Perhaps paradoxically, I’m actually in favor of absolutism in exactly one context and one context only: the belief that diversity is the only principle worthy of absolutist loyalty.

This is why Thumper’s essentialist explanation of submission rubbed me the wrong way back when I first detected the unmistakable stink of the idea. While essentialist explanations seem plausible for an individual (“I am that I am.”) such reductivism is logically irreconcilable when applied to a group. So, this same laughably nonsensical reductivism is also what triggered me to leave the following intensely harsh (and possibly inappropriately mean) comment on Thumper’s most recent post with regards to a masculine identity.

For my own interests, I’m reproducing our public thread here.

I began:

Since you can take it, I won’t mince words. You wrote:

I firmly believe orgasm control is Right and Natural. There’s nothing kinky about it. It’s totally clear to me now that literally every man in a relationship should have his orgasm controlled by his partner (no, I’m not ignoring you gay guys, but I need to leave you out of this for clarity’s sake). I know that sounds very out there and draconian and like I know what’s best for the entire world. Can’t help it. You can disagree with me if you want, but it seems that, for a man, the act of committing himself to a woman would take on so much more significance if he was also committing one of the critical things that defined him as a man: his orgasm. Not only that, it would make it much more difficult for his partner to drift away. If he really meant it and lived up to his word, the two would be forever locked in a symbiotic feedback loop.

(Emphasis mine.)

Put simply, this is the most disgusting paragraph I have ever read from you, and possibly from any blogger in a very long time. Perhaps that is because I greatly enjoy your writing and find that you and I share much of the same fetishistic desires. So I am perhaps hugely disappointed, which thus fuels my disgust at such a ridiculous and callously sexist statement coming from someone who has a track record that has stayed relatively clear of such contemptible essentialism.

Tell me, Thumper, while you stroke your ego for so carefully addressing the wrinkle of homosexuality while simultaneously tossing it to the winds, what about the heterosexual women, what about the wrinkle of gender? What “should” they do with their desires, in your worldview?

On a related note, I would urge you to read the opening chapters to Sex At Dawn, which I hope will purge you of this pathetically reductionist view of the way men “should” be. Ick. This paragraph feels like everything I was warning you against in my (admittedly rambling) post, Orgasm Denial Does Not Submissive Men Make.

I am, in other words, legitimately an asshole sometimes. In case you wonder how I sleep at night, I justify it the same way any other asshole probably justifies it: I think I’m an asshole about “the right things” and not an asshole about “the wrong things.” So, yeah, it’s true I was meaner than I needed to be to get my point across. I hope I’ll do better the next time, and in the mean time I’ll acknowledge both my triggers (sexual authoritarianism and sexism) and my errors (making someone else feel unnecessarily bad).

Anyway, the comment did spark an interesting interaction worth reading. Thumper replied:

Since you can take it, then I’ll not mince words. Chill the fuck out.

Sorry, maymay, this isn’t religion for me or political. It’s my life and what I’m thinking at any given point. I am not here to advance any agenda. I am not trying to please you or anyone. If I disappoint you, we’ll both just have to figure out a way to deal with it.

Nice way to start the day. Thank you for your opinion.

To which I said:

I can take it, and you don’t have to mince words. Sarcasm, however, seems beneath you. Or maybe it’s not? I wasn’t kind, but I was direct.

Anyway, I’m sorry I contributed to a bad morning. That sucks. I’m just headed to bed and didn’t think about your sleep schedule.

You may never take an interest in politics, but politics will take an interest in you. Same thing as what you seem unwilling to acknowledge about my other post, too. Sigh.

As for religion…well, seeing as how you’re the one who brought that up, I’m struck with the unshakable notion that your views are a religion for you.

Such (religious?) adherence to an ignorantly essentialist view of human maleness, or indeed of any human characteristic, is perhaps the most destructive form of self-centeredness, for you declare others’ expressions illegitimate. And I say this, I hasten to add, as a self-identified man who not only would, but already has wholly subscribed to your beliefs for my own life.

I hope you consider these facts the next time you grant yourself absolution because “this isn’t…political.”

Then, circling back to answer my initial criticism, Thumper wrote:

Now that I’ve had a bit of caffeine, I’ll reply to your comment by saying the intention of my post was to describe a strategy in which men (with penises) and women (with the other part) in traditional marriages or long-term relationships could experience greater degrees of sexual intimacy and satisfaction. That should explain my (admittedly flippant) dismissal of the “gay guys” and, I suppose, by extension anyone not in the aforementioned gender group.

I loved Sex at Dawn. Thought it was great. And, truth be told, I think we humans have totally screwed with ourselves and our sexuality. However, I’m also a pragmatist. I live in this time and under these social norms and am married to a devout monogamist. Therefore, while I agree that my POV does not align with the vision of human sexuality presented in the book, I think it very much compliments the version of human sexuality that plays out in my house. Which, at the end of the day, is all I really care about. Were I like you (young, passionate, not married with two kids and a mortgage), I’m sure my position would be different. Alas, I am not. And I’m very happy not to be.

I have no interest in getting into a multi-thousand word debate about this with you. If you feel the need to rail against my pathetic, narrow, disgusting and icky words, please do so on your own blog. Don’t be upset, though, if I don’t ever read it. As I said before, sex is not political for me. It’s personal. You can go fight the good fight. Leave me out of it.

And, finally, my reply:

I think that’s all peachy keen. Until this:

As I said before, sex is not political for me. It’s personal. You can go fight the good fight. Leave me out of it.

You are the pre-eminent blogger about male orgasm control on the entire Internet, on par with Tom Allen. You are political whether you like it or not.

If you want to treat your sex life as wholly personal and not the least bit political, then you can not blog publicly. Otherwise, and I’m not sorry about this, you can’t have it both ways.

