For a long time I felt
Without style or grace
Wearing shoes with no socks
In cold weather
- Talking Heads
Well, my adolescent socially integrative hurdle was not an excess of 80’s preppie-ness (although I did go to a sort of prep school, but that’s another story). Mine was that, for the longest time, I didn’t dare resolve my real life attraction to girls with my fantasy life of seeing them tied up and in peril. That really screwed me up for a long time, and when you’re already earmarked for social ostracism (waaay too smart to be popular, not much use at team sports – at an all-boys school) then having an internal barrier to meeting girls becomes nearly insurmountable.
Without style or grace
Wearing shoes with no socks
In cold weather
- Talking Heads
Well, my adolescent socially integrative hurdle was not an excess of 80’s preppie-ness (although I did go to a sort of prep school, but that’s another story). Mine was that, for the longest time, I didn’t dare resolve my real life attraction to girls with my fantasy life of seeing them tied up and in peril. That really screwed me up for a long time, and when you’re already earmarked for social ostracism (waaay too smart to be popular, not much use at team sports – at an all-boys school) then having an internal barrier to meeting girls becomes nearly insurmountable.
I really thought I was weird. I didn’t really think I was uniquely weird (the refrain we often see among newcomers to the DiD world: “I thought I was the only one.”) I just thought that anyone who admitted to having a kink like mine would subject himself to ridicule among peers and abhorrence from adults. And maybe that was even true, but in retrospect – so what? It’s not like I wanted to, oh I dunno, jet to Argentina on the taxpayer’s tab….
But so bad was my psychological dissonance that I could not really imagine any girlfriend (or, more accurately, desired girlfriend) as a damsel in distress as an adolescent. This wasn’t a problem in childhood – I often daydreamt of some of the girls in class – no later than first grade – as captives of some villainous mad scientist or what have you.
All that changed in adolescence. And it really wasn’t out of shame of the eroticism of the DiD for me – it wasn’t some sort of weird version of a Madonna/whore thing, which I have never had. No, it was my inability to think that any woman (or girl, since we are talking about teen years) might find being a damsel in distress exciting. I thought any girl I told my fantasies to would look at me like I was an axe murderer and conclude that I hated women or something.
And if you know anything about me, you know – I like girls. A lot. And not just the way any hetero guy would. I like being around them, talking to them, working with them, listening to them. Apart from my (male) friends, I typically despise being around guys. I detest pro sports. I don’t bond over beer and hi-cholesterol snacks. I don’t use appellations like “Bro” or “Bud” or any of that crap. However, I also don’t have that nasally superior NPR-listener voice, with that effetely impotent condescension of what passes for the intelligentsia in this benighted country. Neither am I metrosexual, to use a fave term from 2002. I am not nearly vain or douchy enough for that. I guess I am just a very heterosexual gay man. But I digress.
I think I was incapacitated right through college by this very deep split between what I was (and loving the damsel in distress is more than just a sexy kink for me, it’s a core part of my identity) and what I thought was socially acceptable, or romantically acceptable. Since there was only one girl I had a massive crush on in college, we have a small statistical sample for what I am about to say: never, not once, not even in retrospect, could I ever imagine her as a damsel in distress.
However, there were plenty of girls whom I did not have crushes on that I DID fantasize tied up and in peril. Some I thought were cute. Some I was not particularly attracted to. But the moment I “invested” emotionally in one – and it was only one in college – she was, in my mind, cut off from the DiD fantasy world.
Parenthetically, I still remember that girl in college with enormous fondess, even thought we went out exactly once. She is the physical model for one of the heroines in my (non-DiD) fiction, although the character does not really share that much of her personality.
I’m not really sure when I really became comfortable with my “inner villain.” I suppose it started in grad school, which was simultaneously very isolating but also in a weird way socially liberating. Maybe it was seeing people far more socially impaired than me. At any rate, in retrospect, I think one relationship finally did it: my most “ex” of ex-girlfriends. I think I started off in the same failed mode as before, but the relationship turned into something so uneven, so “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours we share” emotionally speaking, that at some point I just snapped and thought of her in peril. So maybe my happy state of mind now is really just the by-product of a grudge match. I never got to tie her up – shame, it would have done her good.
At any rate, I still am not foolish enough to think that I could let the world at large know I am a DiD aficionado. I don’t think that is some sort of criminal societal hypocrisy; one doesn’t immediately share one’s cholesterol count or SAT scores (well, maybe the latter if you are some Ivy League fuckwit – full disclosure, I am Ivy League, but I hope not a fuckwit). One has to slowly ease into DiD just as one has to be a little circumspect about any other intimate revelation. But at least I now no longer care whether it’s right or wrong in an absolute sense.
