A few weeks ago I asked a service company to come over to look at our air conditioner. As I was watching the guy poke around the unit, he asked me what I did for a living. I said I was a writer. I didn’t tell him I wrote erotica. Nope. I also didn’t tell him I wrote BDSM. Instead, I said, “I write romance.”
That got me to thinking: is BDSM romance fiction really romance? It can be. It’s what I try to write. BDSM stories can end with a Happily Ever After, just like romance; a BDSM plot frequently revolves around two people (or more) ultimately committing to each other.
Readers of BDSM fiction have a hard time reconciling BDSM with romance when the interaction involves sadism. That’s unfortunate. There are all sorts of ways to love and be loved. I realized readers freaked about sadism when Sterling, a sadist character in my first novella My One was viewed as the bad guy. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just wasn’t the right partner for my heroine.
I signed up with a blog tour operation last year, and after dozens of requests to host (mainy) paranormal, I finally said yes. I agreed for only one reason: the novel had a sadist character who was also poly. I asked the author to blog about sadism or polyamory in legitimate BDSM erotic romance. She didn’t, preferring instead to write about her hero being a better Dominant than the guy in Fifty Shades. I was disappointed.
Speaking of Fifty Shades, I did read some of “Master of the Universe”, the fanfic that gave birth to the mega-selling trilogy. I admit that I don’t read a ton of BDSM romance, because I’d like to avoid having my own experiences influenced by the writings of people who just talk the talk. Fifty Shades is a romance. Beneath the paper-thin, dark sheen of BDSM, the obsessed hero of Fifty Shades harks back to the tropes of Gothic romance.
Some strange books have jumped on the Fifty Shades bandwagon. Many of them are neither BDSM nor romance. I read one of them. This novella, reprinted as a novel with a black cover to take advantage of the hype (and in extra large letters to make it appear meatier) was only an unending series of swinger-style sexual encounters with some overtones of control.
Ahhh, but I’ve also seen signs of progress. I recently saw a stack of “Story of O” novels at the airport bookstore.
To Serve or Not to Serve
The last few years brought a distinct change to this particular blood bank environment. It's a management issue. It starts with the receptionist. Recently, the receptionist glared up at me and asked, "Do you need something?" She acted as if I was a homeless person come to use the bathroom. I explained I was there to donate blood, which evidently she was not expecting. The bank was also not expecting a Bronco fan. I was ushered into another room where the walls were plastered with Steelers paraphernalia. The blood bank had become a mancave. I was stunned by the lack of professionalism.
The person who would do the blood draw was training another phlebotomist. The "experienced" phlebotomist started the training by taking an inkless pen to scratch my skin. "This is where I will take the blood," she told the new one. I was speechless. Who pre-injures like that? Then the "experienced" one started showing the other worker various pieces of equipment on the floor. The new phlebotomist, kneeling on the floor, kept brushing her head on my hand as she examined the equipment. I like to pet dogs and cats--but not strangers. I pulled my hand away, grossed out. The "experienced" phlebotomist then yelled at me for moving. Evidently, my scratched skin no longer acurately reflected the vein she had decided on. Luckily, the blood draw went okay. Except the phlebotomist pair had to go run off to have lunch so I never got the usual survey about my experience to take home. After donating, I sat at a table to drink cranberry juice, have some snacks and read the newspaper. A different worker (the Steeler's fan?) came over to me and said, "Is there something I can help you with?" Again I was a homeless person. This time I'd wandered in the blood bank and was stealing food. I ignored her, seriously annoyed. She grabbed my peanut wrapper from the table and huffed off.
This sequential hostility and lack of professionalism had an impact. I was reluctant to donate again. I stalled for months. I finally convinced myself the world needed my (rather ordinary) blood. I vowed that if at any point I was mistreated I would walk out.
So I returned to the blood bank a few weeks ago. Unfortunately. So I showed the phlebotomist where I normally get a draw. She ignored my suggestion. Instead she said she'd found a vein she liked better. She summarily stuck the needle in the crook of my elbow. I felt a horrible sting travel from my arm all the way down to my hand. I nearly fainted. In all the years of donation, I had never felt anything like that. I told her it really hurt. She did nothing. She didn't reposition the needle at all. She merely asked me if it was feeling better. I went through the donation in pain. I shouldn't have. Because she injured a nerve.
Nerve injuries take a long time to heal. If they ever do. For more than 10 days, my hand alternated between numbness and sparking electrical pain. The weakness in my hand was so profound that I couldn't even grasp a fork to cut meat. I couldn't fold clothes, dance, put away dishes, make beds. I couldn't lift anything. Everything took twice as long.
It's been almost three weeks and the nerve still hasn't grown back completely. My hand strength is back though, making my life easier, but I still have residual pain and numbness in my hand. I won't be donating blood there again.
I think there's an attitude by some organizations that carelessness toward volunteers is just fine. They believe that volunteers have a such a strong need for service that merely satisfying that need is good enough. It's not. It's true that I enjoy service, there are plenty of other ways I can volunteer. My ordinary blood will be appreciated somewhere else.
This holds a lesson for BDSM practitioners. Service and submission may be an intense need, but that desire shouldn't be abused. The sub can easily find somebody else to serve.
Is Online BDSM Real?
I'm one of those people who doesn't regard BDSM as being a more intellectual form of sex, or a superior sort of interaction. It's a relationship. Rules of emotion still apply. For that reason, examining long distance relationships of all kinds can be informative.
Consider Manti Teo. A gifted Notre Dame football linebacker, he fell in love with a girl he never met. They had a many months long distance relationship. It turned out the girl didn't exist. She was an elaborate fiction created by a male acquaintance of Manti's. That doesn't make Manti gullible, it makes him a person of imagination and faith. His victimizer (aka a "catfish") was skilled and sensitive, but fundamentally cruel.
Exploitation in long distance relationships is a favorite topic of Dr. Phil. He focuses on women who are highly susceptible to flattery and attention. The catfish ensnares by setting up a fake online profile with stolen pictures, and sends the woman poems plagiarized from the Internet. These desperate women respond with love--and money. Long-distance exploitation happens in the kink world, too. They're called financial Dommes or loser Doms, not catfish. Perhaps my attitude is elitist, but a sub shouldn't send a Dominant money. Ever. A true Dominant will have his or her affairs in order. Why surrender control to someone who is unethical? Why submit to someone who doesn't have their act together?
Maintaining long-distance relationships of any kind is tough, even for established couples. My husband and I once endured an 18 month separation. I'd moved cross country to the East coast to take a temporary job. He remained on the West coast. The whole experience was pretty awful. We were dirt poor and couldn't afford lots of phone calls. But we were committed to the relationship. We persevered. Fast forward a few years. The Internet came along. I experimented with cybersex. I had a blast, never fucking the same person twice. I had zero emotional connection to these guys (if they were guys). To my mind, cybersex was no different than improv, or enjoying a hot romance novel. But I soon discovered that my husband viewed my erotic entertainment as cheating. He certainly thought online was real. Of course I quit. As a side note, my frustrated desire to create cybersex scenes may well be the reason I write erotic romance now. It's a good thing my husband doesn't believe writing stories for a non-interactive audience is cheating.
Though I don't have any solutions on how to maintain online interactions, they can absolutely be real. They are as real as the care, sincerity, creativity and devotion of the participants. Kink or no.
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