Saturday, July 24, 2010

What will it take for the silent majority to speak up?

Category labels: BDSM psychology, D/s dynamics, Femdom, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex

I am uniquely privileged: because of my relative self-sufficiency, I am loudly, unabashedly out of the closet. This gives me a certain power; I make no bones about wielding it. Unfortunately, not everyone enjoys the ability to be wholly and publicly authentic about who they are because standing up for what you believe in can get you viciously attacked.

That’s why I continue to receive numerous personal, private, correspondence from people of all genders, backgrounds, ages, and concerns who are uncomfortable about speaking non-anonymously. These folks have already made a leap of faith merely by emailing me (emails are not anonymous), yet what they have to say is so vital, is so important, and I believe is so prevalent that not sharing these “private conversations” publicly routinely pains me. I frequently ask for permission to publish these exchanges (even though I consider anything that comes to my inbox fair game for public blogging) out of respect for the concerns of others, regardless of my personal inclination towards radical transparency.

This stockpile of personal correspondence, the things these “garden-variety,” “normal,” even “vanilla” people tell me about themselves and their lives in one-on-one conversation that they would not feel comfortable sharing more publicly is evidence of the reality that “the moral majority” is simply a misnomer. They are, in fact, merely one very vocal minority. And, what’s more, so am I—I am a different vocal minority.

Since it will always be easier to destroy, to shame, to hate, than it will be to create, to empower, and to love, my challenge is to prove to the silent majority how necessary their voices and their actions really are. Until some perceived heretic such as myself can stand up to the monster of cultural shaming, to challenge the tyranny of “common sense,” and to expose the enraging and despicable lies activist academics peddle as fact, the silent majority will remain silenced by the vocal minorities fighting to maintain the cultural, religious, and economic status-quo.

On that note, here’s one such (slightly edited) exchange that I think is eye-opening with regards to its under-reported, and perhaps unacknowledged, prevalence. Like many others, this person prefers to remain anonymous because their “views have the potential to piss just about every camp off.” (That’s rarely been on my list of reasons why not to do something, but I respect the sentiment.)

So without further ado, here’s the closest thing to a guest post I’ve published on this blog:

Maymay,

I can finally sit down and write you an email on some of the thoughts I’ve had while reading your posts. Let’s start with the Submissive Man in 2007:

I wanted to write about why many submissive men are just as responsible for debasing their own sexuality as the many pro- (and so obviously not-so-pro-)dommes who take delight in squashing them down while lifting them of that burdensome weight in their wallets. (“Thank you for stealing my money, Mistress, would you like another dollar?”)

There seems to be this strange notion in femdom that women are superior to men. As a fantasy, I can kink on that notion for perhaps a two minute stretch at a time (perhaps longer with a visual like something by Sardax) before I discard it at as silly (for me). I’m not a loser. I’m not a worm. I’m not a piggy. I’m not worthless. I’m not a maid. I’m not a handyman. And I’m not a wallet. These notions of male submission don’t resonate with me at all. In fact, I think my submission to a woman has a special meaning because I’m awesome; the type of submission I do when I’m submissive is not necessarily “better,” but it is different, and it is under-represented.

There are tons of internet femdoms urging me to prove how worthless I am to please them; why not femdoms urging me to prove how awesome I am to please them?

I certainly don’t want to step on other people’s fantasies, yet there comes a problem when certain fantasies can’t be distinguished from reality, and when certain fantasies marginalize others (like mine). Sexual dominance really isn’t necessarily the same thing as status superiority; just because I often want women to have the former, it doesn’t mean I believe them to hold the latter.

Like you, the other thing I have trouble relating to is paying money for “financial domination”, “tribute”, or “sessions,” at least not in typical contexts. As a student of seduction for many years, I want people to do stuff with me because they are enthusiastic about it. I want people to want me. If someone doesn’t want me enough to do something with me without any exchange of money, then they don’t want them as much as I would want them to want me.

I originally figured out some of the problems with males attempting to exchange money for female sexuality from the seduction community, in posts like these.

