she ain’t that sweet, see

I’ve known this G. Love song for years, and right now I have it on a CD in my car, and it really reminds me of a scary (to me) turn that submissive guy blogs take sometime, and I’m really enjoying this take on the song.

But, seriously, this song has it all – the worship, the nonconsensual violence, the cuckoldry, you name it.

G. Love and Special Sauce – Baby’s Got Sauce (video)

Lyrics below the fold.

orgasm denial ftw

One of my regular readers was giving me crap this morning about not posting anything, so, being the pushover that I am, I will post…well, anything.

Not much is going on with me and Joscelin – the usual stress of the week precludes a lot of drama or sex.  (I think we haven’t had sex since Thunder, two weeks ago, actually.  Last weekend was kind of a clusterfuck, though in some ways we had a nice time together.)

Before Thunder, I didn’t let Jos come for about three weeks, and I haven’t let him come since the orgasm he had at Thunder.  He’s getting quite desperate.

Earlier this week he asked me to do something with him, just briefly.  I had him come into my room and kneel on the floor (while I finished up some work on the computer).  I had him bring a cloth to put down in front of himself, to come on.  And then I told him to jack off.

The understanding is always that he will get close and then stay close, ready to come on my word.  He is exceptionally talented at this.

So he did, with some whimpering.  I messed with (squeezed, pinched, hurt, caressed, etc.) his nipples to bring out some more whimpering.

Then I told him, “OK, you can stop now.”

“Noooooooooo…please,” he said, and proceeded to beg me to let him come.  He doesn’t do that often – I think I got him with the cloth ruse.  It was super hot.  I had my own orgasm afterwards, with him playing a supporting role.

I’ve told him that I intend to make him come this weekend.  I decided to let him know this in advance frankly so that he won’t be disappointed when I tell him to come.  He mentioned that this also makes it harder to wait, knowing that an orgasm is around the corner.

Lucky boy.

“relax”

One of the things that came out in our conversations at Thunder is that Joscelin basically hates it when I say “relax” in relation to a scene.

If I understand it correctly, when I say “relax” (for instance when I am beating him) he can’t interpret it in any kind of good way.  He’s happy to be ordered to do something, but obviously you can’t relax on order.  (Keep in mind it’s impossible to think clearly while your dom is beating you.)  And if I order him to relax, then is it wrong if he feels tense or afraid?  Is he disobeying me?  But I’m asking the impossible!  If I want him to relaxed, why do I beat him?!  AAARGH!!

I think it’s something like that, anyway.

I do not, of course, mean “relax” as an order.  It’s more like a request or a suggestion.  Sometimes I say it to communicate my intent.  By “relax” I mean “it’s not going to be that bad” or “you can relax.”  But this doesn’t come across to Jos at all, and it’s much better if I communicate my intentions directly.  (“I don’t intend this to be scary, so if I see you getting tense I’m going to pull it back to where you can be more relaxed,” perhaps.)

This brings up an interesting point, which is that Jos basically cannot tolerate not knowing my intentions during a scene.  It is really hard for him if he doesn’t know how much I intend for something to hurt or how far I want to take things or how I want him to respond or feel.  This doesn’t leave a lot of room for me to fool around just trying things out to see how he responds, at least not unless that is my explicit goal.  (I’m not sure how well he would take that as a goal, but I know he would try.)

This “relax” business is also a small smart of a larger conundrum we’re having with pain scenes, which is about the role of his submission.

When we started playing, I would basically do what I wanted to Jos and he would do his best to take it.  I tried not to force him to safeword and he tried not to safeword.  (I think that’s fair to say.)  He claimed, vehemently and often, that he wanted this feeling of being forced to do something hard and unpleasant, that he craved it, that he wanted more of it.  But over time what I realized, and what he realized, was that these scenes were harming him, rendering him untrusting and more or less traumatized.

