“Good girl.”

I don’t think there’s anything that captures my mixed feelings about submission like that phrase. There’s so much in there.

Until very recently, it was one of my least favorite things to hear. So condescending. Patronizing. Paternalistic.

[…]

[W]hat feminist wants to be a Good Girl? After all, every feminist knows that Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. And then there’s the whole madonna-whore complex thing, which will certainly be a subject of its own post at some point.

[…]

So that’s why I don’t like “good girl.” Or rather, why I don’t want to like “good girl.” Because, honestly? I fucking love it. It makes my pussy wet and my heart sing. The first time a dominant partner called me a “good girl,” I felt like I had just taken a shot of morphine. And I wanted more.

[…]

[T]he very fact that I like it so much[…]is a little, well, humiliating. And that just adds an extra frission of erotic stimulation and emotional intensity. As maymay said once, ”I don’t want to be tortured, but I want it.” Obviously, being called a “good girl” is not exactly torture, but I think maymay perfectly captures that paradox of being submissive for me—of wanting the things I don’t want. I want them both in spite of and because of the fact that I don’t want them.

There is, indeed, so much in there. Others’s comments are good, too. I left a comment, which turned into two comments, both of which are relevant enough to this space that I’m cross-posting the ensuing exchange:

Huh. Interesting.

For what it’s worth, being a “good boy” has been one of my favorite things to hear for as long as I can remember. Reading your uncomfortableness towards the phrase makes me inclined to attribute our differing feelings about it to our gendered experiences in the world. (For another example, see also The Sexism of Sex and Smarts.)

When you say:

Oh, and of course, there’s the fact that it’s “good girl.” I know it’s pretty commonplace to refer to grown women as girls, and I do it all the time. But there’s no denying that it adds to the patronizing tone.

I’m reminded of the examples many dictionaries cite to explain the meaning of the word “pretty”: pretty song, pretty room, pretty girl. These are (sexist) sexual standards. They hurt me—and many others, too.

Also, Leah:

I like the powerlessness of the experience. […] Sometimes it embarrasses me to ask for a thing, but I do so out of desire — because I want. Although I am not the one in control, I nevertheless consider myself an equal partner, fully complicit in the sex.

In my (not so) humble opinion, extricating control from power is what claiming sexually submissive agency is about. We are not often taught, as bottoms in the BDSM Scene, how to do this and I think that’s because most of the BDSM community at large has an unacceptably poor understanding of the systemics of power itself, sexual and otherwise. It seems to me that your desire for the experience of powerlessness feels at odds with your claim of “complicity” precisely because you wish to abdicate your control of the sexual situation in order to serve the fantasy of “not being in control.”

That’s totally cool (and fun), but by your own admission of being “an equal partner,” that’s not really what’s happening. Put another way, the liminal space of “wanting what we don’t want” problematizes dichotomized notions of control to a degree that threatens much of the powerful/powerlessness fantasies intrinsic to most BDSM discourse. The BDSM community, writ large, enjoys either/or thinking to an astonishingly damaging degree—not to mention how disgustingly sexist they are.

Let’s develop a deeper understanding so more of us can approach these issues using both/and thinking, instead.

FeministSub briefly responded asking for clarifications:

This comment will take me a while to work through. :) But thank you! I did stop and think while I was writing this about whether or not male subs enjoy “good boy.” It actually made me think about how much of the language of domination and submission is at least subtly gendered.

Do you mind explaining what you mean by this?

Put another way, the liminal space of “wanting what we don’t want” problematizes dichotomized notions of control to a degree that threatens much of the powerful/powerlessness fantasies intrinsic to most BDSM discourse.

Since she asked, I went ahead and risked explaining without sugarcoating:

I did stop and think while I was writing this about whether or not male subs enjoy “good boy.” It actually made me think about how much of the language of domination and submission is at least subtly gendered.

Subtly? :) It’s quite overt. “Sissy,” “bitch,” “slut,” etc., all usually treat femininity as intrinsically submissive.

And it’s not just gendered. Sexually dominant and submissive lingo frequently puts underprivileged (oppressed) populaces in the submissive role while putting privileged populaces in the dominant one. See, for example, “little girl/boy,” which highlights both size and age—youth are arguably the most consistently disadvantaged populace on the planet—or “who’s your daddy,” for the reciprocal perspective. In other words, if “power is an aphrodisiac,” then oppression is a sexual performance enhancing drug.

In my experience, most BDSM’ers like to avoid thinking about this potentially uncomfortable truth because they either think it might ruin their fun or that they’re not complicit in the damage this can cause. But turning a blind eye to this is as idiotic as saying talking about sex (e.g., negotiating) “ruins” the fun of playing or it’s narcissistic to the point of being inhumane. Yes, some BDSM’ers say that and are those things, too, and they’re usually idiots or privileged shits.

Do you mind explaining what you mean by this?

Put another way, the liminal space of “wanting what we don’t want” problematizes dichotomized notions of control to a degree that threatens much of the powerful/powerlessness fantasies intrinsic to most BDSM discourse.

Oh, all I mean is that most BDSM’ers enjoy treating “What It Is That We Do” as a dichotomy of power wherein bottoms/submissives have none (they are powerless) and tops/dominants have all of it (they are powerful), as if it’s all some kind of zero-sum, either/or game. The way the community talks about this (i.e., its discourse) typically fails to acknowledge or delegitimizes situations in which bottoms have power and tops do not (regardless of whether or not they also have “control”).

For instance, “service top” is a vague pejorative in the BDSM community precisely because it threatens the “powerfulness” of a top. Conversely, “do-me bottom” is similar because it threatens the “powerlessness” of a bottom. I think this is why expressing desire in the form of “wanting what I don’t want” is complicated; it problematizes my own fantasy of absolute powerlessness and my top’s absolute powerfulness, which can feel threatening to many ignorant or simple-minded BDSM’ers.

Since so much of the way the BDSM community and, in fairness, contemporary overarching society, couples submission with femininity and femininity with powerlessness, it should come as no surprise that most BDSM’ers are profoundly sexist and, worse, often willfully ignorant of that. Sadly, the petulant self-righteousness with which many of them go about espousing their “lifestyle” can easily obscure a greater understanding of both the problems with and benefits of “The Scene.” They certainly obscured them from me for a long, long time.

I hope that wasn’t too brash a comment for your blog. I think your post was really good.

As is always the case, the best places to see idiocy and inhumane narcissism of the kind I described is to go to the places where idiots and privileged shits talk amongst themselves. The Internet is amazing for this because few people have the technological know-how to shield their internal discourse from prying eyes—not to mention that such shielding is often antithetical to the point of telecommunication in the first place. In this sense, FetLife offers ideal grounds for privileged-shit-spotting, and David Futrelle’s blog Man Boobz consistently offers awesome roundups and priceless quotes from inside the pro-sexism MRA forums.

Perhaps predictably, this very topic was raised in a question posed to the “BDSM 101″ panel that I participated in at last weekend’s Western Regional LGBTQIA Conference at UC Berkeley. On the panel was Sloane Soleil, a self-identified switch who notably enjoys heavy masochism. In her introduction, she disclosed that she had a history of cutting, prompting an anonymous question from the audience.¹

Unfortunately, to respect panelists in the closet, no recording devices of any kind were allowed, so I can’t remember the question in its own words (nor can I perfectly remember anyone else’s words). The gist, though, was something like this, paraphrased: “As someone who has a history with cutting, do you ever feel uneasy about seeking to satisfy your masochism in BDSM play or worry that what you’re doing is self-harming again?” That question was possibly the best one we received and I felt disgruntled by how little time we were given to discuss the topic.

