a new approach to hitting

Many things are going beautifully in my relationship with Joscelin – better than ever, in fact. I’m getting pretty good at doing little things that make him feel like a slave, turn me on, and keep the dynamic going in everyday ways. Orgasm control is hotter (and in some ways more vicious) than ever. There are plans and goals, tasks and protocols, and things are just great.

But one thing that isn’t going well is scenes that involve hitting.  (By “hitting” I mean caning, beating, flogging, slapping, etc.)  And this is a problem, because hitting Joscelin is one of my very favorite parts of sex. It is probably my favorite part of sex, period. No, seriously.

Hitting is hard for Joscelin and seems to be getting harder over time.  I get a lot of advice from him about what would make it easier for him.  More bondage.  More telling him in advance [exactly] what I’m going to do, so he can process and accept it.  Conversations if I’m going to do anything new.  Various kinds of reassurances.

Lately we’ve made punishments more intense.  He has talked about how it’s confusing him, making him expect more harshness in other scenes, making him afraid.  His unconscious mind, at least, can’t separate punishments from scenes.

A lot of times, the scenes simply go badly, at least for me.  The other night, somewhat post-scene, he asked me to hurt him.  (He was in that “wanting everything” mode with which I’m very familiar.)  I told him I would slap him – not the kind of pain he had in mind, I’m sure – and I took off his glasses.  “Please, make it hard,” he asked me.

So I slapped him, four or five times, pretty hard.

And it was too hard.  He said it wasn’t helping to rebuild his confidence (re: the punishment confusion thing) for me to do that.  It was scary.  Too scary.

Everyone has limits and needs, and blaming Joscelin because being smacked frightens him and is hard for him would be a real asshole move on my part.  But his needs and limits around it are growing rather than shrinking.  In the earlier days, we had plenty of nice, easy scenes where I hit him freely in different ways, and he was able to manage it, and things were good.  I got that beautiful clean high and we had aftercare and nobody fell apart (most of the time).

At some point recently, after a scene, I found myself face down near the edge of the bed, arm hanging over the edge, sodden with despair.  You’re making it impossible for me to top you, I thought (but didn’t say).  I have to navigate this byzantine hedge-maze of techniques, rules, needs, laws, reassurances.  I can’t do it.

Whenever we’re going to have a scene, I think about what I want to try, and lately, when I think of hitting, I usually run into all of the reasons and ways it won’t work and the different kind of steps I would have to do to even have a chance of it working and all of the dangers and traps and ways that it is fraught, and then…I just don’t.  I decide to do something else instead, something easier and more manageable, something that won’t end with me getting my confidence destroyed or feeling like an asshole for not navigating the maze correctly.

There are many different ways of managing this type of relationship.  Jos is more or less in favor of a system where I get to hit him, it’s dreadful for him, and he has no choice but to bear it because he is my slave.  His advice to me is about how I can make that work, because he does have limits and isn’t capable (obviously) of just taking everything under all conditions.  He loves our d/s overall, and I don’t think he’s even dissatisfied with how these scenes are going.  He just wants to be made use of and wants to help me do that.

Maybe if I were a different kind of dom, a different kind of top, I would be able to use him in that way.  I would have to be very careful and measured with it.  I would have to want that exact result – his pain (and not the happier masochist kind, but more or less just pain) and suffering.  The grinding away at his will.

I don’t think it’s what I want.  I know I’m not capable of carrying it out, whether I want it or not.

The idea that I can’t have it is painful to him.  He wants to give it to me.  I’m not sure he can bear the thought of me not taking it from him.

But as I was thinking through this yesterday, and talking to him, I came to the hypothesis that these types of scenes are just not safe enough for him, the way that we’re currently conducting them.  A part of him is erecting these continual barriers and conditions against me in a desperate attempt to keep him safe from imminent harm.  It’s the best guess I have as to why things seem to be going backwards all the time.  He is just too scared.  And that fear is not irrational, but simply the natural result of what we’ve been doing.

The night that we switched back, just recently, I hit him over and over and over with my quirt.  It was the most satisfying, best hitting in a long time.  And it started with me telling him that I wanted him to try to relax and find the pleasure in what I was doing.  Besides setting him up to try to do that, it set me up to try to keep the pain in the range where he could find pleasure in it.  And it worked, and I was actually hitting him way harder than I would have thought I could.  I got very high and it was wonderful.

