The Education of a 'Good Girl' [3/3]

Part 3: Persephone’s Power

Content warning: This piece contains descriptions of sexual assault, rape, and rape fantasy. Part three of a three-part series exploring consent, sexual assault, desire, and healing.

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Hand in hand we stand
Strangers in this land
Catch me if you can
Before I fall again

- Before I Fall, Latch Key Kid

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Part 1 and part 2.

Mad Science

I sit in my tight cropped sweater, mini skirt, and matching choker, in a room full of nervous, scantily clad ladies and men in lab coats. It’s the opening circle for my very first Red Means No sex party, and I know that this speech will wrap up any moment, leaving the mad scientists free to have their way with us. I’ve been imagining what will happen next for weeks, and I’ve been fantasizing about variations on CNC (consensual non-consent) themes for years. My carefully chosen panties are wet, but it all still feels slightly surreal.

The speech is over, and within moments I am grabbed, groped, and stripped completely naked by the strange men next to me. They (the mad scientists) come around with markers to write some secret markings on us (their prey). The next thing I know, I’m being pushed onto the ground. I am face down, I can’t even tell who is touching me and sliding fingers inside me.

Later on in the party, I’m sitting alongside the action, wristband off, taking a break. One of the predators says something to indicate he wishes I were still in play, and I decide to slide my wristband back on. I’m quickly wrestled to the ground, and pinned down. Multiple men are touching me, and another man hands whoever is on top of me a blindfold. I am touched, I had specifically mentioned my love for sensory deprivation in the opening circle. Clearly, someone had been paying attention.

Now fully blindfolded and overwhelmed, I feel the man on top of me slide inside me and start fucking me. At the same time, a man in front of me has started using my mouth.

Waking up in Hell

The next thing I know, the weight on top of me is gone, and there’s a mood shift. One of the organizers helps me up, removes my blindfold, and shepherds me outside to the private backyard. I’m nervous, wracking my mind for anything I could have done wrong.

In somber tones, I am caught up to speed. During the party, one of the participants ignored the default consent rules, fucking multiple women without protection. The organizers were alerted of this pattern while he was fucking me, which culminated in the intervention I’d just experienced.

I was stunned. I'd heard of stealthing, but never expected it in this context. I was reeling from realizing I'd just experienced a form of sexual assault in a semi-public space.

Landing on an Aella-ian Planet

But let’s rewind a little. You may be wondering how I jumped from dipping my toes back into kink via Feeld as Pandora, to attending a CNC orgy as prey.

My journey took a fateful turn when I met Sacha (my first rationalist boy) via Feeld. He soon told me about the rather niche sex parties he co-organizes. The Red Means No parties were Aella’s solution to the problem of being under-ravaged at normal sex parties. I was intrigued, but I’d never even been to a standard sex party. After about a year of attending other parties and reacquainting myself with kink, I decided I was ready. I signed up to attend my first CNC sex party, brimming with exhilaration and anxiety.

The irony of being actually sexually assaulted at my first CNC party is not lost on me. Unfortunately, the specific parallels to my first assault brought me right back to that trauma. But luckily, this time I had a few more tools in my arsenal to cope.

In particular, Aella’s writings about her own experiences with sexual assault offered a perspective I hadn't encountered before.

"I wish someone would have told me that I should feel and process whatever pain I need to feel, but to refuse to give it an identity, to refuse to make it part of me." - Aella

This blog post leveled me. I realized I had let short experiences have so much power over me, partly because the cultural moment had taught me how incredibly Bad they were. Thanks to the alternative frame Aella presented, overnight I was able to relate to my own experiences differently.

Her lack of identification with her experiences did more for me than all the prior therapy and processing combined. I realized I could rewrite my narratives, and choose my own frame.

Return of Spring

My third and hopefully last brush with sexual assault was different because I was different, I was armed with a new frame, and I was in a beautiful alien culture that was gloriously different from the inadequate one that had made me feel like my first sexual assault was my fault. I was finally surrounded by enough good men, who cared deeply about consent and my wellbeing, and this helped insulate me from any intentional or unintentional badness that crept in.

After the incident, the organizers swiftly and decisively handled everything. They kicked the stealther out of the party, made him submit additional follow-up STI tests, banned him from future parties, and reported the incident to other party organizers in the area. They wrote up an in depth incident report and implemented strategies to prevent similar issues in the future.

The support I received from my new poly community was revelatory. One of my partners held me tight while I cried, and another booked me a massage. The message was clear: I had done nothing wrong, I was being cared for. There is only so far you can fall when you have so much love and support to catch you.

Experiencing the stark contrast between sexual assault 1 and sexual assault 3 even helped me heal further. Sexual assault 1 hadn't been my fault. I kept myself physically safe by playing along. The shame and loneliness afterwards, that was not my fault, but the markers of an inadequate culture.

Thanks to Aella’s blog and my community, I was equipped to move quickly through the grief of the newest addition. Rather than feeling victimized, I felt that I had taken a calculated risk and then something bad had happened. The model was good even if some of the finer points of implementation needed calibration. Thankfully, there is no shortage of good men who will do all they can to make sure they only ever rape you consensually.