As all great questions do, this one betrays an understandable ignorance coupled with eager curiosity. Sloane answered first, since the question was directly addressed to her, and she asserted the oft-repeated notion that she had no trouble reconciling her history of cutting with her interest in engaging in BDSM as a bottom because in the former case she was working through personal mental issues while in the latter she was simply seeking pleasurable experiences.² Other panelists jumped in after her, most of whom were simply reiterating Sloane’s assertions in their own words. Dean, a fellow panelist, made the point that one’s mindset while self-harming is typically self-destructive to the body (and thus unhealthy), while one’s mindset in doing BDSM is not (and thus not unhealthy).

These answers may be valid for the individuals giving them, but they are murky at best. Dean’s point in particular borders on incomprehensible because masochism is by definition a desire to engage in activity that is violent to one’s own flesh.

The issue with both the question and the answers others were giving was the failure to acknowledge the necessarily collaborative nature of BDSM play. This was a point I made on the panel, although perhaps not as clearly as I could have. “A top requires a bottom, and a bottom needs a top to play with,” I said. Another panelist, Lola Sunshine, immediately took issue with my statement by offering the facile and contrarian assertion that “you can totally do BDSM on your own.” She then offered numerous examples of things she thinks is “BDSM on your own” such as self-suspension.

Once again, however, a core distinction was being repeatedly and ignorantly obscured. While I agree that a panel such as this was, to quote fellow panelist Maggie Mayhem, “a sharing of deliberately different experiences with ideas side by side,” it clearly does no “good” and potentially can do a significant amount of “bad” for a representative of the BDSM community to actively obfuscate important facets of BDSM, a topic they are presented as being not merely knowledgeable about, but expertly so. My objection to Lola’s disagreement was not an attempt to win a debate, as Maggie implies, but to illuminate where and how the question’s premise was flawed, and nowhere is such an attempt more pertinent than an expressly academic conference about sexuality.

If and only if “BDSM play” is understood specifically and exclusively as the experience of physical sensations does the question and the aforementioned panelists’s answers make sense. However, every experienced BDSM’er worth their weight in salt understands and should be able to articulate on an academic panel that BDSM can not be wholly understood as physical sensation alone—something Dean almost accomplished. As the panel facilitator was giving Lola the last word, I interjected, “It’s the same as the difference between (conventional) sex and masturbation.” I felt deflated because I was worried I was not understood.

To understand why self-harm has nothing to do with BDSM, there are two separate issues that need to be treated separately. The most obvious one, and the only one I felt was even recognized by others on the panel, is whether or not self-harm or BDSM is unhealthy. That’s an important question, but ultimately a distraction. The other issue, the one I was trying to bring to light, is far, far simpler yet goes even further in destroying the silly idea that BDSM is somehow an expression of self-harm.

To posit BDSM as self-harm (or, “self-abuse”), a position often advanced by anti-SM folk who like to capitalize on the fact that many BDSM’ers (including me, I’ll say publicly possibly for the first time) have a history of self-harm, is as ludicrous as saying masturbation is rape, not because masturbation is either negative or positive but because masturbation is necessarily a lone act and rape is not. Both BDSM and rape—regardless of any moral entanglements—necessarily involve multiple people. Self-harm, on the other hand, is by definition solitary.

Recall, for example, the process of negotiation and its importance to a successful BDSM scene. Even the very word “negotiation” underscores the involvement of more than one person. When viewed in its full capacity, BDSM play is an interactive social process in which players come to an agreement regarding their physical and emotional boundaries.

If you have some personal interest in BDSM, you may be able to find more examples from your own experiences. How many times have you “gone through the motions” during pickup play and ended the scene feeling unfulfilled? How many times have you tried flogging your own back, or spanking your own ass, and found the experience rather unmoving? If you’re anything like me, you probably felt like someone out of a Monty Python movie. Further, if such self-play is done in a public setting, most likely a club, then even lone acts become necessarily collaborative. How many times have you heard of tops and bottoms “enjoying the energy of spectators” in a dungeon?

Even where self-harm features in pop culture depictions of BDSM (such as in the movie Secretary), the two acts are markedly distinct.³ While it’s certainly the case that one can do bondage on one’s own, as Lola said, only the misguided argue that “having orgasms on one’s own” is the same as “having sex”; while the physical results may be similar in both circumstances, these are clearly different behaviors, possessing different motivations, and are approached in many different ways. Likewise, no matter the similarities BDSM acts and bodily harm may appear to have to uninvolved onlookers, it is obvious that they are different.

While we can (and many do) argue ’til the cows come home over whether or not self-harm is unhealthy, and we can likewise argue over BDSM, we would have to be ignorant or insane to argue that the two are similar.

1. Audience members were given the opportunity to write questions anonymously on pieces of paper that were then collected and read to the panelists.
2. Again, I’m paraphrasing from memory, so my apologies for any misrepresentation.
3. In Secretary, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character is fantasizing about James Spader’s character and tries spanking her own ass, but is disappointed by the result.

I’m not a traditionally recognized expert about anything. Sure, I have street cred in some cyber-neighborhoods, but I don’t have a single piece of institutionally-backed credibility to offer. I’m not a doctor, a lawyer, a counselor. Heck, since I quit my day job recently, I’m not even any kind of professional anymore.

Now, that doesn’t mean I can’t offer my own opinions or that you shouldn’t find them informed—I do a lot of thinking about the things I write and speak about. What it means is that you should never blindly take what I say to you or what anyone says to you (yes, including doctors and lawyers and counselors) as though it were The Truth™. Knowledge, especially knowledge about yourself, can never be given, it must be grown. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that your choices should be based on anything other than your own convictions. If you remain open to embracing your own mistakes as learning experiences, you will never find yourself disempowered.

Now, with that out of the way, I recently received a very thoughtful email asking for further discussion about my two most recent posts regarding youth sexuality (On Youth, Sexuality, Education, and Your Fears and Sexual Adultism). In fact, I’ve received more than one, but this latest email was beautifully representative of the whole lot, so I want to address its contents in general and its author (who shall remain unnamed unless they wish to be associated with it) in specific. In order to respond coherently, I’m going to respond to the email in chunks.

Hello Maymay:

I was wondering if you would mind discussing this issue a little further. I’ve read and reread both your posts regarding adultism and youth sexuality several times over in an attempt to understand your point of view and for the most part, feel like I am failing miserably. I get what you are saying about having a safe place for people to discuss sexuality, but struggle with the assertion that all sexual topics are appropriate for all ages.

Let me start by stating that I’m uncertain where I ever said “all sexual topics are appropriate for all ages.” While I vehemently disagree with much of so-called conventional wisdom about what age-appropriateness entails and how it’s enacted, I do believe the premise of age-appropriateness is, well, common sense. It is just as appropriate for a parent to hold a child’s hands when they cross the street as it is appropriate for a parent to purchase “Where the Wild Things Are” instead of “Girls Gone Wild” for their toddler. The premise of age-appropriateness isn’t what’s at issue here.

What’s at issue here is the idea that age-appropriateness gives people who are older than other people the right to actively create obstacles to that younger person’s growth. That, by the way, is also the definition of adultism, that adults are somehow entitled to act upon young people without their agreement. I find it infuriating that our educational system is founded on the idea you are forced to study as you age, and yet somehow that same system actively barricades organic, natural, healthy sexual learning and growth simply because older people deem such topics “inappropriate.”

