The Mirror

i’ve gained some weight. It’s 2023, so it’s been about eighteen months since i got sick and never got better. Eighteen months since twenty mile walks turned into five turned into spending two days in bed if i have to go into the office. It’s been a messy breakup and then a new relationship – with the associated comfort eating followed by celebratory eating. When it comes to other people’s bodies i’m very body positive – all bodies are good bodies, except mine. Fat is a neutral word, unless it can apply to me. i have a good understanding of what an average body type is, until it’s mine and it’s distorting in the mirror into something extreme, huge, grotesque.

Mx has me put on lingerie. It’s a wet look and lace set i bought to wear for a pole dance performance, back when my body could still do that. It’s gorgeous. It’s a size eight – and i definitely am not. My hips flow over the bite of elastic, it cuts mercilessly into my butt giving me four distinct cheeks. My underarms bulge over the side of the cups and my back forms a roll under the back.

“Look.”

They grab the back of my neck and push me closer to the full length mirror.

“Open your fucking eyes, pig. Look.”

i obey. i can’t help but obey, it’s Them, it’s how i’m wired, it’s the way the air hums with a strange electricity when They speak. i look.

The mirror doesn’t have to lie to me today, Mx has made the truth ugly enough. Flesh bulges and twists in the tight clothes and i flinch as They grab a handful of my belly, pinch, and twist.

i don’t remember what They say. i barely remember what They do. i know They touch me – pleasure, pain, and overwhelming ugly shame build up in me until i’m sobbing, struggling, trying not to watch. They are relentless, turning my head back to the mirror, harsh commands to open my eyes every time they drift downwards. It’s a blur of horror and misery and then…

Then i’m on my knees and They’re holding me. The tight lingerie is peeled away and there in the mirror is my body. It just is. Softened and folded and it’s just a vessel, isn’t it? Just the shell of me, just a bridge between my mind and experiences, sensations, touch. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. No monsters in the mirror, just my monster holding me and asking how i feel, if this was okay. This is new to Them, and They faced something terrifying in the mirror too.

When i first started exploring kink i didn’t know that degradation was what i wanted – in fact i barely knew what degradation was. i had a vague idea that it involved being called a slut during sex which i was comfortable with but didn’t really make me feel degraded. i am a slut when i’m single, i like being a slut, and i don’t see any moral issue with it. i knew the feelings i wanted though – wanted to explore fear, shame, pain. i wanted to feel used and violated. When early partners responded to these desires by suggesting verbal degradation i was interested, and once i started exploring i graduated beyond “bitch” and “slut” fast.

i discovered that there is a whole world of degradation beyond the obvious “nasty words” as Mx calls them. And that’s not to say those words necessarily feel like the light end of the spectrum – we all have different sensitivities and although “slut” doesn’t make me feel degraded, being called a whore yanks the leash of some old trauma and hits much harder. What hurts me won’t hurt everyone, and the things that have no impact on me could break someone else. Pain is subjective, and the mind is even more unique than the body when it comes to what it can take.

So i set out to find out what my mind could handle – what gave me that release, that breaking point. What am i truly ashamed of? What are the worst things i say to and about myself? What am i terrified my loved ones secretly think and say about me? What parts of myself do i find it most frightening to confront?

i explored body shaming – one of my most persistent insecurities. i explored transphobia and misogyny, being belittled and insulted over both the fragility of my identity and perceptions of my biology. i delved into trauma play – being blamed for abuse i had endured, forced to remember, relive. i asked for – though found no Dominant so far is able to handle it – people to tell me i was fundamentally unlovable. i wanted to feel worthless, useless, undesirable, repulsive, invalidated.

The obvious question is – why?

i’m not a psychologist – but i’ll take a crack at it. It’s about – as perhaps everything i do in kink is – power. About my Dominant’s power over me to start with. They can control my emotional state – make me cry, make me panic, make me triggered and dissociated. That’s a much higher level of control than physical play, and even rivals elements of O/our day to day dynamic. It’s on the verges of mindfuck and things like hypno kink, to surrender that level of psychological power to another. But more than that, it’s about power of another kind. The non-consensual power these fears and insecurities hold over me.

Because the first person who taught me to hate my body was not a Dominant. It was a message i received daily, from birth, growing up being taught that the worst thing i could grow up to be would be fat. The people who taught me that my assigned sex made me inferior were the preachers in the church, the school teachers who took sex education and told the boys how to masturbate and the girls how to get pregnant or say no, and the teenage boys who sexually harassed and groped us in the halls. The person who taught me i wasn’t “trans enough” and that if i was, if i dared speak it aloud, i’d be rejected and hated and alone was me – the me that marinated in transphobic media and then turned that weapon on myself to keep me closeted for years. The person who taught me i was unlovable was the person who told me every day that they loved me from the moment of my birth, and demonstrated with their actions that they did not, could not, would not. That there was something wrong with me that poisoned that love and turned it hateful and violent.