So what I am asking from Jos now is that he let me take him down this different path.  Many things will not change, but how we do pain in scenes will change.  The main thing I am asking is for him to be less stoical and more responsive.  When I hit him, I want to know from his sounds how much it hurts, how pleasurable it is (if at all), how afraid he is, how much he does or does not want me to continue.  I don’t want him to rigidly bear what I do to him.  I want him to move, I want him to groan in pain or pleasure.

Currently, we sometimes have a dynamic like this.  I hit him somewhere, and it’s hard enough to scare him.  And he forces himself to lie still and not thwart me, but he can only do this by trusting me that I won’t hit him that hard right away again.  But he hasn’t actually communicated anything to me, so there is absolutely no reason to trust that I won’t go right back with the same intensity.  And I do and then he feels even more afraid, possibly angry, because he knew the trust was misplaced and was proved right.

We have both trained him to be this way – to lie still, not to thwart me at all, to simply submit to everything.  And his self-discipline is amazing.

But imagine that, instead, he lets himself put his hand in the way of my next strike, and waits until he feels safe enough to remove it.  I want that pushing, where he pushes himself to let go, but I want the pushing from the inside out – I want him to push himself to relax and then remove the hand.  Under that scenario, he has communicated, and it’s reasonable to think that I’ll pull back for at least a little while.  The trust he needs is warranted.

When Joscelin screams or squirms and I pull back, that can also make him afraid or angry.  He feels like he has failed, and maybe like he is being punished – similar to how, if you screw up a chore, someone might say, “Fine, you don’t have to do it.  I’ll do it.”  (Sure, you’ve gotten out of a chore.  But you’ve also been passive-aggressively reprimanded.)  So he has focused a lot of energy on resisting doing anything that might force me to temper my strokes.  And he is also afraid of hurting me by seeming not to enjoy things.

What a tangle, eh?

I want to focus on having pain scenes that are pleasurable for us both.  If you view pain and pleasure as adjacent territories, I want him either on the pleasure side, or in that gray area between, where you hover between the two.  (Maybe you’re reading this and you’re not a masochist and this sounds crazy.  Have you ever had a professional massage?  If it hurts too much, it doesn’t feel good, but it feels best if it’s challenging rather than just nice.  I don’t think that’s just my masochism talking.)

He wanted to know whether I do or don’t want him afraid.  This has always been a question because, on the one hand, his fear turns me on, and I often say things to encourage it, but on the other hand, I don’t actually want him to dread our scenes, or to feel locked into something terrible.  And I think where I want him to be on the fear scale is the same as on the pain.  I want him to look forward to scenes and to want them to continue, or else to be in that badlands between fear and thrilled anticipation.  I definitely want the news that I’m done to engender disappointment before the relief sets in.

So I am asking Jos to come with me on this radically new approach to our scening.  I am asking him to accept that I don’t want to have a scene with him if he doesn’t want one, don’t want to hurt him if he doesn’t want to be hurt, at least for now.  I will continue to push and force him in other ways but not with hitting, and generally not with much pain at all.  (Some types of pain are more erotic for him and he isn’t showing a loss of tolerance in those areas.  I’m talking about the other types.)

He keeps flipping back and forth between “Damn, that sounds really wonderful” and crippling anxiety about the loss of being forced, the loss of being used, the (completely unwarranted) sense of having failed at bottoming.  But I think with skill and effort we can make this work and be good, and eventually come to a much better place than we’ve been so far.

the fight with the radfems

Yes, everyone and their kinky mom is posting on this topic.  Earlier I posted this comment:

Earlier in this thread, the question was asked, why would anyone want to be a slave?

My boyfriend wants to be a slave in his personal life. Since he hit puberty it is the basis of every sexual thought and feeling he’s had. Who the hell knows why?

He’s also a clear-thinking, sarcastic, independent-minded, regular person who wants to do fulfilling work, having relationships with friends and family, and so on. And like anyone in a relationship, he has to balance those things.

We talk all the damn time about how things are going, how we both feel, how/whether things are impacting his life. And then I go treat him like an object and he lights up with joy and begs me for more. And we keep talking and fixing what isn’t working.

