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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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.
Comments (3)

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Wednesday Wanderings #9: Winds of Change

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Femdom, Male sexuality, Politics of sex, Stupid submissives, Technology, Wednesday Wanderings

It’s Wednesday, so let’s just dive right in!

  • For a long, long time I wished I had been sent to a Montessori school when I was younger because one of my tried-and-true learning techniques comes from making associations between things other people would not typically realize could be applicable to one another. I made one such connection when I started reading Susan Mernit’s excellent blog about social media, social networks, citizen journalism, web technologies, sexuality, online dating, and so, so much more. Reading her blog makes me feel like I’m discovering, and continually rediscovering, value in so many places; I feel like Susan’s a sort of kindred spirit, and would recommend her blog to everyone.

    Two pieces of Susan’s writing was also picked as BlogHer’s best picks of December 2007. One was called Breaking up: When do you stop loving someone? and the other was titled Not choosing monogamy: Why exclusivity doesn’t matter. Both of them are excellent pieces that I think are worth your time. Her blog is a fantastic read if you’re at all interested in Internet culture and technologies, sexuality, and especially if you’re interested in both!

  • One of the writers who sometimes makes me feel as though she could have been a fly on the wall of every conversation I’ve ever had with myself is the Subversive Submissive. As a female submissive, many of the issues she writes about are not the ones I have, yet every once in a while, I’m perusing my news feeds and something she wrote will just stand up and grab me.

    One of these posts is this post of hers in which she talks about her personal approach to BDSM and why it’s put strain on her relationship:

    I have something of a history of (a) not feeling comfortable with my own sexuality and kinks, and (b) not trusting that my sexual partner is actually interested in the sort of sex and the sort of relationship I desire.

    […]

    But I realize now that I’ve been disappointed in him for not coming at this in the same way that I do; I’ve been disappointed that he doesn’t write about all of this, doesn’t comment here, doesn’t read any BDSM nonfiction, doesn’t initiate taking classes with me. And that’s just holding him up to an absurd and unrealistic expectation. There’s no reason why he should have to approach BDSM in the same way that I do.

    Or this one, about what it’s like not to feel submissive sometimes:

    It’s the nights when the same thing we did two weeks ago not only fails to arouse me, but irritates me. It’s the nights when I have zero interest in any kind of sex at all. And it’s also the nights when I find myself wanting to just climb on top of him and fuck him until I come.

    She works out issues so carefully and intelligently that, if she really is anything like me, I’m certain of two things. First, that she is shielding readers like me from the incredible turmoil that she must go through to reach such insightful moments of clarity. Second, that what she has to say is going to be valuable regardless of your orientation.

    It’s nothing short of a real delight whenever I see a new post appear from her corner of the Web. Go check her blog out. You can get there from my blog roll.

  • This week the ever-thoughtful Richard Evans Lee came out with an excellent, must-read post called Femdom Kink is Vanilla. His observations, that kinky people and vanilla people seeking relationships with one another have the same complaints (women wanting conversations, men wanting stereotypes), have been made before but never seem to subside. In this post Richard is able to map the vanilla versions to the kinky versions of these facts to one another and back again and the result is an illuminating entry that deserves a spot in your “send this to the hopeless stupid submissive” bookmarks folder. (What? Doesn’t everyone have one of those?)
    In talking with other kinky people about BDSM relationships it has been nagging at me for some time how closely what I say is what I would say to anybody looking for a romantic partner.

    And how annoyingly the words map into gender stereotypes.

    […]

    Where BDSM departs from vanilla is that the former is never going to be satisfied with bodily beauty. The latter can be satisfied - if only for a single night - by arrangements of muscles and bodyfat. The former will never be happy without some meshing of minds.

    That heterosexual male bottoms often don’t grasp this is why even though there are probably far more of them than female tops the limitations of the former are an equalizer of the wrong sort.

  • Dovetailing perfectly off the last item, the latest post by Joscelin, an intelligent and young submissive man whose blog has been on my blog roll for a while, posits a possible (at least partial) solution to the problem of ignorant submissive men that is so obvious it bears repeating: sex education for the adolescent submissive man. Joscelin says:
    I feel like now that I’m 24, my sexual education is finally getting started. I finally realize that intercourse has never been a big priority for me; I’m more interested in scenes anyway. This has had the convenient side-effect of making me appear not to be a sex-crazed loser who only wants a score. I am, I just have a differeing definition of “score.” As such, traditional sexual education failed to even address most of my questions, let alone answer them correctly.

    […]

    The marginalization of female dominant’s sexuality involved limits the females that are willing to dominate men. Additionally, a substantial unmet demand is created, i.e., a professional market, which in many ways worsens the problem. One obvious solution that I’ve never read before is sexual education of adolescent submissive men.

