rant – Page 2

I have a fantasy of being institutionalized for one reason or another. But, here’s the thing, it’s just as glamorous as this. There’s no pills, no emotional trauma, no group therapy, no straitjackets. There’s just me, a couple of nurses, and a bed with plenty of straps and buckles. It usually ends with them taking turns at sitting on my face, giggling and shoving each other aside to get on my mouth.

WARNING, RANT STARTS HERE:

One issue I have with my kinks a lot of the time is how they are watered-down versions of actually really terrible things. Institutional rape happens. Kidnapping happens. People wind up with their significant other’s hands around their throats. They wind up being tossed to the wolves (so to speak) and thrown into sex with a ridiculous amount of partners simultaneously. It’s not glamorous. No one is giggling.

Where I am working at my internship right now, I’m encountering women who have fallen victim to a few of the things, and several other ills of society that don’t wander into my sex life, that I fantasize about. And I cannot help but sit there sometimes and feel terribly guilty for glamorizing and sexualizing things that absolutely traumatized them.

Sometimes I run into a moral dilemma on having these fantasies and, moreover, indulging them. You’re stuck differentiating between what is a purely consensual act and what is a crime against humanity, society, etc. Moreover, if I am acting in imitation of an act, such as institutional rape, I am not only acknowledging its existence, but attributing my own “fun” to its existence. And maybe I’m taking it too far. Maybe I’m getting too introspective.

But, then there’s the issue for me of posting stuff like that on my tumblr. Not too long ago, a group of black men watched Mississippi Burning and, inspired, walked across the street and beat a little white boy to death. The issue was brought up if Mississippi Burning was to blame at all for the actions taken by this group of men. Of course, one could argue that it’s the same sort of misinterpretation that lead Catcher in the Rye to be misread, causing John Lennon to be shot. We can blame the person’s own insanity for the actions, of course, but can we also blame the incendiary material as well for sparking the insanity? You don’t give a serial killer a freaking box-cutter and diplomatic immunity.

So, I wonder, as I make posts about all sorts of forced sexual interaction, which of course exist in a consensual frame for me, who is reading it and what they are doing it. I’m in no way as influential as JD Salinger or the creative staff behind Mississippi Burning, but, nonetheless, my fantasies are on the Internet and they have the propensity to be misinterpreted.

I don’t know if this is a rant, a self-criticism or an attempt to cover my ass. But, I suppose I need to say that what I write here is purely fantasy that exists in a frame of consent, willingness, and trust. While I still have not been able to reconcile that with the actual acts that go on and what my endorsement of a glamorized, watered-down version of them might entail, I in no way encourage the acts.

Rant over. Thanks for sticking around.

Dearest Tumblr,

(Please feel free to skip. This is a rant and a little too TMI)

I am not a doctor. I don’t really know much medically. But let me tell you a little something about a drug called Chloroquine.

It’s used to prevent malaria. I took my first Chloroquine yesterday with my lunch, as instructed. My stomach hurt a bit, but I was told this would happen. I proceed with my day normally and was fine. Then, at three in the morning, I woke up and got sick. I never, ever do that. Really.

I got incredibly cold. I was trembling harder than I have ever before. I literally could barely walk and I managed to go to sleep. I wake up a few hours later and cannot even bring myself to leave bed. I have to force crackers down to keep from getting sick again. I chug a gatorade (yuck) and my friends take me to a diner where I manage to get some eggs down.

I send an email to the woman who prescribed it to me with a ton of enthusiasm. I google the drug and speak to montecervesa, who is seriously a wealth of knowledge and was a huge help/provided a ton of support. Google and The Count agree, Chloroquine is a horrifically bad drug. People would rather get malaria than take these pills. I had a huge list of pills I could’ve possibly taken and this woman gives me what appears to be the worst.

She responds to my email really blandly and says she’s going to prescribe me more pills. I google this brand. It looks just as bad. I send back something that may have been a little bitchy, but I’m tired and I have to work 9 hours and gosh darn it.

Thanks for listening.

<3, Ivy

Grammar police. And spelling. For serious.

Seriously. I’m trying to find more tumblrs to follow and the results have just been bleak lately. I really want people who put commentary to their photos, whether it be about themselves or not. I follow enough photo-only tumblrs. I want to read.

