Tuesday, July 8, 2008

This is not the post you’re looking for

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Personal experience, Reviews, Sex, Sex toys, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

The post you’re looking for is actually my new review of the Tantus silicone cock ring on Eden’s site. Unless, of course, you really are looking for this one, in which case read on.

It was recently my birthday. This is actually a bigger deal than it would otherwise be because I’ve just turned twenty four and, by my logic, this means I am entering my “mid-twenties.” For the first time in my life, I kind of feel old.

Of course, I’m not that old, but I’m still kind of old. It’s summer in New York City even though it’s winter in my new home on the other side of the world, which means school’s out of session. The new Executive Board of Conversio Virium is finding their feet, and though they’re doing a fantastic a job of it if I do say so myself, I notice all the little gaps in their knowledge about things. These are things that will come with time and experience, two things I seem to be finding plenty of in myself lately.

I’ve been a very busy bee and thus haven’t been paying much attention to this little corner of cyberspace except in the form of sporadic tweets where my real life intersects (as it often does) with the BDSM stuff. It is one of those cyclic things wherein kink takes a back seat to life. In part, this is simply a matter of lack of opportunity. I miss the public scene I know and complain about back in New York.

I think this has made play a form of comfort rather than a form of exploration, and doing a scene for comfort is not at all the same as doing one for personal exploration. I’m sure there’s a post in there, somewhere…. Ah, well. At least I am still getting new sex toys to review.

Comments (5)

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Young people into BDSM are not exceptional

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, Bisexuality, Community, Generation gap, Sex

Every so often, such as last Saturday night, I get to talking with a bunch of people in the BDSM scene. Most of these people are almost always decades older than me. At some point in the conversation, which usually turns into a friendly debate of sorts (because those are the kinds of conversations I enjoy having), I get complimented on my “exceptional” nature.

“Oh, but May, not everyone who is your age has the emotional maturity that you do to handle BDSM,” they’ll say, “You’re exceptional.” And then they’ll go on to tell me countless stories about how they saw some young people totally fuck up their lives by not “being ready” for BDSM play.

Of course, it’s kind of nice to be complimented on my emotional maturity, or my intelligence, or whatever it is they feel will drive their point home the strongest, but the truth of the matter is that it’s total bullshit. I am not that exceptional. Very few people are.

Here’s the lie: to be “ready” for BDSM, you need lots of life experience, commitment, maturity, and intelligence in droves. They say you will need these things so that you won’t freak out over what you’re getting into, so that you can spend the years it’ll take you to find the (increasingly less) underground culture that is the scene, and then enough intelligence to “get it” when you’re finally there.

Here’s the truth: BDSM is just like anything else and you’ll get out of it whatever you put into it. That means if you’re an idiot and you think being kinky is the next bi, you’re going to do stupid shit and you’re going to regret it. But you know what, that holds true if you’re 15 or if you’re 40 years old. Age has nothing to do with it.

It is true that 15 year olds have a lot less life experience than 40 year olds (duh). However, I think it’s just plain dumb to assume that because of this lack of life experience these younger people have less emotional maturity (or intelligence, or what-have-you) than older people. Just because you’re 40 doesn’t mean you’re more mature than me, it could mean you’ve just been acting really immature for 40 years. Come on, you all know the kinds of 40 year olds I’m talking about.

People often use my mere presence in the community as proof that you do need to be exceptional to be a 23 year old with a healthy BDSM lifestyle. “Where are all the other 23 year olds in several year long committed D/s relationships?” they ask. Indeed, I’ve asked that very same thing, too. Since there are so few of us, that must mean people like Eileen and I are exceptional. Right?

Well, maybe in some respects (we do write pretty cool blogs, after all), but what’s exceptional about my being heavily involved in the BDSM community isn’t how exceptional I am, it’s the fact that I’m involved despite the odds. In other words, the circumstances themselves are rather remarkable, but that does not mean that the cause of those remarkable circumstances is solely of my own doing.

Though I could easily take all the credit for being one of the few young people out and about in the scene, most of the credit belongs to the rest of the community that doesn’t see young people like me as capable members in equal standing. With consistent decrees that we need all that largely useless life experience to really be a part of the scene, how could young people ever hope to be engaged?

What’s even more bewildering to me is that this apparent necessity for life experience makes no sense. Not only is that kind of disrespectful (albeit in a good-natured sort of way), it’s also contradictory: more often than not, you’ll hear people tell newbies that they need to “unlearn” lots of cultural and social programming to feel comfortable with BDSM. Well, gosh, unless the unlearning itself is the goal of BDSM (which would make for a really really boring kink if you ask me), then doesn’t that put younger people in a far more advantageous position to be “ready for BDSM”?

The inaccurate representation that BDSM requires some kind of special life journey, different or unique from other, “less intense lifestyles” is really nothing more than the older generation’s self-consoling opinion. “It’s okay that it took me thirty years to come out to the community and start having kinky sex,” they tell themselves, “because I needed all that life experience to be able to handle it now.” On the other hand, for them, maybe that was really true. If I were born in the 60’s instead of the mid-80’s, I also might have needed quite a few more decades to get my head around the fact that masochistic or submissive urges are not sick.

That’s not what I needed as a young boy, though, because with information about sexuality finally freed from the stranglehold of large organizations (such as governments and religions), young people are way more capable of exploring their own sexuality safely than almost anyone gives them credit for. Most of us are also smarter than people give us credit for, and we’re also way more emotionally mature than they think.

As long as people like Miriam Grossman don’t get their way, this means younger people like me (and, hell, even younger people than me—damn, now I feel old) will be able to find our sexual comfort zones at much younger ages than the previous generations. And really, how can that be bad?

Comments (13)

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Article published in Kink-E magazine: Learning the Ropes

Category labels: BDSM psychology, BDSM safety, Beginner BDSM, Communication, Community, Femdom, Male sexuality, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Personal history, Writing and blogging

I’ve been somewhat silent on this blog for a little while and some of you probably already know why. For those that don’t, my professional life has been all a twitter with all sorts of tasks related to my first (non-BDSM or sexuality-focused) book publication. That’s quite exciting, but it also means I’ve pretty much taken on another part time job in addition to my full-time one.

A while back before any of this began I submitted an article to a small local kink magazine here in Sydney called Kink-E Magazine. Apparently it’s been accepted and published and I never even knew about it. You’d think I’d get an email or something of the sort (if not an author copy), but I’ve not heard a word from the publishers. The only reason I found out the article was published was because I met a nice fellow at a dinner party of sorts who recognized my name and said he’d found this blog through the magazine.