    I sincerely doubt I’ll see this happen in America in my life time, especially with the Federal government actively sabotaging attempts at fairly balanced sex-ed, but one day I hope this obviously positive thing won’t be such a radical thought. Like Joscelin, I first learned the majority of information about my sexuality from Internet pornography, ninety-nine percent of which was absolute bullshit and, thankfully, had a noticeably weaker impact on me than the vast majority of other submissive men out there. It shouldn’t be a mystery why I want better for the next generation.

That’s all for now. A lot of my time and energy at the moment is being spent scheduling my last month in the United States before the big move to Sydney. I’m at the state where I can just begin to feel the winds of change gaining strength. They’re not gale force yet, but they’re getting stronger.

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Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Fantasy Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I feel bad…,” I groaned.

“Bad how?” she asked.

“Physically,” I said.

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

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

“No, it’s filthy,” I said.

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

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

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

“What? I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disappointed, I had to agree.

“Will you be okay for just another minute?”

“Yeah,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love you.

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Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Wednesday Wanderings #8: Mixed Visions for the New Year

Category labels: D/s dynamics, Femdom, Male sexuality, Polyamory, Religious Evil, Stupid dominants, Vanilla life, Wednesday Wanderings

I missed last week’s Wednesday Wanderings due to Christmas, but I’m not really apologizing for that anymore. Instead, I’m just going to move right on into this week’s personal (and somewhat random) picks. Check them out:

  • The most exciting (by far) find of the week for me was Reverend Debra W. Haffner’s blog titled Sexuality and Religion: What’s the connection?. Debra is also the founder of The Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing and to many people’s surprise despite the name, that does not mean they advocate solely abstinence-only education, anti-abortion political agendas, or rigidly define the sanctity of marriage in a sexist (solely heterosexual) way. Debra is a breath of fresh air in and from a direction that sorely needs it. In a recent post regarding teen pregnency, Debra writes:
    The U.S. continues to have the highest teen birth rate in the developed world. Our teenagers need their parents to educate them about sexuality; our faith communities must address adolescent sexuality; our schools must provide comprehensive sexuality education; sexually active teens must have access to reproductive health services. That’s what happens in other countries that have a teen birth rate much lower than our’s…that’s what we need to do here.

    I’m so happy that she’s speaking out, and even more grateful for her advocacy.

  • Another recent and interesting addition to the portion of the blogosphere I watch is the sweet submissive man who writes at Unspeakable Axe. His blog chronicles many of his attempts at finding dominant women and, sadly, he is a perfect example of the kind of nice guys out there who just can’t find submissive sexual fulfillment despite all their efforts. He writes about women who expect money even after financial transactions were already negotiated out,
    “How much can you pay?” she asked.

    “What? Nothing. I don’t pay for play so why would I pay to meet?”.

    I almost sounded dominant. She knew that I wasn’t looking for that, why would she even suggest it?

    “Really? Ok well maybe we can just be friends then. You’re cute so I’ll let you meet me for free and maybe you can clean my apartment.”

    I was glad we were on the phone, otherwise she would have seen me roll my eyes at her.

    And he writes about women who use submissives like him for an easy ego-boost:

    I know what she’s doing. Whenever she needs to feel wanted or desired she calls me. She constantly gets my hopes up only to cancel at the last minute. She’ll talk about wanting me to sleep at the foot of her bed chained and used just to get me excited. Then she’ll cancel hours before meeting. Over and over we’ve played this dance. She’s probably canceled close to a dozen times.

    And even about women who don’t want an eager submissive, but a challenging alpha-male type to break:

    She enjoys making a man do something he wouldn’t normally do, she loves the challenge. With me, there’s no challenge, she knows I’ll eagerly submit to her desires and because of that I’m no use to her. She made several comments about how there’s nothing hotter than making a man submit who normally wouldn’t.

    Though I’ve been saying it to her forever, it took Eileen to start reading Axe’s blog before she finally fully understood the extent at which submissive men long for something we are only rarely able to find. Thanks to the simplicity with which Axe writes and the personal stories he tells, he can make the problems submissive men face when trying to find opportunities for play partners that are satisfying exceptionally, heart-wrenchingly painful—even if you’re not a submissive man. I think his has now become a must-read blog, so it’s been added to my blog roll.

