Friday, February 27, 2009

8 Things Submissive Men Want From A Dominant Partner

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, Communication, Male sexuality, Myths and misconceptions, Relationship, Vanilla life

My friend over at Kink In Exile, has recently posted a fantastic list of 8 things dominant women want. The list is so spot-on that I think it is a must-read regardless of whether you are in or are looking for a kinky relationship or not—or even if you’re not even “into all this kink stuff.”

I’ve been struggling to write more in this space lately. I want to, but between having to deal with the stress of moving to New York City from Sydney in less than two weeks and, more recently, the stress of losing my relationship with (Sara) Eileen, most kinds of words seem beyond me right now. Naturally, reading over a list of the things dominant women want during this time triggers a certain amount of introspection.

Kink in Exile’s list is so good, actually, if it were not unspeakably lazy of me I would want to copy it in its entirety for a post of my own. Instead of plagiarism, however, here’s a companion list of the things that submissive men want from a dominant partner that I think might be helpful. Astute readers of both my post and hers will note how similar these two lists actually are in content if not in voice. That, of course, is no coincidence.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll preface this list with an explicit remark about how it’s not intended to reflect anything other than a generic exploration into what I believe submissive men want from dominant partners, and should therefore not be interpreted without salting to your own taste, so to speak. I’d also like to acknowledge the excellent pre-publication input I received on this post by Kink in Exile herself, ironrose, as well as a few more friends. Thank you all for your thoughts.

You act upon details

Everyone’s fantasies—and demons—are in the details. Specific words, intonation, materials used in play (e.g., hemp rope versus metal bondage), and other things all have different meanings to different people. Personally, for instance, I react badly to words I associate with worthlessness (like “pathetic”) but favorably to others (like “whore” or “slut”) that I associate with wanton sexuality. While I am not alone in these particulars, there are others who respond in their own, unique ways.

It’s important to understand what these details are before you access them, but it’s equally important to eventually access them; ignoring such details is tantamount to ignoring me. When I play with a partner, a sense of depth and meaning is literally impossible to achieve if I have not first talked (usually at some length) about the details of my desires and fears, and asked questions of my partner to understand the details of theirs.

You need to be consistently inviting these details into our talks and our play; merely acknowledging their presence—without acting upon them later—is not enough. I do not believe a meaningful relationship can be built without successfully interfacing over these details.

You treat me as an equal person first and a submissive partner second

I am not a doormat—no submissive man is (even the ones that say they are). I see both dominance and submission as requiring equality first and power play second, and you should too. Moreover, you need to not only recognize but articulate the distinction in your actions when you demand something versus assertively request something of me.

My submission is a vital facet of who I am, so you never act in ways that are disingenuous, exploitative, or demeaning of my submissive sexuality, nor do you suggest that innate parts of who we are or the situations in which we exist (such as orientation, race, spiritual beliefs, socioeconomic status, or other external influences in our lives) make us unequal beings in any way. You strive towards fairness in all your dealings and recognize that our different wants and needs means that the goal of such efforts is equivalency, not sameness.

You can distinguish fantasy from reality, and objective reality from subjective interpretation

You understand how to live out a fantasy without living in a fantasy. This doesn’t mean so-called “24/7″ situations are unacceptable, because even in more casual relationships you need to be able to intelligently distinguish between playtimes and other times. Using protocols or any “lifestyle” behaviors as barriers to communication is not okay, so you must be adept at sussing out problems between us as well as vigilant in and receptive to addressing them.

You understand the difference between entitlement and advantage; you recognize the advantages you have that I may not share, but do not feel as though you are somehow more deserving of them. In reality, you do not consider yourself entitled to my submission or acts thereof. In fantasy and play, however, you are not afraid of asserting such behavior.

It’s also important that you remain aware of and empathetic to concerns I raise and act with consideration toward them both inside and outside of play. It helps if you also expect the same from me—don’t be surprised at my vehemence in encouraging your comfort and pleasure because doing so is a pursuit of my own happiness. Part of that pursuit is making the effort to build a common understanding of things between us, and I need you to make an effort to refine this understanding with me over time. Doing so will make it possible to interact with me as a dominant partner, a top, and a friend, all of which you need to be able to do.

You know and make your own desires clear

You are knowledgeable about yourself and communicate what you know openly, honestly, and freely. You needn’t be divinely enlightened but you do need to have a solid understanding of something you like and be assertive in asking for it. You must have actively pursued explorations into your own desires, or are at least actively pursuing them with me; your sense of self must be strong enough to weather discoveries of new desires in yourself and in me over time.

Being eager to often try new things (in terms of play specifically and in general) is also important because it tells me that you are interested in learning more about yourself, more about me, and more about how we work together in all of the ways that we do. You delight in novelty and discovery; you “know thyself,” and you share who you are with me—I think it’s sexy. Moreover, you encourage me to do the same because when I share who I am with you, it’s out of a desire for you to reciprocate.

