Ruby's Game

Here is what you do: you make someone’s acquaintance. Exchange pictures. Discuss what you would like to do. Eventually, if you feel safe enough doing so, you meet. It isn’t so very different from the usual forms of dating these days, except we don’t meet up to kiss and cuddle, but to slap and scratch and bite. We meet to fight.

On Fetlife, which is as close to mainstream as BDSM gets, the term ‘struggle play’ is sometimes used to lend a sense of respectability and separate what I do from competitive fighting. I can see why. There is something tacky about it. Something a little bit redneck, a bit working class. Punishing someone with your own body is churlish. A true gentleman has tools for such specialist work.

And a true lady?

There’s something particularly declassé about women fighting each other. Scrapping isn’t ladylike. Even those who service the fetish connive in the perception: I once saw a video described as ‘the kind of action you might see outside a rough pub on a Saturday night’. Now, my experience of rough pubs is limited, but as I recall they don’t provide rubber mats for aggressive patrons to fight on, even on weekends. Maybe they should.

Yes, I watch this stuff: other women fighting, their bodies colliding in private rooms, in public bars, in rings and pools and cages. And before the Web, before I was able to watch it, I would scan the grainy adverts in the Apter mags, pick up copies of Catspats from the American Magazine Centre on Collingwood street, a haven for hard-copy specialist porn, long since transformed into a lifestyle venue which advertises itself with a giant Buddhist head in the window and the words Hidden bar and secret lounge etched into the glass. An open kind of secret, like the link between violence and sex.

The first person I ever wrestled was…probably my father or one of my brothers. Being raised as a boy gives many opportunities for rough-housing. I sometimes wonder how I would have been different had I been raised as a girl.

One of my earliest memories of school is being beaten up by a gang of girls for some reason or other, some infraction of the playground code, some rule no-one had thought to let me in on. Pointy-toed shoes were the fashion for rough girls in Jarrow in those days, and I remember how painful it was to have those sharp tips digging into my chest and my abdomen as I lay on the ground. A teacher had to intervene to stop them kicking me. Unchecked, I really believe they might well have kicked me to death. I learned at a very early age that girls can be as violent as boys. It’s something I’ve never stopped learning.

I do not consider myself a subscriber to the school of thought which locates sexual fetishism in early traumatic experiences. According to this school, my liking of female violence is a kind of Stockholm syndrome, a pact made at an unconscious level to recuperate the trauma of remembering. I do not refuse to subscribe to this school because I fear it, but because I find it all too simple, too much of a Freudian gotcha! That it is probably partially true on some level I don’t doubt, but where the psyche is concerned nothing is ever simply causal. Reckoning with the unconscious is like wrestling in oil (I have never wrestled in oil, though I would like to).

Reducing this to a trauma-response makes it seem sad and abject, and in fact over the years fighting, being beaten up, choked out, made to give in, has been a source of joy. Feeling helpless excites me, and when I see other women feeling the same way, and the women who make them feel that way, I feel a rush of carnal recognition. I don’t identify, have never identified, with the dominant one in these encounters, but the woman who is dominated, who struggles. I want to fight, and to lose, and to lose badly, at the hands of another woman. And one of the things I want out of transition is to have a body that experiences pain the way cis women’s bodies do, so I can feel that loss fully. I want breasts that hurt like a bitch when someone mauls them; I want a cunt so you can punch me in it.