The male-dominant, female-submissive relationships I’m familiar with seem to work the same way.

to which I got this response from Delphyne:

“My boyfriend wants to be a slave in his personal life.”

Luckily for him he’s got a woman on hand to meet his needs then.

Female subs talk about keeping their masters happy, now you are doing the same from the other direction. The one constant is that it is the men who have to always be pleased and appeased by the women in their life.

Anyhow looking at your blog it appears he also enjoys beating you up, so it isn’t the same dynamic of most of the female subs here who have relationships with male sadists. Although just reading through it apparently you have to wait until he wants to switch back, so it appears the control still lies with him.

This highlights what is, for me, one of the most frustrating aspects of this debate: the lack of belief, on the part of radfems, in any possible symmetry between men and women.  Some of them believe I am different from the mandoms in that

1. I am obviously doing this to please Joscelin, while mandoms are not in the game to please their partners.  (Indeed, in the same way I am trying to please Jos, submissive women are also trying to please their male masters.)
2. Joscelin is in control of who dominates whom.
3. Joscelin and I sometimes switch.

Point #2 is simply wrong.  Both times that we switched, I initiated switching.  Both times, we explicitly agreed that either of us could initiate switching back (with the understanding that the other would agree) for any reason.  One time, he initiated the switching back, and the second time it was me.

Naturally, Jos could end the d/s part of our relationship.  He could withdraw his consent from my domination of him.  I could end it as well.  I’m comfortable saying that this is true in all healthy relationships (d/s or otherwise).

Point #1 – that I am in this to please Jos – I doubt is more true for me than it is for your average mandom.  Because of our fucked-up patriarchal culture, it may be true that there are more femdoms doing it to please men than there are mandoms doing it to please women.  Women are trained by the culture to please men, and I think men are often more in touch with their own sexualities.  However, that “average” difference doesn’t mean that, in any given relationship, it’s the man dragging the woman along.  I certainly know submissive women who want more dominance from their partners, seek it out, feel bad about being pushy, and wonder whether certain things are done merely to please them.  (I don’t know many mandoms, so I can’t really comment about their experiences, but I’m sure many are pretty much like me – kinky, sadistic, happy to be in control, and also pretty well motivated to please their partners.)

Point #3 is…strange.  I’m not sure which combinations of dominant/submissive male/female are most likely to be switches.  I know plenty of both sexes.  For a lot of us, kink is kink, and it’s hot (if not to the same exact degree) from both sides.  I know other men and women who don’t switch.

You simply can’t make yourself heard in this conversation.  If a mandom says he pleases his partner with dominance, or a submissive woman says she’s pleased by her partner, then they’re lying or the woman is confused, or in denial, or experiencing “Stockholm Syndrome.”  (I guess those female submissives who intentionally seek out d/s relationships do so because they’re confused, and then they get into these horrible abusive relationships, and then they learn to like them because of Stockholm Syndrome.  Kind of complicated compared to the idea that they just seek out what they want and then get it, isn’t it?  But whatever.)  If I say, “This is all right [not abusive] because my partner likes it and thrives on it,” then it’s just a sign that I’m doing it all for him.

There is absolutely nothing you can say about bdsm that you can’t say about fucking.  It resembles an act of violence (rape).  It poses health risks to women.  Women do it to please men.  It’s a tool men use to control women.  It’s associated with centuries of oppression.  Some people have no interest in it.  Sometimes women think they want it, but end up not enjoying it.  Sometimes a woman fucks a man who turns out to be a jerk.  Sometimes people fuck for the wrong reasons.

And yet, I think that women who enjoy fucking can be listened to by radfems.  I think most radfems understand how someone – even a woman – might enjoy fucking, and how a man who likes to fuck women isn’t necessarily an abuser, a rapist, a controlling asshole.  They might be able to conceive that sometimes a man fucks a woman because it’s her idea or because she likes it.  They might be able to conceive that a woman who seeks out a man to fuck isn’t necessarily confused or driven by patriarchally-instilled self-loathing.

But because bdsm is “obviously” abusive and wrong, any woman who participates in it is a victim, whether she knows it or not.  Any man who does it is an abuser and an asshole.  It doesn’t matter what it feels like to you, or what effects it has on you or your partner, or what it means to you.  It just is what it is.