It would certainly traumatize me to be topped in such a way, so I definitely have nothing bad to say about Jos in this context.  I regret that our maturity and his self-knowledge weren’t further along when we started, because I think he still has anger and fear left over from those days, and I really do not like the thought that I hurt him.

What I am trying to do these days is actively condition or train him to be more of a masochistic bottom.  Part of this (a big part) is training myself to be the kind of top I have enjoyed playing with, but part of it also requires Joscelin to change if it’s to succeed (which it may not).  It requires him to learn to relax (yes, I said it) and accept sensations that are not too difficult, so that he can sort of broaden out to accepting sensations that are a little bit difficult, and (in my dreams, at least) learn to enjoy that difficulty.

I’m not talking about training him to be cut hundreds of times with a whip and still beg for more.  I’m talking about more like him learning to accept a therapeutic massage – that’s in the ballpark of the kind of pain/difficulty I mean.  (In point of fact, Jos cannot take a massage either, even a very casual one for the most part.)

I’ve seen him get masochistic before.  He certainly is about nipple pain and about some other things like icy hot.  And he can go into a serious headspace from some other kinds of pain, too.  And occasionally he gets a little bit into the hitting that I am doing and wants more.  But it’s just not as consistent as I’d like.

So what I want Jos to do is just, when he feels able to (i.e., not when he’s tired or underfed, etc.), allow me to have a beating scene with him in which I am pretty gentle.  And I will try to take him up to that border where things start to feel a little difficult, and then go back down to a kind of safer level of sensation.  And we will do this a lot of times and (in my dreams) it will get easier for him.  But right now, all I want him to do is relax (there I go again) and let me try this, and not hold himself responsible for his reactions.

But that type of request seems to him, I think, to be ignoring his submissive feelings.  What is there to submit to in that desire of mine?  Submission makes him want to feel forced to be there enduring something horrible.  Submission makes him feel like a failure when he gets tense or says “ow” and I pull back.

I guess all I can say is that what I’m asking for isn’t really submission, exactly – it’s trust.  And trust has to be earned, and maybe I fail at that.  I’ve tried really hard but maybe I suck as a top.  I really don’t know.  Or maybe Joscelin is just really unusually bad at being trustful when it comes to unpredictable touching of his body.  (I know this to be the case.)  But what I want is for him to trust me to drive us down this road and see where it leads, and to trust me enough not to hold himself responsible for controlling where we end up or what the journey is like.

And that is some hard shit.

seduction

I wrote a couple of days ago that, during a workshop at Thunder, “when I looked into [Joscelin's] eyes they had gone all cute in a way that made me want to rough him up.”  And this thing – this changing of his eyes and face – happens every year at Thunder (generally in the dungeon).  And it really brings out my desire to subjugate him.  To devour him.  To crush him.

He, in turn, sees this in my eyes and in my actions, and that feeds his submissive spark, and thus we are enflamed together, and wonderful madness ensues.

I can’t usually figure out how to create and use this energy at home, though.  I am not always receptive to being submissively seduced, somehow, and he is not always receptive to my advances either.  Even when we both intend to have a scene, or sex, we can’t seem to easily work ourselves and each other up to that kind of fever pitch.

He will claim there are certain things – primarily bondage – that will put him there.  But often, putting him in bondage does not result in those eyes that say “exploit me.”  Instead I get a kind of flatness of affect.  It might be that he withdraws inwards, where he is submissively awaiting his fate, which sounds hot, but which I can’t see from the outside, and thus doesn’t help my own mood.

And it’s hard for me to just go make dommy eyes at him when I’m not feeling it.  I imagine the same is true for him and he can’t just summon up those hot little anime eyes at will.

How do you seduce your partner?

sticks (no stones)

I highly recommend that anyone who is phobic or squicked by medical things not read this post.  I’m going to write about some stuff I rarely write about here.

am I deceiving myself about what I like?

