interview me meme

I got this from Lady Julia.

Here’s how it works:

* Leave a comment for me saying, “Interview me.”
* I will respond by asking you five personal questions, which I will leave for you in my Comments section.
* If I don’t know you that well, the questions will probably be easy and fun.
* If I think I know you pretty well, then expect the questions to be a little more personal but still not toooo personal.
* To answer them, you must repost the questions along with your answers in your journal/blog. If you don’t have a journal/blog then you may answer the questions here in my comments section.
* Then if you do have a blog, make sure to include this explanation of how it works, and offer to interview anyone else who asks.

Lastly, if you’d like to interview me feel free to do so by posting the questions in the comment section of my blog or on your blog if you have one.

Meanwhile, here are my answers to the questions Lady Julia asked me:

1. Who would be on the list of women you most admire and why?

I admire my best friend for her extraordinary efficacy in accomplishing the tasks she sets herself.  I admire any woman (or person) who works to become smarter.  I admire Hillary Clinton for coming so far against the very negative images many people had of her in the 1990’s.  I admire the great women scientists of the past.

2. Describe your “I feel great” outfit. (Every woman has one – that outfit that makes her feel uber sexy.)

Hmm.  My initial response to this is to say “not me.”  But I do tend to feel a bit sexy (or hot, anyway) if I dress kind of butch.  I like seeing myself in the mirror at the gym pumping some iron in a sleeveless athletic shirt.  I like to look down and see black jeans and hiking boots.  That’s about it for me and sexy outfits :-)

3. If money, time, and physical health were such that you could do any daring activity that you chose, what three activities would you try for the first time? (You define what “daring activity” means to you.)

I’d learn the trapeze, trampoline gymnastics, and scuba diving.

4. List something that really turns you on for each of your five senses.

Sight – lean upper body muscles of men.  Smell – Joscelin’s armpits.  Hearing – sounds of pain or arousal.  Touch – stinging or slapping sensations on my ass, especially after it gets sore.  Taste – there are many I like, but none that I can think of that turn me on.

5. If you could furnish a dungeon with anything you wish, what objects would you include?

Every kind of hitty thing, especially canes.  Tables and stands that would make it easy to immobilize someone.  Chains.  Locks.  Soundproof walls.  And a cage to leave my darling in for a while…

two beautiful women

Jos and I went to the club last weekend – the place where we met.  We were supposed to meet up with a couple beforehand, of which the woman is vanilla and the man is submissive, and take them their for their first time.  The man had initially contacted me, but I’d met the woman and not him (by my request).  Apparently he chickened out, because she called me to cancel right as Jos and I arrived at the restaurant where we were meeting.  So we went to the club by ourselves.

The club makes Jos really headspacy.  We had a lovely small beating scene, and then I botched things slightly.  I hadn’t brought a blanket in, so I left him momentarily to go get one, and when I got back, the DM’s were asking him if he was all right.  Later, one of them let me know that I could have asked them to get a blanket for us.  (She meant it very kindly but I felt like I looked like kind of a jerk, leaving my bottom standing there forelornly.)

I took Jos out to the dungeon antechamber, which is now furnished with a lot of seating, and is the preferred arena for scenes that might require extra lighting.  He was wrapped in two blankets, and we sat on a couch, and he clung to me.  He was really spacy in a way that just doesn’t happen at home.  After a minute, I left him so that I could clean up our space in the dungeon.  I let him know first, but when I got back, he was coming to find me, because he didn’t want to be alone.  So that is how things are at the club.

Our favorite (only) prodom friend Saskia was there, and she had a scene with a SAM guy I’ve watched before, with some vicious paddling and the like.  It was very cute and light-hearted.  There were other friends around.

And then, on the coffee table immediately in front of us (so close that I offered to move), two women had a very intimate scene.  They both looked so beautiful to me – not dressed up at all, not model-pretty by any means, but just beautiful in their eyes and in the intentionality of how they looked.

I don’t want to describe what they did – it doesn’t feel right to describe other people or their scenes in an identifiable way, for the most part – but something happened between them that was very moving to me.  Jos was getting very headspacy watching them, and I was watching them as well, though somewhat subtly (they were so close that I could have leaned forward and reached out to touch them, so I didn’t want to stare).

