
 
Maybe I’m feeling those things because I’m not nearly as self-aware or good at self-soothing as I’d like to think, and this is actually a problem I can solve myself by taking a bath, doing some anti-panic breathing, eating some protein + having a glass of water, journaling to try and figure out why this call might actually be coming from inside the house, and otherwise doing self-care and self-work rather than expecting other people to manage my feelings for me.
E.G.: I am, by now, well aware of how threatened I regularly feel when a partner gets a new partner, or when one of their already-existing partnerships levels up or becomes more entwined in some way. But, as recently as five years ago, I didn’t really know that my generally pretty negative feelings about new metamours were at least in part due to my own fears of abandonment and being replaced. Learning how to better self-sooth, as well as doing a bunch of self-work to figure out where those feels were coming from, went a long way to smoothing my relationships with my metamours.
 
Maybe I’m feeling those things because A Specific, Concrete Thing that I asked of a co-attachment-bondee, in order to meet a particular need… isn’t actually doing the trick, BUT I can’t figure out why, and so can’t articulate a new Specific, Concrete Thing to ask for that will better meet that need.
E.G.: I once asked a long-distance partner to text me when they got up in the morning and when they went to bed at night. My live-in partner does this pretty reliably with most of her non-live-in sweethearts, so it seemed like a very reasonable thing to ask of someone one theoretically would be missing me as much as I was missing them.
I thought the need I was addressing was for contact. The kind of thing that might be named “quantity time” and that might be related to stuff like the “parallel play” of two adults hanging out on the couch next to each other, each one reading a book, not interacting much but being close together and getting something out of that proximity.
I was SO wrong.
Which is maybe (or maybe not) why a couple of auto-texts per day were really not doing it for me.
The needs I was actually trying to meet were
1) The need to mutually affirm “I’m here for you. I’m listening and will be as available as I can be given stuff like work hours, other partners, and life in general” in the morning, and to assure each other “I’m still here for you, I still care about you, even though I’m sleeping and/or on a date and will be mostly not available for the next 8-12 hours”. I wanted to let my partner know that stuff. I needed to hear that kind of stuff from them, too.
and
2) The need for frequent, albeit brief, emotional connections at regular intervals. My primary love language is touch. In a long-distance relationship, I don’t get to speak, let alone hear, that language very often or even very reliably. Which means I need to lean more heavily on secondary love-languages like “words of affirmation” or “quality time” or the kinds of “caring actions” that can be done by text/phone such as asking me about my day/life, listening to the answers, and then responding to what I’ve said as though it matters.
But it took me until several months after that partner and I broke up for me to understand why my Specific, Concrete Action (text me at regular intervals) wasn’t getting me what I actually needed (affirmation of mutual love and care; reliable and frequent-ish moments of emotional connection and mutual support through the gifts of our respective time, energy, and attention).
 
Maybe I’m feeling those things for the reasons Ten talked about in their video: I don’t feel like I have the right to ask for my partners’ time, energy, and attention.
E.G.: Because demanding those things makes me a shitty metamour or Bad At Polyamoury. Because if she really wanted this power exchange, I wouldn’t have to ask for X Task to be completed anywhere near as frequently as I do. Because they’re going through a really hard time right now and don’t have the emotional energy or attention to offer, even if I psyche myself up and ask for it. Because if they wanted to prioritize spending time with me, they would take some initiative and ask, instead of leaving it to me 100% of the time. Because, if she wanted to spend more time with me, wouldn’t she be kinder to me on the phone? Because if I keep reminding them about X Significant Date in my life, they will feel stupid or like I don’t think I can trust them to remember stuff that’s important to me. Because asking for stuff, when that stuff isn’t forthcoming after asking once, is being a pest at best and being abusive at worst, and I don’t want to give them reasons to be uncomfortable with, or irritated at, me. The list goes freaking on.
 
Maybe I’m feeling those things because I have asked for The Thing, and my co-attachment-bondee is dismissing my want or need by telling me that I over-think things, or that my emotions are exhausting, or that I’m too needy (or too sensitive), or that expecting fair treatment and basic kindness from someone who says “I love you” to me is expecting waaaaaaaaaaaay too much. Or whatever. (Which, btw, is why I was having such a feeling of Consternation while watching Ten’s video). Maybe my co-attachment-bondee’s behaviour is not matching up with their stated feelings/intentions, and I’m feeling Actually Fucking Bonkers on top of feeling frustrated and angry.
 
See?
Sometimes those feelings are a definite indicator that something is wrong in one of my relationships, and/or that I need to talk more explicitly (or even just remind a given partner) about what I need and how to help me get it.
But a lot of the time, those feelings are the result of stuff that I’m kind of doing to myself. Brain weasels. Limited and relatively new coping techniques for dealing with same. Ignoring basic stuff like feeling hungry, tired, or socially drained.
Between that and a history of my needs being poorly received, and often dismissed, when I’ve expressed them?
I find it’s generally a less risky, but also more-likely effective, plan of action to take a look at how I can solve my problems myself.
 
Which would be great, if some of those problems didn’t take literal years to solve.
Which would be great if, by doing so, I wasn’t also reinforcing the hopefully-false belief that “People only want me if I give them things am compliant and low-maintenance (easy to ignore when they don’t want something from me)”.
Which would be great if these behaviours and assumptions didn’t make it easier for other people to manipulate and gaslight me around whether the things I want and need are “reasonable” or not.
 
It’s kind of fucked up. Equal parts necessary self-work and possible/probable self-sabotage, and I’m not sure what to do with it all.
Clearly I have more work to do in this area.

Explore More Summit 2018 – Pre-Game Show

So. I signed up to take part in (meaning receive videos from) this year’s Explore More Summit.
I’m feeling equal parts excited/anticipatory and… prepared to be disappointed?
 

An oval. Around it are arrayed the words “Thought”, “Behaviour”, and “Outcome”,with arrows leading from one to the next in an endless loop.

 
I’m feeling “prepared to be disappointed” because the last/first time I signed up for this (Free, I should mention, so I’m not out anything but time – and that’s pretty flexible right now) series of discussions, I found that there seemed to be a significant amount of centering or assuming… something that looked a lot like heterosexuality even when it wasn’t necessarily so (a lot of stumbles around what “sex” looks like, what the gender of a woman’s partner is likely to be, and what kind of genitals she and said partner(s) are likely to have). I felt this to the degree that I actually wrote to the (turned out to be queer) organizer to complain about how othered I felt, even as a cis woman who periodically dates people whose genders don’t overlap (er… much) with my own[1].
So, in spite of the glorious array of queers who are signed up to present at this year’s summit, I’m prepared for the possibility that those same assumptions will be present.
 
THAT BEING SAID…
 
I’m also excited and looking forward to this. I like me a good workshop series. I like having ideas to poke and prod at. I like a “facilitated discussion” as much as the next Harvister, and there’s bound to be a lot of food for thought going on here.
Seriously. There are so many talks about “messiness”. About uncertainty and navigating trauma in sexual (and maybe non-sexual?) situations, about desire, self-compassion and pleasure, along with discussions around dominance, sex magic, femme-daddying[2], “writing towards pleasure”, sexual creativity, and other stuff that is really relevant to my interests.
 
