“Mars the Father” by Eryn Sunnolia
Now that Quinn was in front of me, on their knees, ass in the air, I realized spanking might be more complicated than I’d thought. Like, where was I even supposed to spank? All over? Upper cheeks, middle cheeks, lower cheeks? How fast? How hard? Was I supposed to only spank the whole time, or should I use my mouth, my fingernails, touch between their legs?
In my queer relationship, I was being asked to play a role I’d never played. Shaped for submission from years of sex with cis het men, I knew my perfectly feminine role to play. I could be innocent, or bratty, or excited, but I couldn’t be daddy.
Now, my partner wanted me to hurt them in every good way, and they trusted me enough to give themself over to me. Poised over their waiting body, I had no idea what I was doing.
Aries placements are a Thing in my family. In astrology, Aries is a fire sign known for its leadership, bravery, boldness, independence, and dominating nature. All signs have their shadow side, too. Aries can fall into hyper independence, aggression, selfishness, stubbornness. And like any fire sign: anger.
Most people are familiar with their sun sign. It’s the horoscope you read as a kid and what you mean when you say, “I’m an Aries.” But everyone has a multitude of planets in other signs, too, and you can see them in your astrological birth chart: a snapshot of all the planets at the moment of your birth.
When I first looked up my dad’s birth chart, I gasped at the Aries sliver packed with planets. I knew he was an Aries, but I didn’t understand how many planets he had in the sign: his sun, Chiron, Venus, Saturn, North Node, and Mercury. In astrology, this is called a stellium: a cluster of planets that strengthens the energy of whatever sign they fall into.
I have a planet in Aries, too—my moon, which represents instincts, innermost needs, how to deal with your feelings, and the ways you might parent your inner child. My need for freedom, my instinct to blow through my feelings at a rapid clip, the way I run away from what’s emotionally difficult, the swiftness with which I go after my desires, the same bravery and stubbornness that has had my dad and I at odds over the years, that’s all Aries. It’s what my dad and I share.
I thought maybe the anger was his alone. But flipping through my middle school journals, I saw pages with huge furious scrawl, pen punched through in some places from the hardness of my grip, detailing my rage: toward my sister when she stole my clothes, the boy at school who called me names, my father. Reading my own journal gave me whiplash: on one page, he stormed into the den where I was listening to song clips on iTunes and feeding my Neopets, and yelled at me for reasons I didn’t understand. On the next, he apologized, kissed my head, told me he did what he did because he cared and didn’t want me to get hurt. On another page he hit me; on the next, he was going on a business trip, and I would miss him. I loved him just as much as I was afraid of him.
Aries is a fire sign known for its leadership, bravery, boldness, independence, and dominating nature.
The word Aries comes from the Greek god Ares, the god of war. He was known for his cruelty, warrior nature, and brutality. His counterpart, Athena, was known for strategic war tactics and heroism. But unpopular Ares was associated with chaos, destruction, and violence for violence’s sake.
As the story goes, Ares loved his mother, Hera, but hated his father, Zeus, who scorned and rejected him.
Here is what I know about my father’s father:
He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
He dated my grandmother when she was 18, and she found out she was pregnant with my dad the autumn that she was the first in her family to go to college. She dropped out, left Baltimore, and came home.
At some point early in my dad’s life—maybe even before my dad was born—his father left. Rejection, certainly, if not a scorning.
Decades later, when my sister and I were kids, he sent my parents a check as a gift for us. They used the money to re-do our bedroom. My sister and I excitedly picked out everything: pink and purple paint for the walls, bright reversible bedspreads for our bunk beds, all from this ghost of a man, a mirage of a father, of a grandfather.
“I don’t think I’m very kinky,” I told Quinn weeks before our first spanking attempt, our love still new, tucked into their chest under warm sheets. “But I might want to be.”
“I don’t know,” They laughed after I listed my sexual interests. When we were quiet, we could hear the candle wick flicker vanilla and honey beside us. “You sound pretty kinky to me.”
It would have been more accurate to say: I was kinky, I’d just never really had the chance to be. I wanted to be kinky, but I didn’t know how. They, on the other hand, had been plugged into Philly’s kink scene for years. They knew what they liked, and they were excited to introduce me to kink – if I wanted.
Together, we took the now TikTok-famous BDSM quiz, an educational test to determine what kind of kinkster you are. Did I like to be totally helpless and at my partner’s disposal, physically unable to resist what they did? Was I willing to try anything once, even if I didn’t think I would like it? Did I like forcing my partner into submission?
It laid out my interests: Experimentalist. Switch. Rigger. Rope Bunny. Submissive. Degradee. Dominant. According to the test, I had dominance inside me, braided like sweetgrass with submission.