Another very annoying thing is that apparently the magazine decided to print my article—which includes a picture of my back—on top of a large picture of a submissive, bound woman and some other random picture I’ve never seen before. I’m not claiming I should have had artistic input for the layout, but doesn’t it seem more than a little disingenuous to print an article about a submissive boy with a huge picture of a submissive girl behind the text of the article itself? This might be a great time for another one of my rants about the state of acceptance for submissive male sexuality but in deference to my exhaustion, I’ll let it slide without another word this time.

Scanned image of \"Learning the Ropes\" article text (Click to enlarge.)

Sigh…. Either way, I’m glad to see that the article is in print, and that it’s providing this blog and the great blogs I link to some additional exposure. Since the magazine’s website has seemingly gone from a partially free online publication to a closed “we won’t show you our content unless you pay us” model, I’m going to repost the entirety of my article here for your viewing pleasure.

This article was a part of my efforts to encourage educational events focused on BDSM and alternative sexuality (beyond queer or homosexual issues) in the Sydney area. See also My First Two Months in the Sydney BDSM Scene.

I still remember [my partner] Eileen’s face the first time she talked to me about hitting me with a single tail whip. “It makes a completely different noise when it hits skin,” she said, brimming with excitement. I gave her a knowing grin. When the two of us began playing together regularly she was the new-blood and I was the one with the reputation.

Her enthusiasm and eagerness to learn more and to try new things was enthralling, attractive, seductive. Sometimes she would tell me that her fingers itched, that they wanted to hurt me. I wanted nothing more than to give her unfettered access to me to do just that.

I think ‘access’ is a sexy word. It’s seductive in implication, explicitly slippery on the tongue, and just sounds raw. Even its meaning is primal: a means of approaching or entering a place, or person. Part of what I found so enthralling about playing with Eileen was how much her newness to the kind of play we were doing was teaching me things, too. Contrary to the popular stereotypes, I didn’t actually have much hands-on experience at the time.

For a lot of people, the answer to the question “When did you know you were into this BDSM stuff?” is very similar. It goes something like, “I’ve known as far back as I can remember.” I’m no exception.

I was four years old when I started making requests of my father to tie me up. At that young age, I wasn’t really questioning why I was asking this of him, I just knew that it was something I felt like I really wanted to have happen, something that would relax me. As a boy, I liked crawling into small spaces like the one under my bed or in my closet. At night I would wrap myself up in a cocoon of my sheets to relax, enjoying the compression and tightness of the fabric on my body.

When I was nine my family got a computer connected to the Internet for the first time. By the time I turned ten I had several hundred bookmarks of BDSM resources saved on the computer. I started reading each one voraciously. Thousands of words a piece, all about sexual dominance and submission, straight-out sex, sexuality, sadism, masochism, and erotica of course.

At first, most people look aghast when they learn this about me. In what world would exposing a ten year old child to endless information about BDSM sex be a positive experience? Indeed, I believe there are myriad dangers in doing so, arguably more so with today’s Internet than the one of thirteen years ago.

To be certain, that kind of access to information is Pandora’s Box. Looking in hindsight at my own experiences, as I’m sure Pandora must have done, I can now see both the good and the bad. The bad: misinformation, and deceitful, predatory, or just plain misguided people. The good: information in abundance, and a community of like-minded people.

For more than eight years I lurked in cyberspace, reading other people’s experiences. I spent a lot of my time filtering out what I thought was fanciful fiction from what seemed like an accurate representation of events and fact. I learned safety basics such as risky parts of the body to strike (kidneys, the tailbone, the neck, etc.), which led me to pursue other interests in anatomy.

Finally, together with my first kinky girlfriend, the two of us braved the real world together. We went to our very first BDSM-oriented meeting at The Eulenspiegel Society. It was a lecture-plus-demo-style presentation on flogging by the well-known Boymeat and his partner at the time, Luna.

“Not everyone plays this way,” I remember Boymeat saying with ernest while locking his gaze straight at my girlfriend and I, who—dressed in our casual cottons and Birkenstock sandals—stood out like a pair of sore thumbs in the crowd of some thirty-odd much older people wearing leathers, vests, and other black accoutrement. “Because we know one another,” Boymeat continued the caveats to his demo, “Luna and I play very roughly together.”

Little did he know at the time, but he didn’t need his caveats. When he began the demo and his flogger literally shoved Luna into the wall she was standing near, I was endlessly intrigued. Here, now, I could finally see with my own eyes everything that I’d been reading about for nearly a decade.

I realized that I could once and for all put to rest dozens of questions that I’d had about flogging and begin to answer dozens more. Watching, I remembered descriptions about flogging I’d read online and started cataloguing some as plausible and others as fantasy, distinctions I could not be confident of just twenty minutes prior. The experience of attending that presentation was invaluable, and for years following that attending similar presentations proved very rewarding for a lot of different reasons.

On a very personal level, spending time with other people who had similar desires as I did helped to legitimize my own thoughts and fantasies. It also showed me just how social an activity education really is. The vast majority of learning happens in the presence of either peers or teachers (or sometimes someone who is both). This is even more apparent in a community like ours that is heavily focused on physical, social experiences, either with a single partner or with a group.

Education, like sex and play, is a social activity—and learning can be very sexy. This makes face-to-face education even more valuable because, in addition to being the single most effective measure against accidents, abuse, and other negative consequences of ignorance, it can also provide opportunities to make friends and to network with others. At that first TES meeting I attended, I met Virgil, now former Vice-President of Columbia University of New York City’s BDSM discussion group called Conversio Virium, where a few years later I first met Eileen at a single tail demo I participated in.

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Sunday, May 11, 2008

CBT? WTF is up with that?

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, BDSM terminology, Cock and ball torture (CBT), Femdom, Foot worship, Male sexuality, Myths and misconceptions, Stupid dominants, Stupid submissives

I just got an email I thought was pretty funny. In it, the sender implies a conspicuous lack of an item from my toy collection: weights. I mean, doesn’t everyone have weights, at least for cock and ball torture?

Actually, no, I responded…and why would I? I don’t actually like cock and ball torture that much. I don’t really mind cock and ball torture—I mean, it can be fun and all and I’ve done it and stuff, hell I’ve even felt Eileen pierce my ball sack with a needle and poke my penis a bit with one, too—but I just don’t really enjoy it. It’s not a fun kind of pain for me. I just don’t get off on it.

Even if I did, though, would I really need to go out and buy special weights specifically for the purpose of dangling them from my genitals? Eileen’s response to this idea was something along the lines of, “Why the fuck would I spend money on that? There’s tons of shit in my house that’s heavy and tons of ways I could attach it to you. I am way more creative than that.”