  • Richard Evans Lee, whom I know primarily from Down On My Knees and as a moderator of Fetish Lore (a BDSM-focused discussion board) has a new project up at FemaleLedRelationships.Net. To my eyes, in much the same way as “pro-life” is a term that has been co-opted to mean “anti-abortion” by conservatives, the term “female led relationships” has been co-opted to signify a specific brand of narrow-minded and harmful relationships involving female sexual domination of men. Richard is taking back the phrase by writing insightful, targeted posts about various topics of female domination as only he can so eloquently do. You’ll find this on my blog roll now, too.
  • Isn’t That Special? is one of Mistress Matisse’s articles for her regularly appearing column, Control Tower in The Stranger, a Seattle-based newspaper. It is also an incredibly brief (500-some-odd words) and incredibly poignant piece that relates a classic misunderstanding that can occur in polyamorous relationships to riding a bike. From the article:
    Pat’s emotional crisis is of his own creation. He took an arbitrary symbol—”Chris sleeps with only me”—and gave that one symbol a lot of power. He made it the solitary litmus test of whether his relationship with Chris was stable and safe. People do this because it’s simpler than having to really examine themselves and their feelings. It’s basically replacing sexual monogamy with some other symbol. But as long as you assign power to symbolism rather than what’s real, then you’re mistaking the form of love for the substance. Sleeping with Pat is not what makes Chris love him and treat him as special.

    In other words, go read it right now. Mistress Matisse is, in general, an excellent writer and worth a look herself. She also keeps a blog.

  • Finally, even though it often has little to do with sex directly, I want to point readers to the incredible wealth of knowledge and inspiration that is available for free at the TED Talks Video Blog. Many of these are must-see videos that are not only eye-opening, but truly unique, beautiful and touching stories as well. Some of my favorites are Sir Ken Robinson’s talk about education and intelligence, Steven Pinker’s talk explaining the intricacies of human thought through an analysis of how we use language (with direct implications for understanding sexuality!), Peter Donnely’s talk about common but tragic mistakes due to misunderstanding statistics, Mena Trott’s talk about how blogging is changing the world by making the personal important, Jimmy Wales’s talk about why and how Wikipedia works as well as it does, Helen Fischer’s talk explaining the science behind love (also with direct implications for understanding sexuality!), Barry Schwartz’s talk about the paradox of choice and how it relates to happiness, and Eve Ensler’s understanding of happiness through the exploration of vaginas and so, so many more.

Everything is, in the end, related to everything else; it’s all connected, even if you can’t see how just yet. One of the things I am wishing for myself in 2008 is a greater ability to be at peace with myself in those times when I see that I can’t see something. That would be true vision.

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Friday, December 28, 2007

Three easy steps to meeting and playing with people in BDSM clubs

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, Communication, Femdom, Fetish, Foot worship, Myths and misconceptions, Stupid dominants, Stupid submissives, Vanilla life

While filling the Conversio Virium calendar with other group’s events to publicize to the CV crowd, I came across a curious meeting topic that DomSubFriends (one of our local NYC BDSM groups) is going to be presenting on shortly. It is a presentation, taught by a dominant man and intended for other men regardless of their various potential orientations (or so one is led to believe from the description), about how to be more successful when trying to meet partners. It’s called “Why can’t I meet someone? (In the scene!)”.

I have to say that I’m glad this topic is being brought up at a local kink group. I also have to say that whenever it’s been brought up in the past, it’s been a miserable failure of a presentation with no insight and nary a good point being made by the presenter or the audience. But maybe this time will be different….

Of course, it is an oft-cited criticism of the BDSM scene that many men have: “It’s too hard to meet women!” Indeed, many men feel that their attempts at engaging members of the opposite sex are consistently unsuccessful. What many men fail to note, however, is that women decry the experience of trying to meet a partner just as much, usually with the similarly oft-cited complaint: “Why is every man who talks to me so obnoxious and weird?”

In my decidedly not-as-vast-as-other-people’s personal experience and observations, there are a few key guidelines that have proven themselves to be invaluable to me personally and have been present in every successful pre-play interaction I have witnessed—ever. Astonishingly, very few men actually seem to follow these three simple steps, which apply regardless of situation, circumstance, or participants involved:

  1. Vanilla rules apply. Just as certain common-sense rules of etiquette are followed in non-kink spaces, so too must they all be followed in kink spaces outside of a scene. If you’re not invited to be a part of someone’s scene, that means you’re not in a scene, clear? Being in a BDSM dungeon does not implicitly grant anyone the right to be rude to, to invade the personal space of, or otherwise behave poorly towards anyone else, no matter who you are or who they are. End of story.
  2. Make conversation. Nine times out of ten, if you ask someone to play with you before you even say hello, you’re going to get turned down. Think about it: do you walk up to random women in bars and ask them to have sex with you? No, you talk to them first, you flirt. Do that in a BDSM club, too. If there’s some chemistry in the conversation first, then the apple of your eye is much more likely to say yes when you broach the topic of playing together.
  3. Be generous. Give and you shall receive. If you get turned down, be gracious and accepting about it. There’s nothing more damaging to your search for a play partner than to be seen acting like a big baby that can’t handle rejection politely. On the other hand, if your offer to play is accepted, then do something you are both going to like when you play and make sure your play partner knows how much you’re liking it while you’re playing.

