leashes

I’ve been asked to write a post about leashes, which are a big deal for Joscelin and…not so much for me.  He asked me to write a blog post because I am usually pretty open here, as well as thorough, and he wants to know how I feel about leashes, really, truly, all the “stuff.”

I knew leashes were big for him since nearly the beginning of the relationship, but I hardly played with them at all.  I put him on a leash a fair bit our first year at Thunder in the Mountains (though you can’t leash someone in the common areas of the hotel, out of respect for the staff), and I’ve since done it at other times.  I think there was a period of a few weeks or a month or two where I was using a leash fairly often.

So, aside from the whole “it puts Jos in headspace” thing, what I like about leashes is leading him around on one.  One moonlit night a long time ago we went on a walk in a park, and I leashed him, and he was nervous because of the whole public thing (though we saw very few people), and I enjoyed the feeling of that.  I like walking him, in other words.  It’s the same reason I’ve enjoyed using a leash at Thunder.

Everyday life does not afford many opportunities to walk your boyfriend on a leash.  I was willing to do it on that one walk because it was late at night and we were going to be in a secluded area, but we don’t walk late at night in secluded areas often at all. BDSM clubs are leash-friendly but we don’t tend to move around a lot (or go very often at all, for that matter).  The vast majority of our play happens at home, where we obviously do very little walking around.

Jos likes leashes during scenes.  Well, he likes leashes basically always.  And I don’t dislike them, but because we’re usually not moving, they don’t give me any extra practical control either, at least not that I really care about.  And they don’t hit any particular psychological target for me like they do for him.

And…they are awkward.  If he needs to go to another room, then I have to unclip him, or follow him, or something.  If I forget a leash is involved then it might hurt his feelings (in that way that your feelings can be hurt so easily when you’re in submissive headspace).  And if I am going to just beat him or whatever, then I have to do something with the leash – remove it? tie it to something? These aspects are really difficult and nervous-making in the middle of a scene.

I didn’t realize until I wrote this post how much I do like taking him around on a leash.  It’s when we’re stationary (i.e., most of the time) that using a leash feels…fake.  Forced.  Obviously purely psychological (and not my own pscyhology, so not shared particularly).  I can’t really “mean” it because there is no “it” to mean.  (Do you leash your dog to lie on the couch together watching TV?  For bed at night?  To play fetch?)

I worry that writing this post will make it sound to Joscelin like we can’t ever use a leash again except in those rare cases when I can walk him around.  And I worry that his reading it means that if I do use a leash again, he’ll be afraid that I don’t mean it, and he’ll ask me for reassurance, and I’ll have to be reassuring in some novel way that doesn’t involve a direct lie.  (“I want you to feel what this makes you feel”?)

But, I think those are the basics of how I feel about leashes.

insecurity, therapy

One of the things Joscelin and I talked about last night is my insecurity.  It has many manifestations, but one of the most annoying to me is that it keeps him from telling me what’s on his mind.

See, it often happens that I have a concern or a bad feeling that I realize I can’t tell Jos about.  No way.  It’s…intolerable.  And then, except on occasions when it’s really a bad idea to share it, I tell him anyway.  And he is almost always completely and utterly cool about it.  Accepting.  Seemingly non-threatened.  Able to listen and respond.  And quite often, just expressing the feeling completely defangs it and things are fine again on that front.

But he can’t really do this with me.  When he tells me something that’s concerning him, I do listen, but I also often become somewhat distraught.  He is saying “I love you but there is this one little thing I’m frustrated about” and I am hearing “You make me frustrated; I hate you and I wish you would go away.”  It’s not always quite that bad, but it’s a bit like that.

I do hear what he’s saying, and once I calm down am often able to respond very positively and take care of him in a nice way.  But hurting me is really hard for him (duh), and so he does what he can to not have to tell me things.

