Beth was a virgin. She had never even been kissed. (For obvious reasons, her story hits close to home with me.) She didn’t want to have sex with Logan; she just needed to explore her masochistic impulses. But Beth was a good girl. She knew that she was supposed to keep her private life private. So she didn’t tell any of her friends where she was going that weekend. She didn’t tell anyone whom she was going to meet. Her only safety precaution was to leave a sealed envelope on her desk, with all the information she knew about Logan, just in case.
It was Friday. No one expected her back at school until Sunday night. If Beth disappeared, her friends would not find the envelope until a few days later.
“I was a rational, levelheaded kid,” Beth told me. “But the desire for it was more important than not getting murdered.”
To respect Beth’s privacy, I’ll leave out the rest of her story. Rest assured: no one had to open that sealed envelope. Beth went on to graduate school, became a top professional in her field, and eventually found healthy, safe, loving ways to explore her fetish with wonderful partners. In the end, things worked out. But the point is that when a kink is lifelong, innate, and unchosen—as it is for people like me and Beth, and many others—it mixes with stigma and “privacy” into danger.
We take risks because the isolation and emptiness of the alternative is worse.
I was lucky. I met John. He and I made mistakes—big ones, in some cases—but I stayed, for the most part, safe. Stories like Beth’s are common, but I was the safe one.
Think about that: I dropped out of high school, moved to a foreign country, and let a drug dealer whip me bloody before I had even learned about safe words—and compared to dozens of other stories I’ve heard, mine was the “safe” path.
Without sexual privacy, discretion suffers. Without sexual transparency, people suffer.
My “privacy,” unlike Edwin’s, was, for the most part, not the product of institutionalized government oppression. (That being said, fetishists can and do lose jobs, security clearances, or child custody battles because of our consensual orientations; in some places, consensual kink is explicitly illegal.) The biggest thing choking me was me. I’d been force-fed stigma for so long, I had lost the gag reflex to resist. If the men and women of Pink Dot, a grassroots Singaporean movement for LGBT equality, could challenge their government, I had no excuse to cower behind my own shame.
Nikolai and I said good night and I walked home. I lived on the forty-fourth floor of a skyscraper on Cantonment Road, in an apartment I shared with three flatmates. One entire wall of my bedroom was a huge window. I sat on my bed and remembered the expression on Edwin’s face. The city skyline sparkled before me.
I thought I’d been so honest with David, but that wasn’t true. I had doubled myself up so many times that I was more tightly folded than any origami crane. It would be impossible for anyone to read what had been written on my page. I was so repressed I couldn’t breathe.
The façade of honesty is more dangerous than a lie.
I was that equivocator. I was the fiend who lies like truth.
The two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art both had my face.
I MOVED BACK to New York.
“Will you marry me?” David said, sitting on the green couch in our living room. We were a few months shy of the five-year minimum I had imposed years earlier, but I was flattered that he jumped the gun. I said yes.
The deadline was clear: I had to out myself—really out myself—to David before we got married. It wasn’t fair that I had concealed so much from him for so long. I couldn’t let him marry the woman he thought I was.
But how?
“Let’s have a long engagement,” I said. “Why rush?”
The Macbeths’ marriage fascinates me. Harold Bloom argues that “with surpassing irony Shakespeare presents them as the happiest married couple in all his work,” and, with a possible challenge from Portia and Brutus in Julius Caesar, they win the contest for me, too. In the beginning, at least, no couple communicates better than or is as strong a team as the Macbeths. They are deeply in love with each other; their partnership is ahead of its time. Macbeth doesn’t just include his wife in his politics; he turns to her for advice. If I could mimic the dynamic of any Shakespearean marriage, I’d choose to mimic the Macbeths—before the murder, ruthless ambition, and torturous descents into madness and death, that is. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth share honesty, communication, and mutual respect. They have each other’s backs. It is only after Lady Macbeth lets political ambition supplant every other ambition, famously declaring that she will “unsex” herself, that she and her husband stop communicating. The last time we see her, Lady Macbeth furiously tries to wash imagined bloodstains off her hands, in a midnight bout of guilt and madness.
In Macbeth, the breakdown of communication is the breakdown of the whole world.
“So how do I tell David about this spanking thing?” I asked Lady Macbeth over oysters and wine in the Financial District. (Lady Macbeth lives in Manhattan, of course. She knows where real power is.)
She squinted.
“Do you worry that you belittle Shakespeare by appropriating us into your reductive little narrative like this?” she asked, drizzling mignonette onto an oyster.
“Every day,” I replied. “But the only alternative is to unsex myself. How’d that work out for you?”
Lady Macbeth laughed.
“Touché,” she said.
“So what do I say?” I pressed. “Where do I start?”
Lady Macbeth huffed with impatience.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said. “Where does my story start?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Oh,” I said, as her implication dawned on me. “Macbeth writes you a letter.”
Lady Macbeth’s lips stretched out into a wide, toothy smile.
