On Fat Bottomed Bottoms

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Context:  On Fetlife this week, there have been numerous posts on the subject of rope bottom diversity.  People are having a very healthy and (in my perspective) positive discussion on how to make rope bottoming more accessible to those who are not thin, bendy, young, white women.   This is was my post.

Whenever I post a photo or a writing about my rope journey, I receive messages from (mostly) women who tell me they never thought they could be in rope because of their size.

And whenever I see a photo or read a writing from another larger-bodied femme, it makes me feel so happy, and proud, and represented.

When I first started rope bottoming, I had one tying partner that I tied with pretty regularly. I had a couple of other occasional rope partners – most of them said I was fun to tie, and I choose to believe them.

But eventually they all stopped asking. Or maybe I stopped asking them. Not really sure which one of us was the chicken and which was the egg.

I had an internal narrative that they stopped asking because I wasn’t as bendy as their smaller framed partners, or because they thought I didn’t make their rope look good enough, or maybe because I was significantly more hesitant to be suspended and they wanted to “level up”.

But I never asked them, so I don’t really know if that was all in my head or what.

Thing is – even though I’ve had plenty of rope bottoming experience over the past four years, and even though I’ve had numerous rope tops tell me that I’m fun to tie, I still have that internal dialogue.

Imagine someone who’s never been tied at all.

That’s all I can say on the subject, I guess.

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Yet another essay about want and need and overcoming codependency

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From the archives:  This post was originally published on Fetlife a few years ago.  I’m starting to transfer some of those posts over here.

This one’s hard for me to write. I’ve started it several times and abandoned it along the way.

It’s about need.

In a previous writing that a lot of you did read, I explained that I’m acutely aware of the “distance” between want and need.

There is a difference to me, and I take that difference very seriously. What I want and what I need two different animals and relationship-wise, I can survive (and thrive) on the basics: honesty, trust, desire, passion, respect.

Those are needs. Gotta have ’em all.

But here’s where I never want to go (again). While I accept that I need those qualities in a partner, I don’t want to mistake that for needing a partner.

Likewise, I don’t want to be needed.

Wanted…..fuck yeah. I want like nobody’s business and being wanted is fantastic. Shit, that’s right up there in the “need” category with “desire,” right?

But needing a person – having him be my life support, or vice versa – being someone someone cannot live without….

I can’t. i can’t go there. That’s dangerous territory for me. That’s the space where I lose myself and all my wants (and needs) become swallowed up by someone else’s.

That’s how I end up living with a hoarder in a two-story, four bedroom storage unit with no space for myself and getting sick frequently from the filth.

That’s how I end up playing “cab driver” for someone and all their friends, driving all over town days on end to make it convenient for someone else to see me.

That’s how I eat my cold dinner alone while my boyfriend spends an hour on skype with his other girlfriend after he ate his dinner hot with his cock in my throat.

See, that’s the shit that belonged to the old me. That’s the shit that happened when I let somebody become a need rather than a want.

I can live without a want. I don’t make those kinds of sacrifices for “wants.”

“Oh, but phi – those were just really bad partners.”

Uh-huh. And in this life there is no guarantee that every partner will be perfect. Nobody is. Even me. (I know, so close….)

Which is why I also don’t want to be a need. I’m not saying I don’t want a partner to desire me or be sad if things don’t work out. There are certainly connection, attachments, and feelings involved. I just …I don’t want to be the cause of someone else’s utter devastation. I don’t want their next breath to hinge on my sticking around, even if I’m not happy.

It’s about personal responsibility for me now. I’m in charge of being the decision maker in my life. I’m in charge of keeping myself from exhibiting the natural instinct to give until there’s nothing left. I’m in charge of me.

In the bedroom, that’s another story….

I’m not allowed to hurt myself

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Last week was rough, professionally and emotionally. For a moment, I was so ready to walk out the door and never go back to work, and I was shaking with the power and powerlessness of my position.

The choice was all mine: stay and be gainfully employed with an unbeatable benefits package that comes with an untenable work environment; or free myself from the abusive behavior of my bosses and lose all of the stability that comes with it.

There is this dichotomy of control and lack of control in these decisions that absolutely drives me bananas.

In a way, everything is under my control. If I walk away from a bad situation, I will free fall into the next phase of my life without a net. If I choose stability, I expose myself to continued abuse.

There is no win-win. There is just uncertainty and risk.

I am familiar with that bananas feeling of having all the power to make a decision in my hands and not knowing which is the right way to go. It’s that feeling that draws me to submission, and by extension: masochism.

That’s the head space where I am relieved from making any decisions at all. That’s the heed space where they are all made for me. Enduring pain is the highest level of submission I can give.

That’s the space where the risks make sense.

So, it’s no wonder that my fantasies and my dreams have taken a more deviant turn lately. I’m craving the escalation of everything. I want kisses with teeth. I want hugs with claws and texture. I don’t want to be led, I want to be thrown, forced, and taken.

I want the pain.

