SpanishRed

Is He a Dominant or a Douche?

Does he see kink ethics as necessities, or favours bestowed upon you if you “deserve” them?

Does she see your limits as inconveniences or tools to keep you safe?

Is he here to connect with you or exploit you?

Does he see your capacity to say “no” as an asset to encourage or a horse to break?

Does he want to know you or use you?

Does he demonise you when you refuse to submit? Or does he take it as an opportunity to truly understand your needs?

Does h...

Do All You Can With What You Have

Why I Choose Green Flags Instead of Avoiding Red Flags

During my time on Fet, I’ve met three men I trusted implicitly before we’d met in person. I would let all three of them into my home without a stitch of fear. That means something because I don’t feel the need to look for red flags when a man has flown enough green flags to cover the surface of the moon. I knew I could trust my last top and the play partner who preceded him long before I’d ever spoken to their references.

I couldn’t always trust my own views on people. It took...

Your Last Victim

Contract for Brattish Shenanigans

This contract is entered into between The Sacred Brat and the dominant, who is very, very tired, now.

• For the purposes of this contract, “shenanigans” shall be defined as “anything the brat finds amusing that the dominant should really learn to appreciate more.”

• Shenanigans may include, but shall not be limited to, sticking Googly eyes on penises, knitting hats for penises, drawing smileys on penises, and taking photographs of smiley, well-dressed penises....

  2024-04-07 06:02:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Sometimes You've Just Got to Lean Back and Hope You'll Float: A Post About Post-Remission Relapse

My friend, Jo, spent 2023 fighting cancer like a hero. She didn’t break. She didn’t even bend. She’d disappear for a week after chemo, then return full of smiles and serenity. She coped so well that her nurses asked her to do a speech for their other cancer patients. Yes, Jo was a model patient — A fighter. We all look up to fighters, you know.

Last week, a few months after she’d achieved remission, Jo’s symptoms returned, and she snapped into two pieces like a dry branch. ...

Why We Root for Villains in the Kink Scene

I watched the whole of Ripley, primarily so I could see Andrew Scott walk from place to place making various facial expressions. We all deserve our pleasures in life. I watched the bad guy for eight hours. I rooted for him just as I’ve rooted for every bad guy who was the main character in a movie. I’m more familiar with him than I am with his victims. I know all his best character traits and have shared moments of vulnerability with him. I’ve grown an attachment, and no number of seria...

We Apologise for Our Bodies

Concession and Submission aren’t the Same Things. Do You Want This or are You Just Too Scared to Refuse it?

This is a tale of two subs. First, there is Jess—a sub with a serious people-pleasing habit. Jess says yes.

All the time.

Even when she doesn’t want to. Even when she knows it might traumatise her, and when it does traumatize her, it traumatises her tops as well. Good people don’t like feeling like rapists.

Jack is our second sub—a TPE slave who says “yes” to things that might terrify Jess, and yet “no” is an integral part of his vocabulary. He feels...

Self-Worth

Rigid Negotiation Protocols Can be Deeply Coercive

Over the weeks I spent with B, I saw him tie a veritable horde of rope bunnies. I was one of them. B wasn’t RACK or PRICK or any such thing. B was BESPOKE.

Bottom A was up for gore and blood.
Bottom B needed a gentler touch.
Bottom C was new and needed to learn basic safety.
Bottom D had an illness that required a particular kind of tie.
Bottom E was your basic masochist with a sense of humour.

B knew every bottom was different. He knew their afterplay needs. He knew...

Patriarchy

A Story About a Very, Very Nice Guy

Not too long ago, I met a Very, Very Nice Guy™. He wrote me Nice letters. He left me Nice comments. He was even Nice when I apologised for not having the time for new friendships. He was a Very Nice Guy™, so he told me that was just fine. He understood.

He really, really did.

As I write this two months later, I’m looking at a list of Very Nice Guy™ emails long enough to measure a tree with. He politely explained that it would be really nice if we ...

Things I’m Not Allowed to Do at Play Parties

• I’m not allowed to wear master’s whip as a tail and hop everywhere like a kangaroo.

• I’m not allowed to arrange an interpretive dance team to act out Bohemian Rhapsody in the play area.

• Wrapping the host’s office equipment in tinfoil is forbidden.

• I’m not allowed to attach teeny SpanishRed nametags to everyone else’s toys.

• I may not add nametags to the items on the snack table either.

• Or any guy I th...

  2024-03-31 08:30:19 +0000 UTC View Post

Toxic People Are Just As Deceptive as White Walls

When I was still a tiny thing, my grandmother pointed to a white wall and asked me what colour it was. I was smart, so naturally, I said white.

I was wrong. My grandmother told me there was blue in the shadows. There was yellow in the sunlight. There was grey in the cracks. There was every colour but white on that wall. When I learned to draw, I found out that the brain makes a lot of assumptions about what it sees. You think you know what a face looks like, but you only have t...