I feel truly lucky to be part of this rather niche kink community, which I now affectionately refer to as the Slut Cloud. In the almost three years since I met Sacha, I’ve felt the most loved and most at home that I ever have. Via a kitchen table poly approach to relationships, I now have multiple partners who can conspire to ravage me together and support me together. (And sometimes those are surprisingly overlapping modes, if Pandora’s Box is any indication.)

The Rape Spectrum

As I have continued to explore the poly and kink community and my own desires, I have found myself grappling with the complexities of consent and the nature of sexual assault.

I appreciated Aella's "Rape Spectrum" for helping to affirm my feelings that the nuances matter. I learned to mentally calibrate to what actually happened in any given situation, and not grant it outsized power. I don't think it is fair to either the offenders or the victims of sexual assault to fail to distinguish different degrees of consent violations and rape.

Aella produced this controversial Rape Spectrum to visualize data from over 5000 survey respondents.

The #MeToo paradigm worked to broaden the definition of sexual assault to include more types, and I think that was an important step. But I think it can have unintended consequences when we let the definitions stretch too far, without maintaining the differences. For me, those consequences have included outsized trauma as I bought into the frame that I had to make one event a lasting part of my identity.

I know there are those who will file this series as a point of evidence for the model that sexual assault and trauma causes rape fantasies, but I disagree. I fantasized about being tied up or held down well before I was sexually active. It feels rather hardwired. My favored explanation for rape kinks is still rather dark, but on an evolutionary rather than personal scale. And if it's not evolutionarily hardwired and rather learned, then I primarily blame the Catholic guilt, which made me seek ways to enjoy sex without the shame of choosing it.

While we don’t know exactly where “stealthed at a CNC sex party” lies on the Rape Spectrum, it’s good to know that I’ve survived worse. We joked after the incident that it would be worth reporting to the authorities just to watch the trial unfold. Can you imagine the headlines? But I’d read “Know My Name” and was not prepared to be an even more controversial Chanel Miller.

Reclaiming the Underworld

This blog series is my mini Chanel Miller moment. If you’d told my younger self someday I’d be writing about my sexual assault history on the internet, she wouldn’t have believed you. Writing about my experiences has become part of my integration process. It helps me, as Aella put it, "reject the urge to put those experiences into a storyline that designates them as special".

I don't need to hide these experiences away. I don't need to couch them in the perfect victim image, or make them acceptable to a mainstream audience. I don't need to hide my CNC kink to be able to share my experiences with sexual assault. I believe the story is best told in the context of my sovereignty as a young woman learning about sex, kink, love, and heartbreak.

I've come to understand that my journey, with all its complexities and contradictions, is mine to interpret, and mine to add to. It’s also mine to relate to others, with the knowledge that shame dies in the light. It is my hope that my story can do for someone else what Aella’s did for me, and be a part of the network of resources and support we all need to catch us when we fall.

As I continue to navigate ever deeper into the world of sexuality and relationships, I carry with me many hard-earned lessons. I've found a community that shares my values and stands by them. I am very adept at picking good men these days. I’ve realized that I do not have to compromise. I can date kind, considerate, sweet men who will also lock me in a cabin to torment me. I can have boyfriends who are smart and nerdy and also make me scream and cry.

There is a bit of a dom-sub gap, but that is no reason to accept a bad guy just because the sex is good. I wish I had known at age 21 that there is a whole world of kink to explore, and there are other options for finding kinky men aside from just playing Russian roulette with Tinder. But the journey has been worth it. I’m now more self-aware, more empowered, and more at peace with my sexuality than ever before.

Through these experiences, I've not only come to terms with my sexuality but also discovered strength in my softness, my willingness to trust again, and my ability to hold complexity.

Between Worlds

Lately, I’ve not been abducted by Hades into the underworld, but rather a willing participant in my own repeated falls. I’m eating the pomegranate seeds because I’m happy to remain a part time resident in this Promised Land of KTP and CNC, and the jailers are pretty cute anyways.

I like the Persephone myth for making sense of my coming of age as an embodied and emboldened sexual deviant. Her story is a reminder of the importance of balance - if I stay too long in the underworld, the rest of my life and connections will suffer. I can hold onto my old self for the sake of maintaining ties to my family and old friends. And I can also sink under when I need a break from the surface. I don’t have to choose one world or the other.

I didn’t choose my kinks, but I can learn to navigate both realms, embracing the underworld as much as my vanilla life on the surface. Just as each year contains winter, spring, summer, and fall, I can contain multitudes. I can choose worthy captors and I can choose freedom. I can be a degenerate sometimes while remaining wholesome at other times.

I carry a personal mythology that I can iterate on as I continue to grow. I carry the naive 19-year-old tasting the forbidden fruits for the first time. I carry the heartbroken 24-year-old who had to brave the contents of Pandora’s box alone. I carry the 28-year-old who thought she was out collecting flowers but was actually due for one more unplanned visit to hell.

In refusing to be defined by my traumas or my desires alone, I've found a freedom that my younger self could never have imagined. As I look to the future, I am struck by how unknowable my present was to my past. The uncertainty beckons as I continue to hold myself open to the next installment. And I fully intend to get off on the existential kink of it all.