Speakers I’m particularly looking forward to include:
Cristien Storm
Alok
Sage Hayes
Cavanaugh Quick
Alayna Fender
Imran Siddiquee
Rafaella & Dalychia
Steve Haines
Lorena Olvera-Moreno
Karen B.K. Chan
Fran Tirado
Barbara Carrellas
Joy Harden Bradford
Vivienne McMaster
Sinclair Sexsmith
Mia Little
AND
Leonore Tjia
 
Which is, I think, slightly more than half of the presenters.
I think it’ll be good. 🙂
And I think it’ll be good for me to do a bit of a write-up about (or jumping off from) each of the talks I take in. So that’s the plan.
It all starts tomorrow! 😀
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] Dear Queers: I love us. Please feel free to center your queerness in all things and in all ways. We get to be our whole selves, no matter who we’re dating.
 
[2] Not me, but… probably related.

Polyamoury Ten Years On – Part 2: Why Am I Still So Bad At This?

Why am I still so bad at this?
That’s one of the questions that hit me when I realized I’m a few short months away from my personal ten-year polyversary.
Ten years ago, I definitely had a daydream about what my polyamourous life would look like after ten years of practicing and – also on the very pressing to-do list at that time – getting myself some on-going therapy. And, yeah, I imagined having significant romantic attachment bonds[1] with, oh, roughly two people, neither of whom lived with me and neither of whom were dating each other, but both of whom had other partners. I imagined me and my hypothetical beloveds giving each other a lot of our time, energy and attention. At the time, I probably would have talked about this by saying “I have two primary partners”. At this point, I’m aware that hierarchical language like this has multiple meanings, that it can be used to talk about degrees of entwinement and (often-related) availability, but it can also be a flag for how much consideration and care a given partner is “allowed” to expect or rely on in a given polycule (which… often seems to relate to some sort of seniority thing?[2]). What I mean when I use it is something like “Primary Partner vs Friend-with-Benefits” and it means “someone who (mutually and in an agreed-upon way) refers to me as their partner/girlfriend/wife/sweetie rather than their friend/pal/It’s Complicated/FwB”. Ten years ago, it was a way of referring to how much time, energy, and attention I was giving to my partners. These days (and quite recently at that) it’s become a little more nuanced, but I’ll get to that in Part Three.
 
Where I’m going with this is that, ten years ago, along with all that other stuff, what I imagined was that I wouldn’t be so scared all the time. I wouldn’t police myself so much. I wouldn’t HURT so much.
 
And, to some extent, that has turned out to be true. I can hook up at a play party and do a scene with someone I’ve been ever-so-slightly crushing on for years. I can having make-out dates and play dates with friends-with-various-types-of-benefits. I can hang out with a metamour, or send my wife off on an overnight with one of her partners, and feel comfortable and happy rather than tense, irritable, anxious, and threatened.
Which is all great!
But I’m also anxious, in general, and tend to spin on the things that did, or could, Go Wrong, so maybe it’s not surprising that I still feel Very Bad At This.
 
The thing is, I’m not sure what it would take for me to feel like I was otherwise.
I think about the theoretical still-unfilled spaces on my non-monogamous dance card, the ones that must be there because otherwise I wouldn’t keep getting crushes on people (right…?), and how worried I am about what will happen to my current relationship – the one with the woman who is ready and willing to wait patiently for me to get back from The Land of NRE when those other beloved people come along – if I fall deeply for someone else again.
I think about how confident I was, eventually, in my current relationship, how much I believed I’d licked the insecurities that had me spinning in anxiety and fear of abandonment for the first couple of years with my now-wife, thinking that I’d figured out how to navigate the fear that gets labeled as jealousy. Thinking that I’d Fixed Myself without understanding that a big part of that was being in a relationship with someone who cared about my well-being, treated me kindly, showed up reliably… but also not understanding that, in a situation where the person I was with wasn’t doing those things – was unreliable, cruel, careless or thoughtless when it came to how they treated me – not only would those insecurities (understandably) surface again BUT that if they did, it didn’t necessarily represent a flaw in me or a problem in myself that I needed to fix.
 
I think “why am I still so bad at this” relates to some sort of dearly held but false belief that If I were good at this, none of my relationships would fall apart, or otherwise deviate from what I wanted them to be, because I’d magically be able to discern who would love me, and behave lovingly towards me in ways I could discern, For Ever vs who would get bored of me in a couple of months, think I was too much, or have unrealistic expectations of selflessness from zir partners, and just… equally magically… not fall for people in the latter group.
Because that’s realistic…
 
One of my Brene Brown books – I have so many at this point – offers this little fill-in-the-blank thing as one way of sorting out where your Shame Stuff lives.
“I’ll be worthy of love and belonging when I ____________”.
The blank is supposed to get filled in with stuff like “lose ten pounds” or “get that promotion” or some other specific theoretically achievable, but always moveable, goal. Mine looks like:

I’ll be worthy of love and belonging when I no-longer need them.

 
So maybe it’s not surprising that, when I read and re-read Polyamoury101 books (or comic strips, or podcasts or-or-or), I have a hard time not interpreting them as saying that Good Polyamourous People don’t actually get anything from each other, or even want anything from each other, because Good Polyamourous People are capable of meeting 100% of their attachment needs without actually attaching to anyone.
That isn’t necessarily what they’re saying (I certainly HOPE it’s not what they’re actually saying), but it’s easy for me to read that into the text (or wevs) because I’ve got this unhelpful core belief around how I’m not supposed to want or need things, not supposed to burden other people by Having Expectations of anything what-so-ever.
 
It’s dumb. And I’m not sure how to fix it. But I think that’s where a lot of my “why am I still so bad at this” feelings are coming from.
Anyway. Onwards.
 
 
Cheers,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] Though, ten years ago, I’d never heard the term “attachment bond” – among many, many other terms – let alone what it meant or why it mattered.
 
[2] Which… I can sort of get behind, to be honest. Like, I’ve had to remind myself on a number of occasions not to update my will to include someone I’d been dating for less than a year, no matter how much I cared about that person, because I had zero way of knowing whether or not they would for sure be in my life two years down the road. The problems start (well… “start”) cropping up when those more-recent partners have also been around for YEARS but are still being told that they can only ever expect to be treated like a new and untested fling.
 
[3] Which means I need to make a bunch of art about this, basically. Time to write more poetry. 🙂

Polyamoury Ten Years On – Part 1 (CW Sexual Assault, Divorce)

Late last year, Laurie Penny wrote an article about having been polyamourous for almost a decade. A friend of mine linked to in the other day and I was shocked, in a way, to realize that so have I.
This June. June 5th, to be exact. My personal polyversary.
And this has me thinking about a few things.
First: Why June Fifth?
And Second: Why am I still so bad at this?
With a third, follow-up question of: Okay, but what have I actually learned on this adventure so far?
 