To give just one illustration of this very problem and misapplication of age-appropriate thinking, we need merely look to the recent news story of the Menifee County School Board, which banned the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from schools after a parent complained that it contained a reference to the term ‘oral sex,’ as I discussed on last week’s Kink On Tap. The parent’s complaint, that a collegiate dictionary isn’t appropriate for elementary school children, is logical but also damagingly overbearing. This parent who’s surely trying to protect their child, and who I would presume also doesn’t keep a bible in their house because it, too, is arguably rife with far more sexually explicit references than the dictionary, is actually stunting their child’s growth by paternalistically cutting off avenues of natural experience. And, for fuck’s sake, I was in elementary school when then-President Bill Clinton got impeached after getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinksy. It was all over the news, and so I’d like to hear what that Menifee County parent’s response to that would be for their kid.

Regardless of whether you believe that finding a reference to ‘oral sex’ in the dictionary is somehow going to harm an elementary school kid, the problem here is that you take away the child’s ability to practice having any kind of experience at all, good or bad, helped or harmed. I’m sure my parents wanted to protect me from ills, as all loving parents do, but they also thankfully (usually) realized that segregating me from the reality in which we all live would do more harm than good.

That’s the thing at the core of what age-appropriate misapplication is about, and that’s why I strongly disagree with the typical way it is practiced.

My two eldest children are 11 and 9 respectively and while I would be comfortable discussing a wide variety of sexual topics with them (IE homosexuality, transgender issues, polyamorism), the thought of discussing kink/bdsm with them at this point in time stops me dead in my tracks. My honest thought is that they aren’t yet mature enough to handle the majority of the topics contained under the bdsm umbrella. Hell, alot of adults struggle just to understand that bdsm is about consent and not about abuse. If my two eldest are struggling to internalize the concept of “you can’t slug your sister/brother just because she/he annoyed the shit out of you” and struggle to exercise impulse control when temptation rears it’s ugly head, then how in the world would they have the cognitive skills to understand more complex topics/concepts, IE humiliation, knife or needle play just to give a few examples?

I find myself confused by this. If your contention is that it’s due to the fact that “a lot of adults struggle just to understand that BDSM is about consent and not abuse,” why do you distinguish between BDSM and the many other sexuality issues you mention (transsexuality, polyamory, homosexuality, and so on) that billions of adults also struggle to understand in the most basic of terms? Honest question, I’m not just asking you, I’m asking everyone who’s ever made that distinction, because I just don’t get where it comes from.

Now, one distinction I think you should make that I don’t see you making is between sexual activity and sexual identity or desire. When you talk to your children about homosexuality, I presume you’re not telling them which brands of lube you think they should buy for the best anal sex experience. Similarly, why jump to conclusions that discussing BDSM has to be about sterilizing body parts for needle play?

Extrapolating for a moment, if I had a child and they came to me with a question about gay people, I’d probably discuss it in terms of gender attraction. I’d take the opportunity to explain that different people find different bodies attractive. Maybe something like, “Lots of people love people with different bodies than they have, but a lot of other people love people with very similar bodies.”

Similarly, if I was approached by this hypothetical child of mine with a question about BDSM, I’d probably discuss it in terms of power dynamics. Since power is the fundamental property of BDSM sexuality, it also strikes me as a particularly good segue into a discussion of self-empowerment. Perhaps, “Just as different people love people with different bodies, different people love others with different wants. Sometimes, as part of specific kinds of games, people find it fun to play by rules where one person gets to make decisions and the other person, only if they agree to it, will follow the rules.”

The point I’m making here is that talking to very young kids about sexuality—any kind of sexuality—rightfully starts by discussing the fundamentals, the 101s, if you will. Since these are fundamentals, they are widely applicable, and even if they include some explicit references, they never need to be eroticized (because yes, there is a difference between “explicit” and “eroticized”). It frustrates the living daylights out of me that so many people seem to forget this basic principle of growth and learning and start freaking out over whole subjects, rather than specific details, that they project would be “age inappropriate.”

While I’m on the topic about talking to young people about BDSM, I think this excerpt from Laura Goodwin’s short essay is appropriate:

Children kiss dogs, torture bugs, turn kitchen implements and power tools into toys, climb on furniture, mark their skins with ink or self-inflicted hickeys, and invent the most ingenious, nasty, kinky little games to play with each other (as we have seen), but for them that’s considered normal. Adults are supposed to know better.

There is no such thing as a vanilla child, but somehow we should mysteriously emerge from the teen years like a butterfly from a chrysalis, utterly transformed. A person is supposed to outgrow that stuff, not go and make a career out of it. Nobody told us that, though, because “we don’t talk about those things”. Sex is instinct: you are supposed to ~just know~ what to do.

Sugar Gak Cereal can sponsor “children’s television entertainment” that features bondage, funny costumes, and dominance themes, and that’s OK. Kids can play games that feature bondage, funny costumes, and dominance themes, and that’s OK, but if Mommy and Daddy play games that feature bondage, funny costumes, and dominance themes, that’s not OK. Excuse me?

Another prudent point to make right about now is this: I don’t think you have to, and arguably I would go so far as to say you shouldn’t bring up any specific sexual topic with your children out of the blue. If your child never asks about BDSM, or transgender issues, you don’t have to talk about it! But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t remain open to being approached about the subject, and prepared for the eventuality should it come to pass. The objective is to avoid cutting off avenues of learning just because you decided ahead of time that they’re damaging your kid instead of giving them an opportunity to grow healthily.

Back to the email:

This is where I believe the parents have to step in and based upon their knowledge of both the topic AND their children, provide some guidance and ultimately make the final decision as to what topics are age appropriate. Touchy subject, I know. […] Ultimately, someone has to make the difficult and often unpopular decisions and given that we have so much more life experience to draw upon than my children, I feel that my spouse and I should be the final authority because I believe we are better qualified to realize all the possible ramifications of some of the decisions they might want to make. This is not to say that our kids aren’t allowed to voice their opinions or their disagreement with the decisions we make, and we DO listen to them, try to take their feelings into account and try to explain to the best of our ability the reasons behind the decisions we make. But often they want to do what they want to do and no amount of reasoning seems to satisfy the answer as to why we won’t allow whatever it is they want to do.

Sure, your life experiences may be more quantitive, but can you in good conscious say they are more qualitative than your children’s are, especially when it comes to their experiences? I don’t disagree with the reasoning here, I just disagree with the framing. Specifically, I think it is a missed opportunity.

I would never presume to tell you how to be a parent, but since you asked for my opinions, I would offer the suggestion that each of these “putting your foot down” situations is an opportunity to explore an improved model of household governance. Parents often act like dictators in their own homes; the axiom “my way or the highway” will be familiar to anyone who experienced this as a young person. Instead, when there is a disagreement, why not use a collaborative decision-making model and reach decisions that way, so that you’re not only “listening” to your children but actually inviting them to offer their own solutions to your objections?

Such models of governance are, in fact, being experimented with for whole societies, so I imagine that some of their lessons could be applied here. For more about this topic, you might find the MetaGovernment project’s article about Synthesis interesting.

Anyway, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter. Even though I’m finding it difficult to agree with you, your posts did make me pause and examine my parenting practices to see if there are areas where I can improve.

It’s really encouraging to hear that I got you thinking. I don’t have any solutions for parents—I’m not a parent, I don’t want to be a parent anytime soon, and I don’t have any experience with adolescents (and that includes when I was an adolescent, since I was a real loner). That said, we were all children at some point, and I so often hear laments about sad childhoods that I simply know in my gut that it’s gotta be possible to make a future where all childhoods are safe, healthy and happy ones.

I sincerely appreciate the thought that you, and the several others who have written to me about this topic, put into your correspondence. That tells me that you, like me, reject the falsehood that to keep children safe, they must be censored. On behalf of future children everywhere, we thank you for that.

Unfortunately, although this sounds good to many people, by focusing on the physical acts of sex, what these people are actually advocating is discrimination based on one’s choice of sexual activities. That doesn’t strike me as a very noble goal at all. A great example is the endless blowjob debate: Is the act of orally pleasuring a partner inherently submissive?

