My master didn't build my sexuality.

"*So what was your training like? How did your master turn you into this kind of masochist? Can you share a little bit about how he made you into this person? What did he do to make you take all this kind of pain? How, oh how, did he manage to mould your sexuality into exactly what he needed?*"

Those are just a few examples of questions I have been asked, mostly by men but there have definitely been other genders in the mix. I have never responded to these questions but they irked me a lot more than the standard drivel that makes its way to the inbox of a woman anywhere on the internet. For a long time I couldn't figure out what about them was so profoundly insulting to me, after all, I admit and glorify the concept of erotic control and suffering all the fucking time. Then I had dinner with my dad's family and I realised something that is, alarmingly, rather relevant to why I am irked by these questions.

My father's family is the fucking worst, okay? I have a contentious history with them because they were terrible to my mother, I wont get into the details of that here, but it's way worse than anything you are imagining. It's not gossip and rumours, it's abuse and exploitation, and so I have been openly insolent to them my entire life. I don't fucking care that they are my "elders" because that stops mattering when you are fucking heinous and would harm another person. Also, they kicked my parents out because they had a daughter? Hi. I mean what kind of 1944 bullshit. My parents have in the thirty years since moved on from all of this and we're all now pretending to like one another, and be all for women's power and liberty. I am a less inclined to this narrative because I don't have that generation's level of normalisation of trauma and   moral ambiguity. In some ways I envy them a little bit, because while I believe that people can actually evolve from toxic beliefs to better ones, I cannot bring myself to associate with those people. I cannot because, to me, merely changing what you believe is insufficient,  you have to take responsibility for your bad behaviour as well. I cannot move past it when people fail to take responsibility. Of course, none of this has anything to do with my actual point. I had dinner with these guys. I had successfully avoided them for four-years, and six before that, but they cornered me. At dinner they kept reminding me that they hadn't seen me since the wedding

"You didn't even come for your first Diwali," one of my cousins said.

It irked me.

Let me explain with cultural context. This is an Indian-thing (and maybe it's just a North Indian thing, if anyone has context from other parts of the country, please do tell). So when you get married, for a full year after that you have to play the role of the new bride. There are many components to this, all ridiculous, but one of them is that every festival in the following year is your "first" and you have act like a decked up as fuck bride at that, because you are experiencing those things with your "new family" for the first time, because for women, marriage is a whole new birth. Now, I am the most uncultured bitch in this country, so the fact that I even got married is a major victory for my family and marriage in India is 99% social and 1% personal, I refuse to participate in the theatre but people believe, and indeed it happens very often, that marriage is how you turn wayward, immoral youths back into "Indians". They wanted to have dinner because they wanted to see if I became Indian-enough yet. The problem is that I was always Indian, that just means different things to them and to me. I'm not being reborn because I got married and becoming a glitter-covered doll, I am not going to start hosting *poojas* because I am a married woman now, I won't be dressing any differently (if anything I have fewer clothes now and most of them is one pair of black pants), I won't be putting on marital symbols, I won't be becoming more tempered and grounded. I will be indian the way I know how, constitutionally, for instance. I will be indian by owning every spice imaginable to man. I will be Indian by celebrating our linguistic diversity. No matter how many "scientific reasons" are presented to me for the gilded oppression, I'm not participating in that Indian-ness.

So what she said irked me.

"I wasn't born the day I got married," I retorted to her, "I had a whole entire life before then."

She rolled her eyes and began speaking with someone else.

I guess I irked her too.

But that's exactly it. That is exactly why her question and why the questions about my master training me into the person I am bother me so very much. My life had meaning before a man validated it. My sexuality had experienced depth before a man took me on long-term, and I don't like being viewed as a function of a single man's influence on me nor as that of a role I embody. Within this community, all kinds of bottoms exist, I don't know that a disproportionate amount of them are women, but it seems like a disproportionate amount of them are women. Regardless, a lot of people treat us like we're helpless creatures you need the guidance of a dom, daddy, master, top, blabity bla, to fucking function. The assumption that we could not possibly explore, develop or know our sexualities unless guided by a top plays so far into the infantilism of women that it makes me vomit. The assumption that the entirety of my current sexuality is owed to the man I am with now, also makes me want to throw up.

Here's the thing. My sexuality was my path to self-awareness, liberty, growth and communication. I have had it as long as I have lived, I have experienced it for over two decades, it was not created by anyone. It is totally and completely *mine*. Sexual development is how I learnt confidence, it's how I learnt to communicate with people, because I am genuinely lacking a lot of the language of emotional expression, I am often faking it, but sexual connection comes easily to me. I have taken my sexuality through dozens of phases, through hundreds of beds and at least twenty toilets. I am a masochist because of me, not because of what a man does to me. I am inclined towards power exchange because of me, not because of what a man taught me. I don't enjoy the insinuation that I could not have come to my sexuality on my own, without the guidance of a man. I smell a rat, and some of that is because I think deep inside we don't like to think of women as sexually experienced, and even less so, as more sexually experienced than their male partners, so we restart their existence at the point that they've been mastered. Their existence becomes real again when they've settled down with a man who controls them, while we are free-agents, we are like aberrations that don't register as real-enough.

Fuck if I am gonna stand for that.

So let me actually answer all of those questions for once.

*So what was your training like?* You're a moron. We came to the agreements of our relationship organically, and they were deeply informed by the intersection of things we both like, any erotic "training" occured in circumstances you wouldn't understand because it's less fap-fodder for you and more research fodder for @djolinar (and maybe it is also fap fodder for her, she has a fun brain). *How did your master turn you into this kind of masochist?* He..beat me? Because I wanted to be beaten, and he likes to beat people. There was no turning. He is not a vampir.  *Can you share a little bit about how he made you into this person?* No, because he didn't. I can however guide you towards hundreds of thousands of words about how I (and well, life, that bitch gets a lead role in everything) turned myself into this person. All the shit I wanna do, it's my idea, and sometimes his ideas, all the suffering past wanting it to stop, my idea, that doesn't mean he just provides what I want, it means I provide the concepts of me and he provides the concepts of him and we let them interact within the terms of our relationship and life. Again, I don't think this is the answer you were looking for. *What did he do to make you take all this kind of pain?* He met me. *How, oh how, did he manage to mould your sexuality into exactly what he needed?* That's just serendipity. We fell in love and part of that is because we speak the same sexual language. That's rare and beautiful and I am eternally grateful for it. He didn't approach me as a fetish-fulfillment mechanism and focus my 'growth" on things he wanted from me. That's just grooming. He met me as individual who spoke completely for herself and doesn't need a man to teach her about her own sexuality.

And finally, *why didn't you come home for your first Diwali?*

Well, because Diwali sucks. It scares my pets, it supports the massive, mostly illegal, deeply exploitative industry of fireworks. It is terrible for the environment. Oh and oh, I wasn't fucking born the day a man validated my existence and gave me life meaning so I wasn't about to abandon my entire belief system to celebrate my indoctrination. I know who I am, I made who I am, that I kneel to a man and let him rummage inside me for the shards of glass he left in there, doesn't mean he made me. It means, I agreed, to let him fucking break me.