Cycle I: Coming on Strong
The Hidden Voice
The Record · RFI Three (v2.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan
VOICE ADVISORY: The speaking voice is sexually candid, reflective, and darkly playful. Contains themes of trust, consent, control, bodily embarrassment, and adult sexual dynamics.
For me, thankfully, there are a lot of self-assigned moral guardrails installed inside me.
That’s useful, because it lets me walk right up to the edge of something dangerous without losing sight of what makes crossing it acceptable.
It’s not enough for someone to say:
“I’ll do whatever you wish, Master.”
There needs to be understanding.
There needs to be acceptance.
Not blind following.
Without that, a couple of things can be happening.
The person may be chasing their idea of what they think I can offer them.
I’m not Hall & Oates, so making your dreams come true isn’t on my bucket list.
Or they may not understand enough about what they are agreeing to for the decision to actually belong to them.
I’m not looking to hire legal counsel because YOU couldn’t communicate the difference between this feels amazing and manslaughter.
If someone cannot, with clear understanding, choose to submit themselves to whatever the hell I’m putting down, then I don’t want the submission.
Let me explain with a slightly crude and revealing fetish analogy.
Someone being unable to hold their bladder, for example, does nothing for me.
There is no choice in it. The body has simply taken control away.
There is no decision being made, no boundary being crossed on purpose, no awareness of what is happening followed by the conscious choice to let it happen anyway.
There is no chosen surrender of freedom.
For people who live with conditions where that happens, it can be an unfortunate and difficult reality.
Now…
Take someone like Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke.
Winslet plays Ruth, a young woman being subjected to an attempted deprogramming by Harvey Keitel’s character.
At one point, she strips naked and urinates directly in front of him.
Not because she cannot stop herself.
Because she can.
Because she is making a point.
She deliberately takes something that should make her embarrassed, vulnerable, exposed, or controllable and uses it as proof that none of those things have any authority over her.
She chooses the loss of inhibition.
Which means, paradoxically, she is still the one in control.
Holy Smoke.
That’s hot.
Naturally, he fucks the living shit out of her directly afterward.
The allure is not in simply gaining unauthorized access to someone.
It’s in gaining their understanding, acceptance, and consent.
The psychological connection comes from two people being on the same page:
“Yes, I want this.”
“Yes, I want this too.”
With the clear understanding that afterward, someone is probably going to have to drag out the wet vac and deal with whatever mess both people managed to make of the carpet once things got wet and wild.
If I may step across the fresh stain of that image in your mind, trust has to go both ways.
I need to trust the person not just with me, but with themselves.
They have to be able to communicate well enough that I can actually feel confident when I’m in control.
Imagine trying to fly a plane with a yoke but no instruments.
Try landing one like that and you’ll figure out pretty quickly that it ain’t no joke.
Too high-concept?
Look, even with the best and most innocent intentions, mistakes happen.
Somewhere in life, somebody is usually taking more of the lead than somebody else.
If two people are moving forward together, there has to be some form of communication or you’re going to end up like my first and only set of Sea-Monkeys as a child.
In a sink full of hot water.
Look…
I couldn’t read.
Nobody explained what to do beyond whatever I could make out from the pictures.
They weren’t alive yet, so they weren’t exactly in a position to tell me I was doing it catastrophically wrong.
Anyway, I don’t want to get into that now.
It was pretty traumatic for me.
I’m sure it was traumatic for that particular breed of brine shrimp too, but they didn’t live long enough to have to live with what happened.
Oh shit.
Okay, we need to stop talking about this now.
You know too much.
Let’s just get something to drink and forget about all of this.
Would you like some apple juice?
Companion Track: “Drive” — Incubus
VOICE FEEDBACK: Proof of Agency — Haumea Detected