Evidently, this sort of attitude is nearly unheard of for submissive men. It’s one of those things, right along with foot fetishism and a desire to be forcibly feminized, that many people tend to automatically assume every single man who is submissive must be into. I mean, I must at least have a weight for cock and ball torture, right?

You see this everywhere. Cock and ball torture is probably in every single stereotypical representation of BDSM that I’ve ever encountered. Women, usually women dressed in stereotypically shiny outfits, who are kicking, punching, slapping, poking, clamping, or otherwise delightfully abusing the male genitalia. Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Like I said before, if this is the kind of yodeling garden-gnome sex session you want to have, be my guest, but don’t assume that I’m going to want to do it with you.

And while I’m on the subject of yodeling garden-gnome sex, I’m sure there are a lot of dominant women who aren’t particularly enthusiastic about the idea of cock and ball torture, either. Like chastity and orgasm denial, this is so often just one more unbelievably penis-centric fantasy that the men who perpetuate the stereotype don’t even stop to think about what’s in it for their partners.

Cock and ball torture is so common, actually, it’s got an acronym: CBT. I kind of like this acronym, though, because it means I get to snicker quietly to myself when the HR director says something like, “Maybe we should invest in that CBT package to help our employees understand the new database system.” Of course, she’s talking about computer based training, which actually gives my filthy mind even more awesome fantasies in the office.

Anyway, I find the whole thing to be rather a big nuisance. It’s a little like going to a big city, New York for example, and assuming everyone you meet is a fan of the most well-known sports team, say the Yankees, right off the bat. Most of the people you meet are actually not going to be huge baseball fans at all, and some of them might like the Mets instead. Obviously, making the assumption that everyone you meet is a Yankees fan is kind of dumb.

Well, so is the assumption that all submissive men like CBT, or feet (which I think can be beautiful, but are often very silly looking). It’s more likely to make you look like an ass than anything else. So my advice is the same as it’s always been: stop treating sexual situations so differently from the rest of your life; if you’re not walking around making assumptions about sports teams based on where I live, stop making assumptions about my sexual preferences based on my submissive orientation.

Comments (8)

Monday, April 21, 2008

The Gadfly publishes an interview with myself and the VP of CV

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, BDSM safety, BDSM terminology, Beginner BDSM, Community, Masochism, Sex

This is probably old news to a lot of you, but for those who don’t keep up with news from Conversio Virium, I wanted to direct your attention (however briefly) to the latest issue of The Gadfly, Columbia University’s undergraduate philosophy magazine. As part of their Winter 2008 issue, the Gadfly has published excerpts of an email interview that Tyler, the current Vice President of Conversio Virium, and I agreed to do with Stephanie Wu, the Gadfly reporter.

I think the article, which is titled Tie Me Up: A Gadfly Interview with Conversio Virium and begins on page 13 of the PDF, came out really well. I hope it gives CV some more positive exposure to the Columbia University community, and to other colleges and universities as well. Here are a few choice samples:

Gadfly: Are there ways to think about pleasure and pain apart from the classic continuum defined by opposites, with a line in between marking the transition? Is the relationship between pain and pleasure actually circular?

Maymay: I think there are as many ways of thinking about pleasure and pain as there are people thinking about it. When you generalize, you begin to see that more people share classic opinions than those who share the radical ones, but that is true of anything, not just pleasure and pain. People who do SM often find themselves broadening their own awareness of what kinds of interpretations of pain and pleasure are possible, thereby increasing their own maturity and capability to navigate the world around them.

It behooves us to be humble, to acknowledge that we don’t know as much as we think we do. SM doesn’t suggest a relationship between pain and pleasure. On the contrary, SM challenges the relationships science, theology, morality, and other cultural norms have already established about pain and pleasure. SM doesn’t aim to indoctrinate, SM aims to free us from such indoctrination.

[…]

GF: Besides an interest in pain, what commonalities do the activities covered by BDSM share that are unique from other sexual interests?

MM: These things are grouped together largely because there is no other space where people can talk about them. Not even the Queer clubs do enough to educate people about how to practice these forms of sexual activity safely (both physically and emotionally) and consensually, and that’s okay as that’s not their place. These activities are grouped because they share a common physical theme. This is rough sex. Like a sport, people can get hurt. Like a sport, people can become very skilled in doing it in a safer, more effective manner.

You can read the full interview (PDF) over on the Gadfly’s web site.

Comments (2)

Friday, February 8, 2008

One, sir: On Titles in Scenes

Category labels: BDSM psychology, BDSM terminology, Beginner BDSM, D/s dynamics, Exhibitionism, Masochism, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Whipping, Writing and blogging

Reading through my own personal journal’s archives reminded me of how early on many of the thoughts, feelings, and ideas that I express today have been inside of me. It’s also shown me how some things changed, and looking at which things have changed and which have not is an interesting pursuit in itself. This post, below, which I wrote on April 26th, 2005, references a Singletailing demonstration I did with an occasional play partner and friend of mine at Conversio Virium that was very well-received.

Back then, I didn’t even identify publicly as submissive, and in fact I was such a stalwart bottom that more often than not I was often described as being one of the “toppiest bottoms” people knew. I knew how I liked to get hit, with what, where, and when. I would scoff at attempts to get me on my knees and never, ever wiggled cutely.

Along those lines, I never used titles in my play or otherwise, because that’s something submissives did. I cared little for honorifics, not out of a lack of respect but out of a narrow-minded view engendered by my environment of what they were for and how they could be used. Of course, now I use some titles more than others, and have even grown to enjoy their use at times. That’s not to say that titles are “better BDSM” or “more real” or anything of the sort (that’s bullshit), but I have managed to broaden my view of what they can do.

This post from April 2005 is republished here in part because I think it’s a pretty good entry, in part because I still strongly believe the things I said were true for me then and are true for me now, and because I’m way too busy to spend that much time writing posts at the moment but I’d really like to keep some new content flowing into the blogosphere from this blog. Enjoy.

I’ve already decided this kink-blog thing is a step in the right direction. Many reasons, not least of which is the enormous relief I feel to be able to unburden myself of these musings and, later, look back on them as I do with all my other writings. Another benefit, however, (beyond the social ones of sharing these writings with pertinent folk, such as those with whom I play) is that it will lead to reflections I’ve not been able to access for a very long time.

Eileen brought up some great points about tonight’s CV singletailing demo/scene (was it a demo or was it a scene?), which I did not have the presence of mind when I was writing the earlier entry about it to make note of. Specifically, I said Sir.

Titles are a funny thing. They’re amazingly common, I dare say deeply loved and deemed important to many, and yet they make very little sense to me. Calling someone (my top) “Sir” or “Ma’am” (or “Mistress” or “Master” or whatever) during scenes just isn’t something I’ve ever had the inclination to do.