If you answered yes, can you please explain to me why women are being submissive when they give a man a blowjob but not necessarily being submissive when they give him a kiss? Both activities are manifestations of potentially (but not necessarily) sexual desire that use a woman’s mouth and lips. I recall reading a study (and now fail to locate the source; damnit; can anyone with Google-fu out there find this?) showing that 30% of a typical person’s ability to sense arousing sexual stimuli is clustered around their mouth and lips. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, would you agree that kissing can be physically stimulating for the person actively doing the kissing? If so, why would this not be true for fellatio? Do you really think kissing the skin of a person’s penis makes that much of a neurochemical difference than kissing the skin of their lips? It’s no wonder so many people enjoy making out and giving their lovers head.

Everyone—including feminists—who incorrectly couples physical activity with emotional intent like this is doing exceptional amounts of damage to the realization of sexual equality. They are forgetting a fundamental truth of Ethics: equality is not interchangeable with sameness. If you treat two different people in an identical fashion, without regard to the context each individual is in and without consideration of their personal motivations, are you really treating them fairly?

Riddle me this, anti-BDSM feminists: Is your goal to establish an allowable set of sexual activity or is it to empower everyone to choose what activities—not necessarily sexually motivated activities, mind you—they would like to partake in, free of social, political, gendered, racial, and other barriers to the pursuit of their own happiness?

Now, while you’re chewing on that, despite the fact that I think feminists, if not feminism, who are rife with extreme opposition to consensual power exchange and BDSM activities is unfortunate, I’m actually pretty empathetic to them. Sadly, such fierce opposition to What It Is That We (in the BDSM communities) Do is not hard to understand if you’ve seen even one glimpse of the sexist assholery I’ve witnessed coming from significant segments of the BDSM community.

Oh yes, don’t you fret, radical feminists, I agree that sexism is alive and well in many people’s understanding of BDSM, if not also their practice of it. ::shudder:: That said, I don’t think inheriting indefensible ideals of sexism by lazily flipping the genders around is anything other than bad logic.

Without a doubt, the most blatant recent example of what I see as indefensible sexist beliefs coming from someone involved in the BDSM community was expressed by a man named Rob, who co-hosts a podcast called The Oh Team (…ew…really? Reminds me of that guy in Office Space making his “oh face”), when he appeared as a guest on episode 2 of the This Week in Kink podcast. I raised a stink about it over on MaleSubmissionArt.com, which I’ll quote:

Our species is fantastically diverse, so collectively we embody myriad dichotomies: tall and short, women and men, dark-skinned and light-skinned, hairless and hairy, and dominant and submissive, are just a few. Human diversity is so vast, in fact, that it’s impossible to infer any given person’s makeup in one sphere (say, D/s) from their makeup in another (say, gender) with 100% accuracy.

Nevertheless, many people often attempt to do just that and end up acting in extremely discriminatory ways, such as the example of Rob in Episode 2 of the This Week In Kink podcast (produced by, surprisingly, the same people who run FetLife.com), with this astonishingly sexist remark:

“I firmly and strongly believe that it is a woman’s role to be submissive to a man. I believe that submission in men is taught at conception because as soon as women realize that they’re pregnant, they start planning that child’s fucking future and quite often that the mother is definitely the beginning of the emasculation. That said, I think that women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power and eventually need to be slapped in the fucking head and put in their place.”

(Skip to 34 minutes and 32 seconds for the quote.)

This is the kind of thing many dominant men say that makes me want to puke and—I might add—to which I would quite reasonably respond with an anti-BDSM mindset if I were not a submissive man myself. Since I am, the idea that “women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power” seems ridiculous to me, because I’m constantly facing a world in which I get handed the bill in restaurants if I’m eating out with a woman, in which I’m unfairly expected to be the pursuing partner in a flirtatious conversation, in which I’m rarely encouraged to feel beautiful, in which I’m granted unbelievable privilege in my professional work. (I’m a male programmer. Here’s what I don’t have to deal with.) Beyond that, the fact that I’m submissive and a man seems to signal implicit permission for others to ridicule or sissify me, and ignore my desires.

What reality do some dominant men inhabit that they think women-at-large “need to be…put in their place”? Sounds to me like they are pretty well entrenched where these men want them to be already. What ruffles my feathers, however, is this: by pigeonholing women into submissive positions (in any sphere, not just sexual ones), these men not only obstruct the equal opportunity that should be afforded to women, but they also obstruct the very same right to equal opportunity for other men.

In other words, there will never be the opportunity for anyone, regardless of D/s inclination, to freely choose how they would like to experience consensual power exchange without gender equality. Many people in both the feminist and the BDSM communities consistently fail to correctly recognize the interactions that power has with sex. In the case of the former, specific activities are assumed to relate to a power exchange, perhaps thanks to cultural scripts that are played ad-nauseum such as those in mainstream pornography. In the case of the latter, gender insensitivity contributes to a belief system that actualizes sexist behavior without regard for personal choice (and that’s why outspoken women like Bitchy Jones are so spot-on so often).

In one of the followup posts over Rob‘s sexist remarks, Delilah expressed my sentiments very well, if strongly worded:

I’m disgusted by the tendency in a certain type of male dom to believe that they are simply bringing back the good old days by making women subservient the way God intended. Aren’t we supposed to be progressive? Isn’t the point of alternative sexuality to explore, well, alternatives??

And get a load of the comments over there. Don’t get me started on the whole “I have a right to my opinion and you have the right to yours” crap. Free speech is free speech, and this fuckwad has the right to say whatever he likes, just as I do. But to hide behind free speech, to say that you will “fight to the death” next to me to defend my right to have an opinion, too, when in the same breath you’re saying that I’m a second-class human being, is completely disingenuous. It wasn’t so long ago that women didn’t have the right to an opinion—whether in matters of state or in the home. You can’t have it both ways, asshole.

[…]

Much more of this, and I’ll be as bitter and angry as people seem to think darling Maymay is. Nice job, kink community.

What’s worse, such ignorance is not restricted to anti-BDSM radical feminists and parts of the BDSM community. Professionals like lawyers and politicians come to similarly ignorant conclusions, I think, because they haven’t the necessary understanding either of gender or consensual power exchange.

Well, fuck! Wouldn’t you say coming to ill-conceived conclusions about things like how our bodies work, how our legal system should work, and how our governments should be structured, not to mention how technical societal infrastructure should be built, is a problem for our society? I think that’s worth fixing.

I have a great deal of respect for John and Tonja, the hosts of This Week in Kink. Nevertheless, I’m saddened by the ignorance about how issues of power intersect with issues of sexuality some of their asshat mandom guests have displayed. I also feel that anyone with an audience of several hundred thousand, such as that of the FetLife.com membership, has a social obligation to accurately portray the distinctions and details of What It Is That We Do and to combat misconceptions about it, such as deeply-engrained sexist ideals, whenever they arise with at least equal vigor as the misconception was presented with.

Which is what I told them when, to John and Tonja’s immense credit, they actually invited me to come onto the show for episode 8. Since the This Week In Kink show page has since disappeared from the Internet, here is an archived MP3 recording of the show. Skip to 6 minutes and 10 seconds in for that part, although I’d love your feedback about the entire conversation. Also, as an aside, I’m looking forward to This Week In Kink getting more submissive men on the show (and maybe even some gay, lesbian, and transgendered people as well, which TTBOMK, are also missing), as are some others, it seems. Once again I find myself alone, for the time being.

