Since this boy first gave me his ass a few months ago, I’ve been thinking about the relative ease of topping versus bottoming. What’s easy? In derisive references to pillow princesses, defensive assertions that we can top even if we aren’t right now, and disproportionate resources and education for kinky tops, I hear from queers and pervs that topping is harder and more valuable. Topping requires skill, strength, and endurance; bottoming just requires lazy acceptance. Flipping a top is an achievement, but for some reason flipping a submissive little girl like me isn’t.

I once saw a long-haired white-man hippie flopping like a boneless fish out of water on the floor of a yoga studio. Instructing future yoga teachers on the paradox of masculine/feminine duality, he was demonstrating what women [his word choice] would look like during sex if being receptive required no strength, intention, or effort. To hold yourself in place and open so that another person can drive into you requires all those things; otherwise instead of getting fucked, we’d be slithering away like so many boneless fish. As the Collective Tarot highlights with the Reception card that replaces The Empress in the major arcana, the receptive role is traditionally coded feminine; therefore, it’s no surprise that it is devalued in this sexist world (which, yes, includes the queers and pervs):

Receiving has often been associated with weakness. It is actually the sturdiest of endeavors.

Dualities are interdependent. When I think about the strength it takes to bottom, I think about how a top’s strength relies on it. I think about passive resistance, the way a body gone limp and uncooperative hinders or prevents another from exerting physical power on it. A little while ago, Nic wanted to pick me up, so I wrapped my arms around her neck and curled up into her arms, and she said:

Femmes have all the strength. Bottoms have all the strength. I could carry you to your room right now and all I’d have to do is…not crumble.

I love bottoming. When I put myself in a top’s hands, I’m deep and safe in my own skin. It’s what comes most naturally to me and it’s how I identify. Yet with the boy, topping feels most natural. Fucking him, power wells from the depths of my body, surging huge and strong and protective against my skin, and this is easy because it feels so good, but it’s also hard. It’s hard because I feel so exposed: every kiss, touch, or slap is a public test of whether I read my bottom’s desire and consent accurately. It’s hard because it’s outside my comfort zone.

Easy and hard are meaningless as generalizations. Sometimes it’s easier to take on the role expected of your gender or your gender presentation. Sometimes it’s easier to be in control because you can’t trust people to see and touch your body in ways that make you feel right and good and hot. Sometimes it’s easier to be in control because you’ve had so many experiences where you weren’t permitted to be. Sometimes it’s easier to be in control because the straight dude you brought home is painfully clueless.  It depends so much on the person and the situation, and for so many people, bottoming is what’s hard, what feels vulnerable. And even if you’re fucking a bottom for whom it’s easy, we are still vulnerable. If you’re a top who believes in pillow princesses, all that says about you is that you consider us just holes to fuck or flesh to beat, and if you don’t appreciate what we do–the way we feel, the way we look at you, the way we sound–then you don’t deserve to fuck us.

A few days before Christmas, my paternal grandpa passed away. I grew up knowing that my family line through him had escaped Hitler’s Germany with no deaths, that his father had been a Jew, and that he shed his Jewishness along with his name when they arrived in the United States. When I was growing up, my grandpa did not talk about his childhood before immigrating. I remember my dad telling me that Grandpa once mentioned the pet goat he’d had as a kid, but when they started asking questions, he clammed up. I am not Jewish; my fascination with this part of my heritage feels almost appropriative. But then I wonder what must have happened to make the first fourteen years of my grandpa’s life off-limits, and I think about what I know about his relationship with my dad, and it matters.

In his last conversation with my dad, my grandpa’s strongest message was that the most important thing is family. Any psychotherapist would agree: our familial relationships are our formative relationships. They shape how we will relate to other people, to friends and partners, for our whole lives. Even as our ways of relating evolve, by conscious will or the simple passage of time and experience, our change is in reference to the strong patterns of those formative relationships. So when there is trauma that makes a childhood unspeakable, when there is mental illness (diagnosed or not), it is part of our lineage. By lineage, I don’t mean blood, though it seems depression flows in ours. I mean the lineage of relationships, the ways that my grandpa related to my dad and the ways that my dad echoed or discarded his dad’s ways to relate to me and my sister. This is the cracking open: on its millionth spin around the turntable, my plaintive refrain of loss was interrupted.

The triad was a trial by fire. All of us had been non-monogamous, but none of us had been truly, functionally poly. For me, Andy and Nic exploded the rules and constraints of their slow and cautious wading into polyamory: one on each side, they grasped my hands and cliff-jumped into unimaginably deep tides and giant waves. They were simultaneously the first people I actually dated, and they became my first partners. Their relationship has survived two relationships with me, during which time I went insane, was diagnosed borderline, and began to manage it. We all survived somehow, stayed friends.

