Our friend Emma-Jane has written an interesting post on her blog (which is brand new, by the way: check it out) about struggling to reconcile being a kinky Irish girl with hearing about the results of the Ryan report into child abuse in Irish State Institutions:
“An emotionally abusive institution. Girls were humiliated and belittled on a regular basis”
Sounds like the brochure for a reformatory roleplay my friends are planning.
“CP was often administered in front of other girls and staff members. The use of denigrating and humiliating language was commonplace”
Sounds like the type of scene I’ve been fantasising about all my life.
“Physical punishment was severe, excessive and pervasive”
Sounds like a description of my latest play weekend.
Yes, well. I’m not going to make anyone feel better if I say that, without taking on and processing different kinds of violence visited by one human being on another throughout history, we would be bereft of any settings for role-play. The stuff we feed on, from Roman slaves, via Victorian maids, to nearly modern schoolchildren, is in its core quite appalling.
How much of it you then make it yours, whether you decide to play with certain aspects of it at all, is then a sensitive individual choice.
Abel and I discussed this the other day, and he wondered whether his ease or difficulty in accepting his own desires depends on how recent the historical event that triggers the fantasies. Does the fact that the Irish schoolchildren of the reports are real people who may be still not quite into their middle age, amplify the guilt?
When he said this, I wondered out loud how, then, the role-play involving trafficked Eastern European girls – who are our actual contemporaries – works out better for him. For me this is a semi-hard limit: I will only go there with one of a handful of extremely trusted tops, and only to please them as opposed to entertain my own desires. Abel, on the other hand, has independent fantasies in the white slavery milieu.
I think that, rather than being a question of historical proximity, our comfort level depends on how personal the story of the suffering is to us. History helps, to an extent, to soften the grip of guilt, but it’s personal involvement that creates qualms and hardens limits.
And it is, unfortunately, something each of us has to work through in our heads, alone with the shadows in our consciousness.
I’m glad you raised this, Haron. The whole prison girl fantasy does trouble me (although I have sometimes gone there in my own mind). I think it’s because I once read that the vast majority of women in Canadian prisons are ADHD and abuse survivors.
The only sense I can make of my own fantasies is that they *are* fantasies. In reality I absolutely do not support the corporal punishment of school children. Yet my fantasies about CP in a school setting are unremitting and powerful. My fantasy life is my own, and whatever I may do with those fantasies I do with consenting adults.
I spent/wasted a lot of years trying to force my sexual fantasies to have more “acceptable” content. With zero success. The peace I’ve experienced recently in accepting the way I am wired has been extraordinary.
Haron, this is indeed a complexing subject. I also have schoolgirl-being-beaten fantasies, and yet I fully recognize how abhorrent this would be in real life.
Here in Canada we have the terrible legacy of the residential schools, where small native children were placed after being forcibly removed from their parents and transported hundreds of miles away. Many children never saw their families again, and physical, emotional and sexual abuse was all too common. The goal was to stop them being Indians and turn them into people who behaved and thought as whites do. Sigh.
We also have a great deal of recently-exposed sexual abuse by members of the clergy, choirmasters and teachers on acolytes, choirboys, and students. Also food for role-play, but not at all acceptable in “real life”.
I think that situations I can relate to personally (I was once a schoolgirl!) are more of a potential role-play option, while situations I simply can’t imagine myself in (I am not a First Nations person) are more horrific.
Perhaps it is best if we keep our inner fantasies within the circle of those who do TTWD.
Hugs,
Hermione
Haron, you raise a very pertinent point: how personal the point of suffering is.
Right now I don’t think I personally know anyone who experienced abuse by the religious orders but it was so prolific and widespread that I probably do. And that makes me most comfortable.
Also you point out a stark reality of where our fantasies come from in the first place but sometimes we need to acknowledge that.
I meant ‘makes me most uncomfortable’ in my post.
A very thoughtful post, as was Emma Jane’s. I think the fact that I can be turned on, and fantasise about things that in a real life context would be totally abhorrent is one of the reasons that it took me so long to come to terms with my kinky self. Not that I’m completely there by any means. As you say, I think what scenarios we are comfortable fantasising about and playing is something very personal, and each person had to work out their own comfort level for themselves.
Thanks to both you and EJ for two great posts.
Just chiming in to appreciate these posts. It can be tempting to just put my fingers in my ears and go “la la la la I can’t hear you” when faced with difficult questions, and I have great respect and admiration for those who face them head-on.
“History helps, to an extent, to soften the grip of guilt, but it’s personal involvement that creates qualms and hardens limits.”
QFT.
As you can tell by the same names making the comments, some (and probably most) of the Irish contingent are struggling with this.
Your post is appropriately provocative in making us acknowledge that the proximity to evil is part of the kick. From my, admittedly very novice, association with this group, we appear to educated, liberal and remarkably supportive people. We have been bravely confident that we could handle ourselves in edgy situations. Isn’t that the basis of all endorphin/adrenaline sports, the proximity to danger and the confidence that we have good enough coordination and reactions to survive. There is a great similarity between believing in my ability to drive a car hard through a chicane without hitting anybody and my ability to punish a girl exquisitely without injuring her. Judged on my first ever visit to a party night last Saturday, it had to be the least violent nightclub in the whole of Dublin.
And isn’t that the point. Even though we seem to be playing with violence, for me anyway, the satisfaction is in avoiding violence If we humiliate our sub, we do it for their benefit. Those are not the self justifying words of a drunken wife beater the next morning. Any Dom I have seen is actually protecting their sub so carefully.
All of us have a desire for “the rush”, the exciting sport. Unfortunately for us in Ireland at the moment, we are having our noses rubbed most graphically in the seeming unending horror of car crash after car crash after car crash. Its difficult to go on supporting Formula One in that environment
Pingback: Zille Defeu's Fetish Fantasies ยป Deep (kinky) thoughts, and hot previews
Thankyou for this post. It’s a deeply uncomfortable and complex issue, and I think discussion is necessary. I was six paragraphs into a discussion of my own response to the Ryan report when I decided it should be a blog post in its own right. Thankyou for the food for thought. xx
Dear Haron,
“Physical punishment was severe, excessive and pervasive”. Sounds like a description of my latest play weekend.
Yes you raise a very difficult question, sometimes a source of inner conflict, and everybody in “the scene” has probably at some point been faced with it.
Maybe an analogy can point to an answer.
Case A: a woman is assaulted by a stranger in the park and raped brutally. Nobody hears her screams and groaning. She will have psychological scars, feel misused and “dirty” maybe for years to come – a common reaction to such an event.
Case B: a woman walking in the forest is assaulted and raped by a man. It is her husband/steady boyfriend doing it, and he knows that she likes being taken rough and hard sometimes. It is an exciting variation and a proof of his strong attraction to her. She groans but really enjoys it.
Seen from the outside, videotaped, the two events would look strikingly similar.
The difference is all on the inside.
Punishments and punishments may be very different things also.