Rage

I came to the leather scene when I was 18, two weeks after my 18th birthday, I wandered into my first TES meeting, and never really wandered out. I had the crappy abusive relationship that all guppy subs seem to have to have before they get to the good stuff in the scene. I met people and made friends. I'm very lucky to have met the people I have, to have had the opportunity to make friends within my community. Of course, when I first came to TES, I had no idea that TNG existed. In fact it would be about two years before I was taken to a meeting, where I met Terra, my leather sister and best friend. Ironically the meeting I first went to was run by one of the founders of the TNG movement, but that's another story.

This story, I'm sorry to say, is steeped in rage.

I often tell people that my best friend when dealing with the community is the buddy system. And people laugh, I even laugh, but the truth is I utilize the buddy system because I don't feel safe in my own community. I don't feel that I can go to a party, or any other kind of kinky event alone because I get hit on constantly and obviously by creepy men who have no concept of personal space or finesse. Men who get all up in my junk because at 21, I still look like a 16 year old girl. And you know what? It sucks. It sucks that I don't feel like I can go out and enjoy my own community and feel safe. And I am outraged by this.

I'm not the same girl I was when I came to the scene, in the time that I've been here, I've learned how to stand up for myself. I've evolved into a heavy bottom, and I'm smart about it. I have rules, very strict rules that govern who I play with and how I play with them. I don't deviate from my rules. I had a scene that went bad a while back. I'm not blaming anyone, it's just that I had medical staples in my chest, and we couldn't find the staple remover, so we wound up having to remove them using pliers. It was one of the most painful things I've ever experienced in a scene. I've learned that the most painful things that happen to me during a scene are never intentional. And one of these aforementioned creepy men, who shall remain nameless showed up and was watching this like it was some hot amazing scene. And I looked at him, already in an intense amount of pain and said loudly and firmly that he needed to go away because I couldn't deal with him.

Or at the Pirate Party a while back, I did my first single tail scene. I was whacked out of my gourd on endorphins and adrenaline and feeling more than a little bit fragile. My top had gone to get some water for us, and this man saw me sitting there topless and staring off into space. He came over and actually had the audacity to touch me, I don't even remember what he wanted, all I registered was a threat. I said as loudly as I could "Get your hands off of me!" He backed away quickly, and I was grateful when my top came back.

I'm tired of these men who really need to stop using the same tired old 'Wanna look at my toy bag?' line. I'm tired of having to literally hug the wall on my way to the ladies after a scene, because chances are I'm still naked and probably more than a little bit spacey. It's like those construction workers who constantly hit on women on the streets, catcalling and yelling sexual comments at these women. They never seem to change their tact, they seem to think that eventually it will work in their favor. It's the same thing in the scene, the same sad, pathetic, terrifying approach is used time after time on whoever their target is. You think they'd get the clue.

I've told Terra that I want to teach a Miss Manners class, and she continues to remind me that I will in all likelihood get up there and revert to my Jersey girl nature and spaz out and start ranting for an hour and a half solid at these people about why they can't get anyone to play with them. Us Jersey girls play dirty sometimes, Aimee speculates that it's something in the air that comes to us by way of Refinery Row and the Pulaski Skyway. Personally I've always said that it's something in the water.

But the point is is that this has to stop, I desperately want to be able to go to a party on my own, or maybe meet people there and get there early and not feel obligated to stand outside in the dark street because I would rather take my chances getting mugged than having to deal with people who never learned the concept of personal space.

It seems to me that these behaviors are so common that they are accepted and tolerated by the rest of the scene. Now, I know that my paltry three and a half years doesn't come close to some of my friends' time spent in the scene, so I might be missing some really big piece of the puzzle here, but why is this tolerated? Why are these people just accepted and ignored?

There seems to be a new strain of classes about how to get people to play with you. It seems odd to me that we need classes on common sense things. I think it's idiotic that people need to pay some small fee to be told to act how they would in a vanilla situation. I just want to understand this. I want to work towards a better community for everyone. I can't be the only one who wants this, but sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who wonders why this is, and tries to figure out how it can be changed.

