Thoughts on Leather

[sophinisba]

Hello, here is some meta for the “leather/latex/rubber” square on my kink_bingo card. Some of the post is negative about leather.

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I haven’t been in much of a fanworks-making mood for most of the last few months. I signed up for a kink_bingo card and found I wasn’t excited about most of the squares on it, but looking at it again the other day I thought, well, at least I’ve got the undeniably sexy leather/latex/rubber.

I don’t know about you, but when I look at that square my brain pretty much just goes, Leather!, as if the other two words weren’t there. Nothing against latex or rubber, I’m sure if I worked at it I could come up with something. I could develop a taste for them the way they say one does for vegan cheese. But with leather it wouldn’t take any extra effort to find the hotness and get excited. It’s just one of those things I’ve loved since I was a kid.

Here are some things I’ve gotten turned on by over the years:
-the texture of different kinds of leather against my fingertips, ankles, and other parts of my skin
-the smell of leather (whether spending some time alone with a favorite item or, say, walking past a leather goods store in the mall)
-the taste of leather
-the sound of the word leather
-the Tori Amos song “Leather”
-the fact that the French word cuir sounds so much like the English word queer
-Uther’s leather gloves
-Morgause in leather
-Strider in leather
-the ladies of Legend of the Seeker in leather
-fanart of Gwen dressed like one of the ladies of Legend of the Seeker
-certain shoes, especially the one with lots of little straps and buckles, and on the other hand high and imposing leather boots
-I mean obviously all the bondage-y things you can make from it such as collars and whips, oh god and belts, and so on.

The two fandoms I’ve been in the longest have both had fantasy settings (though of course Merlin fandom loves its modern AUs) and there tends to be a lot of leather around in canon, and then it’s just easy to imagine into all kinds of costumes but then especially sex toys. Whenever I start writing about Merlin canon-era characters and sex toys I end up going off on big tangents about how the toys are made, because oh god to think how my character went to the trouble of tanning and stitching that thing on their own, and also how does it taste when they suck on it or shove it in their partner’s mouth, how much sexier is that than ordering something cheap and plasticky on the Internet like I would do? I love how fleet got at the hotness of leather handcrafts in The Shoemaker, the fic she wrote me in which Gwen makes a leather dick and Freya animates it with magic!

On the other hand I also like fanworks with modern settings where a character buys leather stuff because something (such as the kinky sex they’re having with their partner, or how powerful they feel wearing those boots) is important to them and they’re willing to spend some money on it. It’s that taste for luxury that comes up more often with silk/velvet/feather/furs. I tend to shy away from buying expensive clothes, toys, etc, because I’m afraid I’ll choose the wrong thing and then feel bad about wasting money, and that’s one of the reasons I don’t own a lot of leather products myself.

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Another reason is that I don’t want to cause unnecessary harm to animals. Not to judge anybody living in the Middle Ages (or imaginary fantasy kingdoms) or anything, ’cause there weren’t as many alternatives then and the cattle probably didn’t have that bad a time of it back then. But these days it really does seem unnecessary, and farming practices unnecessarily cruel, and it’s hard for me to reconcile that with the sexy.

I have a few leather things, including the shoes I wear every day, which are not sexy but have been really great for my faulty arches and looked really good for work until I wore them out. Buying them last year made me feel responsible and old. It was at a special store for people with foot problems and there were no similar alternatives there that weren’t made of leather. I’m going to need to replace them sometime in the next few weeks and I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

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This one time, maybe eight years ago, I was sitting in a student lounge, trying to study, and I suddenly noticed that there was this little black leather collar with spikes sitting on the table next to me. I quickly looked around and saw that there was nobody else nearby, and I grabbed the collar and put it in my bag and have had it in the drawer in my nightstand ever since. I don’t think it was made as a sex thing really, I could easily imagine some undergrad wearing it to class, or maybe I stole it from somebody’s dog idek. But for me it is awesome. I’ve never worn it with anyone else around or bought anything similar. It’s as if the gods of the student lounges just wanted me to have it.

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I’m a vegetarian who aspires to veganism. I’ve been traveling for most of the last month but now that I’m home I want to try cutting back on dairy and eggs. Maybe I could limit them to a few meals or days per week, the way some people do with meat.

