Friday, July 17, 2009

I, too, kink on BDSM stereotypes

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, Emotions, Femdom, Male sexuality, Personal history

As sometimes happens, the Internet sends me alerts of things I’ve told it I might find interesting. Tonight, Delilah Wood’s post, Questioning Desires: A place for sissies and worms? splashed onto my radar. Reading the post, I found it heartening to find that there are people, like Delilah, who have been reading me and, even better, actually thinking about what I’m saying.

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.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (7)

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

I like feeling like a beginner again

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, Bondage, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Communication, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Erotica and pornography, Fantasy, Femdom, Fetish, Male sexuality, Masturbation, Relationship, Sexual teasing and control, Training/Conditioning, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

Things have been a little bit busy in my life lately, and for once the busyness has not been solely professionally-driven. Though I am working on a number of very exciting things, my days have been excitingly full because after I work hard, I come home to Eileen and we play hard. The play, however, hasn’t been the same sort of stuff we used to do. I think isolation from our friends and community and our efforts in our respective professional lives have actually helped us enjoy our time together.

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 31st 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. 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….

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (17)

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Firsts are always changes

Category labels: Community, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Femdom, Kink events, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Masturbation, Personal experience, Relationship, Sex, Uncategorized, Writing and blogging

One of the reasons I’m so interested in kink and sexuality is because it’s implicitly a big part of my life. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the very same time, not unlike how many people understand god. For me, my sexuality is akin to my religion: self-expression (and particularly sexual self-expression) is my prayer, I am my own god, and the pleasure-positive, queer-friendly, self-empowering communities of which I am a part are my Church.

I like the references to religious imagery apparent in much of my play even though the thought of religion in my sex life makes me feel viscerally repulsed. I won’t do religious-themed play (naughty priests, nuns, and even Rabbis spring to mind—all potentially sexy for some people if not for me), but I understand the impetus of those who do. I like getting wings, being referred to as an obedient angel, or the idea of being nailed to a cross. I am no martyr, for martyrdom and ultimate self-sacrifice is in many ways the epitome of what I find repugnant; I ask to be hurt, to be beat, to be etched and marked, because it’s what I want, not something I dislike that’s merely a path to something “more.”

Parts of my life, like kink, present themselves in interesting ways sometimes. They’re like habits, much in the way going to the gym is something that is at first difficult but over time becomes habitual and—not necessarily in a negative context—addictive. If I don’t get my kink fix for a while, I start getting antsy. The physical catharsis of a good beating goes hand-in-hand with emotional catharsis of some kind. It’s one way that I experience the connection between the body and the mind.

What I’ve found over the past few weeks is that, at least for now, writing about these experiences and continuing my own introspective explorations about myself, my sexuality, and how I relate to the world around me (as well as why the world around me is so fucked up), is similarly emotional cathartic. Yes, I’ll admit it: I blog as a form of self-treatment. And I’ve been itching to start writing again.

However, I’m a horribly change-averse person at my core, in spite of the fact that I am also occasionally an eager risk-taker. When I stopped writing often, it became difficult to start up again. So many pieces of my life are scattered about the floor around me, in piles waiting to be sorted, packed, and shipped off to the other side of the planet (I’m moving to Sydney, Australia, from New York City), that I desperately wanted to maintain some semblance of continuity and order among the change and chaos.

You’d think, naturally, that with all the preparations to be made, the telephone, Internet, gas and electric, and other utility accounts to close down, the bank accounts to open and close, the taxes to complete for the previous year, the stuff to move, the apartments (and jobs?) to find on the other side of the world, and everything else I have to do to move my whole life from one of Earth’s hemispheres to the other, that I wouldn’t be able to squeeze in time for more play. In fact, I expected to be so busy that kink would have to take a back-seat to the rest of my life until I was settled again. Boy, was I wrong.

In the past few weeks, I’ve played more often than I have in the past half-year. Furthermore, I’ve played with more people in less time than I ever have before—the exact figure would have been even higher had there been the time. I lament the fact that it’s only now, with my imminent retreat from the in many ways stifling New York City scene that I’ve suddenly experienced an explosion of play partner possibilities who are not only fun and intriguing but who also seem to actively desire playing with men who bottom or, (gasp!) are actually submissive and self-respecting. C’est la vie….

The experiences are not all incredibly intense in and of themselves, but the experience of my own broadening “promiscuity” and apparent desirability is incredibly disorienting, and surprisingly uncomfortable at the same time that it is very welcome. After repeated conversations about the topic, in which I often express confusion, doubt, and glee at the situation, the best I can come up with is that “I’m not used to being liked at so intensely,” to borrow one of Rona’s lovely grammatical idioms. Of course, I’m not oblivious to the reasons: I’m relatively good-looking even if I still don’t consider myself “hot”, I have a pretty wide and (to some) intense range of things I enjoy doing, and I’m an all-around decent person.

What’s so astonishing to me, then, is that other people have taken note of these things, too. Actually being in demand by people who’ve never even heard of me before, as opposed to being merely available, is a lovely, self-affirming experience. It’s the ego-boost I’ve heard so many women talk about. And I’m not too proud to admit that it was really, really nice to have.