I don't know, I've only been here for so long. And my so long is really very limited. Maybe I don't know something everyone else does. But if we all know the same things, then why isn't anything being done to change it? My goal here is not to offend, it's to learn, to understand why things are the way they are. It's to help stop people from being hurt, to bring people into our folds instead of turning them away. There are so many wonderful people in our folds. There are wonderful people from age 18 up through 110 and beyond. Truly lovely people who are worth your time and energy and love and trust. They are people who can teach you things, and learn from you as well. I know they can be found, because I found them, they are my friends. But I also know that I had to drag myself through countless leering stares and bad pick-up lines. I had my bad relationship with an abusive man, who I later discovered had a pattern to go with it. I know that I wasn't the only one.

I want things to change so that people can come to our community and see that everyone is worth their time and energy and affections, and that they don't have to sift through the predators and creeps to find the diamonds in the rough. Everyone should be a diamond. There's no reason why it should be a mix of coal and gems. No reason at all.

So why tolerate the predators?

FGM

Sorry I haven't been posting, things have been kinda nuts lately. But I'm alive, and giving you this little story to sink your teeth into. Enjoy!

I was in my sociology class a while back, and we were talking about FGM, or Female Genital Mutilation. This is a practice done in some third world African and Middle Eastern countries, and as I understand it, it involves removing the clitoris and labia, and then the genitals are stitched shut leaving only a small opening for urine and menstral blood to pass through, and scar tissue is encouraged to form. This often results in a number of nasty effects. When the girl gets married, the opening is widened to accomodate her husband, and it is widened even further when she gives birth. After she delivers the child, the vagina is stitched shut again, causing more scar tissue to form. Many women die from this, or live very painful and debilitating lives because of it.

So anyway, we were discussing this practice in my sociology class, and one of the students piped up, even had a valley girl tone in her voice, no joke. "Umm, they do that in America too, in like, the BDSM community, yeah, like, women do that for their masters to show their devotion and submission to them." I whipped around and looked at this girl and then whipped back. It took all of my self control not to bitch her out right then and there. Everything I had not to rip her throat out for uttering such stupid and ignorant words.

Now, I understand that the leather community isn't the right group to head the equal-rights-for-alternative-lifestyles movement. The world really isn't ready for us, but we are not that bad. Now, I've heard some horror stories, like the one about some idiot woman pouring hot oil, like, hot cooking oil that was being heated on a stovetop and pouring it on some poor unsuspecting man. People like that are stupid and ignorant and they are the ones who give the scene a bad name. But never have I heard of anyone in the scene, here or anywhere else, chopping away at a woman's genitals like it was a steak. Never ever ever. Now, maybe I'm ignorant, my experiences in the scene are certainly limited to the few years I've been here and the small number of people I've become friends with in that time. I know people who have been in the scene for a lot longer than I have, and they are good kind people who would only hurt a fly if it said 'please', but they would never ever do something so horrible to someone.

So yeah, I was completely caught off guard by this statement, and all I could do was raise my hand and recite a little fact from a medical journal I had read. "Umm, yeah, the last documented case of genital mutilation performed by a doctor was in 1958 on a 5 year old, it was a clitorectomy. Since then any procedure relating to the removal of any part of a healthy woman's genitals has not been performed by anyone with a sane head on their shoulders." I hated that I couldn't rip her to shreds, hated that I had to protect my anonymity.

I called up Terra later on, totally dumbstruck by this girl's idiocy. "Are there kinky people that do this? No one has ever proposed cutting my snatch off in all the time I've been doing this. So I need to know, are there people that do this? Because they need to be stopped. They need to be stopped right now Terra. I'll buy the bus tickets, we'll find these people and slap them." She was just as flabbergasted as I was, neither of us could figure out where this little fact had come from. We finally just let it go into the ether, helpless to change the flow of bad information, lest we pay of the price of exposing ourselves. It really is a pity though.

