On (Not?) Being a Sub

I'm not at all sure about labelling myself 'a sub'. Calling myself a masochist seems straightforward, because I enjoy being hurt, but submissive? I dunno.

There's the old question of 'who's really in charge?'. And I think I may well be 'a reaction top' in the sense that I like to provoke and control the man who's supposedly dominating me, by torturing him with his own desire to hurt/fuck me.

Of course it's narcissistic: I'm very turned on by seeing someone else's unwilling desire for me, a desire they don't want to feel. And exploiting that desire to get them to do things they are intellectually or morally uncomfortable with. Like making me bleed, or cheating on their partners (I'm trying to be honest here, not to justify any of this).

Because then they're angry with me. They want me - but they also want to punish me for making them want me. And that's when they push me down or grab me by the hair and fuck me harder, too hard. And I have a sort of sense of triumph.

I'm not sure that submission is an accurate description of this. I like to be hurt and dominated, but I don't see myself as submitting to that domination. What I want is to be forcibly overpowered, not to consent to it.

Ever since I was a child, I've liked arm-wrestling men: women too, but especially men. I've almost always lost, but I never, ever, let them win, and (in any context) I'm furious if I feel like someone's doing that to me. Where's the satisfaction in winning if it isn't real?

I like the idea of real wrestling, tumbling and struggling, heavy breathing: halfway between fighting and fucking. And ultimately being restrained, a hand over my mouth, being held down by one or more blokes as they use me. The idea that there is, in the end, nothing I can do about it - and I know because I tried.

Blood, Biting and Badness

It's a cliche that sex is better when it's wrong. But I understand it. Because, if you shouldn't do something, but you still end up doing it, you must really really want to.

It's come into play a lot recently with B. For him, every aspect of his desire for me is wrong. It makes him feel bad and guilty. And that turns me on. A lot. Not so much the real-life badness when it starts to fuck up our friendship, but the "oh god I shouldn't but I want to so much" badness.

Way way back in 1996 when I first met R, I was really into blood. I used to cut myself, badly enough that I ended up in hospital, but I wasn't angsty about it. I had quite a detached relationship to my own body and could cut or burn it (or have someone else do it) without feeling any particular emotion. I liked the aesthetic.

Sometimes I wrote him letters in blood. I used a ceramic cup which I'd smashed up. I kept the pieces in a plastic carrier bag in my bedside table, and used their sharp edges for both cutting and writing. The variation in the shape of the pieces, and in the viscosity and colour of the blood, created nice calligraphic effects. From his perspective, the strangest thing was that the content of the letters was mundane: just scraps of institutional news and thoughts about what had been on telly. But - incongruously - scrawled in blood.

At times, with R, this cutting spilled over (sorry) into something like sex. The first time I ever went to his house was around my 16th birthday. We stayed up all night talking. Eventually, around dawn, the inevitable sofa snogging session began. There was fumbling and groping and heavy breathing, but it only got properly heated when I persuaded him to bite me. The harder he did it the more turned on we both got. There was something in his savagery which made me lose my mind a little bit. Something about being meat. The smell of blood and sweat. His absorption in his own violence.

Then the fateful moment: he looked up momentarily and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror above the sofa. The sun had risen and he saw his own face, pale, his skin and teeth stained with my blood. I saw the horror in his eyes and felt him growing cold. I took him by the arms, tried to pull him back to me, to relight the fire. But it was too late. He was scared, disgusted, by himself and by me. He stood up and went to make tea instead, refusing to go any further down that road.

Writing this eleven years on, what sticks in my mind is the look on his face when he saw himself. Not because I liked the horror, not because I wanted him to stop, but because... If he looked like that, if he was so horrified by himself, then it meant he hadn't quite known what he was doing. That he had, somehow, lost control. Lost his presence of mind. Was carried away by desire and by the physical. He'd betrayed himself, betrayed his better judgement and his reason, to blindly follow the urges of his body.

I'm not really into blood anymore, but that doesn't matter. Some people have a thing about specific acts, specific objects, but I don't especially. Whether it's biting or choking or groping in an alleyway, it's making someone do something they know they shouldn't. Divided between their own desires. Driving them to the point of savagery and violence. I want to make them break themselves.