Catholicism & Kinking on Sin

I recently ran into a friend I hadn't seen for a very long time. I was best friends with her when I was six and sporadically for many of my formative years. She asked me how I was doing, I told her I was doing wonderfully! That I was hanging out with total sexual radicals, that I had had a girlfriend for a week. I told her I was happy, and that I was finding bits of myself that I had tried to deny (just not very well).

She told me she was Catholic.

I didn't try to take back what I had told her. I instead told her I was respectful of her choice, but the more I talked to her about why she made it, the more I realized I wasn't actually respectful of her decision, only of her choice and option to make the decision, but that is a rant for elsewhere. I had told her I was respectful of her choice, in the hope that she would be respectful of mine, and I suppose in a way - we both were respectful of each other choices - in so far as we respect that people should consciously choose things.

She talked about how she wanted her virginity back. She talked about how she stopped living with her boyfriend, how she stopped fucking him. She was too proper to say the word fuck.

I didn't talk about how much I enjoy being flogged, or how much more at home I feel with pervs than I do (in some ways) with regular vanilla folk. I did not tell her that the notion of 'having my virginity back' squicked me.

She told me that my mother told her that I was living in sin with my boyfriend. That she had laughed, thinking it was a joke, and that my mother hadn't. My mother is not bothered by my 'living in sin' with my boyfriend. My family approves of him, and of my living situation, and they'd better, else they'd be hypocritical old hippies.

The oddest part of the conversation was when I had to explain that when my mother said 'sin' she didn't mean 'sin' in the religious sense. I describe myself as living in sin with my boyfriend, and I certainly don't think it's a sin. She didn't understand. I had to actually explain that I didn't recognize what I was doing as wrong in anyway. She hasn't been catholic long - in fact it couldn't have been more than a few years ago that she identified as atheist, and/or Buddhist.

A while ago, back in September in fact, Eileen had a post about kinking on sin. Calico also had a post along the same lines back in July. In some ways it was these two specific blog entries that made me think I ought to blog. I do kink on sin. In a way. But I realized after talking to my friend, that I don't kink on religious 'sin'. I do kink on sin which converts in my mind to something much akin to shame.

Eileen after my first post, asked me how I'd made he-who-was-mentioned-in-the-first-post cry - and I was at somewhat of a loss as to how to answer. The answer is shame. I told him those things that I (often but not always (it would be nice if my kinks could be so consistent)) enjoy hearing - that my arousal in things of kink is a dirty, naughty thing. He was raised Catholic. I think of this as his excuse for embracing shame. I have no such excuse. I'm oddly enough ashamed of my kink of shame, to some extent because I can't find any source so simple to name.

Maja recently posted about floating world. She was talking about her feelings regarding her sexuality:

"But I was scared because it’s so huge. When you separate your identity from the identity of your sexual desires, it makes your desires more fun. Like being possessed by something delightful and terrifying, and you have a crazy ride and then later you can claim that the devil made you do it.

The truth that I unlocked at Floating World is, that’s not a devil. That’s not anything separate from me. My desires are powerful beyond measure. And frankly, that fucking rocks."

The notion that it is in some way 'the devil' appeals to me. But I do find it irksome to say the devil made me do it. I am a lover of responsibility almost to the point of the ridiculous Sartre existentialist 'no one can be a slave' crap (which isn't really all that simple but I'll not go into it since there are better venues for learning about such). I much prefer the notion that I am part demoness, that it is all a part of me. Letting myself be taken by this delightful and terrifying aspect of myself, for a crazy ride, and I'm left with no one to blame but myself. Which is fine with me, because as Maja said, desires being powerful beyond measure - that does fucking rock.