Written by G. A. Johnson.
At the age of six, I developed my first fantasy, in which I imagined kissing and comforting a crying boy.
Unconsciously, this yearning to heal the troubles of the soul through the dispensation of the flesh became a theme in my trysts with men. The first person I kissed on the mouth was a 47-year-old friend who had a rocky relationship with his teenage son and compared me to a Robert Crumb caricature. Upon further navigation of the adult world of sexual rendezvous, my addiction to the sadboy archetype made its ravenous, self-destructive self known.
Upon further navigation of the adult world of sexual rendezvous, my addiction to the sadboy archetype made its ravenous, self-destructive self known.
The culmination of all this was one fateful post made to a subreddit designed for personal ads featuring gentle femdom. I was a sophomore in college, consumed by loneliness. Not wishing to subject myself to the soulless square dance of another doomed Tinder date, I turned to the captive audience of isolated and terminally online young men who needed affection as much as anyone else.
After I posted a personal describing myself as a Mommy Domme in search of broken boys, my inbox exploded. The senders were diverse and numerous, and the content of their correspondence ran the gamut from detailed paragraphs about their romantic isolation to “I have about 15 clothes pegs and a shoelace. Some poppers as well. Tell me exactly how to take it all.” Against all common sense I challenged myself to respond to as many messages as possible, a move that would prove injurious to my own well-being.
After I posted a personal describing myself as a Mommy Domme in search of broken boys, my inbox exploded.
After a month of sustained conversation with a rotating solar system of internet subs, the cracks in my poorly-laid foundation began to show. Most days I would wake up to Discord notifications from a dyspeptic Romania-to-England transplant whose mother had tried to poison him as a child because he wasn’t the daughter she had hoped for. Thereafter would come a steady trickle of messages from several other people, responses to which I volleyed back like a frenetic badminton player in between classes and before work. One particular submissive, the transfeminine headmate of a German programmer, developed separation anxiety when I could not respond to their pleas for attention across the six hour span of a shift. Late nights studying at the library were interrupted by Snapchat correspondence from a military doctor in Guam who said he needed my undivided attention while he pleasured himself with a horse dildo. I drank more nights than I did not. Sometimes notifications from subs would send me spiraling into mild anxiety attacks. Some men, having already called me Mommy, unadded me after they felt I had taken too long to respond. I broke down crying on more than one occasion from the sheer stress that I had caused myself by the naive and egotistical thought that I could be responsible for furnishing everyone’s happiness. The fact that this whole fiasco was tied to my maternal worth and fitness only exacerbated the guilt I felt at having failed another lonely boy. The hardest lesson to learn in the business of loving (and fucking) people is that you cannot bear their sorrows as your own, however kind a person you are.
The hardest lesson to learn in the business of loving (and fucking) people is that you cannot bear their sorrows as your own, however kind a person you are.
After three months had been invested into this unsuccessful experiment, I began to pull the plug on many of my correspondences. Most took the severance cordially, especially when I cited the deleterious effect Domming was having on my mental health. My sex drive plummeted, to the point where the thought of fucking or genitals repulsed me. Through the beginning of the pandemic I tried unsuccessfully to maintain a more serious relationship with a man I had met through the ad. He meant well, but his framing of this development was that my sexlessness in this time was an issue I needed to work through. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that huddling in my parents’ garage and verbally coaching him through the motions of masturbation caused me more stress than it ever did pleasure.
“Why men?” I wondered after all this had passed into uncomfortable memory. When I fucked women, it was passionate but vanilla. The intersections between queerness and kink are well-documented, but in a sapphic context I was much more concerned with gentle pleasure than with the socially transgressive potential of sex.
Gender played a fundamental role in the way I experienced kink. Though part of it was rooted in the societal tendency to cater to men, it wasn’t as simple as that. I pitied these men and identified with them through a masculine lens, having known isolation and undesirability just as they had. In becoming their mother and master I was trying not only to subvert the presumptions of my femininity, but also to nurture the angry, ugly part of me that in younger years had resented not being wanted by anybody. When tending to soft and emotionally scarred boys, was I in a way really giving succor to the eighth-grade iteration of me who relished Halloweens in drag and desperately sought camaraderie with her male classmates even as she pined for them?
Renewing my lease on sexuality meant reckoning with my desires and gender outside of the context of existing power structures and my ability to subvert them. Being pushed beyond my emotional boundaries led me to cherish them even more. Liberation for me was realizing that my kinks do not exist for the sake of others, as ostentation or wish fulfilment. The quiet animal of my sexuality is found in the organic communication of desire and sensation, not the checking off of items from a laundry list of fetishes or camouflaging my insecure ego in fishnets.
Most vital is this: compassion cannot be practiced from the lofty heights of a god(dess) complex. Its place is drunk on the floor, crying with your lover about his dead brother. It’s the exhilarating freedom of kissing him goodbye, secure in the knowledge that you can honor his sadness without being responsible for its ablution.
About The Author
G.A. Johnson is a Wisconsin cryptid masquerading as a writer and artist. Often bewildered, frequently peckish, and a big fan of graveyards.
Follow on IG: @the_opossum_queen | Follow on Twitter: @specimanjars