Almost three and a half years after that Labor Day weekend in New York when Andy and I first flirted, I see with no doubt that our relationships have been formative for all three of us. Each of us is unique, of course. We do not date identically; compare Andy’s relationship with Aurora to Nic’s relationships since our breakup to mine since then, and it’s very clear. But our style of polyamory is distinct and recognizable: we have shaped each other, and the echoes of our ethics, values, and norms reverberate through all of our individual relationships now. This revelation of family stills the record.

I want to advocate for disclosure norms that are compassionate and intentional. Our norms at the time weren’t; they developed accidentally, a seemingly natural corollary to no-rules poly, and they made compassion very difficult. In one fight we had about the new girl, I remember pleading for Nic to “take care of me,” but under these norms, neither of us could see a way for her to do that without artificially restricting her new relationship or lying about it. Clearly the latter wasn’t an option, and while the former is an option in some forms of polyamory, it wasn’t in ours. I found myself asking for it, but as an INFJ, it broke my heart to want something I didn’t believe was right. Nic was my man and my butch and becoming my daddy; not having any tenable way to take care of me was equally heartbreaking for her.

In relationships, I like to feel that anything can be shared and anything is fair game for a question, that honesty is expected and safe. This is a solid foundation, but for it to be meaningful, partners need to build structures that encourage other dimensions of safety. Today, I suggest that it is our responsibility to think before we speak. We can and should process our own desires and feelings for one partner before telling another partner about them. We should do this in a timely manner, but we should also take our own time. Knowing and loving our partners well, we should consider what they need to know about others and why, rather than routinely sharing every detail. Knowing and loving our partners well, we should consider when and how they will be most equipped to be their best selves, by their own definitions, as they hear us.

It is also our responsibility to consider what we ourselves need to know and why. We can and should communicate with our partners about what makes us feel strong and sweet and ready to support developments in their other relationships. We should be clear about our limits, and be unafraid to help our partners care for us by reminding them of those limits when their excitement or their stress overwhelms them. In these ways, we can be compassionate and intentional.

What is the work­ing title of your story?
“Ash,” because it’s a Cinderella adaptation.

Where did the idea come from for the story?
I wrote it as a submission for Leather Ever After, but it wasn’t accepted. I was playing with a few other ideas for this callout, but having trouble with each of them. Eventually I realized that in order to complete something by the deadline, I needed to write about what was currently real to me. I’m just coming back into writing [anything but a personal journal] ten years after ruling it out because as a teenager, I decided I was hopeless, so I’m out of practice and not as disciplined or versatile as I’d like. I was thinking a lot about embodiment and mental illness/health, and the idea of the body as fairy godmother: wise, kind, and powerfully transformative.

What genre does your story fall under?
Fairytales retold, queer fiction, kinky smut

Which actors would you choose to play your char­ac­ters in a movie ren­di­tion?
For the butch, maybe Jenny Shimizu? She’s incredibly hot, and her vibe seems right. Azmarie from ANTM could also work. Trying to figure out who’d play Ash, all I realized was that there is no top hot femmes list to reference–kind of a catch-22 because the idea of such a thing existing is kind of gross, too.

What is the one-sentence syn­op­sis of your book?
Femme goes out dancing to get into her body; gets fucked in the bathroom by butch.

Will your book be self-published or rep­re­sented by an agency?
This is too long to be a blog post, so I’m keeping an eye out for a good home for it–an anthology, a magazine, something of that sort.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your man­u­script?
A few weeks, but I’ve been editing it on and off for months since then, and won’t submit it again until I’ve worked on it more.

What other stories would you com­pare this to within your genre?
I’m really inspired by the way Xan West brings careful thought, intention, and identity into stories like “Strong”. I don’t know that we compare as writers, but I’m also trying to bring “full selves” into what I write.

Who or what inspired you to write this story?
The underground tech house scene in Montréal, and an ex or three of mine.

What else about your story might pique the reader’s inter­est?
I don’t usually see sexy stories about characters who are crazy, but we fuck, too. Sex, as a way to connect with my body and as a way to be cared for, is really valuable in managing my mental health.

Here are the writ­ers whose work you can check out next:

Hey, just like elementary school! I definitely don’t have many writerly acquaintances whose content would be appropriate and who would be up for participating. So, I present just one recommendation:

Flexibeast writes about gender, trans-ness, genderqueerness, kink, sex, and more on Dreamwidth. Recently I’ve enjoyed this excellent guide on figuring out whether someone’s “debating” you in good faith.