(If you are wondering “What about teh gays? Haven’t I seen lesbians doing bdsm too?” don’t worry. They don’t actually exist in this conversation. You were imagining things. I’m sure they just imitate fucked-up hetero culture in their relationships anyway.)

I start off agreeing with the feminist idea that one should examine bdsm and recognize how it mirrors patriarchy, and give that some thought.  But I’ve never been as turned off from feminism as I am right now, and I say that as a committed feminist.

switching back

Saturday night, Joscelin was very tired.  I was (as usual in this switching period) dying to be hurt, used, “done to,” but I could see that, after three straight days of scenes, he probably wasn’t going to want to do much with me.  He talked about wanting to do some rope bondage.  I committed to not being a dick about not getting all of my submissive whims fulfilled by my tired partner.  We went out to dinner (at one of those places where you order at a counter, since it was Valentine’s Day and we didn’t have reservations anywhere).

While we were eating, and of course talking about everything, I started to feel dominance towards him.  I was just kind of missing my slave, and realizing he was right in front of me.  And I let those feelings grow and kind of soaked in them.

He wanted some ice cream, so we went to an ice cream parlor nearby.  I hinted to him about how I was feeling, but he didn’t pick up the hints.  When I told him I was feeling dominant, he was like, “Oh, interesting.”  But not in an interested way.

I went to the bathroom, partly to collect my thoughts.  One of our understandings from the beginning was that either of us could instigate the return to normalcy when we wanted to.  Did I want to?  On the one hand, I didn’t want to miss out on any submissive experiences, and I had really been enjoying everything – even things that are not typically up my alley, like service, protocols, and postures.  On the other hand, I wanted to feel dominant.  I wanted not to have my dominant feelings rejected, as they felt like they were being by his indifference.  (I am reasonably certain he was not actually indifferent.  But what do you say when someone who is submitting to you tells you they feel dominant?  It’s hard to know which way to jump on that one.)

I was confused emotionally.  We went to rent a movie, and in the parking lot, all I could think was how badly I wanted him to ask me to switch back.  I needed for him to need to be my slave.  I was afraid to make the first move.  I felt I was risking rejection.

I’m not even sure I wanted to switch back as much as I wanted him to want to switch back.

So we talked in the parking lot, and we did switch back.  I managed not to sound as muddled, I think, as I really was, and as I’m describing myself now.  He got headspacy in the parking lot.  He didn’t reject me.  He never does.

When I reassured him that I wouldn’t hurt him that night, that we didn’t have to have a scene, he made it clear that that would be a loss for him.  I said, well, it’s negotiable…

So we did have a scene.  I (among other things) used the quirt on him – asking him to try to be calm but not stoic, accept the slight randomness of it, and try to find the pleasure in it.  And I think he did.  (Amusingly, the last time I used the quirt on him – many months ago – he asked me if I would please practice on an inanimate object before trying it again, because he feared my lack of control over it.  This time, the only comment I got was that my control with it was so much greater than his.  I have not practiced.)

After the scene, he was mixed up, a bit depressed maybe, confused.  Switching back was confusing, and he was tired (as he had been all evening), and just hoping he would feel better in the morning.  I just encouraged him to keep talking to me and not to worry about feeling mixed-up, because I felt it too.

I am not sure I did the right thing in ending the switch when I did.  There may have been more for me to learn and get out of it (and enjoy).  I may have ended it prematurely out of my insecurity.  But it feels good to be where we are now.  I had a fantastic time and I think I got a lot of insights from the experience.  And I am glad to have my slave back.

the last scene

Friday night after dinner, Joscelin had me strip and stand facing the window.  (The blinds were closed – it wasn’t that kind of scene.)  I had just finished being emotional over something and I had been eager to be hurt or used or fucked all day, but I was afraid.  He pulled out the quirt, which I think he has never used before, and which I have hardly used myself.  It scared me but I worked on staying calm and accepting.

my boyfriend the dom

My boyfriend is a slave – a very sexy and exciting one.  But it’s always amazing to discover his sexual versatility and what an amazing dom he is as well.  I don’t think he ever wants to not be a slave – to just be the top in a relationship – but damn, he is good at it.