The weekend after the Flea in Rhode Island, I went to a weekend-long private party near Boston, having been invited by a friend along with Eileen, and the experience (much of which is the foundation for the feelings expressed in this post) was the exact opposite of what I expected. Instead of feeling shunned, I felt wanted. I played each night, each night feeling a bit more comfortable than the one before, until on Sunday night I not only got beat in ways that made me moan when I moved for days, I also had my first semi-public orgasm and outright sexual experience with someone I’d just met.

Oh, it was tame, and relatively short-lived, but the fact remains that it was the first of its kind: invited to join Eileen and the top both she and I had met (and played with) earlier in the party on the floor in a corner of one of the party rooms, I lay back and the two of them proceeded to rub and caress my bruised body while he (the top) pressed a Hitachi Magic Wand against my penis. A few minutes later, while I was just beginning to start writhing in pleasure on the floor, my friend from Kink in Exile, who had just gotten through beating my thighs and ass with one of her metal pipes, joined our corner and took a spot rubbing my chest, nipples, and sides.

I was uncomfortable being the center of so much explicitly sexual attention. Three people, one of whom I didn’t even know before the weekend started and another whom I’d seen in person for only the second time, were now sitting around me while I lay on the floor and braced myself against the vibrator’s insistent buzzing. And at first, I really was bracing against it.

“This is not very like me,” I was thinking. It was weird and uncomfortable, and I wondered if they were actually enjoying this anyway, letting me just lie back and enjoy myself with almost no words exchanged about it. “Maybe there are expectations I’m not aware of. That’d be bad!” I closed my eyes early on to try to fend off any triggers for more doubt, and not being able to see is something that helps me turn inwards, to focus on the sensations in my body rather than the thoughts in my mind.

It took me a long time to shove the nuisance of my own self-doubt out of my head in order to relax enough to enjoy what they were doing. At the start I was giggly and clearly nervous, but they all reassuringly told me to hush. The orgasm built slowly, but as a result it was fierce and explosive and wonderful and it left me a little dizzy.

After it was over and I came back down from the high of the beatings and the orgasm, the newness of the experience struck me most clearly: I’m changing, too. For years, even though I’ve had due cause, I’d been walled off and detached from the social and sexual possibilities and opportunities laid out before me. No, they aren’t always there in such massive quantity as they were at this party for the first time, but I know they were there.

Maybe I’m starting to be ready to really say “yes” to a lot of the things I wanted but wasn’t ready for before. It took the right people, in the right place, at the right time, to make it happen. Just as it did when Eileen and I first met.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (3)

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

One night, I fell in love

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

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

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

In chronological order:

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

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

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

    And this time you weren’t smiling anymore.

  • I also remember looking into your eyes when you were suffocating me, actually. But, strange, I don’t remember your eyes.
Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (3)

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The Selfish Highlight Reel: Rhode Island Fetish Flair Flea-market Recap

Category labels: Community, Emotions, Kink events, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Pet play, Puppy play, Sex toys, Uncategorized, Vanilla life, Wednesday Wanderings, Writing and blogging

Almost a week and I haven’t posted nary a word in either posts nor comments. What is going on? Despite the praise—which is lovely and makes me feel good, and useful, and accomplished—I have no altruistic goals for my writing, no illusions of where my motivation to keep this blog going stems from.

In case it hasn’t become common knowledge yet, in exactly four weeks I will be leaving the United States on a jet plane headed towards Sydney, Australia, where I will be living for at least the following year. This marks the very first time in my life when I will not have lived in New York City. In fact, it marks the only time in my life when I’ll have to call some location outside of the island of Manhattan my home.

I’m so excited, I can’t wait. But I’m also going to miss so many people and things about New York City and the East coast in general so, so much. In this last month in the States, I don’t expect to be writing every day anymore, and would like to echo the things Eileen said about the stress of moving.

But it’s Wednesday, and I want to keep the commitments I make to myself, so I wanted to post a Wednesday Wanderings link-fest for everyone reading. This Wednesday Wanderings post is going to be a little different because instead of wandering all over cyberspace this past week, I wandered around meatspace. Specifically, I went to the Rhode Island Fetish Fair Flea-market.

Part of the goal for this blog—making myself feel more visible, more heard, more seen, and more listened to—has been a major success. People are finding their own kinds of value in what I have to say, and they do so by finding their own motivations for listening in the first place.

Going to NELA’s Rhode Island Fetish Fair Flea-market this past weekend felt very much like that. I decided to go at the last minute, for my own reasons, to turn the event into an opportunity for personal exploration and experimentation of a sort I choose to keep my own, for now. I had some successes, some pain, some very frustrating dashed expectations, and some disappointments, so it was not the sort of spectacular experience some people might expect it to be. That said, I’m glad I went, and I don’t think I did too badly on my own.

The Flea’s primary purpose for me, an opportunity to practice (among other things) taking the bad with the good without Eileen present was something I accomplished in the end. As I mentioned, for now I choose not to show you (all) the bad parts. I don’t want to talk about them right now, especially since I’ve covered lots of them before.