As soon as I left the house, I felt long fingers of anxiety reaching under my ribs. I suddenly realized just how short my dress was, how bright my wig was: how conspicuous a girl I was. I’ve never worn a “slutty” Halloween costume before. I’ve never in my life worn that much pink before, not even as an infant, and certainly not in such an obnoxiously glorious shade. Grateful to have my best butches with me on the métro and bus, I realized there was no way I was trekking home by myself that night. I had known that wearing this costume in public would be out of the ordinary, but I hadn’t realized it would kind of be solo edgeplay.

Last year at Unholy Harvest, I went to a workshop on humiliation and degradation, which, combined with gender, is my primary fetish. One of the participants used the idea of pillars that form the foundation of your sense of self to explain how when you play with H&D, it can be powerful to shake those pillars, but you have be careful because if too many crumble, you’re demolished. Shaking pillars is edgeplay, and after a year of consideration, femme is one of my most important. Lately “princess” is an ornament on that pillar, and being Princess Bubblegum came in part out of that (as well as stoner-geek love for Adventure Time and for two besties who were Finn and Marceline).

One reason I embraced princess was recognizing the internalized misogyny at the root of my prior resistance to something that truly fit me. Another part was letting myself be girl, and I mean that both as a gender and as a D/s dynamic. Part of the vulnerability of being girl is the pure disdain this world has for girlness. The girlier you are, the more visible a target for misogyny.

My favorite story in Say Please was Xan West’s “Strong,” Daddy/girl¹ that is beautifully articulated and heavily misogynistic. A few months later, I read The Ultimate Guide to Kink and found myself mulling over Mollena‘s chapter on taboo role play, in which she talks about how getting close to the things with the most power to hurt us can be such a profound turn-on.

Then I went to Harvest, where I heard the silver butch Master² who made such an impression last year describe a mindfuck she’d done with her girl of over a decade. That scene played hard with femmephobia, and it was evident in their telling of the story how deeply bonding and beautiful it was for the two of them, a renewal and revaluing of their butch/femme, Master/slave dynamic. In the same workshop, a participant described her girl-gang scene from the previous night as cathartic, a group of femmes hurling years of received hurt at her scapegoated boi–you think we care what you think??–and then at that night’s play party, I watched another girl-gang scene in which a femme was initiated through forced feminization. What these scenes had in common was their intentional employment of insulting and devaluing quotidian comments, those comments that make it so risky to be girl, those comments that people feel entitled to make when you’re feminine.

At the Halloween party, people responded enthusiastically to my glammed out appearance. I, on the other hand, felt viscerally the vulnerability that makes “high” femme so hard for me: the girlier you get, the more vulnerable you are to public commentary on your appearance. If go out in makeup and tits and a skirt, it’s likely that the next day I’ll need to wear men’s jeans and a tank. Fuck you, everyone who felt the need to tell me I looked so pretty yesterday when I better lived up to the demanding ideals of compulsory femininity. I think I’m just as hot with nothing on my body but cotton.

Some compliments for Princess Bubblegum felt good: those from the Adventure Time enthusiast who kept screaming my name every time he saw me; from Nic and Andy, who have a complete and appreciative view of my femmeness; and from my femme coworker with whom I’ve talked a lot about “coming around” to femme. Shockingly, the compliments that felt backhanded (albeit unintentionally) to me were those from gay men suggesting that I should semi-permanently alter my appearance to resemble the overblown artificiality of Princess Bubblegum. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being that fabulous every day; the offense is in their underlying assumption that my own everyday gender presentation is borne out of feminine lack rather than strong intention. The offense is in their refusal to see that I am already doing feminine exactly the way that feels like home for me, every day.

The next morning, I woke to the bleak knowledge that I’d crashed hard. Granted, this severe crash was due far more to the events of the week than the party itself, but it’s draining to put yourself out there as trying to be a girl, to put yourself up for judgement as to whether you’re succeeding, and then to hear the verdict that you’d look better if you succeeded in such ways all the time. My usual femme doesn’t expose me that way; it easily discourages unwelcome commentary with its simple clothes, broad movements, and assertive opinions. For many of us queers, our genders are not a given; they require constant proof of their reality within us. But despite such a hard crash, the edgeplay was good. It felt good to pull it off: the bright pink, the tiny dress, the wig. It felt good to pass as that kind of girl. I just wish there’d been a daddy at home to dole out a reward.

1. I am only okay with this capitalization of the dominant’s title because Daddy is actually a proper noun.
2. And I’m capitalizing this dominant sadist’s title out of respect for her demonstrated preference.