My final words on the issue, since I don’t want to overstay my welcome (and you have been generous with my characteristic harshness, so I thank you) will be to make clear that I care about this with “passion” precisely because we share a fetish and every single time I talk about it I reference this blog as one of the only sensible places on the entire Internet to learn about this fetish. It would upset me greatly to need to start disclaiming my admiration for you due to an increasing amount of relatively careless and flippant remarks specifically due to how often I cite your otherwise fantastic writing.

I hope I didn’t ruin your day. I shouldn’t have that much power over you. Thanks again for your generosity with your comments section.

There is, of course, something to be said for Thumper’s argument that we live in a particular world, with particular realities, and not some other world with some other realities. However, we know what we can say about that: it needs changing. I remain baffled by implications such as his that, thanks to the way things are, ideals like sexual egalitarianism even–and perhaps especially–when it comes to consciously constructed power imbalances are the illusory fantasies, rather than the other way around. The ideals I hold about sex are not the illusions, they are the core of our humanity, buried under eons of cultural sediments (stigma, collective phobias, mass hysterics like religion, and so on).

If reality was, in fact, as gender essentialist as Thumper described it, he would not have been able to actualize the relationship he currently enjoys precisely because such a relationship is founded on the very egalitarian ideals his thesis dismisses. He shoots himself in the foot with his own words, same as I sometimes do by forgetting to use honey in situations where it would catch more flies than vinegar.

Maybe next time Thumper and I talk, we will both have learned a thing or two. (If there is a next time.)

Update: Thumper’s got a reply on his blog. It’s worth a read, so check it out. TL;DR version and my reaction: Thumper affirms maymay’s asshole-ishness and will “amputate him from my life” (sic.) (well, okay, but owch), asserts that our worldviews are irreconcilable and as part of that his blog “is not a platform for any kind of activism” (except, as I keep reminding him, when it kind of is, which says more about how narrowly Thumper construes activism and how widely I do) and will continue to write his blog while abdicating any recognition of the influence he has. All right then. Truce?

1. I originally intended the prior, non-parenthetical link to point to Dan Savage’s post, and mistakenly pointed to Thumper’s post about an article by Dan Savage. Hence the inserted parenthetical statement.

Maymay has this blog post that’s been sticking with me recently called “How not to fuck up a D/s relationship.” In it, he correctly points out that successful relationships are not a monolithic mass but are actually made up of multiple layers (like onions or, perhaps, parfaits), each building upon the last.

There’s this concept of layers, or more technically a stack, that is fundamental to the construction of many things in our world today. The basic idea is that one layer builds upon the things it receives from the layer beneath it and provides things to build upon to the layer above it. In this way, a robust and reliable system can be developed—and maintained—by segmenting different pieces of the system.

I think that a D/s relationship could benefit from a construction similar to this. It’s the way I think about my relationship with Eileen. I am at once her friend, her lover, her boyfriend, and her slave. Indeed, I am her slave because I am her boyfriend, and I am her boyfriend because I am her lover, and I am her lover because I am her friend.

I was reminded of this because, for the past two weeks or so, there’s been a kind of dissonance between Belle and I that’s taken the wind out of the sail for the sexual part of our relationship. […But o]nce the issue with the lower stack was resolved, the issue with the higher one was, too.

Now, Thumper’s blog is perhaps the only “sex blog” actually about the sex its author has that I don’t outright dislike for that fact. I hate most sex blogs, and even the ones that aren’t total bullshit (either because they are fiction or because they’re just flat-out terrible) give me pause since reading about someone else’s sex life while you have none of which to speak feels kind of like banging your forehead into a concrete wall over and over again. (Which, if it’s not obvious to you, is not my kink thankyouverymuch.) But I keep coming back to read Thumper’s blog because his ability to share his experiences with such sanguine simplicity while using marvelously empathic language leaves me feeling like I’m living vicariously through him.

And, for the record, there’s simply no other sex blogger whose sex life I want more than Thumper’s. Except possibly Tom’s. Sure, Thumper’s innately emotional phraseology can sometimes trigger downright rantings from me, but if you want to read about the sex life I wish I had, just read Thumper’s blog.

Anyway, beyond the fact that Thumper’s post was really life-affirming (literally) to read, it sparked a few comments that develop the D/s relationship layers (or stacks) idea further in a very valuable way. Mykey very keenly noted:

I might add though that the layers feed back to each other. I’m a better sub because [my partner Sandy and I] are in love. But I fall more in love when I see my submission is appreciate and valued. That is, a higher stack feeds back and strengthens the lower one as well.

Absolutely. And in the case of a sexual relationship, abso-fucking-lutely. This is true, techies like me will note, of many other systems whose architecture makes fundamental use of the layers concept. The Internet’s TCP/IP stack (which provides loads of sexual inspiration, if you’re looking), has an entire process for sending messages up and down its neighboring layers. So, too, must human relationships.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is a relationship that begins when two lovers’ eyes meet across a crowded room, suddenly feeling lustful for one another. (Doubly true if this is a sex party.) These weren’t “friends first” situations, which means the initial spark for the relationship happened, in this parlance, on a higher stack, the lover layer. So the sex can beget friendship and, like a tree, the relationship grows both roots heading downwards and branches heading skyward.

In Thumper’s case, as he puts it:

I think in Belle’s mind my chastity has stopped being just a game we play. It’s been elevated over time to be a fairly significant commitment I’ve made to her. A sign of my devotion. A permanent part of our relationship. And for some reason, I played right into that by equating my chastity to her [far "lesser"] commitment. So, I guess, what this boiled down to was a conversation about our commitments to each other and how we need to keep them. And a tacit implication that I will probably be chastised for the rest of my life.