Disgust

I received this in an e-mail recently, in a dummy account I keep for kinky mailing lists and things like that. Keep in mind I never heard from this person before this showed up in my inbox. He was a complete stranger until he was brought to my attention. I copied and pasted it, it is completely unedited, down to the caps:

MY NAME IS THE PAIN DOCTOR.MY MAIN SPECIALTY IS INFLICTING PAIN BY GIVING CRUEL AND UNUSUAL CORPORAL PUNISHMENTS...MY TECHNIQUES AND METHODS ARE QUESTIONABLE BY SOME,BUT PROVED TO BE VERY PAINFUL AND EFFECTIVE...I AM VERY STRICT AND DO NOT TOLERATE MISBEHAVE DISOBEDIENT SLAVES...YOU MUST OBEY TO EACH AND EVERY ORDER - NO QUESTIONS ASKED OR YOU WILL SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES = AGONY ORDEAL... I DO NOT GIVE ANY "WARM UP" AND GO DIRECTLY TO DO WHAT I DO BEST:TRAINING DISOBEDIENT AND DISRESPECTFUL SLAVES.YOU WILL NEVER KNOW WHAT REAL PAIN IS - UNTIL YOU HAVE MET THE PAIN EXPERT... I HAVE MY OWN TORTURE TECHNIQUES, AND WHO EVER FELT IT,COMPLAINT THAT THEY ARE TOO EXTREME,TOO SEVERE...THE WORDS:MERCY,TOO SEVERE,I NEED A WARM UP,I CAN'T TAKE IT AND SO - DO NOT EXIST IN MY VOCABULARY... I WILL TORTURE YOU AND MAKE YOU SCREAM,BEG FOR MERCY,BEG FOR ME TO STOP AND CRY,CRY,AND CRY...I WILL START THE TRAINING BY SECURELY TYING YOU UP IN UNCOMFORTABLE POSITIONS AND END THE "SESSION"BY PUTTING SALT AND ALCOHOL ON YOUR COLORFUL MARKS, WELTS AND BRUISES... YOU WILL NEED TO USE A VERY SOFT PILLOW TO SIT DOWN... IT IS UNNECESSARY TO MENTION THAT YOU WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO TOUCH AND RUB IT WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.... REMEMBER : YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE YOU NEED TO BE SEVERELY PUNISHED,TRAINED AND DISCIPLINED - YOU MUST NOT ENJOY IT.YOU ARE HERE TO SUFFER,TO FEEL UNCOMFORT,EXTREME PAIN AND AGONY,TO SCREAM, TO CRY, AND BEG FOR MERCY...AND I WILL NOT FEEL SORRY FOR YOU !!!I HAVE MORE THAN 15 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE AS WELL AS ALL THE TOOLS NEEDED FOR ATTITUTE CORRECTIONS.

THE PAIN DOCTOR

Now, I don't think I need to tell you how angry and upset this made me. Why on earth would anyone say these things to me? I reported him to the mailing list, saying that he was threatening me, and was probably threatening others as well. Unfortunately I don't have the e-mail that I sent him in response. But I basically responded by telling him that he was threatening me, and basically telling me that he wanted to assault and abuse me and that he was a shameful predatory woman hater and it was people like him who gave the scene a bad reputation. And I then I shamed him several times.

This is not the way to get my attention. No, I'm sorry, that's wrong, this is a very very good way to get my attention. But the problem with getting my attention in this regard is that I will come down on your head like a safe dropped from a window several stories up, and the end result generally isn't that pretty.

I asked Terra if she thought I was overreacting, but I felt absolutely flabbergasted that anyone would write this to anyone else, let alone a complete stranger. I sat there agape, like a fish when I first read it, the second and third time proved to change little in my behavior. When I read the e-mail to her over the phone, she too was perplexed and concerned by this e-mail. We had no idea what to make of it, we still don't, for that matter. We just know that it's offensive and rude and unacceptable.

