Storytime with Clarisse, slash Communication Screwup Post #1: isn’t tickling cuuute?

I had a conversation over the weekend that reminded me of an incident with one of my exes — a communication screwup that really highlights how strangely our culture thinks about consent, and how BDSM ideas of negotiation can work against that.

Wow, I’m realizing that I’m about to write a totally serious post about tickling. I hope I don’t sound too pompous.

Anyway, story!

So, I was lying around having a casual conversation with this particular ex, and he started tickling me. I really wanted him to stop, so I asked him to. He didn’t. I safeworded, and he still didn’t stop. Furious, I lashed out and scratched him badly enough to bleed. I do believe I left a scar.

He got upset because he was bleeding, and I got upset because he hadn’t listened to me. I can’t remember how exactly we talked it out; it was a pretty tense moment. I think I might have apologized, but I also might not have. I was really angry, and my stance was, “So I drew blood — how else was I supposed to get you to stop? You should have respected how much I don’t like that, and it is totally not okay that you ignored my safeword!” He snapped back that it simply never occurred to him that I would actually safeword, for real, against being tickled. Tickling just seemed like such a mild, unimportant thing to him ….

If we’d been in the middle of doing BDSM stuff, then he would have stopped instantly. Indeed, I did safeword with him a couple of times in the middle of BDSM stuff, and at those times, he did everything exactly right — he stopped immediately, he calmed me down, he reassured me, and so on.

I think one of the hardest parts about relationships is learning that your partner really doesn’t work entirely the way you do. That there are things that absolutely drive your partner crazy, that literally don’t matter in the slightest to you … and vice versa. That sensitivity is so hard to build.

I also think that when people engage in careful, consenting BDSM relationships, they learn that kind of sensitivity more quickly — and, more importantly, they learn how to communicate about those boundaries. If I hadn’t had a safeword at all — if I’d been in a “normal, vanilla” relationship with my ex — I’m not sure how I would have even tried to communicate about the tickling problem. What would I have said, if I hadn’t been able to draw on BDSM experience? “No, really. I didn’t like that. No, really,” — over and over, until he got the point? Thank God I had words for how I felt: words better than, “I wasn’t trying to be cute, I really meant it.” I had these words: “You ignored my safeword. You know what a betrayal that is. You know that’s never okay.”

There’s this stereotypical image we have — of the cute couple where one person is tickling the other, and the second person is protesting but secretly enjoys it. I’m sure everyone reading this has encountered that image; you see it in romantic comedies all the time. And that situation is totally fine … if the second person really does secretly enjoy it.

But I don’t think most people have considered what happens if the second person, who “secretly enjoys” being tickled, doesn’t actually enjoy it. How does that person show that they really hate it? Protesting won’t necessarily work, because people are expected to protest against tickling even when they like it.

There’s a limit to how much we can expect “No, really, I don’t like that … no, really,” to work in such a situation. This is part of what feminists are talking about when they discuss a “rape culture”. We have a culture where certain acts are considered acceptable, simply because they’re “not that bad”, or they’re “unimportant”; and sometimes people are expected to protest those things at first. So, (a) it becomes hard to tell when the protests are real, and (b) people are trained to ignore protests. Almost nobody is actually trying to be insensitive, but the culture in which we find ourselves encourages us to be.

BDSM is unusual in its approach to specific sex acts: the rest of the world is far less likely to think about consent in terms of “I consent to this act, but not that one.” (Instead, it is fairly common for people to assume that the existence of a sexual relationship or sexual agreement implies consent to all manner of acts. As a random example, if two adults are dating, then frequently there is an assumption of consent to oral sex.) And the BDSM community often emphasizes that members must consent to each specific sex act. But this is something we must teach everyone — not just kinksters — to communicate effectively, because that’s what all good relationships are built on: trying to make sure that we mostly do things we like together, and avoiding asking our partners to do things they dislike.

It is so telling that my ex violated my boundaries with a vanilla act, but never violated them with a BDSM act. To me, it indicates that — for all that I talk about how BDSM ideas of consent can influence us into being more respectful about our relationships — sometimes, our ingrained assumptions about “normal” consent can be so powerful that they overwhelm what we’ve learned from BDSM.

BDSM-related relationship screwups

Bloody Laughter has recently started a fantastic series of posts about BDSM screwups, and how it would be helpful if the BDSM community were more willing to talk about the encounters we’ve had that went wrong. You know: the encounters where we miscommunicated — felt confused — felt like we were pushed into things before we were ready — pushed our partners into things they weren’t ready for ….