[…]

Before, I had developed a kind of begrudged resignation toward the device and had more or less lost my interest in being sexual with or even touching Belle. Last night, though, I was all over her and fell asleep clutching her body, my hands up under bedclothes. Her hand was down around the device and she stroked my balls as she fell asleep and I just about melted. On the way into work this morning, I sensed the tube on my body and the stirring of the cock inside and a warm, excited fluttering was in my chest.

In other words, as Mykey observes, Belle considers chastity to be a foundation layer now. And that not only makes sense, it’s an absolutely critical thing for anyone—straight or not, vanilla or not—to appreciate.

We’re so often told sex, or fetishes, destroys relationships. But for many people, it’s one of the strongest ways to maintain and even strengthen one healthily.

Well, fuck that. I’m a person, too. And I still have sex, though not as much as some of my critics seem to think that I do. (Actually, that’s their fault, too, considering the enormous amount of time I spent managing attacks against me.) I hope someone’s getting off on it, because I’m not.

And speaking of not getting off, that’s one way I enjoy sex even without “having sex.” Just lucky, I guess. ;)

Anywho, I’ve been catching up with some of my favorite sex bloggers—y’know, the ones that write about what sex means to them, instead of who they fucked last weekend—and I came across Push me, please by Thumper. In it, he writes:

I tried to explain that there’s a desire within me to go far beyond my comfort zone if for no other reason than she’s asked me to do so. I pointed her to Maymay’s post related to this (is there anything he’s not written about?) and also sent her a couple of Sarah Jameson’s emails that, I think, touch indirectly on it.

Sarah Jameson, for those who don’t know, writes the Male Chastity Blog. She’s a “normal” woman, not unlike Belle, with a husband who likes abnormal things, not unlike me. She writes with confidence and, while I don’t always agree with her, find that she’s right far more often than not (at least IMO). Besides the blog, she also sends out a multi-part email newsletter on the subject of…wait for it…male chastity. […] I recommend it, especially for those just starting out.

First, yay, a relatively new and sensible addition to the orgasm denial/delay/control/what-have-you blogosphere. That is sorely needed. Second, yes, I’m sure there are many topics I’ve not yet written about but I’m working on fixing that. ;)

So, quoting Sarah Jameson, Thumper continues:

…in part 11 of her series, she asks, “Just how long can a man wait?” Her initial response sends an electric shiver down my spine:

Well, the truth is…your man doesn’t have to orgasm ever. As in NEVER.

But then she gives what I think is the best advice I’ve read on the subject:

Over time I’ve come round to the way of thinking that you should keep your man in orgasm denial for at least 50% longer than he asks for and thinks he can stand.

Why?

Because in the early days, while you’re still working out the ground rules, he’ll be basing his own estimation on insufficient knowledge. To HIM, fresh into male chastity, even a week seems like an eternity.

So if he thinks a month, make it six weeks; if he thinks six months, make it nine months; and if he thinks a year…woe betide him.

I think this is a really interesting excerpt because it shows an awareness of the importance of unpredictability, of keeping the orgasm control “game” novel and interesting. Now, Sarah Jameson seems to veer off in the direction of denial period length, which is not unreasonable but is, in my opinion, possibly misleading.

Although it certainly can be an exercise in control to keep a partner orgasm-less for 50% longer than they asked for, that in itself doesn’t reliably provide pleasure. If your measure of “fun” is “longer,” then by all means, go 50% longer. But you could just as easily go 70% longer or, hell, 100% longer, and in my experience, the “pleasure” would be equally unreliable. When you can change the variable and you don’t get a “better” result, then you know you’re missing the core issue.

Moreover, since “pleasure” is different for different people, achieving it doesn’t always boil down to lengths of time, or any other particular activity. Case in point, I spent a lot of time locked up and forbidden to masturbate during my relationship with Eileen, but things are different with Emma. I feel pretty differently about these experiences, but I can’t really say I enjoyed one situation more than the other.

So all of this had me thinking, is there any reliable, measurable way to induce whatever “maximum pleasure” means for me? Although I’m not certain, I did find a hint in this Class Day Lecture given at Stanford University by Robert Sapolsky, a world-renowned primatologist. In it, he discusses the neurobiology behind the feelings of pleasure as associated with reward and anticipation. (Watch the video or read my text transcript, below.)

How we go about reward: now this brings in a little bit of neurobiology, the involvement of a neurotransmitter (a brain chemical messenger) called dopamine. Dopamine is all about reward. You do not want your brain to run out of dopamine, or else you’ll become clinically depressed.

Cocaine works on the dopamine system. All sorts of euphoriants work on dopamine. Dopamine is about reward. At least, that’s what people used to think. And they used to think it would work as follows.

You take a monkey and you’ve trained it in some task. You give it a signal, a light goes on in its room, and that means, ‘Okay, this task is about to begin.’ And the monkey’s learned that if it now does this task, whatever the work is, it will then get a reward after some delay. And what everybody assumed was what dopamine was about was that, once you got that reward, dopamine levels went up. Dopamine was about pleasure, reward, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, all that sort of thing.

Turns out that’s not what dopamine is about. It looks like this instead.

You’ve got this monkey trained to do this task and the signal comes on saying, ‘Okay, we’re starting one of these sessions again,’ and then the dopamine goes up. What is this about? This is not pleasure of getting the reward. This is, ‘I know how this one works, this is great, I’m all on top of this. I know exactly what to do. Piece of cake, I got this under control. I’m on this one.’ It is not about reward, it’s about the anticipation of reward. And in fact, if you block that dopamine rise from occurring, you don’t get the work.

It’s not only about the anticipation of reward, it’s about the goal-directed behavior it is able to fuel.

Very subtle additional piece of this. A wonderful study some years ago where you take this scenario: okay, the individual, the monkey, does the work and, after the delay, gets the reward 100% of the time. Now, instead, in this setting, it gets the reward only 50% of the time. What happens now when that signal comes on, what [the dopamine levels] looks like is this: you switch over to 50% and the dopamine levels explode through the roof there.

