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Tearing paper, self hatred, and consensual violence in A Real Game and Kirigami Dominatrix Simulator
(I'm not going to be particularly explicit or personal in this essay, but it does talking about self hatred, body dysphoria, and kinky sex. So if you don't want to read that, don't read this.)
Paper folding and tearing is a regular motif in +Caitlynn Belle's games. I first came across it in Kirigami Dominatrix Simulator (KDS) where you simulate kinky sex acts by folding, tearing, and puncturing a sheet of paper, with tearing and puncturing being obvious metaphors for fairly violent sexual acts. To be clear: all of the sex in KDS is mutually consensual and positive for both / all parties. But it's also representing some fairly taboo, physically violent actions.
(This is an utterly brilliant design, by the way. if I ever need to role-play sex in a game, I am going to steal this technique and use it.)
So, going into A Real Game (ARG), that is how I understood the function of paper tearing.
And then A Real Game, in a fit of self loathing and textual dysphoria, asks me to tearing, stab, and fold it. And I paused. Because it seemed to me that this was very clearly an externalization of self-harm, and I didn't know if I wanted to participate in that or not. I didn't know if I trust the game (hahah I know, right, but the game does a very good job of establishing itself as a character) to know what reasonable limits were, or to not hate or blame me afterward.
And so, of course, I thought about kink.
The kink world is often portrayed like KDS: a bunch of happy, well-adjusted people who just so happen to have these particular deviant / fucked up sexual desires, and want to practice them in an ethical way with mutually respecting partners. And, while the kink world contains the same bullshit as any social circle, this is not a particularly unreasonable presentation. But it's also a very surface level presentation.
For some people, of course, that really is what it is. But for a lot of people, kink is a place where they are expressing their anger at themselves or at others, their hatred of their body or the bodies of others, their relationship to messed up gender power dynamics, their powerlessness and self loathing and impulses towards self-harm. This isn't a bad thing. In fact it can be a really good thing: it can be cathartic and healing. But it can also be re-opening or aggravating those wounds, or an excuse towards self-harm using others as the conduit.
I don't know whether the consensual violence in ARG is healthy or unhealthy (and, of course, the game is a fictional character and not a real person). But it certainly throws some scary flags, and it lifts the veil towards some of the other stuff that's going on in the context of kink, not part of the shiny happy outward projected image, but (what is for some people) the psychological core.
One of the most important things is that it gets away from the idea that the only thing that can go wrong with kink (or sex) is that it's non-consensual. Often we end up fencing ourselves into a libertarian ideological corner of "if there's consent it is necessarily okay." But people can make consensual mistakes, and can hurt themselves or others very badly in the process. The (paper based) violence in ARG is clearly consensual. The page itself is literally asking you to do it. But that doesn't necessarily mean its okay, and it doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do, emotionally or personally.
That's really cool to see in a piece of media. It's critical in a real sense, unlike "kink critical" texts which are largely about dismissing kink as depraved or evil. In the context of KDS (and also Orgy in the Fens, which uses the paper-folding technique for sex), ARG's consensual violence raises the actual questions, difficulties, and rewards that (at least in my experience) come along with kink as a practice.
(I'm not going to be particularly explicit or personal in this essay, but it does talking about self hatred, body dysphoria, and kinky sex. So if you don't want to read that, don't read this.)
Paper folding and tearing is a regular motif in +Caitlynn Belle's games. I first came across it in Kirigami Dominatrix Simulator (KDS) where you simulate kinky sex acts by folding, tearing, and puncturing a sheet of paper, with tearing and puncturing being obvious metaphors for fairly violent sexual acts. To be clear: all of the sex in KDS is mutually consensual and positive for both / all parties. But it's also representing some fairly taboo, physically violent actions.
(This is an utterly brilliant design, by the way. if I ever need to role-play sex in a game, I am going to steal this technique and use it.)
So, going into A Real Game (ARG), that is how I understood the function of paper tearing.
And then A Real Game, in a fit of self loathing and textual dysphoria, asks me to tearing, stab, and fold it. And I paused. Because it seemed to me that this was very clearly an externalization of self-harm, and I didn't know if I wanted to participate in that or not. I didn't know if I trust the game (hahah I know, right, but the game does a very good job of establishing itself as a character) to know what reasonable limits were, or to not hate or blame me afterward.
And so, of course, I thought about kink.
The kink world is often portrayed like KDS: a bunch of happy, well-adjusted people who just so happen to have these particular deviant / fucked up sexual desires, and want to practice them in an ethical way with mutually respecting partners. And, while the kink world contains the same bullshit as any social circle, this is not a particularly unreasonable presentation. But it's also a very surface level presentation.
For some people, of course, that really is what it is. But for a lot of people, kink is a place where they are expressing their anger at themselves or at others, their hatred of their body or the bodies of others, their relationship to messed up gender power dynamics, their powerlessness and self loathing and impulses towards self-harm. This isn't a bad thing. In fact it can be a really good thing: it can be cathartic and healing. But it can also be re-opening or aggravating those wounds, or an excuse towards self-harm using others as the conduit.
I don't know whether the consensual violence in ARG is healthy or unhealthy (and, of course, the game is a fictional character and not a real person). But it certainly throws some scary flags, and it lifts the veil towards some of the other stuff that's going on in the context of kink, not part of the shiny happy outward projected image, but (what is for some people) the psychological core.
One of the most important things is that it gets away from the idea that the only thing that can go wrong with kink (or sex) is that it's non-consensual. Often we end up fencing ourselves into a libertarian ideological corner of "if there's consent it is necessarily okay." But people can make consensual mistakes, and can hurt themselves or others very badly in the process. The (paper based) violence in ARG is clearly consensual. The page itself is literally asking you to do it. But that doesn't necessarily mean its okay, and it doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do, emotionally or personally.
That's really cool to see in a piece of media. It's critical in a real sense, unlike "kink critical" texts which are largely about dismissing kink as depraved or evil. In the context of KDS (and also Orgy in the Fens, which uses the paper-folding technique for sex), ARG's consensual violence raises the actual questions, difficulties, and rewards that (at least in my experience) come along with kink as a practice.
