Hello, Kitty by Giselle Renarde

I'm not sure who started it.  Maybe it began organically.  Maybe it started with Lexi Wood, the sock puppet who lives in my night table and writes stepdaddy smut.  Or maybe it started before that.  Hard to say.

Maybe it started with a spanking.

In fact, yes, it probably did.

Was that spanking my idea or hers? Can a spanking be a mutually spontaneous idea?  If it can, then it was.  She'd never spanked anyone.  I'd never been spanked.  But from the very first smack, we were hooked.

It grew from there.  We'd both mentioned, in passing, that roleplay wasn't an interest.  We weren't lying.  When we said those words, they were true.  And yet, somehow, things evolved.  Spankings altered the power dynamic. In bed, I grew younger, she grew more... authoritative.

When she bought me the hot pink Hello Kitty panties, she became my Daddy.  I became her little girl.

Now, there are complications here.  Complications beyond the taboo nature of a Daddy/daughter ageplay scene.  We've got insecurities, yes we do. And many of our primary insecurities are around gender.

Lesbian Daddies have been around since the dinosaurs. There's a long history there, but for an older trans woman who's led a shockingly vanilla life (until she met me), that seems like a different world. I've never called Sweet "Daddy" out loud, and I'm not even sure I'd want to. I think it might squick me bad and throw her into a not-so-sexy abyss of gender dysphoria.

But wouldn't you think I'd fall into that same abyss when my girlfriend calls me her little girl?  I am genderqueer, after all. My gender seems constantly in flux and it's hardly a binary entity. When people use strongly gendered terms with me in day to day life, it fucks me up.  For me, gender dysphoria feels like... I don't know, vertigo? What does vertigo feel like?  Makes me dizzy, anyway.  Sometimes all the way to that pre-fainting feeling where you know you're going to black out but you're trying really hard not to.

Is that how I feel when my girlfriend calls me her little girl?

Nope.

It's titillating. And it suits me, physically. I've got this tiny body.  Some of my clothes are children's clothes because that's what fits. But when I'm out in the world, do I want to be treated like a little girl?  Nope on the "little" and nope on the "girl".

In the bedroom is a whole other matter.  I put on my hot pink Hello Kitty panties and I get to be this person I would never be in public. I get to be that person in a safe space with a woman I trust more than anyone in the world.

She's bigger, I'm smaller.  She's older, I'm younger.  These are elements that can become very distressing in a relationship if you try to sweep them under the rug. It's no good to dismiss the ways in which being older/younger and bigger/smaller impact the power dynamic in the relationship as a whole. If you don't acknowledge these factors, they can fester--been there, done that.  It's not pretty.

We can add an element beyond bigger/smaller, older/younger.  Of course we can.  In fact, we can add two, because what's an ice cream sundae without a big banana and a cherry on top?  So let's add the fact that my girlfriend is actually actively a father.  She's not out with her kids.  She might not be their Daddy but she's certainly their dad. And me? I never discuss my gender identity with my family. Just doesn't seem necessary at this stage.  Or I'm scared. Point is, won't I always be my parents' little girl?

These are topics that can be uncomfortable to discuss and tricky to work through.  I think the organic roleplay that's eased its way into our sex life has helped us to address some of our anxieties around size, age and gender.

Maybe some day I'll be ready to call my girlfriend Daddy. Maybe some day she'll be eager to hear it.

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You Can’t Step Into the Same Book Twice

By Lisabet Sarai

All the members of the Grip could, I’m sure, tell you about books that changed who they are. We all know the power of the word. That’s part of what draws us together. Recently, though, I came to understood the ways in which we also change the books we read.

As birthday gifts, back in November, I gave my brother two of my all-time favorite novels: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin and Little, Big by John Crowley. Both date from the early eighties. I’ve been hauling my paperback copies around with me since then, including half-way across the world to Asia. The bindings are brittle; pages are falling out. I was heartened to discover that both are still in print, in new editions.

After I sent them off, I decided I should re-read them, to refresh my memory. My kid brother’s pretty intense. When I sent him The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, he insisted on spending an hour and a half on the phone (long distance, from the U.S.) discussing it. This time I wanted to be prepared.

I believe this was the third time I’d read Winter’s Tale. The last was in the late nineties. It’s a long book (800 pages) and deliciously complex—something of a commitment. I had vivid recollections of various scenes and characters, but a lot of the details had faded.