It should come as no surprise to long-time readers how frustrated I am with the persistence that women’s bodies are the sole subject for fetish photography and how combative I feel around asshat mandoms. The Flea had its fair share of these things.

I’ve been to this Winter event two times before and each time it felt like, well, like going to a kink event. This time, however, it felt far more like I was just going to Providence to see some friends, who all happened to be congregating at a kink event. That was much, much more fun.

I didn’t make it to a single class or workshop. I never made it through the entryway of the Fetish Art Show, even though I passed by the entrance at least a dozen times. I didn’t make a single significant purchase, though I did pick up a small, spontaneous gift for Eileen that I’m hoping gets used on me soon. And I’m not at all disappointed about any of those things.

I do wish I had gotten to spend more one-on-one time with my friends, especially Switch, whose insightful self-reflection was the source of my original motivation to attend the event in the first place.

Switch and I travelled to Providence with Dov on Saturday morning who, like both of us, had made similar last-minute plans to attend two days before. Conversations with Dov are always at least entertaining and at their best are very interesting. At the Flea, we couldn’t walk more than five feet in any direction without one of us stopping to say hello to someone we knew. Midori was vending near the entrance to the infamously gigantic vendor’s area, so she was one of the first people Dov stopped to talk with, and he introduced her to Switch. (I just said a brief hello.)

It wasn’t long after that when Switch and I met up with my good friends Maja and Týr, the marvelous Mischief and the enchanting Estra, as well as a few of our other friends without blog names. Together, we swept through the vending area at least three times over. I also said hello to David King, maker of the excellent Coyote Whips single tails, was introduced to Leah and Scott of Big Head Studios, and waved to Hilton manning the Purple Passion booth.

Eventually, after also connecting with Calico, the group of us went to the Bondage Lounge, where we hung out with Sascha, and I spent a fun few minutes as Switch’s ball of human and hemp.

Later, our group swelled to ever larger proportions, including the addition of yet-more-non-blog-people. Also included in the mix was a specific attractive and dominant woman who I was very happy to get to see again—and whom I hope to be able to see more of in the very near future—but unfortunately didn’t get quite as much time to speak with as I would have liked. (You know who you are; I’d rather not call you out by name without prior notice, though if that’s something you wouldn’t mind then I’d be happy to do so from now on.) Eventually we all made it to dinner in spite of a wait well over an hour.

At the hotel room, emotional issues struck at night alongside insomnia of sorts. None of us got much sleep, but the conversation with Switch was heartening and was the highlight of my day, however mixed it was with exhaustion and other sadness.

The next day back at the Flea-market, I was happy to get the chance to meet the brilliant blogger from over on Kink in Exile, who has finally returned from physical “exile” and is back on the East coast just in time for us to cross paths. The two of us wandered around a bit, and I got introduced to some of her friends, like Mr. Pet (who makes incredible custom couture pieces), Steve of Circlet Press, and a few others who also don’t have public blogosphere identities.

I also had the pleasure of seeing Margaret, the absolutely unabashedly, astonishingly adorable founder of Wolf Princess Designs, a company that sells vegan sex accessories for the extremely enjoyable niche of human animal roleplay (aka. pet play). The fact that I’m not going to get the opportunity to get to know Margaret better is one of the reasons I’m sad to be leaving New York City. Not that opportunities were abundant seeing as how I’m from New York City and she’s based in Providence, but still.

After Kink in Exile and I finished making the rounds, I reconnected with Switch over at Monk’s booth to find her literally tied to Maja. Dov snapped a few pictures as Týr’s massive frame provided a background that would hide other people from the camera, an important thing to be careful of at kink events.

I took the opportunity created by the impromptu bondage photo shoot to speak with Monk’s self-described Twisted Mentat, Alex. I had a thoroughly enjoyable conversation about Seattle, the scene there, and stuff to do there, with her, as well as shared a few words on each other’s personal history, and (of course) bondage, hemp rope, and all the fun things you can do with it.

For me, getting to meet Monk—but especially getting to speak with Alex—was probably the best thing about the whole vendor’s area. As it turns out, I might get the opportunity to actually visit Seattle for few days in early February, so making a good local connection ahead of time was simply wonderful. That, and Alex is clearly full of awesome: outgoing and outspoken, energetic and fun.

Unlike me, Monk and Alex were at the Flea on business and so I tried not to get in the way of the constant flow of customer’s questions. Instead, I spoke with Viviane, and then to Rita Seagrave. I was very happy, and flattered, that Rita made it a point to say hello to me (and to compliment me on this blog! Thank you, Rita!) because her own writing is filled with intelligent observations just as mine is, but it’s also polished into some of the most evocative poetry and prose-poetry I’ve ever come across, and I really admire her communicative ability in that style. If you haven’t yet peeked at some of Rita’s blog, you should.

And that, as they say, was that. The overall uneventful affair was ended with some fond farewells and retracing most of my steps back to the city, with a stop to see Boy for just a couple hours along the way.

The takeaway from it all is this: kink is not some kind of magical mystery tour, some alien or foreign experience devoid of the mundane and—gasp!—normal human interaction. For many people, especially the vendors, kink is a part of the daily grind, and is remarkable largely for its unremarkable quality. And I guess that’s really what I wanted to add to my blog when I started writing this entry.

