The first kinky fantasy I can remember is, I’m almost sure, not the first kinky fantasy I had. I remember it because, like many things people remember, I got in trouble.
I was in fifth grade, in a suburb of the bay area. My parents were divorcing, and had moved away from the city to a house with a pool and an astroturf patio; a long dark low house, they bought it in what we’ve all come to refer to as a last ditch attempt to save their marriage. I left my small, individual learning-style oriented elementary school, complete with hippie teachers and flexible class schedules, and enrolled in Springhill Elementary. There were four or five classrooms per grade, held each in their own identical temporary portable while they remodeled the main building. I went each morning to sit at a desk, in a long row of other desks, and listen Ms. King, a tall woman with thin lines, teach long division and spelling. I was bored and sad, and had very few friends.
There was a boy named Andrew, or maybe Alex, who sat two desks away. He was strange, and everybody thought he was strange, and he was ostracized and made fun of accordingly. In an effort to diminish my own ostracization and being-made-funning-of, I joined in, and although he was fascinating in a way, I was cruel and distant along with everybody else.
He was weird, to be sure, but so was I. He was awkward and vaguely inappropriate and made me feel, on occasion, feelings that were a little beyond my time. I didn’t know why that was, but he both frightened me and made me want to know more, pull closer to him.
These might seem like outlandish things to talk about a fifth grader feeling, but they’re what I remember.
So we sat in Ms. King’s class. I think it was spring. I was bored and doodling, as usual. I drew mandalas, and Andrew loved them. He wanted me to draw him one, wouldn’t tell me what he wanted in it or what he liked about the other ones, but he wanted me to make one for him. Instead, hunkered over my desk (suspicious already, I see that now) I drew a picture of a woman. At first she was naked, and then I drew her a tiny bikini. A baby sitter of mine had taught me how to draw anime faces, so my woman stood with ballooning breasts and eyes glittering huge and square in her head, mouth a tiny dot just above her chin. Pigtails and high heels. No belly button.
Between her hands (which fell at her sides, because that was the only way I knew how to draw hands at the time), I made a chain, link by link in smeary pencil, to attach the two manacles I’d put around her wrists. I drew a speech bubble to the right of her head, and wrote “Come here, Andrew, and do whatever you want with me.”
I was funny, and the girls around me tittered when they peaked to see. I felt like a queen for a moment, proposing the embarrassment of this boy so righteously hated by my not-quite-friends. I turned to hand him the drawing, thinking that maybe, finally, I would be accepted into the wider social hierarchies of the school, and also wanting, strangely, to give it to Andrew even if nobody knew. To hand it to him and look him straight in the face, to say without saying that I wanted to be the girl in the picture, that he was deliciously frightening to me in a way that few people had been, in a way that I had been taught wasn’t okay, but in a way that I wanted.
Instead of Andrew, Ms. King stood beside my desk, looking over my shoulder, her blue eyes squinted almost closed in her pointed face. She took the drawing and sent me to the office. She called my parents. I went home from school, and missed the next day. Whether I was suspended or not I don’t remember.
My mother sat me down at home, after she’d seen the drawing and had time to think about it, had the time to consider what I now imagine to be a Difficult Parenting Moment. To her credit, she told me that it was okay to express myself any way that I chose, that drawing naked people was completely okay, but not at school. What worried her, she said, was the words in the drawing. That I would think it was okay for someone to “come and do whatever they wanted with me.” I remember the hot flush of talking about this, as a child, with a parent; the topics that feel inexpressibly embarrasing in their very existance, the topics that become garish and offensive whenever acknowledged out loud. I felt ashamed, and ended the conversation as quickly as possible. I threw the drawing away.
Nothing ever happened with me and Andrew, or Alex. We moved back to the city a year later, my parents divorced, and my mother and I never spoke about what happened. But I think I held onto it, in a way. Whether it was the bondage aesthetic, or the objectification, I thought about it often, and when I learned to masturbate, masturbated to it often. Not so much to the picture, but to the feeling of being a plaything, to the idea of being used.
I’d disagree with my mother now, although it’s never come up in my adulthood. I don’t know what I would have done differently as a parent, and I imagine that even with all her support, the feelings of guilt and shame and fear around desiring sexual expression contrary to societal norms would have developed anyway (in shorter words: I don’t blame my mother, or anyone, for the guilt and shame that, for me, come along with submission and masochism. Those feelings are actually something I value, and present, in my current relationship anyway, incredible opportunities for vulnerability and trust). She did the best she could, and she’s an incredible mom. I credit her, most probably, with the fact that I’m a kind of person who can respectfully disagree with her mother, on many things, kinky and otherwise.
I’ve never dressed in a bikini for play, nor do I own any shackles (although I’d like to. Own shackles. That is. Ahem). But on a more abstract level, I think that drawing summed up, and still sums up fairly well (if not in it’s entirety, at least in part) a good deal of what I need in a sexual relationship, and represents well why I’m attracted to kink, to masochism, to bondage and submission and all the bells and whistles and nooks and crannies along the way. I want to be used. I want to be beaten and forced. I want (consensual) nonconsent, to know that the speech bubble is unnecessary, because the partner that I’m with doesn’t care about permissions*, isn’t worried about what I need, or my pleasure. I’m there to be fucked, there to shine boots, there to be used as a thing. There is great comfort, for me, in objectification, and being used as such an object. And who knew, I’d have a glimmer of that, and remember it since.
So. That’s all for now. More next week, if not sooner.
Happy and battered and bruised, as always, as ever.
*Safewords. Always safewords. I love safewords, and I use safewords. Any and all of the play I talk about here, and any and all of the sentiments, consider them with a big fat SAFEWORD tag next to them.
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