James, part 1

The beginning of a series on violence and intimacy

I wanted to write about James from the moment we met. In him, I found the equal and opposite to so many of my desires - someone fluent in the same erotic language and just as concerned with the sweet spot between love and sadism. There’s so much more to come in this series, including (but not limited to) almond milk, gang bangs, messy polyamory, fisting, tarpaulins, wedding rings, red meat, jealousy, and the mortifying ordeal of being known. Most of this will be paywalled on account of being explicit. But the first one’s on me.

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I found him on Feeld, in a fit of distracted swiping. I’d just had my heart broken by a three month situationship and had gone in search of relief. I’d wanted to substitute one type of mortification with another, assuming it would be a simple, albeit temporary, swap: The emotional for the physical. The break for the bruise. It was not to be that straightforward.

What happened between us made more sense when I considered that my foundation with James was an exposed nerve. I was in retreat from love, freshly horrified by its brute force and cowering like a kicked dog. James promised some respite: the safety of rules; an entirely pre-negotiated form of intimacy. I planned to give him nothing of myself beyond the outer limits of my body and he’d ask for nothing in return. But all boundaries - especially the strict ones - contain within them the fantasy of their transgression.

I’d used Feeld for long enough to remember when the freaks outweighed the normals, a claim which made me sound resentful and old (which I was). Feeld had not been perfect in its previous form, but it had contained vestiges of that ‘old internet’ horniness that echoed around relics such as Fetlife, Tumblr and Livejournal. In the before time, within a landscape of anonymous, disembodied genitals, we had all been simply fuckers, loosed from the firm grasp of identify and collectivised in our grubby desire. The app glitched constantly, like an volatile erection that threatened to wilt under pressure. You had to jump on it whilst you still could. Later was not guaranteed.

Old Feeld had facilitated some of my more memorable hook ups. A handful of chem-fuelled orgies; a domme who had made me play strip ping pong with in the freezing cold; getting pissed on and fucked by two guys who claimed to be step brothers in a basement car park in Edmonton (they weren’t). These days it was hard to find anything of that calibre. As the app sought to raise capital, it positioned itself as more than just a home for freaky sex. Its marketing strategy pushed “personal growth, fluidity and discovery”, designed to lure in regular straights for dating, or perhaps fully optimised ethical non monogamy. The men that remained interested in hooking up all wrote that they were kinky, but now identified as ‘pleasure doms’, as if wanting to go down on your partner was BDSM, actually. These labels, along with terms like ‘heteroflexible’ and ‘gynosexual’ felt like the concession of the liberal centre that their sexual preferences ought to match their politics, without committing them to anything too edgy. “Hinge got too boring” these profiles complained, as if they themselves weren’t the tedious element.

As with so many of the other spaces in which we organised our intimacies, Feeld was now fixated on identity over practice, so these otherwise-pretty-vanilla guys had embarked on a rebrand. The soft boi had evolved into the soft dom, his focus squarely on pleasure. For him, kink needed to be entirely safe and contained, rendering the symbolic engine of BDSM - objectification, exploitation, torture, obliteration, death - abstracted to vanishing point.

Because of all this, Feeld was infused with a pervasive sense of anxious political performativity instead of horniness. One saw the phrase ‘consent is key’ so often that you had to marvel at the statistical impossibility of none of these men being rapists. People stuffed their profiles with their politics, as if sexual chemistry was guaranteed by you both having the same set of copypaste opinions.

And then, against the tide of gentrification, there was James. On first glance, his profile skewed unremarkable: 32, into greyhounds, European cinema, cacio e pepe, and with the standard issue moustache and little earring. I was neither attracted nor unattracted to him, but that’s normal with men, I find. It was a brief reference to sadism at the end of his profile that caught my attention. It was not a word one saw much on this platform.

In my experience, when men on Feeld spoke of dominance what they meant was that they liked rough sex — the frenetic extravaganza of hair pulling and face slapping they saw in mainstream porn. This is an unthinking, boring type of force to me, one lacking in any real imagination or context. The younger men I hooked up with did it to me by rote, their hands floating wordlessly up to my neck mid-fuck. ‘Please ask before you choke me’, I’d say, and they’d stop instantly, the glazed-over reverie of a doom scroller broken by the intrusion of my subjectivity. I don’t think they even really wanted to do it. They simply assumed they should.

This generic violence is a different beast to sadism. A skilled sadist will pay very close attention to you, each grimace, each sharp intake of breath a step towards figuring you out completely. What’s more, the people who name themselves as sexual sadists have, by definition, recognised what they’re into as unusually violent, in a way that the consumers of bog standard rough porn often haven’t. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all sadists are ethical - as anyone on a regional kink scene will tell you, it is eminently possible to understand you like hurting people without then critiquing how to do so responsibly - but a little self awareness goes a long way in developing a politic of inflicting harm responsibly.

James sent a ‘ping’ when he matched with me, one that responded to my profile’s stated ambition for the year ahead.

‘I can’t tell you how much I’d like to get my fist inside your arsehole’

I went back to his photos to try and see how big his hands were but I couldn’t get a sense. Regardless, it was nice to have a shared goal. I matched.

I wasn’t to know then, but what followed would change my life. I think he would say it changed his, too. James would touch parts of me (both figurative and literal) that no one else had before. He would go on to lead me back to myself, or at least serve as an encouraging companion as I picked my way through a new internal landscape of desire. Even now, nearly a year later, I’m still unsure of what to call it. It was never a normal relationship. It was fucking. It was a dynamic. It was an extended roleplay. It was an exchange of commitments. It was a set of conditions.

But also it was a love affair.