This afternoon I was upstairs in my office on zoom with one of my children helping them write an essay about food and cooking. Like Trans Daddy, this particular child has found a path into food and cooking. Out of the babe’s mouth came a truth which could be mine. I was pushing them to articulate the truth, the meaning, the essence of the story.
“Cooking was just fun to me. It was fun to hang out with you in the kitchen. And plus, family time was at the table. Lunches on weekends, dinnertimes. That was when we were always together. I don’t know. It’s life.”
Boy was that music to my ears. It is life. It is the meaning of life. To me, the essence of life is love. I love through the stomach, through hospitality, through a warm welcome. You can psychoanalyse this through this site, but it is not a bit ironic that my version of love is most commonly expressed through bringing people together at the table through good food and conversation. It is the antidote to the under-breast-fed version of my life that sees me suckling at the plump breasts of Miss Conviviality herself.
Meanwhile, downstairs, with a slow roast in the oven, another child is cooking a childhood favourite: banana bread (recipe to come). One of the refugees has joined in the fun, and there is energy on every floor. Music in every room. Isn’t that what Sunday’s are for?
It’s funny. In some ways, aspects of my life are truly sublime. This is one of them. My home. It isn’t right of me to think of my house guests as refugees, or even all of us, me and my children included, as a group of misfits, but who in this world isn’t a misfit?
Even the white man is a misfit. It seems to me an existential imperative that all of us come to recognise that we all have the potential to be “other”…which is by no means a way to diminish the reality that society crushes difference, crushes things and people without privilege, crushes minorities. If you don’t fit the narrative, then you don’t fit. Privilege is real and it is gross, and it does untold damage to those who don’t have it.
Privilege is a zero-sum game. And this is civilization? That our modern culture should be so utterly and completely oriented towards a celebration of privilege, of creating wants. The entire edifice of consumerism is a corrosive evil.
Why do I love the dominatrix as an art form so much? Not because she beats me. But because she takes the perverse lust of a patriarch gone awry and makes him swallow it, choke on it, eat her shit, pay her, crawl for her, be in a state of abjection. I do not care that she advertises herself for the male gaze. Whatever it takes for her to lure him in and see his balls and cock locked up in a cage. If they had behaved well when they were free this wouldn’t be a solution but now it is. And I’d like to see more of it.
One of my enlightened dominatrix friends said to me, “I don’t go for key holding or control in the strict domme sense. If he lets himself out, who is he really hurting? Not me. Himself.” I knew she was right at the time, but of all the dommes I have met, she is the one who has made me think the most. Not because of what she is or what she does, but because of what she is not, what she does not do. Because self-realisation, submission when it is for you, now that is what real power is.
I feel this as someone who is intensely sexual but could be mistaken for an asexual. I’ve never gotten off with a sex worker. No matter what kind. Okay, I confess, but I don’t consider the tantric massage women I have seen sex workers, even if the law regards them as such, and regards what they do as more illegal than what I have done with others. When you go to see a woman who fxxks for a living and spend the evening talking and holding hands, then you know that something is definitely up over here. And yet, I find this arouses my curiosity far more than what I imagine she does with her other clients. True for the domme too.
Star Child was asking me the other day about why I see a dominatrix from time to time. She had latched on to my statement of the day before, “oh my G.., I so need a whipping right now.” There aren’t many moments when this is true, but this was one of them. I had been dealing with my wife. Talk about interactions that make me want to be hurt. Physically, that is.
The answer to Star Child’s question was complex, and therefore not well-thought-through. The Domme is a teacher. Her area of expertise, the power-exchange, infused as it becomes with sexuality, is my life blind spot. A deep need which is beyond understanding. A deep belief that the erotic is the true north to our healed selves. A faith that God speaks through arousal, sexual bliss, union with a partner. The Domme is like the boatman, taking me across the fevered river of my own sexual darkness, firm hand on the tiller, competent guide.
Star Child understood why it wasn’t safe to explore such a world with a vanilla partner. Agreed that it was too dangerous to explore these things within the bounds of a loving relationship. Too dangerous. I would lose myself.
There is a domme out there who I am terrified of, which is absurd, because I will never, ever see her. I know she would eat me alive. I also know how much I would be vulnerable to her. Why? Mostly because she wouldn’t notice me. And that would kill me. I would try so hard to please her, to satisfy her, and she wouldn’t give a damn. I know that nothing I have could give to her in the ways that she wants, and I would die on the rocks before even reaching the shore. That is my ultimate submissive fear.
Why do I submit? Why does innocence matter so much to me. Because as this baby lies in her crib and looking up, wanting solace, wanting the comfort of mommy, wanting all the things I have created, have done, just enough for her to come to me and tell me that everything will be all right, that she loves me, that she will hold me, and that I can drift off, feeling safe and held, and feeling what I needed to feel that I never felt when I needed it.
Is it a surprise to you that love for me is an expression of what I lacked? Does playing it out for others give me the feeling that I am finally getting it? Maybe. Probably. Yes.
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Such a thoughtful, inspiring post, my beautiful friend. Thank you for sharing your life with us. I am grateful to be following your journey <3 XOXO
What a dear, sweet, special human you are. I sure do love having you here in comments and in life. You enrich mine through your engagement, and I am deeply grateful.
that’s really sweet of you to say and much appreciated. it is becoming easier and easier to admit that have the word slave come from my lips when I describe myself to people. Gradually opening up one of these last places of shame and discovering that when understood and used and placed in context all in a healthy way, it can very easily and effectively describe my life and outlook.
The more I embrace it, too, and this is really critical, the more I am able to isolate aspects of my personality and self that I consider ugly or unattractive character traits. It is the strength of the slave within me that is able to work on them. The power of sex and sexuality as a tool for self-improvement rather than self-indulgence, is the most powerful of all.