On Being Selfish and Having No Boundaries

Two ostensibly self-deprecating notions have followed me around for a long time:

The first originates with others and gets brought up every once in a while on message boards in the kink community. It says, "Switches are selfish and greedy... they just want to play with everyone." The same is often said about bisexuals.

Being both switch and bisexual, this idea intrigues me. It's easy enough for me to assert that I most certainly do not want to play with everyone, just as I am far from being sexually attracted to everyone I meet. But am I greedy? Perhaps. I have strong appetites, and I'm fond of filling them. On the other hand, like most people, I have many urges that I don't act on. I recognize the limitations of social interaction and even have some inhibitions of my own. Would it be fun for a casual play session with friends to turn into group sex? I'm pretty sure it would. But it's not a good idea for many reasons.

I wonder where the idea that those of us who are flexible are also selfish comes from. I think perhaps it has something to do with the distinction between roles and behavior. A role is a clearly defined set of behaviors that coincides with an identity. One says, "I am a mother" or "he's the mayor", and we all have a socially constructed notion of that person's behavior and lifestyle, and even their thoughts and feelings. Behaviors are just that... behaviors. One can easily exhibit maternal behavior without taking on the role of "mother".

For all that alternative lifestyles require us to discard some of the socially constructed roles we're handed, kinksters have created new ones. And "switch" is a role defined primarily by variety and inconsistency. People worry about us. What happens if you are scening with someone and feel like switching in the middle of it? How can you have a stable relationship? The first question has never happened to me. Yes, I've played top and bottom in the same night, but not in the same scene. The second question assumes that varied desires necessarily lead to equally varied behavior, which is not the case.

The second notion has to do with boundaries. I've noticed that, compared to others, I somewhat lack them. "TMI Chick" is a label that could be applied. I feel the urge to share everything, especially about myself, and especially about sex. I've learned to be more careful about repeating other peoples' information, mainly by meeting with the mortification such behavior can cause. And I have a pretty good sense of what NOT to share in order to maintain safety.

It just rarely crosses my mind that people don't want to know about sex. From an early age, I felt the social taboo on sex talk was silly and unnecessary. By middle school, I was dealing in raunchy stuff on a regular basis. At one point my best friend and I had written a letter to the boy we tormented, and were tormented by, detailing exactly what we thought he had been doing when he claimed to be home sick. Among other things, we suggested that he had hired a prostitute and paid "$500.00 per hump." We were about thirteen years old.

Well, poetic justice struck, and before I knew it, I came down with the flu. Through a bizarre confluence of events, the cat threw up on my three-ring binder and my grandmother found the letter while cleaning it up. Our little friend had declared us to be "sick" and gave the letter back. So my grandmother berated me for my foul language and precocious sexuality while I was lying in bed suffering with the flu.

That boy with whom we engaged in sexual harassment ended up being my first kiss. We met behind the old middle school campus on a wooded hiking trail and made out. Unfortunately for me, I was his experimental girl and he was pretty clearly gay within a few years. He declared my breasts to be "ugly", which somewhat traumatized me.

Still, for all my big talk and furtive adventures, it would be six more years before I would have sexual intercourse. In the meantime, I harbored elaborate crushes on smart, dark, brooding, musical types and made out with the strange boys, drama geeks and drum majors who were so inclined to participate. But I never stopped wanting to talk about sex. I was reproached frequently to get my "mind out of the gutter" by my more prudish peers.

The vanilla world's imperative to confine sex, intimacy and sex talk to specific spaces and times never much appealed to me. And one thing I discovered is that vanilla life presumes two discrete categories: Friends, and Intimates. Once the line has been crossed between friend and intimate, it can never be un-crossed. Friends don't snuggle, or play with boobs, or tie each other up for fun.

In BDSM, there is a range of intimacy levels. Friends can play and remain friends. Friends can snuggle without presuming that it will lead to sex. Switches can be submissive with one person and not submissive with others. It's all a question of mutual consent and enjoyment.

It's always been one of my favorite things to say in favor of BDSM - that we discard what is useless in the cultural understanding of sex and relationships and build our own way of doing things. But we're not immune from building new structures that end up being just as repressive and useless as the ones we discarded. It requires regular self-scrutiny and analysis to keep ourselves on course. Fortunately, some of us are both happy to oblige, and have no boundaries to get in the way.