I'm Changing My Major to Kink

Oh my god last night. Oh my god, ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod last night...

I've lost my virginity three times: Once when a woman touched me, with intent, for the first time (my first intercourse, only a week or two later, is almost an afterthought in my memory); once when I pinned a submissive girlfriend to the carpet and first saw that look in her eyes; and once when I hypnotized someone for the first time. After each one, the world changed.

(in case that video link is broken, search for "fun home changing my major")

I don't know who I am / I've become someone new.

Nothing I just did, is anything I would do.

I just paid a huge amount of money, took two weeks of vacation time, and spent hours arranging flights, rides and hotels, so that I can go to the New England Hypnosis Unconference (and the London Hypnosis Workshop). I'm leaving Italy, to spend a little time in urban Connecticut in March! I'm leaving tomorrow.

There's a big part of me, maybe it's my respectable canadian protestant side, that is very uncomfortable with making all this effort and sacrifice for hedonism.

Which is what this is. I could say it's to be with community and friends, which it is - the North American hypno community is amazing, and some of my favourite people will be there, people I can't wait to see and hug after a whole year away - and I could say it's about learning and growing, which it is - if I could somehow split myself into four,  I could attend something like 80 hours of classes about erotic hypnosis, not to mention insane opportunities to see most of the best erotic hypnotists at work, and to try out every technique and hypothesis I've ever heard of.

But really it's about sex.

I’m changing my major to sex with Joan, / With a minor in kissing Joan.

Foreign studies to Joan's inner thighs. / A seminar on Joan’s ass in her Levi’s...

The chance to have lots of hot, weird hypnotic sex. Which can be all kinds of things - not necessarily involving touch. For me, anything from a sexy induction, to hypnotically-enhanced intercourse. It's all sex. And I'm going to have it with my partner khatsha, in many locations and novel modes, and with lots of other people too.

But I'm in my mid 30s. All my friends have babies and houses. How can I justify putting so much emphasis on sex?

All I can say to answer that is that sex is important. And I'm about to compare being kinky to being gay, but only in one specific way: without a culturally-approved script to follow, about the proper ways to have and enjoy sex, the discovery of sex can turn your life upside down.

Because you turn it upside down yourself, on purpose.




What I've been quoting is the song "Changing my Major to Joan", from the musical Fun Home. It's the writers' interpretation of the author Alison Bechdel at age 17, the morning after her first lesbian experience. She was a cripplingly bookish Pennsylvian teen, who was ultra sophisticated in some ways but didn't know anything about her body or her sexuality. (in fact she discovered she was gay by reading a book). But sex and love with women immediately rewrote her life and art: as she says, "I exploded out of the closet." She started spending all her free time on campus activism and LGBT community, and then decades writing and drawing a comic strip called "Dykes to Watch Out For". (which I love)

When it takes this much effort to have the kind of sex you want, even to figure out that's what you want, you better believe it goes right to the middle of your identity.

 Overnight everything changed / I am not prepared 

I'm dizzy, I'm nauseous, I'm shaky / I'm scared

Am I falling into nothingness / Or flying into something so sublime?

Another person who turned his life upside down for sex is the english writer Christopher Isherwood. I just finished reading his memoir "Christopher and his Kind". Immediately before that I read "Berlin Stories", about his time in Berlin in the 1930s, which was made into a stage play, a movie, a broadway musical (Cabaret) and a movie of that musical.

But why did he move to Berlin and start learning German at the age of 24, rather than settling into a profession like most of his peers? The first book is foggy about that, whereas the second memoir, written 40 years later, is crystal clear: "To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys."

He was encouraged to go by W.H. Auden, who was also there to have lots of sex with hot working class Germans: "I can still make myself faintly feel the delicious nausea of initiation terror which Christopher felt as Wystan pushed back the heavy leather door curtain of a boy bar called the Cosy Corner and led the way inside."

He talked a bit about reading a passage by rogue psychotherapist John Layard  that inspired him to change his life so much, and not just accept himself as gay but to really go for it:

When Christopher heard [that passage], he was even more excited than Wystan had been, for they justified a change in his own life which he had been longing but not quite daring to make. Now he burned to put them into practice, to unchain his desires and hurl reason and sanity into prison.

The rest of the book goes into satisfying detail about the romances and large amount of fucking he did in Berlin - none of which can be found in Berlin Stories. And by the way, if you think the modern kink or queer community invented power-exchange sex games (including switching), default polyamory and polyfuckery, and rough bodyplay, you should read this book! He was into all three in 1930!

This rough athletic sexmaking was excellent isometric exercise. It strengthened Christopher’s muscles more than all his years of joyless compulsory games at school.