By the cultural default, paying money implies that I am inadequate in intrinsic desirability, and that I must “sweeten the deal” financially to make up for this inadequacy. I do not accept that framing of the situation at all! If I’m not desirable enough for someone to want to be sexual with me without me having to include extrinsic incentives outside their enjoyment of the activity, then we are really not a good fit.

An important lesson I’ve learned is that a lot of the status that people give me depends on how much status I act like I have. Similarly, people seem to treat me as more desirable when I act like I’m desirable, and when I act in a way that shows that I believe that they will find me desirable.

Yet if I offer someone money for a sexual experience, I am acting as if I believe that I’m less desirable to her than she is to me; my belief in my lower desirability will then serve as evidence to her that she should also believe that I have lower desirability. By the same logic, I understand your ambivalence about pro-dommes asking you to session with them. If I received such a suggestion, I would be offended inside, because it would imply that she saw me as less desirable than I saw her, and that she considered it acceptable to rub that perception in my face and have me be thankful for a chance for an asymmetrical interaction with her. Thanks, but no thanks.

I would argue that pro-dommes (and non-pro) are also being short-changed by these exchange metaphors in their own dating lives. They (and men who approach them as potential lovers) are used to accepting a metaphor which devalues the man’s desirability. I’m currently seeing a pro-domme. She asked me out after we got talking…but I wonder what would have happened if instead I had followed one of the standard submissive scripts and asked to be her slave, pay her tribute, worship her, or session with her. There is a good chance I would have destroyed my desirability for her, and we wouldn’t now be enjoying experiences that she charges other men hundreds of dollars for in “sessions.”

Since I want people to want me, I go to great lengths to make myself attractive to people I’m seeing. Getting ready can take me several hours, and even more if I’m going out as a girl. As a student of
seduction, I enjoy using my knowledge of sexuality and psychology to create mutually-enjoyable situations. Sometimes, I view the images and interactions I create as a form of power, and sometimes I view them as a form of service; these views are not mutually-exclusive. With people I go out with, part of my effort to create an attractive image and enjoyable interaction involves avoiding and ruthlessly shutting down interpersonal dynamics that undermine my desirability or value as a person; this could be construed as a service.

Since I believe that a lot of stereotypical male submission dynamics and scripts will undermine my desirability and value in even a dommes’ eyes (including, but not limited to, forms of financial exchange), I am forced to reject them in order to maintain a mutually pleasing and sustainable interaction. For me, the best way to “serve” (to the extent that the notion of service resonates with me) is to reject the stereotypical, self-undermining notions of service that are associated with the devaluing of submissive male sexuality. I serve the relationship, and I serve the other person through my service to the relationship, even if this service involves me rejecting tempting cultural scripts, rejecting certain dynamics or tests from the other person that I judge as harmful to the long-term health of the relationship, not necessarily giving them everything they want when they want it, asserting myself, presenting strong opinions, being challenging, or saying “no” or “not yet.”

I’m really grateful for all the personal correspondence I’ve gotten and I hope it continues. I also hope that more such correspondence—in whatever form it takes—encourages people to open themselves up a bit more than they otherwise would. Although this exchange was about a topic germane to BDSM and, therefore, this blog, I’ve had similar exchanges with self-described “normal people” who held “unpopular,” “under-culture,” or just plain “perverted” views.

And you might be surprised to learn how many of them came from doctrinal socially conservative or religious backgrounds.

You guys are the silent majority. I’m a bullhorn, a loud voice, maybe a lighthouse doing my best to shine light onto an otherwise dark and rocky shore of a corrosive and repressive hegemony. But I’m not the meat of the matter, you are. What will it take for more of you to speak up and speak out?

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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.

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Now I remember why I love and hate New York City’s BDSM scene

Category labels: Bitter and jealous, Community, Femdom, Male sexuality, Personal experience, Rant, Stupid dominants, Stupid submissives, Vanilla life

So, this is a complete and utter rant, because that’s just the mood I’m in. Also, it’s my blog. In case you didn’t know, I rant hard (and fast).