That’s not to say I have much of an issue with it. I’ve occasionally done this during private play sessions with past partners. In every case I can recall, though, it was either initiated by their request or due to a role-play scenario which was currently unfolding. It makes sense to me if, say, a partner and I were playing out some specific scenario with very defined roles to then refer to my partner with a name respective of their role in the scene. After all, we’re already role playing.

But scenes, for me, are not usually role play. I love BDSM. I do not love roleplaying (though I do enjoy it on occasion). When I scene, I’m not “the victim” or “the slave” or anything like that. I’m me, plain and simple—and it’s so much hotter that way, too.

Similarly, my tops aren’t “my Master” or “my Lady” or anything. They’re just themselves as well (at least they are in my head, most of the time) and again, that’s so much hotter for me. I can’t speak from a top’s perspective, but Eileen expressed this issue for herself rather eloquently: I feel like I’d rather be a scary-yet-caring version of myself, rather than a scary-yet-caring hypothetical dominant construct.

Three things about this statement:

  1. First, version of myself. Yes; when I bottom to someone, I have chosen to bottom to them, not their image or their reputation. (Sidenote: For now I’m going to assume that this is one of the reasons playing with pro Dommes at the parties they invited me to was never as much fun as playing with lifestylers in clubs or friends at home; pro Dommes are constantly keeping an eye out for potential clients, and showing off what they can do to me is an advertisement for themselves more than it is a scene for me. Fun, but lacking.)
  2. Second, scary-yet-caring. One of the overriding themes of my fantasies, for as long as I can remember having fantasies, is the notion of feeling precious to someone, specifically, my top. (You will get smacked if you make a LOTR reference in the comments.)
  3. Third, hypothetical dominant construct, which ties back in with the first thing. Titles make things fake for me. They turn something real into something imagined. They build hypothetical dominant (and submissive) constructs of who we are in our heads.

    For some scenes, like the one during the demo, this is fine. Other times, such as during structured role play scenes, it’s even great. For other scenes, it just has no place because it wrecks the realism. (Sidenote: I have a huge thing with realism. For instance, it’s one of the reasons I simultaneously love and fear knife play. I have to write about that sometime in the future.)

So, I said Sir. That’s not really the big deal. The big deal is that I said it publicly, and not just publicly out at a club where it’s noisy and dark and no one can really hear. No, I said it in a room full of people who were neither doing nor saying anything because they were intently watching his whip and my welts.

The effects of this was interesting. Fortunately, singletails hurt (god, do they ever!) so at the point where I was counting strokes there was little actual thinking going on inside my head beyond “Oh fffuck!” and similar. I neither wanted to nor do I think I could have, at that point, think too much about anything that was happening. (Also, see earlier entry about feeling free, relaxed, and not self-conscious, which helped.)

When asked if I could count strokes, my response was a tentative I think so. When pressed, it did take me a moment to respond. Why? What was going through my head at that moment? I’m not sure, but after the above reflection I think I entered “a role”—specifically, “the demo bottom.”

That sounds obvious; may, you do realize you were actually demo bottoming, right? Well, yes, of course I do. But in the role, it wasn’t me at CV being hit with the singletail while leaning against the chalkboard playing with my top anymore. Instead, it was me as the demo bottom at CV…. The difference is subtle, but the difference was there, and it did change the scene. (It didn’t make it worse or anything like that, it just changed it.)

At first, I was being singletailed and then, later, the demo bottom was being singletailed. Again, that’s not worse. It is enjoyable in an exhibitionistic sort of way to perform in such a manner and such a performance is not necessarily less authentic, though it has more potential to be. The devil, as always, is in the details.

My conclusion, then, is that for me (like most things) titles in scenes are tools to be used when appropriate. It’s important for me (as well as for my play partners) to understand how things like this affect my head and what responses they will get from me. All of this needs a follow-up entry, but that’s for another time. It all also ties in very strongly with the realism bit which I mentioned earlier, so that will need to be explored as well.

For now, however, I’m headed to the shower and to tend to my skin. I’m really looking forward to that first hit of the water on my back. After that, it’s bed time. ‘Night, all.

Comments (8)

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

One night, I fell in love

Category labels: BDSM psychology, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Faceslapping, Femdom, Knife play, Male sexuality, Personal experience, Personal history, Relationship

Back on May 3rd, 2005, a bit after 4 AM in the morning, I came home from an evening out at one of TES’s “College Night” parties at New York City’s local BDSM club, Paddles. A little over a month earlier, I had first met Eileen at Conversio Virium, but it had been significantly less than a month since we really began getting to know one another. This night, this College Night party, was the first time we played in public. It’s the first time I’d ever felt the beginnings of submission towards another person.

This night was one of the nights when I fell in love with her. Below, a protected entry from my personal journal is republished in full. With the end of my time in New York City fast approaching, I feel like the beginning deserves another look.

In chronological order:

  • Saying hello to more people than I can remember. Giving out hugs.
  • Pledging, hazing. Eating “live goldfish,” immitating a duck (badly), playing Simon Says, and ass paddling.
  • Electric touches everywhere, different on the scalp, on the body, on the genitals. (The ones on the genitals made me squirm to get away—never thought that’d happen when hands and my genitals were involved.) Also laughter, much of it.
  • Knives on steroids, the sound of sizzling, the feel of them burning my skin, forceful like lightning.
  • Caged by the electrified metal, trapped and cornered and struggling.
  • Cowering, hands bound behind my back, slapped and scared and being held, rocked, and petted.
  • He looks like a slave boy. Also a title, but not entirely transferrable from the titles given to a top.
  • Face slapping, breath play. Being broken, defeated, knocked off my feet by the power of her hits; no weapon, no threats, because none was needed—I was her’s.
  • Is this submission? Cavernous, dark, frightening, paralyzing and blurred, treasured.
  • Flinching at the gentle caresses, clutching her arms like they were a tether back up and out of the darkness.
  • A straight-edge blade and a curved blade both at my neck, held by two different people. Cornered in a booth almost kissing one of them, the other pushing my chin up with her knife, forcing the kiss.
  • Grilled chicken, pancakes, and stories at a diner. No coffee for me, though—this was a group outing.

In addition to all of the above, some reminders from an IM conversation for more things to write about:

  • The main difference between every single other time I’ve been in pain and these times was that every other time, my body extended itself towards the pain, again and again and again. Not just willingly—lustfully. But that didn’t happen with this.

    And this time you weren’t smiling anymore.