An ability that he has on both sides of the fence, and in other contexts as well, is something I might call “role-playing” or “performance art” or “high theatre.”  I don’t mean to imply at all that he says a bunch of fake stuff and is acting, but rather that he sees what a role requires, and will say amazing things and act in amazing ways to make that a reality.  He’s very creative, and I think it also helps that he is not self-conscious at all.

It is somewhat enlightening to see, through his actions, how he imagines a dom behaving.  He says that he sometimes says what he thinks I would say, which is either high praise or a recognition of the fact that what I say is probably biased towards what would work on me.

It is all too, too sexy.

Probably the biggest struggle in doing this is my insecurity.  I love correction and discipline, but if I get the slightest whiff that he’s actually upset with me at all (even when that whiff is completely imaginary), I tend to fall apart.  Being underslept isn’t helping, but that’s not responsible for all of it.  The result is that, in effect, I need complete, utter approval at the same time as I get exactingly corrected.  That’s a bit hard for a top to pull off.

I think part of what happens is that I really forget Joscelin, the person that I know.  He becomes some kind of dom entity that then calls up all of my internal psychodramas around approval and disapproval, the granting and withdrawing of affection, and so on.  It’s hard for me to remember that the entity I’m dealing with is really my dear friend with all of his joys and quirks and humor and love for me.  I know him. I should not be emotionally afraid of him.  He is not going to actually disapprove of or dislike or stop loving me even if I am a bad submissive, which I am not.  (I don’t even think “bad submissive” has an actual meaning, when I’m not being nutso.)

So I am working on bringing a bit more joy, humor, and confidence to my role.  “Pride” might also be appreciated, but I’m not sure that’s forthcoming.

the scene of my fucking dreams

I took yesterday afternoon off to handle some things, which also resulted in a lengthened evening.  All the same, I was afraid that nothing really exciting would happen, and since I was kind of all about SEX, that felt like a bad thing.  I tried not to put too much pressure on Jos, but it was probably slightly hard on him anyway.  You know how it is with us needy submissives…

But after our errand and before dinner, there was time for a scene.

ok, so I lied

I’m going to write about my bottoming experiences after all.  Can’t get it off my mind anyway, so I might as well, right?  Right.  (I’d say “feel free to skip” but that seems to imply that you weren’t already free to read or not read whatever you come across.  But I’ll put in a cut anyway.)

good for what ails you?

It’s been a somewhat rough few days, as you might have gathered.  Yesterday, I admitted to Jos that I’ve been fantasizing about him topping me again, so we decided to switch again for a few days.

It is…magical.  Exciting.  Hot.  Scary.  All that good stuff.  Also, he makes me feel very loved and accepted when he tops me, which is wonderful.  (It’s not that he doesn’t do that in our normal arrangement, but it’s a bit special in this direction as well.)

We had a small scene last night – some semi-rough sex with my hands bound, some fear play around a phobia of mine.  A lot of it was really awesome.

I slept poorly.  I was extremely horny, in that way you can only get when you are specifically forbidden to have an orgasm, and I had a lot of exciting memories to pore over, and a lot of fears and fantasies about the next 2 or 3 days.

I’m not sure how much I’ll post about it here – I’m not that into writing about being a bottom.  But for now this is being a really exciting and (in some odd way) relaxing change of pace.

a disappointing scene

Saturday night, Jos was making dinner.  I took him to my room for a few minutes, had him strip, and chained his wrists together, connecting the chain behind his back to a chain around his waist.  I then put him in a robe so he wouldn’t be cold, so he was berobed but with a chain running from one wrist to the other inside of the sleeves.  I also shackled his ankles and connected them with a few carabiners.

“Part of the purpose of this is to help you remember what I’m about to tell you,” I said, “which is that you cannot speak until I say otherwise.  I will punish you if you forget.  Unless you have any questions right now.”

He had none, so I sent him to finish making dinner.  I figured that the chaining and the speech restrictions would make him good and headspacy for our scene later, and I got a little charge out of talking to someone who couldn’t talk back during dinner, and out of the clinking sounds he made walking around.