My first half-week in New York City has been an utter roller coaster. In these few short days after I (mostly) finished regrouping with friends, I remember exactly what I love about New York City, and exactly why I can’t stand it anymore. On Thursday, my first day back, I literally got off a bus, called Sinclair, and spent the evening first at Alphabet Soup (organized by the extremely perky and energetic Mina), and then later at a smaller, somewhat more private gathering of a few particular sex bloggers.

Let me say that again. I literally got off a bus, and went to a kinky social gathering with friends. I spent the majority of my time at Alphabet Soup talking to Sinclair about femme identity as it relates to cisgendered men. Others joined the conversation and things branched from there, but never did the conversation stop, and rarely did I say something that people couldn’t offer their own opinions on. I think I got the “you’re kind of an alien” face twice, maybe.

Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve felt like any gathering—regardless of whether it was filled with kinky people or not—was even remotely interesting on a sociosexual conversational level? That’s right, a year, because I was in fucking Sydney, where despite not being in a body-phobic culture like America is sadly entrenched in, people are still so massively ignorant about gender and sexuality issues (including people in the BDSM community), that it felt like I had actually travelled back in time. So, that was awesome.

But Alphabet Soup had its less-than-awesome moments, too. One dominant woman (plus one point) started talking to me, but her tone and demeanor was so overly presumptuous that I lost interest pretty quickly. One of the first things she said was, “I can get any man I want.” (Minus ten billion points.) ‘Really?’ I thought, ‘Well, you must not want me, then, because you’ve just ensured you’re not going to get me.’

Since I’m a submissive man, I get similar reactions when I turn down would-be advances from dominant women as I do for being a self-sufficient professional from bosses when I quit jobs: shock and a certain degree of indignation. It’s like they simply can’t parse what just happened, and the conversations would almost be funny if those conversations didn’t betray how totally fucked up these people probably treat the rest of their professional or sexual lives.

On the sexual advances front, I blame a massive swath of other submissive men for this, the ones whom I sometimes feel compelled to apologize to my friends over because they are so stereotypically stupid. No, really, on behalf of my gender, I’m sorry. (On the job front, I blame the education system for lying about life so horribly and for not giving students the actual skills they need to make it on their own.)

I was having a good time at Alphabet Soup, but was glad when Sinclair pulled me out of the bar to grab a slice of pizza and continue our conversation. Afterwards, we met up with Axe and Bad Man, among others at yet-another-bar. I had a blast getting to see Axe again, who also introduced me to Mia, and then had another awesome conversation about pornography and the impetus behind MaleSubmissionArt.com, my photo-blog-ish thing where I try my best to make poignant remarks about “bad” porn by showcasing “good” porn.

My favorite exchange from that conversation had to do with horse sex—which isn’t and probably never will be my thing—where somewhere in there I said that I’d be happy to see pornography depicting men having sex with horses because so much of that same stuff exists depicting women. Seriously, doesn’t it strike anyone else as being somewhat fucked up that it’s 2009 and I had to make a web site so that when you Google “submissive men art” or similar, you actually have a shot in hell of getting what you’ve been searching for? And no, damnit, pictures of women dominating men are not the same as pictures of men being submissive to women.

Also frustrating? The fact that “Femdom Sissy Art” is still ranked higher. Fuck’s sake. This was supposed to be the future. Where’s my goddamn equal sexual opportunity? And while you’re at it, where’s my goddamn flying car?!

Anyway, I left when the gathering whittled down to few enough people that the conversation, thanks to the skew of hegemonically masculine men, I suppose, began to go places I was no longer interested in going. Like, uhm, why girls don’t call you back when you send them text messages that read “come over.” (Should I apologize for this one on behalf of my gender? No, probably not.)

I spent the night in Brooklyn and the next day, mostly, with my family. That was good. The weekend was as relaxing as I could hope for, but I’m still stressed and need a vacation. Badly.