“So write it down,” she said.
I went home and googled “spanking fetish.”
I read that I’m mentally ill. I read that I’ve been brainwashed. I read that I’ve internalized patriarchal oppression. I read that I was spanked too much as a child, so I eroticized that trauma; ironically, I also read that I was spanked too little, so I eroticized the idea of “discipline.” I read that I feel guilty for my success and therefore want to punish myself (as if professional guilt explains the masochistic impulses I had by age five). I read that I’ve been “fooled” (as if my own sexual and intellectual agency are irrelevant). I read that women fundamentally want to submit to men (as if dominant women and submissive men don’t exist).
“If [your sexuality] entails wanking to women being tortured, it might be best to leave it unexplored. Or kill yourself,” one “feminist” blog declared.
“Sick motherfuckers!” the very first comment agreed. “Absolutely fucking sick!”
In my entire life, I’d never had a single orgasm that didn’t revolve around the thought of a woman being “tortured.” Or—why lie?—Ryan Atwood being “tortured.” Or, more to the point, me being “tortured.” Even at age eight, when the girl across the street and I had accidental orgasm races with the water jets in her swimming pool to see who could withstand the “tickling” the longest, the fantasies in my head had always been about punishment.
I sighed. The suggestion that I leave my lifelong and unchosen sexual orientation “unexplored” had, of course, never been an option. As for the suggestion that I just kill myself—
I opened a Word document.
Over the next three days, I unfolded myself as best I could. I wrote down things I should have told David five years earlier.
The hardest part of “coming out kinky,” if such a thing even exists, isn’t coming out to other people. Beyond sexual or romantic partners, coming out to others isn’t even necessary. The hardest part is coming out to ourselves. Many never do. I didn’t share my obsession publicly in the hope that other fetishists would do the same. I did it in the hope that, despite our national epidemic of se
xual repression, a few others might feel empowered to confess their desires to themselves.
I passed my laptop, with a draft of what I’d written open on the screen, to David.
“This is hard to show you,” I said. “Also, I’m worried that my paragraph structure is confusing.”
In that essay, I wrote that coming out of “the closet” isn’t the right expression, for any sexual identity. The rooms in which we hide our sexual selves never have only one door. Shame is a labyrinth, with a dozen doors. And every one is heavy.
For me, one door was heavier than the rest.
“I’ve been exposed to enough pop psychology to recognize the obvious first question: yes, I was spanked as a child, but infrequently and never to an extreme degree,” I had written.
Like the weyard sisters’ prophecies, it was only factually true. Just as they promised, at the end of the play Macbeth is not harmed by someone “of woman born:” Macduff, who eventually defeats Macbeth, was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb because he came into the world by cesarean section. And Macbeth, as promised, is not vanquished until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane hill: Macduff’s army cuts down its branches and carries them to disguise their numbers. And I really was spanked “infrequently and never to an extreme degree.” But although everything the witches say is factually true, the truth is a far different story. At the end of the play, Macbeth is still dead.
I was so afraid to perpetuate the incorrect—and damaging—stereotype that kink is caused by childhood trauma that I had clung to a factual technicality at the expense of truth. The truth was too much. Too painful. Too difficult to face. The truth didn’t fit into a thousand words of newsprint.
MACBETH
How does your patient, doctor?
DOCTOR
Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies,
That keep her from her rest.
MACBETH
Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff,
Which weighs upon the heart?
DOCTOR
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
“Is there a point to any of this?” Cleopatra had asked me. “Or are you just wasting our time?”
There is a point.
4.2 King Lear:
Speak
My hometown was named for a bird that burns itself to death and is reborn. That’s how the city itself survives. Each summer, Phoenix explodes into a heat that forces drivers to touch their steering wheels and seat belts only through the protective padding of oven mitts. People call Phoenix “the Valley of the Sun.”
What I’m saying is, it gets hot. Very hot.
“Yes, but it’s a dry heat,” Phoenicians reply, as if that matters past 120 degrees.
In my neighborhood, we used the summer heat as a chance to play a vaguely masochistic Phoenician game: we walked barefoot down the street, as our feet burned against the pavement, to see how long we could withstand the heat. One by one, kids would yelp with pain and rush onto the grass for cool relief until only one person, the winner, remained. It’s a weird game. I hear kids still play it.
At night, I played another game. From time to time, someone came into my room, when I was four years old or so, to practice naming body parts in the dark. I don’t remember this person’s face—or even a gender—but I remember our game. The person would touch my nose and say, “Is this your ear?” And I would giggle because it was so silly. That wasn’t my ear! And then the person would touch my elbow and say, “Is this your chin?” And I would laugh again. That wasn’t my chin! The game always ended the same way, with “Is this your belly button?” But the person was never touching my belly button. That made me laugh, too. It was silly. My belly button was on my stomach, not between my legs.
This chapter is the low point. You could say we’re at the nadir. We can only go up from here.
