Master Han’s Daughter
December 27th, 2008Months ago, a lover bit my neck. He’d caught what I call “the crunchy bits” — those little tendons and nerve bundles that try to skitter out from under teeth — and this bizarre hot-coldness shot up through my neck and jaw. I reacted to it like the bad pain it was.
“I can’t feel my face,” I said, clutching my jaw.
“I liked hearing you say ‘No, stop’, though.”
The numbness was pronounced, and lasted a month. When I put on blush, the brush “felt” funny when I swept it along my cheek.
A month gave me plenty of time to reflect. I’m always getting nerve problems from bondage and biting, but usually they resolve themselves quickly.
Midori had a story, I remembered, in Master Han’s Daughter. Actually, there were several that had struck me: the girl who sells her memories to her employer, and fucks her employer’s daughter. The cat-woman prostitute. But the most memorable story was about the submissive woman who gives herself to her owner/partner… literally. Like body parts. All of them.
I don’t think I could read that story again. Kudos to her for writing it — I thought it was a really brilliant criticism, or maybe the logical conclusion, of submission-as-sacrifice — but even thinking about it is tough. I tend to be really oversensitive to any perceived victimization of women, but I’m not sure if I’d be less revolted if the genders were reversed.
The only other related “love story” I can recall, not that it was consensual, is Dexter and Layla. Actually I think the fact that it was murder makes it less squicky for me. If she’d been all “inject me with a paralyzing controlled substance and then kill me and put my body parts in a plastic bag”, it would have been… far more disturbing than if he just Did It. At least the second way, only one of them was irreparably fucked up.
Complicity always makes it worse.
What interests me is that these are not isolated fantasies. I remember the man who used to call up at my old dungeon and beg, “Will you kill me? Will you put me in a bodybag and throw me out with the garbage?” The girl who specialized in death roleplays and showed me how to tie a noose.
What if my feeling had never come back? I imagined future lovers caressing my face, all unknowing, and I unable to feel it. In the fantasy I wanted him to override my plea, ‘knowing’ that I didn’t mean it: wanted him to bite harder, sink his teeth in deeper, and let him take it all away.
His touch could have been the last one I ever felt. How… romantic? How fucking fucked up. We should value what we do with our partner, not what we can’t for them; romanticize gain, not loss. This feels like something Figleaf has blogged about: the utter screwiness of our traditional notions of romance.
As much as it sometimes turns my stomach, it’s hard to condemn what turns us on. Whatever moves us will inevitably arouse us. If our likes are uncontrollable, we can always reframe the world in which we like them — even if that’s relegating them to fantasy, with all the thrill and none of the consequences. And certainly we always choose what we do.
Me, I’ve laid off the neck biting, at least for a little. That makeup thing was weird. And the third season of Dexter wasn’t that good anyway.
December 27th, 2008 at 3:56 am
I sometimes think of these things like Maori tattoos symbolizing moments in ones life or like some twisted reality version of the show me your scars romance scene between Riggs and the female cop like him in lethal weapon 3.
There was interesting article on BME awhile back that really bothered me in which a couple bit off the tips of each others ring finger as a bonding exchange instead of just having an a matching set of engagement rings.
The themes just ripple out from the stone breaking the water in the middle of it all
December 27th, 2008 at 5:00 am
It isn’t as bad as you think loosing sensation, you get used to it, I have Osteonecrosis and after breaking all the bones in my hands multiple times, can’t feel anything in my left hand at all, I regret not being able to play the guitar, but you get used to it. I suffer most from broken ankles and they still hurt, I broke my right ankle 26 times and my left one 11 times – thats a pain I could do without. Last time I was at the doctors the guy said to me hey, the pain just reminds you your still alive.
December 27th, 2008 at 8:48 am
I liked your thoughts in here. Even when people want to die, we shouldn’t indulge them. It would be a major bummer if they later changed their mind.
December 27th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Dov, you do know that was an April Fools’ joke, right? Just like the identical twins who grafted the amputated arm…
December 29th, 2008 at 12:20 am
The third season of Dexter was quite disappointing. I feel like they’ve gotten into a pattern- Dexter meets someone who he identifies with, who he thinks he can share his secret with, but who then he has to kill.
Further more, the first two seasons both had incredible sexual tension- the first between ice-truck killer and Deb, the second with Dex and Lila. This season had none of that.
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:51 pm
It’s like Cronenberg’s “Crash” too, right. Craving permanent disfigurement or death as a sexual turn-on. All best relegated to fantasy. I remember a tight bondage, T&D session I was having years ago with a prodomme I became friendly with and she started riffing on one of her clients who was into cannibalism fantasy.
It immediately turned me on and I was really sort of shocked and embarrassed. I had an immediately obvious tell if ya know what I mean. Like the scene in “Hannibal” in which Anthony Hopkin’s Lechter lightly fries the brains of Ray Liotta’s Paul Krendler for Julianna Moore’s Clarice. I dunno … I must be sick and a real perv. Or maybe it was the sixty odd days of on-my-honor chastity I was in at the time. Hmmmm …
BTW, I liked Season Three. Angel and the vice cop. Jimmy Smits offing the “Mad About You” sister who played a defense lawyer. Cool stuff, no?
January 27th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Hi Calico,
I’m going to propose that nerve damage during sex is sort of like having a tattoo of your lover’s name: hopelessly romantic, perhaps, while you’re together; an exceedingly awkward reminder once you part.
I had to have jaw surgery maybe eight or nine years ago. A couple of nerves were traumatized. The good news was that nerve trauma meant I really didn’t need that much pain mediation considering the damage. And in just a couple of months *most* of the sensation returned. But there’s still this little spot, about the size of a quarter just under one side of my lower lip that… still not right.
As Toni says you really do get used to it. But… keep thinking “would I tattoo his name on my…”
Pretty deep and thoughtful post by the way. Sorry I took so long to come back and comment. (I was stroking my chin and happened to notice that spot’s still numb.)
Take care,
figleaf