What have you just done? You’ve introduced the word “maybe” into your equation, and that is reinforcing like nothing on Earth. That signal comes on, and that monkey is sitting there saying, ‘Piece of cake, I’m on top of this, but I’m such a screwup, and I’m not gonna get it–oh, but today, I’m gonna be on it–but it’s not gonna work out….’ And you just have him teetering there on this fulcrum, and that is pushing dopamine out like there’s no tomorrow.

Just to show that, now instead of the 50% reward rate, give the monkey either a 25% or 75% reward rate. Totally opposite things: this one is bad news, this one’s good news. What’s the one thing they have in common? Both reduce the unpredictability, both lower the dopamine surge to the same extent.

Take a monkey and there’s nothing more addictive out there than the notion that there’s a reward lurking out there and it’s a maybe. And what some of our best social engineers, many of them making a good living in Las Vegas, learn how to do is how to turn what seems like a 50% reality of reward to make it that salient when it’s one tenth of a hundred percent of a chance of reward; how to make one get that dopamine surge and get that goal directed behavior out of there.

So, it turns out that brain chemistry works exactly the same way in [humans]. In us, dopamine is about the anticipation of reward, uncertainty boosts it up further, it drives the work needed for the reward. What’s unique about us, what’s the difference is, the lag time between the work and the reward—how long we can hold on driven by that dopamine surge to pump out that work in order to get the reward.

And we all know this scenario: where you interview really, really well for your preschool, and as a result you get into a good school and a good high school, and you study hard and you get a good GPA and get into a good grad school, get a good job, and eventually you get into the nursing home of your choice. What we’ve got here is this astonishing human capacity to hold on. And, what we have that is completely unprecedented is the ability, in some ideological and some theological systems, to hold on even after you are gone—and a world in which you have a reward that comes in an afterlife. A world in which you are willing to put up with the most egregious of versions of pain in the name of holding on, holding on. A world in which unto the generations after you and the sins upon your children.

There’s nothing like that out there in any other species.

So, beyond the absolutely fascinating sociopolitical implications of this insight into human neurobiology, watching this video some months ago was a light-bulb moment for me. I finally understood the neurochemistry behind one of the most core elements of my sexuality, my fetish for orgasm control. And this knowledge is such good power.

I immediately shared my insight with Emma: dopamine levels are maximized when a “reward” (which is probably a “treat” in our parlance) is acquired exactly 50% of the times when it was expected. This means that, in an ideal world, for every orgasm I’m granted (every time I “do the work for the reward,” whatever the work is in our particular orgasm control game-du-jour), let me actually have that orgasm 50% of the time, in as unpredictable a fashion as possible.

So Sarah’s 50% figure is actually really astute. However, scientifically speaking, the variable is wrong. It’s not about how long one goes without orgasm that (in itself) determines the neurochemical levels of enjoyment one gets from the experience. Instead, it’s more about how reliably a sense of anticipation can be triggered and extended, while maximizing uncertainty of whether or not this time the “reward” (or “treat” or orgasm) is actually forthcoming.

That’s why, with Emma, there’s no longer such a thing as “days when I will orgasm.” Instead, there are only “no” days and “maybe” days. And I gotta say, I really like it this way.

Salt and pepper to taste. Yield: infinity. Serve with loving, desperate need and enjoy. ;)

This interesting image via SlaveBoy.Tumblr.com.

One of the things that has seriously bugged me for a very long time is how lots of people think about submissiveness, particularly but not necessarily as it relates to male sexuality. It bugs me because for all the lip service paid to respecting submission, very little about the way it’s discussed actually seems to be respectful of submissive desires.

I, unlike many submissive young men in their teens, surrounded myself with the culture and ritual of dominant/submissive relationships through the very fortunate circumstances in which I found myself. Yet, despite my incredible access to such resources, it was indescribably difficult (not to mention painful) for me to get to a point where I felt like I can enjoy my sexual submission as a valid part of my masculinity.

Why was it so hard for to me feel validated in my submission? Why does it continue to be a struggle for many people, as the overwhelming response to my subversive writings at MaleSubmissionArt.com show? This question, at once both simple and unspeakably intricate, is what I want to address in this post.

Imagine for a moment you’re a young guy (or a guy of any age, really) trying to understand your sexual desires. You know you want a relationship with (in the name of simplicity) a woman who will “take charge in the bedroom,” but you don’t really know what that looks like. You come across porn and sex blogs and, like a second (or third, or fourth) erotic awakening, all sorts of fantasy imagery involving either getting butt-fucked or not being allowed to orgasm, or both of those, starts bubbling in your brain, since—let’s face it—that’s most of the erotic material out there for such guys. You finally get a girlfriend and, remarkably, she’s good, giving and game, so you get butt-fucked and she doesn’t let you come. “Wonderful,” you’re likely to think, “now I’ve been submissive.”

If you’re lucky, maybe it was really wonderful. More power to you. But what if it’s not? Moreover, and I suspect this is most common, what if that wonderfulness is just the tip of the iceberg? What if the new experience was amazing and novel but you want more? What is that “more” that you want? More butt-fucking? More bondage? More sexual service? More orgasm denial? What are you yearning for, really?

This, sadly, is where many of us get stuck. I’ve read countless words from hundreds if not thousands of men, all of whom seem to be trying to answer these very questions. I’m one of these men, trying to figure out what the fuck all this desiring is, trying to make it “more” and “better” as though I’m following some kind of primal programming. I want to be more passionate. More intimate. More connected. More devoted. More focused. More meaningful. More submissive.

