I have a confession to make.
I have a Negotiating/Communicating for Emotional S/m class I’m teaching this weekend that I’ve been nervous about in a way I haven’t been nervous about teaching in a long time. You see, I… kind of feel like a fraud. I mean this beyond the (unfortunately) usual youngish-woman-teaching-in-2023 imposter syndrome; I mean that I’m not sure if I can teach emotional S/m because currently, I don’t know that I can *do* it.
Or at least, that’s what I’d been thinking for a few weeks.
Life has been life. You know how it goes. Hormones. Miscommunications. Med changes. Life. I’ve felt hesitant around any sexual play or banter, mostly knowing how ESM almost always sneaks into it these days. I haven’t known if I could engage in a way that keeps me feeling whole (or that breaks me in an easily reparable way).
The hard part is that ESM is still what I want *anything* along those lines to be, so I have had a hard time feeling flirty or sexual at all. And I’ve been worried. Personal insecurities have left me thinking I just can’t handle this kind of play anymore at all.
Or at least, they had.
Then, the casual condescension started sneaking back into our more playful conversation. Ways I text or chat have once more turned to the kinds of sharp-edged tones of degradation I love. We have had a few mis-steps, but it turns out, my fears were way simpler and smaller than I had realized.
The problem was about two specific words.
Two. Words.
Not their synonyms. Not any other kind of delicious put-down or mocking tone. Just two words that mattered.
Triggers are complicated, and often very specific. What a word means to one person can have a different gravity for others. It’s one of the many reasons ESM is a minefield. A topic can be totally fine until one word sets off the “nope” button.
Words matter. This lesson was driven home to me this week in multiple ways. Last Friday, I wrote a piece on Fetlife about how “enthusiastic consent” is an ableist idea. In it, I took for granted that others would have been taught that concept in the way I was: as a physical display of emotional eagerness given each time and throughout all sexual encounters, something I feel unable to give due to disability. And hundreds replied that they have felt that way too. Still, at the same time, others felt misled or hurt by my words and how they resonated in their own, more individual readings. What I had thought had an implied “for me and my body” didn’t do that for everyone reading, and I left some feeling like I felt sex was necessary for a good life (I don’t; that’s specific to my needs) or like people should push through experiences they don’t want to be in and don’t want to not want to be in (never, ever. If you genuinely want to end something and haven’t mutually elected that experience, you should never feel like you *have* to continue.) Now, I myself may know that these things aren’t what I meant, but it doesn’t matter: people who read those words once and took away something I didn’t mean may never be reached with my corrections, and maybe their reading of my writing leads them into a bad place. There are ways I should have been careful and specific that I was not. It mattered.
Someone I Love makes “actions, not words” their mantra, and it’s sat strangely with me for many years. Now more than ever, I’ve figured out why. Words *are* actions. Which we choose, how we put them together: this matters. It is holy, sexy, life-altering work. And it has a weight and a gravity to it.
Be general. Be specific. Try to say what you mean. Recalibrate when you get it wrong. And if certain words aren’t working for you… maybe you can communicate in another way for now.