New Moon: Inflicter

It's Friday, and after some unnerving warmth the right rhythm of November has at least temporarily resumed. Days and days spent under sunless clouds, with long bouts of rain, with the Sun often only half-showing himself as a diffuse, wan orb through a thinner patch of that perpetual stratocumulus. Juncos feast, jays scream, and the last leaves pile up. When I go out in the evening, which is sometimes the only time I can go out because of what keeps me indoors by day while my owner works, I see the Pleiades haunting the eastern sky.

This is the season of greatest ordeal, for although the nights have yet to reach their longest we are in that painful plunge of acclimation to that darkness. Never mind the artificial clock change; for almost a fortnight here we have had less than the requisite hours of daylight for plants to grow. This is solar winter. This is Persephone's bite of the pomegranate. And here in the week of the New Moon each night feels especially thick with the shadows of fear, trauma, and grief. I have written before of how the alchemical process demands putrefaction, and how this is that time.

What a time, then, to sit and breathe as a remade being whose heels and ankles even still have been tingling with nerve injuries from the ordeal of making life. I have never been more vulnerable. I have never been more powerful.

In this state I find that my heart has hardly turned away from undergoing and enduring more ordeals as the recipient. I remain a masochist and I look forward to when my life's current disruption settles in a way that allows for my owner to torment me again in the ways we love. However, knowing what I am capable of, knowing the violent and monstrous and sacred force inside me, I have a rekindled and deepened thirst to be the dealer of pain.

Now is an apt moment to reflect on the nature of the sadism in my kink.

Let me be a breaker of men

I haven't yet recovered the analytical mindset that would help me define or redefine terms or concepts I've referred to before, and I haven't written much of kink lately. So if anyone has joined my readership from the more vanilla side of my online sphere and you find yourself mystified by kink jargon or by why kink forms a vital element to my rites in the first place, my best advice for the foreseeable future is to read back through the extensively populated kink tag for this newsletter, or the more compact ordeal tag.

With that recommendation aside:

People who know me in the kink scene probably grow aware over time — at least if we're in any space where I might solicit play — that although I'm a switch in all senses, i.e. not always submissive and not always a bottom, the situations in which I find myself craving to dominate and/or top have historically proven much narrower. But even among the people who know, I do not think I've ever shared my most complete thoughts about these facets to my switch-capacity. And I certainly know I haven't fully elaborated here.

To do the subject justice, I would need multiple posts because I'm still reckoning with and studying my desire to dominate and/or top people whose gender aligns fairly closely with my own — people who are mostly though by no means exclusively women. For most of my adult life I thought I had no such interest despite being queer in general; I felt purely submissive and bottom-leaning around such people. A couple of years ago, however, I realized I didn't have an aversion to inhabiting opposite kink roles with them. Rather, as with viewing them in pornography or seeing them bottom and submit at kink events, I identified with them strongly enough that my own standard inclinations would activate and I would want to be the recipient of whatever activity was occurring — why give when I could take? But with that in mind, I slowly acknowledged that I did harbor fantasies about topping or dominating people with whom I could strongly identify, provided that we could trade off in the course of the same scene and maintain a playful, gentle atmosphere, which was not a way I'd previously envisioned playing either. This revelation is still relatively new, so I am still developing a deeper understanding.

Meanwhile, though, I know one constant has persisted over the years, and this is that I certainly can feel dominant and top-leaning around people whose genders feel more distant from mine, and this is especially the case with men. To be clear, I can also feel submissive and bottom-leaning with men — my owner being a perfect example — but it's very much not the only way I tend to feel. And indeed, it's only men toward whom I feel sadistic.

The reason for this is not what you may guess.

I have no interest in punishing men for being men. I have no interest in didactically inverting gender hierarchy between us in a kink context. I have no interest in forcibly feminizing men, nor even in using power exchange as a means to help male-assigned people who might actually be women explore that territory.[1]

I find male suffering beautiful when men allow themselves to do it. I find the male body in agony beautiful because it offers a more complete picture of masculinity than the stoic pain-causing figure that patriarchy demands. So far I have only topped a few men with implements of pain, but when I do so I carry this ethos:

Let go. Let go the expectations that constrict you. Let go and find yourself still a man but one who lives in a better world than this one. Your cries and curses are a precious gift to me, the inflicter, the witness-bearer.