The top was doing something to the bottom that was difficult for her (for the bottom, I mean) and there was this coaching going on, where the top was looking at her partner with these deep, calming, loving eyes, calling her beautiful and amazing and praising her for what she was able to do.  And pressing her fist against the bottom’s (clothed) pussy and saying words about energy and centering.  And you could see in the top’s face nothing but joy to be there, even as the bottom cried and she tenderly brought her back to a better place.

I was so moved, and I’m still thinking about it days later.  I’m moved because the way that top felt, the way she looked, was just how I feel when Jos struggles, and just how I wish to look.  I saw her actualizing the role I want and try to occupy.  I could feel what she was feeling.

And I was so happy for Jos to see it in someone else, because when he needs my help, he struggles with shame.  He feels like he’s keeping me from doing what I want to be doing.  And that is so not true.  It wasn’t true for that beautiful top at the club – that was very evident – and it isn’t true for me either.  And I think, seeing it outside of us, he could see that.

go back to the end of the hall!

In middle school (ages 11-13, roughly), if teachers caught you running in the halls, they would send you back to the end of the hall and make you walk.  It’s kind of a funny thing to remember, for me, because as an adult I wouldn’t normally run down a hallway, but I guess it is a natural kid thing to do (even if you’re not in a hurry).  Middle school is maybe the last age range where you see that; I don’t remember anyone running in high school.

Joscelin and I have been having scenes lately that aren’t as intense as a lot of the ones we used to have.  He’s usually left wanting a bit more, which is more or less intentional on my part.  And, in contrast to the past, I carefully refrain from pushing him to the point of panic.  I am continually, vigilantly careful; I never give in to my instincts and just hurt him.

It feels like going backwards, and I think it is, a bit.

In the past, we went to very intense scenes pretty quickly, and over time we structured the understanding between us to allow that.  He can use a safeword to have me pause, but he can’t end the scene.  He can’t declare something to be a limit and unilaterally decide that it won’t happen.  He can’t make me stop just because it’s too intense or unpleasant or painful or frightening.  We’ve talked about me saying things like, “I’ll give you a minute to pull yourself together, but then I’m going to do what I want.  And if you can’t take it, I’ll do it to you every week until you can.”

That is a hot vision, but I think the effects in the real world haven’t been so great.  It seems that knowing that your dom is going to make you panic by hurting you really bad while you are helpless, and that no matter how much you try to stay calm she will eventually make you fail, is not conducive to being relaxed, trusting, open, and able to receive sensation in a scene.  (Who knew?)

You get to choose.  We could choose to make our sex like Alexis’s, which is hot-sounding to me.  But it’s not, ultimately, quite what I want.  I don’t want the helpless victim as much as I want the eye contact.  I want the caretaking.  I want the trust.

So we’ve gone back to the end of the hall and we’re proceeding again.  We will come back to those intense scenes by this new route, which involves a different kind of mental state.  I will draw him deeper and deeper in rather than driving him before me with a cattle prod.

That’s how I think it’s going to go, at least.  That’s my intention.

whose pleasure?

A couple of times recently, during fucking, Joscelin has asked me to punish him because he lost focus on my pleasure and was thinking of his own.  I have acquiesced, partly because in general I am willing to punish him upon his request, and partly on the grounds that if he tells me that something in his internal state needs correcting, I am willing to trust him, because nobody understands the functioning of my slave better than he does.

I’ve also been asked a couple of times, again during fucking, to assert that he is required to think of my pleasure above his own.  And, earlier this week, he returned the contract to me, which I gave him a draft of months ago, with his edits.  One of his additions:

He relinquishes to her control over every aspect of his sexual expression, promising to place her pleasure and wants always before his own.  While, as spelled out in the rest of this document, he has the right to satisfaction in an ultimate sense, he understands that [Dev]’s decision of how that is to occur is final…

Although I have gone along with this idea so far, I’m not sure whether it really comports with my own view of our relationship.  I’m not sure I can support it.

It feels to me as though I am allowed, by the terms of our relationship, to put my pleasure above his, absolutely.  (Please do keep in mind that we’re talking about pleasure in the immediate sense, not satisfaction in the grander scheme of things.)  And I have the right to force him to do or experience things that give me pleasure, regardless of how they affect him.  So that (to take a trivial example) if I want him to fuck me more slowly than he’d rather, I win.

But it feels to me as though, as a slave, he’s under no particular obligation to focus on my pleasure more than is required to satisfy me.  I feel perfectly willing for him to take whatever pleasure he finds in a situation as long as he’s obeying me to the best of his ability.  Don’t think about yourself is not the type of order I’d like to give.  It doesn’t seem very realistic, nor, for me, is it hotly unrealistic.