On Denialism

Therapy-by-Dominant is Edge Play

We’ve all met a guy like Jack – The dominant who uses kink to cure his sub’s problems.
Feeling unhappy? Jack can cure you through BDSM.
Struggling to get a hold of your eating disorder? Jack can fix it.
Suffering from clinical depression? Grief? A personality disorder? Jack can heal that, too. Think of him as a sexy life coach. He doesn’t know what a “psychodynamic theory” is, but he’s pretty sure he can cure your PTSD.

It’s tempting to make your sub’s entire ...

This Penis Plaster is Totally Not a Condom Substitute (Anymore)

In 2017, a Fetlifian who’d invented an awesomely awesome new contraceptive asked me to write some copy for his site. Awesome is, of course, a relative term. If you don’t see pregnancy and HPV as problems, Jiftip is an awesome condom substitute.

Essentially, it’s a plaster for your penis. It’s stuck over the urethral entrance and ripped off violently after it’s destroyed your orgasm. No, I’m not kidd...

On Being Nice

The one thing people don’t tell you about growth is that you’ll lose friends in the process.

Some people’s boundaries are as porous as spiderwebs. The trouble with webs is that they catch a lot of bugs. There are money-grabbers, takers, narcissists, and creepers. There are consent violators, racists, and every other creepazoid you can catch. If you’re Nice™ to all of them, your home terrain will become a rotten, spidery grave.

The one thing people don’t tell you about growth is that you’ll lose friends in the process.

When you develop healthy self-esteem, you st...

Telling a depression patient to take responsibility for their bad days is like telling a diabetes patient to stop passing out when their sugar level gets low.

I’m as “tough love” as they come when it comes to responsibility and mental illness. I’m a recovering anorexic, so I have to be. My anorexia is controlled almost entirely through behaviour management. If I'm having a bad food day, it's because my behaviours have been off key.

Not all mental illnesses are alike, though. The Hard-Ass-Big-Responsibility Approach doesn’t work for all mental illnesses just because it works for anorexia. Try creating a sculpture using n...

The Secret

Green Flags in a Sub

1. They see safe words as tools, not failures. They’re thus willing to use those tools without hesitation.

2. They don’t order kinks from you as though you’re a dim sum menu — Not unless you have a consensual service top dynamic. You do not have to be a service top. You do not have to dish out kinks like a sexy Pez Dispenser.

3. They respect your limits without question. Hell, they even expect you to have limits and safe words in the first place....

Not All Men

Green Flags in a Dominant Man

• He respects small boundaries. You never have to reiterate your small noes because he heard you the first time. I have a friend who ends his messages, “I know you’re busy, so respond in your own time or not at all.” That’s not a green flag. It’s a gold one. I’m sticking with people who care about my time and comfort as much as I do theirs.

• He’s taken the time to learn how to practice his kinks safely. I have a friend who studied rope for 20 years, and he’...

  2024-03-23 03:38:06 +0000 UTC View Post

There's More than One Way to Skin a Slut

My first kink was sex in public places. I gave head in cars and got laid in fields. My casual years followed. I met men everywhere in those days. My sex life was like Days of Our Lives, only with more penises. I spent five days holed up in a five-star hotel with a man I’d met in a bookstore. One day he checked out and vanished without a word.

Sometimes, you get thrown into a reject pile the moment a man has used you up.

You can play with lust in a thousand meaningless ways. I’...

One Twue Way Does Legitimate Harm

I have my sexual preferences and you have yours. I realise I’m stating the obvious, but apparently, it needs to be said. I’m only too happy to listen to your countertenor about discipline and servitude as long as you don’t insist it’s the only legitimate form of power exchange. I care not a jot about your standards of submission as long as you’re not denigrating mine.

The trouble with One Twue Wayists is that they don’t only sing arias about their BDSM....

YOU get a consent acronym! YOU get a consent acronym. EVERYBODY GETS A CONSENT ACRONYM!

When you become part of the kink scene, your learning curve is more of a Mount Everest than a hill. There are polycules and poly families, RACK, PRICK, and CCCC. There’s ethical non-monogamy, compersion, and 500 kinds of consent violations. You will now be required to figure out which consent acronym is better. Don’t worry. This is totes going to be easy. </sarcasm>

SSC might seem p...

Describing the Female Experience is Wrong, Kids

Words are tools. You don’t use a hammer to screw in a nail, and there is a right word for every job, too. Language matters. It defines our experiences and gives them a voice, so feminism has spent a century giving women the means to define their lives. It’s redefined words like “slut” because sexuality isn’t worthy of shame. It’s refined the definition of words like “consent” because we cannot have autonomy if we haven’t defined the absence thereof. It’s added nuance to wo...

It's Not a Lifestyle

I have two exceedingly frightened men in my inbox right this minute. Both have floated around on Fetlife for some time and are developing the courage to open up to The Lifestyle™. They’re scared that it might not fit them. What if they can’t adopt The Ways of the Truly Kinky™? What if the change required of them is too extreme?

I know how it feels. A decade ago, I, too, was trying to develop the courage to open up to The Lifestyle™. In the years that followed, I learned that i...