Friday, February 8, 2008

One, sir: On Titles in Scenes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three things about this statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Monday, October 29, 2007

Shalloween

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, Emotions, Exhibitionism, Feminization and cross-dressing, Politics of sex, Religious Evil

I don’t like Halloween. I never did. Halloween is the quintessential children’s holiday. It’s entirely about rewards with no consequences. When you’re a child, that means it’s about the candy. When you’re an adult, that means it’s about whatever the rest of your life can’t be about.

For sexually repressed adults (i.e., most adults), that means Halloween is about sex.

It’s an old joke in kink circles: Halloween is the vanilla person’s excuse to be kinky. Of course, a vanilla person’s definition of “being kinky” is something that people like me (who consider their intrinsic sexuality to be composed of what other people often consider taboo) think is very tame indeed.

A case in point is the traditional slutty costumes popular during Halloween. Sluts, gasp, are actually perceived as kinky to most people. That, in itself, could be an entire post. How incredibly right-wing puritanical it is that the display of sexuality itself is a taboo. Sex is a sin; birth is only possible through sex; therefore everyone is inescapably a sinner.

With the ridiculousness of the “Holy Virgin” syllogisms aside, Halloween is the one American holiday where Catholicism and anti-sex propaganda isn’t shoved down the throats of the largely blind and ignorant masses of people who “celebrate” the “holiday.” So, they do during Halloween what they can’t do elsewhere in the year.

Halloween is an opportunity to masquerade oneself as something you are understood not to actually be. It is an exemption from the hum-drum rules of daily living that bind you to the consequences of your actions. And people take advantage of this freedom in all sorts of interesting ways.

But why do people masquerade themselves like this in the first place? Most simply, they do this during Halloween as a means to experiment with attitudes, ideas, and expressions that they are either unfamiliar or uncomfortable with because during Halloween, everyone knows, there are no committments. All of this “acting out” is an effort to discover attitudes, ideas, and expressions that they are comfortable with.

Halloween is one giant societal bullshit session. It’s the religious and societal equivalent of a “Get Out Of Hell Free” card. How else would self-respecting religious boys and girls ever feel comfortable dressing up as such blasphemous things like ghosts and skeletons, or worse, like religious symbols such as members of the clergy, or even a crucified Jesus himself? This “Get Out Of Hell Free” card gives Jane the “Good Girl Next Door” the guilt-free opportunity to be a sexy nurse, or Catwoman (the superhero stereotype of the sexually dominant woman, a dominatrix one might dare say, which is unsurprisingly much rarer than the “sexy nurse” costumes). Likewise, it gives John the “Man’s Man Frat Boy” a chance to dress in drag.

Now of course, it is not necessarily the case that Good Girl Jane or Man’s Man John care all too deeply about actually being the thing they are pretending to be, a “sexy nurse” or simply a “girl” in these examples. But the fact remains that an absolutely overwhelming majority of girls who dress up for halloween turn themselves into the classic example of a sex object. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of boys who dress up for halloween turn themselves into comedic, if not actually accurate, representations of the opposite gender.

I get the question, “What are you going to be for Halloween?” just like everyone else does. I look around at the way other people live their lives and I see the need, the aching, screaming necessity most people have for just this kind of event in their lives.

“Me?” I ask. “I don’t like Halloween.” It’s far too sad a holiday, if you think about it; it’s the inevitable day every year when I see hundreds of thousands of people wanting and not having, and (worse) not even thinking twice about it.

Okay, after getting a bunch of comments on this post, it seems that either A) no one’s observant enough to comprehend my overarching point in this entry or, and this is the more likely explanation, B) this post’s brevity or terseness has caused people to latch on to ideas I didn’t intend as the main point. So, setting the record straight:

  • I do not believe Halloween is a “bad” holiday, that it should not exist, that it does no good, or that it can not entail a great deal of fun.
  • I do not believe that everyone who participates in the celebration is shallow, repressed, or otherwise unhealthy.

If you take the time to read this post without introducing your own stories and take me at face value and nothing more, which you should pretty much always do, you’ll see I never once made such claims, even though quite a few people have implied that I have. Fuck, I like looking at all the T&A just as much as you do, and even though I don’t personally enjoy dressing up to go trick-or-treating, I’ve gone to my share of Halloween costume parties and I’ve had a ball at most of them.

Instead, this post’s main intended thrust was a remark more akin to, “Yay, even repressed people get to have fun.” And yes, like it or not, a sadly gigantic number of people who enjoy this holiday are sexually repressed, confused, or otherwise have a characteristic that I will describe as unhealthy or unhappy. Furthermore, I don’t think anyone’s actually arguing with that point—we all know why you’re not.

Look, the bottom line is this: I don’t presume to tell you what to do in regards to you. In fact, I don’t believe I ever have, because doing so is a violation of the most serious kind—it breaks the rule of no imposition, a principle that simply states that the only thing I have a right to impose on others is how they should treat me. Yet this kind of violation happens every day, all the time, by people, by governments, by employers, and by culture and society, and we have become so used to it that we treat one another’s words as if such imposition was the intention even when it was not. That, my friends, is a tragedy.