As he put it last night, it’s as though everything goes into my mind through one of two slots: acceptance or rejection.  So if he has some concern, it will almost certainly go through the rejection slot even if there’s no rejection in it from his perspective.  So he will take that thought or concern, sit on it, massage it, work with it, until hopefully he can turn it into something he can pass through the acceptance slot.

How exhausting!  And naturally this leads to spinning and suppressing things and trying to cope with stuff on his own a bit more than I think is ideal and so on.

So I talked about this in therapy today.  I told my therapist (not seriously) that I expected him to solve the following problem within the 50 allotted minutes: “How can I stop being an insecure basketcase in my relationship?”

We talked about things I can tell myself – like that my sense of being rejected or “hated” is an illusion, not reality.  I do sometimes tell myself things like “My boyfriend is crazy about me but he just has a problem he needs to talk to me about,” and it helps, but not enough.  The “illusion” idea is interesting, but after all, the conversation itself is not an illusion and I still have to be there and participate in it without crumbling like a day-old scone.

So then my therapist recommended that I try active listening.  I have to admit, the advice was a bit hard for me to hear, because I (perhaps pompously, and certainly in some sense not realistically given my penchant for crying in self-pity at the slightest provocation) consider myself an excellent listener, and I am familiar with active listening although I don’t usually actually do it.

Active listening, if you haven’t heard of it (or just can’t keep track of terms), is that thing where you try to reflect back to someone what you hear them saying.

A: Why do you always leave the toothpaste cap off?!  Gah!!!

B: It sounds like you’re saying you get frustrated sometimes when I don’t put the cap on the toothpaste.

The idea is to help you focus on what the other person is trying to say, clarify that you understand it, and make the other person feel heard.

(On a brief note in case Dw3t-Hthr, whose mom is sort of similar to mine, reads this: my mom came up, and my therapist asked me to imagine how she would respond to active listening.  The idea is nuts and, frankly, kind of hilarious.  “So what I hear you saying, Mom, is that you feel that my decision to shave my head represents a betrayal of you and is ‘the last straw’ in our relationship.”)

I think this technique could help.  One of the important things for me to do when Jos talks about problems is to not think about myself and personalize everything, but to try to think about his actual experience.  (One time I had us pretend that he was talking to someone else – a close friend – about me, and that time I was able to hear all kinds of things without freaking out at all.  It was marvelous.)  And active listening certainly encourages not drifting off into thoughts about yourself and how detestable you are.

It might also help with a problem Joscelin has, which is that when I am carefully listening to him, I tend to just be quiet and let him talk, while I occasionally nod.  I usually have a lot of different thoughts about each thing that he’s saying, so I don’t try to resolve anything or directly respond unless he asks.  But this makes him start to feel really bad and wonder just how much he’s hurting me, or something like that, because I’m not giving any kind of feedback.  I’ve assumed this was an unsolvable problem because I just can’t really resolve things, or tell him my position on things, in that moment.  But perhaps active listening will help him feel heard and responded to.

I think one thing that has changed about me as I’ve aged is that I have learned to accept that most problems don’t get “solved” but merely remediated to a certain, hopefully tolerable point.  This has been true of some health issues that I have, and I think it’s true of relationship issues as well.  So I’m not really hopeful that we will find a magic cure that turns me into a person who isn’t insecure, but there is definitely a lot that can be done short of that, and I think any degree of improvement will be very helpful.  So, I am relatively eager to try this, and I hope I remember the next time we talk about problems.

resumption

Joscelin and I had an interesting night last night.  He got home long after I did, and as he ate dinner, we sat and talked.  Or rather, he listened and tried to reassure me and make helpful suggestions while I ranted about problems I’m having with some math for school.  It was stressful for him for me to be frustrated, even though it wasn’t about him.  And of course I responded to his suggestions and reassurances with more frustration, so that wasn’t great.

As he was going to take his shower, I said, “I hate everyone.”

He stepped out of the bathroom.  “You don’t mean that.”  He sounded really serious.