You are confident and independent in your dominance

Your dominance cannot be your dirty little secret; my submission isn’t mine. You may be excited by taboo but you don’t rely on it to provide enjoyment (because very little is taboo with me). This does not mean that our play can’t be respectful of public boundaries; it means that you know wanting to see me in physical pain is not wrong or sick, and you know that my desire for such experiences is similarly not unhealthy. You enjoy challenging both my physical and mental endurance but are not out to inflate your ego by causing mine harm.

You are an independent, whole person and you celebrate your dominance as a piece of that whole. You are not dependent on my submission to validate your dominance. You appreciate the support and encouragement I provide and are self-sufficient enough not to need it at all times, self-empowered enough not to want it at all times. You do not need constant reassurance that basic aspects of our kinky sexuality are acceptable behaviors (e.g., “normal”).

You must be comfortable discussing and acting upon your own sadism, desire to receive service, or other potentially socially unacceptable traits for us to have fulfilling interactions (because I am similarly not always socially acceptable). Moreover, you need to have and be constantly developing a sense of your own skills so that you know what you can and can’t realistically and safely do. Feeling insulted or offended if I point out the realities of your potential shortcomings in these areas should be a warning sign to you—I do so because I want us both to become better at what we are doing.

You value my input and experiences

You reject the notion that my sexual submission negates the validity of my opinions and beliefs. You know that dominance does not equal superiority, and therefore you are willing and able to reexamine aspects of yourself. You solicit and incorporate input and feedback from me in doing this because you know that my perspective and experiences are valuable. You want our relationship—whatever form our relationship takes—to grow, our intimacy to deepen and you don’t expect this to happen without expending your own energy to help make it so.

You make me a priority and will treat me to indulgences

My submission doesn’t make me more willing to abandon my wants or needs than people who aren’t submissive are, just as your dominance doesn’t make you more entitled to have yours met. You know this and therefore make me the same kind of priority that I have made you. You make time to see me, play with me, and occasionally treat me to indulgences you know I like because you enjoy seeing me be happy.

Being dominant does not mean you get to do what you want whenever you want. Your dominance doesn’t free you of the obligation to treat me with consideration or respect, to dismiss my desires or concerns, or to unfairly prioritize your own wants over mine. This doesn’t mean that I feel inappropriately entitled or deserving of the things I want, and you must not resent me for having these needs or for filling them. Additionally, you are emotionally intelligent enough not to feel guilty or personally at fault when you can’t fulfill them for whatever reason, are communicative enough to speak frankly with me when such clashes arise (because they will), and trusting enough to believe me when I say I’m doing my best to resolve the situation.

Your dominance is personally meaningful

Being sexually submissive is just one facet of who I am. You desire to dominate me because my presentation of self—all of it—is personally attractive to you. You recognize my strength and power as well as my vulnerability and are aroused by both aspects of who I am.

You do not treat me as a replaceable object (out of a fantasy scenario) or as though I am a dime-a-dozen, cookie-cutter submissive man. You understand that our D/s relationship is about the relationship and the power dynamic, not the activities or toys or clothing; I am not a random man that will clean your house for free, and you are sensitive to the fact that any expectation of either this or similar depersonalization will feel exploitative and insulting.

You should feel just as eager to dominate me whether or not you are dressed in fetish gear, wearing makeup, are at a club with an audience, or have a particular toy handy. None of these things matter to me in terms of our connection during play because I desire you, not your image. You should not feel the need to conform to stereotypes you see in pornography, and you must not expect me to do that, either (because I won’t).

To submissive men, I want to say that many—if not all—of these things apply to you as well. Knowledge of yourself, self-acceptance, and confidence in your submission is not just healthy, it’s what makes you attractive to dominant partners (especially the intelligent, sexy ones). If you don’t think your own submission is sexy, how can you expect anyone else to?

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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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Monday, September 22, 2008

Insomnia and pleasant sexual frustration (no relation)

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Community, Relationship, Sexual teasing and control, Vanilla life

As I’ve recently discussed, I’m becoming increasingly upset with life here in Sydney. Since I’ve found the local scene all but worthless, Eileen and I aren’t finding ourselves with lots of opportunities to play or explore others or ourselves. Besides that, we’re both caught up in (equally increasingly upsetting) non-sexuality-related work such as our day jobs and other pursuits.

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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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Friday, November 2, 2007

The unexpected clarity

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Chastity/Orgasm denial, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Femdom, Masturbation, Personal experience, Relationship, Sexual teasing and control

I am anal retentive, persistently consistent, and have a notorious dislike for change. Yet whenever something new happens for the first time, I am endlessly fascinated by it. Just such a new thing happened the other night. Allow me to set the scene.