Naturally, I decided to write about it and, equally naturally, I decided to write about these super-personal, more-than-a-little-vulnerable topics in a very public way by broadcasting my thoughts to the internet. LJ-generation for the win, I guess?
 
So.
“Why June Fifth”, which, if nothing else, is simpler or maybe just more topical given #metoo and #timesup.
June fifth because that was the day I asked my then-husband for an open marriage (in a letter, because I was terrified), and he said no. Very nearly walked out before I got home, without telling me the marriage was over.
It’s the official – not in the legal sense, just in the “what we told the relatives” sense – reason for why we got divorced.
 
And I guess, right this second, I want to talk about my divorce – or the breakdown of my first marriage, or something along those lines – before I get into the other stuff about polyamoury, because the reasons behind “Why am I still so bad at this” are pretty tangled up with – among other things – how that first marriage went down.
 
I married a guy who told me, on our third date or so, that he though people who wanted to get abortions should have to get approval from some sort of governing body.
You know, like back in the bad old days that are absolutely not very long gone at all.
I was so sure that he was just clueless. After all, I’d been clueless, right? I’d been pro-life back in grade eight, why would a dude in his late 20s be any more capable of empathy than I’d been before I hit puberty? I was sure, in my “I’m TAing women’s studies for the first time” way, that this progressive dude would smarten up if I could just tell him why that line of thinking was bullshit, y’know, using the exact right words.
 
I married a guy who sexually assaulted me in his parents’ basement, and many times there-after, because I didn’t believe him the first time he told me who he was. (Uh. “I went through with the marriage because I didn’t believe him the first time”. Not “he sexually assaulted me because I didn’t believe him the first time”. To be clear). I was so sure that he was just clueless, that he would smarten up if I could just tell him that I wanted him to stop [touching me like that], y’know, using the exact right words.
 
I married that guy because I was in love with him, but also because I had already passed the age where my mother – who bless her probably-didn’t-mean-to-be-cruel heart, had once told me she was astonished that I thought I’d ever get married[1] – had married my dad, and also because I hadn’t had enough dating experience to know that NRE is a thing and it follows certain patterns like “the wanting to fuck constantly” lets up at least a little bit at the three month mark, or “you will probably have your first significant fight around 9-10 months in”, or “You might want to hold off on making any legal or (theoretically) permanent decisions until after the 2-year mark, because that’s how long the merging/infatuation/NRE stage can last, if things are going really well”… and so thought that this relationship, which had managed to make it past the three-month mark (the point at which my very few previous relationships had both fallen apart), was The One.
 
I married a guy who turned out to be controlling, isolating, petulant, and periodically sexually violent. A guy who not-so-subtly threatened to sabotage our method of birth control. A guy who treated the suggestion that he actually participate in the raising of his own hypothetical children as a demand that he “babysit all the time” and who told me that, if I didn’t let him get me pregnant, that he’d have to conclude that his marriage to me had been a waste of time.
 
Ten years later, I still don’t know how much of that was him being an abuser versus how much of that was him being a run-of-the-mill straight, cis, white guy from a slightly-wealthier-than-my-own (cis, white, comfortably middle class) background who due to those intersections, had never had to consider other people’s wants or needs as anything but an inconvenience to be worked around or a favour to be magnanimously granted (or not). And I don’t know how much of it was me, either.
Sometimes I wonder how he felt, when the woman who had been so visibly, actively in love with him got distant and silent and turned in on herself, if he was just as bad at talking about the growing gulf between us as I was. Sometimes I wonder if he noticed. Sometimes I wonder why the ever-loving fuck I give a shit. But I do.
 
That’s why I keep talking about it. Because it’s really easy to bury myself in “What if it was me?” or “Was it really that bad?” and I have to keep my head above water.
 
The stories I tell about my divorce aren’t always the same. Sometimes I say “he left me”, which he did. Sometimes I say “we decided to end our marriage because it wasn’t doing either of us any good”, which is true, we did. And sometimes I say that left my husband.
I didn’t leave my husband.
I wasn’t even able to consider leaving my husband until I landed a more-than-minimum-wage temp-job and was able to get out of the part-time retail situation that meant I was economically dependent on my him. The thought of losing the only person who, here-to-fore, had loved me[2] enough to stick around, was utterly terrifying when my whole head was basically one big ball of shame, fear-of-abandonment, self-loathing, and scarcity. I’m not even the one who walked out the door.
What I mean is that I asked for what I wanted and needed and, for once, instead of waiting for him to “get it” and become the husband I wished he had been, I stuck by what I wanted and needed, even though the price was watching him walk away.
 
He walked away on June fifth, ten years ago this year. It took me a week to start getting angry and start naming myself for what I am.
 
 
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] I think I was in about grade six. It was the very early 1990s. Like, early enough that the RCMP was still keeping tabs on suspected-to-be-gay public servants in case they became a matter of national security. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure my mom already knew that her oldest daughter was a homo, and was probably trying to suggest that there were other options available and that marriage was not the be-all-end-all of womanly life. However, being a little kid – and one who was getting pretty hurt, pretty daily, by her peers – what I heard was that my own mother was astonished that I thought anyone would ever love me. Marrying someone as some kind of a “Ha! So there!” to a third party is… not a good reason to get married. But I can’t deny that it’s wound up in that mix somewhere.
 
[2] Even if how he went about loving me was pretty shitty.

Tops, Bottoms, and Boundaries

So, Heather tweeted:

Tops; what, if anything, do you look for that tells you a bottom knows their boundaries and is able to communicate them even when things get intense? Reply here, or feel free to DM.

— Heather (@MissHC) January 15, 2018

 
And I thought… It’s been way too long since I actually wrote something for Syrens, so let’s use this as a bit of a jumping off point and see where we go.
 
So. What tells me that a possible scene-partner knows and is able to communicate their boundaries, even when things get intense…
I think the first part of this is actually to ask “How likely are things to get intense?” because the vast majority of what might be called pick-up play (hooking up with someone and negotiating a scene while at a party, rather than beforehand) that I do isn’t exactly “play”. It’s more like the scene version of running a “sensation station” at a kinky exploration event. Meaning that I’m “topping” in the sense that I’m “doing the doing” but not in the sense that I’m “running the fuck”.
In these situations, “intense” in the opposite of what I’m going for and I’m working/interacting with someone who hasn’t done The Thing (usually The Thing is play-piercing, but sometimes it’s other stuff) before so I’m working from the understanding that (a) they want to try The Thing, but (b) they don’t actually know if they like it, or how their body/mind/body-mind are going to react to it. It means we go super slowly, keep everything light, and front-load a lot of information in both directions. I ask questions about what experiences they have with related sensations (kink-wise –> stingy sensations) and with related experiences (e.g.: medical –> booster shots and blood tests and so-on; body-art –> tattoos, piercings) and about how they tend to respond to those situations/experiences (like whether they get light-headed, how/if they tend to scar, etc). And I offer information (and/or answer questions) about why I’m suggesting starting with thus-and-such gauge of needle or thus-and-such location on their body, stuff like that. There are a LOT of check-ins, way more than I would do in a play-scene, a lot of “Now I’m going to do X, are you ready?”, as opposed to a “fun scene” where the kind of a heads-up I give is more like “Mwahaha, what shall I inflict up on you next… Ooooo! How about THIS one?” when changing toys.
 