Naturally, John and Tonja have a right not to do what I’d like them to. And, of course, how easy for me to tell them what to do. That’s why, because I don’t like it when people just talk and don’t do, and since I’ve been intending to do this for ages anyway, I (re)started my own podcast, one that specifically addresses these issues and ties them into my agenda to make the intersection of power and sex and the way it impacts everyone, not just “kinky people,” more apparent to the world at large. It’s called Kink On Tap.

Kink On Tap 1 through 7 were made way back in 2007—a lot can happen in two years. Also, I’ve never produced a podcast before so I’m excited to be learning about the craft and eager to hear feedback. What do you think?

In her post, Delilah poses a seriously good question:

[I]f we decide that (as Tom Allen puts it) “sissified sissy maids who insist on talking about their sissy clitty,” men who want to be treated like dirt, and even men who want to have their money taken from them and to be ignored by the object of their worship are all suffering from the delusion that their sexuality is not okay and so they are punishing themselves for it, then are we not invalidating what may be their true desires just as cavalierly as the radfems invalidate the desires and agency of submissive women?

She then goes on to suggest a direction for finding an answer:

I think the answer lies in how one separates a kink from a pathology. If you are, say, an insensitive prick at work and you treat women like shit, and you go to a dominatrix who treats you like shit for an hour, and then you go back to work and at least for a while you’re a little nicer…well, maybe that kind of domination is doing some good in the world, and maybe those desires are healing. If instead, however, you’re that same prick and you pay a dominatrix to expunge your prickitude so you can go back and be a prick some more, then that seems control-freaky and pathological to me.

There’s even more, and I suggest you read her thoughts along with the fantastic discussion in the ensuing comments, in full. One of those comments is mine, cross-posted here for my own archival purposes and, hell, because it’s a damn thoughtful comment.

This was a fantastic post, and a wonderful subject matter. Thank you also for bringing this discussion to your own blog, which is precisely what MaleSubmissionArt.com is intended to incite.

I want to be clear that while I personally despise the societal tropes of male submissive imagery as discussed on my own blog, I proudly support anyone, especially submissive men, who make a self-aware choice to do what they love, even if that which they love is the most personally distasteful form of “sissification” for me. That is precisely why I am constantly speaking about creating diversity and new spaces where more than just the mainstream—or even just the subculture’s dominant paradigm—can exist. How frustrating it is to be a minority within a minority….

Furthermore, I’ll admit that I kink on being “financially dominated”. I also love kneeling at the feet of women wearing leather boots. Devoid of emotional context, both of these are pretty distasteful things for me. My anger comes from the fact that it is difficult for me to enjoy these things because, and I face this daily, while some may have painted me as the poster-boy for railing against stereotypical male submissive iconography (and hey, I helped them do that), I am not free of “societal programming,” just as no one else is, either.

However, it does me only so much good to question my desires, regardless of where they come from. I would much rather question my reactions to such desires, rather than the desires themselves because (“despite” my submission) I’m actually all about getting what I want.

I have been tempted to go to pro-dommes and ask for sessions. I have been friends with more than I can count, and even close to several, yet I never participated in the commerce. I even had a number of pro-domme friends who offered to include me in sessions. I would be inhuman if I said I never thought twice to reject them. It is unspeakably painful to feel so alone, as I often did, and to be offered such things and yet to force oneself to say no to them because of how grating saying yes would have been. Despite the temptation for something, for anything that might resemble the activities I so wholeheartedly desire, I knew then as I do now that saying yes to that disingenuous action would have been even more painful in the end.

It is, frankly, incredibly difficult to distinguish between the lesser of these pains in a society that provides absolutely no preparation for dealing with one’s sexual desires. No where in our lives, and especially not when such desires are forming as we are young, is this sort of emotional awareness taught by the world at large. People, submissive men included, end up having to stumble through their own realizations of all of this on their own. And frankly, much of the time they get it wrong.

Anyway, basically I am writing to say thank you for this post. It was a pleasure to read others’ ideas on all of this for a change. :)

Anyway, it’s true: I kink on the stereotypes just like the majority of submissive men, even the ones I don’t like. Is this my own societal programming, or this is my free will? The kicker is this: in the end, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to want what I want and I’m damn well going to try to get it, come hell or high water. I may come across as a harsh elitist to some people some of the time, and this makes sense to me. I don’t believe in a world without distinctions, and by that very nature I need to draw distinctions between what I want and what you want, what I like and what I don’t. So do you—so fucking draw them!

But for goodness sake, when I say something that hurts you, don’t respond with blind anger toward me; look inside yourself instead and ask yourself why the things I’ve said are resonating so deeply. God knows that’s what I do when your sexuality is hurting me.

I’ve been struggling to write more in this space lately. I want to, but between having to deal with the stress of moving to New York City from Sydney in less than two weeks and, more recently, the stress of losing my relationship with (Sara) Eileen, most kinds of words seem beyond me right now. Naturally, reading over a list of the things dominant women want during this time triggers a certain amount of introspection.

Kink in Exile’s list is so good, actually, if it were not unspeakably lazy of me I would want to copy it in its entirety for a post of my own. Instead of plagiarism, however, here’s a companion list of the things that submissive men want from a dominant partner that I think might be helpful. Astute readers of both my post and hers will note how similar these two lists actually are in content if not in voice. That, of course, is no coincidence.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll preface this list with an explicit remark about how it’s not intended to reflect anything other than a generic exploration into what I believe submissive men want from dominant partners, and should therefore not be interpreted without salting to your own taste, so to speak. I’d also like to acknowledge the excellent pre-publication input I received on this post by Kink in Exile herself, ironrose, as well as a few more friends. Thank you all for your thoughts.

You act upon details

Everyone’s fantasies—and demons—are in the details. Specific words, intonation, materials used in play (e.g., hemp rope versus metal bondage), and other things all have different meanings to different people. Personally, for instance, I react badly to words I associate with worthlessness (like “pathetic”) but favorably to others (like “whore” or “slut”) that I associate with wanton sexuality. While I am not alone in these particulars, there are others who respond in their own, unique ways.

It’s important to understand what these details are before you access them, but it’s equally important to eventually access them; ignoring such details is tantamount to ignoring me. When I play with a partner, a sense of depth and meaning is literally impossible to achieve if I have not first talked (usually at some length) about the details of my desires and fears, and asked questions of my partner to understand the details of theirs.

You need to be consistently inviting these details into our talks and our play; merely acknowledging their presence—without acting upon them later—is not enough. I do not believe a meaningful relationship can be built without successfully interfacing over these details.

You treat me as an equal person first and a submissive partner second

I am not a doormat—no submissive man is (even the ones that say they are). I see both dominance and submission as requiring equality first and power play second, and you should too. Moreover, you need to not only recognize but articulate the distinction in your actions when you demand something versus assertively request something of me.

My submission is a vital facet of who I am, so you never act in ways that are disingenuous, exploitative, or demeaning of my submissive sexuality, nor do you suggest that innate parts of who we are or the situations in which we exist (such as orientation, race, spiritual beliefs, socioeconomic status, or other external influences in our lives) make us unequal beings in any way. You strive towards fairness in all your dealings and recognize that our different wants and needs means that the goal of such efforts is equivalency, not sameness.

You can distinguish fantasy from reality, and objective reality from subjective interpretation

You understand how to live out a fantasy without living in a fantasy. This doesn’t mean so-called “24/7″ situations are unacceptable, because even in more casual relationships you need to be able to intelligently distinguish between playtimes and other times. Using protocols or any “lifestyle” behaviors as barriers to communication is not okay, so you must be adept at sussing out problems between us as well as vigilant in and receptive to addressing them.

You understand the difference between entitlement and advantage; you recognize the advantages you have that I may not share, but do not feel as though you are somehow more deserving of them. In reality, you do not consider yourself entitled to my submission or acts thereof. In fantasy and play, however, you are not afraid of asserting such behavior.