Every astrological sign has a ruling planet, which gives it some of its qualities. Aries’ ruler is Mars—Rome’s god of war, the planet of energy, action, and desire. While his Greek equivalent Ares was little worshiped, Mars was one of the most important gods in Rome.
He didn’t start out that way, though. He was originally associated with agriculture and fertility after Juno, queen of the gods, gave birth to him from being touched by a magic plant. He was soft. Tender. Before something happened that made him fierce.
“Just wait until your father gets home,” my mom said when my sister and I fought or talked back to her, red-faced with tears.
I was kinky, I’d just never really had the chance to be.
In our room, we waited, knees hugged to our chests, tensing for the sound of the garage door slowly rolling open.
When he finally got home, he came upstairs with the same wooden spoon my mom used to scoop fluffy mounds of mashed potatoes onto our dinner plates. I waited my turn in the corner of the room with my arms crossed over my chest, my pulse thrumming in my wrists, watching as my sister’s small body, bent over my bottom bunk, crumpled under the thwack of the wood. She always sobbed and got off easy, emerged wet-faced and splotchy, full of I’m sorrys and I’ll never do it agains.
Then it was my turn. I got it harder, in that pink and purple room, when I clenched my jaw and refused to let him see me cry. The wood stung my skin like a promise.
Soft. Tender. Before something happened that made them fierce.
But the next day he would dance with us in the living room to Whitney Houston CDs, or sing hours of karaoke with us in the basement, or make us laugh so hard our stomachs hurt. He rode roller coasters with us and always knew the answers to our math homework. Where I learned to see my mom as an emotional woman in need of protection, I saw him as someone who was free. Southern Baptist Christianity demanded I be like her, but I wanted to be like him.
A moon in Aries is a moon on fire. Maybe the clash between my dad and I can be traced to our warring placements, our shared inheritance. We share stubbornness, we share hyper independence. We share fire. We share a dad who left.
When I came out at 26 around the dining room table at my parents’ house, my dad barely said a word. He left the table angry, and didn’t speak to me for nine months.
For weeks afterward, I leapt at each buzz of my phone, waiting for a response from my dad that never came. “He feels betrayed, abandoned,” my mom said over the phone. “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”
Tears silently dripped down my face onto the comforter I had burrowed myself beneath. I wouldn’t let her hear me cry.
“You two are so stubborn, just so similar,” She continued. “Do you remember senior year of high school? You two barely talked that whole year.”
I don’t remember us barely speaking. What I remember is the anxiety that flooded my chest when I received a text from him that read something like: Come home now, we need to talk. Your mother found your birth control pills.
Aries’ ruling planet, Mars, has two moons. The moons are named after a set of twins in Greek mythology, Phobos and Deimos, who accompanied their father Ares into battle. Phobos was the god and personification of fear and panic; Deimos, of terror and dread.
At 17, I came home after reading his text and lied my face off. I knew how close I was to the beginning of my real life beyond their house and the church. I could feel the tug of the rug underneath me as it all threatened to collapse, and I clamped my foot down.
“It’s for my period pain,” I shot out defensively, fear personified. “My lower back cramps.” I knew my going to college in the fall was on the line if they found out about the nights I was spending sleeping in my boyfriend’s bed in lingerie from the mall instead of a sleeping bag at my best friend’s house.
“I should take you to the gynecologist, and have them tell us if you’ve been having sex,” my dad threatened, sitting in his swivel chair with his huge wooden desk behind him. Aries needs to hold the power, needs to control.
My body shook so hard I was afraid he could see it. “Fine!” I said, looking him straight in the eyes. “Do it.”
He grounded me for the next few months, but he didn’t take me to the gynecologist.
For years in my childhood bedroom, fiercely holding back tears with my dad’s wooden spoon, I learned that my dad would hurt me, and call it love. Maybe he and I have more in common than I think: I too was once soft and tender before it was beaten out of me. I wove barbed wire around me and hid within its protection.
I knew how close I was to the beginning of my real life beyond their house and the church.
For years after moving out, I worked to turn some of my walls into doors. I learned how to cry again. How to peel back a stone rib cage as delicately as an orange peel. How to share what is soft and fluttering underneath.
By the time I found myself poised over Quinn’s waiting body with no idea how to hurt them in the way they wanted, I couldn’t imagine being a person who could hit them and call it love. If I was a tender person who cried looking into my cat’s eyes, rubbed my friend’s backs when they were sad, and wrote poetry about being in love, what would it mean for me to hit my partner and enjoy it?
Mars is quite literally the red planet, thanks to the iron oxide in its soil. In Roman mythology, red was associated with courage, war, and the military. Soldiers were revered in a culture that upheld war and violence, but if they stepped out of line even a little bit, they were fined, demoted, or beaten.
