So I've talked a little bit about myself and my attempt to turn living into production. I've talked a little bit about authenticity, which is going to be a concept I'll have to wrestle with as I inevitably look to monetize such production as I achieve. So I arrive at a point, rather suddenly, where I have to confront the relationship between this blog and authenticity. After all, how can I hope to feel good about making my life into a product (or series of products) if I have to abandon the same desire for meaningful expression which brought me to this place? I'll almost certainly need to revisit this point over and over again, and I hope that the conflict spurns deeper thought and better creativity from me. But this post isn't about creativity; it's about sex.

So this isn't bragging, and I want to be clear on that point from the outset. Muhammad Ali once said that it ain't bragging if it's true, and I intend to tell the truth. But tongue and cheek responses aside, I'm not interested in self-aggrandizement. This is something else. It's something in me which has me looking at things differently than I expected to. It's one way in which I find satisfaction by inverting a paradigm, and how choosing to that path has affected my views.

Lester Bangs, the great rock critic and one of the great literary minds of the 20th century if you're asking me, once wrote "Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain." In a lot of ways, I understand that, but I particularly understand it when I consider the one and only serious romantic adult relationship I've had. I spent my early twenties with one girl, lived with her, expected to marry her. Then, somehow, things changed. My belief is that we somehow grew apart without realizing it, but the only thing that stands out as clear and true about the end of that relationship is pain. We hurt each other, often and deeply, and neither one of us meant to do it. That feeling of pain was indeed the only simple thing about it. And it changed me.

While I don't believe this is a unique experience, I was always confused by sex. Not the mechanics or the desire for it, but how it made me want so badly, how much desire and pain could be twisted together around something so basic, seminal, and important for human existence. I really didn't know what to do with it. This young woman I was with, she and I had been one another's firsts, and so in with all the regular relationship stuff was this trust I had which I didn't even recognize at the time. I trusted her to be what I did with that prod and pull and twisting up. I guess I really wasn't very fair to either of us. But when that trust was broken (by both of us), all I was left with was confused desire and pain. It sent me off looking for something, but I had no idea what. I filled that search with a lot of short-term, ill-conceived gratification, and that did me more harm than good. But it was while I was plumbing the rotted depths of my impulses that I found people who embraced the simplicity of the experience of pain, and I first started exploring the BDSM community.

It took a few more years of slow exploration and my aversion to labels before I decided to embrace the community here in Toronto. I'm really only a few months into living out loud on this front, but here's a few things I've learnt about myself from it;

1- I like to make subtext context in order to find new avenues of thought and exploration
2- I am not monogamous. I might be poly-amorous. But whatever I engage in, respect for my partner(s) is key.
3- It really is all about that trust.

I really enjoy letting one another fall into the bliss of trust for a few hours. The privilege of doing pretty much whatever I want is something I exult in, and which I take a great deal of responsibility for. Part of that is playing safe and staying healthy, and part of that is understanding what you're doing and how to manage the risks to yourself and your partner. It's not nearly the hedonistic image I remember having when I was younger. But the fact that it is more involved, more complex, than pleasure-seeking; it's not all pleasure anyway. Let me be clear that I have inflicted pain for mutual sexual gratification, and I have no intention of stopping.

I have found my involvement with the kink community has given me a new freedom; that I don't worry about being attractive to someone else any more. I know the things I'm looking for, and actually seeking them out has made it a lot easier for me to understand how I may not be what someone else is looking for. I still think we've got a long way to come as a society in expressing rejection with personalizing it, but it's definitely helped my view. I was recently at a party in Kensington Market, dancing as a friend of mine was spinning, and I noticed a very attractive young woman. In years past, I might have agonized over my approach. But as it was not a kink-event, and I didn't know if this young woman would be into the sort of things I am, I didn't bother with it. It was nice to be able to easily let go of that anxiety before it could even manifest.

Oddest of all, I find that I am more engaged by and concerned with women's issues. I recently described it as a sort of "no one picks on my kid brother but me" mentality, but that's not the truth of it. It's a complex thing, but I recently read a quote from Jada Pinkett-Smith in Sinuous Magazine (can you tell that came to me through Facebook?) which seems to speak to it, "How is man to recognize his full self, his full power through the eyes of an incomplete woman?" It seems strange that as I like to tie girls up and spank them that I'd also want to see them as full, three-dimensional, and empowered women. But I do. I enjoy the exchange of power, when it's given to me or I'm given leave to take it. But if that woman is objectified, reduced, diminished, and disenfranchised, robbed of the power which is hers by virtue of being human, then there's nothing for me to receive in the exchange of power. Weird, huh?

So I guess the point here is three-fold. First that the feeling of pain is simple, but the response to pain is complex. Secondly, that I am trying and will continue to try to open up and bleed honesty. Things here might not always be to your liking or safe for work, but I'm going to try to be genuine. And lastly, I guess I really am a selfish prick, but in the strangest way I could conceive of.