It’s also important that you remain aware of and empathetic to concerns I raise and act with consideration toward them both inside and outside of play. It helps if you also expect the same from me—don’t be surprised at my vehemence in encouraging your comfort and pleasure because doing so is a pursuit of my own happiness. Part of that pursuit is making the effort to build a common understanding of things between us, and I need you to make an effort to refine this understanding with me over time. Doing so will make it possible to interact with me as a dominant partner, a top, and a friend, all of which you need to be able to do.

You know and make your own desires clear

You are knowledgeable about yourself and communicate what you know openly, honestly, and freely. You needn’t be divinely enlightened but you do need to have a solid understanding of something you like and be assertive in asking for it. You must have actively pursued explorations into your own desires, or are at least actively pursuing them with me; your sense of self must be strong enough to weather discoveries of new desires in yourself and in me over time.

Being eager to often try new things (in terms of play specifically and in general) is also important because it tells me that you are interested in learning more about yourself, more about me, and more about how we work together in all of the ways that we do. You delight in novelty and discovery; you “know thyself,” and you share who you are with me—I think it’s sexy. Moreover, you encourage me to do the same because when I share who I am with you, it’s out of a desire for you to reciprocate.

You are confident and independent in your dominance

Your dominance cannot be your dirty little secret; my submission isn’t mine. You may be excited by taboo but you don’t rely on it to provide enjoyment (because very little is taboo with me). This does not mean that our play can’t be respectful of public boundaries; it means that you know wanting to see me in physical pain is not wrong or sick, and you know that my desire for such experiences is similarly not unhealthy. You enjoy challenging both my physical and mental endurance but are not out to inflate your ego by causing mine harm.

You are an independent, whole person and you celebrate your dominance as a piece of that whole. You are not dependent on my submission to validate your dominance. You appreciate the support and encouragement I provide and are self-sufficient enough not to need it at all times, self-empowered enough not to want it at all times. You do not need constant reassurance that basic aspects of our kinky sexuality are acceptable behaviors (e.g., “normal”).

You must be comfortable discussing and acting upon your own sadism, desire to receive service, or other potentially socially unacceptable traits for us to have fulfilling interactions (because I am similarly not always socially acceptable). Moreover, you need to have and be constantly developing a sense of your own skills so that you know what you can and can’t realistically and safely do. Feeling insulted or offended if I point out the realities of your potential shortcomings in these areas should be a warning sign to you—I do so because I want us both to become better at what we are doing.

You value my input and experiences

You reject the notion that my sexual submission negates the validity of my opinions and beliefs. You know that dominance does not equal superiority, and therefore you are willing and able to reexamine aspects of yourself. You solicit and incorporate input and feedback from me in doing this because you know that my perspective and experiences are valuable. You want our relationship—whatever form our relationship takes—to grow, our intimacy to deepen and you don’t expect this to happen without expending your own energy to help make it so.

You make me a priority and will treat me to indulgences

My submission doesn’t make me more willing to abandon my wants or needs than people who aren’t submissive are, just as your dominance doesn’t make you more entitled to have yours met. You know this and therefore make me the same kind of priority that I have made you. You make time to see me, play with me, and occasionally treat me to indulgences you know I like because you enjoy seeing me be happy.

Being dominant does not mean you get to do what you want whenever you want. Your dominance doesn’t free you of the obligation to treat me with consideration or respect, to dismiss my desires or concerns, or to unfairly prioritize your own wants over mine. This doesn’t mean that I feel inappropriately entitled or deserving of the things I want, and you must not resent me for having these needs or for filling them. Additionally, you are emotionally intelligent enough not to feel guilty or personally at fault when you can’t fulfill them for whatever reason, are communicative enough to speak frankly with me when such clashes arise (because they will), and trusting enough to believe me when I say I’m doing my best to resolve the situation.

Your dominance is personally meaningful

Being sexually submissive is just one facet of who I am. You desire to dominate me because my presentation of self—all of it—is personally attractive to you. You recognize my strength and power as well as my vulnerability and are aroused by both aspects of who I am.

You do not treat me as a replaceable object (out of a fantasy scenario) or as though I am a dime-a-dozen, cookie-cutter submissive man. You understand that our D/s relationship is about the relationship and the power dynamic, not the activities or toys or clothing; I am not a random man that will clean your house for free, and you are sensitive to the fact that any expectation of either this or similar depersonalization will feel exploitative and insulting.

You should feel just as eager to dominate me whether or not you are dressed in fetish gear, wearing makeup, are at a club with an audience, or have a particular toy handy. None of these things matter to me in terms of our connection during play because I desire you, not your image. You should not feel the need to conform to stereotypes you see in pornography, and you must not expect me to do that, either (because I won’t).

To submissive men, I want to say that many—if not all—of these things apply to you as well. Knowledge of yourself, self-acceptance, and confidence in your submission is not just healthy, it’s what makes you attractive to dominant partners (especially the intelligent, sexy ones). If you don’t think your own submission is sexy, how can you expect anyone else to?

As we usually do, when we reconnect like this, we talk. A lot. Recently, though I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, the huge blocks of time I’ve set aside to work on writing about web development professionally have also yielded some time to write erotica on the side again. (As an aside, that, and crossing paths with the intriguing Ranat has led to some renewed interest in my hypertextual porn experiments.) I actually have the beginnings of a very promising short story based on a more-or-less off-handed remark that Kink in Exile made, which I found really sexy.

Anyway, one thing led to another and in the conversations Eileen and I have been having, the fact that I find it ridiculously hard to speak about my fantasies came out. It may be surprising to some of you, but it’s true: verbalizing my fantasies out loud is unusually difficult for me. Writing about them is for some reason relatively easy. Making my mouth move (which I can do) so that sounds come out of it and form words that describe my fantasies (which I rarely do) is inexplicably hard, even when I’m alone with her. I often literally just lose my breath. This clearly poses a few challenges to discussing such things, and it’s something both Eileen and I would like to see me be more comfortable with.

On a largely unrelated note (no, really), tonight’s also my 31^st day denied an orgasm, which is the longest I’ve ever gone since, well, since I was 9 or 10 and began masturbating. This is significant not due to the time span, but rather because it happened thanks to an increasingly apparent shift in Eileen’s attitude and comfort level with my being denied.¹ As she put it, “I simply no longer have any sense of guilt about denying you.” Then she paused for a moment with a thoughtful look on her face before casually adding, “You should probably be scared about that, by the way.” That was the comment that has hatched a swarm of butterflies in my stomach, which—since last night—has yet to dissipate.

There’s quite a bit more to say about this that I’ll be saving for later. In the mean time, suffice it to say that I was given a few tasks today, one of which was to write and then read a short fantasy “snapshot” (a brief moment or vignette) to her. Coming up with what to write was unsurprisingly easy, but reading it aloud at dinner tonight was actually very, very challenging. This is what I wrote and then, yes, read to her.

The thin rope tasted dry and scratchy in my parched mouth. I opened my mouth wider and extended my tongue as far as I could just so I could feel the cool air. Some of my muscles felt cramped, the cause of which was not the immobilizing bondage I was in but my own exertion. Although she was quiet now, her earlier words still sounded deafening. “Be good, my beautiful toy. Hush and hold out until I want you to come,” she had told me in her kind, almost charitable voice, for what she was doing to me now was indeed generous.