  • I also remember looking into your eyes when you were suffocating me, actually. But, strange, I don’t remember your eyes.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Why Orgasm Logger? Well, why not?

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, BDSM techniques, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Communication, D/s dynamics, Humor, Myths and misconceptions, Orgasm Logger, Personal history, Politics of sex, Sex, Sexual teasing and control, Technology

This is majorly cool: Viviane linked Orgasm Logger in her Links for January 4th, 2008 post and it’s since been picked up by Boinkology, and a few higher-profile bloggers are beginning to display Orgasm Logger counters on their sites, too, like Tom Paine. A few months ago, a search for “Orgasm Logger” revealed only a handful of hits but now Google shows over 1,300 results, which is quite a bit for a project I put a single night’s effort into months ago primarily for my own, personal use.

I’ve also been seeing discussions about Orgasm Logger surface on message boards and other blogs every so often. It’s a lot of fun to read through the discussions people are having and to see what they’re saying about it. Here are some telling examples.

This woman, on an Informed Consent discussion thread, says:

Having orgasms isn’t a competitive activity, it’s just something that happens, or doesn’t and it certainly shouldn’t be used as a measure of anything. In my opinion.

I have to say I agree with her regarding her view on the usefulness of orgasms as a competitive measure, but I disagree that it shouldn’t be used as a measure of something. Measure of what is the question. Well, I think that’s up to the person doing the measuring.

I never think of orgasms as competitive, just a lot of fun. They’re fun to have, and they’re fun for some of us not to have, and the fact that some of us are having more than others is also a lot of fun for some of us. I don’t think there’s anything in this world that turns me on more reliably and so thoroughly as watching my lover have a screaming-good orgasm. For me, when she has ten or twenty, or maybe even a hundred and I haven’t had one, that’s an even sexier thought. I like the disparity in the numbers, but I don’t feel competitive about it.

Naturally, kinky people into chastity play and orgasm control see the value of this tool really quickly. Later in the same thread, another woman writes:

I think the ‘logging’ idea would be a nice little extra feature for those who do chastity play.

And then another guy echoes her sentiment:

I can imagine it might be of use if a man were in a sort of chastity arrangement without a device i.e. based on trust, and monitored by a domme at a remote location.

Curvaceous Dee is (fittingly) ahead of the curve by already having experienced first-hand the intent of Orgasm Logger:

It was a great relief to finally come again. The very useful Orgasm Logger has confirmed to me over the past few months what I’d suspected for a while—that I like to get off every couple of days. Doesn’t matter too much whether it’s self-pleasure or pleasure with partners (both have their moments), but, almost like clockwork, every two days on average will see me gushing, groaning, and generally feeling great. Which explains why I’m always running out of ‘bedroom towels’….

Indeed, as she points out, keeping track of stuff let’s you know more about that stuff.

Here’s another blogger’s comment, one I really love:

I clicked, and found out this guy had his last [orgasm] 3.58 days ago, and this is a feed from an actual Orgasm Logger site! What an add-on to one’s blog! The ultimate in advance orgasm management strategy systems!

The ultimate in advanced orgasm management strategy systems? I think this blogger coined a new acronym: OMSS! Naturally, I can think of dozens of improvements to Orgasm Logger so I’m not going to be calling this thing “the ultimate” any time soon.

Of course, Lux of Boinkology said it best:

We’re both fascinated and confused by this application

In fact, that’s been the most common reaction, and it’s really interesting to me. Long before I created Orgasm Logger, I’d just been naturally keeping a tally on my orgasms. It seems to me like most everyone does this, if only not as mindfully as I do. Of course, what made me mindful about keeping track of my orgasms in the first place was my near-fetish for orgasm control, in a sexually submissive headspace.

I got really serious about keeping track of my orgasms about two years or so before I created Orgasm Logger. At first, I simply wrote down when my last one was, so I’d always know. Then I wanted to be able to easily share that piece of information with Eileen, so she’d be able to know whenever it interested her. To make that happen, I started recording my orgasms as events on my personal calendar, publishing those events as an iCalendar to a local WebDAV server I run for the two of us here at home, and then subscribed her iCal to the calendar feed I was publishing.

It worked flawlessly. Now I had a real database of all my recorded orgasms with embedded date and time, location, and participant information! It was pretty much all I needed. But it wasn’t perfect.

It didn’t do the things I was most interested in, which was tell me at-a-glance how long it had been since my last orgasm, the most personally interesting datum. I had to do that calculation every time I wanted to know. What’s today’s date? When was the date of my last orgasm? What’s the difference between then and now?

Obviously, computers are the answer to computational problems, so I started thinking about how I could get the computer to do everything I wanted. In the process, it occurred to me that lots of people heavily into orgasm control are always talking about “how long it’s been” or “what their last one was like.”

Hell, people who aren’t even kinky are talking about their orgasms left and right, up and down, inside and out, this ways and that ways! Moreover, the entire political debate over contraception, abortion, teen pregnancies, abstinence-only sex education, and a host of other issues, are all centered around exactly this topic: orgasms!

None of this would even be happening if it weren’t for orgasms, but I’ve yet to hear someone acknowledge that simple fact. It’s as though, if you were an alien, you’d think orgasms were what made the world go ’round, but nobody was allowed to talk about them directly.

Which brings me to my point. Orgasms are really important for a lot of people. What’s interesting, then, is why it’s so puzzling to so many people that I’ve made a tool to help people keep track of them. After all, throughout history, the one thing people have continued to do with nearly no change in behavior at all is come up with ways to keep track of the stuff that’s important to them.

No value judgement, no assumptions, just an awareness of what’s important to people and the benefits that can be garnered from using increasingly sophisticated tools to broaden that awareness. That’s what Orgasm Logger is about, for me. That’s what I think everything should be about, on a philosophical level.

No one would have looked at me askance if I wrote improvements to banking software, because money is very important to a lot of people. That’s why it’s tracked so rigorously. That’s why it’s used as a competitive measure of status, of wealth, and of many other things, even though a lot of us think that it shouldn’t be.

Why, then, do orgasms seem so out of place? Maybe the answer to that question is also the answer to a lot of other things that we as a country, a culture, and a species, are struggling with. Maybe understanding value, understanding why the things that are important to us are important, things that are currently so deeply ingrained in the cultural tropes of our society that we don’t even realize we can question, will help us in ways we can’t even imagine today.

That’s what I’m puzzling over.

Update: News of the existence of Orgasm Logger is still spreading, and it’s still getting the typical, puzzled and, in some cases, even hostile reactions I can pretty much expect from the mainstream world-at-large. Latest sighting was at a site called Dear Sugar.

