Last night I was discussing my kinks, and I was having a hard time combing the recesses of my brain to see if I have any left.
Could I possibly be completely unkinked?
I tend to think that kinks come from repression and depths of the unconscious we haven't yet plumbed. Lately, I feel expressed in my sexuality; I've done lots of deep work in this realm. It's not totally clean: there's some past trauma coming to light that needs devotion and work, but in terms of being present in my sexual experiences, I'm pretty much there. After all, I'm a woman who self-pleasures while thinking about energy and chakras.
Oh, wait ... there is that *one thing.*
You can tell it's a thing, a thing buried deep inside, a thing coupled with shame, when it doesn't even ping into your head when you're asked about your kinks. It scurries to the corner and hides under the bed, escaping the flashlight of your conscious mind.
I have, um, kind of a daddy thing.
Sorry Dad! It's not about you, if you're reading this. But it's for sure about daddy issues.
(Okay, so while editing I realized I started this draft on my dad's birthday. What the holy fuck, unconscious mind?!)
The daddy thing shows up like this: when I'm really turned on by a man fully in his masculine (like when he's fixing something, taking care of me, or working on something he's passionate about), I think the word "daddy," sometimes over and over, and get fully weak in the knees (who knew that was a thing that literally happened?). This happens during sex too, of course, or we wouldn't be here.
The other day after sex, I mentioned my kink to my lover, embarrassed. And his response was a playful, goofy, "Daddy's gonna punish you."
"No." I reacted strongly. "I'm not looking for that daddy." Okay, maybe I'm looking for a few spankings and for gentle direction, but I don't want to be brutalized.
So what daddy am I looking for, if it's not one who tells me I'm a bad girl?
The one who tells me I'm a good girl.
A daddy who's there. One who takes care of me. One who makes sure I'm delighted, nourished, and held. Very, very obviously: the male father figure I didn't really have. One who is in touch with his emotions and has right relationship with his power; one who can hold and cherish a woman and her emotions.
My kink is I'm looking for a lover I can gift with a World's Best Daddy mug and mean it, apparently.
You can get this mug on Etsy. I wonder if NanasBooksbyStacie knew she'd be promoted in this kind of space.
As I type, I realize you could also say I have a kink for the Divine Masculine. That sounds a lot tidier, right? Oh Lynn, you could say, you are hopelessly vanilla and you have no business writing about kinks. Go get your amethyst crystal point, focus on Divine Love, & have another full-body orgasm.
But it's not that tidy. Just the word daddy, out of my lover's lips, is enough to send me into knees-weak, body-shuddering, middle-school-girl-with-a-crush, falling-over, full system meltdown.
And part of this, I'm sure, is from the neural wiring of thinking, over and over as I got closer to orgasm, for years during sex, "Daddy. Daddy. Daddy." Never saying it—or rarely saying it—I didn't want to freak the innocent or even slightly-moral lovers out.
So, now, of course, the very word is orgasmic. It's been charged, manifested, and coupled, kids.
Ah, I don't want to share the edgiest part—of course—but in the spirit of me being who I am, I'm going to share it. It sounds so incestuous without context, it sounds so ... terrible to me when I'm not pushed right up into the fantasy. But here it is (it literally took me four minutes to even type this on the page, as if typing it in a document would blast it onto a neon sign above my head, and force me to carry a Scarlet Alphabet for the rest of my life):
"When daddy cums, baby cums."
Ohgodohgodohgod. I feel a frantic back-peddling in my body and mind. Erase that, everything in my being says. But those are the words. Those are the words my mind goes to, when I'm close to coming during sex. Not every time, not even 10% of the time anymore. But in the most heated, animal moments of non-thought, when I'm so, so close to orgasming with my lover, when I'm obsessed and fixated on his pleasure, when I feel mine climbing, peaking with his ... the words come in, without warning, without asking for consent. But there we are, and it pushes me right over the edge, into the moment where my lover is coming, where I'm coming, where time stops, where my mind explodes, where my body is everything, where we lie and shake in a tangle until we slowly wake to this reality again.
The words disappear into the void, as if they never existed, as if they won't come for me again.
The words are powerful. They are powerful because they are bad. Powerful because they are taboo, coupled with shame. Powerful because they are messy, impure, and totally unutterable.
And now I've brought them into the light: into the immortal sheen of the internet, all tied up to my name with black, silk bondage rope. What will happen now?
What's important for me to remember, as I envision the court of judgment before me (and the one in my own head), is that my fantasy is not incestuous. I've never called my father "daddy;" he's firmly in the Dad camp. I don't imagine my own father, and I don't imagine myself as a baby or as a little girl. This comforts me.
More specifically, this is an archetypal fantasy.
Most children of my generation grew up with divorced parents, with single mothers, with dads that weren't around. They grew up with fathers who were taught that masculinity meant: no matter what, don't show your feelings, that's weak. These men were taught that the measure of being a father was simply putting food on the table and a roof over the head. Mothers were meant to be the caregivers. Plus, this was before having children was really a choice. It was expected of everyone. Don't want kids? Not even an idea you were allowed to ponder.