“Of course not,” I said.  “Did I hurt you?”

“Fuck yes.”

“God, I’m sorry,” I said.  And I went to give him a hug.  “I didn’t mean you at all.  Not at all.  I’m really sorry.”

“I was trying to help you and it didn’t go well at all,” he said.

“I know.  I’m sorry.”

So he went and took his shower, and afterwards came and sat on my bed and we talked.  He was angry about the math conversation, which I was able to hear without freaking out, for once.  I admitted to conflicting feelings: on the one hand, recognizing that ranting at someone is obnoxious and often difficult, and on the other hand, wanting to be able to express frustration.  We talked about ways I could make that not so hard for him (like saying ahead of time that I just want to vent).

We talked a lot about my insecurity, which I will write a separate post about at some point.

And we talked about the d/s and related topics.  He had apparently wanted to talk to me about that stuff from the time he came home.  (Things would have gone better if he’d told me this right away, but maybe he wanted to keep his options open.  I’m not sure.  I tend to assume he’s not going to want to spend time with me in the evenings, which makes me a worse conversationalist than I would otherwise be.)

He talked about fantasizing about being dominated by me, and how hot that is.  (He’s apparently been having some really great orgasms about it.)  But he said he was concerned that it would add a lot of stress to his life, which he simply can’t handle right now with the new job.  I agreed that there is no way that being someone’s submissive does not add stress to life.

He also said that, without turning me into a service top, he’d like to be able to try more of the things he wants to try, to “flirt” with my being a service top a bit more so that we can see what’s really what.  What this brings up for me, honestly, is a feeling that he doesn’t really realize how much I take his desires/needs/fantasies into consideration already – really, sometimes to the breaking point for myself.  That makes me feel guilty in two separate, possibly conflicting ways:

1. I’m so bad at taking his desires into account that he can’t even tell I’m doing it.
2. OMG I am just faking this whole dom thing while being actually a service top.

But I can recognize that as a gross exaggeration of reality on both counts.  Ultimately, these are boundaries that we can navigate together in a variety of creative ways.

When we switched this past time, and I became his submissive, I asked him if we could begin by assuming there were no rules I should be following.  I didn’t want to wonder if protocols we’d used in the past still held.  So I suggested that we do the same thing when he becomes my slave again: assume there are no rules or protocols.  After saying he was worried that we’d develop rules at the same (glacial) pace as the first time, and being reassured that I had no intention of taking months to add protocols one at a time, he was all for it.

This will be good, both because he won’t have to wonder if he’s upholding rules I’ve forgotten or don’t care about, or, alternately, forgetting some rules from the past, and because it gives us a chance to develop new protocols based on our two years of experience together and our current needs and desires.  I’m looking forward to it.

This conversation kept making him hard, which was cool.

When he asked me to collar him, I said yes.  He came and knelt in front of me, and I stroked him.  “Do you mean this?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“You really want this?”

“Yes.”

I got his collar from where I had put it away.

“Promise me that I can’t get out of this,” he said.

I felt sad having to say, “I can’t do that.  I can’t promise you something that isn’t true.”

“OK,” he said.  “What can you promise me?”

My brain kind of froze.  The promises I wanted to make – like “I will take care of you” – didn’t seem to be what he wanted to hear in that moment.

“I promise you that I mean this,” I said finally.

After the collaring, we lay in my bed and had orgasms side by side, like the very first time we had sex.

It’s good to be back.

Angie Zapata

It took the jury in Greeley, Colorado (about an hour’s drive from here) two hours to return a verdict in the murder of Angie Zapata, a transsexual woman, by Allen Andrade.  He was convicted of first-degree murder as well as a hate crime, and sentenced to life prison without the possibility of parole.  (Here is the Denver Post article.)

Nothing makes up for a young woman being murdered by a transphobic asshole like Andrade, but I am proud of the jury for correctly applying the law and rejecting any kind of “trans panic” defense.  I am proud that they recognized that murdering someone for being trans is an aggravating and not a mitigating factor.