Of course because this is kink and some more salaciously erotic narrative does not go amiss here, the way I usually present the matter involves some roleplay-that-is-not-roleplay, some ritual transformation on at least my end. Here I am possessed by a succubus who demands men's pain and pleasure intermingled.

Something other than ice

The archetypal dominatrix is also known as an ice queen. She looks gorgeous and dresses provocatively, but she views her male supplicants' sexuality with derision. Frequently they are expected not to touch her, or to haplessly watch her have sex with other people, and in either case or in the exceptions they probably need to stay locked in chastity cages, or the sex that happens is about them receiving anal penetration. To a certain extent this is a very practical approach for professional dominatrices because then they can avoid "full service" sex work or allegations of performing it. However, femdom pornography has conditioned a lot of men and also conditioned women and adjacent genders who dominate and top men as part of lifestyle kink; we all operate in a climate of assuming that if a woman is dominant or sadistic toward a man she doesn't really desire the man in question, or more troublingly that the focal point is about the status of his desire and nothing else.

Like many women I know, including some queer women, I do in fact desire men — and their desire for good measure. This means I have no reason to exclude their pleasure from erotic torments. I want to play with their bodies in all respects. I want them to achieve release at my bidding. I want them to touch and satisfy me even with my own body being penetrated, because that is a way I find pleasure, and it does not mean I am ceding anything to anyone unless we agree that's the case.

I have not yet explored this facet of my sadism very far, but I know it's integral. It also affects the precise forms of sadistic play that I prefer to engage in. I don't like keeping a distance from those I top. If I'm using an impact tool, it still needs to have a relatively short range so that I can stand or squat close to the bottom. I like using tiny, methodical sensation implements that give the air of performing a surgical experiment. I like binding a man in place and crawling all over him as I have my vicious, thirsty way.[2]

Astrologically and in many other respects, I am a being of fire more than of other elements, and I suppose it only makes sense for that to manifest in this way too. Ice simply does not suit me.

Recalibrating

All of the above is an iteration and elaboration on how I have usually described my sadism in applicable conversations or shorter written explanations not-here. It honestly summarizes my experiences with topping men so far and my aspirations for scenes yet to come. If I were writing this post a few years ago or even a few months ago I could leave it at that.

But giving birth has complicated everything in a manner that I am only now able to voice.

As these weeks of my new life and new body go by, I think I might still harbor some demoness, but a term like succubus feels too weak. An unholy fire brews inside me, pulsing through my arteries. A bloody, black-eyed, screeching beast, the bear erupting from a cave, the maw of the earth devouring the dead. This is not a siren but a fury.

By the same token, I feel a new capacity for inflicting pain toward a mystic end — an instinct to cause pain not out of sadism but in order to offer ritual transformation as I myself have undergone, of which our society is bereft outside a scant few contexts. I might feel this openness toward more than men. Let anyone come to me who is ready. Let me be your priestess of the blade, lash, and cord. Let me pass on the knowledge of ordeal that I have experienced.

This is going somewhere. It will be some time before I grasp it fully. It is wrapped up in a recalibration of my dominant instincts in power exchange, too.

I am also feeling the urge very strongly. This is quite strange to acknowledge or express because my instincts toward masochism and submission have in no way diminished. Since giving birth I am still my owner's pet, perhaps more than ever before. Non-erotically, I am also in service to my child. And both erotically and not, I have been swept up by — I surrender to — a current of fate, an intervention of the cosmic flow, which I will only survive through embracing some kinds of pain and giving up all control.

But even in doing so, I have come into my true power. My witchcraft and my kink, together, are growing so much richer than I ever fathomed.

[1] I know people who practice this ethically, but I have too much ancient transmasculine trauma around things like this to practice it myself, and as the rest of this post should make clear, my particular focus — or yes, fetish — is men bottoming as men.

[2] Consensually. This feels worth repeating for those of you who still read these writings from the outside, as it were.

Thank you for reading. I'm glad I could finally manage a New Moon post after months of incidental interference during that phase's week. I can make no promises about what's possible over the next two weeks, of course, but I will be aiming for a post on the literally interlaced histories of weaving and computers, and then a post for paid subscribers that should serve as an overdue part 2 to my theory of divination. I can already guess the latter may turn into a Saturday post because of some plans for that long weekend, but we will see.