Davey Davis's Blog, page 7
August 17, 2024
David Davis

Brain: For my last body scan, I wrote about giving up my daily weed habit of many years. I felt as if I was beginning a new chapter. Now I’m not so sure.
My diagnoses of various mental health disorders began in my childhood, so this bad brain stuff isn’t new to me. But last year, it took a new shape with panic attacks that tend to cluster across stretches of weeks or even months at a time; once I have one, I must be careful for the next fortnight, as my baseline anxiety is heightened and my triggers are more sensitive. Since then, air travel—already dreadful, as veterans of the trans-induced pat-down are well aware—has begun to generate its own panic zone, this intense irritability, paranoia, and terror that manifests as a racing heart, the urgent need to urinate (that is, a hyper-awareness of my bladder and genitalia in one of the locations where it’s most stressful to safely access the bathroom), akathisia, derealization, the fear of imminent death (paired, absurdly enough, with suicidal ideation), and a unique strain of dysphoria that makes me feel like Gregor Samsa.
While these acute symptoms define the panic attack itself, its attendant zone can begin days before and end days after my flight, which means my regular anxiety also spikes, intensifying my day-to-day hypochondria and germaphobia, insomnia, suspicion that everyone around me is trying to rape or kill me, blah blah blah—that is, everything I used to manage pretty well with weed since testosterone gave me a reason to live1. Last week, when Jade and I flew together for the first time since early 2023, the contrast was obvious to both of us.
Jade used to joke that I was never allowed to stop smoking weed or doing yoga, as both, along with my pain practice2, have kept the bugs out of my walls for many years at this point. I was proud of my first non-white-knuckling attempt at life without cannabis, as if this highlighted all of the work I’ve done to feel my emotions, regulate my nervous system, and stay in touch with reality. But of course, these things are hard for some people to do even in the best of circumstances—and the “best of circumstances” is still a cursed world in which my life happens to be one of the easiest.
I don’t crave weed in the least, but a couple months into this experiment, I am reconsidering it. This makes me feel very discouraged. But I don’t want to want to die. I don’t want to wonder if Jade, who has never so much as raised her voice to me since the day we met, secretly wants to kill me. I don’t want to be overwhelmed by my hatred of cis people and fear of men. The disadvantages of staying high being as minor as they are compared to these specters, the choice seems easy enough.
But there is something in me that still resists it. Whatever that is—pigheadedness, a problematic desire for the “cleanliness” of sobriety, the self-harming instinct that has always been there since I was just a little redacted—I’m letting it stay my hand for now. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.
Eyes: From April to October, I never go into the sunshine without my sunglasses. When I started hormones, I no longer needed the sensory-numbing accoutrements that I relied on to leave my apartment for so many years: baseball cap, headphones, all-weather dysphoria sweatshirt. But the sunglasses stayed, like Roy Orbison, a big love of mine. When I was a kid, someone told me that Orbison had been blind, but that was just a rumor that began when he was forced to do a concert in his prescription sunglasses after he left his regular ones on a plane3. People dug the mysterious look so much that it became his signature.
When Jade and I arrived in Mexico, we made the forced but nonetheless sensational decision to rent a car. As she got behind the wheel, I quickly braved the midday glare to clean the lenses, squinting like a mole in the white-hot sunlight. My eyes were safely darkened again by the time she pulled out of the parking lot and onto the deserted jungle highway, where, under clouds of ponderous pale butterflies, I waited for my girlfriend, an excellent driver, to crash and kill us both in brutal repudiation for a moment’s inattention.
Forearms: For the first time in my life, I’m getting acne on my forearms. Not a lot, but even a little seems excessive when it’s never appeared before. I take finasteride to keep my hairline, which means even though I’m injecting 40-50 mg of testosterone cypionate every week, I don’t grow a lot of body hair and still get my period (the FTMs of Reddit refer to this as a nonbinary-style approach to transition).
I’m sure this new development has to do with my cycle—the symptoms of which have changed lot, now that I’m no longer on my factory settings—but I don’t track it, so I’m not sure which phase it correlates to. My boyfriend does track it, however, so I’ll have to ask him.
Belly: In the Yucatan Peninsula, those butterflies are everywhere, even the beach, levitating above the surf: white clouds, white wings, white foam, white sand. Though Jade and I apply sunblock more frequently than most—I set an hourly timer when we go to Riis—the water cooked the skin over my torso over the course of a poorly chosen half-hour. Just the front, not the back.