Then on Monday I hopped down to Conversio Virium for some pre-meeting sociability, promptly ditched the meeting itself in favor of food and conversation with Reki, and then returned for some additional post-meeting sociability.

It’s absolutely inspiring to see some of the Conversio kids be as outgoing and proud and happy as they seem to be. Their vice-president in particular is a young man who I remember as someone who was barely able to whisper when he spoke. Now, he hugs me warmly and openly.

I’m at once incredibly satisfied knowing I had a hand in making a space where he could blossom in that way, and also incredibly envious that his experiences were so quickly so positive while mine at that age were so utterly bitter. I sincerely hope he takes all of those positive experiences and works to make sure that others can also benefit so profoundly from CV.

I keep my iPod with me at all times because I’m constantly writing notes in it, ideas for blog posts or other rants, things I can do better for my community-related projects, and so forth. It’s simultaneously inspiring and depressing being back here. I’m thrilled that I’m surrounded by such wonderful stimuli again, but I’m more than a little overwhelmed at the challenge that lies ahead. Cuz, fuck, I’ve still so much work to do to make the kinds of spaces I’ve always wanted to have ahead of me.

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Saturday, October 25, 2008

Equating passivity with sexual submissiveness is a stupid mistake

Category labels: BDSM psychology, BDSM techniques, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Communication, D/s dynamics, Fantasy, Femdom, Masochism, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Relationship, Technology

This weekend I’m making a concerted effort to spend more time than I might otherwise with Eileen because we’ve been enjoying reconnecting with kink lately and there is just so much work to do during our “normal” days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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….

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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Article published in Kink-E magazine: Learning the Ropes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sunday, May 11, 2008

CBT? WTF is up with that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Friday, April 25, 2008

“Finally! Something that speaks to dominant women!” they said

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, Communication, Community, Femdom, Politics of sex, Professional BDSM

Ever since all that life-rebuilding stuff I’ve been doing in Sydney to get from the “Oh my god, how am I going to maintain positive cash flow?” state of mind to the “Wow, I’m really enjoying my new job” one, most of my thoughts haven’t been geared towards kink. Eileen and I aren’t playing quite as regularly because we’re both super busy, and besides, we still don’t have most of our toys back anyway. Not that we can only ever play when we have a massive pile of leather and metal and hemp, but it helps.

Lately, however, a few things have happened that have put kink and sexuality back on my mind again. Obviously, the presentation Eileen and I did to kick-start the über Skill Share Workshops is one of them, but more specifically, it was the fallout of the workshops that was really interesting. We got some excellent feedback from the presentation, almost entirely positive, which I’m very happy with. Here’s a few snippets, with emphasis added by me:

informative – finally something that speaks to dominant women

Certainly interesting. Focus on chastity and denial with little on the tease build up. But good
good info

Excellent. Very knowledgeable and enthusiastic presenters. Interesting anecdotes and comments
very informative

excellent, very constructive and professional

informative, fun and very horny :-)

inspirational and realistic. Really interesting topic and well presented

informative, well presented, good structure and extremely worthwhile

interesting – gave a good range of perspectives

informative, Entertaining – good tips & things to think about. Thanks!

It was great. Very informative. It was a friendly environment

The really interesting bit was the first item, right up there at the top. Someone exclaimed relief that they had finally listened to something that spoke to dominant women. Wait a minute, aren’t there lots of things that speak to dominant women? I mean, aren’t there hundreds upon hundreds of submissive men and other dominant women milling about the place, whether online or in person, all talking about femdom and stuff? We all know that there are. Hell, there are even books!

But if you take a closer look, almost none of them are actually saying anything to dominant women about dominant women, and instead they’re all just regurgitating the same stereotyped male fantasies over and over again. In other words, there are no good materials from which dominant women can draw knowledge about how to be the dominant woman that they want to be. There’s no good resource (that isn’t a blog, as far as I know) that discusses the kinds of things necessary for self-discovery or sexual self-actualization, such as exploring what turns you on, and why.