My writing is typically full of the extraordinary, of the moments of epiphany and none of the drudgery of the thought process, of the sex without the foreplay. Of course, this has been by design. I want readers to come here with the expectation that they’ll get their proverbial rocks off, a reliable orgasm (metaphorically or otherwise) with minimal personal effort.

However, this blog is just the selfish highlight reel.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (7)

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Fantasy Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I feel bad…,” I groaned.

“Bad how?” she asked.

“Physically,” I said.

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

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

“No, it’s filthy,” I said.

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

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

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

“What? I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disappointed, I had to agree.

“Will you be okay for just another minute?”

“Yeah,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love you.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (15)

Saturday, December 29, 2007

It doesn’t matter if she’s got a brain when your dick is in her

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Communication, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Erotica and pornography, Masochism, Sex

The other day, Debauchette wrote the introduction to a post called On Boys and Pornography that promised to be a very interesting one.

If you say, “Can I come on your face?” or if you try to come on my face, I’ll assume you’ve watched a great deal of porn in your life.

Indeed, porn influences men’s (and women’s) expectations and ideas of sex, what it should feel like, what it should look like, and what we should think about it. I first discovered pornography back in 1994 when I was ten years old and was given free reign to explore the Internet. “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” most parents would cry in knee-jerk outrage, but I’d urge adults to entertain a more level-headed approach to the situation (which is not to say that I, nor my parents, approve or have ever approved of minors having free access to pornography by any means at all—but that is neither here nor there at the moment).

Since then, I do see certain and undeniable ways in which my exposure to pornography has affected my sexual development, and it has definitely impacted how I have sex today. I have, of course, seen a lot of visual pornography. Despite this, I think anyone who knows me would agree that there’s a distinct difference between how I approach those parts of social interaction that are sexual and how people of whom they say have “seen too much porn” do so.

This is why I was looking forward to Debauchette’s second piece: why are some men’s exposure to porn seen as the cause of an issue that I clearly know can not possibly, in isolation, be the entire story that explains the malicious intent these “porn-addicted” men seem to have? Turns out, she didn’t write the post I thought she might have, which makes me smile and want to take her out to diners to keep on talking about it over coffee re-fills somewhere.

When I take issue with porn, it’s the quality I dislike, not the genre. I dislike the tedium, the predictability, the fake tans, the plasticky breasts, the baseball caps, the lack of imagination, the boredom, the soundtrack, the lighting, the dialogue, the inauthentic orgasms, the lingerie, the decor, the overall assault on my sensibilities. But when porn’s good, it blows my fucking mind.

Nodding as I read this, these reasons are also why I consistently decry porn, even “alternative” porn, to be monotonous representations of the very same going-through-the-motions activities that are just not exciting on anything other than a vicarious, or worse, detached experience after the first or second viewing.

Yet two things beyond Debauchette’s well-made points struck me about her post. In this paragraph,

When I say that I can sense if someone’s watched a lot of porn, or too much porn, what I mean to say is that I can sense that their relationship to sex is largely visual. […] Since 90% of my libido is fueled by the physical chemistry and psychology (or, in rare cases, emotion) of the experience, in those situations I just prefer to go home and jerk off on my own. Sometimes to porn.

Debauchette claims that 90% of her libido is fueled by the “physical chemistry and psychology” of the experience of sex. Only rarely, she says, are her emotions involved in the lust. This is very interesting.

It’s interesting to me because, with recent analyses of my own thoughts and feelings, mostly regarding no-strings-attached (or “NSA”) sex, my explorations are increasingly leading me to discover what it is about sex that I find arousing, and therein lies a new distinction. Things that I find arousing are not necessarily the same things or the same reasons that get me to orgasm. In other words, things that make me attracted to a person are not necessarily the same things that I want to get off to.

The best example of this is intelligence, a display of which is the easiest way to get me to crush on you. Meeting someone who displays intelligence and talks about sex that way makes my dick rock hard. I mean real hard, and real fast.

Anyone with enough intelligence can probably turn me on in one way or another. Even exceptionally smart people I despise, I’ll admit, have sometimes appeared in fantasies torturing me with their arguments with which I disagree—and with a lot of psuedo-consensual, psuedo-forced sexual advances, of course! (Seriously. They’re some of the absolutely nerdiest fantasies I have ever had.) Smart people are sexy to me by virtue of their smarts.

However, that said, I don’t always (though, again, I do sometimes) find that their intelligence is what I’m after when I ask them for play, or for sex. To put it really painfully bluntly, the horribly politically incorrect phrase “it doesn’t matter if she’s got a brain when your dick is in her” holds true.

When it comes to sex, the reasons I’m attracted to someone are often the reasons why I want to have sex with them, but they’re not necessarily the same. Maybe the key to understanding “casual” sex, then, is to be able to consciously shift my focus from the thing that was attractive to the thing that is hot. Practically, still using the intelligence example, this means that I’m not going to be very attracted to a gorgeous bombshell who can’t put a sentence together, which means I’ll never have sex with that person in the first place.

