A Kinky Cure for a Cruel World

Valentine’s Day is a bitch for the weirdos and trust me dearest motherfuckers, they don’t come much weirder than me. I’ve long fancied myself a hopeless romantic with a heavy emphasis on the hopeless angle, but lets face it, I’m a freak; a pervert, a sicko, a degenerate. I don’t have a fetish. My whole goddam sexuality is one ginormous fucking fetish and it always has been. Before my gender transition, when I refused to accept that I wasn’t a man, I was a hardcore submissive, what shrinks would classify as a masochist. My sexuality was governed by the idea of being manhandled by a woman a third of my size; being pushed, slapped, shoved, tied up, and generally punished for being born into the wrong gender. Climax usually came for me after having a woman with the body I desired in ways I was terrified to admit step and sit on my face and piss in my mouth. Ain’t love grand?

As I began to transition into the woman I’ve always really been however, my perversions transformed too. I became a dominant, the big bad bitch in control of someone cisgender’s beautiful female body. I wanted complete control of the women I loved, if only in the bedroom. This made me feel despicable, and sometimes it still does. As a transgender feminist, I adore women. I revere them as the ultimate archetype of anarchist resistance to a backwards society. A flaming star in the shape of the girl who bleeds strength through unfiltered vulnerability. What kind of sick fucking bastard would want to cage and tame something so pure? What in Kali’s name is wrong with me?

That’s society talking. The two-headed beast of psychiatry and organized religion which has not only carefully trained us to believe that all but the most regimented forms of procreation are pure sickness, but that they can only be cured through their authoritarian regimes. I spent a decade being stepped on by the Catholic Church and pissed on by the DSM. These giants of totalitarian dominance taught me from an unspeakably young age that my body was a disease only they could cure. I took thousands of cold showers trying to scrub my body clean and cried myself to sleep believing that these feelings, the ones the priests and psychiatrists taught me to feel, doomed me to an eternity in Hell. Is it really any wonder that my budding young sexuality developed into a flower with a crooked and thorny stem? Jesus may or may not want me for his sunbeam, but it was his idiot followers who made me a pervert.

And as far as perversions go, mine are far from cruel. Over the last few years, I’ve explored my sick desires among other adults who practice them consensually. I may be a femme domme but it turns out that I’m far from a sadist. What I thirst for from a companion is someone who I can consensually bind and care for. Once I have possession of the proverbial whip, I’m much more interested in carefully nurturing my submissive with the benevolent authority I once childishly sought from the institutions that battered and abused my trust. I’d much sooner gently bathe and dress my submissive than manhandle them the way I once wished to be. I want desperately to be better to them than I’ve been to myself. Apparently, I fall into a category of service-dominant known as the mommy domme. It’s not about incest, not even symbolically. It’s about taking someone’s complete and total faith in you as a caregiver and rewarding it with unconditional love, and the occasional spanking.

The thing the vanilla world can’t seem to comprehend about BDSM is that it’s all about correcting institutional power imbalances. The relationships I cultivate seek to confront my abusive childhood by becoming the authority figure that psychiatry and organized religion drove me to mythologize and fetishize. By exploring these feelings openly and reserving them strictly to consensual contracts among consenting adults in the confines of my own boudoir, I am avoiding the need to play them out in far more malignant rolls in the outside world. I no longer dream of being Lenin on the battlefield because I can be Lenin in the bedroom. And this is what BDSM has to offer to society at large, extinguishing what Wilhelm Reich referred to as the totalitarian personality.

One of the namesakes of Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, and Masochism is a wildly misunderstood revolutionary named the Marquis de Sade, who spent most of his life in prison for advocating sexual perversion as a cure for political perversion. De Sade too was once a man enamored with revolutionary violence until he witnessed firsthand the horrors it could lead to, even among the most honorable men, with Robespierre and the Terror that followed the French Revolution. His solution to such carnal decadence was the whorehouse. Contrary to popular belief, de Sade had great reverence for strong women and the strongest of them all were the sex workers willing to play dominant or submissive in order to serve as a sort of proletarian therapy, avoiding the authoritarian trap of bourgeoise psychiatric subjugation with the panarchist democracy of contracts and safe words.

Imagine a world where bankers crushed rotten fruit between their toes instead of maverick investors. Imagine a world where police got to put on a uniform and be large and in charge without violating anything but a taught and willing buttocks. Even better, imagine a world where a “suspect” can turn the tables and teach the master cop what it’s like to be the one in handcuffs on the other side of the badge. Imagine people hiring someone to rule their bedroom instead of voting for someone to rule the world. Imagine a world where masters and slaves and gods and subjects only exist in the theatre of the boudoir where such power trips belong. That’s what I want you to do with your dirty little imaginations this Valentine’s Day, dearest motherfuckers. Would this whorehouse democracy cure every woe? Probably not. But it quite literally beats the tits off rotting away in the confessional booth or on the therapist’s couch.

I may be a pervert, dearest motherfuckers, but I’m not the only one. Maybe someday you can join us and the world can be a hell of a lot more fun.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.