He brought this up a couple of days ago and we talked about it, more or less along these lines.  And what he asked me, acknowledging that it was kind of an awful question, was, “What do I do with the energy?”  Because this idea is very hot and captivating to him, and he wants to express it, and do it, and be it.  He can’t do that in a one-sided way (that’s not how our sex works), and he’s naturally wary of doing it to my detriment (diminishing your partner’s pleasure by obsessing over only focusing on her pleasure would be…ironic).

I don’t know the answer.  I may come to feel more comfortable with this idea over time, or we may resolve it some other way.

weekend scene

Jos and I had our date Saturday night, and it felt like it had been weeks since we’d had a real scene.  I think it really had been weeks.  We went to dinner, and when we got back, I couldn’t face the idea of doing anything at all, so we watched a movie for a while before hopping in bed together.

Despite having accomplished getting naked in bed with my slave, I couldn’t seem to see my way forward to a scene.  I felt so disconnected from the idea of dominance.  I couldn’t feel that bridge from the everyday world to the darkly gleaming kind of scene world.

So we talked for a while, and I admitted to this.  Joscelin curled up with his head against my chest, in the way that he knows feels very submissive to me, and I lay there and decided to simply plan some kind of a scene and carry it out.  I knew I wouldn’t feel it again until I simply did it, so I decided to do it.

I got out the cuffs and some chain and proceeded to fasten Jos’s wrists to the eyebolt at the head of the bed, locking him in inescapably.  He reported headspace immediately, and actually, the very moment I began, I felt aroused and a bit spacy myself.  I continued by putting cuffs on his ankles, attaching them to the spreader bar, and chaining the bar down to the underside of the bed, so that he was completely helpless.

I spent some time just touching him, scratching him with my nails.  He was quick to respond, mostly with fear, and I reminded him to stay calm.  I wasn’t really hurting him, for the most part.  (It did hurt him when I ran my nails over his scrotum, but still not quite as badly as his reaction suggested, I think.) Lying next to him, looking down at him, I felt all of the feelings that I’d felt completely disconnected from.  I was amazed.  It was amazing.

I picked up the very small plastic cane I have – about the length of a forearm and as thin as a TV antenna.  I sat down near his head.

“I’m scared of that thing,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s pretty bad.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said.

“I’m not going to make you panic,” I said.

“Normally I think I could just trust you by knowing that it would be OK if you did, but right now I feel like I need to be completely sure.”

I knew he would be all right, but he was very afraid.  I knew he was responding to the stress and uncertainty of the past week, and the fact that we haven’t had a real scene in a while.  For me it had been hardest just getting started, but for him the whole scene might be difficult.  And it was fine with me.  I was comforting outside, and flying inside.  Even his stress was beautiful to me because I knew it came out of headspace.

I gave him some time to get balanced inside, and then I started hitting him.  I hit him for a while on the inside of his upper right arm, and along the crease of his underarm.  It was hard for him to stay calm even though I wasn’t hitting him very hard.  I gave him plenty of time when he needed it.  It felt strange to him to be hit in his underarm, not surprisingly.

I moved next to the insides of his thighs, a perennial favorite.  I wasn’t really hitting him very hard, but again he was panicking easily and I was talking him through it as we went.  He felt shame and fear over his responses, over not being more calm.

As I reassured him, part of me wanted to wring his neck and tell him to at least relax about the self-judging.  I was not judging him.  And part of me – by far the larger part – was actually relishing the kind of communication we were doing.  He has no idea how much I’m enjoying this, I thought.  I was just alive inside, open, all kinds of energy moving through me.  And of course I was turned on.

At the end, I gave him three hard strokes.  I told him in advance and I promised to give him time to recover inbetween.  He got through them but felt that the last one was too hard.  Just a feeling.

When I unchained him, I made him fuck me.  After we’d been fucking for a long time, he asked me to punish him because he had lost focus on my pleasure.  And I did.  And unlike earlier, when his pain tolerance was low, he took a pretty heavy punishment.  I was hitting him far harder than usual and getting less response.

Afterwards, I had an orgasm and he did not.

