Identity

I’ve been thinking a lot about identity lately. There was a recent call into the Savage Lovecast about whether or not being kinky was equivalent to being LGBTQ+ (more or less) and then there was this meme I retweeted that claimed chastity was an identity and then there was this great post on my third favorite chastity blog, Locked Doc. And I suppose most of what I’ve been writing here for a while now gets to the issue of identity.

Dan’s answer was problematic for me because he boiled being kinky down to “it’s just how someone has sex.” At least, that’s how I recall he left it. So it’s not an identity like, say, being lesbian is. And I do get the point that to be openly and happily lesbian (for example, not picking on lesbians), one does need to be identified as such, even and maybe especially by people who are not lesbian. That’s what being “out” is all about, after all. But the “it’s just how someone has sex” part hit me because I think at its root it’s how a lot of people have dismissed homosexuality. I know from personal experience that otherwise straight people have urges to have sex with people of their gender and sometimes choose to indulge those urges and then use that experience to say all same-sex attraction and sex is a choice. “It’s just sex, not an identity.” And that’s nonsense. Some of us can choose to have sex with people of any gender while others can’t because the idea squicks them out. And sex pretty obviously isn’t the same as feeling love, fulfilled, secure, etc.

As a person who came to realize his kinky nature relatively late in life, I can say quite firmly that while it is how I have sex, it is also inconceivable to me that I’d have sex any other way now. I am kinky. Could I have vanilla sex with someone? (I mean, assuming I was ever unlocked.) I guess, sure. Theoretically. But some gay-identified people occasionally have sex with people of genders other than their own and that doesn’t change their identity. I am exclusively interested in having kinky sex now. I’m not sure Belle would call what we have kinky sex, even when she unlocks me allows me to fuck her, but it is. Regardless of the status of the contents, all our sex is in the shadow of a power imbalance. I may not be tied up and she may not be standing over me holding a crop, but it’s kinky nonetheless.

Bottom line, the only kind of relationship I could have with another person would be a kinky one. Specifically, one where I was the sub/bottom and was kept in chastity permanently. I would not be able to be happy with anyone absent those dynamics. That is me, permanently and 100%.

So that’s my sexual identity sorted. There’s also the aspect of gender identity. As I said a few weeks ago…

And while I’m biologically male, being essentially permanently kept in chastity makes me feel like something other than a man. It’s rewritten a lot of my motivations and behaviors that define “man” in my mind. I’m not claiming to be non-binary or anything, but I sometimes feel as though I’m passing as a man rather than actually being one. That I’m actually some other thing we don’t have a word for.

Over on Twitter, someone brought to my attention a post on the Become Her Slave blog where Giles English pondered what it would be like if we treated men kept in chastity as if they were a separate gender. It’s an interesting thought experiment and some of what they wrote I agree with, but the point is, for men in long term/permanent chastity, even being able to have that kind of conversation makes a ton of sense. We just feel how it makes sense.

The part I liked most about Giles’ post was the idea that locked men would be recognized by others. That our state would be accepted and there would be a way to telegraph it to the world (other than walking around with our devices hanging out). And I really crave that. I crave being seen for who and what I am. To be understood and accepted. Because, besides identifying as kinky, I am a kept man.

If that’s not identity, I don’t know what is. It’s So. Much. More than “how I have sex.” When I’m locked and feeling the device and knowing its contents are not under my control and the sex I have is totally predicated on that fact and even my involuntary fantasies and thoughts presume no functioning penis, we have moved way, way past any kind of tactical sexual process.

So my identity is kinky, sub, bisexual, kept male. And probably another couple things, if I think about it (poly and a bottom, for example). How do I boil that down to a pithy set of pronouns? Or expect some muggle to understand the nuance in what it means? Well, I can’t. But it doesn’t change that that is who I am. It doesn’t change the fact I wish I could live authentically and be seen. I’m not enough of a warrior to understand how to make a world where those things are possible, but that doesn’t change that I wish all of it were.

2 Replies to “Identity”

  1. In the musical version of La Cage aux Folles, the opening statement is simply: “I am what I am, I am my own creation…”, and so on. While there are many things that contribute to who we are and how we self-identify and how we self-perceive. The key message here is that we own our self-identification and we should not let anyone else infringe on that.

    While “Identity” should never be undercut, I would argue that Identity is nothing without some sense of “Affinity” with our birds-of-a-feather compatriots. I identify as a locked man, among other things, but I also feel that my life is enriched in the company of other locked men–to be part of that “Affinity” as a doorway to something larger.

    I think it would be fun to go with other locked guys to a baseball game for example. Little might be said that we are locked brothers, or that may be only in passing we might compare chastity bumps; but sharing an outwardly connected life-experience with others knowing that we are bonded and connected in a different way sounds so gratifying.

    Call it kinky, and maybe it is. The kinky magic is being our own creation in the confluence with others in their own creation at the same time. (Gosh that made my cage work a bit there…)

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