This is enlightening because it highlights a distinction between what is attractive and what is orgasmic, for want of a better word. That’s an important distinction, because it plays right into the reasons why some people can find themselves fulfilled by cruising for no-strings-attached sex and why I seem to have been unable to do so, yet it also offers an explanation (or at least hope of one) to explain why my interest in “casual sex” (and, to a lesser extent, “casual play” in the kinky sense) is not a doomed endeavor.

The second thing that struck me about Debauchette’s post was this following part, not because of any unique insight but because of its common-sense value:

Porn will get better. But also, I suspect extensive sexual experience and a modicum of self-awareness will mitigate its influence.

Specifically, extensive experience with sex is valuable, when tempered with self-awareness. Those of us with a sex drive know this intuitively, and we are drawn to sex by our instincts. It’s a part of what makes us happy, and human.

Sex, especially the kind of sex I like to have, is also risky. Kinky sex is much riskier than vanilla sex for a whole host of reasons, many of them plainly obvious; my kind of kinky sex typically involves the heavy use of restraints, percussive implements, lots of roughness, and intense psychological stimuli that crank up the volume for things like power inequality skewed to my disadvantage. If I place this power in the wrong hands, such as someone with malicious intent, it’s obviously going to be dangerous and perhaps even downright lethal for me.

Yet even for vanilla people, sex can be dangerous, and is risky. This is why extensive experience is often denounced as a “Bad Thing”; the more you do it, the higher the chances of something going wrong. Nevertheless, extensive experience is obviously valuable, because it’s the only way to corporeally understand (duh!) what’s going on physically, emotionally, and even spiritually (if you’re into that sort of thing). This isn’t to say that it’s necessary to do this with multiple partners, unless the whole many-partners-thing is what you want to corporeally understand of course, nor is it to say that there aren’t other ways of learning about these things that aren’t intrinsic to the physical experience, but—especially for me—experience is the greatest teacher.

So how do you balance this risk with its obvious potential reward? Like anything else, you have to become educated about the topic in general and, more importantly, about you specifically. It’s nothing knew, and you’ve heard it before, but it’s true: “know thyself,” and then when it comes to sex, I’d like to add “and then explain thyself.” As it happens, pornography can be a very helpful tool to learning more about your sexual self but it can’t be expected to be a good substitute to corporeal self-examination or emotional self-awareness.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (10)

Monday, December 24, 2007

Unwelcome: The Emotional Effects of Social Injustice

Category labels: Emotions, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

I spend a lot of time alone. This is not all bad, and sometimes it’s actually very good, and exactly what I want. A loner, as I have been described many times before, is someone who tends to find themselves isolated from social settings, but the description says nothing about why one is isolated.

Holidays are a rough part of the year in the social sense. A lot of people are dealing with familial issues, emotional stresses heavily laden with experiences from years long past resurfacing specifically during this season due to culturally-imposed proximity; all the “good boys and girls” are going home for the Holidays—it’s kind of like their Christmas present tax.

I’m not going to spend lots of time with my family, which makes sense since I am in many ways the epitome of what people no doubt interpret as the prodigal son. Thankfully, this was more true in the past than it is now. Nevertheless, I’m clearly a “bad boy.”

Instead of heading home, I had some hopes for a certain set of plans this week that did not pan out. I wanted to spend some time in a novel activity with Eileen out of the city. Though I had already mostly given up on this plan a while ago because it hinged in part on the hospitality of the family member who had a negative reaction to Eileen’s blog, I was still hoping that we could find a way to make it work, or that we would at least be able to find a suitable plan-B. Unfortunately, I am finding myself simply without her company for a longer time than I had originally expected, stuck in New York City while she enjoys the privileges of her family’s hospitality that I am unwelcome to share.

Similar displays of privilege unshared are forever painful to the underprivileged.

It occurs to me that these sorts of experiences are possibly the root of historical uprisings such as the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and more recently the LGBT movement (and even more recently—only within the last few years—the asexuality movement). In each case, members of these groups identified that they lacked certain privileges or were stigmatized in some way in their personal lives. They were then able to form communities with other people who were also experiencing the same things and observed uncanny similarities between themselves and the rest of their community. Eventually, they came to the realization that their lack of certain privileges was, in fact, systemic to the culture or society in which they lived and their personal struggles suddenly seemed a valid political cause.

Say hello to “the personal is political.” This is how privileges are turned into rights, and that is sometimes a very slippery slope. Determining which privileges should be rights and which privileges shouldn’t has been the question every civilization since the beginning of recorded history (and probably well before then, too) has grappled with. This is hardly unexplored territory.

However, civilizations are complex and hard to understand. Furthermore, they are always comprised of many thousands or millions of individuals, each with individual experiences, opinions, and emotions. To understand civilizations, it behooves us to also understand individuals. To do that, I begin by trying to understand myself.

Being alone is almost universally expected to make people “feel lonely,” which I think is something of a misunderstanding. Being alone can, of course, cause feelings of sadness due to a lack of friends and company, but it does not innately cause such feelings. What causes feelings of sad loneliness is actually feelings of desire for (possibly specific) social interaction that go unfulfilled; this is what the feeling of missing people (including certain people) actually is.