I was so high.  I felt so good.  He thanked me profusely for not letting him come.  It was so good that we got to do it, and rebuild things.  We had some talking afterwards that I might report on later, about emotional stuff, but I’ll leave it here for now.

the drama, general and specific

Last night I got home pretty late after school – around 9:20.  Jos was pretty tired and stressed, though things were looking up for him, so he was hanging out in his room playing a game.  I ate the dinner I’d brought in with me and watched Top Chef.  He suggested that we hang out a bit afterwards (at least I thought that was what he suggested), so when I got done with the show, I motioned him into my room and made him get naked and lie in bed with me.

I wanted to explain something from my math class that I thought was kind of cool, and he was reasonably into it, so I did that.  But he was tired and doing the thing he does when he’s tired and stressed and [my interpretation] doesn’t want to be there – sighing with nearly every exhale, punctuated with “oh god” or “oh fuck” in a sighing tone every 10 or 20 breaths.

I had wanted him to have an orgasm every day this week, but after the math conversation (which went fine aside from the continual sighing), I knew I couldn’t really participate in that.  Being intimate together drops too many shields for me to do it with someone who is so clearly expressing a desire to be anywhere else.  I thought about how to get out of it while doing the least damage.

“I think you should go to bed,” I said.

“That sounds like a great idea,” he said.

“Have a good night, sweetie.”

“Aren’t we forgetting something?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I said.  Then, after a little whle, “I decided not to do it.”

He asked me if his being stressed and tired was hard on me (always a fear of his) and I said yes, some.  And then said it wasn’t so much hard on me as things were as that it would be too hard to continue and have any kind of sex.  We continued in that vein a little bit.

Now, for the past week or so I’ve been thinking about the sighing/”oh fuck” thing that he does.  I find it really difficult to tolerate and, honestly, it seems like something a person ought to be able to control.  I don’t intend to make him not express tiredness or stress, and I certainly don’t intend him to plow forward regardless of his feelings, but I think asking him not to do those specific things is more like asking someone not to actually whine.  You can feel whiny, you just can’t whine.  So I’ve been meaning to discuss it with him sometime when he wasn’t stressed.

I don’t know if my desire for that is really defensible.  I get comments here a lot suggesting that I restrict Jos’s ability to complain in various ways, and I think that’s just not fair or realistic.  Is this different?  He’s already stressed that his stress leads to me getting my feelings hurt.  Am I going to make it worse?  Am I trying, consciously or not, to force him not to express these feelings at all?

But I would rather him say “I can’t go out to dinner; I’m too tired and stressed” than go to dinner with me and then sigh for an hour (as happened a few weeks ago).  But, having said that, I then have to actually accept it if he tells me he’s too tired and stressed, and not respond badly to it.

Hopefully it’s clear why we need to talk about this before any attempt to implement it.

Now, returning to last night, when we were talking about whether his stress was hard on me.

“I’m afraid of you,” he said.  “I’m afraid of you all the time.”

“What are you afraid about?” I asked.

“I was afraid of you coming home.  I was afraid it wasn’t OK that I wasn’t spending time with you when you were watching TV.”  He went on a little more.  “I’m afraid of being wrong,” he concluded.

“What would happen?” I asked.

“Just being wrong, I think.  I think that’s enough.”

(I may have the order of events wrong.  I honestly can’t remember if the “I’m afraid” part happened before or after this next part.  This is my best guess.)

I thought about this thing I’ve been meaning to talk with him about, about the sighing.  Because everything else that evening was fine.  And I knew it was not the right time to say anything about it while he was in the middle of being stressed.  And I did it anyway.  I brought it up, while saying it wasn’t the right time, and while basically denying that I was even bringing it up.  (This isn’t an exact quote, but the effect was similar to if I’d said, “I’m going to talk to you later about the sighing that you do, because I want you to stop, but we won’t talk about that now.”)

Good job!  Way to be supportive!

He curled up in my arms for a few minutes and I tried to think of ways to make him feel loved and safe, because in that moment I only loved and accepted him.  Eventually he pulled away and became angry.  And he got up, saying, “Everything I do in this bed is wrong.  Everything is wrong.  Everything I express is wrong.  Everything is hurtful.  Everything is personal.”

I knew he was going to leave, and that was all right, but I couldn’t let the statements pass without correction.  “Neither of us deserve that,” I said.  And then, “I have a fantastic time with you all the time.  In this bed and elsewhere.”

So he left, and went into his room.  Later we IM’ed (yes, from adjoining rooms).  I IM’ed him to say I was sorry, that I had meant to be supportive and totally failed because I let myself have a lapse of self control.