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Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Wednesday Wanderings #9: Winds of Change

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Femdom, Male sexuality, Politics of sex, Stupid submissives, Technology, Wednesday Wanderings

It’s Wednesday, so let’s just dive right in!

  • For a long, long time I wished I had been sent to a Montessori school when I was younger because one of my tried-and-true learning techniques comes from making associations between things other people would not typically realize could be applicable to one another. I made one such connection when I started reading Susan Mernit’s excellent blog about social media, social networks, citizen journalism, web technologies, sexuality, online dating, and so, so much more. Reading her blog makes me feel like I’m discovering, and continually rediscovering, value in so many places; I feel like Susan’s a sort of kindred spirit, and would recommend her blog to everyone.

    Two pieces of Susan’s writing was also picked as BlogHer’s best picks of December 2007. One was called Breaking up: When do you stop loving someone? and the other was titled Not choosing monogamy: Why exclusivity doesn’t matter. Both of them are excellent pieces that I think are worth your time. Her blog is a fantastic read if you’re at all interested in Internet culture and technologies, sexuality, and especially if you’re interested in both!

  • One of the writers who sometimes makes me feel as though she could have been a fly on the wall of every conversation I’ve ever had with myself is the Subversive Submissive. As a female submissive, many of the issues she writes about are not the ones I have, yet every once in a while, I’m perusing my news feeds and something she wrote will just stand up and grab me.

    One of these posts is this post of hers in which she talks about her personal approach to BDSM and why it’s put strain on her relationship:

    I have something of a history of (a) not feeling comfortable with my own sexuality and kinks, and (b) not trusting that my sexual partner is actually interested in the sort of sex and the sort of relationship I desire.

    […]

    But I realize now that I’ve been disappointed in him for not coming at this in the same way that I do; I’ve been disappointed that he doesn’t write about all of this, doesn’t comment here, doesn’t read any BDSM nonfiction, doesn’t initiate taking classes with me. And that’s just holding him up to an absurd and unrealistic expectation. There’s no reason why he should have to approach BDSM in the same way that I do.

    Or this one, about what it’s like not to feel submissive sometimes:

    It’s the nights when the same thing we did two weeks ago not only fails to arouse me, but irritates me. It’s the nights when I have zero interest in any kind of sex at all. And it’s also the nights when I find myself wanting to just climb on top of him and fuck him until I come.

    She works out issues so carefully and intelligently that, if she really is anything like me, I’m certain of two things. First, that she is shielding readers like me from the incredible turmoil that she must go through to reach such insightful moments of clarity. Second, that what she has to say is going to be valuable regardless of your orientation.

    It’s nothing short of a real delight whenever I see a new post appear from her corner of the Web. Go check her blog out. You can get there from my blog roll.

  • This week the ever-thoughtful Richard Evans Lee came out with an excellent, must-read post called Femdom Kink is Vanilla. His observations, that kinky people and vanilla people seeking relationships with one another have the same complaints (women wanting conversations, men wanting stereotypes), have been made before but never seem to subside. In this post Richard is able to map the vanilla versions to the kinky versions of these facts to one another and back again and the result is an illuminating entry that deserves a spot in your “send this to the hopeless stupid submissive” bookmarks folder. (What? Doesn’t everyone have one of those?)
    In talking with other kinky people about BDSM relationships it has been nagging at me for some time how closely what I say is what I would say to anybody looking for a romantic partner.

    And how annoyingly the words map into gender stereotypes.

    […]

    Where BDSM departs from vanilla is that the former is never going to be satisfied with bodily beauty. The latter can be satisfied - if only for a single night - by arrangements of muscles and bodyfat. The former will never be happy without some meshing of minds.

    That heterosexual male bottoms often don’t grasp this is why even though there are probably far more of them than female tops the limitations of the former are an equalizer of the wrong sort.

  • Dovetailing perfectly off the last item, the latest post by Joscelin, an intelligent and young submissive man whose blog has been on my blog roll for a while, posits a possible (at least partial) solution to the problem of ignorant submissive men that is so obvious it bears repeating: sex education for the adolescent submissive man. Joscelin says:
    I feel like now that I’m 24, my sexual education is finally getting started. I finally realize that intercourse has never been a big priority for me; I’m more interested in scenes anyway. This has had the convenient side-effect of making me appear not to be a sex-crazed loser who only wants a score. I am, I just have a differeing definition of “score.” As such, traditional sexual education failed to even address most of my questions, let alone answer them correctly.

    […]

    The marginalization of female dominant’s sexuality involved limits the females that are willing to dominate men. Additionally, a substantial unmet demand is created, i.e., a professional market, which in many ways worsens the problem. One obvious solution that I’ve never read before is sexual education of adolescent submissive men.

    I sincerely doubt I’ll see this happen in America in my life time, especially with the Federal government actively sabotaging attempts at fairly balanced sex-ed, but one day I hope this obviously positive thing won’t be such a radical thought. Like Joscelin, I first learned the majority of information about my sexuality from Internet pornography, ninety-nine percent of which was absolute bullshit and, thankfully, had a noticeably weaker impact on me than the vast majority of other submissive men out there. It shouldn’t be a mystery why I want better for the next generation.

That’s all for now. A lot of my time and energy at the moment is being spent scheduling my last month in the United States before the big move to Sydney. I’m at the state where I can just begin to feel the winds of change gaining strength. They’re not gale force yet, but they’re getting stronger.

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Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Fantasy Worlds

Category labels: BDSM psychology, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Fantasy, Femdom, Personal experience, Relationship, Uncategorized, Vanilla life

One of my severe failings is my notorious inability to “take the bad with the good,” or to “just be okay,” or to do that thing that so many people seem so capable of doing with such relative ease that makes them, by and large, happier more often than I am. Regardless of the freedoms or the privileges they may or may not have, some of these people are simply really good at synthesizing happiness. It’s been my mental illness, bipolar disorder, that has been the scapegoat and the whipping boy for much of these failings of my character, yet—ironically, in keeping with my character—I’ve always rejected the notion that such a simplistic, restricting explanation as mental illness is the full answer.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that I lack the refinement of a necessary skill that would give me a lot more peace with the cold, hard, real hardships I’m facing. Though I’m getting better at this with time and hard work, no one has been affected more severely by this struggle of mine than Eileen, for obvious reasons. These reasons include physical proximity, emotional closeness, shared love, and of course, an obvious disparity of some very personally painful privileges.

Right now, as I write this, it’s precisely that thought racing through my head: remember that it will be okay. We’ve recently had a very harsh day. Ordinarily, despite the fact that I reference Eileen a lot in my blog, I don’t often talk about her. When I do, it’s more because I’m talking about me, and even that’s guarded, for both our sakes; navigating the waters between being out and being private is very important to both of us. But right now, I want to write about my night with her.