I was also warmed by Angie’s family’s support for her and for her identity.  I am sure that it made a huge difference in her life, and I wish them all healing after this tragic loss.

being liberated

I’ve been thinking lately about how one should go about being, in the feminist sense, liberated. What types of actions should an enlightened person take?

I have a lot of freedoms that my foremothers didn’t have. I live with my boyfriend, unmarried, and we use birth control to avoid babies. I have a good job that pays real money. I can vote.

I am sure that some of my personality, my desires, and my beliefs are nevertheless formed or influenced by patriarchy. I can’t say for sure which ones, but if we look at people as a group, this becomes clear. Even among feminists, more women choose to be homemakers, substantially fuss over their appearance, or dream of weddings than men do. It could be biology, but I doubt it; I think it’s probably culture.

So, a question: if there is some behavior that you enjoy or find useful, that is morally neutral outside of possible feminist concerns, but that you think you might not enjoy if you were more enlightened or free (or hadn’t been abused, etc.), should you try to avoid taking that action? If I believe that the daughters of the future won’t be more likely to wear makeup than their brothers and boyfriends, but I like to wear makeup, should I not do it, out of fear of perpetuating the system from which I think it arises? Will choices like that bring about a more enlightened future?

I really don’t think so.

I think the way towards freedom is to execise and stretch the freedom that you do have, whatever that is. If something is keeping you from doing something (ethical) that you want, then you should fight the something. If you are a housewife in the 1950’s and you feel trapped and unhappy, you absolutely should organize with other feminists and fight for the freedom to have a career.

But if you are a housewife in the 1950’s and you are happy and want to continue, then no matter how much you agree with your feminist sisters, I don’t think you should go have a career out of solidarity or politics. I think you should keep living your life exactly as you want, and let that be your example. I think that’s true even though the culture has influenced you to be happy as a housewife, when you might have chosen differently in another time or place.

And that’s how I feel about BDSM sex. Will the (I hope) more liberated people of the future want more or less of it? Hell if I know. But I think I can help those people come into being by doing what I want to do now, not by guessing what they would want and trying to replicate it.

I’ve written this before and I’ll repeat it. I don’t really care what patriarchy has made me want, among the things I enjoy. I care about the stuff patriarchy makes me do that I don’t enjoy, or that reduces my enjoyment or productivity or abilities. I care that patriarchy makes me feel like I should wear makeup even though I don’t want to (and don’t), but if I enjoyed makeup, I wouldn’t feel bad just because it was probably the patriarchy. I would think about it, I would explore whether I was just doing it because I felt ugly otherwise, or other soul-destroying stuff. But if what I found in myself was pleasure and enjoyment, then I’d keep right on doing it. Because fuck that shit.

And if it’s the nasty patriarchy that makes me get sexually excited by dominance and pain, so be it. I don’t have the fantastic enlightened turn-ons of some imaginary future people, so I’ll use what I do have.

I have a friend (an atheist, actually, like me) who says that every action we take is a prayer to the universe about how we want it to be. I want the universe to be such that people are free to make choices and seek their own fulfillment and enjoyment. The best way I know to bring that into being is to enact it for myself.

the frustration and disappointment of the submissive

(Yes, I’m using “submissive” as a noun again.  I do that.  Some people hate it.)

One of the biggest contrasts for me between being the dom and being the submissive is that, as a dom, it’s much more obvious how to go about trying to get your needs met.  If I want a certain kind of scene, or for my partner to say certain things, I can either straightforwardly go and get it, or (if it’s not possible for one reason or another) I can strategize about how I might get it in the future.

For instance, thinking something like, “Hmm, Joscelin is not flexible enough to maintain that position; I should have him do some stretching exercises for a few weeks” is completely acceptable, and even desired by him.