Saturday evening at Thunder brings a pretty long gap between the last workshop and the start of the play party.  (There is a talent show, but we have never gone.)  We dragged ourselves exhaustedly to dinner (a horrible pizza) and then had a nap in the hotel room.

We were both horny afterwards, but ended up having a long talk (followed by Klingon sex).

It’s hard to pick out the salient points of these winding conversations, but one important thing we talked about was my known tendency, in the past, to basically do whatever my partners wanted in bed rather than seek my own pleasure.  This has always worried Joscelin for a lot of reasons, including

• it’s hard to know whether the stuff we do is really what I want or like,
• occasionally I realize I’m doing something just to please him and it’s causing me problems and I push back, and
• there are things we now do regularly, which I claim to enjoy, but in which I had no interest when they were originally proposed, which is suspicious.

One of the curious assertions Jos made in the early part of this conversation was that I didn’t really get anything out of satisfying my partners in earlier relationships, and that I was just doing it out of “compliance” perhaps.

But that’s not actually true.

See, most of my foreplay with partners in ages past consisted of me turning them on.  Their arousal would then turn me on.  This seemed to work better, or at least more reliably (or something), than trying to get them to turn me on directly.  And when I did something like go down on a lover, I was almost always turned on by their response, and felt in control and masterful rather than in any way subservient.  (I didn’t feel dominant, at least not strongly at all, but more like accomplished.  Skilled.  Able to manipulate them.)

I was most definitely not just going along with unenjoyable sex because that’s what my partners wanted to do.

There are at least two ways of looking at this.  One is that I felt like I had to please my partners, and now I [often] feel like my partner has to please me instead, though I still struggle with falling back into the old pattern.  That’s how I’ve tended to hold it.  But you could also say I was always a reaction top and with the partners I had, the most I could do to them was a little foreplay and oral sex and the like, and I made do.

The foreplay I have with Jos isn’t that different from the foreplay I had with previous partners.  Mostly I do stuff to him rather than having him do stuff to me (although, unlike with former partners, I feel free to tell him to do anything I want to me).  The main difference is that I can do whatever I want (within limits).  I can do pleasingly seductive things or I can bite the crap out of him.  Either way I get to feed off of his responses.

Sometimes this makes me feel like my sexuality is defective.  Shouldn’t I rather have things done to me?  Is it bad that I get turned on by doing something that Jos really likes?  Does that make me not really a dom?  What’s the deal?  And then I kind of remind myself how much I like our sex and I find I don’t care as much either way.  I love the vastly increased freedom I have doing this kind of foreplay (and sex in general) with Jos  compared to my previous lovers.

To address the third item above – that I now “claim” to enjoy things that I wasn’t initially interested in – we both talked about the things we do that were always interests of ours, and the things we each do, and love, that we never thought of either as masturbating kids/adolescents or sometimes until we tried them together.  My fantasies never included collars or the whole slavery concept.  Jos’s fantasies never included fucking.  It goes on like that…we’ve both learned to enjoy a lot of cool stuff.

So…that was one thread of the weekend.

thunder: a vignette

The last workshop we went to was one on metal bondage.  I enjoy how easy and effective metal bondage is.  I also wanted to go to the workshop because it was by Lolita Wolf and Boymeat.  Honestly, I would listen to those two give a talk on the history of mayonnaise, especially Lolita (though I love their dynamic and also like Boymeat by himself).

They talked a lot about handcuffs (which we don’t have any of; we use leather cuffs instead, which are more comfortable but can still be fastened closed with a lock) and other kinds of metal restraints.  Since rope is beautiful but frustrates me I got a lot of enjoyment out of Boymeat’s “Fuck all that Japanese rope bullshit” attitude.  Yay!

They called for volunteers a few times, and Joscelin went up pretty early in the workshop and got cuffed, hands in front, with his cuffs connected to a chain around his waist like a prisoner.  Then they sent him back to sit down.