In other words, on an individual level, it’s having wants or needs that are not met that causes sadness. Applying this same precept to our understanding of cultures, we would see that when social needs go unmet for a large group of people due to (or informed by) a disparity of privilege that is systemic, the underprivileged become second-class denizens of the social arena. This is important because the social arena extends everywhere from the workforce to the bedroom and beyond.

Costly isolation is equivalent to segregation.

Everyone who’s ever been in a relationship has felt the scrutiny of their partner’s loved ones (friends and family alike) sizing you up, making judgments, determining if you’re “good for” them. If you’re not “good for” them, then you feel judged, the thing about you that is not good enough feels as though it is stigmatized, and you feel unwelcome in that person’s presence. To them, you are now someone who is not as worthy of partaking in whatever privileges they have as someone who is better than you would be worthy of doing.

Similarly, I’m sure everyone can remember at least one time in their lives, probably when they were young, at which point their opinion about something was not considered important. As a result you felt unheard, unacknowledged, or dismissed. Not all of these dismissals have been conscious or malicious on the part of other people, but there is little difference in the experience of being dismissed because you are not seen as valuable after examination, and being dismissed because your value simply isn’t seen in the first place.

Whatever the reasons, both of these kinds of experiences can still hurt just as much. These experiences send the undeniable, specific message, “We don’t care for your kind here.” (I find the wording significant: whereas judgement might sound more like, “We don’t want your kind here,” dismissal sounds more like, “We won’t make any effort to meet your needs here.”)

I’ve felt like this many times and in many spaces in my life. I feel this way about the education system at large, which continues to tell me that I’m not “well-educated.” I feel this way when I’m told by co-workers and bosses that I don’t “value my career enough.” I felt this way in my previous relationships when I realized I wasn’t what my (now ex-)girlfriend wanted sexually, and I feel this way now whenever I’m confronted with justifying my sexuality.

Even many kink-friendly spaces, which have very little issue with my presence, are not welcoming to me. Why would I desire to spend time in such places, when they are in effect no different from, say, the coffee shop down the street? Ultimately, the net emotional effect of not feeling welcome is feeling unwelcome.

It’s that feeling I think many social justice advocates are trying to eliminate, not by breaking down the walls between spaces (homogenizing social spaces is actually detrimental to social justice), but by creating more spaces—because feeling welcomed is not a finite resource. Time, however, is limited. So whenever Eileen spends time with people who don’t welcome me into their presence, I’m left wanting, and thinking about how and why value judgments drive people’s motivations.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (3)

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

How an outdated view of masculinity ignores the needs of all men

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Communication, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Femdom, Gender fluidity, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Masochism, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Polyamory, Relationship, Sex, Sexism, Vanilla life

As his posts usually do these days, this post of Figleaf’s got me thinking about personal needs, how we provide for those needs, and how those needs become needs in the first place. In it, he says:

Just as we indoctrinate men to strive so mightily to provide that they/we never come home, so we also indoctrinate women so thoroughly to believe men won’t even see them unless they’re starved, then scraped bare, then repainted that some of them/you are afraid to be seen by your partners after a night of roaringly good sex. The real thresholds for being sexy, being a good provider, being a man or a woman, are surprisingly easy to meet. However to embody sexiness, or worthiness, or manliness, or femininity is a fools errand[…]

(His thought-provoking post was inspired by none other than this eloquent post of Calico’s, which is also worth a read. So are the rest of both their blogs, by the way, which each have posts that are almost always equally eloquent.)

Acquiring an accurate understanding of my personal needs has always been the central focus of my life and, sadly, I fear that I still have a long way to go. Having needs that are (or, equally bad, feel as though they are) unfulfilled is the obvious source of a lot of sadness, anger, resentment and jealousy in my life.

When it comes to social and sexual relationships, in fact, jealousy is the word most often associated by most people to indicate a lack of fulfillment of some need in some way. This explains why the polyamorous community and their resources, writings, and issues seem to deal squarely with discovering personal needs and understanding the needs of one’s partners in order to overcome that jealousy.

When reading Figleaf’s observation that men are indoctrinated “to strive so mightily to provide” I saw myself in his words. In most typical instances, what men are indoctrinated to provide is “a living” for their family, which in more concrete terms is often defined by mainstream gender roles as “a dependable source of financial income for the nuclear family unit.” Everyone knows that it’s the man’s job to bring home the bacon, and he’s expected to sacrifice everything—his time, his happiness, his independence, his freedoms, and ultimately himself—in the pursuit of this noble, self-sacrificing, almost holy endeavor.

This is masochism perverted into martyrdom—”no pain, no gain.”

Indeed, there can easily be satisfaction and emotional fulfillment to be found from this goal. I have always absolutely loved to buy Eileen dinner, or treats at Starbucks, or spontaneous gifts—big gifts like several-hundred-dollar jewelry—or to treat the two of us to a night at the movies. All of this all on my dime. I enjoy that because my dime signifies my hard work and spending money on the things that make me happy is something I’ve earned.