Before I continue, I need to tell you something about this book. Winter’s Tale is an urban fantasy, but not in the sense that term is used now. It’s an epic imagining that centers on New York City. Indeed, the city is as much a character as Peter Lake, the master burglar and mechanic who returns from the dead after a hundred years, or Beverly Penn, the brilliant, beautiful, dying young woman whom he loves, or Pearly Soames, brutal and dandified gang leader who chases Peter Lake for a century, or Athansor, a massive white horse who can fly. The book begins just before the turn of the twentieth century and ends just after the millenium. The city has its roots in the past and its eyes on the future, creating a tension that provides much of the book’s energy.

I’ve never read anything like it. Hence, it’s rather difficult to describe. It chronicles the interlocking lives of its many remarkable characters, but it’s really, I believe, a book about time. Time appears to change everything, yet at some fundamental level is an illusion. Just behind modern New York City, you glimpse the ghosts of New York from earlier eras. If you could only focus your attention, you could make those ghosts solid and bring the past to life.

Winter’s Tale is in no sense erotica, yet it is exquisitely sensual. It does have one love scene, which I’ll quote just to give you a feeling for the wildly poetic language.

She had not counted on affection. It startled her. He kissed her temples, her cheeks and her hair, and stroked her shoulders as tenderly as if she had been a cat. She closed her eyes and cried, much satisfied by the tears as they forced their way past a dark curtain and rolled down her face.

Beverly Penn, who had the courage of someone who is often confronted by that which is gravely important, had not expected that someone else would be that way too. Peter Lake seemed to love her in exactly the way that she loved everything that she knew she would lose. He kissed her, and stroked her, and spoke to her. How surprised she was at what he said. He told her about the city, as if it were a live creature, pale and pink, that had a groin and blood and lips. He told her about spring in Prince Street, about the narrow alleys full of flowers, protected by trees, quiet and dark. He told her about the colors in coats and clothes and on the stage and in all kinds of lights, and that their random movements made them come alive. “Prince Street,” he said, “is alive. The buildings are as ruddy as flesh. I’ve seen them breathe. I swear it.” He surprised even himself.

This might not be the best passage to quote, but it may give you a sense for the rhythm in Helprin’s prose, a bit like verse.

In any case—I found in re-reading that for me, at least, the book hadn’t lost its magic. And yet, it was a different book, because of what I’d experienced since the last reading.

First, since that last reading, I had the opportunity to actually live in New York City for nine months. In other readings I’d taken the geography of the tale as realistic, but now I know it’s an imagined map superimposed on so-called reality. There is no “Printing House Square”, anymore than there is a village hidden in hills upriver called Lake of the Coheeries. At the same time, I’ve now seen first hand the constellations in the vault of Grand Central Station, so eloquently described in the novel. (Peter Lake hides out in a room just above the star-embroidered ceiling.) During my time in the city, I took a train every week day from Grand Central to the suburbs where I was working. No matter how much I was rushing, I always found time to gaze at the stars.

I understand in a much deeper sense now the way past and present entwine in New York. The book may be a fantasy, but it captures this essential reality, the core idea the drives the story forward.

The second change is the specter of 9/11, haunting me and casting its shadow over the novel. I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment should you decide to read the book, but let me just say that it ends with a disaster that almost destroys the city. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the chaos and terror that followed the fall of the Twin Towers, the legions of New Yorkers trudging on foot over the bridges, the stench of burning that hung in the air for weeks afterward. 9/11 occurred before my stay in the city, but as it happened, I had a job interview in lower Manhattan less than a month after the attacks. I vividly remember the smell, charred and chemical, stinging your nostrils and making your lungs ache—like someone had left a pot on the stove too long, until the BakeLite handle scorched and the metal buckled.

In this last reading, the book darkened. The wonder and beauty have been tempered by the pain of irrecoverable loss. This didn’t spoil the book for me. However, I have a fresh appreciation of the costs of time, and of human folly.

What Dreams May Come

by Lisabet Sarai



The vast room stretches two stories up to a sky-lit ceiling. The trainers bustle about in white leather miniskirts and heeled boots, their hair pulled back into severe pony tails that shimmer down their trim backs. The slaves are shackled to walls, or more accurately, to jointed cantilever frames that extend out from the walls and support all manner of interesting and embarrassing poses.

I am one of them, a novice, recognized by the minions of the mistress for what I am, enticed here by their veiled promises. I am naked, bound and gagged, unable to move. I am simultaneously aroused and terrified.

My trainer, a stunning brunette with crimson lips, approaches me with an enema bag. “You must be empty,” she says, “so the mistress can fill you.” I nearly come from excitement and terror.

The scene shifts to an outdoor café. My own master and the mistress drink espresso at a wrought iron table. I crouch at my master's feet underneath, listening to their conversation. “She did well,” the mistress comments. “You've done a good job preparing her.” The pride I feel at pleasing her and showing off my master's skill is almost more intense than my sexual desire.