It’s a night I don’t ever want to forget.

As I said, the day was harsh, a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs. The early hours swung wildly between comfortable laxness and debilitating pain. By the end of the day, we had found a more even keel.

Unfortunately, I began feeling ill a while earlier. It was a mild but unpleasant upset stomach that hit me first, followed by a familiar stab of pain in my feet as I walked. Later, back at home, exhaustion hit me full force and I was soon collapsed on our bed.

“What’s wrong?” Eileen asked me from her computer chair.

“I feel bad…,” I groaned.

“Bad how?” she asked.

“Physically,” I said.

She put her computer back on her desk and pushed herself out from under it in order to come give me a hug. With the painful tension in my body spreading, her hug hurt and I covered my head with the blankets and crawled to the wall. It was clear that I was feeling quite a bit worse than just “bad.”

She paused a moment and then left the bed. “I’m going to run you a bath. The water will relax you, it’ll do you good.”

“No, it’s filthy,” I said.

“Then I’ll clean it,” she said. “When I come back in this room I expect you to be naked, got it?”

I very rarely argue with beautiful dominant women who demand that I strip, so of course I agreed and quickly disrobed, tossing my clothes over the side of the bed and cocooning myself in the folds of the blankets. I heard the water going, heard Eileen shuffling about, but was too far gone to really take notice of very much.

“Where are our matches?” Eileen asked suddenly appearing at my side.

“What? I don’t know.”

“You used one to light the incense the other day, didn’t you? Where’d you put them?”

“Actually, I used the stove,” I told her.

More shuffling from her, more dizzied motionlessness from me. Then I heard a chain rattling.

A while ago, for the June 2007 Gay Pride Parade, Eileen and I bought ourselves a six-foot length of chain. It’s nothing fancy, just a regular old length of chain from our hardware store and a set of four keyed-alike padlocks. In total, it cost us under twenty dollars, and it’s one of the most versatile, often-used, and enjoyable toys in our entire bedroom.

I love heavy metal bondage, chain, and that chain specifically. It’s just like ropes, but the practicality chain and locks offer is unsurpassed, not to mention hugely psychologically impressive. When Eileen picked up that chain and I heard it rattling by the window, my mind immediately started to race towards fantasies and memories, which is arguably a very stupid thing to do.

Oh, forget about it, I chided myself. She’s just moving the chain out of the way.

She wasn’t, though, and the next thing I knew the blankets were pulled off of me and Eileen had one end of the chain looped around my collar and had it padlocked shut. She began pulling gently. “Come on,” she said as she lead me towards the bath tub.

It was mere seconds from the bed to the bathroom, but even before arriving at the bathroom my cock was as hard as the steel Eileen was pulling with. She smiled knowingly at me, and I smiled helplessly back. Then I saw the bathroom, and I nearly melted from glee.

The bathroom light was off. The room was illuminated by eleven candles, ten tea-lights and one large cylindrical candle (I counted them later). Inside the cylindrical candle was the stick of incense I had pushed into the wax the week before, lit and smoking. On the closed toilet seat within arms reach from the tub, a wine glass rimmed with rock salt held a drink—a margarita, my favorite! The bathtub was filled a quarter way with running water, and not a single smudge of dirt or grime was visible on the white porcelain.

The small room smelled of steam and spice. As I stood at the doorway, not quite knowing what to do, I could feel the warm air touching my naked skin, making the finer hairs on my body stand on end. It made me feel suddenly chilly, but it was a welcoming sort of temperature, like the feeling one might get upon seeing hot chocolate and a roaring fire after just spending an hour playing in the snow. I was so happy.

“Go on,” Eileen said, motioning through the bathroom doorway with a nod of her head. “Get in the bath.”

I’m pretty sure I said something at this point, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. I might have said, “Yes, ma’am,” with a smile on my face that stretched from ear to ear, or I might have just stood there agape. I was simply so pleasantly surprised at the scene that I wished I could play the moments in slow-motion.

The water in the bathtub was a touch hotter than what was comfortable, because I had to step out of it briefly after immersing my foot in the water. Eileen waited patiently as I took a moment to adjust the water temperature, and then slowly seated myself in the tub.

When I was sitting down, Eileen took the free-standing end of the chain and circled it around the piping behind the toilet. I heard a click as she padlocked it shut. The sound sent a shrill jolt of excitement through me: she’s chaining me in the bath! I knew the chain was long enough that I could probably stand on the outside of the bathroom door if I wanted or needed to, but the sight of the room combined with the feel of the chain’s presence itself was enough to fuel my fantastical imagination.

I was a harem slave, pampered and cared for so long as I obeyed my Mistress and her underlings. Or I was a simple villager caught up in some conflict and now found myself a spoil of war, being prepped for her enjoyment that she’d no doubt partake of in just a moment. Or I was a beloved human pet, spoiled rotten with expensive liqueur and kept at my owner’s whim for fun. I was all of these things, and so many others!

“Now,” she started as she straightened up, “relax and feel better,” she said. “And drink your margarita! Oh, and you can masturbate if you want to,” she added with a smile, producing our pump-bottle of Babe Lube in an instant and placing it next to the margarita.

“Yes’m,” I mumbled through an impossible smile.

Eileen took a step forward and bent down to look over me. “Yes what?” she asked, grinning at me.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said again, this time with what was evidently satisfactory volume.

“Good boy,” she said, and moved to kiss me. I dissolved into her kiss.

Sadly, the kiss was too brief. She pulled away and told me that she’d check on me, and that I’d better relax and behave. I lusted after her when she turned to go, my eyes nearly molten with liquid, my cock involuntarily splashing at the water’s surface as though it were some ecstatic child. The feeling was simply indescribable.

I took a moment to look around again when she closed the door behind her. Our bathroom, whose walls Eileen had painted with a strip of silver and blue mermaids years ago and which were now flickering in the candlelight, looked like a small washroom in some palace somewhere. The walls themselves, which are made of white, coated brick, added to the illusion. The faint gray trails from the burning incense made a single winding column of smoke that stretched halfway to the ceiling.

The hot water was, indeed, relaxing. It was soothing my muscles and washing my stress down the drain.

So much water, my fantasy narrator was talking in my head. There’s only a funnel at the drain, so all of this running water, every drop, is being spent on me. (Now, I have to laugh at my inner environmentalist who knows this was horrible.)

That fantasy narrator kept going, melding real and imagined thoughts, feelings, and sensations together.

I wonder what she wants from me. Is she going to hurt me? This is all…so nice…but why the chain?