I don't know why so many people in the scene think that just because they're kinky and identify with a certain role means that the rules of respect and common decency go out the window. I am much more likely to play with someone who says hi to me, and asks me how I am, and engages me in a conversation before asking me to play. And if I choose to decline, then to simply respect that. But these strangers touch me, and call me 'girl' and tell me how much they want to spank me. These people creep me out, which is why when I go out, I use the buddy system, and periodically throughout the night, my buddy changes, because I find someone to play with, or someone to hang out with while my buddy goes off and plays. However it's sad to me that I have to instate a buddy system, something I shouldn't have to use at the age of 21.

I've been trying to find the words to write about predators and the generally harmless albeit creepy people in the scene, because sadly, they are there, many people I know have had their share of encounters with them, myself included. Maymay recently wrote a very well written post about meeting people in kinky environments, and I'm glad that he wrote that post. He touched on some stuff that I've been mulling over for a while now, and between that and the rather rude e-mail I received above put some things into perspective for me.

When I am confronted with new people in the scene who ask me about how to meet people, I'm always kinda floored. My experience isn't that vast, sure, I've had some wild scenes with some great people, but my circle of friends is pretty small. I try to tell people to please be patient, and not to allow themselves to fall prey to the people who will harm them, like Exhibit A above. I tell them to use the same measuring stick that they would anyone they might meet in the vanilla world. Because the vanilla things do matter when it comes to any kind of relationship with anyone. Kinky stuff is fun, but you need a foundation made up of more than your shared love of canes and spankings for any kind of prolonged relationship.

This behavioral pattern of men, both submissive and dominant, coming up to women, and I can only assume men too, and asking if they can rub our feet or show us their toy bag without even introducing themselves to us is offensive and rude. This isn't to say that there aren't dangerous women in the scene, there are, but in my experience they tend not to be as obvious about their intentions.

It's no different to me than the men on the street who catcall at women as they walk by. They just assume that eventually one of them will take them up on their offer, but honest to goodness, if the first ten didn't show any interest, what makes them think anyone else will?

And this notion of people wanting to prove how dominant they are that they throw the basic rules of social interaction out the window is unacceptable. We no longer live in a medieval society where women are dictated by the wills of their husbands and fathers; the feminist movement happened, we burned our bras and redesigned the maxi pad and demanded the oppertunity to prove ourselves in fields outside of nursing and clerical work. And you know what? We did it too. We got out of the kitchen and we stopped making pies.

And then I go and get up this morning and mosey on downstairs to check my e-mail and I find myself reading this little gem. I'm offended that anyone would write that to anyone else, and I keep coming back to it, keep wanting to write back again. I swear, I want to do a Miss Manner's course on etiquette because quite frankly it's shameful that anyone would consider this a suitable way to introduce oneself. Absolutely shameful.

I'm sure people will roll their eyes and tell me to drop it, that it's not worth my time or energy, that there will always be people like this, and that's probably true, but just because it's true doesn't mean that it's acceptable.

No means no

I never classified the assault placed on me as 'rape' until about a year ago. It's such a loaded ugly word. Rape. I find it hard to believe that I would be raped. After all, I go out of my way to move worms off the sidewalk into the grass, I talk to homeless people on the street, and I enjoy spending time with the elderly. Why would anyone want to rape me? I'm a good person who did nothing to deserve it. So I disregarded my now ex-boyfriend/dominant's assault on my ass as rape until I relayed the story to a friend of mine who replied: "Dude, that's rape."

I often asked myself "Well, I'm submissive, and I was submissive to him, so even though he disregarded the fact that I said no but didn't press the matter because I was afraid of him, it's still not rape, because that was my role." Right? Wrong. I said no, but him being larger and stronger than myself forced my face into the pillows while he forced himself into my ass. My being submissive does not equate me being less than human, and therefore denied certain inalienable rights. This was the unfortunate event that made it clear to me that he did not get that memo.