He was really angry, though he didn’t say much in the IMs (but I could tell from the sounds of his movements in the house), and stressed and confused.

“I can’t tell if you continually mistreat me,” he typed, “or if I’m just freaked out or what, exactly.”

“I know,” I typed back.  “We will talk about this when both of us aren’t tired, and if I am mistreating you, I will do my utmost to stop.”

My saying that made him remember his trust for me.  Eventually we had a nice hug and I went to bed.

But this is an ongoing problem that we have, a kind of knot of interconnected issues that I don’t know how to pull apart.  Everything is worse when he’s stressed anyway; when he’s not, mostly we can handle all of this just fine.  But I wish there weren’t so much “this” to handle.

When he told me he was afraid of me, I wanted to say, me too, I am afraid of you all the time.  I am always afraid of his anger.  Afraid of rejection.  Afraid that he resents me.  Afraid that he doesn’t want me to touch him.  Afraid of him pulling away in any way.  I have noticed about myself in previous relationships that I seem to constantly monitor the emotional distance between myself and my partner, and become immediately afraid and hurt if that distance widens at all, ever, for any reason.

And he is terrified of hurting me.  And, you know, who can blame him?  I get hurt too easily.  I take fucking everything personally.  I am afraid of stuff (like being hated) that is never true.  How could that not get to him, given that he cares about my feelings?

He’s sensitive to my anger and irritability because he obeys me.  (Maybe he would be anyway.  I don’t know.)  I am sensitive to his because I’m just a big fucking wimp.  And both of us are naturally somewhat irritable.  And both of us get more emotional and think everything is going to the dogs when we’re underslept.  Both of us fear that we’re in trouble with the other one all the time.

He specifically asked me earlier this week to please not take things personally this week during his stress, to trust him that he was just trying to get his shit together.  Please.  And I promised to do my best.

So much for that.

As I lay in bed last night, I thought about whether I could calm the drama from my side.  What if I just stopped crying or visibly reacting to things?  What if I forced myself not to display hurt?  Wouldn’t I feel that inside too?  If I didn’t allow myself to respond to things, could I stop responding?

I remembered deciding in early high school that I wasn’t going to let my mom make me cry anymore.  And I just didn’t.  I turned that part of myself off around her and it hardly ever happened again.  Could I do that with Jos?  Except that obviously I don’t want to tune out emotionally.  I don’t want to get cold and just suppress hurt and anger.

But maybe it’s possible to do it another way.  Maybe it is possible to actually become easy-going, to let go a little bit.  Maybe I could let go of the bad stuff – fear, anxiety, clinginess, insecurity – without letting go of caring, loving, wanting, and intimacy.

Maybe.

blogs and therapy

At my therapy appointment last week, I discussed the dust-up that Joscelin and I had over his post last week.  (I described the whole thing here.)  My therapist was clearly a bit surprised about how we use our blogs to communicate and it seemed obvious that he would advise against it if he were in the business of giving straightforward advice.  It was also evident that blogs as a medium are slightly foreign to him.

It’s like a diary in that someone reading it should understand that it’s going to be self-centered, but it’s different from a diary in that anyone can read it.  My therapist gently drew out of me something like the answer to the question “Isn’t it kind of passive aggressive to complain about your lover on your blog without talking to them first at the very least?”  We talk about passive aggressiveness a lot, so it was germane.

The truth is, blogging can be a tool of passive aggression.  But I think that we (Jos and I) enjoy giving each other the space to, basically, journal about our experiences.  In theory, the other should read it as though they are reading a diary – without expecting what they read to be completely fair or correct.  Whatever enlightenment one gleans from the other’s blog entries should be enjoyed and appreciated, and bad feelings let go of – it’s just a diary!  Except, of course, that there is some effect from the knowledge that what has been said is public.  And, in any case, it’s not as though you could always read someone’s diary without being hurt.

I don’t write here quite the way I would in a diary.  I actually try to be fair, and I do also keep my readers in mind, in terms of what they’ll think and whether they’ll come away with an accurate picture of what’s going on.  (I think I continually fail at giving an accurate picture, though, perhaps because the task is nearly impossible.)  And I keep Joscelin in mind very much.  I know he will read whatever I write here.

Why have this blog at all?  Honestly, writing out my thoughts in such detail really does help me work things out.  And having an audience motivates me, so that I write here far more often than I would in a private journal.  (The only time I kept a journal for real was in high school, when writing about myself was a great way to pass the time I spent trapped in classrooms.)  And maybe having the pressure of an audience to push me to try to be fair helps me see a bit more clearly what’s going on outside of my head.