    If you’re topping, this means you top with enthusiasm tempered with lots of care. If you’re bottoming, this means you’re reacting to what she’s doing because, remember, she wants to be having an effect on you. I don’t think I know a single top who doesn’t like noise, or squirming, or something of the sort as long as it’s an authentic reaction and not a big phony act. Conversely, almost all of them really dislike playing with a stubbornly stoic, silent, expressionless bottom.

It’s unfortunate that when something isn’t working, many men simply try to do more of the same. If asking ten women to let him rub their feet didn’t work, he’ll just try asking another fifty, thinking one of them will eventually acquiesce. Sadly, this just doesn’t work. “Trying harder” without entertaining some kind of introspection is nearly guaranteed to fail every time.

The only cure for desperation is alternatives. If something’s not working for you, for goodness sake, give something else an honest try.

See also

Comments (12)

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Fun with kissing

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Blowjobs, D/s dynamics, Femdom, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Sex

Kissing seems to have been a popular topic to write about the other day. Both Ilya and Dev wrote about kissing on the same day, and both entries are interesting. Ilya spoke about her disinterest in kissing, and about social pressures that have made one’s first kiss a sort of “right of passage.” In a similar vein, Dev wrote about her revelation that kissing is only interesting if done in a certain way, that is, if she’s on top.

Both posts have struck a strand of truth in me, but not a full chord. My take on kissing is rather different. I like kissing a lot, though my enjoyment from the activity is not the same as other forms of sexual touching. Kissing is different because for me it usually acts as a sort of lens, focusing whatever other forms of sex are happening at the moment, or serving as a physical signal that the mood or the feelings have changed. Maybe because of this, it is also the kind of sexual touch I find to be the most malleable, almost chameleon-like in its ability to be easily subverted for whatever purpose I want to use it for; expressing being a top, a bottom, a dom, a sub, a man, a woman, or something else entirely can all be accomplished by kissing a certain way.

Sometimes this is subtle and sometimes it’s not. Kissing is excellent foreplay and, indeed, that’s what it usually is for me and Eileen. Typically, Eileen will be the one who initiates a sexually-charged kiss and, like Dev, she is typically on top (literally and figuratively) when she does so. I like this because, unlike many other forms of sexual expression, this is one kind of activity that I have not found men to find awkward as a receptive partner, so being kissed passionately never gives me that twinge of “I am not a ‘normal’ man” discomfort that other kinds of sex acts (like getting pegged) sometimes do.

When either she or I feel that the moment is right for a switch from foreplay to something else, or from a switch in mood to another mood, changing how we are kissing is often how we communicate that non-verbally. A common motif I think most people can relate to is beginning to kiss one another on the lips and then moving to kiss the other elsewhere. In this way, it’s a natural segue-way into other orally-based activities like cunnilingus or fellatio, or even nibbling, licking, and biting. Biting in particular can be joyously erotically cruel for me, because it’s one of those things I don’t actually enjoy the experience of, so kisses interspersed with bites of my lip immediately put me in a submissive mindset.

One interesting fact I seem to recall about kissing, and I wish I could remember where I heard this so I could cite the source, is that kissing the average person on the lips will stimulate approximately thirty percent of that person’s directly sexually-responsive nerves. I don’t know how to verify the validity of that claim, but I know that kissing well is a major physical turn-on for me. In fact, I am physically aroused whenever I feel soft pressure on my lips it regardless of the source. Another person’s lips is, on a physical level, simply one of those sources.

Sometimes, in fact, such other sources of lip-stimulating sensations can be even more arousing than a simple kiss. One such example are the times when Eileen will run a single finger across my lips. This, I discovered after some thinking, is probably because the activity of placing one’s hands near another person’s mouth is heavily steeped in power dynamics and a display of dominance is, to me, far more arousing than the act of being touched.

Another part of why I like this finger-over-my-lips thing is because it makes me feel sultry, as though she is admiring me as if I were sexual art. It is objectifying in a satisfyingly primal way, a way that tells me I am wanted because I have some kind of sexual value to her. It is depressing and angering that in the pervasive representations of male sexuality I can find, this way of valuing men is actively rejected; both the typical representations of male submission in various BDSM cultures as well as the hegemonic view of masculinity turn men into sexually obsessed consumers of another gender’s aesthetic qualities.

In any event, with that much potential for sensitivity stored in the lips, it’s also easy to see why kissing can easily become the main attraction in a sexual encounter. Make out sessions are fun in their own right, and sometimes the mystery and anticipation of whether or not they lead to anything beyond is part of their fun as well. Also, kissing someone doesn’t just engage the mouth, it engages many of one’s other senses, like smell and sight, to an arguably lesser extent, sound as well since all of those sensory organs are near the mouth. Kissing is one of the most complete sensory sexual experiences you can have. Little wonder kissing, whether you’re kissing your partner’s lips or kissing their genitals, can be so much fun.

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