Now that’s power. Getting inside a developing mind and making it eat itself alive. It’s power i don’t want anyone or anything to be able to have over me without my consent. It’s power that was taken from me piece by piece until i hated myself so much i wanted to die. i healed in pieces too. And make no mistake – doing kink the way i do kink now when i was in my twenties would have been dangerous and stupid. i had to take my power back in more typical ways first. Positive self talk, surrounding myself with good influences, all that self help stuff. Therapy would have been great too, but the NHS thought otherwise and i didn’t have the cash to seek it elsewhere. Messy, DIY, trial and error – but i got through the heaviest clouds. All that was left were the whispers – when i put on jeans that are slightly too tight, when a partner doesn’t text back right away, when i’m tired and stressed and lonely and the hate creeps back in. Quieter, but still holding power that i never chose to give away.

When i take those ugly things out of the box and play with them in a controlled and consensual way, that power shifts. Those demons are mine to leash. My shame is mine to eroticise, my trauma is mine to declaw and humiliate by making it a game. They lose their power. i gain mine. And when the games are over and the whispers go back into the dark they are choked and near silent, their accusations becoming questions and i hear “is your body a failure? are you worthless and unlovable?” and i can answer them truthfully, “no.”

Degradation play at its lighter end is sometimes sexual for me – i get off on feeling useful and being used so Mx telling me “you’re just a fleshlight that cries” is hot as hell. At its heavier end it’s not at all – Mx, being very considerate, once offered me an orgasm after half an hour of making me sob about my childhood. i appreciated the offer but i was barely even in my body and completely physically numb. That kind of degradation and trauma play is about meeting a deeper need – a visceral catharsis that tests the limits of the mind, releases old pain locked in the body, and gives clarity, purpose, freedom.

An often used phrase is “kink is not a replacement for therapy” and i mostly agree. i’d also argue that therapy is not a replacement for kink – there are parts of me kink can reach that i don’t believe anything else can. The intense mind altering effects of psychological play are unlike anything i’ve ever known. They are also, obviously, riskier than conventional approaches to healing. i’m glad of the years i spent working to repair my own mind – and definitely believe therapy could have got me there faster. It has, and will always have, a major place in healing. The things i do now are best done from a place of stability and self-love – or at a minimum self-tolerance or self-neutrality – but i have found them transformative in taking me from healed enough to truly joyful and secure in myself. They form one jagged and unique piece in the ways i practice self care. Perhaps a better phrase would be “kink can be therapeutic, but is so different from therapy that it cannot be compared or ever meet the same needs.” It’s not as snappy though.

Could therapy fix my degradation kink? i doubt it – evidence all seems to point to kinks being pretty fixed once acquired. It could probably change it, alter the specifics of what works and doesn’t, or make it feel less powerful. The question for me is why would i want it to? When i enjoy it, my partner enjoys it, and the effects are entirely positive, what is there to fix? A good therapist won’t try to fix what isn’t broken – and a desire being strange, dark, twisted, or disturbing doesn’t make it bad. i don’t consider my kinks that come from trauma to be a bad thing – i have plenty that don’t, that i’d have had no matter what, and if one of the side effects of the worst moment of my life is that i’m kinkier and have weirder sex then i’m taking that as a win. Like other positive traits i believe came from trauma – heightened empathy, and a strong sense of justice for example – i take those wins and run with them. They’re mine now and you will pry them from my cold dead hands.

And contradictory as it sounds, i require a hell of a lot of respect from someone to let them disrespect me. Like everything in kink, degradation requires consent – otherwise it’s just called being an asshole. To feel safe and comfortable exploring the messiest parts of my consciousness with someone, i need to know for sure that they won’t mean the awful things they say. That, in itself, sucks some of the power out of it – but in a way that feels like a safety feature and not a dilution of the intensity of play. With Mx i have pushed this kink further than ever before – in part because They are willing enough and skilled enough, but in part because i trust Them more than i have ever known i could trust anyone.

Degradation, trauma play, and psychological play of all kinds becomes the mirror that doesn’t lie to me anymore. The mirror that shows the depths of pain and fear and shame that i hide – that all of us, to some extent, hide – and forces it all out into the light. Without its shadows and mystery the power is gone – transferred, you could say, and transformed to create something new.