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.