Obviously, this is a very big topic, and I often feel overwhelmed just thinking about how submission relates to my life, influences my relationships, or shapes my desires. As I often struggle with articulating these thoughts, I figured that even if I don’t get it quite right, it’s worth sharing some of where I’ve gotten to because I no longer enjoy sex despite being a submissive man. I finally enjoy sex because I am—and want to be—a sexually submissive man.

Hopefully, I’ll clarify the imprecise language we currently have available to explore gendered power and submissive masculinity in particular, and I’ll address how such feeble language may cause egregious ambiguity in communication as well as misconceptions about fundamental desires that hamper our understanding of consensual sexual submission.

Hot or not? Submission isn’t arousal.

This submission stuff is hard, and I’m not the only one who’s struggled, or is struggling, with it. One reason it’s so goddamn hard is because the way I so often see it conceptualized feels polluted by imprecision, absolutism, and sexism.

Most of the time, I ignore a great deal of the polluted chatter because it comes from people I don’t hold in high regard to begin with. Recently, however, some of the men who blog that I respect a lot have hit some of the same notes while singing submissive masculinity’s tunes as the people I ignore, and that is something I cannot ignore.

More specifically, Thumper, whose blog I read almost religiously, inspired a debate between MyKey and myself. In a comment on one of Thumper’s posts, MyKey said:

The denial after [lots of orgasms] is much harder and much sweeter for it, and the submission deeper and more fun. Of course during those periods [after orgasm] its hard to be as submissive[…].

Although I’ve read this opinion expressed in about a bazillion different ways, it’s a sentiment I’ve never felt completely comfortable with. Indeed, the more I dissect my own submissiveness and explore what submission means to me, the more upset I get by its prevalence. I get even more upset when bloggers perpetuate this, because they are currently the most influential source of education about submissive masculinity.

But before I get too far into what I find so upsetting about the way this is framed, let’s make one thing clear: what I’m about to say has nothing to do with espousing a submissive ideology, a One True Way® for being a “real submissive.” It’s irrational to, for instance, call a self-identified switch “a submissive” when that person is feeling submissive by sole virtue of their feelings; they are no more or less “a submissive” than they say they are, despite how desirous of submissive feelings they are at any given time. Insofar as identity politics are involved, they stop at the point of acknowledging that your identity is a part in your personal experience of the world.

This post, however, is not about your experience of the world. It’s about finding a way to convey your experience in a manner that is reconcilable with the different experiences of others. This is important because, lacking this ability, all conversation about submission starts with “for me,” repeats the caveat, and then ends with “Your Mileage May Vary.” To date, every way I’ve heard anyone talk about submission breaks down when someone else introduces their own, differing, experience, and I’m afraid those conversations are no longer useful for me.

Anyway, the short debate between MyKey and I ultimately lead to a post in which Thumper put forth the following equation:

Denial + arousal = submission.

In the comments—worth reading despite veering into predictably unhelpful tangents at points—Thumper later amended this to read Denial + arousal = submissive energy. That’s better, thanks in part to the focus on “energy” (I think more precisely termed desire) over the intrinsic nature of the outcome. Nevertheless, I want to challenge both statements because I think the premise underlying them is simply not true.

Both statements feed into a dangerous, wide-spread stereotype: the cock-centric notion that if you control a man’s penis, you control the man. Is that true? Of course it’s not. These activities could certainly be an expression of dominance or submission and they might trigger dominant or submissive feelings in oneself or one’s partner(s), but Thumper, MyKey and I already seem to agree that the acts are not, themselves, the root cause of submission or dominance.

To wit, and to Thumper’s credit, one of his next sentences is the following:

That’s not saying I’m in no way submissive when my sexual appetite has been totally sated. I think I would be accepting of domination even then. [And later, in the comments:] I wasn’t trying to suggest it’s just that simple […] but they are strongly related.

Indeed, I can think of no realm less suited to the beautiful simplicity of mathematics than human desire, so it’s obvious that Thumper’s equation is an oversimplification. Since we can all see that things are not “just that simple,” I presume that what Thumper, MyKey, and other submissive men perpetuating this simplistic formulation are trying to get at is that they feel submissive more acutely when the fact of their orgasm denial is at the fore of their thoughts. Thumper says he feels his “sub mojo” lessen after he has come. MyKey calls this sensation “sub drop” and, since I disagree with the premise of their statements, questions whether I’m “wired differently”.

At least in this regard, however, I am not wired differently. I do understand the sudden, often startling change in desires post-orgasm. During relationships with keyholders, the degree with which my interest in, say, getting my penis locked away waned after having an orgasm was (and still is) totally remarkable to me. Nevertheless, similar to the experiences of others, when my keyholder wanted me locked, I got locked. Why? Because that’s hot! It wasn’t quite as hot right then, but it was super-hot shortly thereafter, when I was once again unable to masturbate freely.

This simple after-the-fact observation points to a crucial distinction I fear is missing from the conversation about submission: just because an activity is less pleasant at some moments than it is during others doesn’t mean I won’t do or enjoy those activities. Moreover, the drive to perform those activities independent of one’s immediate motivations is a distinct, separate pleasure, from the pleasure one gets from desiring the activity directly.

I think Tom Allen illustrated this in the sexiest way ever in his erotic story, Ahead of Time. Portions of this story are so apropos to this discussion that I just have to quote it:

“And I want you to come really hard for me. I want you to remember this for a long time.”

“Oooh,” I moaned aloud.

“That’s why I’m going to make you eat my pussy right after you come.”

I gasped. It was like an electric shock to my groin. I’ve long had this fantasy, but could never bring myself to do it. The idea of being forced to clean her, to lick my still-hot come from her, to hear her demanding that I make her clean, to make her come with my tongue… I’ve only mentioned to her a handful of times over the years, but I’ve never been able to ask for this, let alone to try it. She was right, there’s something about the first ten or fifteen minutes after coming that puts all that desire right out of my head. I was excited, but at the same time a bit fearful. I knew that I wouldn’t want to do it afterward…and so did she.

