I once passed a story about a woman admirer on to Jake Hale. Jake, a brilliant FTM philosophy professor, was surprised.
“This is exactly the same story as my last relationship,” he told me. Jake was surprised because we come from what might be seen as very different places, he being a tranny fag FTM and me being a transfemme.
What was common in our stories, though, was the admirer. They were both women who knew what they wanted, how to top from the bottom, and, as Carol Queen has noted, do one of the most common things in relationships: try to turn our partner into our own top, the top that doesn’t challenge us but does what we want to do.
I had a mistress who told me she asked her paying subs if they wanted an orgasm. She knew that only the ones who said “whatever you wish” had any real understanding of submission. The rest just wanted to push the responsibility for their own queer heat onto her. Pushy Bottoms.
People rarely come with open eyes, minds and hearts to a relationship. More often they project canned desires onto others, or sometimes just want to consume someone and move on.
I had become a new person;
and those who knew the old person laughed at me.
The only men who behaved sensibly was my tailor:
he took my measure anew every time he saw me,
whilst all the rest went in with their old measurements
and expected them to fit me.
George Bernard Shaw, “Man and Superman”
How do we believe we are desirable when desire is locked into a pattern?
I know, I have experienced, that when people have to tell me how ugly I am, how really ugly I am, that they are not rejecting me, they are rejecting their desire for me.
To flirt is to risk, and to know that all most people see is the surfaces they want to see, whatever that means, changes risk into danger.
Callan 