Even though for many people it is not, for many others Halloween is just such a cultural example of that tragedy. That’s all I was trying to say in this entry.

See also Eileen’s Live and Let Die.

See also, Bruce Schneier’s The War on Different.

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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

More men need to cry on the big porn screen

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, Bitter and jealous, Community, D/s dynamics, Erotica and pornography, Exhibitionism, Femdom, Politics of sex, Professional BDSM, Rant, Sex, Stupid submissives

The other day during dinner while hanging out with friends, of course, pornography gets brought up. (I’m sure the waitresses love us. Or hate us. Or love to hate us. (That’s called foreshadowing, by the way. (And this is called Lisp.)))

Now, porn gets brought up all the time in conversations with my general social circle. This might be because some of them are sex workers, others are sex bloggers, and still others are BDSM equipment vendors, the latter of whom don’t blog much. But unlike the usual discussion, this time I observed a much more interesting exchange about porn. I thought I’d share it with you.

The professor (who has made guest appearances elsewhere) started talking about this one porn web site in particular that’s selling a very humiliation-specific brand of hardcore sex. It’s all about degrading women while fucking them. It’s unfortunate that I’ll never be able to do his description justice because smiles that wide just can’t be communicated through words.

Suffice it to say, however, that all the women start out with delicately applied make up and by the end of the video the tears spilling from their eyes have turned their faces tie-dye colored, their throats are horse as they shout through ragged gasps about how dirty they are, and the guys are demanding they open up and get ready for another dick.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the bigger the shock value, the bigger the payday. (Lack of link because, come on. Tons of porn sites do this, not just this one. Do you really need a link?)

To my knowledge, I don’t think this has anything explicitly related to so-called formal BDSM (you know, whips and chains and stuff, the “serious” stuff) but come on, you can’t deny that’s fucking kinky sex.

Now, here’s the interesting part that came from the conversation. After the table was left momentarily silenced from the description of such (hopefully consensual and totally hot) humiliating sexual abuse, Eileen said, See, I’d have no problem with any of that at all if there were sites where I could see women doing that to men.

“Well, there’s like, Men In Pain—”, our professor friend started to say.

“Ohhhh no,” Eileen and I both started simultaneously. “Men In Pain is largely about excruciatingly typical pro-domme talk. Oh, and handjobs. Lots, and lots of handjobs.”

Are we wrong? Is there porn out there that objectifies men in an equivalent fashion to the way the industry of objectification of women (and very much including dominant women, by the way) called mainstream pornography is doing? I’ll admit to not actually having a subscription to Men In Pain. (I’ve never paid for porn in my life, unless you count buying Eileen dinner and hoping she’ll tie me to a spreader bar and stuff large things in my butt and then beat on me for it but I don’t think that’s comparable.) However, the massive amount of free video clips (soo NSFW) that Kink, Inc. puts out does not inspire hope.

So, fuck, where’s that porn video, the ones where the guys are sobbing? I’d be in it. Over the years, friends and acquaintances have offered me varying spots in varying kinds of porn shoots, but I always decline because they expect me to respond as though being asked to be in a porn production where I don’t get paid for my time is some kind of favor they’re bestowing upon me. As if, oh my god, now they like me, they really, truly like me!

What the fuck is up with that, also, by the way? First of all, it actually is a lot less sexy for me if I don’t get paid to do it, and second of all, why are my only two options for porn shoots always “stand right here and let me kick you in the balls while I look pretty” or “you’ll be blindfolded and he’ll go down on you ’til you pop”? If there’s one thing Men In Pain actually gets right (maybe there’s more than just one thing, but anyway) it’s their fucking variety. Or variety of fucking. (I even submitted a modeling application to them, for many reasons, but to no avail.) Anyway, you get my point.

I’m sure this post is going to confuse a lot of people. Maymay, they’ll say, how the fuck can you be so pro-porn and so anti-prodomme. Pro-dommes are just sex workers after all, you know. They’re part of the same industry. Why not get all huff-and-puff-and-blow-your-house-down about that porn site that your friend was talking about that you think objectifies women?

Because my problem with all of this isn’t the existence of the sex industry; it’s the monopoly (and the resulting monotony) of the sex industry that I think causes problems. In other words, it’s not just that I have a problem with pro-domme’s being the representation of female domination out in the world (a la Mistress Asscrusher), I also have problems with all the other shame-ridden stereotypes of every other gender and orientation combination. A lack of visible variety breeds a closeted, guilt-ridden culture. That is not okay.

Like Eileen said, where are the porn sites showing me some other kind of sex?

There was a wonderfully timely string of comments that started with britspin made on Bitchy’s blog earlier today just as I was trying to come up with the genius conclusion to this post. It’s so perfect, in fact, that I’m just going to quote some of what he says:

OK. Confession time. I’m one of those guys who enables this crap.

[…]

When it comes to a woman who even hints that she might be dominant, I go completely doolally. Self respect gets checked at the door, along with judgement, the awareness of possible mental health issues and anything that comes between me and the possibility of a woman doing rude, rude things.