She sensed my hesitation. “I know the idea turns you on,” she said.

Thinking fast, I said “But, I, um, thought that you were satisfied. You told me that you had come enough for tonight.”

“Oh, you’re not going to do it for my pleasure,” she said, “at least, not for my sexual pleasure. You’re going to do it because in a few days, you’re going to think about it, and you’re going to remember this evening as the hottest thing we’ve ever done.”

[…]

I was still partially dazed as she inched her knees alongside my body. When she finally rested her legs over my arms and braced her other hand against the headboard, though, things…changed somehow. Her pussy, which just minutes ago was a beautiful, warm cave, suddenly now seemed like a hairy tube of flesh that was filled with something that I didn’t want. Ugh, how could I ever have asked for this? I pursed my lips, but it was too late—I felt the drips onto my cheeks and chin. Seconds later, her slick lips were pressed tightly against my mouth, and I could hear her encouraging me to clean her, to keep sucking and licking until everything was gone.

(Emphasis mine.)

What Tom’s story and our many similar experiences show us is that not even the men who purport to quantify submission based on sexual arousal or orgasm denial actually do that. Although our awareness of submissive feelings may be intensified by specific, often fetishistic triggers (e.g., being horny and prevented from coming), those two concepts are not causally related.

For men like Thumper and I, who clearly dig orgasm denial pretty hard, it makes sense that this desire is a core aspect of how we want to fuck. But we do ourselves and our readers a terrible disservice by perpetuating the idea that our fetish is the cause of our submissive desire rather than a manifestation of it. Submission does not come about through someone else’s control—that is mere restriction in the best case, and abuse in the worst case—it comes about through our active desire to submit. Consensual submission is not about how someone else controls me, it’s about the opportunities I create for myself to be vulnerable to that person.

When I hear people discussing submission as though it is the result of the thing they want instead of discussing submission itself as the thing they want, it’s like listening to people talk while putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Such an awkward conceptualization of submission is not merely incorrect, it’s very dangerous because it restricts any submissive desire into a necessarily coercive paradigm.

In this instance, with teasing and denial as the addends, it constructs mens’ submission as totally dependent on the myth of male lust (the idea that men are controlled by their penises because they are men). It states that submissive energy is itself induced by a woman (or, more generally, “keyholder”) by accessing that man’s sexual potency in a strictly prescribed, time-release fashion, like a pill.

This is the same misconception that says blowjobs are inherently submissive, or that pain is inherently bad, or even that blogging about sex is inherently submissive (srsly)! Sadly, these ideas are the prevailing view of what “submission” is, and I think they totally miss the point about the validity of submission itself as a core motivation.

Framing submission as a second-class thing, a byproduct of some other, first-class particle, is incorrect. Submission is it’s own distinct facet of sexual desire.

Reductionist Submission Is Dangerous To Your Sex Life

There’s absolutely nothing wrong about getting off on stereotypes. While the reasons for why many submissive men, including myself, fetishize orgasm denial are debatable, that obvious fact does not make orgasm denial a component of submission. Akin to the way desiring anal sex does not make someone gay, abstaining from orgasm does not make someone a submissive. Abstaining longer doesn’t make them “more submissive.”

Sexual “teasing” is really pleasurable and fun for many people, regardless of their interest in submission. For a huge population, that kind of sex is all about improving their orgasms, whether “vanilla” or not; I’ve read of self-identified dominant men who enjoy the practice, too. For other people, like certain religious sects, some portions of asexual populations, and anorgasmic women, living (or trying to live) an orgasm-less existence isn’t even kinky. On the flip side, there are certainly some submissive men who simply aren’t into orgasm denial at all.

In other words, even though sex acts obviously influence one’s mental or physical state at any given moment, conceptually coupling a sexual activity to what an activity means is going to cut you off from the pleasure of diverse sexual experience. Teasing and denial (the “denial+arousal” part of Thumper’s equation) are not ingredients for submission, they’re just toys I play with because I, like many others, enjoy expressing submission with them some of the time. Sometimes we enjoy it more than other times, but sometimes we express that same submission in completely unrelated ways.

Regardless of your personal experience, I’d urge you to avoid linking any sex act to any intention, even “for you,” even if it’s your fetish. The stereotypical view of orgasm denial as requisite for or even directly “enhancing” submission, even for those of us who fetishize it, simply doesn’t account for our own diverse expressions of submission. To assert that it does is fundamentally miscommunicative. It’d be like saying getting flogged is submission and that the harder you get flogged the more submissive you are, and although people often make the “harder=submissivier” false assertion as well, that doesn’t make it sensible, that makes it dangerous!

That definition of submission, coercive at best and abusive at worst, invalidates submission itself as a potential motivation for healthy sex by undermining a submissive person’s power to choose exactly what they do or do not want—a power that’s required to make healthy sexual choices for one’s self, even “as a submissive.” It tricks us into believing all the false dichotomies embedded in hegemonic culture that tell us BDSM is obscene, and that to be submissive is to necessarily be unassertive, passive, self-effacing, receptive, or acquiescent. These are not ambiguous, wishy-washy obstacles to people’s health. For many people, particularly men who are deeply immersed in heteronormative culture, these are real factors that contribute to sexual anxiety and a horrible depreciation of self-image.

Defining the degree of one’s sexual submission as the summation of a period of orgasm denial and current sexual arousal is not only reductionist, I believe it’s actively damaging. The equation perpetuates the myth of male lust and disavows the validity of submission as a sexual self-expression that can be actively chosen, rather than induced coercively.

In the post that spawned all this theorizing, Thumper wrote:

I had cruised all through my adolescence with no inkling I was what I was (though I can see some signs that were there all along).