Miscommunications happen even in committed, loving relationships. (They even happen in totally “normal”, heterosexual, vanilla relationships — imagine that!) Sometimes those miscommunications are overall positive, because they help partners figure out where their boundaries are. Sometimes they’re overall negative: they strain the relationship, they cause fights, someone ends up feeling violated, someone else feels misunderstood. But either way, talking about these things is one of the best ways to figure out how to avoid them in the future. We cannot create a truly safe, consensual BDSM community unless we’re willing to articulate and describe what it means to be unsafe and unconsensual.

Obviously, I agree with Bloody Laughter. And I’ve got some ideas for posts about some of the problems that have come up, the mistakes I’ve made in my BDSM relationships. But I’m also terrified of posting them. I identify primarily as a bottom — a mostly heterosexual one to boot … so I’m a woman who likes being hurt and dominated by male partners. (Though I’ll admit to a couple of toppish screwups in my time, too.) And that means that the average audience could map all kinds of scary, incorrect abuse images onto my stories. I mean, even I — when I was coming into BDSM — even I was afraid that my desires meant I “wanted” to be assaulted, that I “wanted” to be raped, that I was participating in something deeply warped and abusive.

Of course I don’t want to be assaulted, I don’t want to be raped — of course I am not participating in abuse. But. If even I had these thoughts, once … then how can I expect an audience containing vanilla people to look at my desires, my fantasies, my consensual experiences without flinching in horror? In this particular case, how do I talk about BDSM experiences that went wrong? If I discuss my less-than-perfect moments here, I think I’m mostly telling them to a BDSM-friendly audience: an audience that will get something constructive out of what I’m saying, and might use my experiences as a guide to avoid screwups themselves. But then again, this is the wide world of the Internet, where the audience potentially contains everyone. And the last thing I want is for Concerned Women for America to pick up one of my blog posts and quote me out of context and tell the world about Clarisse Thorn’s abusive BDSM lifestyle.

Arguably, this is a particularly important problem for me, because I am specifically trying to do BDSM outreach right now. I am trying to let the world know that kinksters are not scary. Do I have more “responsibility” in my self-representation? Is it more dangerous for me to talk about problematic BDSM experiences, than it would be for other people?

So. I’ve got some stuff written out, that I’m scared to post. If I post, am I damaging the BDSM community image? If I don’t post, am I allowing anti-BDSMers to silence me?

(Never mind that every vanilla person ever born has had sexual experiences that crossed boundaries — sexual experiences that were poorly negotiated. That’s understood and expected, goddamnit. For so many people out there, their standards for sexual communication are so low, they don’t even notice screwups that the BDSM community usually recognizes as major. Not that I think the BDSM community is perfect, not that I think every kinkster is a brilliant communicator … but we train sexual communication in ways the outside world simply doesn’t.

For instance, there are so many people out there — girls and guys — who are being pressured into sexual acts they’re not comfortable with. Here’s just one example: How many people don’t understand that it’s unacceptable for their boyfriend/girlfriend to demand — say — that they perform sexual acts at times when they’re not in the mood? How many people don’t feel empowered to tell their partner, “I’m not up for that right now, sweetheart”? There’s a lot of them.

Everyone knows that people are sometimes pressured into heterosexual vanilla sex, and yet no one uses that as an argument against heterosexual vanilla sex in itself.

The contrast just kills me. Sure, there were a few problematic miscommunications with — for example — some of my recent BDSM partners. But my slight frustration when I think of those moments pales in comparison to the rage and resentment I feel against my first real boyfriend, whom I dated on and off for six years. My relationship with Boyfriend #1 was entirely vanilla — it was the most vanilla relationship I’ve ever had; we only indulged in genital and oral sex — and he managed to screw me up way past anything anyone else ever did to me. Just thinking about him makes me feel used.

And it just seems totally unfair that I can talk about anything he said to me and people won’t be shocked; but if I mention some of the things my most recent ex-boyfriend said to me, people could be horrified and use it as ammunition for anti-BDSM rhetoric.)

You know, maybe what I should do is write a series of posts in which half the post is about a totally vanilla relationship screwup I’ve experienced, and half of the post is about a BDSM-related screwup. Just to put it all in perspective.