I told him as much, expecting to be given some sort of task to tie me over until I see him next. Something like an increasing number of clothespins or maybe even clamps to inflict pain on myself in the days until he’s there to administer it himself.

But he is a clever sadist, my love is.

“You will self inflict all the pampering and soft pleasures until I see you.”

Clever man. Took the decision right out of my hands.

Why I think you want to hurt me

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This post was originally written and posted on Fetlife in 2015.  I link to it in an essay I have written and will be posting today as well, so I am republishing this one here for reference. 

I want you to understand how submission feels to me. To explain it, I have to tell you why I imagine you want to hurt me.

You want power.

It’s not enough for me to open my mouth or spread my legs for you. You know as well as I do that these things feel good to me. I want you inside me. My body betrays the lie that society or religion or our mothers want us to believe with its warmth and wetness at the thought of you.

In this, my body and mind work in tandem. Wanting. Willing.

Your power – your control over me, wouldn’t come from the penetration of my body but from the denial of it.

Do you sacrifice the pleasure of your flesh for the frisson of your power?

Sometimes you do and that’s enough.

But my body cannot lie when you strike me. It recoils. It shivers and squirms and my flesh reddens in protest.

With each strike, I’m proving my submission to you. First with mind tricks – transforming that pain into feelings of pleasure and enjoyment.

You don’t want my pleasure. That’s not power.

You want my suffering. You want undeniable proof that you are in control.

The strikes bear down harder.

My moans become grunts. Growls. My arching back becomes hunched shoulders.

My mind overrides my body’s demands. For you.

Push me to my limits if that is what it takes to fill your thirst for power. I want this for you. I want you to feel, to understand, to take this control over me.

My body isn’t the gift I give you, this power is. Your acceptance of it excites me.

So push me to my limits, but please don’t exceed them.

Please don’t make me take the gift back.

The shape of me

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This past weekend, I participated in a photo shoot arranged by a friend. She had a long time close friend who is an amateur photographer with a specific and openly stated attraction to larger women. It was an opportunity for us to do something fun for ourselves, and an opportunity for him to practice his passion for photography with two pretty delightful (if I do say so myself) subjects.

It’s not my first time in front of a fancypants camera and lighting rig. It’s not even my second or third time. This is a thing I’ve done before with friends in the past. The exhibitionist in me absolutely loves it – being exposed and captured (photographically) gets my blood flowing. I also generally like to see the aftermath – the images I’ve seen from past shoots have helped me learn to appreciate the ways that I can be sexy, and help me grow my confidence.

So far, I’ve only seen a couple of the images from this past weekend – some previews he’s sent over. It took me a few minutes of staring before I realized why these seemed so different from the others.

Because of the photographer’s appreciation for my body type, the images he has captured (that I’ve seen so far) almost celebrate the parts of me that are usually obscured or out of focus in other images I’ve taken or have had taken before.

It took several hours to process what I was seeing when I first looked at the previews. The way I appear is not how I imagined I looked when I was posing. It was mildly uncomfortable – like when you see a flipped picture of yourself, and that freckle is on the wrong side.

But one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that if you’re feeling uncomfortable about something, it’s worth investigating further. So, I kept staring at it. I’d go take a meeting and then come back and stare at it some more.

Over the course of a few hours, I started to see the shapes differently, a least, in one of the images. I’m still coming to terms with another one that puts my belly on display front and center, almost as if it’s the focal point of the capture.

It was interesting to me – the way I can see myself the way the photographer saw me. All the bits of me that I try to avoid confronting, he was clearly celebrating. That’s why I think it took such a long time to process what I’m looking at.

Because, I am accustomed to seeing and appreciating an image of myself. I’m accustomed to looking at a picture and thinking, “Oh, I don’t look as bad as I thought I did,” or “Oh, I’m not as fat as I thought I was,” and feeling my confidence grow from it.

What’s new about this one is that I’m thinking “Oh, I look even more round than I thought I did….

…but it still looks beautiful.”

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I was once asked if I ever run out of things to write about. This was a few years ago when I was dropping two or three posts a day on Fetlife, and half of them would always start trending.

“No,” i remember answering. “I never run out of things to write about, because I never run out of things to think about.”

It’s still true. I have plenty to say; but I seem to have lost the drive to say it there. The less “safe” that space felt, the less I felt like allowing myself to be publicly vulnerable in it.

There’s stuff I’d love to still be writing about. I have a ton of thoughts on relationships and human connection. A story a week on love and lust and kinky sex. I’d chronicle my exploration with rope suspension and share photos and stories that represent my experiences as a larger-bodied bottom. I’d share my musings on the parallels between life and art (namely in the form of the many, many TV shows that I watch). And so many things to share about the way I’ve been asserting myself at work, because #TimesUp and all that jazz.

I could share about some of the feelings I’ve been having as I form new friendships with new people that are helping me explore different facets of my relationship paradigm. I’d love to openly process where I am emotionally about the potential for one of those friendships to become physical – something I both want and fear simultaneously.

I could keep you updated on my cats and share the whimsy of that time (early this morning) when in a fog of sleep deprivation, I asked Alexa to turn off the cat’s incessant meowing coming from behind my bedroom door.