Like Thumper, I was certainly submissive before I had a dominant partner in my life. So while this rant may sound like meaningless semantics to some, it’s crucial that we amplify these distinctions and move the prevailing understanding of submissive masculinity away from the limiting, misrepresentative, and downright sexist bullshit so often spewed by exploitative pro-dommes and the likes of Elise Sutton (no link because I hate what she says; Google it instead actually, Gloria Brame’s essay on Elise Sutton is totally worth reading). That’s precisely the kind of bullshit that kept “what we are” hidden from men like Thumper and I for so long.

As an adamantly submissive man myself, I’m sure my personal experience is going to be different from, say, a switch’s orgasm denial experience. And that’s the point: submission is not about creating a ruleset of Things To Do To Be Submissive for anyone, yourself least of all. Very simply, it’s about sexual self-expression in order to be happy and healthy.

So please, all of us who blog about such things, stop insisting that keeping a man from his orgasms somehow turns him more submissive. You’re just fooling yourselves, your readers, and arguably worst of all, your lovers.

Once again, as part of tasks she had charged me with accomplishing, Eileen wanted me to write and read another fantasy snapshot to her. This time, however, she gave me a specific direction to go in: write about harems, a recurring fantasy genre of hers. I did this successfully (and if you’re really just here for the pr0n then, here it is) but what she found interesting about it was how much I worked my own kinks (technology, orgasm control) into the piece. My thinking here was pretty straightforward, since all I did was figure that what I’d produce wouldn’t be any good if I wasn’t interested in writing it.

One of my other tasks was to buy her a specific sort of jewelry. This has been an area of relative discomfort for her as a top and, like my own discomfort vocalizing fantasies, is something she and I would like to see her become more comfortable with. Rather than refer to this jewelry as a gift, which is heavily laden with negative stereotypes of gender roles, we’ve been referring to it as a form of tribute, but admittedly that’s not much better either. When I buy her things, and especially when she “makes” me buy her things, she sometimes still feels the resonance of guilt, and so I feel bad about making her feel guilty, and on and on the vicious spiral goes.

For me, however, buying things for her is not difficult because my relationship with money is vastly different from hers. To me, money is accumulated for one purpose only: to be spent. Money is nothing but a manifestation of some kind of confidence in a product, in a service, or in some other thing perceived to have a value of sorts. Since it’s my money I’m spending, I get to spend it on whatever I want. More often than Eileen may be ready to believe, what I want to spend it on is her. Still, financial domination is not really my kink, it’s hers.

What I want for her is to be able to experience guiltless pleasure by enacting kinks and fantasies. That’s why I was happy to see that one of my tasks was to do this thing that, should I be successful, she would find emotionally challenging to accept in a way. And that’s also part of why instead of buying her the one piece of jewelry she tasked me with acquiring, I secretly bought two. Then, that night, I bought her an even more expensive bottle of perfume on a complete whim and treated her to dinner.

My goal was the same as hers: to push limits. We push each other, we always have, and it’s part of what keeps us moving forward together. Though the willingness to push a bottom’s limits is almost a prerequisite to advertise yourself as a top or a dominant, very rarely does anyone seem to recognize the value of pushing a top’s limits as a bottom, and I think that is a grave oversight for all involved. Often, people expect—sometimes even demand—that bottoms and submissives be entirely passive partners in sex and kink, but I think this is wrong.

Equating passivity with submissiveness is just as brain-dead stupid as equating power with penises. When I’m willing to actively push my top’s limits, everything is more fun. That doesn’t mean that I’m “topping from the bottom” in the way many people think of it. I’m not bossy or a brat, I don’t talk back in scenes and I don’t tell you where to hit me (unless that’s part of the scene, or you ask me to, of course). What I mean when I say that I like to push my top’s limits is that I respectfully and incrementally encourage them to explore their sadism, their cruelty, their willingness to impose their will on my body, perhaps in ways that they may not feel entirely comfortable doing but that I do.

I do this for a number of reasons. The most obvious one? It turns them on, and then they do things to me that I like. With Eileen, the other day, this meant I spent quite a bit more money on her than she was immediately comfortable with. This active submission or bottoming has also manifested itself in most of the scenes where my tops told me “Okay, I think I need to stop now.” I half-jokingly say that I want to collect as many tops as I can who I can get to say this. So far, there are five, and I’ve enjoyed playing with each of them (and I hope I get to again, one day)! (You know who you are. ;)

Anyway, the good news for me is that I successfully accomplished all of the tasks I had been given. This has earned me the consideration of a possible orgasm, Eileen said, though she has not specified a time for this. This reward was phrased very deliberately, and perhaps one day I’ll get around to writing about the particulars of what earning something means (though Ms. Rika has already written a fair bit about treats versus rewards, which talks a bit about earning stuff).

At any rate, what I’ve earned is very nebulous because “consideration of a possible orgasm” is basically just like saying “maybe, we’ll see.” This has left me wondering (and fantasizing) about what will happen. Nevertheless, even as day 35 of being kept orgasm-less draws to a close for me tonight, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now, without further ado, as promised, here’s the harem fantasy snapshot that I read aloud to Eileen this morning.

I kissed her firmly on the lips, gently pulling her down with me as I leaned back onto the massive bed and sank further into the gold threaded sheets. She responded by parting my lips with her tongue, one of her hands encircling both my thighs and the other pressing her body into mine. I twisted my body so she was on her side and moved my mouth to her neck. That was my purpose: to exist for her pleasure. The years I had spent in this place had taught me how to fulfill this purpose well.

“You are so lucky,” one of the other boys told me one day as we sat on the marble steps of the pool.

“Why?” I asked.