I think I’ve made this mistake every time I’ve gone swimming in a warm ocean, which isn’t that many times, but enough to know better4. Though the burn faded by the next morning, my skin did feel sensitive for a few days. I’ve always tanned easily. My dad used to say it’s because someone in our history was Serbian, a bizarrely specific source of shame for the racists on his side of the family.
Feet: I did it. After years of dithering, I bought my first pair of Crocs. They’re black, with sparkles, and they’re amazing. I don’t want to wear anything else, and for the past few weeks, I haven’t. I can’t wait to pair them with thick, cozy socks when the weather gets cold again.
Reminder that I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of fundraiser for Palestinians trying to survive within Gaza or relocate to safety. Gaza Funds is one place to get started.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
1I have a Xanax prescription that I don’t like to use because boy oh boy is “habit forming” an understatement!
2I think of masochism as part of a larger effort toward mindful embodiment, achieved through practices like yin, meditation, psychoanalysis, and being a person in a community.
3I’ve worn mine at the movie theater when I had no other choice and it was actually so fine.
4Actually, I think the Indian Ocean may be the exception.
August 9, 2024
David Davis: Members Only

I only have three small, stupid tattoos from when I was 20 or 21. These experiments taught me that while the process itself is interesting to me, I’m just not a tattoo person—I dislike making aesthetic decisions, commitment, and spending money. Small as they are, I often think about getting them removed. Maybe I will someday.
I was raised to think of tattoos as either sins (my Boomer dad) or as expressions of self-realization, embodiments of endurance tests that may not have left a physical mark (my Gen X mom)1. Being in various communities that overlap through body modification, I now know a lot of heavily tattooed people who have a different relationship to all that ink: it makes them feel better about their bodies. While I found this surprising at first, I also immediately related to it: bruises make me feel better about my body.
David Davis

I only have three small, stupid tattoos from when I was 20 or 21. These experiments taught me that while the process itself is interesting to me, I’m just not a tattoo person—I dislike making aesthetic decisions, commitment, and spending money. Small as they are, I often think about getting them removed. Maybe I will someday.
I was raised to think of tattoos as either sins (my Boomer dad) or as expressions of self-realization, embodiments of endurance tests that may not have left a physical mark (my Gen X mom)1. Being in various communities that overlap through body modification, I now know a lot of heavily tattooed people who have a different relationship to all that ink: it makes them feel better about their bodies. While I found this surprising at first, I also immediately related to it: bruises make me feel better about my body.
August 6, 2024
David Davis

This weekend, my boyfriend helped me move into my girlfriend’s apartment. I’ve lived with partners before, but swore it off after last time, when I shared a cozy one-bedroom with someone who did not like me—and made sure I knew it—for two years.
“It’s because you didn’t have a room of one’s own,” Liz used to joke, with whom I’ve lived as lover and roommate in a few different permutations over the years. Liz probably invoked Woolf because we talked about her when she and I met in college. Along with Angela Davis’ autobiography, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On Getting By in America, A Room of One’s Own awakened real thinking for me, giving me words and concepts—like patriarchy, white supremacy, and class struggle—to express the political scaffolding of the world I lived in, ultimately shaping how I understood myself as an adult. I became a feminist shortly before meeting Liz, and a dyke shortly after. Classic stuff.
While I no longer strictly identify with feminism or dykery, their afterlives have led me here: to a shared apartment in Brooklyn with Jade, her cat, and a few other gay people. Although I now claim to think it was inevitable, both of us spent the majority of our almost-five years together declaring that we would never do this—live together—because Jade, too, has a dirtbag haunting her misspent youth.
Despite our well-earned distrust of heterosexist notions of family-building, I think Jade and I are handling all this pretty well. We talked about it a lot beforehand: our fears and anxieties, our preferences and hopes, and what the exit strategy would be if we couldn’t make it work. We both certainly stand to gain from this arrangement: less time and effort spent traveling back and forth; cheaper rent (this one’s for me); more manageable distribution of housework (this one’s for Jade, since I work from home); more socialization for her cat, Marcus, whose agita manifests in very annoying early-morning wailing; and more time together in an increasingly fearsome world.
But for all the advantages moving in together presented, I was hung up on the sacrifices it would require, particularly the ones having to do with my privacy, freedom, and various fantasies of independence. Without a mile between us, how would Jade and I negotiate visits from my boyfriend, Nes? Would I feel resentful if I couldn’t host trade whenever I wanted? What if I lost my mind because I couldn’t be completely alone literally whenever I wanted, as I could when I lived by myself?
