What We Talk About When We Talk About CNC Stigma

BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG. “POLICE DEPARTMENT, OPEN THE DOOR!”

I fly out of my chair so fast I hit my knee on the underside of my desk. The silence that returns from just moments prior now seems deafening, my racing pulse pounding in my ears. I wonder if—and if so, how—our front door is still intact.

My body seemingly set to vibrate, I race down the stairs. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to walk; there is freeze and there is run. I breathe alarmed expletives to myself.

Out our front window, I see the police officers—two large men of color, perhaps in their forties, in uniform and armed.

Feeling helpless to do anything else, I open the door.

I realize that it is not silent anymore—the neighbors’ five dogs are beside themselves at the gate just a few feet from our front door. I can’t hear a word the officers are saying, nor would they hear me if I got anything out. Within a few seconds, they’re pressing past me into the house. I’m already cursing myself for “letting” them in as I shut the door against the dogs behind them so I can maybe hear what’s going on.

They confirm who I am, using my full name. I nod. “And your wife is…?” They give me Mistress’ full name.

I nod, panicked. Immediately, I’m convinced that something horrible has happened to her that these officers are here to inform me of. It doesn’t help that the last time I dealt with cops in this kind of capacity, I’d just found my father’s ten day old corpse in his bed. “Is she okay?” I ask, pressing.

They shrug off this question. “Is anyone else home?”

I don’t like to admit to being home alone, but the correct answer definitely feels like, “No.”

They ask where Mistress is.

I tell them she went out with a friend, by this point suspicious, and purposefully vague, instead of painting the picture that she’s sitting at a friend’s house whose address I should know.

It’s about this time that they finally explain what they’re here for. They use words like domestic violence and abuse and battery is a mandatory arrest and we send two officers because there are two of you and anonymous report from a number in Sydney, Australia and your blog.

So it has finally happened to us. Like it has happened to too many others. When I made it happen to an M/s couple in my fiction novel, it felt like writing a trope. I’ll have to edit that scene now.

“Do you mind if we check if you have any weapons?” one of the officers asks in the same breath. It doesn’t sound much like a question, and the other officer is already poking around the house. I nod for the sake of it. Internally, I survey all of the weapons in the house, trying to figure out if I want to say something—and what—before they get to the dungeon. But the officer who’s poking around returns to where we’re standing just inside the front door without going upstairs to see it.

I also mentally survey my Service Slave Secrets site. I’m confused. Incidentally, I haven’t posted on it in months, focusing on my fiction. My last post was about tea service. No one has checked in on me with concern. I realize I’m laughing. Still shaking, I manage to clearly inform them that I’m not an abuse victim, I’m a kink educator (and author, and homemaker, and other things) in a consensual relationship, which is legal in this jurisdiction. That I’m far more concerned that someone in Sydney I don’t know has stalked me to the point of finding both of our full legal names and address, gone through the trouble to harass us with false police reports, despite my fastidious online privacy practices and making clear in every post that I’m quite happy in my dynamic.

They ask me if I or Mistress have any friends in Australia.

I am still laughing. “No; neither of us have ever been to Australia.”

Any enemies in Australia?

I don’t think, Well, apparently, or We do now, is quite what they’re looking for.

Finally brushing off my questions, they begin with theirs, asking about any recent problems. “Do you argue?”

I pretend to think about this for a second, then say, “No, not really,” casually, because a quick no seems suspicious, even though it’s true. That’s just not how our dynamic works. I watch my body language, keep it open, keep my hands where they can see them. I moderate my expression, my voice, my eye contact—with the same tricks I teach in protocol classes, to make sure I only speak when spoken to, to get all of my daily slave positions just right.

“Does she ever hit you? Slap, kick, anything like that?”

Well, with my consent: yes.

They exchange a look.

Whatever they expected to come here and find, it clearly wasn’t me. Their “suspect” isn’t even here, and I’m batting exceptions at them. They haven’t seen the bloodstained dungeon. They’ve seen a fresh arrangement of flowers in a vase on the large, tablecloth clad dining table, a multitude of soft throw blankets and pillows draped just so over the sectional couches, a neat kitchen station labeled with a chalkboardesque coffee, tea, cocoa sign. Their eyes have skimmed right over some suspicious drywall damage.

“… And she’s never made a report against you or anything like that?”

Interesting. “No.”

“Do you have any injuries?”

Injuries is a big word. Any bruises or cuts or rope marks are always hidden under my ironically conservative slave uniform. I wonder if that’s enough. I’m silent for a second.

“Besides the ones from, maybe, those—consensual activities?”

“No,” I say, more readily.

“How long have you been together?”

“About six years.”

They seem reassured by this.

“Have you ever felt like you were in danger?”

“No.”

They move on. “So, this blog. Were you venting, maybe?”