She did not understand.

I would definitely share with you all the different ways I have been inspired by others. I want to share their blogs and their art and their messages with you, and convey how how much opening up my mind and heart to the things that used to make me feel a measure of discomfort has expanded my understanding of beauty and strength and integrity in so many forms. The way that embracing and elevating and listening to diverse voices has given me so much to be inspired by and has so profoundly enriched my perception of the world around us.

There is so fucking much I want to say.

I don’t even doubt that there are people who want to hear it, and people who have to hear it and people whose lives I can improve by sharing it – and yet….

…and yet, I remain in my silent corner.

I want to blame it on trolls and stalkers, but the truth is – the trolls don’t really come for me, and when they do, I have no qualms in ignoring and/or blocking them. The stalkers, though. That one’s a pickle.

I can pinpoint the moment I started being afraid to share all my thoughts with you to the moment some angry guy on the internet retaliated against my anger toward him for invading my privacy by escalating his implied threats of exposure.

I wish I could have just limited that fear to my exposure on Fetlife – but, no. He made it clear that what happens there does not necessarily stay there.

I changed my behavior after that. I purged my friends list (again). I set all my face pictures (and then subsequently all my pictures) to friends only. I limited the degree of vulnerability I was willing to share openly.

And without that…without that feeling like I could be my most authentic self in that space, I lost the will to post altogether.

I kind of miss it.

It’s not “fine.”

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I know it’s not the time of year where counseling people to walk away from their relationships is going to go over well. People are afraid to be alone – so afraid, that they’re willing to sit through confidence-destroying behavior from their partners in exchange for a label that proves they’re not alone.

But I see these things described in the advice and support forums that I would never tolerate from someone who professed to love me. These are things I used to tolerate when I didn’t love myself enough to expect better treatment from partners. This is the pattern I fell into when I used to date people who would tell me I shouldn’t have any expectations, or that I was too “needy”, or that any request for external validation was “bad.”

I recently read about a situation where a partner had a negative reaction to their partner spending time with another paramour at a holiday party. She felt like she couldn’t speak up and talk about how much it hurt, because her partner would get upset with her for not being thrilled about it.

There’s a commercial making the rounds on Hulu right now. Every time I see this commercial I remember these people I talk to in the forums. In it, the woman keeps cancelling plans she’s made because her eczema is flaring up. Then she says “it’s fine” while shaking her head and acting all sad and looking completely downtrodden.

IT’S NOT FINE. I want to scream on her behalf. IT’S DISAPPOINTING. IT’S EMBARRASSING. IT’S CAUSING ME TO SPEND HALF MY LIFE HIDDEN AWAY BECAUSE I FEEL ASHAMED ABOUT AN ITCHY RASH ON MY ARM AND NECK.

And what would be the problem with calling attention to the disturbance? “Hey, we have this date tonight but I’m feeling embarrassed by my skin condition. Instead of me saying it’s fine to cancel something I’ve been looking forward to, how about you tell me that it’s fine for you to be seen with me with a rash on my arm?”

I don’t know why it bothers me so much that this commercial is portraying this shit like it’s shameful. WTF? It’s not SHAMEFUL to have a rash. Why does this woman look like she’s making excuses for an abuser when she’s bowing out of plans that she’s making with other people?

The eczema isn’t the problem. The narrative that she should be ashamed of it is the problem. The eczema might be a disturbance, and it can be addressed and treated. Someone who’d walk away from you for having it is fundamentally incompatible with you.

I don’t think acknowledging a rash to the people you spend time with should deter them from wanting to spend time with you.

I feel the same way about acknowledging your feelings.

If you can’t tell the person you love that you are feeling insecure, hurt, afraid, or conflicted about something without them shaming you for having a feeling, then you start to say “it’s fine” to their face, while crying in the forums about how NOT fine you are.

Here’s what’s fine: Having a negative emotion associated with something uncomfortable. That doesn’t mean you’re necessarily right – but it’s okay to have an emotion.

Here’s what’s fine: Acknowledging that there are some bad feelings happening that you want to address – maybe right now, maybe in a little while after you’ve processed them in your own mind.

Here’s what’s not fine: Feeling like the only people you can acknowledge it to are strangers on the internet because your partner is going to be upset with you for being human.

Here’s what’s not fine: When that shit crosses the line into abusive behavior because your partner has groomed you into thinking that your feelings are irrational when they are completely rational.

When you’re saying “it’s fine” and it’s clearly not.

That’s when I want to say “walk away from this.” It’s not your feelings that are the problem. It’s the narrative that your feelings are something you should be ashamed of. Your feelings might be a disturbance, and they can be addressed and treated. Someone who’d walk away from you for having them is fundamentally incompatible with you.

It’s hard to be vulnerable, but think about giving the people who love you a chance to prove that your feelings won’t scare them away. If they do, then for a moment consider whether or not you’re the one who should be scared away.

‘Cause it’s not “fine” to feel like you have no choice but to remain miserable in a relationship. Not even at year end.