Chapter Text
This story recounts what happens when you are pulled out of your depth at thirty-five and somehow manage to come out on the other end as a better person.
What I am, in general terms: I am a cis-gender white woman from Italy. I am mostly (let’s say 98%) heterosexual. Like my parents, I graduated in a scientific discipline, and I always prided myself to be the “rational” one, the “wise” one among my friends.
I live in Rome, but I’m not from Rome. Coming from the south of Italy entails certain historical aspects of marginalization and economic exploitation of my people, which will come up later in this story.
I work for an international organization. It was my first job, and I’ve been there for ten years now. This job was not my childhood dream, so I was not mentally prepared for the level of diplomacy required to work in an international environment. I enjoy it, because I’m naturally curious about people, but being a perfectionist makes me constantly anxious of inadvertently offending some colleague from a different cultural background. It’s challenging, and sometimes I hate it and I wish I worked in a standard all-Italian office. But then I think that it’s always enriching for my mind and soul, and it challenges me to confront my preconceptions.
I am not religious, and never have been. I am an only child and an introvert, but I love the company of extroverts and, generally, of people who hang out in big groups and let me tag along.
That’s where the “normal” part of me ends.
I have practiced BDSM as a switch, but mostly Domme, since I was twenty-four. I've read endless blogs, forums, manuals, works of fiction and comics on that topic. I attended play parties, all sorts of related events and even a course on rope bondage. Along the years, I met or talked with hundreds of people with the same passions. I watched tutorials. I've had several play-partners in these eleven years, and I've practiced it with some boyfriends too. I thought I was somewhat of an expert, but then I met him.
The last year had been tough. My mom had cancer (later, she was declared “healed”, but you never know if it comes back), and I’d spent the last eight months practically buried under my bed sheets, mourning my lost love João who had gone back to Brazil and left me with my heart ripped open, feeling as if I was missing half of myself.
Then, in February, after a trip to Berlin planned out of desperation to get out of my head and see some friends, I decided it was time to try and move on, and I downloaded a dating app for people passionate about BDSM.
As one of the first profiles, he appeared.
He was a lanky, very tall young man with chestnut long-ish wavy hair, much similar to my own, a particular sense of fashion and what we call in Italian “una faccia da schiaffi”. A haughty, sarcastic expression perpetually painted on his face. That kind of face which, at least in my view, makes people want to slap it to wipe the arrogant smile out of it.
The first time I saw his pictures on the app, I naturally assumed he was Italian. How many Italians I knew had that same facciadicazzo1?
But then, no. “I’m Tunisian”.
Una faccia, una razza2, we all say in the Mediterranean.
God must have been sending me a test, I thought. This is a trial for me to confront my internalized racism. In all my life, I used to say “one of the few things I’m certain of is that I’ll never have sex with a Muslim guy”. And yet.
Beautiful, charming, witty, unpredictable, crazy Fares. His sole presence turned my life around from winter to summer in just one month. I met him at the end of February - by April I was already a different person; mainly thanks to him (and my new anxiety medication, to be fair) for having pulled me out of my depression and interested again in the things I loved - arts, music, politics, and the world at large.
I found out afterwards that we worked in the same place, but I’d never seen him around the office because I had worked from home since he arrived in Rome.
I liked him so much, and I couldn't even tell why.
Sure, he was charming and unbearably attractive. BUT. I didn’t like his accent - he sounded like every kebab shop employee in Europe (and shame came with this realization: that was my racism talking; I was well aware). I didn’t like that he cooked too much spicy food and then he smelled of it (that was, again, my racism talking). I didn’t like that he was so much taller than me - almost 2 m tall, where I stood barely at 1.60 m. I usually didn’t like men whom I couldn’t look in the eyes without craning my neck up. I didn’t even like his dick that much - it was too large, and he was circumcised, which I found a pity, because he lacked some sensitivity which would have been better to play with him. I found it displeasing, in an unsettling way, that he shaved his armpits but he didn’t shave his balls.
Likewise, his behaviour was awful. He was too young, too vain and too presumptuous for me, I thought. He was rude. He treated people as if they were disposable - only being friendly when it was useful to him. Typical sleazy southern Mediterranean behaviour, my brain said. But then: was I not southern Mediterranean too? Did I not behave exactly like that as well? Maybe he irritated me so much because I saw all my flaws and shortcomings reflected in him.
So many grievances, but still, I liked him. Despite all this.
We met once, and it was very intense. Even though I was still depressed and saw João in the face of every man I met, rarely, if ever, I’d felt so horny during a first meeting. Then, for a while, he disappeared, and I assumed I’d been ghosted. Nevermind; it happens, I thought. But then, whenever I bumped into him at work, he seemed friendly, and then for a whole month he kept texting me random messages and pictures meant to tease me, which drove me out of my mind.