Something that makes me happy is providing good experiences to Eileen, which is also the cornerstone of many components of submission. Feeling as though I am capable to provide good experiences for my partner is one thing that is necessary for me to feel submissive. This relationship between being submissive and being a provider and each of their connection to masculinity is most obvious in service-related kinks (sissy-maids and men-turned-”homemakers” are two prime examples that come to mind), and equally obvious in stamina-related kinks (in which men are tortured but, because they are MEN! GRR! they do not whimper or scream and only display a stoic pride), both of which is the (frustratingly) universal representation of male submission everywhere.

Could this be the root of men’s “chivalrous nature”? We are certainly taught that chivalry is a good thing. These activities and the feelings that come from them is both the hegemonic masculine view of how a man should behave towards a woman and an accurate description, at least in parts, of how I want to feel about the way I treat my partners, men and women alike (though the expression of this is, interestingly, different in my relations with men than they are with women).

And that, now that I think about it, may be the first time on this blog in which I have actually described myself as fitting nicely into the masculine gender role stereotype.

Moreover, there’s nothing wrong with this that I can see. Providing for another person makes me happy, and it simultaneously makes me feel strong. Is this not, in fact, the epitome of the knight submissive concept? The knight submissive is a representation of a man who is at once powerful, who uses this power in a way that is courageous, honorable, and makes the lives of those he chooses to effect better, and yet—contrary to the accepted display of hegemonic masculinity—is also submissive to his partner. One might even say he is dominated by his partner, or perhaps in other words that may provide for more insight, is guided, steered, or advised by his partner.

In other words, “behind every good man, there is a good woman.” To me, this sounds as though the knight submissive is the hegemonic masculine man that women read about in romance novels.

Only, because gender stereotypes are idealized versions of atomic characteristics of gender and the masculine gender role has been elected as “the one who provides” whereas the feminine gender role has been elected as “the one who needs,” men are disallowed from needing and women are disallowed from providing—period. End of story.

The classic examples provide evidence of this dichotomy in abundance. What happens if the wife of a heterosexual married couple makes more money than the husband? Suddenly, the husband feels bad because his perceived “manliness” is threatened since she provides more financial income to their family unit than he does. What happens if the wife has a love affair? Again, negative feelings and a perceived threat to his manliness because he is not the one providing her with sexual satisfaction and some other (presumably) man is. This is even true in the way many conservative men respond to vibrators, or, god forbid, pornography intended to be consumed by women.

Any remotely emotionally functional individual will recognize that this system in which women only need and men only provide is harmful to both men and women. Women are expected to need only what men can provide and men are expected not to need anything except, of course, the needs of women. Thanks to the prevailing viewpoint that monogamy is the One True Way to Love® this set of needs is further restricted to include only, for women, the things your one man can provide and, for men, the needs of your one woman.

I see it as self-evident that both men and women have component needs that are irrelevant to their specific partner(s). In other words, a need is intrinsically born of oneself, not of one’s partner. Otherwise, whose need is it, really? Academically, this concept seems as though it can, broadly speaking, be contained within the greater need for self-actualization.

It seems nothing if not utterly ridiculous to function day by day under the rigid and false pretense that only a traditional understanding of the gender model allows. There’s simply no way that I can see being able to squeeze fulfillment and happiness out of being a man whose sole need is to fulfill all his other partner’s needs because, obviously, need-fulfillment is by my earlier definition not actually possible to obtain from a single source. It may, perhaps, be possible and even healthy to seek to fulfill the specific needs of a partner that can be fulfilled by other people, but ultimately there is going to be something, no matter how small that your partner is going to have to do on their own to feel fully fulfilled. (And, if you’ll take a word from the wise, it’s never something that small.)

That piece, no matter how much you or I strive to provide it, being the good, otherwise capable, and self-sacrificing men that we are, is not ever something we can succeed in. Not recognizing that fact leads invariably to codependency of one form or another and then, inevitably, to unhappiness in at least something, be it our work, our social partnerships (of which sexuality and pair-bonding is a form), or—worst of all in my opinion—one’s ability to think effectively and to make good personal choices in one’s private life.

In other words, by focusing so strongly on the experience of our partners, men end up being unable—forbidden, even!—to live our own lives. We need, as a friend said wisely to me the other day, to find a way to disconnect from the experience of our partners, but not disconnect from our partners themselves.

Finding submission with Eileen, for me, has been a major component in being able to connect with another person on a sexual (and thus at least one piece of a social) level that, finally, feels good, and right, and fulfilling. Being submissive meets one of my needs—specifically the need to have fulfilling social interactions. However, in becoming submissive, I must also allow myself the freedom to disconnect from her experience, to allow her the capability to provide for her own needs.

Submission, or masculinity or being a “man”, is not in reality the rigid, narrow thing society tells us being a man is. Being a man is not about providing everything for our partners. It can be about providing for them, but it’s also about providing for ourselves. And guess what? That’s what being a woman is about, too.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (15)

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Normal is anything but

Category labels: Bitter and jealous, Emotions, Fetish, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Sex, Vanilla life

What-if questions are the introvert’s Schrödinger’s cat. At once educational and unworkable, they can provide insight into your current mental state or process, whatever that may be. More interesting than simply performing the thought-experiment once is performing it several times, posing the question to yourself again after a significant amount of time has elapsed since the last time you thought about it.