It is late, past ten o’clock in the evening. It has been a long day, pleasant at parts and disagreeable at others, but it is over and I am through it nonetheless. Throughout the day, I have spent some short moments flirting with Eileen and making horribly inappropriate remarks about the use I think she should put me to when we are home for my being in an office. I don’t dare stand up, though I have been looking forward to being home.

And, of course, I am horny.

Eileen and I met up on the subway and went home together. At home, she ordered me to fetch her food and drink as she settled down with her computer onto the bed in our living room, which doubles as a sofa because neither of us really care for “proper appearances” and you might be amazed how useful a four-poster twin-size bed is in the living room. Eventually, I had gone to the shower, where, because I was horny, I spent a chunk of the night masturbating (and, of course, not having orgasms).

Now, after ten o’clock in the evening, I am horny.

But, I am also somewhat disappointed, and consequently somewhat annoyed, and consequently somewhat pissed off. I wanted to spend time with Eileen, ideally being sexual, but if not then just spending the night with her. I was specifically looking forward to it, and thought she was looking forward to the same. Instead, I feel lonely because it’s been three hours and her computer is getting the attention I want from her, and now it is getting late and I am tired anyway and soon it will be bedtime and then I will have missed the chance to spend time with her and then I will have a crappy day the next day or I will not have a good night sleep…and…and…and….

And, by the way, I am horny.

I try to ignore the horniness, as masturbating will only make the distraction stronger and anyway I’m not permitted to do that without Eileen’s explicit permission. But even if I did have permission to pleasure myself and even if pleasuring myself would have satiated my growing sexual restlessness, I am uninterested in doing so because it’s not what I want. What I want is to spend time with Eileen, and masturbating while she is focused on her own work does not fulfill that desire in any way.

So I sit down at my computer, trying to forget about how incredible horny I am.

Only, I can’t. I turn to Eileen and dejectedly remark on the time. Only, the conversation doesn’t proceed like the one in my head and instead of making me feel better it makes us both feel bad. Now Eileen, I imagine, feels as though I am too much to deal with, too clingy and demanding of way too much time. I feel bad because maybe she’s right, because I have frustrated myself further by failing to create a better situation for myself, and I still feel lonely and want to spend time with her but then isn’t that potentially asking too much anyway? I am like this a lot. I really am a high-maintenance boyfriend.

Now, I am upset. For a few moments, I’m no longer horny at all.

We stop talking, having gotten nowhere and instead I turn back to my computer, intent on watching iPhone Developer Technical Talk videos from Apple’s WWDC 2007, something that is sure to lift my spirits. Only it doesn’t, and as I’m sitting naked in my chair I feel silly and needlessly exposed.

I do something that is actually a big deal when I’m home: I put on some pants. My mood has shifted and I shed the old one like a skin, donning the new one like a shell that I crawl into. My pants are this shell, letting me emotionally “climb under the covers” and away from this badness.

Only that’s not enough either, and now I’m feeling worse because Eileen is in the kitchen without a smile on her face and I am further away from her, which is exactly what I didn’t want. I’ve succeeded in nothing at all. And now, worst of all, I am getting horny again.

In uncontrollable frustration, I stop the video and rip off my headphones and glasses—but not my pants—and march into the bedroom where I abruptly shut off all the lights and jump into bed, under our sheets. I curl up on my side and try to relax. I tell myself to let it go, that it’s not really a big deal and I’m just being moody, just being affected by all the hardship of work and the uncertainty the next few months are undoubtedly going to bring. But now I’m thinking about hardship and uncertainty and I am angry at the situation I have found myself in and I don’t want to be thinking about it and I just want it to go away.

And worst of all, every time I succeed in calming my mind even a little, my body forces something else to fill the void: I am horny.

Soon, Eileen tentatively enters the room and asks if she may lay next to me. I say nothing, way too deep in my invisible shell to speak, and she knows this. She joins me, snuggles up next to me. I feel her warmth and her skin and her arms around my shoulders, and my penis becomes ever more insistent. My breathing changes involuntarily. She notices, and moves her hand to my back, carefully.

How dare my body do this to me? I am angry, and in some perverse way, I want to be angry right now. And my body isn’t letting me because I’m too damn horny to be thinking about anything except her hand on my back and the softness of her skin and how hard my cock is and how much I want her to fuck me ’til we come. I want it, but I don’t. I try to stifle a soft moan, but can’t. She hears, and now her hand has found its way to my ass.

