Kate Kinsey
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The Last Four Hours of Shirley Beck's Life

7/9/2014

13 Comments

 
Something terrible has happened in Clarksville, TN, just up the road. When the threads online started, I was too sick to even comment. I didn’t want to write about it, because what the hell was the point?

But days have passed and I can’t stop thinking about the last four hours of Shirley Beck’s life. 

As I writer, I choose my words carefully, always looking for the best word to convey all the shadings and nuances of my meaning instead of one that is merely adequate.

But we throw around some words so casually that their edges have been blunted. Words like horrified. Disgusted. Disturbed. Sick. Incomprehensible.

Those words are pale and tepid, not nearly heavy enough, not strong enough. Using them to describe what I feel about Shirley Beck’s death is like trying to smash through a plate glass window with a pebble when what I need is a brick.

Shirley Beck, age 39, was a “house slave” to four roommates, one of whom she called “mistress.”

On June 26, three of the roommates beat her to death while the “mistress” watched.

Beck was hung up, gagged, choked and beaten continuously for four hours. Martial art kicks, a bamboo rod, oxygen tubing and a metal pole were among the weapons used on her.

The story only gets worse.

The beating started in the bedroom, but when Beck “leaned” into the television, they moved her to another room because they were worried about the safety of the electronics.

Beck passed out a couple of times, but they thought she was “faking it.”

One of the murderers paused long enough to take photos of Beck, her body battered and broken, hanging from the ceiling. 

Why does this haunt me so much? Because I know that yearning to serve, to be willing to accept pain and even cruelty for the sake of another’s pleasure.

Understand, I’m not really much of a masochist. I suffer in order to please my master, and I know what it is to just keep breathing, trying to endure. To simply hang on through the next blow, and the next, in the knowledge that it will finally end and I will be rewarded with a kiss, a smile, a tender embrace from the master who has never, in all these years, violated my trust.

What keeps tearing at my heart is that Shirley Beck got none of that. She hung there for four hours, just trying to endure. Four hours. There would be no tender caresses or aftercare when it was done. No one would tend her injuries with smiles. No one would say, “I am proud of you.”

She gave her trust to the wrong people. Maybe she went looking for BDSM for all the wrong reasons. But that doesn’t make what happened her to any less tragic. She still wanted to be a good submissive. She wanted to offer her body, heart and mind up in service to someone that valued her.

It breaks my heart.

Her murderers have admitted she asked them to stop. Did they really mean she “asked,” or do they really mean she begged? She must have. What words did she manage between choking sobs and muffled screams of pain?

For Shirley Beck, the suffering just went on and on. I can’t even comprehend that level of pain, the rising panic when it occurred to her that this time they were not going to stop. In the last moments of consciousness, did she realize that, to these people, she was nothing? To die in that kind of anguish, with that sense of betrayal, might have been even worse than the pain.

When tragedy hits in our kinky community, it is almost always an accident born from ignorance, negligence or just blatant stupidity. People just didn’t think. Or maybe they were being as careful as they could be, and fate just fucked them over with some accident no one could have seen coming. It happens, and many of us hope that someone will not be crucified just because the justice system and the vanilla world don’t understand what it is we do.

But this was not negligence or ignorance; this was just brutality. This case is the very worst of what the world thinks we are, and what they believe we do. It doesn’t matter that these people, while known to some of us, were not really a part of our community, and that their behaviors have crossed so far beyond the bounds of decency that we would hardly call them human beings, let alone practitioners of sane, rational and consensual BDSM.

For every person out there who is still carrying the burden of a secret longing, still struggling to figure out what those desires say about them, and what to do about them, this case is a staggering blow.

Yet I am not hoping that this will be forgotten, or knocked out of the news cycle by some new atrocity. People should hear about this. They need to know about this. Will it frighten some people away? Probably.

Maybe some people need to be frightened. If you want to be a submissive, you need to make damned sure you have your head on tight, and that you understand your reasons for being here, and if you ever think for even one moment that you really deserve to be treated like shit, YOU SHOULD NOT PLAY THESE GAMES. When red flags start flying, so should you.

But this case is not really about BDSM or kink. It’s about criminal inhumanity trying to hide under the sheep’s leather clothing, about the bastards who dare to drape their sins in our kinky flag.

