On Sadism, a personal narrative about trauma, violence & sexuality

“Don’t do that.” she says, with a sharp jab of four pointed fingers into your ribs. As our brains do, we blur the two together—warning and consequence—until her words hurt your body and her stabbing hands forbid your mind any of its agency.

“That joke wasn’t funny.” For failure to be her well-behaved jester, a hand catches you across your face. The burning mixes with aching and shame, partially owing to the new bruise that will swell up, but partly because prior to this, you had thought your joke hilarious.

A friend comforts you. They hug you tight, and all is well, until they reach a hand up to smooth back their hair, and the angle of their elbow rising above waist height makes you flinch.

You will do this for many years. It would be helpful if women would avoid reaching for things in your presence.

“No female friends.” she proclaims, for men and women cannot be friends without sexual inclination stirring one way or the other. It is a long time before you consider ‘platonic’ and ‘female’ to be compatible terms.

You sit on a bus, making sure not to touch thighs with your best friend, for fear of finding yourself accidentally gay, when a hooded sixteen year old finds your friend’s wayward gaze to be provocation, an invitation for him to demonstrate unwieldy aggression as a ritual offering to his girlfriend.

You find yourself an unrelated bystander, but it is your face he smashes into the window pane over and over. His gleeful laugh confuses you. Later, you thank your instincts, dutifully honed via comparatively gentler assaults, for causing you to turn your nose before each impact. There would have been a lot more blood. You tell your mother this, and she is happy you protected yourself. Something about this does not seem right to you.

Years later, when you are no longer fourteen, and these memories have long since faded in severity, a woman in a shithole bar bats her eyelashes at just the right angle to make your heart beat and your pulse quicken. Later, the two of you strip down to the performative version of nudity and you hold your breath a little tighter to your gut so she thinks of you as slimmer and more attractive than you actually are. As one of you climaxes, she slaps you across the jaw and there is a moment where the pain and the pleasure confuse themselves against one another. “Empowering,” you tell yourself quietly. To her you can only grunt in what may perhaps be affirmation. Neither of you know if you liked it, but this does not stop her from slapping you again. It does not feel empowering this time. It just hurts your face.

It has been long since you lived with another person. Your belongings are your own, and only you and the possums in the roof possess a key to your shoebox with four walls and a ceiling. Through brick and plaster you hear your neighbour’s door open and your heart reflexively leaps to your chest, adrenaline and anxiety preparing for intrusion that is not coming—after all, you are alone.

Three women in a row now have asked you to choke them. “Every woman must like this,” you think, and shrug to yourself as your hand again playacts tightening around a windpipe. “Harder!” one cries, thrusting their neck into your grasp. “Not so hard!” the next yells, admonishing you for your poor calibration. It must be nice to be so particularly able to be in charge of your own violence. Although, it does not feel like violence.

“I don’t want to actually hurt anyone. That must be what makes this healthy,” you reconcile with yourself as you participate in a ritual you neither properly understand or care for. The only word to describe the process is ‘inappropriate’. It is perverted, not because of any pearl-clutching around the subject matter, but simply because it is taking a grim aspect of humanity and entwining it with another. How are you supposed to find yourself to a relationship with sexuality? How can you make your peace with violence? And what, God forbid, happens when you recall there are whole other humans mixed up into these messy concepts?

“Call me a slut!” your future wife moans, into a pillow. “I cannot,” you confess to yourself. “I like you too much to say such mean things.” There are many ways to be unable to perform in the bedroom. She leaves you, eventually, and you have to wonder what type of your inadequacy was to blame. Involuntarily, your heart hardens, and you resolve to think lesser of your next better half. Your fourteen year old self agrees.