My friend Mimi visited a few weekends ago. Mimi was my first friend in Montréal, a sharp thinker and extremely talented writer with whom I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life. It was in a conversation with her and our other then-roommates that I began to think about the value and importance of pop culture and the sexism, classism, and racism inherent in literary or musical snobbishness. Sunday night, Mimi was talking about how lately she’s been reading exclusively literary fiction, choosing to consume writing crafted with skill rather than writing intended for mass sales and appeal. I started to realize that in my determination to accord pop culture its due importance, to recognize that we who consume and enjoy it are not stupid or necessarily passive, I haven’t been registering the difference between commercial production and craftsmanship when it comes to music and writing, and that this oversight might have something to do with my inability to write.

It’s kind of like fast food. I don’t think it needs to be eradicated, and I don’t think eating it, whether out of choice or necessity, should invite a value judgement. However, I still wish that fresh produce and unprocessed meat were as universally accessible as a Big Mac. We can still wish that everyone had a true choice between The Waves and When Strangers Marry*. While both have their place, and while a Big Mac or When Strangers Marry might be just the right nourishment sometimes, neither provides what you need to live, in the fullest sense of the word, rather than simply survive. It’s a given that kids who don’t have enough to eat have trouble in school. It’s hard for the body to think when a growling stomach demands attention, and it’s hard to create when you haven’t fed on inspiration.

The week after Mimi’s visit, I heard that Taylor Swift was cast as Joni Mitchell in an upcoming film adaptation of Girls Like Us, and I was appalled. But who wants to guess how many times in these recent months of multiple breakups I’ve listened to “You Belong With Me” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” instead of “A Case of You” or “Blue Boy”? That week, I launched iTunes for the first time in ages and started listening to the music I dissected on page upon journal page, in hour after hour of boring class in high school, compelled by the flawless timbre and placement of every word in her lyrics to learn from her.

You shit what you eat: eating tons of fast food provides constipation and farts; listening to tons of T-Swift provides writer’s block and empty ideas that fail to inspire tangible creativity.

*When Strangers Marry, the tale of an innocent girl’s rescue from her ugly abusive betrothed by a rich hot dude, was a romance novel that got me off few times in 8th or 9th grade.

She likes it when my hair brushes across her ear, she tells me when I lean over to kiss her. Good to know. This is the kind of trivia I collect.

Somehow I end up with my mouth on her nipple, my bottom lip just brushing it at first, teasing. She pretends she doesn’t like it when I tease, rolls her eyes. I keep it slow, catching her nipple with a bit more of my lip. Her nipple and my lip are almost the same texture and density. She’s still and quiet, watching me, not touching me because the last time I saw her I snapped at her for clutching at me when I kissed her–barely capable of talking to another person, I felt trapped and pushed by her arms wrapping tight that night. I know she wants it; her hips are rocking just a little and I can feel her restraint, giving me time and space to decide. I wrap the tip of my tongue around her nipple and suck the whole thing into my mouth for an instant, then slide my body up hers and press her cheek to the pillow with my own.

I kiss her earlobe. I kiss up the arch of her ear, then do it again, mouth open more, softer (my lips) and harder (the pressure), a little tongue. I wait, breathing, millimeters away from her cartilage. She tries to close the gap, pressing her other ear deeper into the pillow to raise this one towards me, and I start up her ear again, this time with teeth. She sucks in air fast and it hisses through her lips as I close mine around her earlobe and work down her neck, tongue pressing hard against the thick line of muscle down to her collarbone and then back to her nipple, the same one.

“If you keep going, I’m not going to be able to sleep,” she says.

“You’re not?” I keep going. I’m pretty sure she’ll be able to sleep when I’m done.

Comfort

Pretty much every single femme I talked to agreed: packing for FemmeCon was seriously anxiety inducing. As I’ve decried repeatedly, femmeness is often reduced to aesthetics, which means when you’re going to be surrounded by femmes (at the adult equivalent of sleepaway camp, with all the same potential for hijinks, no less), it feels really fucking important to look hot. Despite that, I felt pretty chill about it, and might be brave enough in 2014 to fully ladybro-down without fear of being read as an ally instead of a femme. This conference went to great lengths to be accessible and comfortable, and while the organizers weren’t perfect, it seemed like they did a pretty good job. They also seemed quite receptive to feedback; there’s already discussion on the Facebook event about how to organize caucuses better next time, for example. Aside from one really obnoxious exchange with an older femme at the play party, I didn’t generally feel that other femmes were dissecting me or my outfits, or placing me in proximity to a high femme ideal. It felt like most people there valued and respect the vast range of femme style and gender expression, though of course I’m in favor of the request that we start complimenting each other on more than our clothes, from the Mean Girls workshop on femme competition. Also on the topic of comfort, my hotel bed was perfect, and so were my roommates for the weekend. It was so nice to have a few full days to get to know these two friends-of-friends femmes from Boston, and to meet one of their friends who crashed with us for a night!