Do they lie to themselves, really believing they are one of us? Or do they know that they perpetrate the worst perversion of all? They take the things we have worked so hard to understand about ourselves, all the lessons we have learned and taught, all the trust we have earned and given, and they grind every bit of it into the dirt. And then they piss on it.

When I first heard about this, I was sick at heart. Today, I’m angry. I hope these people are nailed to the wall, that they are punished in every way and to every extent the law allows.

But I just keep thinking about those last four hours of Shirley Beck’s life.


http://www.theleafchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2014307030033&gcheck=1
13 Comments

A Girl Scout Cookie on a Plate of Chocolate Eclairs

7/6/2014

1 Comment

 
PictureIt's a nice picture, isn't it?
One of the things I love about going to events like SouthEast LeatherFest is being able to immerse myself in the kinky community. For that weekend, I am able to completely be myself, without censoring my words or wardrobe or whatever. I am among people who understand not just what makes me wet, but the innermost passion that drives the core of my life.

I can call my lover “Master,” without anyone giving me funny looks. I can nibble his ear, even as his other slave pats his butt, and the majority of the people surrounding us don’t see this as anything weird. They only see an affectionate poly triad.

If I show up at breakfast with bite marks on my neck, the waitress might blink, but if someone at a nearby table even notices it, they just know that I had a grand old time last night. All those people around us, most of them wearing black and looking a little hung-over, don’t mind if they overhear me saying, “I really would like to have the shit beat out of me tonight, Sir.”

I can wear clothes that I rarely get to wear, like my favorite t-shirt from Dark Entry in New Orleans that features a bare-breasted winged woman in fetish gear. I can wear the t-shirt that says, “I only hurt the ones I love, but only if they ask real nice.” I can wear my big silver chain collar with the big heart-shaped lock.

Now, I know I could wear my collar anywhere, really, and I could wear those t-shirts to the mall if I really wanted to, but the fact is, I’d feel weird doing it. I’d feel as if I were pulling up my skirt and showing my panties to the world, because the world just doesn’t get it. The kinky world gets it. They get me.

And yet…

At conventions, there is a part of me that feels just a teeny bit like a Girl Scout cookie on a plate of chocolate éclairs. Just a little outclassed, just a little bit out of place.

Why? Hell if I know, though I have some guesses.

Part of it is that I will always, always, always – deep down in the darkest recesses of my heart – be that painfully shy, chubby, four-eyed adolescent who never felt like she fit in. It doesn’t matter that I was never really the outsider I felt myself to be; that girl is lodged inside me like an ancient splinter. Put me in a large group of people I don't know, and I can feel her shuffling around nervously inside, whispering, “Can we go home now?”

People who know me now never believe this about me. All they see is a rather loud-mouthed attention-whore who is pretty entertaining when she’s not on the downswing of the bipolar rollercoaster.

Another part of it is really very superficial and, well, stupid. I worry about what to wear at these events.

Yeah, I have several corsets in leather and other assorted fabrics, but I can’t stand to wear them for more than an hour. There is a reason women stopped wearing those things, and a reason why only we masochists keep buying them. They are damned uncomfortable.

I have the four-inch stiletto heels and thigh-high boots, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to cripple myself hobbling around in misery until I lose all feeling in my toes. Yeah, fishnet stockings and garter belts are so sexy, but they get so easily twisted and you have to keep pulling them up and trying not to snag them on something….

I’m too old for this shit — not for the fashions, mind you, because I can still rock that look when I choose to —  but too old to put up with that kind of discomfort without a vibrator between my legs. This is true of my wardrobe choices everywhere, all the time, now: fuck vanity, be comfortable. I’d wear pajamas to work if I could get away with it. I’ve thought about doing the whole Little thing just so I could wear flannel PJs and bunny slippers to a play party.

Maybe age is another reason I sometimes feel a little out of place. It doesn’t matter that part of my brain still thinks I’m thirty, the rest of me is fifty-one. I’m old enough to have given birth to many of the attendees. I no longer have the energy or desire to be beaten for hours while strung up like human macramé, and then fuck all night long doing alternate shots of Red Bull and Jagermeister.

While interviewing Laura Antoniou for KinkyCast, the issue of heterosexual insecurity came up. Maybe this is another possible explanation.

I’m straight, damn it. Mostly. I identify as heteroflexible, meaning I prefer dick but I’m not adverse to being fisted by a woman if the chemistry is right.

But I would be so much cooler if I were a lesbian, or at least enthusiastically and sincerely bisexual. At these conventions, what I really want to be is a gay leather man, because then I would truly be one of the cool kids.