Notice that these sacrifices only belong to me. I was well aware that Jade would have apprehensions of her own about moving in together, but they didn’t feel real until she laid them out. She isn’t dating someone else currently, but what if she eventually does—would I cramp her style? Would she feel smothered by having someone living and working in her apartment? With me in the adjoining room, when would she have the chance to let her hair down and be a “goblin” ?1 Learning how and why Jade felt protective of her space made me feel less protective of mine. I don’t think I’m a perfect roommate, but I do sometimes forget that not everyone—especially my best friend—is out to get me.
The true tests of this experiment won’t come right away, I don’t think, but it’s safe to say so far, so good. I feel lucky that Jade wants to live with me. Every time I feel vulnerable here, in someone else’s home, I remind myself that it’s just as vulnerable, maybe more so, to invite someone in. I’m not sure I could have done it.
I think Jade likes it, too. Over the past few days, she’s been saying stuff like, “Wow, I can’t believe you really live here!” and, “I should book a session with my old therapist just to tell her.” It’s nice when surprises are pleasant. Sometimes, in the pleasantness, we find that they weren’t even surprises to begin with.
Reminder that I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of the fundraisers featured on Gaza Funds.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
1As far as I can tell, this means eating a snack in bed with a t-shirt on, which Jade and I do together most nights, anyway.
July 27, 2024
David Davis

I read somewhere that the poet Robert Lowell would buy copies of his books to mark up with his red pen. This is the approach I take to DAVID, which I’ve been writing for over four years now. Though unfortunately I can’t delete what’s already been sent to your inbox, I’ve definitely zhuzhed up live posts and even unpublished a few. Because despite my best efforts, I’ve written a lot of crap! Weak theses, tortured sentences, meandering arguments, you name it. (Thank you to everyone who’s stuck it out with me—it can never be said that you weren’t true patrons of the arts.)
Writing well is hard, and I do it very rarely. I know there will always be mistakes and changes of heart; I have accepted that clunkers are a part of my past, and my future, too. And then there are the labor conditions: the compensation I receive for my books, freelance articles, and newsletter is so low that I must subsidize my “career” with a full-time job—which means I am effectively paying to be published. If I didn’t enjoy my work, the humiliation wouldn’t be worth it. But I do enjoy it, and so I wake up every morning, pull my pants on one leg at a time, and get back out there, eager to debase myself once again.
Not to brag, but this attitude has served me well. It’s granted me the ability to accept that my pristine first draft is actually super busted, as my editor will confirm. It’s allowed me to read good reviews with gratitude and bad reviews (and by this I mean everything from bylines to anonymous tweets) with a modicum of grace. As John Waters wrote in one of his books, “Sometimes you learn from a bad review. Sometimes they’re right—a little.” There is a difference between not caring what other people have to say—an easy default for avoidant types—and caring without letting it drive you to suicide (or homicide, whichever is more your style).
I’ve been thinking about this because while revisiting one of my favorite DAVIDs recently, I edited it so much that I almost rewrote it. I could still feel how right it felt when I first wrote it, and yet it was all wrong—abandoned themes, twisted logic, affected phrasing, unsatisfying word repetition and, at the same time, the failure to repeat certain words in a pleasing way. Red pen, red pen, red pen. Now it’s much better, but I suspect I love it less. Having fixed it, am I still proud of the original? Will I be proud of this version when I come back to it in three years? Can I be proud of anything I’ve done? I guess what I’m trying to say is that pride motivates me, but that it also doesn’t really matter.
Reminder that I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of the fundraisers featured on Gaza Funds.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
July 16, 2024
David Davis

Only July 7, the Toronto Star published a statement by Andrea Robin Skinner on the subject of her mother, Canadian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro. Skinner details a long history of horrific neglect by Munro, including her abetting of Skinner’s sexual abuse by her stepfather—Munro’s husband until his death in 2013—the rapist Gerald Fremlin.
I don’t know why I read Skinner’s statement. I avoid reportage on this topic in general, and while I had certainly heard of Munro—who hasn’t?—if I had ever read anything by her before July 7, I didn’t remember it (I’m not a very good literary citizen). Skinner’s words pitched me into such a wrathful despair that I wasted a summer morning wishing I could disinter her mother’s ninety-two-year-old bones and stamp them into powder.
As Skinner’s statement went viral, my rage found more targets, particularly among those who felt the need to diminish or “reckon with” her disclosure: How could Munro, my favorite writer, do this (to me)? Am I allowed to go on enjoying her work, now that I know she chose a child predator over her daughter? And my personal favorite: How can I find a way to carve off pieces of Munro’s guilt and reassign them to the men she collaborated with—Fremlin and Skinner’s own father, who knowingly sent his daughter back to her mother’s home for the rest of her childhood—so as to maintain my fantasies about the maleness of violence?
