My prior post, On kinky competence, generated a few really good replies in the comments, and across the blogosphere. Perhaps even more are yet to appear.

One short piece in particular by Dev so perfectly represented most of the reactions to my post that as I began writing a comment to her I realized it might be better served as a pseudo-comment, or (since it’s so long) an epilogue if you will, to my own post.

Dev states that she feels intimidated by me, or more probably by my attitude towards others. (I haven’t found others who know me in person to be intimidated by me, only by my reputation or the expressions of my way of thinking, such as my writing.) As a result, she says she’d never try to play with me because she feels as though I would judge her to be too incompetent to be interesting, or attractive.

I’d never try to play with him. He intimidates the crap out of me[…]. I’m not super confident and I can’t even play at dominating someone who makes me feel the way May does. […] I have no particular bdsm skills.

Of course, I know I give off an air of potentially arrogant intimidation. I assure you, it is very deliberate. I do it because it’s useful in a couple of ways. First, it’s very expressive. It’s obvious to everyone what I think because I make no bones about thinking or saying it. This saves a lot of time. If only I could learn to be this direct in all my communications, but alas, I am actually rather shy sometimes. (Also, in person, I wiggle a lot more. :)

Second, it can act as a sort of pre-screening process, which again saves time. People who would not feel comfortable playing with me don’t bother to ask. This is not a bad thing. If I want to play with them, however, I (thankfully) have gotten into the habit of asking. (I only wish I got into the habit of asking even sooner than I did.) There are no losses in this situation that I care about too deeply.

In the same vein, people who don’t agree with me about these things are probably not people I want to play with anyway, so the fact that all the cards are shown make compatibility errors a lot less likely. This is basically an instance of Eileen’s negotiation tactics in reverse. The fact that the two of us approached this getting-to-know-you phase in symbiotic ways certainly helped speed our familiarity with one another.

However, I think Dev (and those like her) are more competent than she thinks I think she is. Here’s why:

I have some crazy levels of emotional competence

Most people don’t even have a concrete emotional awareness, so having crazy levels of emotional competence is leaps and bounds ahead of most people already. I also find that emotional competencies are a fundamental ingredient for many other kinds of competence. So, if you care about emotional competencies—which I obviously do—this is a big one, though I’ll admit it’s not actually on everybody’s radar.

Emotional competencies are not a direct subject of this blog post, but they are a fascinating subject in their own right, whether or not you relate to them in a kinky or sexual context. Learning more about emotional competency and, to use the academic term, emotional intelligence, is something I’d recommend to everyone. This is one of those topics that is application-agnostic. What you learn about emotional intelligence in the context of, say, the office, is entirely relevant to the bedroom, and vice versa.

One of the most telling things Dev says is this:

I consider it always my responsibility to play safely, but I also appreciate my partner’s watchfulness in a scene.

Responsibility is an expression of emotional competence, and if Dev is actually playing responsibly every time she plays (and from her writings I believe she does), then she is in fact emotionally competent. Furthermore, an inherent part of being responsible is acknowledging that you are not always going to be able to control every variable in the scene, that things will go wrong sometimes. Appreciating your partner’s watchfulness and responding appropriately is a key example of that, which many incompetent tops and inexperienced newbies don’t do properly.

Again, this blog post isn’t a discussion of BDSM safety 101 (there are tons of great resources for that online, such as those behind the links on my sidebar) so I won’t go into safewords, safegestures, and the like here. What I’m trying to point out is that good tops prepare for the unexpected and take responsibility for the situation when the unexpected occurs.

In conversation a while ago with Eileen about this subject, I remarked that I liked the fact that the way she plays is sometimes incredibly childlike. With little prior understanding of a thing, she will poke at it anyway, she will experiment, and sometimes she will fuck up and the scene will take a turn for the worse. When this happens, however, she pulls it (and me) together, and we regroup in a new emotional (and sometimes even physical) space. She’s not afraid to take risks, and neither am I.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the physical skill of throwing a whip, for instance, and everything to do with the emotional competencies necessary for responsibility. Like a child, she explores with wonder and fun and the faith that everything will be all right regardless of what she does, and like an adult, she cleans up after herself. To really play with her, I have to be willing and able to do the same. Again, competence is not a one-way street.