This was exciting for him and when I looked into his eyes they had gone all cute in a way that made me want to rough him up.  (We had some nice Klingon sex Saturday, so apparently I was just kind of in this mode.)  As we watched the rest of the workshop we had a lot of looks at each other.  I also bit his shoulder a few different times and sort of randomly (though mildly) roughed him up, like pushing his head around or shoving his body a little bit.  And of course I liked to wrap my hand around the waist chain and just kind of yank on it.  It was delightful, the whole thing.

Late in the presentation, his cell phone went off.  This is embarrassing enough normally, but in fact cell phones are completely forbidden at Thunder, which makes it even worse.  And on top of that, he had no way to reach into his pocket to silence it.  We had a good laugh over that.

thunder

There’s so much to say about this weekend, I’ll never get around to saying it all.  My god.  Amazing.  Wow.

Let me just write about one little thing at a time.

Today we were looking at which workshops to go to.  One was about aftercare for doms/masters, and I thought that sounded like a great topic.  Sometimes the idea that the top in a scene needs aftercare gets lost, and it’s a nice thing to discuss.  Also, I really like aftercare and am always interested when it comes up.

It’s hard to talk about this without talking about individuals in the scene, and these are people I don’t know.  But I was turned off from the class a bit because the people leading it were a mandom* with a fairly silly name (think “Mr. Master” or something like that) and a woman with a non-capitalized name, his slave.

But, you know, aftercare for tops!

So we read the description.  And…it was about having your slave or submissive rub your feet or back after a scene because you might be stiff or sore from, I guess, all that beating or whatever.

People structure their play all kinds of ways and I am sure this works for some people, but the idea is almost morally offensive to me, within the context of how I play.  When Jos and I have a scene, he is serving me, and basically giving me everything he’s got.  Expecting him to be able to give me some kind of body service afterwards, like a massage, is nuts to me.

I get most of my aftercare needs met by being cuddly, kind, and caretaking towards Jos.  Sometimes I crash and need to be held a bit myself, but that’s about as far as it goes.  He doesn’t clean up the scene, he doesn’t get me something to eat, he doesn’t rub my feet.  His job is to relax, hear about how good and amazing he was, and soak up my overwhelming love and affection.

So…we skipped that one.

(* EDIT: The person whose name I compared to “Mr. Master” turns out to be a butch woman and not a man.  Shows what I know!)

fear

On our way to Thunder tonight, perhaps at dinner, I want to talk to Jos and ask him to work on something.  Specifically, I want him to work on being less afraid of me.

Wait, Dev.  Don’t you want him to tremble when you loom over him, whip in hand?

Well, yes.  But that (perhaps unfortunately) is not what I’m talking about.

I am talking about the times I stop in his doorway to say something to him (such as “Hug me, I’m going to bed” or “Oh, I have to tell you this thing that happened at work”) and he immediately fears that he in trouble.  I am talking about times like the other night when he was kind of mumble-cursing and I asked him what was wrong, and he said, “I’m convinced that you’re furious at me.”  (I wasn’t mad at all.)

Is this something about me?  I am an irritable bastard (as is Jos), but I don’t think I am angry all that often, or that subtly.  I do not recall previous boyfriends or roommates living in fear of me in any way.

Is it the d/s?  Surely that contributes.  After all, without d/s, your partner might be angry, but they don’t necessarily have the kind of authority that can result in you legitimately being “in trouble.”  (I realize this is not actually true.  There is a whole cultural thing about being in the doghouse or being made to sleep on the couch to suggest otherwise.  But surely it’s a bit less true when you’re not actually doing d/s.)

I really feel, though, that although my personality and our d/s are contributing factors, the biggest factor is Joscelin himself.  I think he still feels like when he was living with his parents as a teenager and was continually at risk of being in trouble over…well, almost anything, including a sulky or disagreeable look or any other hint that he himself was angry or unhappy.  I think he feels like our apartment is full of lines that he might cross, rendering me angry.