Seeking some measure of your own moral goodness based on the art you respond to is to misunderstand art itself, but I can’t stop people from doing it. I don’t see the point in discontinuing to read or teach Munro simply because we now know that she was a covert abuser of children. Not even Skinner asked for this:
I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.
With Skinner’s brave revelation, her story is now Munro’s legacy, just as the sins and violations of other artists are theirs. That is the reckoning here, not anything that you or I can do with our phones, wallets, or bookshelves. There are some artists that I can no longer enjoy because I know what they have done; there are others that I continue to enjoy, despite knowing what they have done. This is not uncomplicated for me, nor do I think it should be. But while I believe we ought to consider the writer’s life alongside their work, to approach a situation like Skinner’s with a scale in hand, ready to weigh a human life against a work of art, is among the most depraved things I can imagine.
As Fiona’s mind and memory fail her, her husband, Grant, puts her in assisted living, only to begin losing her to another man. This is the plot of Munro’s 2001 short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which I read for the first time a few days ago. Exploring themes of marriage, desire, and fidelity—of all kinds—Mountain is at first unassuming, then unflinching. It’s beautiful, and terribly sad, and I understand why it’s considered one of Munro’s best1.
I read Mountain because I was curious, not because I was searching for a smoking gun or secret code. It’s just art, even if the artist was, as I maintain, a contemptible person. But I cried reading it, as I cried reading Skinner’s statement. For different reasons, I believed, until I thought about it some more. It’s not that I see myself in these stories, both the real and the fictional (although, for different reasons, I do). It’s that they allow me to see the people behind them. Oh, that’s me, is the beginning of, Oh, that’s you! That is art. At least I hope it is.
Reminder that I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of the fundraisers featured on Gaza Funds.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
1Much of its sadness is, I think, is the unintended result of its being a portrait of straight, white, upper-middle-class monogamy, and the loneliness it creates.
July 14, 2024
David Davis 45, part 4

In Jean Giono’s The Song of the World, men live in rivers, women know the height of trees by their scent, avalanches are personalities, and bulls can speak to humans. There is nothing about this transcendent French novel that feels like fantasy, yet it embeds its characters in the textures of the world around them so deeply and beautifully that everything—the quickening of sap, the hunting of boar, the melting of glaciers, the burning of buildings—has an undeniably magical quality.
If magical rubs you the wrong way, some other words to orient you to this wonderful book might be pagan, primordial, or sybaritic1. To give you a better idea of what I’m talking about, here is part of Giono’s description of the “sparkling season” of winter in the fictional region of Rebeillard:
Daylight no longer came from the sun only, out of a corner of the sky, with each thing carrying its own shadow; light bounded from all parts of the glistening snow and ice, in every direction, and the shadows were thin and sickly, bestrewn with golden dots. It seemed as if the earth had swallowed the sun and was now the sole light-maker.
Or take this autumn rainstorm:
Now they were alone on the road. Flights of dead leaves were swept off by the rain. The woods were being stripped bare. Huge water-polished oaks emerged from the downpour with their gigantic black hands clenched in the rain. The muffled breath of the larch forests; the solemn chant of the fir-groves, whose dark corridors were stirred by the slightest wind; the hiccups of new springs gushing out amidst the pastures; the brooks licking the weeds with their greedy lapping tongues; the creaking of sick trees already bare and slowly cracking in two; the hollow rumbling the big river swelling down below in the shadows of the valley—all spoke of wilderness and solitude. The rain was strong and heavy.
The New York Times Book Review described the medievally modern Song, originally published in 1934, as an epic, “in the true sense of a much-abused word.” The inspiration he took from the Iliad and Walt Whitman is clear2. This gets at the ways in which setting and style provide the scaffolding for a Song’s riveting story: Antonio travels away from his beloved river, and the woman he can’t stop thinking about, to save a friend’s son from a powerful man’s vendetta3. It also gets at the ways in which Song is as much about Antonio as it is every other character, the rivers and forests and towns in which they find themselves, and the time before and after the action takes place.
I think it goes without saying that I recommend this book to you, but I’m writing about it for this series on the sex scene, specifically, because it doesn’t have any. The only lovemaking we see in in Song is brief, metaphorical, and not even entirely human, taking place during a fertility celebration in which a Wicker Man-style effigy is burned in the town square:
A drover had taken a lavender torch. He tucked up the skirts of the mother of wheat. He began to make love to her underneath with his blazing torch, and suddenly she took fire.