Don’t think I don’t know how stupid and possibly offensive this sounds. I will never know the kind of hate, fear and ignorance that gays and lesbians have to fight through to find acceptance, sometimes even in their own hearts. And when they have to add kinky on top of that? That’s gotta be a hard road to walk.

In my own relatively safe little life, it was difficult for me to stand up and say, to myself and my closest friends, “Why, yes, I do like to lick a man’s boots and be used brutally like a cheap whore for his pleasure!” While that may have, at some point, made me question my sanity, or cost me a relationship or two, my sexual orientation and fetishes have never made me fear being beat to death in some alley. I have never feared being openly discriminated against with the kind of malice so often aimed at the gay community in general, and the gay leather community even more so.

There are those among the gay fetish community who say they just don’t take heterosexual kinksters seriously. They say we’ve never had to fight the way they have, that we have not really earned the right to be kinky. Some point to how we can blend in and “pass” as “normal” so much more easily. Our closet is much nicer than theirs. We can marry and breed and adopt and hold hands with our partners in broad daylight without provoking physical violence. Our suicide rates are much lower, too.

I know that not all gay and lesbian kinky folk think this way. Or maybe they do, how the hell would I know? I’ve had a few say it to my face (or to my Fetlife and Facebook accounts), but maybe more have thought the same thing.

I don’t blame them if they do. And that’s the heterosexual insecurity talking, right up there with “white guilt.” I feel deeply and intensely sorrowful about outrages perpetrated on other people that I, purely by virtue of my skin tone and attraction to the opposite sex, have always been exempt from. I just thank God/Fate/the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I’m not a man, because then I’d have to feel like shit over centuries of patriarchal misogyny as well.

Why else are heterosexual kinksters so ridiculously enamored of the Old Guard myths, if not because we want to prove ourselves worthy in a lifestyle where the gay community blazed the trail? No, they didn’t invent BDSM, but they certainly got a jump on the branding.

I find myself thinking some of the same things about the youngsters coming along behind me now. I have been a sick, twisted bitch since about age five, but it took me until my late thirties to get up the courage to go looking for what I had always wanted.

Up until that point, I really thought BDSM was something the porn industry had made up, that real people didn’t actually do any of that stuff. I had more than one person who claimed to love me turn away in disgust when I told them what aroused me.

Being older, I’ve had a lifetime of friendships, family relationships, and a career fossilized in the vanilla world that I now have to balance very carefully with my “secret” life.

Then I look at the “Next Generation.” I look at how easily they can find the community in the first place; BDSM is on the checkout stands at the supermarket, for Christ’s sake, and all over the Internet. They are still at a point in their lives where exploring their sexuality isn’t going to tear a twenty-year marriage apart, or cause them to lose custody of their children. They mostly still work at jobs where tattoos and nose rings and big black leather collars are not necessarily the deal breakers they are for a bank manager in his forties.

Even more so, they simply don’t carry the same amount of Puritan baggage that we older folks do. People talk about sex more now, and there are so many outlets for information that they don’t dwell so long in darkness and self-loathing for being “weird.” They actually embrace weird!

I am so fucking jealous. Oh, if only I had found the community in my twenties. I would have been so awesome. You'd all be hearing the legends about me now.  

Yet all this makes me question whether these youngsters value the community and these experiences as much as we old farts do. They haven’t had to carry that longing and uncertainty for so many years in secrecy. Many simply visit Kinky World as just one stop on their Grand Tour; it’s not even a destination for them.

So many of them don’t seem to grasp the concept of discretion, or the importance of privacy. Most of them don’t need it the way we did and many still do.

I know I’m wrong to judge them. What do I really know of what it’s like to come of age in this world, or of their personal journey? I really don’t want to be that old lady hollering, “You kids, get off my lawn!”

It would really be nice, however, if they didn’t look at me and see their mothers. I'm no soccer mom. I've done stuff. Some really nasty, edgy shit. So there.

Even with all this navel-gazing angst, I still enjoy the conventions enormously. It’s so nice to be the majority for a change.

Then you get in the car for the drive home, and you have to remember that fisting probably isn’t something you should discuss at a Gas-n-Go in Skunk Lick, Tennessee.

Oh, well. There’s always another convention right around the corner.


1 Comment
    Because I'm a whore for the approval of strangers....

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