Art, vermin and other moral abominations.

The client with whom I was talking about porn was a butch-identified dyke in her late twenties who was seeking therapy because she was struggling with issues she felt resulted from a history of childhood sexual abuse. She wanted to heal sexually and to reclaim a sense of desire and agency. She said she felt depressed because she was unsure that healing was possible.

We met in a miniscule office just off the waiting room of the converted Victorian that housed the clinic. The room faced west. Through the lacy curtains, the afternoon light poured in, leaving watery shadow patterns on the walls. The room had space enough for two chairs and a small table where I kept my appointment book and the tape recorder my supervisor insisted I use to record my sessions.

Over the course of a few months, the client told me about the abuse she had suffered as a young girl, which was simultaneous to her budding understanding that she did not feel normatively gendered. During her late teens and early twenties, she had questioned whether she might be transgendered. She decided that she didn’t actually imagine herself as male, but concomitantly didn’t feel she interacted with women the same ways she saw other dykes interacting.

“I mean, it isn’t that I can’t, you know, pass as a ‘normal dyke,’” she said, turning away from me.

“What is a ‘normal dyke’?” I asked.

“Well, you know, um . . . nice?”

“Nice?” I was not certain where this was headed.

“Yeah.”

[…]

My client took a big risk in telling me what she wanted, what turned her on. We continued to talk about her sense of her gender and her desire for power. Over the course of a few years surrounding herself in community—since moving to the Bay Area from a smaller city—she had become comfortable with her butchness. But she had not found her way into a community of BDSM or kink-identified folks where she could explore her desires for power, for a lover who’d consent to giving her control. What she had found were images that did not accurately reflect her or her desires, but she was attempting to project herself into these images because they reflected the kind of power that she was attracted to.

After the session ended, I turned off the tape recorder. I had a brief fantasy of erasing the tape, because I didn’t sound like any of the neutral-toned, psychoanalytic therapists in the case studies my supervisor had been giving me to read. My fantasies of erasing the tape, or even just misplacing it, were quickly supplanted by a sinking feeling of dread over sharing it with my supervisor.

My trepidation was correct. My clinical supervisor, a heterosexual, white, traditionally psychoanalytic, and conservatively feminist psychotherapist was not pleased with my work. She believed that all pornography exploits women, who must be coerced into performing, and she was concerned that my client’s interest in kink and BDSM was indicative of an unconscious desire to reenact the abuse. My supervisor was interested in the fact that my client imagined herself as the one in control. She thought it meant that my client was identifying with her abuser and desired to play out her abuse on another woman who would look the part of the archetypal feminine woman, and that through the interaction, my client hoped to be healed by externalizing her sense of powerlessness and femininity and projecting it into a sexual partner.

In my supervisor’s assessment, reenactments are always pathological—the desire to feed the perpetually overwhelmed state of the psyche and the nervous system.

I did wonder if my supervisor was correct, but I didn’t think that it had to be a pathological urge that leads us to reenact our past traumas, if we are conscious of the process and pay attention to how we feel and how we integrate the experience. In a healing enactment, some of that experience is symbolized. My client did not wish to actually violate the boundaries of consent of a partner, she wished to have control given to her so she could have the experience of control and empowerment.

I argued with my supervisor about this for weeks. She was interested in my ideas about symbolized enactments, but still felt that my client was setting herself up to traumatize herself or someone else. Eventually she told me that I had to confront my client, to caution her against enacting her fantasies and urge her to explore them only verbally.

I dreaded that session with my client. We continued exploring a fantasy she’d had, based on a porn film she’d seen, of tying up a woman who struggled against ropes with fear in her eyes.

“Maybe this is too perverse,” said my client, shaking her head. “Maybe it is wrong to want this—maybe that fear was real, not an act. Maybe it was violence.”

I was acutely aware of the tape recorder on the table next to me, and imagined my supervisor listening to the tape. “Maybe that is true,” I said to her. “What if it was?”

I don’t remember much about the rest of the session, other than the lack of eye contact, the sense of great distance between us in the cramped, sunny space, and the amplified hiss of the tape recorder.

The therapy only lasted a few sessions after that. My client decided that she accomplished what she had wanted to in our sessions. Indeed, she was feeling more relaxed in social situations and more connected to her friends. But even as I affirmed those developments with her and told myself that they were true, I knew also that I had betrayed her, that I had confronted her most vulnerable, wounded self and made it clear that her desires weren’t welcome in my office.

In believing my supervisor, I shamed my client in the ways in which she had been shamed by others. I continued her experience of not seeing herself reflected, by her abusive family, by mainstream lesbian culture, by her therapist, or by the pornography that she found.”]