Which, I guess, is a good place to start talking about the “fun scenes” that I do get up to.
 
I’ve been pretty lucky in that, when I do pick-up play that is A Scene Where I Have Fun Too rather than, like, Providing An Experience Through My Emotional and Physical Labour (<– Note: I do volunteer to do these things and I do get stuff out of them, this is just marking the difference for me between one type of scene and another), it's been with people who are generally more experienced kinksters than me.
You know that Grand Olde (Mythologized) Leather Tradition where you learn how to top from other tops?
I learned how to top by listening to my bottoms.
 
Related Tangent: I realized a few years back – after I'd had a couple of pretty unsatisfying impact-play scenes (don't get me wrong: spanking and caning are tonnes of fun, but these ones in particular didn't work out) with people I'd only just met, that I needed to change up how I went about negotiating – or even just suggesting – scenes.
There were things I was still yet to figure out (I will get to that in a minute, as those things are really RECENT discoveries), but I realized that I needed to (a) play with people I actually find attractive[1] and (b) play with people who are into the same things I'm into, rather than… service-topping whoever happened to come along.
So I tend to ask people what they like to get up to, and what specifically they'd like to do with me (provided the “with me” part has already been established as something they’d like), and then pick stuff from what they suggest.
It’s… There’s stuff in here that points to “Tops get to want things, too” and my own difficulties recognizing and owning – acknowledging and naming-out-loud – my own desires. Xan West has some stuff on sadistic desire and sadists’ consent that pertain to this, and Betty Martin’s wheel of consent has, more recently, been a major eye-opener for me with regards to how I tend to hide what I want to take[2] (link goes to a half-hour video) as a top, a sadist, a dominant, or even just as a fairly vanilla[3] lover, under the guise of what I’m willing to give.
I can go on at length (and have) about how I feel like my own wanting – wanting-to-do and wanting-to-take – are monstrous and unforgivable. I get that this isn’t really true, but it’s a hard one to navigate[4] and it means that I’m being dishonest when I hide my “I want” (to pull your hair, dig my nails into your thighs, fuck your mouth with my fingers, slap your face, go down on you, carve words into you, sink my teeth into you, leave my marks on you) behind my “I’m game to do what you’ve already said you want”.
It’s cowardly[6].
 
But anyway.
I learned to top by listening to my bottoms, by topping people who were old hat at this and were looking for a new play-partner, rather than a new physical experience[7]. Maybe some of those have involved them Providing An Experience Through Their Emotional and Physical Labour for me, although I kind of hope not. Maybe that’s had an effect on what I look and listen for when it comes to sorting out whether or not someone else is Good Enough At Boundaries to be someone I can play with safely. Some of those things are:
 
* If I’m with someone who I haven’t met before, are they going slowly? Are they looking for a conversation before they look for a scene. E.G.: The woman who is now my wife originally approached me with an invitation to get together to talk about maybe doing a scene, which suggested a solid sense of self-preservation. This can also look like chatting me up between workshops if we’ve met at an event.
 
* Do they talk pretty directly and specifically about what they like and want? I, myself, am hella bad at this – see above. But if we’re BOTH hella bad at this, it is (a) just not going to function at all, but also (b) going to annoy the heck out of me because I can’t Do The Doing if I don’t know where The Doing is invited to go.
 
* Do they talk about “Where can I touch you and what do you call it?” (to use an S. Bear Bergman phrase). Do they talk about what they’re not okay with? Do they talk about what “yellow” looks/acts like in terms of body language if spoken language isn’t an option (because things are intense, because they’re gagged, because they’re non-verbal, because we’re in a loud-ass dungeon and my hearing is kind of fucked). Do they know what “yellow” looks/acts like, when it’s them?
 
*Something it occurs to me I should maybe be on the look-out for, when it comes to people I’ve know for a while, but which I don’t think I’ve been doing (at least not in any kind of intentional way): Have I seen/heard them cross their own boundaries before? Like… “I am so tired but said I’d do xyz social thing, so I have to“. Have I seen/heard them do this frequently or consistently, or is it something that seems pretty rare?
 
Anyway, so hey.
A thing I’m finding as I’ve been writing this is that I look for people who are better at recognizing and articulating their boundaries than I personally am.
I’m not sure what to make of that. I mean, on the one hand, I’m basically administering tests that I couldn’t, myself, pass. On the other, if I’m that bad at acknowledging that I want specific things, let alone asking for them, and have a tendency to… keep going with things, or allow things, or put up with things, or whatever that aren’t actually things I’m enjoying, it’s probably better that I stick to topping (rather than bottoming), and that I stick to topping people who are GOOD at recognizing and naming what they want and need, as well as what they don’t.
Anyway.
Not sure what to do with all that, but there you have it.
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] I have a lot of Feeeeelings about this, just because it feels SO shallow to say out loud, but there it is. My sadism and my dominance aren’t separate from my sexuality and my desirousness.
 
[2] “Take” meaning, in this context, what I want to do (consensually) because it gives ME pleasure, as opposed to what I’m willing to do (joyfully, excitedly) because someone else has already told me it will give THEM pleasure. (This from watching Betty Martin’s videos on the subject).
 
[3] For a given value of “vanilla” that includes spanking, biting, hair-pulling, and digging my nails in… >.>
 
[4] It makes me wonder if the folks who are bottoming for me are looking for flags around “does this person know their own boundaries and can they articulate them when things are getting intense?[5]”, or it they’re only (understandably – you need to put your own oxygen mask on first) looking for flags around “Will this person recognize and respect MY boundaries?”
 
[5] Which, P.S.: It took me a loooooooooong time to understand that I was allowed to have boundaries as a top. That my purpose as a top wasn’t just to Provide A Community Service, sure, but also that in a given scene with a given partner, that I was allowed to set the pace so that I got the warm-up I need in order to enjoy the scene and not end up exhausted. I’m still getting the hang of how that functions in a D/s situation, as the habits and feelings around that have been built over a much longer period of time.
 
[6] It’s also a convenient Domme Cheat Code, though, because it makes the other person be all sorts of vulnerable with you. But… still cowardly.
 