---

The above is part of a real dream. It's not a fictional vignette concocted by my dirty mind—at least, not my conscious dirty mind. I've always had vivid dreams. I recall that my brother and I told each other our dreams when we were just kids. I tend to remember more of my dreams, I believe, than the average person, even though I don't usually write them down.

I dream recurring landscapes: the cities of my youth morphed and mingled together, full of buses and trains and subways; a mansion with endless halls and stairways that I think derives from a long ago visit to the Winchester Mystery House; an ocean-front resort during a storm, threatened by the gigantic waves; the rural town where I lived for more than twenty years. I dream repeating themes. I've been given the chance to return to college once again and I'm thrilled to be able to explore all the wonderful topics I had to pass up the first time around. I'm in college again and it's finals week, and suddenly I realize that I've completely skipped attending several of my classes. Evil creatures, aliens or magicians or monsters, surround my house, while I try desperately to find a place to hide. And of course I dream of both my husband and the lovers from my past, as well as new women and men who tempt and torment me.

Sometimes I dream entire stories, with plots and characters who have nothing to do with me. In my dreams these days, I know that I'm a writer. I actually understand, while I'm dreaming, that there's a narrative playing out on the screen of my mind and I try to remember the details when I wake. Often I do. For the most part, though, I haven't managed to get these narratives out of my head and onto the page before they fade. Often I'll remember the premise and the protagonists, but the emotion evaporates all too quickly. Once the excitement slips away, it's hard to motivate myself to actually fashion the dream into a waking tale. It seems stiff and empty.

I did write a poem based on the dream above. That dream was triggered by one of my rare reunions with my master. I've also got a hundred word “flasher” based on a dream:

---

Conversation with the Marquis

I dreamed of de Sade. He smiled gently down at me. "Come to me when you are ready."

Pretending lightness, I replied, "I never said that I was interested in such things."

"You need not say. I can see it in your eyes."

I knew he spoke truly. When I looked at him I saw ropes biting tender flesh, instruments of steel and leather, candles, clamps, searing pain, scalding pleasure.

Suspended in awful desire, I fled. Waking, I found a volume of his tales by my bedside, inscribed with a single word.

"Come."

---

I don't think much of Freud's views on dreams, but I do believe that they can carry some sort of truth. My dreams reveal to me my passions and my fears. They show me who I really am. They also fascinate me with their emotional richness and their sensory detail. John Crowley's wonderful book Little, Big includes a character who spends as much time as she can sleeping, because she loves to dream. I'm not that extreme, but I've been known to wake in the middle of the night, go to the bathroom, then lie down again and resume a dream where I had left off.

I've also experienced a handful of dreams that I can only call prescient. In one, I sat by the hospital bed of a gravely ill former lover, trying to comfort him and ease his pain. I learned the next day that his father had committed suicide the night of the dream. In another, I dreamed that a dear female friend whom I hadn't heard from in months was going to have a baby. Within two days, an email from me informed me that she was in fact pregnant.

Actually, my explanation for these experiences is grounded more in psychic communication over distances than in precognition. I've never dreamed a future that didn't involve someone whom I cared about deeply. I suspect that there's some sort of emotional vibration—electromagnetic waves of some sort—that can be transmitted between people who have a strong bond.

I do dream quite a lot about sex (surprise surprise). Sometimes very strange sex, involving hermaphrodites and detachable penises and public masturbation, sometimes nothing more than a glorious flirtation which cloaks mutual desire. In the last few years, for the first time (that I remember) I've started to have orgasms in my sleep. At least it feels that way. Of course, sometimes it feels like I'm flying, too.

Even though my dreams have been directly responsible for relatively few of my stories so far, I feel as though they nourish my imagination. I use bits and pieces of dream imagery all the time. And I have written a number of dream sequences which borrow the tone of my real night journeys.

I've been thinking about this blog post for quite a while. Last week, I woke from a dream that may well have been catalyzed by my pondering the topic.

---

The blond young vampire sits on his motorcycle, his face serious. The air is heavy with erotic tension. “I've got to go,” he tells me and my girlfriend. “If I stay, I'll hurt you.”

I take his hand and place it on my breast. He caresses me through my clothing. Desperate lust overwhelms me. I know that he feels it too, that it takes every shred of self-discipline he can muster to hold himself back. “Maybe you could hurt us a little,” I say, trying to tempt him, unable or unwilling to let go of this intoxicating desire.

I wake, wet and trembling, before he can answer.