The Pleasure of Being Wicked

It’s getting close to Halloween…

I don’t know if any of you know this-even though I believe it is glaringly apparent from my social media-but I really, really love dark things.

Actually, I have a running internal joke that my parents should have known how I would turn out as an adult (a bit kinky… a bit sick in the head…) based purely on my childhood interests.

I never, ever liked the good characters. I’ve said this previously, but it bears repeating: I find them boring. Or, more precisely, I find goodness boring when it leaves no room for contradiction. Give me something to get my teeth into. An appetite. A terrible motive. Some interesting internal conflict.

The thing that always piques my interest about human beings-look at me, discussing you all as though I’m an alien studying your planet… I cannot confirm or deny this-is being human.

And I mean the stuff that isn’t curated or palatable. The raw things, the disgusting things, the chaotic things. Those moments when someone lets you see something they ordinarily keep hidden. I find people fascinating there.

As a child, I loved evil characters, especially evil women. I always imagined myself as a witch, surrounded by cats and torturing boys.

Yes, it is fantastic to be living my dreams.

The concept was freeing for me. No longer dancing to a tune of perfection. Wild hair, a dirty laugh and no particular worry about the consequences, because, of course, in my fantasy I possessed immense power.

That last part interests me now. What did the power actually offer? Certainly, the ability to do whatever wicked thing had occurred to me that afternoon. But it also meant I could exist without constantly having to consider whether someone approved.

The witch didn’t have to be pretty enough, pleasant enough or useful enough to justify her presence. She had a house in the woods. You were bothering her.

I can respect that.

Here, I often discuss and break down the experiences of the submissive. But I think, even if you are a submissive reading this, it is relevant to look at the internal experience of the dominant woman. My experience, at least, though I suspect some of this will sound familiar to others.

There is something cathartic about embodying aspects of yourself that are so often cast aside, marked as undesirable or unattractive.

Anger, for example. Appetite. Vanity. The enjoyment of power. The desire to be excessive, demanding, perhaps even a little frightening. These things can be uncomfortable to admit, especially when you have learned to monitor how much of yourself other people can tolerate.

That monitoring takes effort. You catch the expression before it reaches your face. You soften the sentence. You make your desire sound smaller, more reasonable, less inconvenient. Sometimes you do it so automatically that you barely notice.

Then there is the peculiar pleasure of finding a space in which you can let the expression arrive.

Jung’s idea of the shadow offers one way of thinking about this. Broadly, it concerns the aspects of ourselves we struggle to acknowledge or accommodate within our preferred image of who we are. What ends up there will differ between people. Something as ordinary as ambition might be difficult to own if you have learned that wanting too much makes you selfish.

I find that useful as a lens for looking at my own fascination with wickedness. What have I been calling “dark” because it feels dark to me, and what have I been calling dark because I was taught to find it unacceptable?

I don’t imagine every unflattering impulse conceals some magnificent truth. Some of mine are probably just unflattering. I can live with that too.

But I do think there is relief in being able to recognise a feeling without immediately rushing to tidy it up.

Dominance gives some of those feelings a language. I can enjoy my authority. I can be exacting. I can take pleasure in someone finding me intimidating. I can hear my own dirty laugh and recognise myself in it.

And there is something psychologically interesting about being actively sought out for qualities you might otherwise have been encouraged to soften.

Someone notices your intensity and wants your attention. Your appetite interests them. They enjoy that look on your face-the one you might, elsewhere, have felt obliged to conceal.

Being appreciated there can feel unusually intimate. They are seeing something you recognise as yours.

Perhaps that also helps explain my fascination with what people keep hidden. I know the effort involved in presenting an acceptable version of yourself. When someone lets that presentation slip, I become curious. What do they want? What embarrasses them? What do they find difficult to say aloud?

I enjoy discovering the person in those details. And I enjoy being discovered there myself.

Looking back, my childhood witch feels like an early experiment in imagining a self I could inhabit freely. I gave her enough power that she didn’t need permission to enjoy her own existence.

These days, I recognise her in smaller things. The pleasure of giving an instruction. Letting a silence linger. Allowing myself to look delighted when something wicked occurs to me.

The cats are here. The laugh is here.

I think she would be pleased.