[7] Not that I necessarily understood it that way in real time. When I told my wife I was writing this, and that her wanting to meet me and have a conversation before deciding whether or not to do a scene with each other had been a Green Flag for me, she said “Well, yeah. You’re a human being”. Which… In the eight years we’ve been together? It never once occurred to me that she asked me out on our first “proto-date” (or… something…) because she wanted to get to know me. I thought that happened later. O.O

Relationships as Juggling Acts

So a couple of days back, I got to thinking about relationships as juggling acts. Because Metaphors are my jam, apparently. I nattered away on twitter about it, and the nice person over at Poly On Purpose turned it into a Storify (which you can read here). I decided to tidy up the original and expand on it a little bit, because I like the metaphor. I like the way it can be applied to all sorts of different relationships. Parenting. Friendship. Romance. Work. Hobbies. All sorts of stuff.
So, here we go.
 
For a few years now, I’ve thought of relationships as exchanges of time, energy, and attention. Time and Energy are finite. You only have so much time to go ‘round, and you only have so much energy available. You can’t be in two places at once. All that stuff. And, yes, you’ve only got so much attention available, as well, but Attention comes in a billion nuanced varieties. If you imagine them as juggling balls, they are every possible colour you can come up with.
So start with yourself. Here you are, with your colourful collection of Attention Balls, and you can be a solo act, juggling emotional, sexual, physical, cognitive, types of attention on your own when you go to the gym or to a show by yourself, when you write in your journal or use your vibrator, when you take a hot bath or a pottery class or a walk. When you take time for yourself, to catch up with yourself, to look after yourself. That’s a juggling act all on its own, and you need to make time and reserve energy for that act. It’s important.
 
But every relationship you have with a person outside of yourself is also a juggling act wherein you both offer time and energy to juggle your various attention balls back and forth with each other.
Different types of relationships take up more or less of your time and energy, and have different ratios of Attention Balls that you juggle.
So the relationship that you have with an Activity Friend might involve tossing one ball back and forth for one hour every week. Maybe that Activity Friend sees you more frequently, face to face, than a long-distance romantic partner or a beloved-friend in town, but the juggling acts you share with the partner and the friend would involve a lot of emotional Attention Balls, along with whatever else you juggled together, than would be involved when juggling with the Activity Friend.
Likewise, a sexual playmate or a friend-with-benefits might juggle mostly sexual Attention Balls with you, with a few other types of attention thrown in there some of the time, while a work colleague might mostly juggle logistical balls with you – yes, even if you are an escort who does duos and your work involves juggling a lot of Sexual Attention Balls with each other as well.
A relationship that involves a limited number of Attention Balls, but whom you see very frequently (maybe a room-mate who keeps to themselves, or a work colleague or classmate who isn’t sharing a project with you) will still eat up a lot of Time and Energy when it comes to juggling the few attention balls that are in play. That stuff adds up, and can leave you feeling worn out if you find yourself needing to be On when it comes to folks with-whom you juggle a lot more balls on a less frequent schedule.
 
In a related vein, a polyamourous ‘comet’ relationship might only take up one weekend per year, but all your respective other juggling acts get put on the back-burner while the two of you clear your calendars and focus on juggling every ball you’ve got with just each other. A romance that is geographically closer, meanwhile, would take up more of your day-to-day time, but would also require everyone involved to be aware of each other’s respective other juggling acts. Partners with-whom you share finances, housing, parenting, elder-care, etc… would juggle a heap of logistical Attention Balls with you that less-entwined partners never have to worry about, but those less-entwined partners might get a smaller amount of your time & energy to share a juggling act because you need to spend more of your (always finite) time and energy keeping all those extra logistical Balls in the air with other folks.
 
Sometimes, someone with-whom you share a juggling act will need to skim time and energy from your shared act because there are suddenly more balls in play in another act they share. Someone has a crisis or a baby, it’s crunch time at work or school, maybe a relationship becomes more intimate on some level and everything gets a bit of a re-org. In those situations, some of the balls you and that person were juggling together may get dropped. Maybe it takes you a minute to find your own balance when you’re (suddenly?) juggling more balls on your own than you had been a minute ago.
 
…Which is it’s own thing, actually.
 
Those balls that get dropped? Sometimes they’re just gone, and that particular juggling partner is never going to pick them up again. Sometimes you’ll find that you can start juggling them with some of your other co-jugglers. The social balls that were dropped can be shifted into juggling acts where your fellow juggler is interested in taking on more stuff. That’s a tricky thing to do, because you won’t know if the other person can juggle with a few extra balls in place until you try. And maybe they won’t know that either. There can be some trial and error involved in this, and sometimes that’s going to hurt or be awkward or similar. (Uh… Ask me how I know… ). Alternatively, you can juggle them yourself – fill those suddenly-empty evenings by taking on a new project or doing something nice with Just You (I started a poetry show, back in 2009, for a lot of reasons, but one of them was that I needed to direct my Attention at something other than missing my long-distance girlfriend. Similarly, I spent some time volunteering at a local Food Centre in 2016, because I had a heap of social and care-giving Attention Balls to do… something… with now that my (also long-distance) partner had upped and ended our romance). Either way, you are going to have to figure out what to do with those “suddenly extra” balls because lobbing them back at the person who can’t keep up with them anymore? That’s usually not going to work. Sometimes? Sometimes it does. The crisis is temporary. The juggling partner gets their balance back and you can re-add that particular Attention Ball to the mix, albeit probably at a slower, or less frequent, rate than it was there before. But a lot of the time, that isn’t how things go (sit tight, I’m getting to it).
What I mean is that there’s more to this juggling metaphor than just the variety of Attention Balls a given relationship diad can opt to keep in the air at one time. Like literal juggling acts, relationships require everybody to be equally invested. A juggling act is a type of balancing act, as much as it’s anything else. You and a given fellow juggler might opt to keep thirty different balls in the air, but to make that work, you both have to be moving at the same speed, at the same time. You’ve both only got two hands, so if one of you can’t keep up (or if one of you is shifting things too fast), some of those balls are going to drop and somebody is going to get hurt (in the non-metaphorical sense) because of it. Likewise, because we all – polyamourous or not – have a lot of different juggling acts going on at any given time, we need to be aware of the time and energy (and number of Attention Balls) involved in maintaining both our own juggling acts and those in-which we are not directly involved. The co-worker who has a sick relative or a kid in day-care, who can’t do overtime work on Project X. The metamour who’s having a bad bout of depression right now. The teacher who’s expecting a term-paper from the friend/child/sweetheart with-whom we, too, are juggling some kind of a relationship.
 
