supplicium post mortem

Not cunt. I have no problem with cunt as a bit of anatomy. The c-word I can’t stand is the one with nine letters starting with c and ending in y.

Community.

This word acts like smelling salts on me. Possibly I am scarred by too much time in Quaker environments, but whenever people start talking about Community, or about The (Something) Community, I feel sure that a lot of sentimentality, censoriousness, and identity politics is headed my way.

But I can’t seem to find a better word to describe what I was hauled into over the last couple of weeks.

I’m sure readers of this blog all read The Spanking Writers, the only daily non-pro spanking blog on the internet (to my knowledge). So you will all have read in March about the anthology of spanking stories they are putting together. I was flattered last winter to be asked to contribute. I was less enthused last week as the deadline approached.

Why did I agree to this project? I wondered gloomily. I almost passed on it in the first place, because I am busy, because my desire to write about kink has basically shriveled up and died, because I have begun to feel I just write the same thing over and over, and who wants to hear it anymore? But then I had a chat with myself. Self, I said, you are a writer and you propose to turn down publication because you feel ambivalent about kink and because you are busy? Writers don’t do that, self. Get real! So in the end I said yes to Abel and Haron and promised to have a story to them by the deadline, June 30.

Over the last few weeks, the subject of SW stories began to turn up in my twitter timeline. Other people were working on them, too. Other people were chasing this deadline. Other people thought their stories sucked. I wasn’t alone.

Add to this the fact that my story had been inspired by my visit to the Trinity College Library with Emma Jane in January. Add also the fact that Serenity offered to trade edits with me, and with her comments gave my story the structural sorting-out it so desperately needed. Add the excitement trickling into the Twitter feed as people got previews of each other’s pieces. Finally it dawned on me: this was a community activity, and I was having fun.

I know, alert the media.

So when I say I was hauled into the c-word, I mean that Haron and Abel, with their project, initiated the best of community building. They set people a task and let people get on with it. And even I—the girl who loves the sidelines, who has lost interest in blogging, who feels the deepest ambivalence about spanking, tgi, kink, and life itself—even I found myself engaged, boosted, enjoying trading stories, agonizing about deadlines, moaning about process, and knowing that Abel and Haron were reading our pieces and putting them all together almost as if we were part of a class, or a team, or a…

The word still sticks in my craw, but the thing itself is a blessing. So thanks to Abel and Haron, and to everyone else taking part. Sometimes you just need hauling into things.