Well, I’ve learned that if I make a request of the Internet, I need to make my request specific. And I’ll preface this by saying yes, I do have the occasional grammar or spelling error. My syntax isn’t always 100%. But I do try. And I do go back and edit if I notice later.

But, back on track, I found myself some tumblrs with commentary. It’s just that this commentary looks like a hastily written “help being kidnapped and taken to the docks to get fed to the sharks send help” note. I just can’t stand it. I’m sorry I’m elitist. I can’t do it.

Best moment, though? Well, that would be reading “and ill shove his cook into your mouth slut”. I guess she’ll take his gardener in her ass later. I’m sorry if I’m coming off as a bitch, but it’s almost hilarious.

Yes, Arrested Development is my favorite television show (its cancellation was, pardon my nerdy fan joke, a terrible mistake). And Gob is my absolute favorite character.

I got into it again with a member of the staff for my Christian group on campus. She and I have gotten into it a lot. And, usually, I leave feeling downtrodden and upset. But, this time, I just felt this prevailing sense of fear coming off of her and, for some odd reason, this was incredibly soothing to me. I felt as if I’d gotten closure.

She loves me. She does everything she does for me out of the best intentions and out of the love in her heart for me. But, she’s afraid. I can tell. She’s absolutely terrified because she just can’t understand. She was sheltered and she just doesn’t get it.

And for this reason, I really can’t be angry with her. I can try to explain it to her as best as I can, but at the end of the day, I can’t hate her for it or get upset.

The word passion comes from the Latin stem pati, which means to suffer and to endure. This was, of course, grounded in a very deep suffering on a religious level, but I don’t want to get into that right now.

What I’m more interested is how we use it now. Crimes of passion. Passionate love. Passionate sex. We simply throw this term around without even realizing what we’re implying. Crimes of suffering. Suffering love. Suffering sex.

I feel as if we don’t want to suffer. We don’t want to endure. And rather than seeing love as a means of suffering, we see it as an end to suffering. Which, in my opinion, it is not at all.

I don’t mean to say here that suffering is a bad thing. It’s not. Suffering is a human trait. It’s not necessarily being crucified or tortured or oppressed. It’s not even necessarily a bad feeling. It’s more of just this constant tug that drags us from room to room in life, the constant nagging that keeps humanity yearning, the innate tortured aspect of the human condition that allows us to feel so broken that we need someone or something to share and halve it. “You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart,” says Auden.

Love is suffering. Suffering is love. It seems we always talk about love as this very comfortable thing. And I mean love on all counts. Familial, religious, romantic, platonic, etc. Love is not benign. Love is not the solution. Love does not suddenly calm the storm, save the damsel, and feed the hungry.

And I think that’s why we get so shocked when love is not so simple and when we can’t just be like, “well, we’re here” and then just sort of close the book on the whole thing. Love doesn’t want to handle us lightly, it would drop-kick us to our knees whenever it had the chance. Love is this wild and crazy creature that is this embodiment of our suffering. So, no wonder love is passionate. Sex, too.

I think that’s part of the reason why I love BDSM so much. Aside from the trust, the control and the pleasure aspects of it, it’s an incredibly powerful physical manifestation of our passion, our suffering. The entire process is one of endurance. From enduring the suffering, you experience the pleasure. That’s a hell of a lost of passion there.

I’ll cut this little rant off right here before I just ramble on forever. But, God, language is mind-blowing.

Seriously.

So, I got into a really amazing conversation with that friend from elementary school and we were making jokes about having to “come out”. And she goes, “so, are you out to everyone?"

And I really thought about it. In truth, I’m not. There are some people I have withheld my sexuality from and I never really understood why. Then, it sort of came to me. I wouldn’t walk up to someone and be like, "oh, hi, my name is Ivy and I’m straight.” Nobody does that.

So, why does sexuality have to come to the table so quickly? Or at all? Why does it even warrant explanation? If I’m in a relationship, I’m in a relationship. Not a gay relationship, not a straight relationship. Thus, I’m thinking here that maybe this whole notion of having to “reveal” gayness/bisexuality/whatever the hell you want to call it is a really silly, unnecessary process that really only further etches this line that we’ve been trying to erase.

Man, this tumblr has gotten preachy. I promise to tone it down!

