Quote:
Originally Posted by Just_Me
SM is a fetish, not a sexual orientation.
If you feel sexual atraction to oposite sex, you are straight, it doesn't matter if you enjoy pain or not.
|
Which gender(s) you are attracted to, the situations in which you prefer to be with them, and what categories of sensations and paraphernalia trigger your sexual response are all parts of your sexual identity. Whether we call any one element of this a fetish or an orientation is largely a matter of labeling, and applies differently from one person to another. We can turn it around and say, "If you feel sexual attraction to force and cruelty, you are kinky, it doesn't matter if you enjoy it with the opposite sex or not," and for some people, this would be true. In my case, I am pretty solidly at the hetero end of the Kinsey scale. I have never fantasized myself lying beneath the stars on the still-warm sand of some tropical beach with another man's arms lovingly wrapped around me; I'm imagining that right now, and it's not really doing anything for me. If I send the other guy away and bring in Elisabeth Shue, I become very much more interested, yes please, give me a plane ticket etc. The thing is... Now if I imagine myself chained up naked and spread-eagle between two pillars in a torchlit dungeon, writhing in agony as that very same other man tortures and rapes me, some part of me does want that to happen, as much as or possibly even more than the vanilla sex on the beach with Elisabeth Shue. Of course, if the man stays home and Ms. Shue takes over as the torturer/rapist instead, that's pretty close to my ultimate fantasy situation. The point is that the turn-on of the S&M elements can override my gender preference in triggering my sexual interest.
Over the course of my life I have spent (or perhaps wasted) a lot of years trying to work out why I am "this way." One of my earliest memories related to this is of my parents innocently taking us kids to see
Chitty Chiitty Bang Bang at the movie theatre when I was five. Just a few years ago I rented the DVD and saw the movie again for the second time, and was overwhelmed by how much of it came back to me. Now... The only way for anyone to understand this is to watch
CCBB themselves, which I can't really recommend doing, because for an adult person the film as a whole is almost unwatchably tedious; but if you can put yourself into the relatively blank-slate mindset of a five-year-old, it is, in parts, just about the kinkiest goddamn thing you've ever seen. We have:
- The Child Catcher, an archetypal free-candy predator whose job it is to go around with a hook and a big net to sniff out and capture any children loose in the realm of Vulgaria (children are forbidden there, see)
- Let me tell you, Toymaker... This nose of mine has never failed me. And... If there ARE children here, my friend... You will DIE!
- A little boy and girl, close enough to my age at the time, shoved into a horse-drawn cage on wheels and carried away screaming for help
- The children now locked up in a different cage, carried into the throne room and displayed before the Baron and Baroness (Children, your highness— Foreign children! Unique specimens! Perhaps your highness would care to examine them?)
- Take them away! To the tower!
- The brainless but outrageously hot (seriously) Baroness dancing around in fetishy lingerie while the even more idiotic Baron repeatedly fails to kill her
- More children sneaking under the table at a party and clamping shackles on people's feet
- Crowds of people getting trapped in big nets and flailing helplessly as the kids rope them all together en masse
- The Child Catcher finally surrounded by children and caught, guess how, in a net
- The Baron and Baroness attempting to escape and winding up in the cage together themselves
I always remembered that damned Child Catcher; he is consistently one of the higher-ups on lists of scary kids' movie villains. The rest of the things I did not consciously remember, but when I saw it all again, it was obvious how the movie had been the trigger for so many elements of my childhood fantasies. Out of all the stuff going on up there on that giant screen in this visually intense movie, all of the whistling candies and flying cars and yadda, it was the abductions and the bondage and the imprisonments and threats of death that latched onto my fresh little mind and formed the foundation of what grew into my sexual identity. I have no way of knowing whether or not that part of me would have evolved differently if I'd never had that experience; maybe my folks should have taken us to see
Oliver! or something else instead. But my hunch is that
something in me was hard-wired from birth to accept that activation signal, like a garage door opener, and if it hadn't been the Child Catcher with those caged and screaming kids who pushed that button, it would have been some other Hansel Und Gretel story or comic book or newspaper article or who knows what. So ultimately my
belief as to what is the case
for me is that along with my gender orientation, I have what I guess I have to call a kink orientation which is equally innate, and the two interact in ways that are sometimes rather confusing.
EDITED here to make it clearer that my inclination does not involve children in any way. I was five
at the time, and my imagination then was all innocent pre-sexual cartoonish adventures and rescues and such. The participants in my fantasies grew along with me, and dark sexual contexts gradually formed around it all later.