Performative Cruelty

If you only know me online, you probably have a different perception of me than the people I have met in real life.

I have intermittent explosive disorder. Sometimes it expresses itself in physical ways and sometimes it manifests in more verbal ways. It’s defined by short bursts of anger inappropriate to the severity of the situation. It’s kind of like a tic. Except I can be compulsively mean.

It’s ruined many aspects of my life. There were never really any solid treatments for it while I was growing up, so a lot of people just thought I should be nicer or something. Or that I was straight up being intentionally abusive.

Why are you always upset? They’d ask. I don’t know. I don’t *feel* upset. I just *sound* upset.

After burning enough bridges and sabotaging most of my relationships, I decided to put my energies into trying to be ethical about it. What if I lean into the violence? What if I find consenting adults who actually won’t mind being around me?

Someone introduced me to the kink scene, and that introduced me to femdom, humiliation, degradation, and all that sort of thing. As an asexual who isn’t necessarily quite into the erotic aspects of all that, I was more interested in the roleplay of it. These scenarios provided a certain sense of comfort. There are safe words! There are moderators making sure I don’t cross boundaries in the dungeon! Everything is great, I thought.

People who get to know me sometimes are a little confused by the optics game that I play. A lot of you think I’m the nicest person you’ve ever met. The rest of you think I am going to abduct your grandma for ransom or something.

The truth is, I don’t know what I’m doing. I open my mouth and stuff happens. I want less bad stuff to happen when I open my mouth. So I explored safe ways to be myself.

This eventually led to me adopting this sort of performative cruelty vibe as a persona. “Shame Soiree” and all that. I got tired of having to explain, “I’m not actually mean, I just sound like this and also can’t handle closed spaces.”

I thought: what if I could get paid for this instead of just having to endlessly hover in the punitive end of functioning. What a thought. I did some videos on the adult clip sites, I made it a thing. I went full femdom for a bit there.

I don’t know why I act like this. I have PTSD too, but I was acting like this since I was a child and haven’t managed to get it under control without medication.

There’s a certain amount of shame and social isolation that I’ve been engulfed in over the years due to my behavior and this project is more about helping me process what’s performative cruelty and what’s my mental illness. Where does the torture stop and the art begin?

Cancel culture. Brigades. Dogpiles. All this sort of public shaming is supposed to what, make me realize the error of my ways? Make me less of an embarrassment to the human race?

I think about consequences of our actions quite a bit lately. Wondering what any of it even matters in an age where I can have 4 billion email accounts and be a different person every other second. I think about how I don’t *actually* want to be mean to people, and that it’s compulsive. I think about how my cruelty used to not be performative and how far I’ve come since I was a child. And how little it matters if I can’t be 100% appropriate all of the time as an adult because second chances are a joke, everyone is ableist, and it doesn’t really take much for a transwoman to get labeled as a ‘danger to the community’ for really any reason at all.

I just want to be honest with myself and with my audience about who I am really am. What I am, and what I’m not. I’ve designed this website in such a way that I can monetize being myself and hopefully do it in an ethical way.

You want me to be mean to you? Sure. Grab the permission tokens and I’ll do it for you. Otherwise, I’m too traumatized to really socialize very much at all anymore. The more time I spend isolated here in my tiny, subsidized Seattle apartment, the more my ability to communicate effectively erodes, and I feel desperate to do something that I enjoy. I can feel my brain rotting away.

I’m trapped here. I can’t get out. I can’t be myself. I don’t talk to anyone anymore. I still feel this compulsive desire to just lay into people, and I need an avenue that helps me ethically scratch that itch. I want to hurt people. I don’t want to *harm* people. There is a difference, I believe.

Is my cruelty performative? Maybe? Existence is performance art. With this project I want to continue to explore this and try to create new art that doesn’t try to hide myself.

I’m glad I have a presence on femdom clip sites and make harsh noise music. I already have great avenues to explore this.

I did not set out to make a metaverse based on shame and humiliation. I wanted to do like a content creator/performance artist/tech type situation where I can mix ~all~ of my interests and hobbies together. During the development phase, I realized that yeah, the behaviour/meanness/femdom stuff needed to be at the center of it.

This is content for me. And content should come from the heart. And my heart is black.


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