As a submissive, by contrast, I find there are things I desperately want that I am nearly powerless to get.  I can let Joscelin know about them; he appreciates that.  But he still might not do them.  They might be a thing he will do “someday” but then I wonder if that day will ever come.  Or he might try to do them, but not do them in a way that satisfies me.  He does something different from what I meant.

And there are limits to how controlling one wants to be of one’s dominant partner.  “You’re not doing it right!” might be (sort of) true and useful information but, seriously, it gets old, and kind of kills the sense that you’re submitting at all when you’re actually micromanaging the exact terms of the scene.

I honestly don’t understand how Joscelin deals with this kind of frustration and disappointment when he is the submissive.  I don’t think he is actually “more submissive” than me in some way that makes it not an issue, by which I mean  I don’t think he purely desires to serve or be subject to me rather than having more specific needs.

We’re still relating in an egalitarian fashion right now while he works through some thoughts and feelings, including concerns about this exact issue.  I think when we move forward, it will be with a different awareness of it on both sides.  I think Jos learned, from being a dom, that it’s really easier if you do know what your partner craves, so that he might be more willing to push for what he wants, and I’ve certainly felt how maddening it is not to see your dreams realized, so that I might not put his off for quite so long in the future.

Some people believe that in bdsm the bottom really controls the scene.  What I think is, the top so easily controls so much about the scene, that if what the bottom wants is to have their wrists tied just so, it detracts only trivially from the top’s ability to direct.  When desires are incompatible (as they sometimes are between me and Jos, when he wants me to say things to him that aren’t really how I feel), that’s more of an issue.  But it’s one I’m looking forward to working on…from the top.

no master, no slave

After a fantastic scene last night, and three and a half weeks of amazing experiences as Joscelin’s submissive, I resigned my position today.  I felt…done with it (for now).  I didn’t really want to continue; I missed being free, and I really missed having Joscelin as my slave.

But I didn’t switch us back.  It didn’t seem right or within my power.  I just told him that I felt done with being his slave.  And what we settled on is that he will take a few days to think about things before becoming mine again (which we both assume will in fact happen).

So for now, we are what we haven’t been since the first couple of weeks of our relationship: equals.

(Of course, we are actually equals in general, but I mean in the d/s sense of choosing to be equals and one not having power over the other.)

It’s an adjustment.

I love my boyfriend.

imagining relationships

When someone complains to me about the relationship they have with their boyfriend, girlfriend, mother, etc., I find that I have two (non-mutually-exclusive) options about how to listen.  I can either listen purely sympathetically, trying to see the situation from my friend’s perspective, or I can listen with the intent of understanding more about the relationship.

Listening sympathetically is pretty easy – you take the words at face value and imagine the relationship that they suggest.  Invariably, your friend appears to be in the right, because when people tell their own stories, they are the heroes.

Listening for understanding is harder.  You have to imagine the various conditions that could lead to someone talking like your friend.  You can kind of imagine how the other person would describe the situation.  And you have to let go, a bit, of your own sympathies.

It’s easiest to do this kind of listening when we have more natural sympathies for the other party.  For instance, if you’re a parent, and a teenager is telling you how impossible their parents are, you’re probably inclined (in the absence of something really damning) to think the parents are trying hard, just want what is best for the teen, etc.  It’s easy to picture the other side of, “My parents won’t leave me alone!  I just want to go be by myself in my room and they keep hassling me all the time.  Why don’t they trust me?”  (I’m kind of in the middle on this one.  It’s also easy for me to imagine the other side of, “Our kid used to be sweet but now he just goes and locks himself in his room every night and if we try to say one single thing to him, or ask him even the most innocent question, he practically goes ballistic, or just acts hostile and won’t talk to us.”)

I bring this up because when I read blogs it is often at least a bit obvious how the “other side” might be represented.  You can probably imagine, re: my clinginess, Joscelin saying, “God, I love Dev, but I wish she weren’t so insecure.  I really do want to be with her and around her all the time, but I also need time for the other things I want to do, and when she freaks out about it, it makes me afraid to be around her because I’m just going to inevitably hurt her feelings when I want to go do something else.  I feel trapped, but I don’t know how to even bring that up without making her cry.”