The ever-prolific Richard Evans Lee has been posting questions for bloggers on his new site, FetishMeme.com and Dev picked one up that I found interesting. It reads:

If you could remove your kinky sexuality, become ‘vanilla,’ conventionally sexualized, would you? Would you rather have normal erotic needs than face the challenges and frustrations of being unlike the majority? Could being like most people be a sufficient repayment for knowing exactly what you need even though it is specialized and not easily realized? Would you rather be normal?

I commented on that post, saying something like, to me, it seems to be a matter of satisfaction. Put simply, when I am feeling satisfied with what I have, then I don’t feel like changing it because what I have is wonderful and makes me happy. However, in times of distress when I am not feeling fulfilled due to a lack of that Thing I Want, then yes, I would exchange my differences for normalcy in the hopes that such normalcy would elevate my chances of fulfillment simply thanks to the probability of that Thing I Want being more available, less stigmatized, or hopefully both.

Here’s the thing: we all want whatever it is we want. You can’t escape your own desires, no matter how “abnormal” (though I prefer to use the word atypical) they are, no matter how likely or how well you can fulfill them, how difficult that process will be specifically for you, or what other people might think of you for wanting it in the first place. You just can’t. More people than I’d like to imagine try to do just that every day, with universally similar and depressing results—failure, every time.

For many people with atypical desires, especially sexual ones, actually experiencing fulfillment is a pipe dream, and (sadly) they accept it as such. Thankfully, the human psyche is an amazingly resilient thing. These people may feel bad about themselves or their state of affairs, but they’ll ultimately be okay, and the vast majority of them will blend into the everyday populous as completely normal, fully-functional people that are (for all intents and purposes) just like you and me.

What’s even more depressing, in fact, is that personal fulfillment of any kind, not just sexual, is so often regarded as being a pipe dream that it is actually considered “normal” to long for it and not to have it. Millions of employees work endless 9–5’s in jobs they don’t like for decades (that’s longer than I’ve been alive!), most of them for less money than I used to make last year when I was 22, and that’s if they’re lucky. What is it about these people that makes them so able, no, willing, to do that? And what makes me so unable, if not unwilling, to follow suit?

I’m reminded often of an anecdote my father once told me when I was very little about elephants in the circus. He said that elephants are often kept in their tents with a single iron cuff closed around one of their ankles that is then chained to a stake driven into the ground. Soon after birth, a baby elephant will find itself with such a shackle and, being a baby (small and weak), will also find that it is unable to pull itself away from this stake or escape. As it grows older, it stops trying to escape from the shackle and before long it considers the restraint to be irremovable except by its handlers. However, as a much stronger grown elephant, it would have no problem whatsoever removing the stake from the ground and yet it never attempts to do this.

I have no idea if that anecdote about elephants in the circus is true or not, but I think that most people, who are imbued so strongly with other people’s values from birth, values that reinforce their own importance while simultaneously suppressing or dismissing questions about them, end up like the elephant in my father’s anecdote. Most people—parents, teachers, older children—thoughtlessly tell kids, “you can do anything you want” while in the same breath berating them for doing the most mundane, natural of things. “Stop crying! Sit still! Don’t play with that!”

Little wonder most people start to think of things in terms of “don’t”s and “can’t”s by the time they’ve reached elementary school. At which point, of course, it’s the same thing all over again. Then when they reach adulthood, it’s once again more of the same only this time it’s in the shiny, brand-new packaging of A Job. Most people’s single significant reprieve, if it can even be called that, is college. If you want to know why college is what most people call the time of their lives, it’s because it’s usually the only time they can remember when the hope of possibility ever permeated their environment in amounts big enough to make a difference.

If this is all sounding a little dramatic, then you’re actually getting the point: most people feel exactly that sort of overwhelming hopelessness in regards to their sexual satisfaction. Furthermore, the more “abnormal,” the more “perverse,” the more stigmatized and discriminated against your sexuality is, the more overwhelmed you are by just such a feeling of hopelessness.

I am very lucky. I have counted my blessings. I have acknowledged the good and caring people around me, though perhaps not enough. (Can anyone ever do that enough when the disparity between the “lucky” and the “unlucky” is so vast?) Despite all of that, even I feel overwhelmed too often by sadness born from a lack of fulfillment in my social and sexual life, not to mention my professional life, my education (or lack thereof—I am a middle- and high-school drop out), and my own private sense of self-worth and self-image.

So you ask me if I would rather be vanilla, rather be more like everyone else, as though being that would make me happier. Unfortunately, the question is moot: I’m not like everyone else, and as all the evidence to the contrary has made abundantly clear, simply wishing it and waiting will not make it so. But if I could change? Be something or someone I’m not?

Well, yeah, I’d turn vanilla. Sure, I’d turn into a guy who wants the straight-forward 9–5, the house, the wife, the two-point-four kids, the family pet, and could be happy with that. And even though most other people are saying they wouldn’t, that they’d never give up who they are or what they have, I bet if you asked them at the right moment, maybe tomorrow or next year, or maybe last year, I bet at one point or another, they’d say yes, too.

Yes. I’d do it. I’d be someone else.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (12)