At some point during dinner, I said, “I don’t intend to let you recover the use of your limbs or your voice anytime soon.”  I couldn’t tell if it was hot for him that I said it.  I figured it probably would be.  It sounded hot to me.

After we ate, I waited for him to finish cleaning up.  I was really horny, largely because the chains and speech restrictions made everything about sex.  You know?  When he was done in the kitchen, I told him to go to the bathroom, do whatever he needed to do, and then wait for me in my bedroom.

When I joined him, I got him naked and had him lie down in bed, and I connected his wrist chain (now in front of him) to the eyebolt at the head of the bed, leaving him some slack so that it wasn’t a very restrained position.  And I lay down with him.

It was sweet.  I asked him if there was anything I needed to know before proceeding, and he shook his head.  He looked very submissive and headspacy.  I was really aroused.  We kissed some.  I took it easy for a few minutes since we had just eaten.

I then had him turn onto his back and I chained him up for real, shortening the chain from his wrists to the eyebolt, and connecting his ankle shackles to either end of a spreader bar, which I chained to the underside of the bed, so that he was fully restrained with his legs spread.  I confirmed that he was OK, and then pulled some toys out of the toy box – a vampire glove, some clothespins, a candle, a wooden spoon.

I lay down next to him and just enjoyed him for a few minutes.  I bit the inside of his upper arm and he got panicky.  I said, “I’m going to do that again and I want you to be calm and relaxed,” and I did, and he was.  I scratched his side and he stayed calm for that too.  Good stuff, all of it.

I had talked a few weeks earlier about doing some cbt, so I wanted to explore that a bit.  I put on the vampire glove (it’s a leather glove with pointy metal bits coming out of the fingers and thumb, if you’re not familiar) and gently grasped his balls with it.  He gasped and moaned a lot as I played with him somewhat gently (though, you know, with the sharp metal bits and whatnot).

I was able to wrap my hand completely around his cock, jacking-off style, which required some care and finesse on my part, and which was painful for him.  I then sucked on and bit his nipple so he’d get hard in my hand and press against the points, which he obligingly did.  It was nice.  I liked making him do that.

After a while I took the glove off and picked up the wooden spoon.  When I laid the spoon part against his balls he got panicky.  I waited for him to calm himself some, and then started to tap him with the spoon.  He got jumpy and then really, really panicky, so I stopped, put the spoon down, and looked at his face.  He was freaking out.

“Do you need to talk?” I asked, since he was forbidden from speaking.

He just looked at me, and I realized that’s exactly the kind of question he can’t answer.

“Would you like to talk?”

“Yes.”  And then, “I’m terrified of that thing.”

“Do you know what it is?” I said.  “It’s this wooden spoon.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “I’m afraid you’re going to whack my balls with it.  I’m afraid you’re going to go way past what I can take.”

I couldn’t help thinking about this post by Alexis.  (But that’s not how our relationship works.  Obviously.)

“I’m not going to go way past what you can take,” I said.

He was freaking out not just from what I was doing, but from the freaking out itself.  He felt bad for breaking the scene, for stopping me, for not being calm.

When he said he was ready, I continued.  He was still extremely jumpy, and started to say things like, “no no no no,” so I switched to my hand.  It helped a little bit.

I got the clothespins and said, “You probably won’t even feel this,” as I put them on his nipples.  (The nipple clamps we usually use are far, far more sensation than clothespins.)  And then I put a row of them down the front of his cock.  I don’t think it should have been all that painful, and indeed he was quiet for it.

I started playing with the clothespins, kind of gathering them in my hand and flipping them this way and that, and at some point he started screaming.  I mean really screaming.  I knew the neighbors could hear it if he continued, and he did until I told him to stop.  I took the clothespins off.  He cried.

“I am so tired,” he said.

I was feeling confused, and I asked him to close his eyes.  After a couple of minutes he chuckled some, and I asked him what he was thinking about.

“I was worrying that you’d be disappointed,” he said, “and then thought that even if you were you’d be so resolved not to be that you wouldn’t be.  And that was funny.”

Feeling disappointed or let down or angry was the last thing on my mind.  It’s unthinkable.  Instead I was feeling like I wanted to cry.  And what I wanted to do was find a way to go on with the scene – something that would work – but I had to figure out whether I could kind of fake my way through to a good emotional place again, because wanting to cry sucks.  And I wanted to fuck him – I was still turned on, and very wet – but I didn’t want to fuck him while wanting to cry, because that sucks.

