In Spite of It All (SIDESHAVE, 2024)

(note: this post includes descriptions of BDSM practices, proceed accordingly)

“Because I’m sick, because there was so much sickness, because I said fuck the sickness [...] and in spite of it all I have no guilt;”

In SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPER-MASOCHIST, Bob tells us about his relationship to BDSM and his relationship to his cystic fibrosis in the same shaky breath. He was supposed to die young, and he spent his childhood being tortured by medical devices and jerking off to relieve the pain of drowning from the inside out. As an adult, he realized that eroticizing the situation had become key to his longevity, and so he became an artist and a pervert of great renown.

I am also a person with significant childhood trauma, and the task of surviving myself has driven me down some confusing roads too. I used to drink too much and pretend I wasn’t a boy in order to cope. These days I am a sober trans dude who reprocesses the worst things that have ever happened to me by watching a tiny dot dance across a screen once a week. It feels like Looney Tunes hypnosis, but because it takes insurance, it is judged as therapeutic. 

I also enjoy kinky sex, which I judge as therapeutic, even if others might find it unsettling. So I feel a kinship with Bob, even though my tastes are comparatively tame.

I know who Bob is because I am a fan of Carta Monir. Monir is a trans artist and porn performer who makes incredible kinky art and maintains an Internet Archive collection I adore. I was lucky enough to see her latest work, a short film entitled “SIDESHAVE,” at the Leather Archive in Chicago. 

In SIDESHAVE, Monir collaborates with Sir Testimony to recreate a trauma from her youth. Monir grew her hair out as a teenager for the first time, using Locks of Love as an acceptable rationale for subconsciously expressed femininity. Eventually her parents decided her hair was too long “for a boy,” and gave her a forced haircut. 

SIDESHAVE shows us the memory from Monir’s perspective, a bloody reinterpretation that honors the trauma she experienced. We witness her naked, crying with horror as half of her hair is roughly shaved away. She weeps and giggles at her reflection in a handmirror, and then things escalate into a needle play scene. Her shocked gasps of pain were the only thing in the film that truly disturbed me. 

But still, I stayed and watched the blood drip down Monir’s face, astonished I was delighted to witness it. I was happy for her suffering, because I knew what reclaiming a memory feels like.

Within the kink community, experienced people tend to be self-aware about the relationship between their kinks and their trauma. That isn’t to say every traumatized person is kinky, or that every kinky person is traumatized. I will say there is a startling prevalence of ex-evangelicals who like to get hit with wooden spoons on their own terms, and there’s probably a reason for that. Research into kink as a reparative experience is new, but the results are positive.

Of course, most traumatized perverts don't do a literature review before we realize we like choking people. We just do it, and figure out why later. BDSM instinctively empowers the traumatized because it gives us the opportunity to experience a darkness we can control, instead of one we are controlled by. 

I think this is a difficult appeal to explain to people without trauma, who do not understand why you would invite darkness to your doorway in the first place. However, for those of us who are severely traumatized, there is no invitation needed. The darkness simply is. It is with us at all times, and it creates a painful frission between ourselves and reality every time we interact with it.

Trauma causes brain damage. For many of us, complete recovery isn’t possible. What is possible for us is processing old pain with new coping mechanisms and finding a sense of safety in structure and aftercare, so that's what we do. 

If you have decent insurance, you can do that by watching a dot bounce around. If you do not, you can watch a flogger bounce around instead. Many do both. There is no shame in either option. 

BDSM is a safe space for trauma because it's high camp. It creates an authentic emotional reality out of a pile of tropes that feels realer than the life you’ve dissociated from. It’s a fantasyland where everyone at their most monstrous or most pathetic still has the power to say no, and everyone is cared for appropriately after they are hurt. 

That is why I was able to watch Carta suffer. During the Q&A, where she explained her agonies, she also told us about how she was cared for throughout the scene. The quick cuts in the film obscured repositionings and check-ins, moments where Carta's flagging blood sugar were raised by candies dipped in said blood. (I thought that was sweet, no pun intended.) 

Trauma offers no dignity or comfort in survival, which is why it breaks so many of us. The gift of SIDESHAVE is brutality, but also consolation. Fucked dumb, bleeding and suffering; that cues the final moment Carta collapses into her tormentor’s arms for the comfort she deserves. It's the moment the thrill ride is revealed as what it is as it clanks to a shuddering stop.

BDSM taught me that the strength I bring to sex can be a gift, not an embarrassment. It gave me people who wanted to be slapped as badly as I wanted to slap them, and people who kissed my burning palms after I beat their asses red. BDSM taught me how to ask for respect, for boundaries, for the right pronouns.

(And here's one last painful trauma truth for you: BDSM gave me the first time I was ever held after I was hurt.)

Perhaps the warmth I felt from SIDESHAVE is projection; if so, can you blame me? I’ve seen the beauty in adults healing each other with whatever instruments they have, breaking each other like bones and holding each other as the heal sets. I consider that box of tools just as indispensable as my tiny dot.

 And in spite of it all I have no guilt.