For the first time in longer than I care to recount, one of her hands had spent a pleasurable eternity slickly caressing, gripping, pulling, stroking, and pumping my cock. Her other hand alternated between doing the same to my balls, thighs, and perineum. Occasionally, when she would tire of her manual ministrations, she played with the remote controls of the large, self-propelling vibrating prostate massager she had inserted into my ass and I could hear her giggling with enjoyment as she varied its intensity. Eventually, she would always find a combination of settings for the machine that she seemed happy with and resumed stimulating my penis, complete with a fresh dollop of lubricant. The only indication I had as to how long she’d been playing with me was provided by the increasing wetness dripping onto my thighs and torso, and my own growing incoherence after each frustrating edge, as I had lost all sense of time early on.

After a while, I could no longer decide if her actions were merciful or torturous since for ages even prior to this she hadn’t given me any indication whether some sort of relief was in sight. I couldn’t see through the opaque bondage tape that covered my eyes, but somehow I could tell she was smiling. She loved watching me struggle—and suffer—and so she would make games out of tantalizing me more and more. This was her most satisfying form of amusement and I am, after all, one of her favorite toys.

There’s no doubt that intense control, teasing, and orgasm denial are on my mind of late. (I mean, hell, it has been over four weeks now!) The fact of the matter is that since this particular kink is a fetish of mine—orgasm control is an integral part of my understanding of my own sexuality—for me, when we play with such things and when Eileen actively takes control of my sexual pleasure to choose when and how I get it, it’s a wonderful tool for catalyzing lots of other possibilities.

Now, I look forward to a cozy night of cuddling, snugly locked in my chastity device. If only I had checked that store’s hours earlier in the day, I might have had other things to look forward to, as well….

1. For more insight regarding this shift, this comment by Eileen comment on Thumper’s blog is relevant.

So, since this is the sort of stuff I see asked time and time again on newsgroups and forums and the like dedicated to male chastity, I figured I’d share a top ten list of things I’ve learned. Lots of these things are probably not sexy, so if you came to read some erotica you’re probably looking for Tom Allen’s hawt chastity porn instead. (Or maybe “Real Ultimate Male Chastity”?) These aren’t in any particular order, though, they’re just noteworthy.

Also, of course, the standard caveats of Your Mileage May Vary apply. These are just things that work for me and are thus naturally untested on anyone else. (Though that lack of testing on anyone else is mostly only due to a lack of opportunity. Are there any volunteers who want to give enforced chastity a try with Eileen and I?). ;)

1. Cotton swabs (aka Q-Tips) are your friends

I’m a really, really big fan of cotton swabs for lots of reasons, and one of them is their usefulness for hygienic purposes during a long-term chastity belt lock up. It probably seems obvious once you’re told, but lots of folks don’t realize that getting locked in a chastity device is a lot like wearing a rubber glove non-stop. That can get pretty messy and—worse—unhealthy, if you’re not careful about hygiene, so it’s important to be able to keep yourself clean.

Cotton swabs are one of the two essential tools used to clean one’s genitals when they’re all locked up. The CB-3000 and most other male chastity devices have some kind of small air holes big enough to stick the cotton swab in, roll it around and rub off any dirt, sweat, and general ickyness that may have accumulated in the device over the course of the day. They’re also helpful as a follow-up to using toilet paper to wipe down any urine remaining after peeing that has seeped towards the sides of the device, which is hard to get to with just toilet paper alone.

Unlike what you may have heard elsewhere, it’s a good idea to keep your genitals as dry as possible without drying out your skin. One way to help do this is to use cotton swabs to dry off the inside of the device as much as possible after taking showers, swimming, or otherwise wetting the device (such as, say, dripping lots of precum during a sexy scene where you remained locked). This is because in such a small and confined area, stagnant moisture like that is your skin’s worst enemy. This holds doubly true for people with especially sensitive skin (such as yours truly).

On the flip side, you may find yourself getting dry skin on occasion, such as what might happen if you over-wash with harsh soap. In these cases, put a drop of your favorite moisturizing cream on the tip of the cotton swab and apply it to your genitals. At first it might be hard to maneuver the cotton swab to the right places, but you’ll soon learn how to roll and twist it just right—well, right for cleaning, anyway. (I could never get enough stimulation this way for any pleasurable sensations.)

One last cotton-swab-related tip is that they are great indicators of how well you are doing hygiene-wise. Take a whiff of the tip of the cotton swab after rolling it over your genitals and you’ll quickly be able to determine whether or not you need a thorough cleaning. This may sound gross, but seriously, how often is your nose right up in some genitals anyway?

2. Strategically placed baby oil helps scrotum soreness, particularly at night

The single most difficult part of wearing the CB-3000 for me (and I imagine this would be the case for most trapped-ball devices), is the soreness it causes on my scrotum when I get involuntary erections at night. It’s a catch-22 because the device is designed not to let me orgasm and so I get hornier, which causes more involuntary erections which causes more soreness. When it’s real bad my ball sack gets red and painful and it becomes difficult to sleep comfortably because every way I turn I feel it being stretched.

It took a while to figure this out, but I realized that one of the most effective solutions is simply to rub a bit of baby oil or other absorbent cream (NOT LUBE! An exception is a thicker, water-based lube such as Babelube; just a little bit works like baby oil but stays on the skin longer. Thinner lubes like Astroglide that contain glycerin are too sticky for my tastes.) on the sore areas. In fact, doing this before bed (and after a cleaning) can even help prevent the soreness throughout the night. It works by helping the so-called A-ring (the cock-ring portion of the trapped ball device) slide more easily away from the body. If you’ve sized the device correctly, the ring is still snug enough that your testicles won’t be able to slip through, but when they get stretched due to your nightly erections (and they will), the ring won’t scrape your scrotum.

Note that doing this for your penis by placing baby oil or other moisturizers inside the tube portion of the device is a very bad idea. See tip number 1, above, for why.

3. Hygiene is easiest with a nozzle and high water pressure

Along with the cotton swab thing, I find that the other absolutely essential tool for hygienic long-term chastity device wear is a squeeze bottle with a nozzle small enough to maneuver just inside the holes of the device. I found one in the form of a hair dye developer bottle and it works wonders, but a specialized shower head can also do the trick. What you’re after is a high-pressure stream of water that you can aim with precision.

I put a drop of moisturizing body wash in the squeeze bottle, fill it with lukewarm water (or cold water if I’m all hard right then), shake it up a bit, and then squeeze the water into the CB through its various holes. Lather, rinse, repeat a few times, then lather, rinse and repeat some more without the soap. This pushes water and soap all the way through the tube and underneath the ring, cleaning both it and me. Couple this with the cotton swab tip for a decidedly thorough clean.

This tip along with number 1 is how it’s possible to stay so clean for so long without ever removing the device. And, yeah, that’s kind of a frightening thought…. Aren’t you glad I told you?

4. Body wash or other moisturizing soap is better than lube for application

It’s kind of hilarious, but for chastity fetishists such as myself, it’s actually very difficult to put a chastity device of any kind on! Why? Well, most chastity devices for men require you to apply them when you’re flaccid and, if you get turned on by the idea of wearing a chastity device, it’s very unlikely that putting a chastity device on is going to be a situation in which you are flaccid. As a result, it’s surprisingly difficult to get the tube over my penis in order to get the CB-3000 on me sometimes. I’m sure other men (and probably some women) have had this experience as well.

For some crazy reason, the manufacturers of the CB-3000 ship instructions that says using lube helps this. Well, it certainly makes you a bit more slippery, but lube is not a good idea because it’s sticky and it’s hard to wash off. Furthermore, many lubes contain glycerine, which is basically sugar, which in turn is basically like inviting a yeast farm into your privates. Yuck! Instead of lube use regular soap; it’s just as slippery, it’ll clean you while you’re putting it on (see tips 1 and 3), and it’s cheaper than lube.

Also, the penis is surprisingly malleable. I don’t even bother trying to “git it all in” on first application anymore, especially if I’m semi-erect while getting the device locked on. Instead, I just get it locked and take a shower to clean myself up. By the next time I’m ready to take a shower, I’ll have gotten flaccid enough to finish adjusting myself however I need to.