What I said, above, about dropped balls and how lobbing them back at the person in question generally doesn’t work? I’m talking about unbalanced relationships. The kind of situation where either you feel like you’re being pelted with balls that you didn’t ask for and can’t keep up with (and which are making it harder for you to keep juggling the balls you did sign up for). But also the kind of situation where you feel like none of the balls you’ve tossed, so hopefully, to this new (or not-so-new) other person are being juggled back, which can mess with your head, especially if the person in question is saying things like “Woah, nelly! Look at us juggling! So many balls in the air!” …The metaphor falls apart a little bit here, since actual attention isn’t a finite, physical object, but work with me for a minute: In this kind of situation, it’s sort of like you’re stuck with fewer balls in your own kit, going “Hey, uh… Person? That Attention Ball I just tossed you? I need you to toss it back. I’m due at my buddy’s house for Fannish Night in half an hour, and if you don’t toss that ball back, I’m going to be hella preoccupied and checking my phone every five minutes”. (Like I said, the metaphor doesn’t work perfectly here. In reality, I can choose to put my damn phone away during a get-together with someone, whether or not someone else has answered my most recent text. Still, I probably will be preoccupied, and I think you can see where I’m going with this particular scenario). If you are a parent of a child who is Exerting Their Independence, you may be familiar with this kind of feeling. If you were ever a teenager with a parent who seemed over-protective or nosy (note, I am not talking about abuse situations here)? That’s part of the re-balancing of relationships (adult-child parent/offspring re-balanced to adult-adult parent/offspring), too.
 
In the case of friendships and romances – voluntary, chosen relationships – I can offer a warning here. One that I am, personally, utter CRAP at heeding, but am trying to get better about. If the Attention Balls you toss to a given juggling partner are Not Coming Back? What you’re doing, if you keep throwing balls at them, is basically up-ending an entire box of your attention balls onto someone who is either (a) hoarding attention balls with no plans to ever start juggling with you, OR who is (b) not really interested in juggling with you, at least not to that degree, and the message has just not sunk in yet.
 
An example:
I have TONNES of Attention Balls that I can share with people, and not very many people with-which to juggle them. Most of them are near-and-dear friends. Not a lot of work colleagues in my web of jugglers, and only one sweetheart. My income-quilt of semi-solitary, flexibly-scheduled jobs means that I have tonnes of Attention Balls available to be an attentive, care-giving Buddy and a friend-group social co-ordinator, while someone else – someone who works a 9-5, or whose job involves a lot of emotional labour – might be using those logistical and social Attention Balls to deal with work-related social interactions, meeting-coordination, and similar.
Another example: I am a romantic, sexual person. Amatonormative, basically. My lovely wife is romantic, and Grey A. We are both polyamourous. What all this means is that
1) While I have a dozen (or more? Who knows?) Sexual Attention Balls in my juggling kit, she only has one, maybe two at the most. I will always have spare Sexual Attention Balls to juggle with other people.
AND
2) While I have only one romantic partner (for now), my lovely wife has… noticeably more than that. This means that, while I’m juggling my Romantic Attention Balls with her, and her alone, maybe occasionally (if I’m feeling brave, and not too burnt, and there’s someone who looks like they might be a good fit) tossing out one of my many, many spares to see if somebody else is up for juggling with me – my lovely wife needs to juggle her Romantic Attention Balls with multiple people. Note: there are a variety of ways to do this. You can juggle most of the Romantic Balls in your kit with one particular person, but occasionally juggle the few that remain with other people else (think: hierarchical poly). You can juggle 100% of your Romantic Balls with each respective romantic partner at different times (which is closer to what my wife does). You can find whatever balancing act work for you between (or outside of) those two particular options, too.
 
Something that relates to the above: It helps if you and a given juggling partner are working with a matched set of balls. They juggle a passion for Foucault and pizza dinners your way, you juggle your own passion for Foucault and pizza dinners towards them, and everyone is offering and receiving Attention Balls that they actually like and know what to do with. Within the context of kink, this is pretty-much built into the culture – you can be as good, giving, and game as you want, but if you’re just not that into knife play, your S/M partner will have to find somebody else to cut them up – but it applies just as much to non-kinky hobbies like knitting or motorcycle maintenance or snow-shoeing or whatever. I may have a dozen different hobby-type Attention Balls available, but I probably won’t be able to juggle all twelve of them with each specific (or even one specific) co-juggler I’m involved with. This theme is one that shows up in all the poly101 books, I know, but I’m only just starting to be able to wrap my head around how it works without spinning it like I’m expected to treat all my partners as Interchangeable Needs-Meeting Machines or something.
Likewise… remember what I said about how, sometimes, if you and a given juggling partner drop a ball, you have to either find someone else who wants to juggle it or you have to learn how to juggle it yourself? There’s a Kimchi Cuddles comic that I tend not to handle so well. I read that last panel “What if he doesn’t WANT to give me more attention?” // “Then you give it to yourself” as just the most trite piece of bullshit EVAR.
But I’m trying to sort through it.
 
I’m going to use an easy-ish[1] example here. If I want more sexual attention, and I can’t get it from a partner because my partner is Ace / I’m sexually insatiable / I only have one sexual partner / insert-other-reasons-here… there are things I can do about that. Jerking off is a thing. I can have sex with myself. But I’m learning to parse the different Attention Balls that are juggled into the mix when I have sex with another person. Affection. Admiration. Romance. Emotional and Physical Connections. Stuff I can’t get when the loop involves only me and (maybe) something battery-operated.
It means that, right now, I have a few balls that are just… parked between my feet, while I look for people I can trust and care about and connect with enough, and in the right ways, to bring them into play again; while I try to figure out how to trust and care about myself enough, and in the right ways, too.
I’m trying to teach myself to build intimacy slowly, rather than trying to bury someone in a ball-pit all in one go. I’ve definitely had a few (a lot of…) relationships where I moved too fast, flung too many Attention Balls (some of-which I wasn’t aware that I was trying to juggle) at somebody who might not have been up for them (at all, or just yet), a rash move fueled mostly by scarcity thinking. I’m hoping that the metaphor of relationships as juggling acts – both the balance and equal-investment required to make them work AND the vast variety of different kinds of attention that can be juggled between various people in various ways & to various degrees – will help me pace myself, but also help me gauge who is actually up for starting to juggle with me, or for adding new balls to an already-shared act.
Fingers crossed that this will work (and I’m not just Overthinking Things).
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] I’m saying “easy-ish” because I’ve got a whole lot of not-so-easy stuff going on in my brain telling me that I’m just not supposed to “need” sexual connection with other human beings. That I should be able to Make Do with what I get with the partners I’ve got, or else be able to cobble together some mixture of vibrator + affectionate friendship + ‘non-serious’ flirting with semi-strangers at queer events + hot baths, body lotion, perfume, chocolate & other sensual stuff… or something to approximate “giving myself” the sexual attention-cocktail that I actually want. “Want less, and you’ll always be satisfied” is a damn hard indoctrination to shake.

Initial Impressions of “Conflict Is Not Abuse” with BONUS Look at the Mess Inside My Brain

So… I’ve started reading Conflict Is Not Abuse.
It’s… difficult. (There are going to be a lot ellipses in this post, which I know can be irritating, but please just bear with me).
 
I’m not yet 50 pages in, so I have some hopes that it’s going to get easier, that the author’s theories about powerful individuals or groups reading threat & danger into what would more accurately be called resistance to oppression will find a better fit when she’s talking about white cops and unarmed black men, or occupying forces and the people they’re terrorizing (she uses Israel and Gaza, but could just as easily be talking about Canada and the many nations contained within, and overlapping, its borders). But at the moment, we’re at the “micro level” of this theory, talking about interpersonal relationships, flirting and dating, power plays, “shunning”, and… you guys, it is not going well.
 
