Life Lessons Learned From Scheduling Gang Bangs
I have a friend who’s always scheduling gang bangs.
Note the precision of that word: she spends more time scheduling them than she does having them.
Now, the popular take is that dudes are fuck-hungry horndogs who’d drop anything to get their dick wet. But in truth, finding a dude who’s willing to get erections in front of other men turns out to be pretty goddamned rare.
Some are homophobic, and worried the mere sight of a peen might poison them into gayness – let alone what happens if they brush up against one. Others aren’t sure whether they’ll be able to perform in front of other men, and God, it’s embarrassing enough to have Little Elvis take a premature curtain call in front of one woman – but a whole crowd?
Others still love the idea of gangbang sex, then get squicked when the day comes – like many fantasies, it’s better kept in the shrinkwrap, never to be opened. Still others fear showing up at a hotel room and being mugged or blackmailed.
Still others get sick at the last minute, or forgot they’d promised to take their kids to see the new Disney pic that afternoon. You know; normal scheduling difficulties.
And all that comes on top of the problems with arranging gangbangs- you need a burly friend you trust to tell the new dudes what’s allowed and how this is going to go down, and you have to find a hotel that’s okay with this, and you have to plan the condoms and lube to bring and worry about latex allergies, and, and, and….
By the time it’s all done, I know of at least three gangbangs that had at least eight dudes RSVPed, and nobody showed.
There’s a lot of empty gangbangs out there.
(Which is the other reason you bring the burly friend. If nobody shows, the burly friend is like the best man – they step in and bang the heck out of you. Which is why smart planners make sure their burly friend is good in bed.)
I’ve spent years soaked in the kink scene’s depravities – and yet these gangbang fizzles are still hysterical to me. I’d never thought of a failed gangbang, but the difference between the popular media portrayal of Fantastically Kinky Sex and the reality of it is vast.
But then I think how much of kinky sex is not kinky. I think of me, getting home from a big convention and sterilizing all my fire cups, airing out the wands, checking the alcohol levels and goddammit, I gotta stop by CVS, I’m almost out.
I think of cleaning up after a big scene, the room strewn with clothes and handcuffs and knives and floggers, and starting the cold and unsexy business of putting them away.
I think of rope aficionados endlessly washing and whipping their rope, forever piling it into coils, debating hard points strong enough to hang a person off of.
I think of all the tarps and sanitary processes that responsible kinksters use to sterilize a scene for bloodplay.
And I think, “Why should gangbangs be any different than the rest of kink?” And the answer is, they aren’t. Kink can come organically – ask anyone who’s undergone a spontaneous scene with my sharp pretty pretty princess nails – but a lot of kink is this bubble of fantastic sensation, arrived at because someone’s done a lot of work to clean off the manacles on that St. Andrews’ Cross.
And even then, there are scenes that don’t happen. Things bomb out. All the fucking time.
So much of kink fizzles because of the same ordinary reasons that other things get cancelled: flat tires. Schedule conflicts. Couldn’t find the time. And everyone’s old friend, “Not in the mood.”
A lot of kink is, weirdly, that tedium of preparation. Making sure everything is set up safely, so the proper implements are at hand and the big decisions have been made in advance.
All so when the time comes, so can you.
And the thing is, I think kink is a reflection of life: there are too many people who seek the experience without wanting to do the preparation, and that costs them. They’re so eager for the effortless high of the kink that they sneer at gruntwork, seeing it as a buzzkill – they don’t want to think about details, they want to float away on a cloud of sex.
Bad things happen to these people. They rush into hookups with careless riggers who cause permanent nerve damage with bad knots. They seek a kink partner, any partner, and they wind up alone in rooms with people who do bad things.
And the problem with chasing the high is that there’s not a perfect correlation between “Skipping the necessaries” and “Paying the consequences.” You can do a lot of unsafe fireplay before the lack of safety precautions finally sets someone’s hair aflame. It looks like you can skip the boring stuff to head straight to the excitement, but…
Eventually you discover the quick excitement has a much greater cost.
Smart kinksters understand that the preparation and the enjoyment are two halves of the same whole – you build a solid foundation to leap from safely. They don’t feel cheated when they spend hours on tedious busywork, because the busywork is not a betrayal of the experience, but a fundamental part of it.
They understand that life is not meant to be a series of exultant explosions, but rather that a good life is finding ways to be fulfilled by the necessary preparations.