I used to be vegetarian mainly for environmental reasons, thinking about the inefficiency of land and other resources being used to raise plants to feed animals. In the last few years I’ve learned a little more about the conditions animals live and die in in factory farms (where almost all of our meat and eggs and milk and leather come from) and that’s come to be a more important reason for me. I guess lots of people who don’t eat meat for ethical reasons eventually go vegan. The fact that I haven’t done it yet has involved a lot of… kidding myself, I guess. That kind of knowing but not knowing, distancing, being aware of baby chicks being ground up alive but refusing to think about it while enjoying my delicious omelet. The same way I used to do when I ate meat, or still do when I feed meat to my cats, or put on these great shoes every damn day.

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I just got home from a couple weeks in a city that’s special to me but that I’d only been to once before, and very briefly, when I was in college. (Actually a lot of this post was written in airport lounges.) On my last day there I went to a craft and souvenir market and, as I was walking around, realized that I had been to the same market on that much earlier trip. I’d bought a really cute little purse that had soft leather of a few different colors stitched together, with a cloth liner. Oh my gosh I carried that bag for so long. It got holes in the lining pretty quickly but I took advantage by hiding my money there, especially when traveling in sketchier areas. I did a heck of a lot of traveling over the next few years, and this bag became a souvenir not just of that beautiful place where I bought it but of so many of the other places I lived and traveled on four different continents. It was very much connected with my idea of myself as an independent young woman, plus it was really pretty and soft and smelled nice.

I did eventually stop using it after it had stopped being functional as a bag.

So anyway here I was back at the craft fair a few days ago, having fond memories of this earlier time, but also sort of semi-consciously recognizing the smell of leather coming from some of the stands, and steering away from them. It wasn’t like when I’m at a food market and I steer away from the fish stands, because I’ve hated the smell of fish for as long as I can remember and the sight of them seriously grosses me out. Here it was just a little sigh of, well, I guess I’d better go look at these things made of cloth instead.

I was pleased to find a stand with some cute belts not made of leather. The woven ones I liked best were too long so the vendor offered to alter one of them for me, but I wasn’t really sold on any of them. He also showed me another kind that was shorter and fit better but was made of some kind of synthetic material that felt cheap, and that made me sad and I wandered off without getting anything.

Thinking about it later I realized I don’t really get hot and bothered by the smell of leather anymore; there’s a little bit of fondness mixed with a little bit of horror (like I think about a cow getting skinned alive, which I guess is a thing that happens fairly often, even though it’s not standard practice like grinding up male chicks? I could maybe make a more effective post if I weren’t scared to do more research) but mostly just a practical/neutral feeling of “that is not for me”.

That night I found this article that’s mainly directed at people like me, vegetarians who try to kid themselves about leather. This paragraph especially struck me:

The softest, most luxurious leather comes from the skin of newborn or even unborn calves, cut prematurely out of their mother's wombs. Sometimes it will be from the same veal calves whose lives of misery are well documented. Many committed carnivores draw the line at veal: why then wear calfskin?

because I was remembering how lovely and soft that old bag was.

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Surely some of our fandom characters must also have conflicted feelings about leather, and they would be more fun to read about than mine. Aang from Avatar comes to mind, though I’ve never gotten into sexy stuff about him. I’m not actually sure whether I would enjoy, say, reading fic about those kinds of conflicts. I’ve tried writing characters discussing vegetarianism before and I have trouble balancing my own feelings with the desire not to be preachy or boring. (I worry about that also with this post, which is not even trying to be sexy or otherwise entertaining.)

It seems to me like we don’t get as many vegetarian characters on our shows as there are vegetarians in real life, for instance among the actors on our shows, and that is something to think about. Maybe TV writers also have trouble bringing it up without being boring, or maybe there’s actually an issue with advertisers, I don’t know. It’s unfortunate for me because I have a big old mental block against writing RPF. A person’s life always feels like a huge canon from which I’ve only seen a few episodes.

We know that Colin Morgan doesn’t eat meat, for example, and we know that he loves animals. I like to tell myself that he doesn’t eat meat because he loves animals, but what do I know? And I would feel weird about digging around for that, or making shit up. I think I’ve read that he doesn’t eat dairy for health reasons. He wears leather as part of his costumes, but does he wear it when he’s not working? And does he like it? And if one of his costars like for instance Bradley James bought him idk maybe some leather cuffs would he accept them, and would he find them sexy? Would he refuse them with a smile and a shake of his head even though he found them sexy, and would he and Bradley then have to learn to love some other material, the way one can develop a taste for vegan cheese? I feel like these are questions worth exploring.

I always have trouble ending posts so here are those pictures of Colin Morgan with a koala and a wallaby:

Comments

[zulu]

Very interesting thoughts. Re: your last point, I think that could be very sexy and perfectly legitimate as RPF, even if it wasn't 'canon'.

