Your favorite DAVIDs
The year in review
On New Year’s Eve, DAVID will be one month shy of a year old. I have my own favorite entries, but you’ve already chosen yours. Below are some excerpts from my mise en abîme in serial in 2020.
One of my beloved sadists, a femme daddy whose violent intrusive thoughts and compulsions are the perfect complements of mine, told me about a femdom she knows who has had her male partner in chastity for decades. They have never fucked. What a terribly romantic story—how is that not fucking? Have I fucked the friends who slice me open? Have I fucked the friends who beat me into unsittable purple?
But for all of my dad’s failures, I know I could have easily been dealt a worse hand. My dad was merely shitty and neglectful and, now, absent; his own dad was a violent drunk and indiscriminate rapist, so miserably vicious that when he died alone a few years ago, my dad, who almost never talked about him as a rule, threw a party to celebrate. That was around the time when he and I—my dad and I, I mean—stopped talking to each other. Or rather, he stopped talking to me.
I am always afraid in the moments before a sadist tops me, but I was surprised by the quality of my fear. It was different than usual because, I realized later, I was not positive I would be able to say no if she kept asking me to say yes. In the moment, and for a few months after, I rationalized that fear away—it was just second-date nerves, or a new queasiness around whips that had happened to develop that summer (too loud!). The fear spiked unpleasantly, an adrenaline rush with no sexy limn. It was only later, once I had broken things off with the woman, that I understood why.
Masochism is how I understand intimacy, affection, excitement, joy, fear, and power. It’s more than sexual, yet deeply erotic. It makes sense to me, and like all true perversions, it is not optional. I’m wired this way, at least for now.
Without seeking to deny anyone the succor or relief they provide, when I encounter non-binary markers for drivers licenses and trans-affirming credit cards, do I feel less dysphoric? Less alienated? More safe?
Where I was once almost hairless, follicles of white and fawn were sweeping up my thighs and toward my navel, feathering my forearms and knuckles and knees, like a time-lapse video of springtime shrouding a meadow. The ways that I weep and cum have evolved like Pokémon—similar enough to be recognizable, but different enough to merit, perhaps, new names. All my clothes feel new again, except for the shirts that no longer fit me.
On the infographic industrial complex
When I am irritated by Instagram text posts from “educators” that insist on emptiness (“Practicing kink outside of a dungeon is a totally valid way to practice it!”) rather than real engagement with the many thorny, complicated, and conflicted aspects of a healthy, community-minded BDSM practice (“Is it irresponsible for me, as a white gentile, to participate in a Nazi scene in this public play party without giving anyone else any warning?”), I am noticing how distressingly easy it is to repackage (or commodify) a radical subculture for a mainstream, white-washed, pro-carceral, pro-capitalist palate (or algorithm).
To live as a weirdly gendered person is to have people constantly misunderstand not only your sex, but your age, your occupation, your function, and your role in life, family, and work. To live as a weirdly gendered person who would like to, perhaps, transgress to a different embodiment of that gender, through which one must pass, again, through puberty and whatnot, is to find oneself paying much closer attention to people still in their first puberty than one ever thought one would.
I find the concept of “imposter syndrome” to be annoying, played out, and basically useless. IMO, our understanding of it needs to be tweaked: It’s not that you must defeat the little voice inside you that tells you you’re an imposter because your self-esteem isn’t good enough or whatever, because I think that little voice is correct: You are an imposter and you should not be there.
[Stone Butch] Blues also showed me it was possible to view stone sexuality, leathersex, and other adaptive means of intimacy as a Truth, without losing hope for something truer, if that is what one desires.
There’s nothing like having someone bigger than you take a baseball bat to the fattest, softest, thickest parts of your body.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.