Or I could be wrong. As Shakespeare scolds me, “The worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”
But I hadn’t read King Lear yet.
YOU CAN ASSUME a lot about a person by how he or she reacts to King Lear. (At least, I assume a lot.) I assume that people who sympathize with the elderly King Lear, whose ungrateful daughters take advantage of his creeping dementia to push him out of power, were the happy kids. And I assume that people who are more inclined to look for reasons to understand Lear’s daughters and Gloucester’s bastard son, Edmund, were the unhappy kids.
We don’t really read literature. We only read ourselves, and each new book is another chapter.
As King Lear begins, Lear, the elderly king of Britain, wants to split his kingdom between his three daughters—Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia. But there’s one condition: before they receive that inheritance, the daughters must describe their love for Lear. Regan and Goneril flatter their father with obsequious declarations of love, and their father rewards them each with a third of his kingdom. But when it’s time for Cordelia, Lear’s youngest and most beloved daughter, to speak, she resists. She tells her father that although she loves him as a daughter should, it would be insincere for her to pretend, as her sisters did, that she loves him more than she will love her future husband.
“What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?” the king urges his youngest daughter. “Speak.”
“Nothing, my lord,” Cordelia replies.
To me, the fact that Cordelia refuses to humor her father’s request for words of love is the most fascinating mystery in the play. Why won’t she just tell her dad that she loves him? He’s an old man. He wants to hear that his daughters love him. What’s wrong with that? Cordelia’s refusal to comply seems especially ungrateful when we remember that, according to sixteenth-century philosophies of kingship, Lear wasn’t even obligated to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. In fact, to split his kingdom this way would have been considered counter to divine law, which said that kingdoms should pass undivided to the eldest child after the reigning monarch’s death. With that in mind, Cordelia’s refusal to describe how much she loves her father, despite the fact that he’s circumventing God’s law on her behalf, seems cruel.
King Lear recoils with surprise.
“Nothing!” he says.
“Nothing,” she confirms.
“Nothing will come of nothing,” the king warns. “Speak again.”
But Cordelia doubles down. She refuses to play this game. At that, her father flies into an uncontrolled rage. He disinherits and banishes her.
Adults forget what it’s like to be a child. I think that’s why we don’t extend more sympathy to Lear’s eldest daughters, who, after Cordelia’s banishment, treat their father with cruel disregard as he descends into madness. But Regan and Goneril are not that old. At the beginning of the play, they’re most likely in their late teens or early twenties. How terrifying must it be for Regan and Goneril to watch their father’s abrupt and violent banishment of Cordelia, knowing, as they do, that he values them even less? In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, daughters were the literal, legal property of their fathers. I think they’ve been twisted into something hard and heartless after years under their father’s powerful heel. I know exactly how destabilizing it is to grow up under the total control of someone so powerful yet so unpredictable and easily enraged.
I was ten years old. My mother woke me up early one summer morning. She was erratic and inconsistent with everything, and the educational choices she imposed on me were no different. By then I had attended at least six different schools.
Yet again, it was time for a change. This time my mom hoped to enroll me in a public school in a different, wealthier district. I was exhausted. I didn’t want to
get out of bed. It was supposed to be my summer vacation. But since we didn’t live in that school’s neighborhood, we had to meet with the principal to see if I could charm my way into one of the few spots reserved for out-of-district students.
I don’t remember much of that meeting, other than how tired I felt. I must have thought it had gone fine, though, because I was stunned to learn as we left that my mom was furious. She thought I had been rude. She screamed at me through the parking lot, dragging me toward her car, while I begged her to yell more quietly and not make a scene in front of any future classmates who might be lurking on the playground.
When we got to her parked car, she pulled a flat hairbrush out of her purse and told me to lie, facedown, on the backseat. My mom’s outbursts of physical violence were usually too uncontrolled to call them “spankings,” but she had targeted my butt enough times that I knew exactly what she intended to do. I was crying and scared, but I thought maybe we could negotiate. I suggested a compromise: “Not with the brush,” I begged, in tears.
“No,” she said. “Get on your stomach.”
The human response to fear, they say, is to fight or to fly. But there are moments when neither is possible. For me to get on my stomach and offer up the sexual center of my body against my will, I had to choke down the human inside me until she stopped my breath.
I lay, facedown, on the backseat of my mom’s Volvo.
I had been playing kinky games with neighborhood friends for at least five years by this point. Given how early I can pinpoint the origin of my kink, some people have, incomprehensibly, asked me whether it’s easier to be spanked by a parent when you’re developing a spanking fetish. Of course it’s not easier. It’s worse. It felt like the most erotic part of my body was being violated against my will, in a way that was profoundly sexual to me—because that’s exactly what was happening.
Then it was over. My mom returned to the driver’s seat and began to drive home. I remained in the backseat, furious. I almost never talked to myself—to this day, my thoughts process in feelings or images, not words—but in that moment I decided I should. I could comfort myself.
Sex with Shakespeare Page 21