There is so little my dad shares about his childhood: riding a bike up and down the small hills at the trailer park, picking bugs out of cereal bought with food stamps, being beaten with a wooden spoon for the tiniest of infractions, a mother who loved him and alcohol very much, a stepfather who became like a father, who loved him and alcohol very much, who in the end, left too.
My great-uncle, my grandma’s brother, tells the story like this: he went to his sister’s house for a barbecue one day. I don’t know how old my dad was. Old enough to miss his stepfather, old enough to have been attached for years.
“Where’s Jim?” My great-uncle asked.
“Jim’s not coming back,” my grandmother said, flipping burgers on the backyard grill.
And he didn’t.
In ancient Rome, Mars was called many things, including Mars Pater: Mars the Father.
Back in their room, Quinn directed me to the right places. I brought my hand down, watching their skin slowly redden. Their body sank lower into the bed. I traced over the red with my fingernails and reached for the tools they’d given me. The paddle was heavy in my hands, and I found the thuddiest edge of it. I was clumsy, too gentle, afraid to hurt them. I wanted to make them feel good. They were patient, walked me through it, told me not to worry.
I learned that I could like being dominant. I’d tasted it in small moments – stepping on their waiting chest in my platform Pleasers, a little light choking, claiming them mine as I sat on their face. But I was afraid of the part of me I’d need to get to know in order to fully embody dominance. I was afraid to be daddy.
“It was really important to your dad to be the good dad he didn’t have,” my mom confided when I was in high school, sliding a stack of clean plates into the kitchen cabinet.
I am lucky to have not had the childhood he had. Even if we share abandonment, my dad was here in the ways his dad never was for him: changing my diapers, teaching me to ride a bike, taking pictures at my first Homecoming dance, helping me apply for college. But when he wasn’t speaking to me, I was haunted by him. A ghost of a man. A mirage of a father.
At the first Christmas after he stopped being “sick” when I was coming to a family gathering, we sat across the room from each other precariously and I thought about the email I sent him last winter, telling him how much I loved him and missed him and wanted to talk.
Quinn and I did a few more spankings. I was cautious, but I wanted to learn.
I could never forget his response: “Yes, I’m not interested in talking. It will only make things worse for everyone so pass.”
“Tough place for life,” NASA’s website explains of Mars. “At this time, Mars’ surface cannot support life as we know it. Current missions are determining Mars’ past and future potential for life.”
My sun sign is in Libra, the sign opposite to Aries. Aries is how I traveled around the world to places people told me I should be afraid to go instead of trying to fix a life that wasn’t working, it’s how I started working for myself, it’s how I tip-toed into exploring my sexuality with a threesome.
I was afraid of the part of me I’d need to get to know in order to fully embody dominance.
But Libra is in me, too—in my sweatshirt that says your interest in beauty is not trivial, in the daily alarm I had set for years to go off at sunset so I could watch it every night, in how I lose myself in a relationship because I can’t imagine anything more important than being my loved one’s person, in how I struggle to leave a job or a relationship that isn’t working because I can talk myself into seeing every side.
A sun and moon in opposite signs means I was born under the full moon—and so astrologically, part of the work of my life is the balancing of opposites. The embodiment and integration of different, sometimes warring, parts of self. I am dominant and submissive, abandoner and abandoned; if I had to abandon my dad to not abandon myself, so be it. I am my dad and I am not. I choose what to do with these shards, with this inheritance.
Astrologer Jeff Hinshaw once shared a few questions for Aries signs to reflect on: who am I? What do I desire? How am I being invited to more lovingly stand in my power?
He also shared these affirmations: I am. I transform. I start anew.
My training wheels on, Quinn and I did a few more spankings. I was cautious, but I wanted to learn. Finally, we went to a kink party together. I hadn’t known what to expect even with their primer, but it was a welcome surprise: a lot of friendly, non-judgmental queer people consensually hitting each other, tying each other up, and eating chips.
In the beginner’s room at the kink party, my partner laid on the leather spanking bench, their body an eager thing. People around us twirled floggers and chatted while an impact play teacher demonstrated techniques and guided me through using them.
It turns out, there’s more to a good spanking than you think: warming up the skin, reading the signs of your partner’s body, knowing when to keep going and when to withhold, using the right amount of force at the right time, finding the right rhythm, dancing with the tools as an extension of your own body, mixing a thuddy fist or paddle with a stingy palm or, in our case, a wooden spatula. A pervertible, my partner said: an ordinary object used for sex.
I finally got into the moment, body flushed from the inside out. My wrists flicked as I moved loosely around their body, delivering thwacks and thuds. A part of me I’d hidden from wriggled out from the dark room they’d been tucked inside and held the spatula with me. After forty five minutes of spanking, I buzzed from the high of hitting Quinn exactly how they wanted to be hit. My baby. I wanted to take care of them. This was how.
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