As a digression, another thing I related to my experience joining the hypno-kink community was his first encounter with gay culture out in the open, on his visit to Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut fuer Sexual-Wissenschaft—Institute for Sexual Science - which was destroyed by the Nazis only a few years later:

Christopher giggled because he was embarrassed. He was embarrassed because, at last, he was being brought face to face with his tribe.
...

 Up to now, he had behaved as though the tribe didn’t exist and homosexuality were a private way of life discovered by himself and a few friends. He had always known, of course, that this wasn’t true. But now he was forced to admit kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen and their distasteful customs. And he didn’t like it.

This feeling passes, and he lived the rest of his life in that community and dedicated himself to its growth.

So this is something that gives me strength, artists I admire who spent a lot of their time and energy thinking about, pursuing, and having, nasty sex: Isherwood, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Samuel R. Delaney, Nicholson Baker. Obviously lots more!

But there's that voice in my head, doesn't chasing desire taint you, waste you away, lead you to destruction? Christopher Isherwood died in his 80s as a highly acclaimed writer and bon vivant, in a multi-decade relationship so famous and inspiring there's a documentary about it, "Chris and Don", while Alison Bechdel is 55 and super awesome, with both a MacArthur "Genius" award and a Tony award forever tied to her name. But those people were artists. Are we kinksters the grasshoppers in the story of the ant and the grasshopper?

People put sex to the side completely in service of other priorities, and for many it works, at least most of the time. (I am not talking about asexual people in this bit of course.) But I think there's always a cost to it. It can cause major problems, sometimes years down the road.

Christopher Isherwood writes about how even in his sophisticated circles, many gay men accepted the mainstream theory that the sex they were having was an "immature phase", and went ahead and married women. They bragged about being grown up now. Just guessing, but I'll bet the marriages he's thinking of caused a lot of misery to everyone, and then exploded - I mean if they were lucky.

In Fun Home, we learn that Alison's father, who was gay and closeted, never had that awakening, never really got to have the kind of sex that changed Alison and Christopher's life - intimate, abundant, not contrary to his public life. So instead it came out in many destructive ways, and probably contributed to his dark depression.

On a more positive note, I think of all those posts I've read on Fetlife from women in their 40s and 50s discovering, after decades of marriage, that they are kinky, always were kinky, and are now far more interested in casual sex and being dominated, whipped, tied up, and/or hypnotized, than in still being married. I see them having a blast! (of course there are lots of men on fetlife who have the same story! But for men there aren't quite as many societal messages to defeat, about what you're supposed to want out of life.)

Will you stay here with me for the rest of the semester? We won’t need any food. We’ll live on sex alone. Sex with Joan!

I'm especially thinking about this, because I invited khatsha to travel across the Atlantic with me to NEEHU, and she's someone who turned her life upside-down for hypnokink even more than me. And I was her first contact with it. (though as with me, her hypnofetish runs deep) A part of me is saying, my god. What am I responsible for?

But I can point to lots of wonderful things that have come from my kink (meeting her not being a small one). Wanting to have hypnotic sex has pushed me way, way out of my comfort zone: walking into a sex club in Milan with leather pants and no shirt is not something many people in my nonkink life can imagine me doing, or teaching a crowd of people in a Swiss rope bondage dojo. As someone who defaults to cautious and timid, it's a tremendous gift to be driven to do adventurous things by my cock. Kink has brought me in contact with so many different types of people with many different lives and identities that my narrow, upper-middle class academic track (for all its internationality) would have isolated me from. And I love the fact that erotic hypnosis connects to literature, poetry, spirituality, the body, experimental psychology, science fiction, computer science, feminism, public speaking... (I can go on, and will given the slightest opening!)

There I go, falling into the trap of needing to justify it as worthy! As a means to an end. But pleasure should be an end in itself - if there's one thing I should be learning in Italy, it's that! (oh man the cities, the countryside, the meals, the wine, the coffee...I'm getting all these gifts dropped on my head...)

Is chasing pleasure and desire a good foundation for a life? I don't know! I do know it's better than a lot of others, anyway! Most important for me, it's a better foundation than fear. It's running towards something, not running away from something. Do you become an artist, at least a little tiny bit, when you commit yourself so much to something positive like this? When you try to eat and breathe it? This feels like it will repay that, like it's about growth, creativity, connection. Also boners.

Who needs dignity? / Cause this is so much better...

Opening yourself up to desire and passion takes courage. Makes you silly and vulnerable, like Alison in her underpants. My friend has a line about how much safer it is just to fantasize alone in the dark - besides the obvious risks of going out and doing things, you also risk having your cherished masturbation fantasies touched by disappointment, embarassment, sadness, all the complications that come with doing things with real people, in the real world.

The upside? Having my wildest dreams come true.

And so I have no trouble committing to this. I'm in it. Long term.

I must say that I'm changing my major to kink.