One of the things that has fascinated me in the past few years is failed scenes. Because I think we are all terrified of failed scenes. Terrified of being left with a hopelessly fucked up crying girl who we have broken and cannot be put back together. And we are right to fear that.
I’ve talked to people about failed scenes, read about them, watched videos that had failed scenes in them. I am fascinated by when it goes bad. Not because the idea of a failed scene turns me on. The idea of pushing a girl too hard and having her breakdown, safeword or have me call the scene because she didn’t safeword because she couldn’t. That’s the stuff of nightmares.
I don’t think you can drive at a hundred and ten miles an hour unless you are willing to visualize yourself dead in a tangled pile of metal. I do not think you can do anything very well or very regularly if you do not face the fears associated with it. Understand the consequences.
I’ve been in a few car-crashes. I was rammed at a stoplight when I was a relatively new driver. I had a witness that the guy ran a red light and hit me, so I guess I was lucky in that I did not have much guilt about smashing up the family car. When driving for Yellow Cab I got in a pretty bad bust up while rushing some people to DCA one rainy, foggy, morning. I have another friend who totalled out a car and never drove again. To this day as far as I know he lives in New York and doesn’t drive, though maybe that has changed.
I figured that I had been through it now, and that it was not so bad. There’s no way to get over a fear of being in a car crash like being in a car crash. You understand that freak mischance aside, at suburban speeds a crash is nasty but not usually deadly. We might die by freak happenstance but so we might on the stairs. You understand it’s bad and annoying and you want to avoid it, but you no longer have a visceral fear of the thing, it is just another bad thing that could happen like falling on the stair or dropping a tray of drinks.
And that’s freeing. Because then you are not fighting an abstract fear, you are just dealing with real and reasonable anxiety and you are not likely to over or under compensate. You just drive.
So that is what I think about failed scenes. I think that you cannot do the scene if you are afraid of the unknown. I think you have to understand the risk that the girl will come apart, and I think you have to know how to have the best chance of putting her back together.
Like car wrecks, most busted up scenes can be walked away from. They are a breach of trust but if they are handled right they can be made a strength rather than a weakness.
What is required is resolve. The response when a scene starts to go south is not to drop everything and begin acting as a submissive. “Oh my godiamsosorrycanigetyouanything” is not what the girl needs to hear. She has just had her Dominant push her too hard or in a bad way. Most likely she is feeling anger for having been betrayed (because she trusted him not to) and guilt for having failed, and a huge amount of conflict.
So let me tell you what I think she does not need. I think she does not need her Dominant to betray her by becoming her submissive at that point. That is a bad thing when it happens in relationships – when one partner suddenly and unilaterally wants to change roles. But it is explosive in a scene.
The girl is in trouble. She may be on the rocks. She may even be sinking. But the one thing that is certain is that the only thing stable in her environment just then is her Dom. He may have just rocked, but she needs him to be steady more than ever. He needs to keep her in a submissive frame, and not allow her to crash out too quickly. He needs to remain in a Dominant frame. And he needs to do all that while being able to figure out what is wrong, and beginning to fix it.
If I were to say this bluntly it means that “the fact you fucked up does not entitle you to quit…you are responsible for cleaning up the mess you made.”
So watching the fuckups, reading about them, learning about them, fascinates me. Because if I am going to be what I pretend I have to look at them without flinching and learn.
Science Fact: Glossina Cunnus, a fly found throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere, may impregnate over a thousand females in its short two month life, yet due to huge case backlogs and a comparatively short lifespan even when named almost never survives to appear in a paternity suit.