The 800 lb. Gorilla

I was reading this blog post a few days ago at A Place to Draw Blood Laughing and this paragraph in particular struck a chord with me:

If I wanted to, I could make all kinds of trickle-down analyses of how the roles of my parents led to my kinkiness, and so on and so forth. I don’t particularly want to, and I have no burning desire to know why I am what I am. It’s easy enough to see that their lives influenced my understanding of gender role fluidity, creating an awareness of mixed partnerships of responsibility and tradition rather than handing me off into the world with a simple role reversal. But I don’t think I’m a dom because I have a corporate exec for a mother. I also had a mother for a mother, you know, the kind of mother who makes really good Thai food and likes to play online Scrabble. In short, just a person with some labels attached to her, like me.

And while I didn’t think about it too much this weekend while knee deep in sex and submission and all of the fun stuff, I’ll admit that on the plane ride home, while holding the plane up in the sky with only my sheer willpower, I thought about it, a lot. Because Eileen is skating around my 800-lb. gorilla. The question that used to be phrased in my mind, “What’s wrong with you?” is now phrased a far more healthy-but-still-scary “How did I get like this?” and I still don’t have an answer.