It makes sense that those of us who longed for a present father, would look for him everywhere.
Daddy, for me, has been an evolution. I first lost myself to it when watching too many James Deen Kink.com porn scenes a few years ago (this was before he was accused of rape; and for many reasons, I don't watch porn anymore). I never got into the heavy punishment on Kink—I mean, I gave it the 'ol college try, but there was a lot that struck me as gross, rapey, and violent—but there was something about the dependency in certain scenes that I loved.
Woman, serving man, on the surface of things. Being submissive, little. Being "punished" when she didn't address him as daddy or sir. The kind of porn I enjoyed was when she was punished with things she actually loved—nipple pinching, spanking, forced orgasm, sex. This didn't read as punishment to me. In fact, it was a subversion of power, a woman playing the game, getting everything she wanted in the end. All the attention, all the focus, all the worship, of a man who was also getting what he wanted.
While that description is absolutely idyllic and there are about 1,000 things wrong with the mainstream porn industry, the way porn treats women, the way we consume porn in our culture, and etc, etc, etc, this doesn't change the fact that I found myself floored by my absolute titillation and turn-on at this dynamic.
Now that I have a spiritual framework for all this, there really is something with the divine masculine and divine feminine at play here. The chaos, the pleasure of the feminine in the "misbehaving" and taking of pleasure at every turn. The attention, attunement, and structure provided by the sacred masculine, as he attends to the feminine's every action and desire.
When it's done right, it's about worship.
I want a daddy who worships me. I want a daddy who is grounded, present, capable. I want a daddy who allows me to play, but reigns me in from time to time. I want a daddy who knows what he wants, with me, with the world, with his purpose. I want a daddy who lets me play and then pulls my hair gently to remind me I'm his.
When I'm with my lover, I sometimes have a hard time turning off the "daddy" in my head. I focus on love, I focus on my heart, I try to move from the splendid charge of the word. I want to be present, right? But he's so fucking divinely masculine. He's present, he worships me, he's creative, always making new ways up to pleasure me. He's strong and always on his haunches, stroking me, figuring me out, opening me. He's everything I want in this dynamic. He takes care of me.
I'm not sure there's a higher sexual compliment than daddy, in my book.
Yet he's not into the word. We all come with word connotations & experiences, that's why the word is so charged with lust for me, so charged with weirdness for him.
How do I reconcile that?
When I read these descriptions of a daddy dom and little girl, my breath actually leaves my body. I gasp. It's so hard hitting, and I'm like, oooh, of course. Of course other women are experiencing this, given that so many of us were raised by distant, disconnected fathers.
Miya Yamanouchi sums up the kink in her article Ladies, This is What You're Actually Doing When You Call Your Boyfriend Daddy,
“Here’s what’s important: trust, devotion, attention, tenderness and unconditional love and support lie at the cornerstone of this deeply psychosexual dynamic...
The payoff for the Little submissive in this alternative relationship dynamic is that she gets spoiled, babied and adored 24/7. She receives all the affection, adoration, support and encouragement a girl of any age could ever want and coupled with an endless source of quasi-paternal love and care.
Meanwhile, the Daddy dominant benefits from having a totally complaint and reliant endearing woman-child forever doting on him, looking up to him, and surrendering herself to him — body, mind, and soul.
— https://thoughtcatalog.com/miya-yamanouchi/2015/04/ladies-this-is-what-you-are-actually-doing-when-you-call-your-boyfriend-daddy/
I can't. I can't even with this. I'm so ridiculously into it. At least, on the fantasy level. I still have a strong attachment to being smart, right, and intellectual, so I'm not sure how the whole lifestyle thing would pan out for me. But as a role playing dynamic that seeps into a relationship ... it sounds so fucking relaxing, doesn't it?
The more awareness I have around my daddy issue, the more I talk about it, the more I bring it into the light, the more I make peace with it. And this is how we heal harmful (or even just annoying) sexual fantasy. We remove the shame by talking it out in safe containers (like with a sexuality coach, therapist, or trusted friend—I wouldn't necessarily recommend my route, the public domain). We remove the shame by playing out the scene with a trusted lover who won't shame us.
Shame only couples with thoughts or self-concepts that we believe we shouldn't dare speak, else we're judged or ostracized.
So do I still experience shame when I talk about the daddy thing, especially the words I mentioned above? Oh hell yeah. It's just beyond what my conscious mind wants to own or deal with. But I have the sneaking suspicion that we all have a thing. Yours might not be the same as mine, but the more we all bring these things up, the more we normalize them. And in this good company, out in the light, the less of a thing they become.
Update: It’s almost two years since I wrote this blog, which was hard to publish. I didn’t even promote the damn thing! But as soon as I made this public, as soon as I cast off one veil of shame … the kink quieted. I can’t remember the last time the words infiltrated my space in a time of turn-on. Because I’m a big believer in both/and (rather than either/or), I don’t doubt that another layer of this kink will arise at some point. I don’t doubt that some person, somewhere, could whisper Daddy to me and send a tingle straight up my spine. For now though, I feel free of it, and thankfully, my sexuality and paths to pleasure continue to grow in different ways, ways that feel more aligned and true to me.