Love Will Not Cure You.

From time-to-time my flatmate Married Suzanne (she's married now so I have changed her name to that permanently) and I used to get other roommates. There wasn't really a system to how we did this but once every few months someone would move into the spare "room" or live on the couch while they searched for a real home. It was fun, we met a lot of nice people that way and we were able to help out the female transient population in a country where single women have a hell of a time trying to rent apartments. Sometimes we temporarily had terrible roommates and sometimes we had really awesome ones, like Avino, who only dated dentists, could sleep through nuclear war and changed jobs once a week. One of our roommates, maybe her name was Anushka, had moved to the city and was waiting for her company to allot housing to her so she had  temporarily moved in with us.

One night after I had just returned home from a "date" and Suzanne has come back from having sex with a guy (who wasn't her boyfriend but was the only one who could make her have penetrative orgasms), and we were sitting on the couch, smoking pot, and talking about the weird fucking we had just done. Suzanne is reasonably sexually adventurous, she's not into BDSM per se but likes some stuff (costumes, floggers, blindfolds, that kind of thing) and I was in a phase where I carried a whip around in my bag *just in case* I met someone who was into that. I would have hated to have not had a whip when I really needed one. Suzanne was toying around with my whip when Anushka came out of her room and asked if she could join us. We had spent time together before but not post sex-dates and in the midst of discussions about penis curves that make you come real hard. It didn't matter though, we asked her to come hang out. She saw the whip and asked questions about it, not clueless questions, she obviously knew exactly what it was for and she wasn't weirded out by its existence. Finally, she offered this,

*"You will learn that when you really love someone you don't need all these things for the sex to me amazing."*

Girl.

*Girl.*

Now I don't disagree with her about sex being great when you love someone, it's great. At least, I cannot imagine a situation where I love someone and the sex isn't amazing (as long as you actually feel like you want to have sex in a romantic relationship). However I am also not delusional
Even if I set aside that love can be expressed by any means, candles or whips, and focus entirely on other less esoteric arguments, I find that view problematic. I think pop culture heavily influences how we view sex, and I think because sex is something so often portrayed in books and on screens in way of longing or following a great emotional breakthrough, we have one some level an idea that sex is a far more emotional thing than it is. Is sex emotional? Sure. Is it heartbreaking, world-changing, universe-stopping in its intensity? Well. It could be with a whip. I think there is an idea that sex must be significant. And of course it is when you first meet someone and it's new, but the reality is that two people who love each other could have boring, good sex. Boring good sex is good but it is less good when it starts to look down on other kinds of sex that may involve whips. It's horrible when it thinks love erases the need for pain.

I believe very strongly that sexual connection comes from the strength of your sexual dynamic with your partner. In that I agree with Anushka, you don't necessarily *need* a whip, you can use your body to express your sexual desire in very complete ways. You can pleasure and hurt, using just your body. However not needing a whip is kind of like not needing a cute skull cup with freckled cheeks to drink your tea out of, I don't need it, but it brings me immense joy. My relationship with tea is not built in it, but it adds to the experience of drinking tea and isn't that what it's all about? The immensity of experiences? That's exactly what a sexual dynamic brings to the table and I think maybe people who think like Anushka are less scared of the idea of sex toys and more of the idea that sexual engagement could exist within a structure that we cannot imagine. It's like when someone in a non-democratic country loves their life and you want to, but you just can't believe it (so you invade them and try to fix it).

It happens to me too. Sometimes I hear about forms of relationships that people practice and it bothers me. I see people talk about never sleeping in the same bed as their partners and on the floor every day instead, and it scares me because I would be very hurt if I did that everyday. I would be very unhappy in a dynamic where we didn't share a room too. That scares me. The idea of a dynamic where you must use only third person speech to refer to yourself also scares me a little because when I see someone else do it, I picture myself doing it and concluding that I wouldn't be happy. However after the momentary discomfort, I take myself out of the situation and consider their lives as a function of who *they* are, and I am usually able to see their joy or comfort in their sexual dynamic and accept that relationships take all forms. That's an important step because without it I would just be a sanctimonious judgemental bitch (and I save that for things other than sex). The essence still is that the specific nature of the things you do to express your sexual dynamic are a function of the dynamic and not the basis for it. The engagement is defined on the basis on the dynamic and not the other way round. In that the whip is much less important than the desire to hurt your partner. The whip is only a tool.

But the tool is a representation for the idea that love can exist in a format where you hurt a person. It can exist in a format where you violate them and humiliate them sexually. The idea is much less jarring that the leather based actualization of it on your couch. At the core, it seems like there is an idea that intimacy cannot exist when objects like whips and gags are involved because we see those as objects of perversion and as is often displayed in the world, perverts are a function of their sexual urges and have no space for love. It hurts our brain sometimes to accept that a person making someone scream and cry could actually love the person they are doing that to so we condescend to the idea and tell them they need healing. Or we tell ourselves that they might have been abused as children and that's why they need this (and man if I had a cute cup for each time I have heard that, I would have even more cups and an even bigger storage problem). I understand the temptation to explain away something different as mental illness but I don't understand giving into it without expressing any intention to learn something new.

The truth is that sometimes this explanation is not entirely wrong. I will be the first to admit that while my masochism seems to predate any trauma, there are parts of my sexuality that are influenced by my experiences with rape and abuse. Does that mean I do not love the person who whips me or they don't love me back? Get out, man. It's not about what explains a sexuality. If your sexuality involves lighting candles and always being on top, that likely has an explanation too. It could be a perfectly normal explanation or a strange one. A perfectly normal sexual behaviour could be influenced by a strange sexual root. It's not about the explanation. The only people we need to really analyse our sexualities for are ourselves, and our partners. Those are the only stakeholders. The explanation is just like the labels they put behind packaged foods that tells you how much of what is in something, and it may influence your decision to eat something, and it may not influence someone else's decision to call it their favourite food. However, it is all food. I just moved a lot of furniture around, I think I'm hungry. There is no perfect food, unless you know what your body needs from food. It's the same. I need the pain. Married Suzanne needs the theatre. My partner needs compliance. We all need different shit and it's best when we do it with someone whose needs align with ours.

That's what I told Anuska. That great sex can bring fulfillment in various configurations with or without love, it's more contingent on your sexual dynamic with a person but you definitely don't need to throw away all toys the moment you find love. Anuska didn't agree but I still don't see why. I don't see how you can harbour the idea that just because you love someone the eleven minutes of thrusting or licking will be better than my two hours of being chained up and yelled at by a crazy man who tried to fuck me with a hairbrush. I cannot subscribe to the idea or honestly believe it doesn't stem from oppressing female sexuality when I am told that a dick in me should be enough because love. A dick in you doesn't even guarantee orgasms and I'm told those are important to people.

The candlelight-delusion about sex makes sex look great and significant on screen but that's the first time, if you did exactly that five times a week for a year, you would be bored no matter how much you love the other person. You'd be even more bored, and probably incompatible, if you want whips and your partner thinks love should be enough. That's why weird women's magazines are always suggesting "light bondage" to spice things up. Love is great. I love love. However I don't believe love erases your weirdness or fetishism. I don't think it is a cure. I don't even think it needs to be cured. Anushka didn't agree though. She kept waiting for me to find a person I didn't need to be hurt by so I could finally be happy. I guess she's still waiting.