I explain that I haven’t posted in some time, that the “blog” is more an educational essay collection, that I haven’t said anything negative about our dynamic on it, and always emphasize my consent, my joy and gratitude to be in such a relationship.

They ask to see it.

I think that a link to it has probably already been provided, that it would be suspicious to hide it, that it really is benign. “My laptop’s upstairs.”

They let me go get it, alone. They haven’t looked upstairs at all. I find this to be an odd move. Upstairs, I also look at my abandoned phone. Perhaps I should be recording this conversation, but maybe it’s already too late. Perhaps I should text Mistress, warning her. Instead, I just check that it doesn’t look like she’s on her way home. Maybe I should just bring the officers the two Service Slave Secrets paperbacks from my personal collection of my books. Instead, I close out of everything on my laptop, and open the homepage of Service Slave Secrets. I bring it back downstairs, set it on the ping pong table for them to peruse.

I am, once again, not what they’re expecting. One of the officers reads my tea service post. He jumps around the site a little. There’s our contract, my posts about butler school and lifestyle masochism and ascetic stoicism. There’s one post titled “What Makes Irrevocable Consent Okay?”. One of the comments where it’s crossposted to FetLife says simply: Nothing. Ever. Another comment says that our contract is not worth the paper it is written on. Many of the commenters just tear us apart.

Apparently, the cops disagree. “Thank you,” they say, and turn away from the laptop.

Several of the comments tell me that help is available if I want to run. I think of my fourth ever class, when someone insisted on helping me run away. Well, the “help” is here—and I want nothing more than for them to leave us alone.

They tell me they’re just here to make sure everything is okay, not to scare me.

But this doesn’t seem like how you treat someone you think is a victim.

But someone sent them here to scare me. To shut me up and make me stop saying things like no safewords, no limits, no rights, no way out—and happy. I know this, deep down. Because if someone were for some reason confused and concerned, despite all of my declarations of happiness, they would have asked if I was okay, not tracked me down despite all signs I didn’t want to be found, and sent men with guns to my door.

The cops ask for my ID, for some of Mistress’ information, promising that they won’t come back unless one of us calls. I give it to them. They take their final notes for their report, leave me my ID, and then they’re gone.

Still vibrating almost too much to walk, I pace and resume whispering expletives to myself. Finally, I call Mistress. I tell her what happened, that I’m okay for now, that she doesn’t need to come home.

Yet, it’s not okay.

I am burning with fury and terror. Mistress decides we should keep this quiet (at the time), not wanting to give whoever called the cops the satisfaction of an immediate reaction, not wanting me to have to be quickly reimmersed in it via questionable FetLife comments. I tell my mom and my best friend minutes after I tell Mistress—they’re of course outraged at whoever called; I also tell them I’m shaken but okay. For weeks, we tell only our very inner circle. Eventually, it slips out to a few more friends in person, mostly from TNG munches I host, as a “funny story”.

The first several weeks—months—are the worst, maybe.

I now have a rather silly looking panic attack any time someone even gently knocks or so much as rings the doorbell. I unpack it endlessly in therapy; we discuss exposure therapy options. I wake up gasping from renewed nightmares, settling back down into my blanket on the floor at the foot of the bed when I hear Mistress’ steady breathing in the bed, aided by Seroquel. We lock down even further, finding a leak deep in Mistress’ FetLife activity that may have led to our address, and plugging it. When Mistress critiques my handling of the cops, I have a self harm relapse for the first time in a long time, rinsing the blood down the drain with isopropyl alcohol. I start taking the Klonopin I was prescribed but never touched, and then quickly stop, not wanting to get hooked on the relief it alone seems to offer. My fading PTSD from my father’s death comes back full force.

But, slowly, it fades again. We heal stronger than ever.

It’s been one year today. The anniversary weighs on me.

I’ve just settled in on the swingset in the backyard when my whole body starts to shake, twitch, convulse. Knowing what’s coming, I manage to run back inside—Mistress is upstairs—and get on the ground. The room swims and veers, but I don’t think I pass out this time. I run an ECG with my Apple Watch, although it keeps telling me to stop moving and accidentally pressing the button I have to rest my finger on. The result comes back definitely out of my norm. The seizures have been worse this year. Psychogenic non epileptic seizures traced back to trauma. Within a few minutes, I’m just kind of shaky, mildly woozy. I tell Mistress, and I tell my best friend—mostly just the facts.

But the fact it’s been a year, and I’m still like this—all because some people refuse to try to understand my dynamic—weighs heavily.

My mom comes over for dinner with us, as she does every week. I don’t mention it, protective and not wanting to worry her anew, about me or her favorite daughter in law. But she’s able to spot something off with me from miles away. “You okay?” she asks, rubbing my shoulder. This is what concern looks like. Not flinging baseless accusations from a continent I’ve never set foot on.

“Yeah,” I tell her, smiling weakly. And, quite honestly: “I’m just tired.”