It’s hard to read this book, or at least it’s been hard so far, because a lot the stuff that the author is saying – and probably feeling pretty confident about her professionalism in saying, given that her publisher is the kind of place that has a slush pile, professional editors, and a number of titles that wound up on Canada Reads – sound like the inside of my own head when I’m not doing well at all.
 
So I thought I’d talk about what goes on in my own head.
Which is a scary thing, in and of itself, because a whole bunch of it? Is probably really wrong.
So. Here we go…
 
The first thing is this:
Boundaries are complicated.
I mean, yes, they’re also really, REALLY simple. They’re as simple as “No”. As simple as “Stop”. The words that two-year-olds say over and over and over – No! Mine! – because they are at the developmental stage where they start actively differentiating Self from Other and that difference is HUGE big news.
But they’re complicated – for me, if not for everyone – because they are many-layered things. Boundaries are No and Stop. The place where I begin and You can’t cross.
But they are also the place where You begin and I can’t cross.
The place where my privileges end.
But also the place where my responsibilities end.
I had such a lightbulb moment, years ago now, when my therapist told me that she wanted to try Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – AKA “talking to chairs” – with me. With much trepidation and a lot of side-eye, I told in all seriousness that I was willing to try it, but that I couldn’t guarantee that I would know where I was supposed to go with it.
And she said something along the lines of: “You’re not supposed to know where to go with it. That’s my job. Your job is to trust me and give it a shot. See? Boundaries.”
Mind. Blown.
It was a total penny-drop.
But I still have trouble with it.
I try to anticipate what a given partner or friend will want/need/feel so that I can have that base covered by the time they’re wanting/needing/feeling it. If my life were a movie, the results would probably involve Zany Hijinks, or at least Hilarity, ensuing but… this is real life so it mostly just involves me putting undue pressure on myself and then needing a lot of reassurance that I’m not doing something wrong just by existing in a not-actively-helpful way.
I try to chess game my way through Hard Conversations (job interviews, relationship transitions, crisis moments), to know how my interlocutor is going to react, so that I can address whatever comes up perfectly, so that they won’t be scared or angry, so that things won’t go completely to hell, so that the person won’t Leave Me[1]. So that I’ll (hopefully) get what I want, whether that’s a happy and invested romantic partner or a realist-artist who wants to hire me again; a friend who is eating a real meal, with protein, for the first time in three days, or an acquaintance who’s interested in meeting me for Pho at a confirmed date and time.
…And the more intimate the relationship, the more invested I am in it continuing, the higher the stakes are when I have to go into a conversation (even if it’s with an empty chair representing my own inner child, if you will) where I don’t know what the path to the other side really looks like.
 
So that’s the first thing.
 
The second thing is… My primary love language is touch.
So, yes, when a romantic partner and I have sex together, I’m speaking (and listening to) my love language. But that’s also what happens when I offer my hand across the pub table to the friend who’s having a really hard week, and she takes it. Or when I hug my favourite auntie (or my mom, even if our relationship is still a little bit fraught), and she hugs back. Or when my wife snuggles up and spoons me at night, and I twine my fingers with hers. Or when I scratch my pal’s recently buzzed scalp and they lean against my shoulder, while a big group of us chat over brunch.
And that’s all lovely. That’s all consensual and delightful and good.
But things get pretty fraught, pretty fast, when you are asking (pleading with?) your partner to start speaking your love language… and that language is touch.
I don’t think that happens nearly so much, or to such a degree, if one’s primary love language is, say, Caring Actions. In which case, maybe what you’re asking for is “Can you be at the train station to meet me? Can you call, out of the blue, to offer to pick me up from work in the car so I don’t have to brave OC Transpo during flu season? Can you know what my favourite food is and keep it on hand and make it for me sometimes, Just Because? Can you surprise me by hanging the pictures while I’m out getting groceries, so I come home to a house that feels a little more finished? Can you put a photo of us, together, on the lock-screen of your phone, or the desk of your home office, so that when I visit, I can see it and know that you are wishing me close, even when I’m far away?”
…As opposed to asking that someone to “speak your love language” in ways that, whatever they happen to be, all boil down to “Can you touch me for longer durations, and/or in more intense ways, and/or with greater frequency, than you are probably comfortable with, because if you were comfortable with them, you would probably already be doing so?[2]”
Yeah.
That can turn into scary-pressure really fucking fast, and I’m not sure where the line between “advocating for my needs” and “pressuring someone else” really is in that situation. (If I’m upset that someone said No (I don’t want to have sex with you; I don’t want you to hold my hand right now; I don’t want to sit next to you; etc) do I have to hide my upset forever, or can I talk about it the next day? If the next day isn’t okay, what about the next week? Can I ask for touch at all, or is that pressuring someone in and of itself? Is my level of skin hunger abnormal? Does that make it bad? If it’s not bad, why is it so hard for someone else to meet me where I’m at? Is there something wrong with me?)
 
So. That was the second thing.
 
The third thing is that I’m still trying to internalize/grok/something the relationship between “Abuse is too much closeness, NOT too much distance” and Covert Boundary-Crossings like lying, manipulation, and gaslighting. Because I think there is a relationship there. (The gaslighting link talks about a thing called “glamour gaslighting”, where someone puts you on a pedestal and then gets mad, or freaks out, and pulls away when you start asking for support or care which, like, “Oh, hai, extreme familiarity”… And it feels very much like “too much distance” to the gaslighted party, and yet… may still qualify as abuse?)
I went to Kai Cheng Thom’ and Kota Harbron’s “Monstrous Love” workshop on mental health and intimate partner abuse, about a year ago. It wasn’t what I was expecting it to be, but it was an interesting workshop. There was an example given by the presenters wherein they roll-played two conversations, in which the respective people in a romantic diad each confided in a friend about something scary and uncomfortable going on in the romantic relationship. Then the presenters asked the workshop participants to identify who was abusing whom in the shared scenario they’d just performed.
One partner was clearly experiencing anxiety because of something their partner was doing to them (asking a lot of questions about what they’re doing with whom, when, and getting angry or otherwise upset when they weren’t home or made plans to hang with other people), whereas the other partner was clearly experiencing anxiety because of something she was doing to herself inside her own head (replaying situations from a past, painfully-ended romance and assuming that the same thing is happening in her current relationship).
I have a really hard time discerning when I’m reacting to stuff in my head versus when I’m reacting to stuff someone else is doing to me.
When my friend says “we should do coffee soon” but never follows up with possible dates and times (nor responds to my suggestions of dates and times), am I feeling angry and blown-off because my friend is actually blowing me off? Or am I feeling angry and blown-off because I’m hyper-sensitive and/or believe that I have a closer relationship with this person (friend, as opposed to friendly-acquaintance?) than I actually do? Is someone actually doing something to me (blowing me off, suggesting a thing and then not following through) or am I doing something to myself (having unrealistic expectations about the kind of relationship I have with this person, expecting follow-through when “we should do coffee soon” really means “it was so nice to see you at this public, group event, I hope I’ll see you here again”).
When I ask the person who refers to herself as my girlfriend to act like she likes me (see: love languages, limerence behaviours, the general idea that one can – one hopes – expect a reliable degree of acceptance, empathy, validation, and reciprocal disclosure from one’s romantic partners) and she tells me that I’m being unreasonable or needy, is she reacting to something she’s doing to herself (replaying an earlier romance that devolved into stalking, or a childhood situation where she was made to take responsibility for the emotions of an adult care-giver, or a limbic-response that relates to her ambivalent/avoidant attachment style), or is she reacting to something I’m doing (Am I actually being unreasonable for wanting those things? Am I being needy/pushy/demanding in how, or how often, I ask for them)? And is my upset/panic/spiraling at her reaction based on something she’s doing to me (punishing me for wanting care or reliability, gaslighting me about what are, or are not, reasonable things to expect from a partner) or something I’m doing to myself (my own limbic responses as relating to my insecure-anxious attachment style; replaying stuff that happened in earlier relationships – a minor schoolyard disagreement at age nine directly resulting in years of ostracizing & bullying; my ex-husband insisting that there wass nothing wrong with how he was treating me, and that the problem was clearly my having a problem at all – and believing they are happening again)?
A lot of the time, I suspect it’s a little bit of both.
But I am an absolute MESS when it comes to sorting out… basically, how much of that “little bit of both” is stuff that I’m doing and can therefore (ha, in theory) control, or at least make decisions about.
 