Eventually she pulls me out of my fetal position and removes all the layers of fabric that are covering me until I am naked once again. “Tell me this is okay,” she says to me. “It’s okay,” I whimper, surprising myself with the speed at which the response came out of my mouth. It’s no use trying to fight it anymore: I still don’t want to be sexual but I want her to force me to be sexual with her anyway. I am not so naive as to be perplexed by how these two seemingly contradictory feelings could possibly be within me at once, but I am nonetheless unfamiliar with their incredible genuineness and intensity.

What I want is to have things—my mood, our communication, the night—be better. I want to let go. This is the most indispensable quality of surrender, and of submission. I no longer care what happens. I just want her to take me so that I am dominated.

She touches my penis and I instantly shudder. Slowly, she moves my own hand to it and strokes me with my own fingertips. She tells me to keep masturbating myself the way she is showing me and I do. While watching me, she brings a bottle of lube and pours a few drops on the head of my cock and tells me to use my index finger and thumb to slowly rub along the underside and the top of my penis, from base to shaft and back again very slowly.

After another short while of watching my body shake and my mouth gnaw at my lips, she tells me to press harder. Then to go slightly faster. Then she closes the rest of my fingers around my shaft and guides my masturbation somewhat faster still, all of this to the music of my moans and whimpers.

Then she peels her underwear to the floor and lays down next to me to begin masturbating herself. “You’re not going to have an orgasm tonight,” she tells me quietly and I fight for breath at the thought, “but I’ll give you a choice. You can keep masturbating now, or you can stop and lie next to me here so I’ll hold you while I come.” I just whimper more. “It’s going to be excruciating either way. Do you want to keep masturbating?” she asks. For a moment the only sound that fills the room is that of the lube between my hand and my penis popping. I nod, and she smiles. “I like seeing you like this.”

She gave herself a strong orgasm that night. When she was done and had caught her breath, she looked back at me, my face contorted as one might be when near to the point of tears. She addressed me by my real full name, something she rarely does, paused so we could lock eyes, and said simply, “stop.”

Though I did stop, I also almost shrieked as I did so. She quickly collected me in her arms and hugged me close. Afterwards, I felt oddly satiated, and I had no trouble falling asleep that night.

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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

When I’m not feeling submissive

Category labels: D/s dynamics, Emotions, Relationship, Vanilla life

I cycle a lot. (Not a surprise, really, for many reasons, but moving on….) Sometimes I’m all submissive and hurt-me-use-me and sometimes I’m not.

I haven’t felt very submissive lately. Not “not submissive” in the sense that now I’m a top or a dominant, not like “oh, see, you’re a guy so you’re not really submissive anyway.” I fucking hate that crap, which is the same thing as “you’re a woman so you’re really a submissive, at least a little bit.”

I feel like anyone, anyone who’s expecting me to get down on my knees for them is going to get smacked upside the head. Get me on my knees? Hah. Laughable. Because secretly, you see, I am actually the incredible hulk and when I am irritable or angry—or not feeling submissive—I become the emotional equivalent of a raging juggernaught. Only way you’ll see me on my knees is in seven-inch thick steel, because I could break anything thinner and I would actually take a bullet before I voluntarily unlock my knee.

I don’t like that I don’t really understand why or where this comes from. I probably would enjoy the seven-inch thick steel, but I’m probably too ornery to actually make it a good scene.

Maybe it’s been all the tech geekery that’s turned me off from the submission for now (temporarily, I assure you; this has happened before). I spend all my time “being productive” and then when I’m feeling this way playing just feels like a waste of time. Like I could be doing something better with my time, as stupid as that sounds.

I am very picky about who and what gets access to my time. My time is very valuable to me. I only have so much of it. I’ve already used up 23 years of it. I loathe the idea of wasting anything.

I typically don’t spend time thinking about things I don’t care about. I get angry at people who I need to interact with when they are slow, physically or mentally. Of course, sexual playtime is hardly what most would call a waste of time, but I digress.

Naturally, this is sometimes problematic relationship-wise. Eileen calls it “not being in sync” (or something like that?) which sounds an awful lot like biorhythms, something I’m skeptical about at best. Still, there’s no denying the cyclic nature of everything about me, which itself would be a complete summation if I were willing to accept it as such. (I’m not, of course.)

When “not in sync,” however, what happens? One of us gets frustrated, in the bad way, about not getting to do what we want. “It’s been a long time since you’ve wanted to get hurt,” Eileen tells me a lot. “You used to get all moany when I pulled your hair, now you just say ‘ow.’” I had to remind her: “I was all moany at the fact that there was a beautiful and sexy dominant woman paying attention to me. The hair pulling always made me go ow.” (Yes, Eileen’s attentions were my first that count. Being pissy about that is another rant entirely.)

Relationships cycle just like I do. Or maybe my relationships cycle because I do. Whatever it is, it’s pissing me off. But don’t try to put me on my knees because I will hurt you.

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