“And you’re dumb,” he replied wryly. “How can’t you see it? She adores you. She takes you more often than any of us,” he said as he gestured around the room, a hint of envy in his voice.

The sunlit pool hall had white stone walls with large glass doors and a few stained glass windows depicting young men and women in various states of servility. A dozen or so other slaves like I were swimming and a few more were lounging elsewhere in the hall. Most of us were naked, and those few who weren’t might as well have been, as we were given very little in the way of fabric for coverings by our keepers. Instead, we typically wore jewelry whose particulars were carefully chosen to match our body’s aesthetics. Many of the darker-skinned slaves wore intricate silver bands while I wore lots of copper, rose gold, and turquoise to compliment my pale skin.

I cocked my head and grinned back at my friend. “That makes me sore, not lucky,” I said to him.

“Still,” he said, the envy turning into a soft sigh, “you get more stimulation than we do.”

We were not only kept as pleasure slaves, we were also slaves to pleasure. Shortly after being bought, I was strapped to a contraption that left strategic parts of my skin perfectly hairless and others incredibly erogenous—even some that had not been before. Despite my fear and anguish that first dark night, I couldn’t help but masturbate through my tears. Strangely—cruelly, I thought—nothing I did brought me to the satisfaction I craved and yet every other sensation seemed amplified such that merely the feel of the sheets in my new bed filled me with lust. At first I thought these sensations were hallucinations, but when I braved asking the others they told me similar stories. “It keeps you eager for her,” they said, and they were right.

I soon learned that she alone had the power to satisfy my body, though I didn’t understand why that was so. We never knew when she might choose to sample one of us, and yet eager as I and the rest of us were for it, much of the time it was not pleasant when she would. I frequently sported bruises, and more often than not she chose to take her pleasure from me with seemingly little regard for my own obvious need.

In her bed, she rolled her hand in my long hair and pulled my mouth off her neck, exposing my own to her tongue. I shivered, whimpering as goosebumps appeared on my flesh. To avoid the maddening stimulation, I pushed my mouth back to her neck and tried to focus my attention on the mundane parts of the act, like the motion and pressure of my lips.

Then I saw her eyes glint just so. She grabbed my wrist and pulled it by the copper bangle I wore from her side to the restraint in the headboard, which automatically held my jewelry in its grasp. I held my breath, fearing that tonight would not be one of the pleasant nights.

As a final aside, I’ve posted this vignette into the Hypertextual Porn wiki because that project needs a little tender lovin’ care at the moment and I think this is a good piece to begin loose construing, a good snippet to remix with, as it seems like it can go in any number of directions.

I’m hoping that, over time, I’ll be able to create an archive of lots and lots of snippets like this so that erotica authors might find interesting ways to mix and match and modify them to suit their story ideas. If you’ve got some short, erotic vignettes you’d feel comfortable contributing to the project (and basically releasing your writing as “open source” hypertextual porn), then please take a peak at the project’s homepage.

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.

Catching up on some blogs tonight (during yet another bout of procrastination and insomnia), I see that I’m not the only one. The enviable Mischief has some plans but isn’t doing much about them at the moment, and Selina emailed me to say hi but due to an (equally enviable) overabundance of sex hasn’t blogged about it much. Tom’s even feeling a bit depressed and doesn’t have much in the way of new erotica on his blog these days. I’m finding myself feeling more severed from the only communities I’ve ever had major social roots in than ever, and it’s decidedly unpleasantly disconcerting. It’s even more upsetting that this happened mere months after the first optimistic signs that things could actually get better for me back in New York City.

A few weeks ago, in response to this, I remarked to Eileen in a conspicuously offhanded fashion that I’d like to play with our CB-3000 some more, and since we lost our shower’s water pressure in the move, I’d like to find a good squeeze bottle for hygienic purposes, too. I like starting down the orgasm control route again because it’s a (for lack of a better phrase) low-intensity thing we can do to mix a little bit of our former lives back into our daily interactions. I feel like letting my arousal build and release at her whim helps counter some of the less desirable things of all that “domesticity” that has been creeping into our lives of late.

It was an indescribable pleasure to feel the tenacity with which my sexual attention was affixed to her late last week and especially Saturday, when we had the time to spend the day at the beach and napping on the park’s grass lawn. I was reminded of the first summer we’d spent together and of the fact that I can count my orgasms during those three or four months on two hands, and of when we met. I bristled with pulses of arousal at her touch, and whenever I’d see a pretty girl walk past me I’d think of both Eileen and the pretty girl. Little did I know that meeting Eileen would be the catalyst for so much pleasant sexual frustration of exactly the sort I craved, and keep craving today.

Of course, orgasm denial brings with it its own challenges, both to me via the obvious and somewhat newly novel sexual frustration as well as to the relationship. Daily obligations don’t just go away, and Real Life hasn’t been exceedingly accommodating of our want to play. Eileen and I both still get tired, we’ve each gotten ill at different times this past week alone, and of course work incessantly mounts upon itself. I’ve tried to sneak away some time for personal projects (some of which are sexuality-related and which I hope to unveil shortly). I’ve also been doing my bit to improve Conversio Virium’s presence, of course. (Sidenote: CV has a Twitter stream now.) I sorely miss CV and a big part of me wishes I could be there in person to witness their ongoing success.

I do feel like I’ve grown here, and if nothing else in this circumstance absence is surely making my heart grow fonder of all that I left.

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.

As a brief interlude from all the heavy-hearted posting, I thought that, instead of making associations between this holiday and the fear of sex (I mean, as I understand it, people all around the world are generally celebrating immaculate conception, which doesn’t sound like any fun at all to me) I’d give you all a few moments of “mmmm, that nice!” in pictorial form. Enjoy.

As an aside, if anyone has information as to the identity of the artists, I would love to give them due credit as, unfortunately, I do not as yet know the original source.