Car Crashes and Comas

When I was little, around the ages of 7-10, I was slightly obsessed with car crashes, injury, comas, and paralysis. As far as I can remember, this fascination started when I watched a crap TV movie in which a young girl was hit by a car and left paralysed. It must be twenty years since I saw it (blimey) but I can still remember the scene in which she was hit. She's crossing the road, carelessly, looking back at her friend, and then WHAM. I remember seeing her body flung up in the air and bouncing hard off the car bonnet.

It wasn't just the climactic impact that enthralled me. It was also the fact that afterwards she was so badly damaged, physically and mentally. She spent the rest of the film learning to walk and talk and eat again. It's hard to be sure, but I think part of the fascination was that a single moment of carelessness could have such immense consequences. What could be destroyed in an instant.

There were lots of other examples:

We were shown a public information film at school about a boy who was skateboarding and was knocked over by a car. I still remember the final image with the blood trickling out of his nose, and the solemn pronouncement that he had 'a fractured skull'. I think it was the first time I ever heard the phrase.

In real life, around the same time, I knew a girl who was in a serious car accident and was paralysed. We weren't close friends - I think our mothers vaguely knew each other. I have a vivid memory of an article about her in the local newspaper which included a photo of her with her legs in some sort of metal contraption. I was painfully interested by this picture.

The enforced passivity of the coma also intrigued me: for example, the film Reversal of Fortune, about Klaus and Sunny von Bulow, and the Sweet Valley High book Dangerous Love, in which there was a motorbike crash which left Elizabeth comatose. I had a thing about unconscious people being physically moved around. I used to play a game with my sisters where we would take it in turns to 'play dead' and be moved around by the others.

I even remember telling a babysitter, who was probably only about 16 herself, that I was really interested in people being paralysed, and her having no idea what to say back to me. Which isn't that surprising really.

Does this belong in a blog about sexuality and BDSM? Instinctively I think it does. My fascination, which coincided with the very beginnings of puberty, had an edge which I would describe as sexual. (I told some of this to a friend in the pub last night, and she suggested that it might have something to do with your body changing, beyond your control.)

The vividness of the images, how clearly I can still recall these verbal and visual scenes twenty years later, means it must have been very very intense at the time. Perhaps it could even be described as a fetish. But I had more or less completely forgotten about it until something sparked my memory recently, and it all came flooding back.

I have no idea what conclusions I can draw from any of this, except: it's amazing what you can forget; I was evidently quite strange, even at the age of 7; and it's not very surprising that I found Crash ridiculously erotic.

Watching Men Come

In feminist writings, I've often encountered the argument that the emphasis on cumshots in porn is purely for male gratification: that it provides confirmation of his potency and his orgasm and disregards the woman's pleasure.

I can understand this view to a certain extent. Generally speaking, it's not that exciting to have someone ejaculate on you. [Notwithstanding my occasional bukkake-style fantasies, which are about degradation and exposure and excess and mass loss of control, and may or may not get a separate post at some point.]

And yes, the emphasis on the male orgasm as the endpoint of sex can definitely be detrimental in real life, even if it does provide an easy narrative closure. But I think these critiques perhaps miss the fact that for some women - for me at least - seeing a bloke come is very very erotic.

Admittedly, a lot depends on the specific way it's represented. I'm not aroused by watching a woman's face or breasts as she waits to be splattered on: in particular, the emphasis on women looking apprehensive or resigned or disgusted is unappealing, and probably somewhat misogynistic. And porn which fetishises the spunk itself doesn't do it for me either. Bubbles? No no no.

But watching a man masturbate - the gradual build-up, the rapid, instinctive, almost unconscious movements of his hand as he gets close, the twitches in his belly and thighs and balls, the sudden pulse through his body in the millisecond before he comes, the moment where his consciousness is annihilated - is incredibly erotic.

Hardcore pornography breaks down the boundaries between fiction and reality, performance and life, and this is perhaps most evident in orgasm. It must be difficult for a man to come on command in what is most likely an unsexy and uncomfortable environment. So to see him overcome that, to get to the point where the context doesn't matter any more, and he's just intent on reaching orgasm ... appeals to me very much, for some wrong reason.

I actively like the disjunction between the industrial conveyor-belt nature of porn and the immediacy, the realness, the physical ooomph of watching a man ejaculate. I like seeing him have to make a conscious mental effort to block out the surroundings. I like the flicker of relief in his face when he realises that, despite the situation, he is going to come.

Yeah, that's not right, is it?

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.

MSN 1: Two People Trying to Destroy Each Other

02:40:33 yeah

02:41:05 think it's a possibly misogynistic control thing. Just want to hold you down and keep you down and please myself

02:41:26 shut me up

02:41:31 and use me

02:41:56 yeah, stop you...talking back. Or something. Just take what I want from you.