5. Press on to smaller sized rings, spacers for both security and comfort

The other major hurdle you need to get past when you first begin wearing trapped ball chastity devices like the CB-3000 is proper sizing. You want to find a fit that is snug when flaccid, yet not too restrictive when erect, and that is comfortable all the time. Without going into the merits of the CB3k’s security, suffice it to say that smaller rings and smaller spacers are “better” than larger ones.

I think it makes the most sense to start out with the largest ring that you can easily fit your index finger under, and one of the larger spacers. Wear that combination for a while, and decrease the size of the spacer ’til you hit the smallest one. If this combination is still comfortable for you, revert to the next-smallest ring, and up the spacer’s width. Keep going in this fashion until you reach a point where you can still push your index finger under the ring but just barely, and are using the smallest spacer you can handle. You’ll know if you can’t because your testicles will feel cold, look blue, and lack blood shortly after putting on the CB. This is a sign that there is not enough space between the ring and the tube for your testicles’ blood vessels to keep flowing smoothly and it is a very bad thing.

It’s also worth noting that I think it’s actually the size of the spacer that is the biggest boon to the security of the device, since it’s the spacer that determines how “tightly” the device grips your testicles.

In any event, it turns out that smaller rings which are more snug are actually also better for your comfort. The simple fact is that the larger the plastic thing between your legs is, the harder it is to wear pants with a smooth outline, or just sit down comfortably! The smaller rings are also lighter, which pull on you less, and are also easier to find suitable underwear for. So whenever you can, go for the smaller ring.

In case you’re interested, I currently wear the size 3 ring with the second-smallest spacer that came in the pack, but am considering trying the next smallest ring size soon.

6. Swap the default lock for a rubber-coated one to avoid pinching

Another of the annoyances I have with the original product is that it ships with a pokey metal Master-branded lock. I mean, the thing has edges and corners that, yes, may look cool but when you’re all bulging out of the top air holes can really pinch you hard. More than a few times I’ve even gotten a small cut from twisting the wrong way and having one of the four corners of the master lock dig into the uncovered bit of my penis.

The solution to this is to go to your local department or hardware store and find a lock of equal size that is rubber-coated. These rubber-coated locks also often have curved edges, which is even more helpful. They cost on the order of 5 to 10 dollars depending on the make and model and are just as effective as the factory’s master lock, but they don’t hurt when they poke you.

7. Trim pubic hair short for increased comfort, but do not shave to hairlessness

There’s a lot of fantasy material out there that suggests you should shave yourself hairless before putting on a CB-3000. OMG NO! This is a terrible idea. First, you’re about to make it much, much more difficult to keep yourself clean, you’re going to cause potential irritation to your pubic area already, and now you want to compound that challenge by shaving all your pubic hair off?

A word to the wise: when your hair starts to grow back you will be very itchy, probably irritated, and unless your stint in the chastity belt will be for a grand total of two days, you are most certainly going to stay locked up longer than it will take your hair to grow back. Quite simply, do not do this. It is dumb.

That said, it’s a surprisingly good idea to trim your pubic hair so that it is short. The reason is so that you avoid situations in which a single hair or two or three get caught in the CB and pull on you. This is not a major problem since you can just yank them out, but it hurts and gets annoying when it happens too often. By trimming your pubic hair short you simply avoid this in the same way that cutting your hair short makes it harder for people to pull your hair (which may or may not be what you want, I guess…).

My longest pubes are approximately a centimeter in length right now, and that’s plenty short for fantasy play as well as CB comfort. The easiest way to do this is to use an electric razor with a guard (without wearing the CB, of course, though it can technically be done with it on, too) and simply trim that way. It’s fast, easy, and lots of folks consider it sexy. :)

8. Do not avoid hydrating, not even before bed

This is kind of related to tip number 2, because there’s this myth that it’s a good idea not to drink too much before you go to bed so as to avoid a possibly painful erection during the night. This is stupid. Why? Because it’s never a good idea to avoid hydrating your body. Your body needs water to survive, and peeing is a natural thing to do, even at night.

Further, I found that this doesn’t even work. Your body’s gonna want to go pee whether you drank water or not. It just might not pee as much. So instead of not drinking, I say drink all you want, as normal, and when you need to get up to go pee, go pee. If you’re having pain at night due to erections, it’s probably caused by soreness in your scrotum and you should take a look at tip number 2 to see how you can use something like baby oil to help ease that pain.

9. Tuck it in (like a drag queen) to keep your bulge from showing

Often times, people are frightened that the bulge from their chastity device is too noticeable under clothing. Obviously, one solution is to wear baggier clothes. This works, but is more like a work around than a solution, though it is a good one. Wearing a baggy swim suit, I’ve been able to go swimming at crowded beaches while all locked away without even getting a second glance. Nevertheless, I love wearing tight jeans, girl’s pants, and so forth, which are typically pretty form-fitting and thus not very CB-friendly.

Luckily, I can tuck my penis downwards and back between my legs to a certain degree and in many cases this helped reduce the bulge in my pants to nothing, depending on how severely I tucked. Drag queens are famous for doing this, but of course they (probably) don’t have unyielding metal and/or plastic between their legs to deal with. Since we do, things are a bit more difficult, but still possible.

Wearing the right kind of underwear can help you keep your chastity device-encased penis “tucked.” This is actually one reason why I wear certain kinds of thongs (sort of wide in front, thin in back) while locked up; they help press my penis to my body and avoid the bulge in my pants. The fact that they are also traditionally thought of as women’s underwear is kind of icing on the cake at that point. ;) Also, arguably even more effective than tight thongs are girls’ boyshorts panties.

10. Take it off if you’re not having at least a little bit of fun

This should go without saying, but it never does so I’m saying it. If wearing the chastity device becomes more trouble than it’s worth, take it off. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including sustaining an injury such as a patch of dry skin that needs healing, being unable to sleep due to pain or other problems, or even just because it’s not fun anymore.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a break for a while, and in fact I found it was necessary for me to adjust to wearing the CB long-term over a period of time, gradually building up the amount of time I would spend in the device over each round, as well as shortening how long I would spend out of it at the end of each round. It took no less time than a full month of trial and effort for me to be able to spend 5 full days in the CB, and it wasn’t for another three months that I could spend 10.

This was not easy, and you better believe there were lots of days when it came off during that period for one reason or another.

Finally, keep in mind that no chastity device is proven 100% effective 100% of the time. Staying chaste, not orgasming until your partner “permits” you to, is just as much up to you as it is up to them no matter what kind of chastity toys you’re wearing. Sure, your orgasm may not be quite as pleasurable if you orgasm while in chastity than while you’re released, but if you were determined enough you could probably do it. For me, it’s actually downright painful to come while in the CB, and it takes a ton of effort for a result that isn’t satisfactory at all, but it is a release of some kind, no matter how small.

In other words, chastity devices available today just aren’t denial devices, they’re deterrent devices, so it takes a bit of cooperation from you—the wearer—to maintain your abstinence. Rather than see this as a bad thing, realize that this means you can be just as denied without the device as you can with the device, and you and your keyholder can take that as license to remove the device if it’s not working out for some reason. There are a number of circumstances, mostly mental and emotional health reasons, where Eileen will remove the device from me and still tell me not to orgasm. This is hard for me, sometimes even harder than being locked up, but it’s still sexy and it’s still orgasm denial.

I guess my point is, find what works for you and go with it, even if that means what you go with for a day, a week, or entirely, is not a chastity device.

If you liked this, you may also like Kink On Tap’s T&D episodes 6 and 7.

“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?

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.

(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.