Tag: rape

Officer Good Guy – why I don’t trust cops

I’m not ready to write about last night yet.  The situation is still too close and too vivid.  Instead I will talk about the first time I realized I could not trust the police.

As a child I’m sure I had officers come to my school.  They were always Officer Good Guy, the hero who saved little kittens and stopped the bad robber who broke in after dark.  I’m sure there were children in my class who aspired to be Officer Good Guy when they got older.  I never had the sort of inclination.  Mostly I wanted to grow up and be a dragon, but I had a fleeting aspiration of being a garbage man for a while, and sometimes thought about becoming a veterinarian.  At some point I developed a vague distrust for police, but nothing concrete.  I wasn’t into drugs in high school, I didn’t drink or get into fights. I was pretty much a quiet unobtrusive shy little goth, who sat reading in a back corner while others disrupted class, having already finished the next week’s worth of work.  I didn’t have a reason to dislike cops yet, I simply felt uneasy around them.  They seemed to constantly condescend to people, to treat people as though they were just waiting for you to do something wrong, whether they had reason to suspect you or not.  If I had been more aware of the world around me, I would have seen more of the racial issues in how they treated the kids from black and low income neighborhoods differently, and how much my privilege protected me.  It wasn’t long before my vague distrust had grounds to grow.

My group of friends would always hang out on a large patch of astroturf on one corner of the square of our town’s downtown shopping center.  There was a mall on one side, a movie theater and a series of outdoor shops on the other, another string of shops on the third, and the astroturf rounding out the fourth side of the busy square intersection.  Small concerts were held there, occasionally a flea market was set up, but mostly it was a gathering place where you could see a few folks playing guitar in one spot, card gamers in a yu-gi-oh battle in another, the Jesus folks giving a sermon in a third, and kids of all ages with parents and friends just running around and having fun.  It was perfectly allowable to be there after dark, so when the sun started setting on the hot summer days, many of us migrated up there from the library park that closed in the evening.  It was a place to be out in the open and just relax.  I won’t say that some of us didn’t sneak back into the library park to drink, or slip behind the shopping center to do drugs, or hide in the church parking lot to clumsily hook up with our grasping eager friends.  But when we were hanging out on the astroturf, we were in plain site just sitting and talking or wrestling around playfully, it was a safe zone for those who weren’t up to something, at least not at that time.

We were sitting on the concrete stair at the corner of the turf, me in my heavy tripp pants and cutesy wolf ears and tail, and my friend Sesshy on my lap.  Both of us very small and at the time very feminine creatures, about as intimidating as a fuzzy caterpillar.  We were laughing with a few other friends standing around when we noticed the cop standing at the top of the stairs staring at all.  My first reaction was to feel creeped out, chills going up my spine.  He wasn’t saying anything and the way he was watching us put me on edge.  We were polite, asking him if he needed anything, and he just leered at us.  Suddenly being one of two cute girls cuddling did not feel safe under his gaze.  We asked him again if we were doing anything wrong, if he needed us to leave the area, and he just took a few more steps down and kept watching us eerily.  Our other friends split, jogging off across the astroturf.  I don’t blame them, they were much less trusting of cops then we were, having grown up in neighborhoods where Officer Good Guy would beat down your dad for going to the corner store in a sweatshirt that just might “match the description”.

We crossed to the other side of the large steps and tried to walk up towards the new flashing tower they had installed with a button you could press if you were afraid you were about to be mugged or raped.  The thought went through my mind, if we press it, because we don’t know this man’s intentions and he’s approaching us in a way that feels threatening, who will respond?  The cop is already here, he’s the one we’re afraid of.  It didn’t matter because he glanced up at it and moved to position himself between us and the button.  At that point alarm bells went off and I took Sesshy’s hand and walked quickly away, chattering about all the people we were about to meet up with and how we were going home to our parents, anything I could think of that would sound reasonable and deter him.

The cop followed us to the bus stop.  He stood there watching, never having said anything, but still looking at us like a predator.  At one point he ignored a few calls on his radio, and then radioed back at one that he was engaged at the time and would respond only to urgent calls.  He followed us onto the bus.  I was too frightened to take it to our usual stop, because that left a mile long walk, some parts through the woods, to get back home.  We got off one bus and onto another, and then when we made our third transfer and got onto the metro, he finally stopped and walked away, leaving us terrified and confused.  Did we imagine that he was following us the whole time?  Would an officer of the law really stalk two young teenage, seemingly girl-children, half way across town?  Why hadn’t he responded when we asked why he was watching or following us, or if we were doing anything wrong?  Had we done something wrong, by simply existing as two feminine presenting folk sharing platonic and non-sexual affection in public?  And if he had gotten us alone, what would have happened?

I’m much less naive these days.  A cop does not follow two teenage girls across two bus lines for shits and giggles.  And if we had been breaking any law, we would have been arrested or spoken to about it at the time.  We didn’t get raped, but we very nearly could have been.  In no terms were we safe at the moment, and Officer Good Guy was not leering at us and following us to serve and protect.