When they’re not tasked with advancing the plot, sex scenes are often relied upon to create eroticism, but Giono accomplishes this with a cast characters whose lives, while at times violent or precarious, foreground the sensuality of human (and interspecies) relations. Antonio enjoys stroking his own “velvety” body, feeling the muscles, bones, and scars under his fingers; women characters travel alone, breastfeed, give birth, have autonomy over their sex lives, and spend time with men without fearing for their safety—even while nude, as in a scene where Antonio and his friend come upon a barnful of men and women partaking in a kind of sauna situation; and violence, injury, illness, dying, and death are neither avoided nor fetishized, but experienced as natural and inevitable, if also terrible, confusing, and frightening.
I don’t mean to say that suffering or patriarchy are prerequisites for the sex scene. But I do mean to say that the sex scene is often rendered and understood as distinct from real life in literature and on the screen4. Song is different. Its sensual world of purpose, desire, and connection is so lush on the page that, as much as I love a good sex scene, I don’t miss it here at all.
Reminder that I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of the fundraisers featured on Gaza Funds.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
1I have not seen the Marcel Camus film on which The Song of the World is based (see image up top), but the screenshots I’m finding bring to mind Old/New Hollywood bridges Dr. Zhivago (1965) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972).
2Other comparisons I would make, some contemporary, some not: William Faulkner (/McCarthy), Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ernest Hemingway.
3In light of a very long and intense jacket quote from Giono, a famous pacifist who was twice imprisoned (though not charged) as a Nazi sympathizer, I found myself second-guessing that effect. Here’s some of the quote:
“I have tried to make a story of adventure in which there should be absolutely nothing ‘timely.’ The present time disgusts me, even to describe…At this very time when Paris flourishes—and that is nothing to be proud of—there are people in the world who know nothing of the horrible mediocrity into which civilization, philosophers, public speakers and gossips have plunged the human race. Men who are healthy, clean and strong. They live their lives of adventure. They alone know the world’s joy and sorrow.”
It’s giving reactionary! But I know little about this author, and his Wikipedia page is spare. An interesting complication, at any rate.
4And for this we can thank patriarchy, specifically censorship, but certainly in other expressions, too.
July 9, 2024
David Davis 45, part 3

Back in January, I began writing a series on the sex scene, which was promptly sidelined after I began another series on how to vet sadists, dominants, and tops. I don’t like to work out of order (though though two series did have some overlap), but hey—when the spirit calls, you gotta listen.
With my vetting guide finally complete, I can now return to writing about how sex onscreen and in literature is not just accomplished by the artists, but received by the audience. Which isn’t to say that the sex scene has ever lost my attention—I’m into it, famously! But my memory did have to be jogged, and by a surprising bit of media: Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which came out last year to what Wikipedia is telling me was critical acclaim1.
Acclaimed or not, I agree with the reviewer for Bright Wall, Dark Room, who found Hit Man—the story of romantic loser falling in love with a suspect while on duty as a Mrs. Doubtfire-style sting operator for the NOPD—to be thematically noncommittal, poorly written (in terms of dialogue), and badly lit, a tragedy considering the extreme physical beauty of its stars. Though leading man Glen Powell is undeniably charismatic, he has yet to live up his dynamite turn as ur-bro Chad Radwell in Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens, much less to the Tom Cruise comparisons, which I maintain are the collision of proximity with the lack of a clear heir to His Impossibleness, who turned 62 this week.
Indeed, Powell’s sexual chemistry with love interest Adria Arjona is one of Hit Man’s few strengths, which I bring up because—shocker—it’s on display in more than one halfway decent sex scene, which is all the more remarkable in a movie that’s too politically wishy-washy to even be called conservative.

Now, I don’t recall either actor revealing anything in the bathing-suit zone, and there’s definitely nothing sexually outré, other than the implication of cunnilingus, which depending on your moral panic can definitely pose a problem for us sex scene absolutists. But neither is Hit Man cutting away at the kiss, compartmentalizing sexual content to be cut for international markets (at least, I don’t think it is), or compensating for its relative sexual laxity by throwing in a real pervert for the shock value, though it certainly had the opportunity to, what with Powell’s extended dress-up scenes just begging for a read from one of these gender academics.
As dull as I found it, Hit Man is, or at least aspires to be, a movie for grown-ups, engaging with grown-up preoccupations—like workplace ethics and identity—and depicting grown-up activities—like police entrapment and extramarital sex. And I guess that’s something, isn’t it? Neither particularly reactionary nor aspiring to the vanguard, its refusal to say or do anything is almost refreshing in its nothingness. While failing to deliver on its marketing as a sexy, rompy, throwback to the action movies I grew up on, the ones that Trojan horsed romance with guns, titties, and light patriotism, Hit Man’s absence was so comforting that it almost pushed it over the finish line, anyway. There’s no there there, but isn’t that what we’re getting out of the elevated binge fodder of The Bear and Brat and whatever else we’re using to distract ourselves from everything?
