O The Embarrassment

I can't respond to this in a way that makes sense on the threads, because where I'm coming from is utterly tangential; the origin of the discussion is here and here.

One of those places that I'm ludicrously short-fused is when I run into stuff that equates submission with humiliation. I sort of touched on it obliquely when writing about language and terminology and 'name-calling' before.

I actually had a long conversation with my husband a while back trying to get an explanation of mere erotic embarassment that made any sense to me. After going back and forth for over an hour, I still didn't really see how it could work. So the best I can do is figure that other people are wired up differently from me and not think about it too hard because it makes me queasy.

Which it really does.

And I think it comes down to a place where the contrarian iron is in my spine. The short enough to be catchy but a little too short to be perfectly accurate way of putting it would be:

If I got off on being a lesser being, I'd have run back to mommy when they threw me out of school.

And it's not just the mommy issues or the failure at college thing; it's that my life has made me into someone who wants to defy shame. (And one of the things that I find powerfully attractive about my liege is his lack of shame, and lack of interest in it.)

And experience with bullies and experience with abuse means that my reaction to someone trying to twist a perceived weak spot, to humiliate, or degrade ... is cold fury. Sometimes controlled; sometimes not. I protect my vulnerable spots, and someone who wants to get me alone to twist a knife into them will run into my defenses, not get happy pervy goodness out of it.

I spent my childhood as scrawny, bookish, socially inept; my early adolescence in a maze of social abuse and sexual harassment and appropriation; my adolescence shaken by the aftermath of assault and a growing awareness of myself as Unacceptable due to my sexuality, my religion, my politics, my lack of class-appropriate ambition, my failure at higher education, my domestic focus, my mental illness. I have had enough of being treated as a defective or lesser being, well past enough.

And when she tried to coerce me back to the explosive shelter of my disintegrating parental home where I could be further humiliated and degraded, I refused. That's the key thing: I refused. I drew the line, I extracted myself from that.

I'm not going back, not to anything like that.

My happy pervy goodness comes out of being in an interaction where I am able to be whole. Not crushed into something lesser, but where my entire self, including the darker and more fragile pieces, including the parts that the outside world wants to break me of (like an impulse to service) are honored, are valuable, are precious, are holy.

Someone who thinks that my desire to be possessed and of service is a matter of humiliating me is not treating that desire with any respect, and thus becomes someone from whom that desire must be protected. Not someone who can share it.