Regarding BDSM-specific skills, Dev says this:

In a scene, I think I am decent with touch and tone of voice and things like that. Physically, no – I have no particular bdsm skills.

Using touch and tone of voice and things like that is certainly what I consider to be under the umbrella of BDSM skills. BDSM is, as a simplistic definition, a superset of sex, so I think most skills that can be sex skills are also BDSM skills.

Most people frankly aren’t that competent at sex. Since so many people are so different in so many subtle and not-so-subtle ways, it’s actually quite difficult to be really competent at sex in general when most of your understanding of sex revolves around things like how to suck and how to fuck. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of sex and other factors that change from person to person, smart (or intuitive) people focus on skills that are universally relevent to making sex better. These are (perhaps counter-intuitively) mostly skills that relate to oneself, such as confidence, attitude, and an ability to adapt.

This is why the sexiest people you meet are always the ones with the air of self-assured seduction. Convince yourself that you are sexy and, by golly, most people will actually agree with you. Act, look, and talk that way, and I don’t think anyone will find reasons to disagree. They probably won’t even be looking for reasons in the first place.

Also, it’s really easy to be “good enough” at sex. “Good enough” is certainly a level of competence and it’s likewise really easy to be “good enough” at BDSM sex. I’ve played with and had sex with people who I’d consider “good enough.” It wasn’t spectacular, but it was certainly good enough, even for the competence snob that I am. There’s really nothing wrong with something that’s only satisficing, instead of something that’s very satisfying. In vanilla terms, this is usually a “quickie,” and kinky people do that, too.

As a final point on sex skills, just so it’s on the record, I don’t think most people I know—including myself until very recently—actually know how to use their tone of voice as a tool to enhance sex or a scene. It’s actually quite a tricky thing. It requires quite a bit of skill and situational awareness to use consciously, and a lack of self-consciousness to use unconsciously, so “good enough” is actually not that low on the bell-curve, I think.

Most of my toys don’t require much skill to be safe. I pay attention to safety. (I pay a lot of attention just in general.)

Many people who are incompetent betray that fact specifically by playing with toys and in ways that they should not for safety reasons. (I have seen so many people use a flogger while not even looking at the person’s back they are flogging. For fuck’s sake, look where you’re aiming! You seem to be able to do that when you pee, why not when you flog?) That’s actually the classic earmark of a clearly incompetent top.

Furthermore, when incompetent people try to learn things they do so in thoughtless or unsafe ways, whereas competent people tend to learn skills from people they already know to be competent and continue to play with such things only under the watchful eye of their teachers until both them and their teacher feels that they can safely do it alone.

In other words, if you’re doing what Dev is saying that she is doing, then you’re competent insofar as your own training is concerned. For obvious reasons, being a competent learner is one of the competencies I consider to be most important.

This brings into the spotlight another distinction I feel compelled to make. That distinction is the one between incompetent partners, as I’ve described before (briefly: someone who does not have or show the required skills to do something successfully and thus does not perform successfully), and unskilled partners, who may become competent but aren’t yet. Via an optimistic eye, all people could be said to be merely unskilled, not incompetent, but that is not very helpful. Instead, the word unskilled connotes merely a lack of some special skill without further implication that they are thus not executing this skill successfully.

I don’t really have much of an issue with unskilled tops as long as they are competent enough learners in general to become skilled. I’ve let more than a handful of people learn things like singletails and piercings on my flesh, possibly the two most “edgy” things by some people’s standards that I do often. I’ll admit these scenes were not as exciting for me as the scenes in which I play with one of the other more skilled tops or tops with whom I am emotionally invested, but then again, excitement was not necessarily the goal for the scene.

Finally, Dev notes:

I am honest about my level of experience.

Obviously, honesty is critical. Honesty is in a way the underpinnings of all of competence. So naturally, I am just as honest about my standards of competence as I am about my level of experience.