Reminder that I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of the fundraisers featured on Gaza Funds.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
1Not to be confused with the Plasmatics song.
July 2, 2024
David Davis

Hair: I bleach it myself about two times per month. Professional bleaching is a luxury expense, but if you know how to do it, it’s really cheap and not so difficult. I don’t know what I would do if I wanted long hair, though—my process would absolutely wreck it, Olaplex or not. Luckily for me, I knew from the age of 18 that I would never grow it out again. Right now I’m getting it cut by either this dyke barber around the corner, or by my boyfriend, also about two times per month.
Head: After many years of daily cannabis use (primarily edibles, because I hate coughing), I stopped entirely about two weeks ago, save a puff off Jade’s joint to come down from some Pride drugs. I think it’s because my siblings came to visit me in New York last month, and while they were here I found myself wanting to use it it like I did when I visited them at my mom’s home, an experience that required complete dissociation for me to survive without committing assault. While I was happy to see them, I was also nervous; I wanted to eat so much weed that I wouldn’t have to hear or speak or think. But I resisted the impulse and enjoyed their company instead, and I’m glad I did. After that, stopping just sort of happened, though I miss it during certain transitional times: clocking off work, driving to Riis. But socializing without it is actually easier, and I’ve begun to dream again, every night.
Shoulders: After Charlotte Shane recommended Rolfing in one of her Instagram stories, I had an intake with a provider for my chronic shoulder pain, which has come and gone for several years. We talked about how scar tissue from top surgery (which I had twice, due to a botched procedure that was one of the most traumatizing events of my life) has likely affected the alignment of my body1 . Scar tissue is amazing, the provider said. It holds our body together for us after trauma. But it’s also rigid by design, so we often need help helping our bodies resettle. I haven’t gone yet, because after our intake, the current wave of pain suddenly went away, as it occasionally does. I guess I’ll wait for it to come back before I try again.
Stomach: I’ve only had coffee so far today, but I’ve been eating a lot big, beautiful salads on account of the hot weather, and plan on having another for lunch. Lately I’ve been making this vegan Caeser dressing, which really does just take five minutes. If I don’t have hummus on hand, I just use chickpeas, or some other canned white bean. Red cabbage and some greens or herbs (arugula or cilantro or dill, usually), carrots, cherry tomatoes, and pepitas or peanuts or walnuts if they’re handy. Since I didn’t eat breakfast today, I’ll probably throw some grilled tofu in there for protein.
Ass: I used to run. Now that I’ve accepted that it’s pretty bad for you—especially if you’ve been doing it for one hundred years, like I have—I’ve replaced it with yoga and calisthenics. Years ago, I read an interview with Dita Von Teese, who said her exercise routine was walking and jumping on a trampoline, and that’s kind of my vibe these days, tbh. That being said, though having a boy butt is endlessly pleasing to me, I’ve been trying to juice it up with squats. There’s no need for another essay on the pressures to be “fit,” in particular for people on the transmasculine side of things, but I no longer feel as if I must be buff or shredded to be okay. I don’t think we should look to cis people to feel at home in our bodies, but I don’t think we shouldn’t, either, if that makes sense; my working definition of gender is that it is the people you want to be like, and the gender I want to be includes both cis and trans people. I notice fem cis gay men whose proportions and muscle/fat distributions are similar to mine, thanks to testosterone, and that makes me feel good. I lost my entire family (other than three of my siblings) and blew up my life to look like a soyboy—and I fucking like it!
Feet: No body is symmetrical, but my right foot is significantly bigger than my left, which means buying shoes is a total bitch. All my digits are uncommonly long, which means my fingers have an elegant, Rachmaninovian wingspan, but it also means that my toes are freakish in length (you win some, you lose some), another annoying consideration. I’ve been wondering if I should just bite the bullet and become one of those people who buys their shoes in different sizes, but I just can’t bring myself to do it yet. Maybe someday.
Reminder that I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of the fundraisers featured on Gaza Funds.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
1I was raised Evangelical, so chiropractic was a big part of my life growing up. Don’t worry, I know it’s hooey.
June 23, 2024
David Davis 46, part 9

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8.