I sometimes do try to present a semi-balanced point of view here, and give Jos’s side.  But I can’t be completely successful at that, because I really don’t see myself through his eyes.  And sometimes I feel bad because you guys will read my words, interpret them sympathetically, and think, “God, how can you have a girlfriend and not want to spend any time with her?  What the hell?”

So, all I’m saying is, Joscelin has his story too.  Always.

leaving him alone

I wrote last week about the problem of my clinginess.  On the advice of a friend, I proposed to Joscelin that we spend two hours together on both Saturday and Sunday doing something that allows us to talk (like taking a hike or whatever).  This would be in addition to our Saturday night date, which usually includes dinner and hot sex.  And my friend also advised that I work really hard at leaving Joscelin alone during the week.

So far, so…OK.  We had the two talking dates, and that was great, and I’ve pretty much left him completely alone all week.  Any time we’ve spent together has been at his instigation.  I have found other things to do with my time.  (It’s not that I don’t have hobbies, etc.  I’d just rather talk to him.)

Tonight I was in a cranky mood already, and when he came home and told me two stories – one long and involved – without asking me anything about my day or letting me say much in between, I got crankier.  And during dinner when he asked me to get up and get him a napkin, I managed to call him “Sir” but I started to feel angry.

I admitted after dinner that I was angry but didn’t know why.

I had some punishments coming to me for some forgetfulness, so we handled that.  I told him beforehand that I might freak out, and he said he’d be there for me if he did.  I took the punishments silently, which was part of feeling kind of angry and defiant.

But I felt better afterwards, and we hugged a little bit, and I left him alone.

And he followed me to my room, not because he actually wanted to be around me, but because he was freaked out because I obviously wasn’t really doing that well despite saying that I was.  And, you know, I couldn’t completely reassure him.

On my way out of his room, moments earlier, he had told me of his plans to stay up until 10 PM so he could play some Eve Online since he hasn’t had much time this week.  And inside, I just could not fucking believe that after not spending time with me for the past three days, this was what he felt he hadn’t had enough of.  Playing Eve Online, which he does every night.

So, but he freaked out a bit, and I didn’t say anything like “What the fuck is wrong with you that what you miss is a computer game and not me?” and I felt better and better and we just talked in a friendly way and I tried to be reassuring.  I asked him to trust me.

There is really no other way forward.  He needs the time; I need to respect his need for the time.  If it bothers me, it bothers me, and we might need to adjust it at some point, but that point lies on the other side of this discomfort.  He needs to be brave enough to take the time that he needs even if I’m not 100% OK about it, because what is the other alternative for him?

What’s unfortunate is that my way of adapting to this is to basically turn off the relationship part of my brain during the week.  I think that’s why his dominance during dinner made me feel angry.  I’m not really in relationship with him right now, in terms of my feelings – or I wasn’t, at least – and to be called upon to serve just felt inappropriate.  (It was not actually inappropriate.)

So, that’s kind of where my feelings stand.  I’m uncomfortable, but I’ll get over it.  I’m doing my best to leave him alone so he can come to me when and if he wants to.  And, IMO, he needs to accept that space and make use of it, and trust me to deal with my own feelings.

And, honestly, most of this week has gone really well for me.

new addition to blogroll

I don’t normally note changes to my blogroll, though I do shift it around occasionally.  But I thought since I was whining yesterday about the absence of gay men’s voices I’d mention that the guy from the survey (Samuel) emailed me and pointed me to his blog, which is now blogrolled: The Hitching Post.

There are dozens of blogs I could put on the roll but don’t; I like to keep it pretty short and punchy, partly so I don’t check other people’s blogs all day long.  But the blogs that are on there are pretty good and all come highly recommended by me, so check ‘em out if you haven’t.