At the thought of the chain I melted again, curling up on my side and letting the fantasy reel keep playing in my head. Every so often Eileen would appear at the door, checking up on me. She never looked sexier to me than she did from that vantage point in the bath.

Unfortunately, my stomach soon began feeling upset and my limbs could no longer find a comfortable resting position. I was feeling ill again and had to stop the water. I sat up, slouched over, holding an arm over my belly. Hearing the water stop running, Eileen came back to check on me.

“I think I need some water,” I could barely croak the words.

“Okay,” she said, and she went to get some, bringing it back in a hurry. I drank.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t drink the drink,” I said. And I’m so sorry my body isn’t playing along with this amazing, incredible creation you’ve made for me, I thought.

“It’s okay, I’ll drink the rest” she said as reassuringly as she could, “I think you should go to sleep.”

Disappointed, I had to agree.

“Will you be okay for just another minute?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good,” she said, and went about clearing the margarita and the lube from the bathroom, preparing our bed and turning out the bedroom lights. A minute later she was back with the keys to my chain leash and had unlocked it from the back of the toilet. “Can you stand?”

I could, and did, and she helped me out of the tub and gave me our big beach towel. I dried myself off as she led me by the chain leash, still locked to my collar, back to the bed.

“Drop it,” she said of the towel, “and get in bed.”

I did as I was told and was greeted by the warmth of several layers of blankets being pulled over me. I closed my eyes and tried to relax. I heard the chain rattling against our window’s security grate.

“Oh but…what if I need to go pee in the middle of the night?” I asked without moving or opening my eyes.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Eileen said to me. “I haven’t locked the other end of the chain to the window, I just used a carabiner.” I opened my eyes in slight surprise and saw her smiling cleverly at me. “But I’ll only do that for emergencies or sicknesses, okay?”

“Oh, okay,” I smiled back and closed my eyes again. I spent a little while trying to fall asleep but couldn’t manage it easily. My body still hurt and my mind wouldn’t quiet. She noticed this and was soon in bed with me. We spooned. She was gently caressing my back and my sides.

After a while, when I still wasn’t able to sleep or chase away the tension in my body, Eileen started whispering in my ear.

“I like to think of you owned by me,” she said. “You, a young farm boy, no one special, though pretty, and me coming with an army to pluck you out of your life and take you away with me. I like to think of how you’d fight, how you’d struggle, how I’d break you. You’d be on your knees, being held down by two strong men, when I first see you. I’d tie you down and put a collar on you, mark you as mine.”

One of her hands found my collar and slowly pulled back on it so I’d feel it against my neck. I was silently moaning at this point in little shallow breaths that dried my mouth completely. I was so turned on, hanging on every word she said.

“You’re property,” she continued, “owned, you belong to me. I like that you breathe when I let you…” she closed a hand over my nose and my mouth, yet I only twitched nervously once, “…that you eat what I give you, that you’re living because I want you to. That’s what I mean when I say you’re mine; that I’ll care for you, that I want you.” She stopped and let the words sink in. I still couldn’t breath, and I was happy to let the fantasy of my fear of her keep me from struggling to get away.

Eventually I couldn’t help but begin to pull away from her. “Shhh…” she cooed, and I tried uselessly to relax. The lack of oxygen was growing insistent in my chest, quicker than it would have been had she not raised my heart rate with such arousal. “Shhh,” she said again, more forcefully this time, pressing her hand against my lips and tightening her fingers’ grasp of my nose even stronger. I did my best to hold still, to let my muscles sink into our mattress and my head rest limply on her arm.

I felt the emptiness in my chest growing. I closed my eyes to help myself stay relaxed. What was at first the small circle of emptiness in the center of my body seemed to expand to fill my lungs, and then began pressing at my ribs. Still I remained motionless, restful. Still the emptiness pressed against my body, growing slightly painful. I drowned it out of my consciousness with arousal as best I could.

Still, she didn’t let me breathe. My cock throbbed with my every heartbeat. I could hear her breathing calmly in my ear, the warm air passing over my earlobe and my cheek.

“Good boy,” she praised me, holding me tightly. I waited longer, longer, and yet longer. I waited longer than I think I’ve ever been able to wait for her permission to breathe, but I waited. And finally she let me, and I gasped and wheezed for breath when she moved her hand.

Her hand moved down my body to my stomach, my hips, my thighs. She touched my cock only enough to check my hardness and to feel my precum leaking from it and then moved on, chuckling softly to herself, relishing my breathless whimpers and slight, weakened writhing. Her hands continued to roam all over my body, which was really hers now, and she continued the narration of our fantasy.

I was so aroused I had forgotten my tense and aching muscles and my upset stomach. And that, really, was the point. Eventually Eileen stopped and she soothingly encouraged me to stay relaxed and go to sleep. I tried but succeeded only in falling into a fitful slumber.

I woke up less than two hours later, aching all over and still feeling slightly nauseous. I tried several times to go back to sleep but ultimately got myself out of bed, unclipping the chain leash from our window and carrying it out of the bedroom with me. The rest of the night was a mix of pain and frustration, trying to sleep but being unable to, and weathering through the aches and pains of my physical illness.

Nearing dawn, still unable to sleep, I started writing this entry. I did so because I was feeling upset, angry at the world for making me ill. Why tonight? I thought, Why now? If it weren’t for this stupid, unfair virus, tonight would have been so much better.

The truth is, that night was spectacular even though I felt pretty bad physically throughout much of it. I need to remember, I keep reminding myself now, that it was good, that everything will be fine, that I should take the good with the bad. That I should just be okay.

This is very important, but this is very hard for me. That night was not the night in my fantasies by any stretch of the imagination. Like many things, the reality of it was very different from the fantasy. That night, with its imperfections and nuisances, obstacles and truly undesired pain and discomfort, is what real sexual experience most often looks like, not the perfect creation you and I see in most pornography, the glossy sex in movies and magazines, and sometimes even in many sex blogs.

It was up to me in this moment, after it was all said and done, to make it work. Would I choose to remember this night as “if I just weren’t sick…” or would I choose to remember it as “the night Eileen did something absolutely incredible for me”? To make it work, really work, I had to make it work.

Eileen and I, we’re not just the people we write about, and it’s easy to get a wrong impression or miss out on the rest of us from simply reading about us on our blogs. It’s even easier, for that matter, to get the wrong impression about her from reading my blog, as it is about me from reading hers. Neither one of us can really do the other, or ourselves, justice on a sex blog.

That’s why when I say that Eileen is my love, my hero, and my best friend, I don’t think any of that can actually convey all of what I mean. She is all of that, and she is also so much more.

I love you.

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