My opinion was not asked during the course of that relationship, I had no rights or privledges. I was not even awarded the common courtesy of asking to consent to blanket consent, something I never would have done given the choice. None of the fetishes that I enjoy today flourished then, even though I did them on a regular basis.

I'm not one to write in anger, but after keeping my silence for almost two years, I feel that I'm allowed to write about my anger towards what was done to me. I strive to be strong, to take what happens to me in stride, but even the best of us get stopped in our tracks, completely floored by certain events or circumstances. Some people grieve, some people get angry.

I got angry. But my anger came later, much later, when there was nothing left to gain from it. It never occurred to me to grieve for myself.

It was months before I worked up the courage to leave him, and it didn't happen right after what I have come to term as The Incident. It was four months after that that I finally broke free. I never reported him to the authorities. The physical evidence of what was done to me has been washed away.

I, for the most part, have healed. I enjoy power exchanges today, I greatly enjoy service and, since that relationship, I have never encountered the problems that I did then. I have fetishes that I did not have then, and I allow myself to play with some people with a certain amount of abandon. I'm in service now, and very very happy with what we are doing. I am also due to graduate in March. In short, I'm a person who is being given a second chance. I'm furious at the man who did that to me, but I don't allow my anger to bleed over into the other parts of my life, because my life is too good right now to let that man take it all away from me again.

I do, however, get angry at the people who get all uppity about topics like rape. We did not invite it. We are not accountable for what happened to us. How can we be? By it's very definition it's impossible. How can anyone say those things when from 1992-1995 20,000 to 70,000 women a year were being taken to 6 DIFFERENT RAPE CAMPS in Bosnia as a systematic tactic of war. That every 15 minutes a woman in South Africa will be raped, and that those are the only ones that are reported. This is to say nothing of that fact that every 2 and 1/2 minutes someone is being sexually assaulted in the US. Don't tell me that I asked for it to happen when I laid there underneath that terrifying sweaty man and begged to die. And if you tell it to my face, then be prepared to tell it to those women in Bosnia, Yugoslavia, and Croatia. Be prepared to tell it to all the women, and yes, men who were victims of horrible hate crimes and terrible circumstances.

Seeing the right people, wearing conservative clothes, all of those things do not protect us from being raped. I am no virgin by any means, I know that there are naked pictures of me floating around out in the world, I know that there is one 'home video' out there starring me and an old ex. Yes; I fuck and play with different people, but that does not automatically mean that my right as a human being to say 'no' should be taken away because I'm a woman who is comfortable in her skin.

Virgins are just as likely to get raped as whores are. No matter what our sexual status, we are still daughters and sons, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, and friends and somewhere along the line, that concept that the offended belonged to someone went missing. And my heart bleeds, not just for myself, but for every one who was forced into a situation against their will. Because the wounds are not always reparable, and scars can be ugly.

Almost two years later, and I still get tears in my eyes at how furious I am at what was done to me. I have nothing but admiration at the people who have the courage to write about their experiences. I am in awe at what College Callgirl wrote, and her courage should be commended for putting herself out there like that. I also felt very much in agreement with Calico's righteous anger. Living in fear, powerlessness and pain is a horrible thing, but to blame ourselves, to let these crimes against us go unspoken is just not cool. Those of us who are survivors of sexual assault and/or rape did nothing to deserve it, we are not worthless. It doesn't matter who raped us; boyfriends, girlfriends, acquaintances, clients, employers, random strangers, doesn't change the fact that they violated us and made us feel small in that terrible way that makes you feel like you are going to vanish and no one will notice.

Rape and assault are rape and assault, no matter what the circumstances, and we cannot make excuses for those people any more. It's just not acceptable. I don't know how else to put it. Rape, assault, abuse, they are just not acceptable. Don't tell us that it didn't happen, that we 'imagined' it, because to me that just perpetuates the myth that rape and assault are okay. And it's not. It's just not acceptable. No means no.