As leathersexuals, nonverbal communication is one of our legacies. Like other subcultures, leather and its littermate, queerness—both formulations that predate postwar America, but hit their modern strides in the decades following WWII—have relied upon this kind of discretion for many years. Hankies, uniforms, materials (like leather), and other high signs were technologies of safety, and not just on the street: communication when words are not available, or even possible, is highly normalized in leather, particularly during scenes1.
Nevertheless, most of us rely heavily on verbal communication to get the job done. Prior to playing, we negotiate with our words to identify when we have consent and when we don’t, a practice that protects us, our play partners, and our community. Because I don’t want to smother, drown, or find myself chained to the bed when the apartment catches fire, my SDATs and I talk about how we can both get what we want out of our scene while minimizing the risks our desires present to all involved (and even to those who aren’t).
I know many players who seem to be able to speak about what they want with ease. While I don’t share this ease, I do think it lends itself to the act of bottoming, the role often interpreted and textured as wanting [more], needing [correction], or requiring [discipline]. It’s our bodies, after all, that are being used, experimented on, and even transformed, and our active participation in that is normalized erotically and practically. While I know many SDATs who have no problem speaking about what they want to do to their bottoms, I have noticed that the proposition of speaking about what they want done to or for themselves can be challenging for some of them.
While I’ll be focusing on SDATs for the purposes of this post, whether top, bottom, or switch, many of us share this aversion to admitting: I want this. I aspire to that. I crave the other. This is no moral failing, but it can complicate things, and complications at our level of play can often open us up to risk. Not just risk of harm, but of dissatisfaction. We flout norms, laws, decency, and even safety to do what we do—shouldn’t we at least be getting what we want in the process?
I mentioned above that verbal negotiation is how we, as leathersexuals, commonly give and gain consent for play—how we as a community exercise our own agency without violating that of other people. In Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, Avgi Saketopoulou makes a provocative case for a new way of understanding and approaching this process2. Affirmative consent (also known as enthusiastic consent), writes Saketopoulou, “understands consent as issuing from a subject who is fully transparent to themselves and who, in thinking consciously and deciding rationally, can anticipate the probable effects of their consent.” We engage with affirmative consent with the goal of “fostering mutually satisfying experiences in adult sexual encounters.” For example: during our sober, undistracted, power-neutral negotiation, I grant consent to my SDAT to beat me with a cane until I cry, with the expectation that we both come away from the egalitarian experience with some degree of satisfaction.
But as Saketopoulou points out, “One never knows what one signs up for and what one will get until after the fact, however carefully, dutifully, or earnestly one communicates.” Viewed in this way, affirmative consent is a kind of wishful thinking: the idea that we can guarantee the future by virtue of knowing our desires in the present. She proposes an alternative with what she calls “limit consent,”3 which does not “center on (re)producing an experience of satisfaction but, instead, works to facilitate novelty and surprise.” Limit consent does not presume to know how we will leave any encounter or experience; rather, it “hinges on not respecting limits but on their ethical transgression.” And what is consensual sadomasochism but the ethical transgression of limits? What if we are looking for something more interesting than the assurance of satisfaction? What if we are willing to acknowledge that power exchange between equals does not exist, and attempt it anyway? What if we are looking to take some fucking risks with and for each other?
One of the things I love about Saketopoulou’s limit consent is that it takes into account the risks undertaken by the SDAT in any scenario of power exchange. Readers may already be familiar with my evergreen rant about “where” the power goes during these exchanges. Is it “really” with the SDAT, the person running the fuck (a common misapprehension, especially among those outside the community)? Or is it “really” with the masochist, submissive, or bottom, the person with whom the buck is supposed to stop (the reactionary stance of thoughtless perverts everywhere)? Both make my blood boil. We share the power while fetishizing the unavoidable disparities inherent to our connection! I shriek from the rooftops. Enter limit consent, which “centers, rather, on surrendering to another,” on both sides: on the part of the bottom, who offers up their body and cedes their control, and on the part of the SDAT, too, who not only assumes responsibility for that body, but “allows [themself] to be taken over by an internal force that [they] cannot fully control.” There is risk in controlled suffering, just as there is risk in controlling that suffering. Sketching out a hypothetical rape roleplay scenario, Saketopoulou writes that the top will have to “engage with the rousing of her sadism to let it flow, while also keeping some relative check on it.”
I’m not recommending throwing away the baby with the bathwater by dropping negotiation as we know it, but rather augmenting your process with deeper consideration of what you want, what outcomes might be acceptable, and what could be gained from a more holistic conception of risk. In any case, Saketopoulou’s recognition of the “complex,” rather than “dichotomous,” distribution of power and responsibility in any dynamic resonated with me tremendously. And while I don’t know for sure, I suspect she would agree with me that safer play happens because all parties work toward it by building intimacy in and out of scene, something which only happens when we are both brave enough to be vulnerable and wise enough to be aware that true vulnerability requires the support of our lovers, friends, play partners, and community.