And I enjoy it as a communication channel with Jos.  It’s much easier to write here than to have conversations in person.  I get to write everything from my own perspective without taking his feelings into account quite as much as I would in a one-on-one conversation.

Most of what I’ve said is applicable, or at least I hope it is, to Jos’s blog.  And I think these good things make it worth the occasional pain and confusion over things that we post.  It’s just stuff to work through anyway, and we usually come out stronger on the other side.

the Saturday date

Joscelin and I have a standing arrangement for a date on Saturday night.  It is the one day of the week that doesn’t involve either working or getting up early the next day, for me, and it gives us a nice chunk of time in which to have good sex and heavy scenery and reconnect.  It’s really important to me, and I had to fight hard for it in the beginning of our relationship, and sometimes I went a bit crazy over it.  I’m not as crazy now, but I still think it’s important.

Jos agrees it is important, and he says that he looks forward to it, but unfortunately I don’t really feel those things from him.  Because I have kind of taken ownership of the Saturday Date, and become the enforcer thereof, most of what I hear from him is pulling away from it.  I hear a lot of stress over the time that it takes away from his work.  I hear fears about disappointing me by not being able to do it. So it tends to feel to both of us as though it is “my time” and not his or ours.

Last night, we got to our date a bit late and we just ordered some dinner in.  Jos was crazy tired and stressed, and eventually I made him lie down in bed with me.  I had no plans of doing anything stressful like a scene, because he really couldn’t (I felt) have handled it.  I just wanted us to spend some time together in an intimate way.

As we lay there, he asked me how I’d feel about playing Eve Online sometime during our Saturday date.  We play together occasionally, but not as often as we’d like to.  Yet he had asked me for an honest answer, and I’d promised to do my best, so I said that I’d rather not play it during our date.  I knew it was the wrong answer when I said it, but, you know, what are you gonna do?

So he said that if we did that sometime, he would feel as though he had some say in things, and as though the date was not completely my time, but also his time.  I acknowledged that, but there wasn’t much else for me to say.  And he said that the date often stresses him because of the lost time for working, etc., but that it is important to him and he looks forward to it.

This just brought up my feelings about being tired of being the Enforcer of the Date.  I hate it.  I hate the way it always feels like I want it and he resists it.  I hate feeling like I am making him give up time for me.  So I said something to this effect – that I am tired of being the enforcer, and feeling like I make him do this.

I watched him get visibly angry, and I pulled away from his body so that we weren’t touching.  I was afraid.  And I decided to not feel afraid, to be trusting instead, to remember who I was really dealing with, and I let my arm fall across him and I just watched him, and focused on trusting him.  And thought about him just dealing with his anger.

“If that’s your response then you didn’t hear what I just said,” he said.

So it went on like that for a bit; the idea of trying to recap it makes me feel tired.  But we were all right in the end and we had a little bit of sex.

But I so want out of this enforcer role about the dates.  But I don’t want to give up the dates, so I guess I’m just hoping for a consequence-free environment again – wanting to make sure we have the dates but without it being me who is responsible for making us have them.  Typical me.

I guess I would feel better if I heard positive things from Jos about them before hand.  Like “Are we having our date this Saturday?”  Or “I can’t wait to have our date tomorrow.”  That would be nice.

“24/7″ and switching

Omnivore’s Dilemma left an interesting comment on my “Opportunities to Submit” post:

Once again you’ve managed to articulate for me one of the reasons I’ve always felt uncomfortable about 24/7 topping — it’s hard work!

From the other side, though, I understand Jos’s frustration with the whole wanting-to-submit thing. Bottoming is hard work too.

My solution, of course, is switching. Doesn’t work for everyone, though.

It made me think, not for the first time, about what it would be like to switch with Jos.  When we first met, we played in both directions (twice each, over a period of months, before we started dating), and much more recently we switched for most of a weekend.  And being the bottom/sub was very hot for me, and he certainly seemed turned on most of the time.  A good time was had by all.

But I really, really don’t want to be the submissive partner in our relationship, and I don’t want to have a regular switching arrangement either.  When I was submitting to Jos over that weekend, despite how real and vivid it was, and despite how sincere my submission in the moment was (and it was), I still had a comforting background knowledge that I was “really” the dom, and would resume that role at some point.

