In which I show my true colors

[Note: for those of you who watch Lost and haven’t yet reached the Season 5 episode “He’s Our You” – SPOILER ALERT – READ NO FURTHER!]

I’ve mentioned in this space before that I have a thing for interrogation scenes, and that that fact scares me a bit. In fact, the more I’ve gotten into them, the more uncomfortable watching them on TV is, and I’m not sure if it’s discomfort in a good or a bad way.

But last night I was just delighted to watch an episode of Lost in which the always-yummy Sayid gets shackled to a tree and fed a truth serum. What starts out as something really frightening quickly turns into something almost goofy: they don’t beat Sayid or even treat him all that roughly, though there’s a marvelous physical reference to the way Sayid tortured Sawyer in the first season, when the leader of the Dharma Initiative pulls out a pair of shears to cut Sayid’s handcuffs off. (“Put out your hands,” he says, and the alert viewer recalls the way Sayid put that same instrument around Sawyer’s finger and threatened to snip it off.)

Instead the interrogator – the magnificent William Sanderson of Blade Runner fame – tells the others to open Sayid’s mouth, and puts in a sugar cube onto which he’s dropped some kind of drug. Sayid’s resultant confession is wide-eyed, soft, and reminiscent of someone on Ecstasy. “I come from the FUTURE!”

Oh, how awesome. I definitely have some guilt at times for enjoying those kinds of scenes, but I feel a bit let off the hook when they turn out like this.

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Dorothy, we’re not in Guantanamo anymore…

It has not escaped my notice that I have a hot spot for interrogation scenes. Okay, maybe a wet spot would be more accurate. But there’s a mystery to it for me. While I admit to enjoying the rush of power that comes from hurting someone until they break, the place I more often imagine myself in is the role of the break-ee.

I read this post and its follow-up from Miss Calico and found myself alternately disturbed and aroused. (I sense a new title for this blog coming.) I sent the links to my go-to man for such things, knowing he would get off on it, even as I squirmed with it, even as her words kept rising in my throat like a sickness.

I was not having fun…this was a big mistake…I would rather be somewhere (oh god, anywhere) else – I knew these feelings, and knew, too, the anticipation and memory that bookend and feed those experiences. The amount of pain described sounded horrible to me; I was turned off by what seemed to be the top’s total insensitivity to where she was in her pain, even as I could feel that tension in her words, the place where this was exactly what she wanted even while she was hating it. There is a place of terror for me in all of this: that place where I’m silenced by my pain, and by my pride: where I’ll do anything for my top except surrender. That level of sadism – and masochism – is somewhat frightening to me, even as I somewhat understand it.

Yet I can’t stop looking at the posts, can’t stop picking that scab today. What fascinates me so about this type of play, this place where I’m tied down and begging, and nothing I say will make him stop?

This part moved me in particular:

“I clung to the paternalism in his address. I wanted to be his good little girl. If he was getting off on using his little girl, it wasn’t meaningless torture: he wasn’t going to kill me and dump my body behind the woodshed. Probably.”

I’ve been turned on before by someone telling me how easily he could kill me. Hell, I’ve turned it around and used it to make someone else come. The idea of someone having that kind of power over me, the intimacy of death, so close to sex, his body pinning mine, huge hands crushing my throat as he pierces me with his eyes, his cock…yeah, it gets me hot, the idea.

But there’s a line here, and I’m struggling to figure out where it is. Something to do with the lack of intimacy, the pulling back from it. The coldness in the torturer, who begins to make me believe that he no longer cares, that I’m just another victim to him. Some people fantasize about being tortured, raped and abandoned on the side of the road. I am not one of those people. No, I fantasize about being tortured, raped, and then rocked back to regular consciousness with cuddling and soothing words.

Maybe that makes me some kind of kink wimp, I don’t know.

A commenter on the post had this question: “Do you ever fear that you will go to that ‘it was a long way back’ place and not return? Or return but be changed?”

I like to think that I have a strong mind; I think that’s part of what perversely (how else) attracts me to this type of scene. I want to know how much I can take. I want to know how far I can go. But to what end?

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