[sophinisba]

Thanks! Yeah, I think a good author could do a really fab job with it. I tend to like reading about people who are somehow mismatched but find a way to make it work, negotiation and learning each other's kinks and all that, and learning to love say PVC could work really well with that.

[thingswithwings]

I really enjoyed reading this. It was very thoughtful and interesting and I found myself nodding along a lot, because I too have those moments of internal conflict where desire and knowledge of the thing I desire work against each other. I eat mostly vegetarian, and when I eat meat/eggs/dairy it's all ethically sourced, but still sometimes I want to eat something that isn't and I fall into a desire/repulsion cycle about it.

Anyway! Thank you very much for writing this; it communicates so many rich potential feelings about leather.

[sophinisba]

Thank you buddy, I like the idea of a cycle of desire and repulsion, yeah, when I realize that having something would be destructive and irresponsible and that makes (part of) me want it all the more, to be selfish, to say my desires are important, my sensual pleasure is important, and so on. But if I go ahead and take it it tends to be a letdown, and the guilt and thoughts of "Was that really worth it?" take a lot away from the pleasure.

[claudia603]

you know, back in 2009, I actually became vegetarian because of your influence and then some of my own research. However, I am very lax now and it makes me feel guilty and I don't really know how to handle it. Part of it was that in 2011 I was getting sick all the time and I couldn't seem to recover the way I do if I eat chicken, for example. So I pretty much started adding chicken back into my diet, although I never told my parents that I went back to that so they still think I only eat seafood, but whatever, that's a different angst for a different time. But anyway, I tried really hard to be ethical about it, like buy chicken/eggs from local farmers, etc., but there are obviously times when I don't do that and I feel really bad about it. I don't really eat pork or beef, but yeah, the chicken thing. I shoudln't eat dairy because it affects me negatively (lactose intolerance), but I do on occasion. In other words, I feel terrible for not being able to stand up and live what I believe out of laziness/health fears, etc. Anyway, that was just me babbling because your post was interesting and thought-provoking! :)

Welcome back! Did the kitties greet you?

[sophinisba]

Right, and I think that's still totally a good thing, that you're limiting how much meat you eat, and I don't think your parents need to know if you eat chicken sometimes. But I get a lot of the health worries/fears too, not so much with my own diet because I'm pretty confident I'd be healthier if I were eating less cheese for instance. But like, I *think* these shoes I've been wearing have been good for my feet and I haven't found any vegan shoes (certainly not in a store where I'd be able to try them on) that look and feel as good. But where are my priorities? And couldn't I get inserts?

And there is soy food for cats, that is a thing that exists and that you can order on the Internet, but doing so would take a lot more effort than buying the meat at the PetSmart down the street. Also most people seem to think that meat is better for cats, and it makes sense that it would be because of their history, but other people say they do fine with soy. I have no idea, but we're privileging this hunch over what might be better for these two cats health in the long run versus the obvious suffering and killing of other sentient animals. What the hell? But I fricking love these cats.

Cats have been very sweet, greeted me but pretty much in the normal way they do when I come home from work. Of course I spent more time cooing over them than usual. :)

[kaizoku]

I really like this post. Nice mix of the sexy and the practical/realistic. My partner is vegetarian, but he bought some leather moccasins a few years ago because he dislikes wearing shoes and thought they might feel less clunky. The smell bothered him though.

I eat mostly vegetarian and meat/eggs rarely enough that I can afford to buy organic/free-range or from people I know. (And yeah, I am aware that "free-range" doesn't always mean much.) Now I'm wondering if the local farmers who raise cattle are doing anything with the skins when they slaughter. I'm basically okay with my choice to eat meat, but I haven't thought very much about clothing choices. Then again, almost all my clothes are second-hand, so I don't know that it makes much of a difference?

Here's a post about vegan shoes/boots. There's also this vegan guide to leather alternatives.

I really do like how leather feels. In a weird way, I like the idea of wearing the skin of an animal. But not an animal that's suffered and had a short, painful life. That video of the baby chicks was actually freakily similar to a nightmare I had once about rabbits. I am much more bothered by something suffering and being ill-treated over a long time than a brief death (is it really "instantaneous" though?) To be totally honest, the human rights issues and environmental effects associated with chrome tanning bother me at least as much or more.

It might be interesting to up the stakes and have a character with a really intense leather fetish who feels conflicted about it. Do they try to rationalize it? Do they have one really special leather object that they wear/use even though they feel ashamed of their unwillingness to give it up? Or maybe they try to shift their focus to some other kind of material? Or you could mix-and-match kinks and have a character bootblacking faux leather boots...