Superstition

I’ve been wanting to blog about this for a while. It’s kind of embarrassing, but I’ve been completely unable to work through it on my own, so I’m throwing it out there.

My wife and I are trying to have another kid. We love kids; our daughter is possibly the greatest thing in the world. We are fantastic parents, with good boundaries and good genes and – generally speaking – a lot of love to give. My wife is 35, so the longer we wait the more things get difficult. She’s decided to cancel her Master’s program in order to do this — she wants to be able to focus on having a baby, maintaining her career, etc. There will be time enough for the Master’s later, if she still wants it, but right now, this is what we want more than anything.

So, we have a lot of sex. She’s very dominant about it, telling me when it’s time to go back to the room and complaining loudly when real life intrudes, which it does often due to her work schedule and the child we already have. It is — as I said in my blog post earlier today — usually “stolen moments” sex. But it’s good, and it’s rough, and she’s all achey afterwards, which she has always said is the sign of a solid fuck. We’ve tried to have a few scenes, but — and I’m going to be utterly honest here — I sometimes beg off of the possibility of a scene if I know she’s ovulating.

The problem is — and the title of the post is — that I feel superstitious about having kinky sex when we’re trying to conceive. I know, this is total bullshit, it’s all in my head, but in the back of my brain, I think, “Does the fact that the sex we had tonight was kinky, if it leads to conception, mean anything?” Will the spirit of the child come out different because I was pegged and beaten and burned before I fertilized the egg? Or is it genetic? Does the act not matter, but the fact that it’s me matter? Submissive masochistic me?

I’ve been very open about the fact that my sexually submissive feelings stem from long before puberty — they are, as certain ancient peoples would frame it, “bred in the bone.” There’s no magic moment where I got kinked. No “lightbulb” experience where my mom spanked me too hard or my babysitter tied me to the bed because I was a bad boy. I suspect — as near as someone can think about these things — that I’m simply predisposed toward sexual submission, toward masochism. There’s a wire somewhere that connects A to C instead of B, and *wham* I’m submissive instead of whatever normal people are (if they’re anything. I admit I’m oversimplifying to a great degree.)

So does that get passed on to my son? Does my daughter have a higher likelihood of being dominant because of my wife? Is it not gender-linked? Is there a kink gene? Less scientifically phrased than that, does the nature of the sex I’m having mean something different if a child is conceived that night? Is my future offspring going to be different because before fertilizing the ovum, I licked feet and begged for punishment and entered subspace?

The answer is, “Of course not.” It’s the height of superstition to think that just because I was flogged and spanked and wore a bit and bridle while getting pegged that the sex after all of that kink will mean something different — a different sperm will hit the ovum, or that some kind of Lamarckian miracle will occur and the nature of the act will somehow affect the child’s genetic inheritance. It is, I think in my more reasonable moments, halfway moronic that the thought even crosses my mind, and I suspect that if I grew up in a more primitive society, I’d be worshipping fire or something.

Obviously, I know that there’s no connection. Realistically, I know that whether I have a scene before conceiving is not going to affect the baby. But in the back of my head, I get anxious. That lizard hind-brain, those primitive bits of cerebral matter passed on from Cro-Magnon man, they tell me to worry. And I know they’re wrong, but I also turn photos around in our room before a scene — not because I really believe the dead relatives and living family members in those photos are somehow “aware” the perverse sex acts going on in front of them if I don’t turn the pictures, but because on some level I’m discomfited about thinking about them, about their faces watching me while I’m beaten and abused and humiliated. And maybe that’s the real secret here — that on some level I worry about my children going through what I went through, or growing up with the same war inside their psyches over what’s “right” and what’s “dirty.”

I don’t have any answers — but I just wanted to put this out there. I know it’s stupid, I know it’s nonsense, but in the back of my head, it nags a little at me.