02:42:32 i have a very distinct memory of my face pushed against brick.. a wall maybe.. damp from the rain

02:42:48 and you pressed hard against my back , with your hands wound in my hair

02:43:20 see...I don't understand why, but you make me feel violent. I've had that with some people but not with everyone. I don't understand the chemistry of it.

02:43:59 i love that. it charges me up so much.

02:44:48 makes me want to struggle just to be restrained harder

02:45:22 * thinking *

02:45:41 * feeling *

02:45:54 * wan --

02:46:35 I want to...I suppose my lying on your back thing, the root is, I want to possess you and make you helpless

02:47:23 its hard to analyse this stuff... when you say "you make me feel violent".. that hits me in the pit of my stomach.. in such a good way

02:48:08 yeah...my curiosity is, I don't feel that way about everyone. I was very violent with H (D's ex), but it's not my norm.

02:48:27 well, a few possibilities

02:48:37 its to do with her and me - the fact we want it

02:48:48 or its to do with the context

02:49:40 I think it's partly being intimidated and bewitched at the same time...makes me want to physically and mentally crush you in revenge

02:50:03 yes. its a lot to do with the fact that i argue with you and challenge you and exhaust you

02:50:20 R and i are like that... not always, but often ..and at first, always

02:51:16 yeah, you're a more dominant personality than me. So there's a massive backlash.

02:52:11 It makes it D H Lawrence style sex. 'He could only conceive of the sex act as two people trying to destroy each other' -- Earl Russell.

Purple = Me

Black = Him

Train (of) Thoughts

B seduces me with words. There is, as he said, a 'powerful mutual physical attraction', but that isn't what does it. When my mind wanders, when I'm struck by a memory that makes my stomach go suddenly hollow, it's verbal. I remember stuff he's said: jokes, compliments, statements about what he'd like to do to me, how I make him feel, replaying real encounters we've had. We meet up and we start to give in to our desire but then we stop. Responsibility to other people (and, in his case at least, fear about falling too hard for each other) gets in the way. So we go home and go online and 'talk' to each other on MSN for half the night.

Through typed words alone, he reduces me to a quivering breathless mass of sexual desire. There's nothing of the body in it, not even as much as in handwriting or speech. I remember the physical events, they turn me on, but I don't dwell on them in quite the same way. And when I do, it's about what we said and about what I think he was thinking when he touched me like that. The look in his eyes. The conflict in him. His desire fighting against his better judgement. [More on that at a later date.]

And my ultimate desire to really fuck him is at least partly because I want to destroy his ability to think and to articulate. It's ridiculous. It's his verbal dexterity that makes me want him so much, but what I want is the dissolution of that dexterity. What really makes me catch my breath is when his brain melts. When he can no longer manage the quotations, the witty phrases, the polysyllables. When he can do nothing except mumble obscenities or inanities, and grab me and bite me and smack my arse. The sudden plummet from the ultra-intellectual to the visceral. The funny thing is that most blokes are like that most of the time, and it turns me off. What I want is to take the clever articulate ones and turn them into gibbering priapic wrecks.

Is this a statement of principle? A mission? Is it possible to stick to verbal fucking alone? Because when we kiss, when we grope and stumble and stagger together, it's not just biology. It's the end result of the way we talk and write to each other. The verbal tension-building. Is it possible to go so deep into someone's sexual psyche, to know so much, that you can never forget it? That it's always going to get in the way, at least until you've fucked and destroyed the mystique and the tension and the imagining and reduced each other to sweaty, spludgy, rutting animals?

None of which erases the fact that I want to feel him come inside me. I want to hear him come. I want to see his face. I want to know if he groans my name. All those times on MSN I made it happen - I chose my words so carefully that he came over himself, but I didn't get my reward. The sound, the look, the smell, the taste. Yes, I do love talking to him. Yes, he is witty and articulate and ridiculously educated. But I want to drink his come. I want him to come in my mouth. I want him to come over my face and up my cunt and in my hair. I want him to come with his hand tangled in my hair, or over my mouth, gagging me, with his cock inside me.

But why can't that be just anyone? Desire is such a weird, fucked-up thing. Just because he can talk like that - why should that mean I want to feel him orgasm inside me? What the fuck is the connection there? And what I should do about any of it is another matter entirely.

What This Is, and Why

Inspired by the incomparable Bitchy Jones, I've decided to try to write about sex. Well, not sex exactly; I'm not intending to give lots of gory details. More to try to thrash out (ho ho) the stuff that goes on in my head and why some things turn me on so much.

I found myself on a train the other day, coming back from a work-type thing. Beautiful countryside outside, water and bridges and hills. I was very sleepy (it had been an early start) but I knew I should get on with something useful, so I took out my notepad and my biro. The sun was warm on my skin and I couldn't concentrate on work. Instead, I found myself wandering into the dark alleyways of my mind: replaying real events, fantasising about different endings. I scribbled four sides of A4 in an intense 20-minute burst, and presenting a version of that here seems like a good place to start (if I can decipher my own handwriting).