That is not the only story, it is one of many I’ve amassed in a lifetime.  I am white, I appear now to be your average cis male even though I am not, I came from a middle class family and grew up in a nice neighborhood, and I don’t make it habit to break the law.  I’ve been privileged not to have to break the law to survive at times, and was generally pretty sheltered in my youth.  And I have enough bad cop stories to fill a small novel.  That doesn’t even compare to the Encyclopedia of Britannica length book series most marginalized folks can write.  I don’t trust cops.  I don’t trust their training, I don’t trust the system of power they are a part of, I don’t trust their morality in taking a job that requires upholding racist and immoral laws.  I don’t believe they can do their job correctly and also be good people, at least not in this system, and in this country.  Elsewhere it might be different.  Maybe there are places where Officer Good Guy you meet in kindergarten really is the childhood hero he seems to be.  But here he is the wolf in sheep’s clothing and I know better then to ever trust a cop.

When kink coincides with trauma

I’ve been into kink for as long as I can remember.  Thinking back, I was writing erotic dungeon stories involving seduction and torture before I even understood how to get myself off.  I drew terrible kinky sketches long before I had considered exploring another human’s body on my own.  I’ve had people say that my interest in kink must be related to trauma, and I won’t deny, I’m a person who has been through rape, sexual assault, abusive relationships, and violence fueled of bigotry.  The funny thing though, is my love of kink and the seeds of interest in engaging in bdsm, began long before any of that trauma.  And no, I did not have a traumatic childhood, I was raised in a stable middle class home, never disciplined with physical violence, did well in school, and so on and so forth.  So for years I was so proud of being able to declare that kink and my trauma were unrelated, after all I had definitive proof in the terrible scrawled pages of werewolf sex stories, woven together with a good many of the fetishes I maintained later in life.  Those happened first, so nope, trauma and kink have no intersection for me!

Well, a funny thing happened in the more recent years, I realized there was a connection.  Yes, I was kinky first, but then I went through some rough shit.  I was cheated on, I dealt with codependency and abandonment issues, I suffered through emotional abuse and some physical abuse, I was raped and sexually assaulted, I was treated as less than human for being a queer trans man and dealt with violence and threats of violence.  And in the past few years, I’ve developed some new kinks, or gone farther down the rabbit hole with others.  I noticed it first when a partner cheated on me, not the first time I was cheated, but I had just gotten out of the dynamic with my ex-fiance where cheating played a part in his departure, and that was a particularly brutal emotional roller coaster.  Then a very stable partner broke relationship agreements, and while the whole incident was something of a miscommunication, it was momentarily very painful before we sorted it all out, and it brought up the larger betrayal I had just experienced. Suddenly I found myself fantasizing about catching a partner cheating and the sting of that betrayal, or of cuckolding, being made to watch a partner with someone else in something of a negotiated consent but feigned nonconsent and hurt scenario.  After the incident with miscommunication, I struggled a little with insecurity and jealousy.  Once the fantasies squeezed their way into my brain’s meat space, that disappeared.  I didn’t think much of it quite yet.

Then I noticed a humiliation fantasy popping up.  Now in real life, I’m a strict Dom, and I do not like to be humiliated or play a submissive role in any way.  Suddenly though, there was a fantasy in my mind related to humiliation and cuckolding, that revolved around me lacking a specific body part (psst…it’s a penis).  I don’t have a lot of bottom dysphoria, but there is certainly some, and I was confused as why the hell my brain would present me with a fantasy that seemed hell bent on triggering worse dysphoria, and more importantly, why the hell I enjoyed it?

One of the times I was almost sexually assaulted but managed to escape the situation before the assault occurred, was when I was sleeping.  A few years later I was assaulted while sleeping by a partner.  Well what do you know, my brain decided the next in the series of fucked up fantasies I would develop, was of someone having sex with me while I slept or was unconscious.  At this point I noticed a trend, though I had already been wondering what in the ever living fuck was going on with my brain???  Then it clicked.  I realized that after my brain turned the trauma I experienced into fantasy, I actually felt better.  Now I had no desire to really explore these things in real life, and certainly I knew that any of these without very explicit negotiated consent would be beyond fucked up.  But letting them rattle around in my brain and zing right to my sex drive, was somehow cathartic.  Not a by the books way of dealing with trauma, but it was working.

Then I remembered a conversation I had many years prior with a partner.  He was heavily into impact play, but he had also been abused as a child.  I tried to carefully negotiate our scenes, worried especially about triggering that trauma.  And I asked him one time why someone who experienced that and had been profoundly fucked up by it, now found enjoyment in being beat.  He explained to me that being able to consent to a scene, having the control to say “yes, I want this” or “no, you need to stop” was empowering.  And in a scene he had the knowledge that there was a close trusting relationship between himself and me, that I cared for him and was doing what I was doing out of mutual enjoyment and love.  At the end of the scene he knew I would hold him and tell him how well he had done, how proud I was, and how much I cared for him.  It didn’t heal all that trauma completely, but it was cathartic.  It helped rewrite the script of something that had destroyed him, into one of something he was choosing with love, one where he was embraced at the end after holding the reins of power the entire time and being able to say stop the moment he didn’t want it.

So, I’ve realized that I don’t need to wave a flag of pride that I’m a “normal” kinkster, one of the undamaged and unbroken ones.  I don’t need to be proud that my kink came long before my trauma and try and justify no connection between the two.  Kink is normal yes, and it isn’t something that is born of us being damaged people, but it is okay if the two are connected.  When my trauma and my kink finally coincided what happened was I began to heal.  We are allowed to heal in whatever ways are most comfortable, and if consensual exploration into bdsm is a way that works for you, that is completely valid.  My brain decided to show me that it was a way that worked for me, whether I liked it or not, and I’m grateful for the cathartic release.  It did what years of therapy couldn’t manage to, it made me feel better and it helped me move on.