So that’s the third thing.
 
But. Back to Conflict is Not Abuse.
There are things that the author says in her book that are… unbalanced. I get the strong impression that the grace being asked for in interpersonal conflict situations… doesn’t go both ways.
That the author is asking the reader to extend a lot of empathy and compassion to someone whose “being interpreted as abusive” behavior is (probably) coming from a place of unexamined, maybe even unacknowledged trauma & anxiety, but that they are not asking the reader to extend that same compassion to someone whose “reacting to perceived abuse” behavior is ALSO (probably) coming from a place of unexamined, maybe even unacknowledged trauma and anxiety. Honestly, I kind of feel ike maybe we, as readers, are straight-up being asked NOT to extend that compassion towards the “reacting” person. That it’s cruel and wrong to force someone to back off (by cutting off all contact), but not cruel or wrong (quite the opposite) to force someone to keep talking, keep meeting (in person, no less) with someone they don’t want to be around anymore.
 
And that’s just majorly fucked up.
 
Even I know this. Even I have my shoulders up around my ears (when my eyes aren’t rolling skyward, at any rate) reading some of this stuff, and I understand really, really well the feelings of loss, anxiety, abandonment, and hopelessness that the author describes the “perceived as abusive” person feeling when all contact is refused.
I have SO been there.
Deep Breathing through hours of unanswered texts or days of unanswered emails & social media messages, trying to find a balance between the Captain Awkward axioms of “Silence Is An Answer” + “People Who Like You Act Like They Like You”[4] (I swear, Captain Awkward is how I learned what boundaries actually are in practice) and the million Totally Reasonable Reasons[5] that someone might not have gotten back to me yet.
Fighting off yet another goddamn anxiety spiral because I ended a message with a question mark[6] – “How’s your day?”; “I’m free for coffee and knitting on Tuesday. Want to join me?” – and the vulnerability built into one stupid piece of punctuation, the rawness of showing even that much wanting, needing, is overwhelming[7]. (I… don’t actually have a clue why it’s that overwhelming, but there it is).
That place of doubt, where you can’t actually tell if you’re really asking for way too much or if it’s within reason to expect the other person to probably be game for snuggles/hang-outs/sex/writing-critiques/confidences/coffee/whatever most of the time, or at least be up for proposing alternatives; where your own desires seem utterly monstrous specifically because (apparently) they’re not returned; where you feel so lonely and so nuts…
That’s a hell of a shitty place to be.
 
But you don’t get to call the other person “childish” just because they don’t want the same things as you. And you DO have to at least be willing the see the possibility that, while you feel like you’re starving or desperate, or whatever, the other person is maybe feeling crowded or eaten alive, or otherwise overwhelmed by the closeness you are asking for, however minimal that might be, or might be right now, or might be in a different situation but NOT right now, or whatever.
And I get that.
So it’s really uncomfortable to see what are basically My Worst Moments – the stuff that scares me when I think it, and that I try to never let come out of my mouth[8] – published in a mass-market paperback, as if they were totally reasonable things to think and act on.
O.O
 
It’s a bit of a tough go, you might say.
 
So, we’ll see how I do with the rest of it, but… I don’t know if this is going to be something I’m able to finish or not.
 
 
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] Whether that means “not hire me” or “break up with me” or “retreat into shame-hiding and massively disordered eating” or some other thing doesn’t really matter in the context of this post. It all tends to boil down to “don’t leave me” when we’re talking about my brain.
 
[2] And here’s the thing about me: I don’t even know if that’s true. If my assumption that someone would be doing the things that tell my limbic system that I’m safe and loved in return if they were comfortable doing them, that I wouldn’t need to ask (at all, let alone over and over) because it would come naturally[3]… Would it? I have no freaking idea.
 
[3] As happens during limerence – AKA New Relationship Energy – when your brain chemistry tends to lead you to want to share as much time, energy, and (various forms of) attention with The Other Person, whether or not you’re actually thinking about, or putting conscious effort into, it.
 
[4] For some reason, “Silence Is An Answer” translates in my head as “If an answer is not forthcoming within a two (txt) or 24 (email) hour period, you should just wrap your head around the idea that the recipient of your message has finally gotten sick of your shit and is either waiting for you to get the hint that you are no-longer friends, or else has moved on already”.
 
[5] Phone died; driving; person is at work or has a date or other social event; their in-laws visiting; Maybe they… kind of didn’t feel like talking? (<– This one sucks SO MUCH, but it’s still an option, and it’s not actually the end of the world); they needed some introvert time, or didn’t know how to respond to the question; Got swamped on some other front and then felt embarrassed (I have been here, too); was in the middle of a really good novel and didn’t hear the phone; etc…
 
[6] For real. I figured out last… February? That I am waaaaaay more likely to get antsy or worse about an un-answered text or email if I’m asking the recipient a question. Because a question is a request for contact, and an attempt to build or strengthen ties, and if it’s left hanging, maybe it means that I’m the only one who wants those ties in the first place[7].
 
[7] Yes, I know Normal People don’t do this. That a text message, an email, or a tweet suggesting that “we should do coffee soon” isn’t actually a referendum on a given friendship/partnership/lovership/whatever. It was kind of a clue that maybe I have Actual Problems and am not just, I dunno… weak-willed or “too sensitive” or some other bullshit.
 
[8] Except here, clearly, where I’m telling you all about the mess that is my insides.