TAKING IT: CONSENT AND THE DARK ART OF FEMININE SUBMISSION

We had kissed only once before, inside the small and sultry elevator of the Hotel Shangri La, smashed against its smoky mirrored wall. For our next date (our 3rd), he asked me to meet him in a park in Santa Monica. I arrived late and he was waiting for me, sitting cooly along a stone wall. He explained that timing was rather important so we weren’t going to chat.

My body knew instinctively to listen very closely.

“Gillian, I am going to explain to you what I intend for our date together. Its up to you to provide your consent, or your lack of consent. Is this clear?”

“Yes. This is clear to me”, I responded, my body instantly shifting into a heightened state of erotic exhilaration.

“I am going to place a blindfold over your eyes. I want you to communicate with me so that I know you are comfortable and that you can no longer see. We are going to walk together. We will sit and we will eat. If this is something you consent to, this will begin our date together this evening. Do I have your consent, Gillian?”

In this moment, I was relying on my feminine instinct….I was relying on the felt sense in my body that spoke its YES.

Biting my bottom lip with an inescapable thrill, I gave clear voice to my body’s yes. It was only then that I saw the backpack. Black and bulky, somehow a tad menacing — it clearly contained the contents of his plot for me. He turned towards it and pushed its clanging contents around as he carefully extracted a black fabric sash.

His body was now behind mine as he placed the black material over my eyes, tying it firmly at the back of my head. I could hear him lift and arrange the heavy backpack onto his body. He then placed his hand at my elbow, and with a necessarily firm hold, we began to walk.

We spoke no words. Each step I took was precarious and clumsy. Every sound became heightened: the pattern of his breathing, the song of the birds in this city park, and then voices, and traffic.

“In 2 more footsteps, Gillian, you will need to step down. There are 3 steps here”, he would cooly notify me.

The quiet innocence of the park quickly faded and was soon replaced by the sound of voices and traffic, and distantly, the oceanic heartbeat of the sea. The little park we were walking away from was positioned just behind one of Santa Monica’s most iconic oceanfront avenues.

In the short time I had been blindfolded, my capacity for hearing had already become wildly alive. What was the joyful attunement to birdsong and the sound of his breathing now became increasingly drenched in a titillating humiliation as I could hear the snarky comments and my body sensed the hot stare of bewilderment thrusted upon me by the fancy passers-by. He held me steady, and offered no words of reassurance.

I could hear the cars lining up on either side of the light, and people….dozens of them….crossing the wide avenue, my cheeks now searing with stinging humiliation and my body involuntarily gushing in wetted waves of defiant pleasure. My dancer’s composure fell away like long, heavy hair falls to the floor once chopped by the sharp blade of the scissor: each of us made new in a single moment.

We arrived at edge of the beach…my nose lifted into the air like a hound, tracking the scent of fading humanity: car exhaust, sticky perfume, and now…the raw salty wildness of the sea. He directed me to sit along the edge of a concrete wall and take off my sandals. I did, randomly feeding each golden Miu-Miu to the air, waiting for him in the forced darkness to take them from me.

We walked into the warm sand. Startingly, his hand let me go, now using only his voice to keep me close to him.

“Come closer to the sound of my voice, Gillian” he would say to me, if in my darkened ecstasy, I clumsily staggered too far.

He set out a blanket and directed me to sit down. I straightened my skirt, it having become twisted in my awkward stumbling, and made my way onto the blanket.

I became acutely aware that I was wearing no panties and rather lost in an ecstatic fugue state about where thigh and skirt met skin, heat, and wetness.

In silence, he fed me: umeboshi plum, dragonfruit and kiwi, toasted nori and salted chocolate….the mysterious contents of the backpack now revealed. It is not so easy to be fed in forced indigo darkness, and I felt the clawing growl of my own hunger, and the surrendered knowing that any attempt at elegance in these moments was devastatingly futile.

(In the distance, a violin…. its aching notes straining to be heard above crashing wave, the laughter of children, the staccato of reddened forearms, hot + welted by the harsh smacks of the volleyball, laughter and snickering of teenagers staring at the erotic tableau of a blindfolded women being delicately fed by a man large both in presence and in body.)

I was deep inside the sensorium of carnal pleasure. My most darkly and exquisitely treasured moments in life are when my animal body uncoils itself from within, heavily leaning against my ribs, heaving itself against the winged butterfly bones of my pelvis, and pawing its way behind my throat to give voice or sound to my desire. This wanting creature who lives inside of me was dangerously close to the surface: my head tilted back in the air, searching for fecund octaves of scent, of sound, of twilight on my cheekbones.

I could feel him watching me as I burned brightly in my own pleasure. I was slightly….thrillingly….mortified at how I must appear: head thrust back, 1/3 of my face bound in black fabric, nostrils widening, face lifted towards sea and setting sun as I stalked the smell of the rotting carcass of gull, the salted brine of the hot seaweed, and no less, my own rapture. I let desire fully enter me.

Sometimes surrender isn’t enough for me.

I need the deep, instinctual sensation of an erotic trust fall, of consenting to begin a game that I fool myself into believing I have no idea how to play. I like the feeling of placing my will in someone else’s hands, especially the hands of a man….this desire being of course taboo, and therefore, all the more precious to me.

I had not mentioned a word of this to this man and yet he — and men like him — in their deepest instinctual sanctums recognize this in me ~ and in women like me.

They create big, dark, exalted experiences and ecstatic frames for me to animate with my own pleasure.

They say that they have no idea why they feel compelled to create at this level of gameplay. They say that they have never done anything like this before. I know this to be true.

They have created this for me because I energetically hired them to do so; their turn-on responding to my own. In asking for my consent, a man is responding (obeying, actually) to the game I have already begun. Consent is never the first move. Consent is instinctual response to a game already begun.

I used to think that providing consent was collaboratively negotiating with someone who has specific desires to touch another person’s body in co-creational and sensual ways. In other words, one person has the desire to create an intimate enactment for another person — and this desire requires agreement...the green-light.

This experience showed me the ways that consent begins energetically far before its ever verbalized. Truly, and women like me, carriers of sensual darkness and remembrance, will know this to be true: I began this game. His showing up with this level of creational intentionality was in response to my erotic advances…not of body or gesture or sex — but of psyche. When I gave my consent, I was giving myself permission to take the thing that all of us in psyche and limbic system desire: quest for experience with other (the archetypal beloved) so we can feel ourselves.

Consent isn’t simply a response to a question a person asks that will allow him/her to ethically parameterize their sensual advances.

We’ve already hired them. He/she is showing up to play the role that we selected and hired them to play to fulfill our wanting — whether conscious or not. Consent accelerates and deepens a game already in-play…it doesn’t begin it.

This evening ended with a sweet and sexy kiss in the parking structure, each of us headed to our separate homes. I do not confuse a man’s effort, desire, hardness, or investment in an experience he chooses to create for me as an obligation for my opening to him.

I am respectful and appreciative — and — clear about what is mine to take.

And I take it.

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