In conversation the other day, the woman I was speaking with remarked on how her male friends found her own awkwardness in revealing her sexual proclivities to others strange. One of her male friends, she told me, said quite bluntly that he just tells other guys he likes to tie girls up, and they all think that’s great. This guy doesn’t understand that if he had any other sexual orientation or interests, or if he were not a male, then the people to whom he might announce this interest would not think so highly of him. Why? Because any proclamation other than a male-dominant, female-submissive heteronormative paradigm is seen as “abnormal.”

That’s why this woman, and most others I know, don’t go around telling other women how they’d love to tie boys up. That’s why boys like me don’t go around telling other boys that we’d love to have women tie us up. It’s just not met with the same kind of accepted “boys will be boys” attitude. It’s not “normal.”

Thanks in part to this idiocy, I’m sure, we end up with literature and resources that proclaim themselves to be femdom-themed and “aimed at women” but in fact do nothing other than mirror the supposed male fantasy ideal. As I was drafting this entry, I found that Calico may have said it most simply:

There’s a big difference between learning to be a good pro-domme […] and learning about your own dominance. They are not always interchangeable.

She should know. (She’s a pro.) Like most things, this is also a two-way street. Submissive men, for whom new and updated content seems to be in endless daily TGP-style supply, also have a sad lack of any really good material that speaks to their needs. But I don’t want to get distracted, so back to my original point, which is that no one’s really talking to dominant women….

The next day, I read a couple of emails from a chastity group I subscribe to. I almost never read these emails, and I wouldn’t have read this one either if it weren’t from a first-time female poster who was asking the group for advice. The original inquiry read as follows (emphasis added by me):

I am new to the group. My husband and I have used the CB for play over the past few years, but he has never been locked up longer than a few days at a time. To be honest, he seems to enjoy it more than me.

He has been wanting to be locked up for longer, so I put the cage on him a week ago. I let him take it off to go to work, and sometimes I take it off at night when I want to tease him.

How do I decide how long to keep him locked up. Also, what can I do to make this more fun for me?

If you have suggestions, please help.

Here’s what blew me away. She says—in what I can only describe as painfully blunt language—that the whole chastity thing isn’t really doing it for her right now and that her husband’s the one getting his fantasies fulfilled, not her. It just isn’t fun enough. Yet nobody, not one person who responded to her, said anything about her, or even any woman, at all. Every single sentence in every single response was focused solely on the guy in the chastity device and, of course, his penis not getting to squirt.

I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s really hard to get my rocks off when someone pulls a garden gnome out from under the bed and starts yodeling at me. I’m not frigid, I just don’t get off on garden gnomes and yodeling. If you do, great, and if I like you enough and we can agree on some additional, mutually enjoyable activity, then I’ll probably even go along for the garden gnome yodeling sex session every so often. But the fact of the matter is, it’s just not going to be as exciting for me as it is for you.

If you think this analogy is unfair, take a look at some of the absolutely horrific responses this woman got to her post. Here’s the very first response:

Maam,
For the past 4 months I have been locked up in a CB 3K.  Here is how things work at my house:

1.  It doesn’t come off except for showering and she stands there and watches me so I can’t jack off (Every guy is going to jack off at work if you take it off for them to go there).

2.  I am required to deliver a minimum of two, but as many orgasms as demanded using my tounge most evenings.  I am so hard, and dripping so badly with the sorest balls imaginable after this.

3.  If I do not get to cum, I get milked every week but into a condom and I must consume the contents.

4.  If I had a nocturnal or other unauthorized ejaculation, my cock and balls are punished pretty intenseley.

5.  Sometimes when I have pleased her and am given the opportunity to cum, she will release me, have me roll a single dice, and that is how many minutes I get to cum. If I don’t, then tough luck.

Thanks Maam.

If you think that’s bad, here’s the second response, supposedly by a woman:

 
Ann ,I  somewhat agree with geoge;s list to start with ! Most deafly Keep him LOCKED when goin to work ! Try 24 hours for min of two weeks ? Switch roles and use Strap-on on him ! Milk his prastate also Very Important ! Do just as geoge said ! Cuckholding is also Very Good and Can be LOTS of fun for you ! Especially if ypour hubby avg sized and you can Find Well Hung Stud to use in front him !   Good Luck !