So when you walk by some phenomenal rope scene with beautiful people hung from the rafters and spun like Cirque de Soleil performers, you might think that oh my God, that is what I aspire to be. And maybe you should.
But remember the work that goes into gangbangs. Realize that rope scene involved years of practice and safety checks and scheduling to coalesce into this transitory beauty that never lasts as long as the run-up. Recognize how the life-changing experiences are always a little harder to come by than you’d think they should be.
Remember that this effort is not a betrayal of what life should be, but rather a reflection of how life truly is, and be enlightened.
Fuck Your Jealousy. Try Mine.
“You used to enjoy having sex with me,” someone says. “Now you’re seeing your new partner all the time, and we haven’t had sex in a month, and I really need a cuddle date. Can we schedule that?”
At which point CAPTAIN ANARCHY leaps out of the closet like a ninja referee to pass judgment on your relationship: “FOUL! FLAGRANT JEALOUSY! TWO POINTS, PLUS THE IMPLICATION THAT MAYBE YOU’RE NOT CUT OUT TO BE POLY!”
Then Captain Anarchy disappears, leaving behind a bunch of snide leaflets on why No True Relationship Feels Jealous.
But that’s not jealousy. That’s “You are no longer doing a thing that used to make me happy, and I would like to open negotiations as to whether I can get that happy experience back.”
You’re not asking because you’re resentful of this new love – you’re asking because you’re no longer getting all the things you require to be satisfied in a relationship. The new lover is the root cause in this instance, but you don’t have to be jealous of them any more than you have to be “jealous” of someone putting in too many hours volunteering for Burning Man or “jealous” of a 70-hour-a-week work schedule.
You do not have to personally loathe everything that’s getting in the way of getting your needs met to say, “Hey, would it be okay if we did this?”
And what Captain Anarchy is trying to do is this spectacularly toxic assholery that tries to shame people into silence for things that should be healthy to ask for.
Look. Relationship Anarchy is a valid approach. But what it does not mean is that you should be a quivering snail, never requesting anything of someone you’re dating, passively accepting whatever some douche of a date chooses to dole out to you.
Because communication is complex! Sometimes the people you’re dating don’t know that doing more of this thing would make you happy, and they’d be thrilled to do more of it! Sometimes your lovers get distracted, and are happy to be refocused!
Never opening up a discussion on What You Need is not a fucking strength. It is a weakness. It presumes your partners have a secret telepathy that tunes them into a full knowledge of what thrills you, and it passes on the toxic idea that actively requesting things that make you happy is somehow a downer to other people.
No. What’s a downer is getting too attached to the answer. It hurts getting an an honest response of “You know, I’m no longer into you sexually, maybe it’s time to move on” – but it saves time. It means you don’t spend months reserving emotional space for someone, hoping wanly that maaaaybe this NRE will wear off and they’ll get back to you. And it means maybe you get an answer of “I don’t want to pull back on this relationship right now, because this is the way I operate, but past history shows I’ll probably return to our old pattern after another month or two – at least until I find someone else.”
It’s fine for them to say that. It’s fine for you to say “yes” or “no” to that pattern. But none of that happens unless you’re willing to open up a discussion without some idiot drive-bying to say “JEALOUSY IS BAAAAADDDDDDD.”
Look. There is jealousy out there, in the sense of “They are taking you away from me and I deserve you.” And that is bad.
But there’s also, “I used to get this thing that made me excited about being in this relationship with you, and I no longer get that.” And in that case, bringing it up isn’t “jealousy” so much as it is saying “I’m with you because you provide certain experiences, and if those experiences are no longer going to be a part of what happens between us, I deserve to know what’s going on so I can make sane decisions as to whether to stay involved with you.”
And sometimes, those experiences are no longer provided to you because this person has decided to give them to another person. Sometimes that can be rectified by saying, “Hey, you know, I miss that.” Sometimes it can’t.
But generally, I find the people who are most enthusiastic about suppressing discussion of What Makes You Happy are trying to quash this discussion because they don’t care what makes you happy. They care about what makes them happy, and when you bring your tiresome ol’ self into the discussion then you’re bringing them down, and why can’t you just shut up and let me do what I want?
To which I’ll go to one of the other definitions of jealousy: “fiercely vigilant of one’s rights.” That kind of jealousy, I can get behind. And one of your rights in a relationship should be to have the information you need to make informed decisions about what you’re willing to do within a relationship.
Anyone who tells you otherwise, well… they’re probably hoping nobody knows too much about what they actually provide.