This is even worse with people like me whose starting point with Femdom is the internet and our own fantasies- I get to measure my behaviour by strange chatroom etiquette, incredibly varied demands in alt.com profiles and a few videos made by english mansion and men in pain.

I suspect that basing my flirtation with dominant women on these reference points is not a recipe for successful social intereaction… but christ, I’m an ignoramous mostly hoping not to make an utter fool of myself… so I plead ignorance, not malignity!

Just as I’ve said countless times before. And then, just to drive the point home:

When you realise you’re sub or Dom, what reference points do you get? For me it was the avengers and a very weird fantasy about being kidnapped and kept in an emptied swimming pool by about twenty avenger clad women. I don’t think I ever got any options showing dominant women without PVC and leather.

[…]

I think with me it was very much… Gosh, I really want this badwrongthing done to me. Hmmm who seems to get away with doing badwrongthings. evil, pvc clad, fur wearing, faun torturing, whip wielding bond villanesses. Well in that casen that’s who I fancy… because they do the badwrongthings….

Did it really need this much elaboration? Where do you start railing against this stuff? Mainstream pornographers? Pro-dommes? Submissive men? Gender supremacists? Fucking abstinence-only sex educators? I’ll tell you where: every-fucking-where you see it. Yeah, that’s where you start.

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Sunday, April 8, 2007

I’m not a masochist

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Emotions, Exhibitionism, Marks, Personal experience, Relationship, Whipping

Sometimes it’s strange that it’s actually difficult to write about this kind of stuff—kink, I mean. You’d think it would be easy, you know, comes from the heart and all that, but it’s not. So many personal things hinge on the acceptance of this sort of writing. What would she think? What do you think? What will I think, looking back, reading my own words a minute, a week, a month, a year, a decade from now?

I can’t help but think, though, so I do it all the time. It’s shocking, sometimes, how central kink is to who I am, to what I do, to why I do what I do. It doesn’t just manifest in the bedroom (or the club), either. It’s everywhere, all the time, involving itself in my relationships with friends, even employers in some indirect ways. (When thinking about living choices, one of the first questions I ask is, “What’s the scene like there?”)

That is not what I sat down intending to write tonight, but it’s certainly worth thinking about. I’m sometimes amused at the directions my thoughts wander when I let them. I sat down wanting to write about some of the recent experiences I’ve been having.

Last weekend was the first time in a long time that Eileen and I made it out to the club. I used to hang out there religiously every Friday and Saturday night, long before I knew her. I used to miss the club because it was the club, it was my hangout, where everyone knew my name. But for a while, I was missing it—we were missing it—because it meant play, the kind of play that works better in noisy dark spaces with (I’m almost ashamed to admit it) onlookers you know are watching because you can feel their eyes but you can’t see their faces. There’s something delicious about that space, so fun, so personal, so intimate, yet so public.

It was an absolutely amazing night for the most part. I was chained to a metal frame and took lash after lash of the singletail ’til I bled. I didn’t bleed much at all by our typical standards, but I bled. It felt good to bleed from a whipping again. Strangely, she thought, and I concur in some ways, in part of the scene I kept saying, “I’m not a masochist!” only to breathe in deep and obvious pleasure when she would strike me again.

She is getting bolder with the whip, which I like, making it dance on my back in the way she knows I enjoy but also starting to let her crueler side out a bit more. I noticed it most when she picked up a fast and hard rhythm that seemed to purposefully stay at the same spot on my back stroke after stroke. It hurt, a lot, but I was so happy to have her hurting me again that I wanted more of it.

I’m really not a masochist in the way the dictionary defines what a masochist is. The definition I’ve seen most often is:

Someone who obtains pleasure from receiving punishment.

Wikipedia, naturally, does a better job:

The counterpart of sadism is masochism, the sexual pleasure or gratification of having pain or suffering inflicted upon the self, often consisting of sexual fantasies or urges for being beaten, humiliated, bound, tortured, or otherwise made to suffer, either as an enhancement to or a substitute for sexual pleasure.

Without being baited by these definitions or going down the dark path that is defining “punishment” or even “sexual pleasure” for that matter, why was I saying I’m not a masochist? Well, because I don’t like pain. To put it bluntly, it really hurts. It’s uncomfortable, it’s painful (duh), it’s not a state I really enjoy being in for the sake of being in that state. It certainly doesn’t turn me on in the make-my-dick-hard way most often associated with “sexual pleasure.” However, I have found no equally intimate experience to share a moment with a loved one in any other way, and that’s probably one reason why I enjoy being beaten so much. I cried a little by the end of the scene. It was from joy though, not from pain. It was just…so loving.

The whip marks are fading by now (I’ve been told I heal like Wolverine, apparently an invaluable trait for a sub as far as a dom’s concerned, though rather annoying if you, like me, enjoy the visuals of the marks), but they’re still there. And hopefully I’ll have more in a week or two, when I’ll be the demo bottom for a singletail demo again. Now that brings back memories. It’s how Eileen and I met.

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