Mistress Coral

Okay, okay, surely the good responses just take a bit longer to arrive, right? Um…wrong. Here’s the third response:

Try this.

Put it on him. Tell him you’re giving him a longer period, but don’t say how much – tell him you haven’t decided.

Next, think of some things you really want him to do for you.

Then just let him simmer till he asks to be let out. First time he asks tell him to wait a while. Then start making conditions.

Meanwhile don’t take it off at night. If you want tease, have him satisfy you in other ways.

Sigh. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

What does any of this have to do with answering her question, or even with her at all? Nothing. Which, for any of you unable to follow along at home, means she probably didn’t find it all that hot (even if other submissive guys did).

You see, that’s the thing about male submission. It’s been so utterly divorced from female dominants, segregated by this absolutely unbreachable moat around the castle of male fantasy (with all of its very long, very hard, very locked-up spires), that there’s just no way for womankind—dominant or not—to have any hope of actually penetrating it. Which I think is odd, considering how much some of these guys seem to enjoy being penetrated.

You don’t have to read past the first sentence in most of these responses to see that they’re entirely dick-driven, that absolutely none of them—not a single bullet point in any of the responses—have to do even the tiniest bit with how she’s feeling, or what she might want out of the chastity play. So what if you get off on having her not tell you how long she’ll keep you locked up for? What’s in it for her? Is “satisfy you in other ways” really the best you can come up with?

Why is nobody talking about the sexual rushes she might feel (instead of what the guy’s tongue may or may not be doing), or the feeling of power and self-empowerment that being sexually dominant might engender in her? Modern waves of feminism may have done heaps for women in the workforce, but they seem to have done absolutely squat for women who want to find good resources on being dominant.

Of course, none of this is all that surprising. Send an email to a group of locked-up guys who probably haven’t been having a lot of orgasms recently and I suppose you can’t expect much more than dick-driven responses. Like Robin Williams said (sort of), God gave all men a penis and a brain, but he only gave most men enough blood to run one at a time.

That, of course, doesn’t even begin to address the issue of whether or not submissive men can even speak knowledgeably about the self-actualization of dominant women. After all, I know of no dominant women who can speak with much first-hand authority about the self-actualization of submissive men.

In the spirit of being the change I wish to see in the world, here’s a snippet of the response I sent to the original poster (privately):

 
I am a submissive man, myself, and my dominant girlfriend and I play with chastity, too. We both have a lot of fun with it. I love the control over me it gives to my girlfriend, but I wouldn’t like it if my girlfriend didn’t also enjoy it for her own sake. She finds our chastity play fun because she genuinely enjoys having the power to make decisions about my sexual state, but that is not necessarily what I would expect every woman to think was sexy.

The only way to make chastity play more fun for you is to find out what you think is sexy about it. Chastity play and sexual teasing of this nature should be fun for both you and your husband. You don’t have to be a mean and demanding bitch, like some of the responses might have implied, nor do you have to go find additional sexual partners, give up penetrative sex, or set goals or tasks for him to “achieve.” These are all just things that other people, mostly submissive men, have found to be arousing. Don’t feel bad if they don’t sound sexy to you.

The key to enjoying chastity is no different than it is to enjoying any sexual activity, for that’s what a chastity fetish is—a sexual activity. What other kinds of things, imagery, thoughts, scenarios, emotions, sounds, or other stimuli do you find erotic? What do you really enjoy? You don’t have to follow stereotypes, because sexual desires are individual.
 

So, I guess that’s why I was so heartened by seeing that first line of feedback from the presentation I gave with Eileen. Someone sees that we want to talk to dominant women. I hope more people start doing that—not least of all submissive men, since it’s kind of in their best interests to do so, y’know?

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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.

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Wednesday, February 6, 2008

One night, I fell in love

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

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

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

In chronological order:

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

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

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

    And this time you weren’t smiling anymore.

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