I don’t really know how to explain all of this, and I especially don’t know how to explain it without sounding like a dick.  But one thing that is operative here is that I really do like the feeling of status in the relationship that comes with being on the top.  I like that it is “real” (I guess that’s the word for my feeling) and not just a momentary arrangement that can just as easily go in the other direction.  And I really do not want to be the kind of submissive that Jos would want, not all the time.  (I would say that I don’t think he wants to be the kind of dom that I want, except that I think the “kind of dom I want” is probably the empty set.  I strongly do not want a dom.  However, the type of partner I could enjoy who would be dominant with me in bed is not dominant in the way that would most appeal to Jos, I think.)

As for the 24/7-ness of what we do…god, it is the bomb.  It does require some work, but it’s the absolute bomb.

I think people (not Omnivore’s Dilemma, but other people) have misconceptions about 24/7.  Joscelin is not a doll or robot who sits idle unless I tell him to do something.  I do not have to control his actions all of the time, by any means.  He has a life that he goes about living all of the time.  And there are limits to my control as well.  It does not extend to his job or his family, for one thing.  And there are other limits as well.  (For instance, we don’t do breath play or anything involving denial of food or drink.)

But I love that, within these limits, I can at any time make him do whatever I want.  It’s not just useful, though I am so in love with the usefulness that I couldn’t bear the thought of giving it up.  It is also beautiful and hot and special.  It’s powerful.  And I want it.  And I don’t ever want it to be some other way.

Jos could have easily had a relationship with me in which we did d/s only in bed.  I’m not sure if it would have even occurred to me to clamor for more.  But I am delighted and pleased by the way it actually is.

exercise

Ever since July of 2007, Joscelin has been doing exercise on my orders.  The rules changed slightly over time, but basically required him to get some form of exercise several days a week for a total of a little over 3 hours a week.  He kept a log, and I can report that between 7/2007 and 10/2008, he got a total of over 200 hours of exercise in, for me.  He exercised, on average, over 25 minutes per day over that entire interval.  That’s pretty impressive to me.

In all that time, I think there was one week, early on, when he didn’t get the required amount of exercise and was (at his request, back then) punished.  Other times I excused him for illness or other reasons, but not very often.  He often got the required exercise in the midst of a lot of other stressors, sometimes staying up an hour later in the middle of the night to go out and walk for me.  He’s been extremely reliable on the whole, in ways that made having given him this assignment very easy and enjoyable for me.  (When I first gave it, we’d been dating less than two months, and I really did not think he’d be able or willing to do it.)

A couple of weeks ago I was feeling envious of some friends we have who seem to go the gym together, and wishing I had a gym partner myself.  Well, thought I, I have a way to fix that, right? So, after checking the feasibility with Jos, I changed his exercise task.  He no longer has to keep a log, and he no longer has to exercise without me.  Now he has to accompany me on three non-consecutive days a week to the gym for about a 45-minute workout.  He’s not required to like it, but he is requested to be relatively positive about it.  He’s not supposed to try to force me to go if I’ve decided not to, but he is not supposed to enable my not going.  (The proper question on those nights is, “When are we going to the gym?” not “Are we going tonight?” and certainly not “Do you want to go?” followed by “Oh good, me neither.”)

At first, my intention was that we would simply each pursue our own goals.  But last week I decided to give him an actual mandated strength training routine, so I did – drew him up a chart and everything.  Last Thursday, I trained him on the specific exercises I’d outlined, showing him how to do them and monitoring him.  Last night we went for the second time, and I monitored him on the one exercise I was concerned about his form on.

I also decided yesterday to do the same routine myself.  It’ll be convenient and fun that way, and since he is already required to bring his chart on a clipboard with a pencil, I can just have him bring my chart as well, on the same clipboard.

So we did this last night, our routines, and it was awesome.  I did 20 minutes of cardio afterwards and I’m still high from it all.  I fucking love strength training, especially with free weights.  And with my (essentially) crew cut right now, I look super butch doing it, too.  Rah!

Jos was a bit curious why I chose to emphasize strength training rather than cardio for him.  Even though cardio is (marginally) more likely to make him more slender, and is important for health, I find strength training personally much more satisfying, more butch, and sexier.  The idea of a guy pushing heavy things around for me is much yummier than the idea of him using an elliptical machine.  And, you know, muscles are nice.  So, yeah.  It’s good stuff.

Plus it makes me high, like today.  I am really thrilled about the whole thing.