When I was younger, I saw some speaker get up in front of a group of girls my age and say, “one day, women are going to rule the world”. She made some whole speech about it. At the end, she called for questions. I raised my hand and said, “well, honestly, don’t you think saying something like that is setting us back? Because, really, come to think of it, we were pretty angry when men said the same thing a long time ago. I mean, don’t get me wrong, sometimes I get annoyed and wish we just kept the men underground for breeding purposes. But, honestly, if we said we just want women to rule the world, then we’re really no better than chauvinists.” She had no idea how to even respond and just thanked me for giving an opinion.

I tend to catch a lot of heat from some of my friends for wanting to do some, as they define it, things that act in defiance of all of the work that feminists have done. They can’t stand the fact that I’m not a huge fan of jeans or pants. They blanche at the fact that I enjoy cleaning and doing the laundry. They’re shocked to hear that I wouldn’t mind doing all of the cooking in a domestic situation. Stuff like that.

Part of feminism, in my opinion, is the possibility to still make these choices. Anthony, Stanton, and others didn’t just fight for my sex’s right to get equal pay and go into normally male-dominated fields. Don’t get me wrong here, I expect these things and think they’re incredibly important. They fought for women to have the freedom to determine their destinies. And, sorry, if I like the smell of detergent and get a really fun, accomplished feeling from a day of cleaning, and if I really like cooking, I should have the freedom to take on these roles. Maybe they’re considered antiquated domestic roles. But nobody said I couldn’t do those and, I don’t know, have a career and a life and everything else they seem to think I can’t have if I do that.

I think we get so caught up sometimes in the cause for feminism that we forget what we wanted was equality and not female supremacy. I have a friend right now who, although she intends to get a degree and have a job, really wants to be a stay-at-home mom when she has children. The cause of feminism fights for women’s right to choose her destiny to be a high-powered lawyer as much as it does for her to choose to be a stay-at-home mom. And, I’m sorry, but I think that anyone who thinks women don’t have the right to choose to opt-out or to take on some traditional domestic roles out of their own free will is simply anti-feminist.

I’m about to lose followers, but bear with me here. Please.

I feel like I’m being torn in two constantly. I’m a Christian. I’m a kinky, bisexual girl. And, for some reason, there’s a terrible assumption that these two are mutually exclusive.

Both Christianity and my sexuality are huge, huge hot-button issues which make a lot of people uncomfortable. On the Christianity end, I understand that it’s because a lot of Christians have a tendency to make other people feel uncomfortable about their lifestyles by being hateful, rude, and ignorant. I’ve got it. Trust me. But, c’mon, it’s me, Ivy, and I’m not that kind of girl. At all. I’m pro-choice. I’m bisexual and I think gay marriage is a basic right that we’ve been foolishly denying people for fear that it would “destroy the institution of marriage” (in my opinion, it would only strengthen it. I mean, look at how strong a lot of lgbt relationships are!). I’m kinky as a cheap garden hose. Look at my freaking tumblr if you don’t believe me.

Christianity, to me, is not about the exclusivity and the harshness. Perhaps it’s a way different experience for me than it is for other people. I’m sure a lot of other people would call me rude. But, here it is: Christianity, for me, is realizing that it is within my nature that I am this way, I am incapable of being anything other than what I am without feeling miserable, and that my creator understands and loves me for what I do. At the core of my Christianity is love. That’s sort of God’s thing. He loves people. And he’s got a son he put through hell and high water to prove it.

But, honestly, I’m not going to get into the route of my faith, the concepts, what I think of Jesus, etc. I’m rather going to stress here a surprising finding I’ve come up with in being kinky, queer, sexually liberated and Christian. It’s usually not the Christians who give me a lot of hate for being the former, it’s my friends who are the former who give me crap for being the latter.

A lot of my Christian friends who I’ve opened up to about my sexuality are incredibly supportive of my lifestyle. And a lot of my non-Christian, kinky, non-straight friends who I’ve told about my religion are incredibly supportive. But, of course, on both ends I get judgment. I’ve been called a bad Christian by both sides. I’ve been called a bad kinkster, member of the lgbt community, etc by both sides. And it really, really troubles me that the two have this duality. I’m comfortable in my faith. I’m comfortable in my sexuality. It just seems like other people get really, really uncomfortable.

For instance, when I tell my non-Christian friends who are on the more “libertine” end, they’re usually the ones to jump to “you must be judging us” or “you’re too smart for something like that”. They get defensive. I remember one specific instance when I was out with my girlfriend (at the time) and a friend. Here I am, in my openly lesbian relationship where she doms me and blah-blah and this friend blurts out, “I just can’t believe you’re a Christian, it’s something judgmental idiots with shotguns do."

