Book Review: “A Queer and Pleasant Danger” by Kate Bornstein

***3/3***

I met a real sweetheart recently.  She came to me for a spanking.  We bonded during aftercare and got to talking.  The anonymity of intimacy with a complete stranger, one with whom you have just shared an intimate act, can be more than superficially deep.

The afterglow of said spanking, found as she cuddled with me in my lap, strips away this idea that we are all strangers until so much time passes.  There, in those moments, once you have done something like that together, almost before even uttering any words to one another, one finds connection.

Into this space she recommended a book.  I feel a bit silly now as I look back that I did not know the book, that I did not know the author.  I really should have.  It isn’t like there are all that many trans authors.  Even fewer who write so well.  Fewer still who share a common school.

My new friend could not have known that some of the small details of the author’s life could have been in mine too, but she got the big parts right, and it mattered not one bit that there are key details in the life of Kate Bornstein that are also in mine.  And they don’t really matter at all, other than having served to make me feel more connected to the story.

My new friend came over to my house.  I was brought into her life in part to play a therapeutic role, one which we just slotted into and one which felt completely natural as an extension of how we met—over a spank and cuddle.  And this fits neatly with the bigger picture of my life, that I am becoming a dominatrix with a particular style, one which is centred on healing.

I didn’t think I would read the book.  I might have even smiled politely but grimaced inside thinking I wouldn’t read it. That has happened before.  So many people in my life who don’t know me all that well, do know that I love to read, that I read an awful lot, and recommend or give me books that I end up really not much caring for.

I picked this book up one day while I was dilating.  This is just one of those things, where for 45 minutes to an hour, three times a day, I am forced to do nothing.  And because I can’t stand watching television because it feels like a waste of time, and social media generally doesn’t do it for me, reading is a preferred outlet.  It is a bit awkward to balance a book on my belly whilst I am holding a long, hard plastic dildo inside my neo-vagina, but hey, whatever it takes.  I love to multi-task.  Life is too short to live in serial.

The book is an autobiography and relates the author’s experiences as a trans woman.  Finding herself.  Coming out.  Finding her way into kink and BDSM.  Only these aspects are a relatively small part of the story.  What the book really digs into is her decades spent as a Christian Scientist, a kind of cult.  And this was how it spoke to me.

My new friend had escaped from a cult too.  She has a trans sibling who had read the book first, given it to her more for the “get out of the cult” aspects, and it had found its way to me.  I love that this book had such a gentle meander through three psyches at least before I cracked it open.

As with any book that speaks to us, we find ourselves in its pages.  I found myself most deeply as I consider my marriage to a woman who bullied me and negated my existence.  The toxic legacy of self-erasure is profound.  Kate does not explore so much where her submission comes from, or how she found herself coming alive as a slave in a relationship with a lesbian couple.  And in later life, after the book is over, in this kind of relationship.

I can see myself in that—and it is funny that we can see ourselves in things that have not happened yet and do so without fantasy or yearning.  It just seems like a natural flow state from my life…and it could be one of many parallel lives.  There is no contradiction between becoming a dominatrix for hire, a possible switch in a domestic relationship, but the dawning realisation that being a slave is a part of my identity.  

Learning about how we are, and why we are as we are, is part of what reading is about.  We can read to escape, to inhabit a world of fantasy.  We can read about a life so far removed from our own, or one with uncanny parallels, and if we stop and look, will always find shared humanity at every turn.

Kate’s writing style is humorous.  It is easy and breezy, slightly self-deprecating.  Her gyrating weight from skinny as a rail to chubby is one that is familiar to me, probably to most women, and certainly to nearly every trans woman I have come to know.  We have a level of motivation in body consciousness that weight sits right at the centre of, body image sits at the centre of, which comes to life in the book.

Her loving relationships are beautiful, and the feelings she explores are universal.  She writes of dysphoria with ease, making such a grim subject into one that is palatable and easy to understand.  There is a lot of life packed into the pages of the book.

You can read about someone whose experience is so radically different from your own, but the thirst for acceptance is universal.  The desire to belong.  Made acute by not feeling you even belong to your own body, your own sense of self, is one that speaks deeply to anyone who wishes to listen.

I really enjoyed this book.  I really liked the bits at the end where she discovers her joy in BDSM, something that emerges relatively late in life.  A parallel to me.  And when we read about someone else’s journey, and how matter of fact, unapologetic they are about it, our own journey becomes less alien to ourselves.  And after all, why should we be alienated from our own desires, our own feelings?

And isn’t that the point of reading in the first place?  To not just learn about someone else, but to learn about ourselves, our place in life, through the experiences of someone else?

After a crazy life adventure, the author settles into a long-term D/s relationship with her lesbian partner.  Kind of aspirational don’t you think?

I wonder where she is.  My lesbian top, mommy, bad-ass bitch wife. I seem to be meeting many straight women who get to know me well enough to know this aspect of me, that I am a slave, a dominatrix, and a lesbian, and I can feel the powerful lure that represents to them, as if it is a magnet which will tear them from the comfortable cradle of patriarchal hetero-normativity.  And I’m like ‘sister, come and take a walk on the wild side’.

What do I conclude from all this? That I had best get a job.