Back to our SDATs. As I wrote last time, safer sadists, dominants, and tops talk about what they want. Why does this matter? To answer this question, we’ll first need to interrogate wanting, starting with this: why would anyone conceal their desires, especially within leather, with our watchwords of fantasy and freedom and fuck?
Desire is inextricable not only from the unrealized, and even the unimagined, but from that which is excruciatingly known. In permitting us to indulge in what we don’t or shouldn’t want, leather shows us, with great tenderness, that we can never hide from what we do want. I’m a germaphobe who licks dirty boots. I’m a prude who wants to get fucked. I’m a masochist who is terrified of pain. Admitting my desires reveals my weaknesses, shortcomings, fears, failures, and needs4. (I have found it helpful to conceive of desire as a field of preoccupations, including things that I both do and don’t want.) As much as they’d like to think of themselves as vampires, SDATs aren’t immune to this mirror: they, too, have a reflection.
What do you want? I feel a deep empathy for anyone who, when confronted with this simple question, responds with irritability, confusion, anger, numbness, or nothing; whose first instinct is to turn away, fight, change the subject, or cause a distraction. To admit what you want is to expose yourself, which is to say that it builds intimacy with a receptive audience: it is worthwhile, but challenging, especially if you’re not in the habit of doing it because of your upbringing, trauma history, or lack of experience, in that you haven’t yet learned that the benefits of connection far outweigh the risks.
I don’t know that concealing desire is easier for SDATs than for anyone else in leather, but those of us in community know that SDATs are often caretakers in and outside of scene, accustomed to and skilled at putting others before themselves, sometimes to their own detriment. At its best, leather corrects for this by creating an alternative infrastructure for vulnerability—a means to give and to accept care that may not be readily apparent to outsiders. Service bottoms provide their tops with a safer framework for accepting help; pain sluts allow their sadists to exercise (and exorcise) genuine feelings otherwise repressed for the happiness, safety, and agency of others; fetishists of dehumanization offer their dominants new opportunities for connection when eye contact, physical touch, or “normal” sex are unpleasant or even impossible.
Little story for you: an elder femdom friend of mine used to go off when people at play parties would degrade or harm her submissives without first asking for their permission, let alone hers5. Their violation of etiquette betrayed an entitled ignorance of what we’re all doing here, which she corrected immediately and without mercy6. “I treasure my subs,” the femdom would tell the rube in question, towering in her heels. “I am here to protect their happiness and safety.” Even if parenting, nurturing, or “care” is not part of the dynamic, SDATs assume a sacred responsibility for their bottoms, even if it’s just for the space of a scene, no matter how challenging the activity or cruel the pageantry.
Unfortunately, not every SDAT is like my femdom friend. Some hide behind our shared fetishes for violence and degradation, perverting perversion to express a very real malevolence or disregard for other people; one of these assholes is why I started writing this series in the first place. Others—more common, in my experience—hide behind their own propensity for caretaking: my bottoms have needs, not me. If I fulfill those needs, then I have fulfilled my responsibility as a top. They abandon themselves in leather as they were trained to do in their vanilla relationships, a tragic turn of events that all too many of us can relate to on some level.
If we’re not intentional in how we build our leather communities, we enable SDATs who harm others or themselves in these ways and others. But this is not inevitable! My advice to you, as I end the final post of this long series, is to add this question to your vetting toolkit, one you can utilize throughout your relationships, and not just at the beginning: Is your SDAT using play to connect with you, or using you to dissociate from themself?
I can’t believe this series is done! Thank you for joining me on this journey. Many of the other posts are locked, so I’ll remind you that I’ll give you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of the fundraisers featured on Gaza Funds.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
1I don’t personally know any leatherfolk who are Deaf, have mutism, or don’t speak for other reasons. If anyone has any articles or books to share about these experiences (written by those who experience them), I’d love for you to send them my way.
2Yes, I know I keep mentioning this book!
3Saketopoulou calls it “limit consent” because, “unlike affirmative consent, [it] is predicated not on setting and observing limits but on…initiating—and…responding to—an invitation to transgress them.”
4Isn’t it interesting that I include needs in this list of negatives without a second thought?
5Obviously they were usually straight.
6“Kinky” and “in leather” are not synonyms! My culture is not your costume, Mary!
Davey Davis's Blog
- Davey Davis's profile
- 52 followers