I’d like to imagine I’m intelligent. I’d like to imagine that I’m accepting. I don’t own a shotgun. And I’d say a pro-choice, vag-licking, spank-enjoying, threesome-relishing girl can still enjoy a healthy relationship with the big guy upstairs.

So I guess what I’d just like to say is that this whole dichotomy between either being a Christian or being whatever term you’d like to assign to my sexuality is pretty darn frustrating. I really hope I haven’t offended or upset anyone. I’m just saying that while there should be a lot more respect for both ends of this spectrum, there should also be respect and acceptance for those people living in the grey area. Because there’s a lot more people than me sitting pretty there.

I’ve been a huge fan of Adele ever since 19 came out and just the power in her voice when she sang “Hometown Glory” brought me to tears. Because, let’s be honest, the gal has pipes. And a shitton of soul. My friend was playing this song in her room a few months ago and I was like, “oh my gosh, it’s Adele.” And I’ve been kind of hooked now for a while.

This video is just so beautiful. Because the song itself takes something so transcendent and manages to hit it without even being remotely cliche. And then this video does the same way. It’s sexual in a really subtle way. It’s harsh without being overtly so. It’s just got that beautiful voice, that soul, that visceral understanding of emotion.

I’m glad she’s getting a lot more popular than she was in her 19 days. Apparently, she’s always been a huge deal around the UK, but we all know the United States has a huge amount of trouble accepting a curvy girl who is pretty unapologetic about being so. And, I don’t know, it’s pretty awesome to see someone respected on the basis of talent.

Gosh, I’ve been doing a lot of ranting lately.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Secretary is, was, and will always be one of my favorite movies. I remember first hearing Whoopi Goldberg talking about it when she hosted the Academy Awards the year it was released. She discussed the outrage that many felt when seeing a film about a woman being forced to carry manilla folders between her teeth while crawling around on the floor like a dog.

Then, I was this ear-reddening, tingle-inspiring feeling that my eleven or twelve year old self couldn’t properly interpret as aroused and intrigued.

Now, I’m outraged. Because this is not what the movie is about. That’s like saying Citizen Kane is about a sled or Reservoir Dogs is about a cop getting his ear cut off. These are incidental things that happen in relation to what the film is really about.

Secretary is not a movie about a woman who willingly carries manilla folders between her teeth (the gal wasn’t forced) or crawls around on her knees. Secretary is a movie with these things. What Secretary is about is trust, love, self-discovery and suffering. It tackles the fragile balance of these concepts vis-a-vis a sadomasochistic relationship.

I can understand why, to people not open to this sort of lifestyle, Secretary can be an incredibly disturbing movie. At first glance, it appears to be anti-feminist in the way that Lee depends so whole-heartedly on Mr. Grey, even to the point of starving herself to prove her devotion. Surely no self-respecting modern woman would do something like that. Right?

Wrong. What people tend to ignore is that Lee did not do these things because Mr. Grey forced her. She acted out of her own volition. She behaved in a way that satisfied her. She put herself on the line in such a way because it met a need that panged around inside her, a need to serve. We even see her backing out of other, similar situations because she did not enjoy the sort of behavior that was being asked of her. She was in control of when she surrendered her control, making her powerful.

She realized the depth of her trust for Mr. Grey and knew the fruit that came of giving it over. She understood the human quality of suffering and knew that to suffer for someone, with someone, who was suffering, too, was better than to “suffer” alone. This degree of trust and suffering brought her happiness. It was what she wanted. She had the power to quit her job. She had the power to stop the other situations. She had the power to end a relationship that wasn’t serving her. And she had the power, in her final test, to stand up, leave the office, change out of her wedding dress, take a long shower, and move on with life. And by the same token, she had the power to endure what she was given.

And in the end, there was love. There was tenderness. And it’s just really screaming in the photo. It’s not all about suffering. It’s about care. It’s about security. It’s about seeing what putting your trust in someone else can do.

So, I’d say there’s really nothing degrading or disgusting about the film. In fact, it’s almost empowering. It certainly empowered me to stop being so ashamed about certain desires and to pursue what made me happy.

I’ll get off my soapbox now. Thanks for listening.