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had the hyper-focused feminist sex educator instincts that I have now. I would have written differently about consent, and I would have written differently about the communication that happened with my partners about my consent. I would have talked about how the S&M subculture isn't always welcoming for everybody, though it feels welcoming for me. Plus, I'm no longer practicing monogamy; I'm polyamorous these days. But at the time, my goal was to do two things: (1) write out how S&M stigma felt for me, as a young feminist, and to talk about how I was overcoming it. And (2) show that sometimes a partner just isn't good for you, even if he has a quality that you really really want -- and you can always walk away. KOK OK Love Bites: An S&M Coming-Out Story I was very drunk. My perceptions had a frame-by-frame quality, and the evening didn't seem immediate: pieces of it were foreign, disconnected as a dream. I was being bitten very hard on the arm. It would leave marks the next day. I was so muddled by assorted things that even now I can't sort out how I felt at that moment. When Richard's nails scored my skin I gasped, but I didn't ask him to stop. I flinched away, but he kept a firm grip on me. "Beg for mercy," he said softly. Frame. Skip. I discovered that a mutual friend of ours had seen us, stopped, and was sitting on the grass across from Richard. "Hey," he said. "You shouldn't do that." "It's okay," Richard said, "she likes it," and pulled my hair hard enough to force me to bow my head. / do? I managed to think, before thought vanished back into the blur of alcohol and pain. Our friend's face loomed over me, concern sketched vividly on his features. I closed my eyes. "Mercy," I whispered. te KK Later, Richard reminded me of something I said that night: "I wish I'd met you years ago.” Thinking hard, I could only recall the evening in broad strokes. We'd gotten drunk at an outdoor party; he'd hurt me a bit; I'd said that; and then I'd staggered off to help clean up. "A lot of crap comes out when you do this stuff," he now said. A few weeks had passed. I was lying on my stomach across the foot of his bed. Sitting perpendicular to me, he leaned back and propped his feet on the small of my back. Thin and pale, he tended to wear black, and had intense dark eyes. It was summer in 2005. I was twenty years old. He'd asked me why I wanted to be hurt. I couldn't work out an answer -- wasn't certain the question was valid -- so I asked him why he liked to hurt people. He'd half-laughed, with a tone that I couldn't evaluate. Ruefully? "That's a long, dark road," he'd said. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018450