Not because of the blatant sexual intent: I was used to the mostly bland sexting of straight men. Men often sent me pictures of their muscles or their hard dick.
What Fares sent me was not straight, or not in a way I’d ever seen before. Videos of him slowly undressing and fondling his chest, as if he had breasts to play with. Pictures of his naked reflection in the window, bedsheets covering his lap, posing like a Renaissance princess. Videos of him in the gym, not flexing his muscles but kneeling on the floor, raising his already short shorts and showing off his thighs.
It painfully reminded me of how some of my girl friends acted when they flirted with men. Acting as “the brat” who’s a slut but plays hard to get.
This odd behaviour sent me down another spiral of thoughts. Half of the people I spoke to about him at work replied with some variation of “But isn’t he gay?”
Was he? Why would they think that? Was it him being too “feminine”? (He was indeed very feminine for a man - at least according to the stupid dichotomic pigeonholing of western society, dictating how men and women should present themselves. Long hair, dainty wrists, always clean-shaved, abundant use of jewellery, and fitted, colourful, elegant clothes - was all this an indicator for a gay man?)
Or was it him having mainly girls and gay men as friends?
On the app he’d written that he was “Heteroflexible”. When I asked about it, he told me “I’ve been with men, but I’m still not sure if I like men or not”. I didn't inquire further, because I’d dated bisexual and pansexual men in the past, and I did not care in the least. But then, everything about his cultural background made me wonder. Did Arab men just have a different way of displaying their masculinity? I knew that, for example, they were much more touchy among male friends than us in the West, by custom.
Could he just be straight, but friendly with men in a different way than I was accustomed to? Was he bisexual and liked playing with the ambiguity of it? Or was he indeed gay, in fact, and just not ready to admit it even to himself? Were people even allowed to be gay in Tunisia? (I knew they weren’t, although overall, from the outside, it seemed like a pretty open-minded country, on the average of Muslim countries. But what did I know about any of it?)
But then again, did dressing and behaving “feminine” necessarily mean that a man was gay? I knew it didn’t.
Even in his numerous selfies shared with his thousands of followers on Instagram, he displayed an ambiguity. It was never clear whether his pictures were meant to tease saying “take me and make me submit to you”, or if they meant “admire me in all my charm and kneel before me”. Or both. Maybe both.
His ambiguity confused me to no end, his sluttiness aroused me, his unpredictability intrigued me, and everything together elated me because I felt like this was the first opportunity in my life where I could really be “the man”, the rational, the level-headed one in the relationship.
Finally he decided he’d had enough of teasing via text messages, and showed up to my place during a work day - he literally up and left the office and came to my place for the sole purpose of getting slapped, bound to a chair, edged and fingerfucked in the ass. After a month of teasing, I was happy to comply.
But then, after that second meeting, as quickly as he had invaded my personal space and forced me to confront the darkness I had inside, he disappeared. Got bored and went on to something (or someone) else. I tried to insist on meeting him again, but to no avail.
***
In the end I pinpointed what had made him so skittish towards me.
First of all, he'd told me in probably the first text message we exchanged that he had serious anxiety. I had later discarded this information because in real life he behaved like he didn't. But he apparently did suffer from it, and that didn't help with the second, most important reason: he was ashamed.
He wanted to play the Casanova, the worldly womanizer, but he definitely had the rules and stereotypes of his home country still ingrained in his mind (as I did too, in a way, even if I deemed myself free of the shackles of Christianity).
He was not used to mixing his sex life (and its very private details, at that) with his usual socializing at work. I asked him several times to casually meet for a coffee break in the office to chat as friends, not seeing what was wrong with it. He never agreed to it.
In the beginning, I had been the one afraid of him bad-mouthing me in the office, but then I realized it had been the opposite. I had bad-mouthed him. Not on purpose! I'd only gossiped jokingly about my private life with my friends, as I always did, and as my friends also did with me.
But I had fallen into the dreadful trap of my western-centric worldview, assuming that everybody everywhere behaved like me and my peers in Italy.
To be fair, Fares did his best to blend in with westerners and behave like us, at least as a façade. But, in reality…he was still his parents’ kid, the youngest of four. Just a little boy from Tunis who grew up sheltered in a big traditional family, and so he already felt rebellious and “out of place in society” only for liking techno festivals and dressing a little differently, a little too feminine (also, he did NOT dress like that when he was back home in Tunisia).
Moreover, I still wasn’t sure whether he was bisexual or not - I was convinced he was, from his behaviour in bed. I heard other people from Arabic countries say that the shame in front of Islam and of their parents to come out as gay or bisexual was so strong that it’s hard to put into words.
Finally, practicing BDSM, and at least partially as a submissive man, was unfathomable for his mind. A shame, a stain on his person as a “honest”, “good” man in Islam.