Pride

Particularly appropriate, since I missed Fierté (including a dyke march) to be at FemmeCon! There were three main reasons I was proud of myself this weekend. The first is that I think I did a really good job of managing my mental health: taking plenty of time alone when I could, talking myself down when I started getting anxious or agitated, and using the medication I’ve been prescribed pre-emptively instead of mid-crisis. The second is that my Cuntext-related work got some props! Two of my roommates inadvertently quoted me: one, my comment on the fingernail flagging post at Bossy Femme and the other, my submission to the Beyond Lipstick project. Also, Kim Crosby included a quote from Femme Post III in her presentation on deconstructing and resisting femmephobia, which is so flattering because she is so goddamn brilliant!

The third reason to be proud was that I went balls-out and, for the first time I can remember, avoided a potential missed connection situation! I’d been eying this stud with a killer smile all night while we were out dancing at Grand Central on Friday. Neither my roommate nor I could tell if she was there alone or not, and no one made a move beyond her asking if I was having a good night at one point. When my group was leaving, I went up to her and told her I thought she was really attractive and wanted to kiss her good night, if she was there alone. She said she wasn’t alone; I said “Aw, have a good night, then!” and we left. I was already really excited that I’d managed to say what I had to say, but then while a few of us were standing near the coat check, one of our group came out and told me someone was asking for me inside. When I went back in, a femme in a cute, short, floral dress came up to me and said, “My partner wants to kiss you good night! Go ahead, it’s okay,” so I said thank you and went back to the dance floor. I walked up to the stud and said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey,” and I wrapped my right arm around her neck and kissed her, feeling her left hand slide around my waist and then down over my ass as we added a little tongue. It was like a teenage dyke TV dream (I mean, if TV ever portrayed healthy nonmonogamy), and a perfect way to end my first FemmeCon day.

Gratitude

I really, really like to think. FemmeCon gave me a hell of a lot to think about, in terms of both femme community and my own positioning within it, and that’s the main thing for which I’m grateful. The huge discussion on Saturday about femme competition, attended by more than 60 femmes, was really effective at opening a lot of boxes whose contents I look forward to sorting through more. I went to a workshop on racism and colonialism in femme communities that was aimed at white allies, which gave me a lot to check in with myself about: how to work on my socially anxious tendency to avoid eye contact so I don’t passively make people of color feel fucking invisible, how not to just screech at fellow white people who do racist shit and instead offer support, how and why it’s happened that every single one of my girlfriends has been a masculine of center queer person of color, and also Friday night’s avoided missed connection, since we talked about white people cruising queer people of color in various contexts, and both the stud and femme from Friday night were black.

The panel discussion featuring working class femmes was a huge highlight of the weekend. I mostly just feel incredibly privileged to have gotten to listen to three panelists (Arti Mehta, Kirya Traber, and Blyth Barnow), a moderator (Chanelle Gallant), and many participants who were so smart and open and articulate, and so incredibly strong and vulnerable. My background is solidly middle-class, and I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but it was truly an honor to get to hear these femmes speak. Though this was an exhausting final event, it’s probably reverberated through my mind the most over the past few days, perhaps because class is kind of hard to figure out, or perhaps because the panelists were just so mindblowingly good. A roommate and I talked about growing up where we both did after this panel, and both wish there were more resources and venues for middle-class people to grapple with their placement within this stuff, so if you have any suggestions, let us know!

One major development for which I’m grateful came out of the “intergenerational dialogue” on Saturday–a group of femmes based in New York with whom I’ll be forming a mentorship group on relationships, sex, and kink. We already have our first meet-up set for early September! Though I didn’t quite end up with the grandma-aged femme mentor of my dreams, this group spans about a decade and I think we’ll learn a lot from each other. And also have a sweet time hanging out.

It goes without saying that I’m incredibly grateful to every single femme who was there that weekend, for making us 400 strong, for effectively taking over the entire hotel, and for engaging so fully and working so hard to make it good. I saw more individual acts of human kindness this weekend than I normally see in a year, from the couple who picked my travel buddy and I up at the train station and drove us to the hotel for free, to people letting each other crash in their hotel rooms when situations changed, to femmes who didn’t even know each other ensuring each other’s safe rides home.