And I realized I couldn’t do it.  Any of it.

And I realized I had to tell him, and unchain him.  I couldn’t decide whether to tell him I was safewording or not.  I couldn’t figure out how gracefully I could pull off the crash landing.  And I just couldn’t bring myself to go forward.  So I sat there for a long time, looking at him (still with his eyes closed) and kind of absent-mindedly touching him with one hand.

Eventually I said, “I’m going to unchain you now,” and I started to do that.  “I’m not angry or disappointed or anything like that, at all,” I said.  And I kept it together while I got him all the way unchained, and put the sheet and blanket back on the bed, and arranged all of our pillows properly, and lay down beside him.

We talked a little bit, gently, and then he asked me how I was doing.

“Not that good,” I said, and started to cry a little bit.  And he held me and the whole thing.

At some point I started crying harder, and it took me a little while to be able to say, “I feel like everything was perfect, and you were so there, you were so headspacy and ready and I just…ruined everything.“  And he denied this a million times, and said that he was just obviously tired and was recognizing it all along as a wonderful, superb, fantastic scene, and wishing he could respond well so that I would get the right message about it and do it all over again many more times, but that he just couldn’t stop overreacting to things and being jumpy and freaking out about things that didn’t even hurt very bad at all.

I felt better then, and after a while I had him rub my clit some, and then I told him we should fuck.  And I wanted the fucking to be tender and close and intimate and not d/s-like (not that d/s fucking is not tender and close and intimate; I just wasn’t feeling very strong for it), but despite feeling that way, I said some things in the family of “You have to do this” and he responded by telling me how hard it is, fucking me, and I couldn’t take it, and I did feel like crying.  I let him come and there was so much bad feeling mixed in with the good feelings for me.  I really felt bad.

It wasn’t until the next day that I was able to admit to myself that I really had been disappointed.  I had done so much to set up the scene and his headspace.  Everything was going to be so good.  I was so horny and I wanted so much for it to happen.  And it just didn’t.  And the point where I cried and said that I “ruined everything” was just me turning that disappointment inward, because the idea of being disappointed with him is so unthinkable.  The idea of being disappointed with the bottom is just wrong.  If someone were disappointed with me as a bottom, I would be crushed, especially if I were so far under their control, the way Joscelin is.

But I was disappointed, crushingly so.  And I was cranky and angry and sad all the next day.  And I can’t seem to get back on kilter really.  It was just sex that went bad, just one time that things didn’t go well, and so not a big deal, and yet I am having trouble letting it go.

So, that’s where I am mentally right now.

[Note: This post was slightly edited on 2/11/09 to remove suggestions that Jos felt were unfair.]

a mostly vanilla problem

I have a little problem I haven’t brought up with Joscelin yet, so I figured, why not write about it here?  Doesn’t everyone love to read about their girlfriend’s problems on a public blog first?  Of course.  But this is 90% vanilla (certified by an international consortium of flavor analysts), so, you know, skip it if that’s boring.

I can’t take the Pill.

When Jos and I started having sex, we used condoms, and we still do.  But a few weeks into our relationship, I went on the Pill so that we would have that extra protection, and I’ve been taking it ever since.  We’ve had sex without condoms a couple of times over these many (18? 20?) months, just relying on the Pill.  And we’re not worried about diseases between us, so that’s fine.

So, a couple of months ago when my pills ran out, I just never got my prescription refilled.  At the end of that month I did get a refill, but I took a couple and then gave up.

This is kind of fucked up.

I don’t think it comes from a desire to get pregnant against Jos’s will.  That would be a bad idea, and if I discovered I was pregnant I would feel quite bad and remorseful.  I’m not sure what decision we would make in that situation.

I think it’s mostly because we don’t fuck that often and, when we do, Jos isn’t allowed to come that much of the time.  He might come inside me (wearing a condom – I did mention that part, right?) about twice a month, in a good month.  And I think it’s just very hard for me to take a pill every single day for something with that kind of frequency.

Anyway, this is something I feel kind of bad about, and that we should probably discuss.