But he definitely liked all of this. He was just very confused on how to deal with it - he felt both very cool for having a kinky secret life, and scared of people he knew actually finding out about it. I'd felt a bit like that too, the first year or so I started hanging around the fabulous world of BDSM, but that was more than eleven years ago. During those years, I had also met a fair share of younger men who had been ashamed of that side of them, but generally by thirty years old, or even twenty-five, people in the West came to terms with that part of themselves. At thirty-five, I did not care anymore about what people thought. It was just another side of me, and I didn’t mind letting my friends know about it.
Unfortunately, Fares wasn't really there yet.
He’d been scared of being seen with me at work, and hadn't wanted to meet up for anything other than sex outside work. But a good BDSM relationship blossomed also from the real-life moments spent together out of bed. For me, it was essential to know each other very well, when threading the delicate waters of domination and submission.
In the end, he'd preferred to stick to meeting up for casual sex with a different girl every week, all younger than him, so that he could feel “in charge”. Most often they were tourists just passing by, or foreign Erasmus students, and he stuck to playing the role of the Dom himself. That felt safer, and he felt more in control. Again, a tiny voice inside my head said: are you not doing the exact same thing? Are you not choosing them younger because you want to be in charge? Are you also not choosing to play mostly the Domme because it feels safer? I couldn’t object.
He was also probably experimenting how many conventionally hot girls from all over the world he could bed, now that he was out of his parents’ house, in “the West”, and free to behave as he pleased. Of course, being handsome and charming, the only limit was his imagination (and maybe his awful behaviour). His follow page was full of Onlyfansers and over-filtered pictures of young girls with fillered lips. Most of them were some kind of artists with soft-fetish styles, piercings and tattoos, striking kinky poses for the likes. I often wondered how many of these girls actually liked dirty, kinky sex done with intention.
What I’d been doing with other partners was much dirtier and genuine than what I’d done with Fares over our two encounters - even though my partners and I were bland and unassuming with our external appearance, in comparison. Fares’ attitude in bed seemed performative, more than genuine. But did appearance correspond to substance? I guess I’ll never know.
I let him be and started dating other people. Even though, whenever I saw him at work, my heart still skipped a beat and I kept wondering how it would feel to walk him on a leash and see him crawl for me.
***
I still kept following what he posted on Instagram. It was mostly music, pictures of places he visited, the random politics news, and very seldom, some teasing selfies. But those came less and less often as the months passed. Maybe he'd already gotten tired of the neverending chasing game.
Although brief, my encounter with him, coupled with the increasing social uprising about the liberation of Palestine by the global population, left me to wonder about modern colonization and what that meant for me. I started reading a book by an Italian lesbian professor titled “Decoloniality and privilege”.
As white and Italian, I had to acknowledge that, even though I declared myself politically far-left leaning, socialist even, I still harbored an internalized, deep mistrust against the Arab world and Muslims at large. Where did that come from? Was it born after 9/11? I was eleven at that time. I couldn’t really remember the world before that.
Because of their own experience with repressive Catholicism, as their only child and female, my parents had always instilled fear inside me about religious extremists and their views on women’s freedom. Our western mass media, likewise, since 2001 had painted Islamic extremists as the world’s “bad guys”.
In addition, the increasing waves of migration to Italy of people from the Middle East and North Africa, who sometimes struggled to integrate, scared me because of our cultural differences.
I had to wonder, though. As southern Italians, after the unification of our country in 1861, we also experienced racism and forced displacement due to economic crises. I happened to watch a US American video saying “Italians were the ones depicted as the world’s bad guys in mass media, before 9/11”. And wasn’t it the truth? We had migrated to the Americas, bringing with us only our poverty and the mafia. We still had to migrate internally to the north of our country for lack of job opportunities in our home regions. I’d been lucky to find a job in Rome, but 90% of my friends from the South lived in northern Italy or northern Europe now. I’d lived in northern Italy myself for two years - I’d also experienced racism on my own skin. I still spoke Italian with my own strong Neapolitan accent, not willing to hide it, wearing it like a badge of honour and antagonizing anyone who dared question me for it. Did these new migrants not have the right to do the same? Living far away from home was painful; I knew that. I’m sure most of them would have liked to live and thrive in their home country, given the economic possibility and social freedom. And whose fault was that, if not ours (the West at large - US and Europe) for destabilizing their countries’ economy and politics?
So, what right did I have to be afraid and distrustful of Fares, or anybody from that geographical region? He was just like me. Having to accept this was hard, and even harder to try and be more open towards the Arab world. This was my issue only - I’d tried to dump it on him during our brief interactions, but that was not his issue to carry. I saw that most of Fares’ western friends welcomed him with open arms without questioning.
He mostly hung out with French-speaking people though, given that it was his second mother tongue. Maybe French people were more welcoming, or maybe he'd just been lucky in the friends’ department.
***
1. Dickface in Italian.
2. One face, one race in Italian.