I want to say, like, so what if I am angry?  Everyone gets angry.  It’s not so bad.  And, if he’s in trouble (in a d/s context), again, well, so what?  So he gets punished, which is hot, right?  I mean, he does not actually want to be punished, but overall it’s more hot than not.  It’s no disaster.

I’m relatively sure that I should be assuming more responsibility for this, but I’m not sure how to try any harder than I already do.

Two recent conversations may shed some light on this.

A few days ago, after the whole vanilla incident, Jos said that my having reassured him that I don’t want vanilla sex kind of made him feel like, ok, it was all right to enjoy this with me.  I want that feeling to spread – I want him to feel like our whole relationship is there to be enjoyed.  It won’t be 100% enjoyable but it is fundamentally about enjoyment.

A couple of weeks ago, one of us (probably me) joked that we should just break up.  The conversation went something like this:

Me: We should just break up.

Jos: OK.  But can we still live together?

Me: Absolutely!

Jos: And be friends?

Me: Of course!

Jos: And can we still have hot bdsm sex?

Me: If we want to, then whenever we want to, yeah!

Me: … oh my god, why does that sound so great?

Jos: I know

Me: It sounds better than now!  What is that?

Jos: I don’t know

Me: Wow.  That just sounds so good.

This suggests to me that we’re getting a bit too caught up in troubles and drama and worriful things and we might need to relax and just kind of have a good time together more.  (People, we met in a dungeon.  We were friends who sometimes had scenes for months before we ever started dating each other.  We don’t have kids or a mortgage.  Where does all the stress come from?)

I want to ask Joscelin to try to just remember that I’m his friend.  That he likes me.  That I like and am crazy about him.  That living with a friend who is nuts about you and with whom you can have kissing, hugging, hot sex, skin touching skin, and all of that, is supposed to be fun and nice.  That he shouldn’t take me so seriously.  That I’m mostly only scary in the fun way.

That I’m his friend.

“in-out grouping”

Steve Mayhew (of The Glow Inside) has recently commented somewhat vehemently on a post by Ranat.  In the post, she gives a list of mansub blogs, with asterisks near the ones she enjoys.  She points out

Those where the relationship seems to have settled into a mutually fulfilling d/s dynamic are almost always entrenched in an Arthurian, Euro-centric paradigm. Fucking with the capitalization of pronouns abounds. Then there are the handful I circulate through constantly, hungering for updates. Blogs I read regularly to semi-regularly are marked with an asterisk.

I’ve written before about how much the Arthurian paradigm of male submission pisses me off. Nonetheless, as someone pointed out, if that’s legitimately someone’s kink, then Godspeed to them. But it seems really fucking shady to me that this is all there is.

Steve seems to be objecting to his sense that Ranat was trying to divide these blogs into, I guess, OKOB (“our kind of blogs”) and NOKOB.  He writes

Coincidentally, [by linking to the blogs on the list] you alerted all the owners that we were part of your “Arthurian paradigm of benighted disappointment” or whatever you want to call it. Or, that we might be on the wrong side of your list. Some of the post smells like in-out grouping to me, and a lot of the comments fucking reek of it. “We have real kinky relationships. These other people don’t!” Out comes the label gun. Fuck that.

and

I get that you are looking for a way of being dominant that’s outside of a male-constructed paradigm…so is my wife, I respect it…but if that’s your thing, then why go to the trouble of listing all these blogs that you haven’t really read, but which you think sit within this paradigm? As though the men responsible for them are thereby responsible for the shape of the kinky blogosphere? We’re not. We’re just sorting shit out.

I’m intrigued by the “in-out grouping” remark, and I am forced to admit this is mainly because I feel very sensitive to it myself.  There are kinky bloggers I think are awesome who no longer seem to read me or comment on my blog and that makes me feel sad, and there are other cool kinky bloggers who do still talk to me, and that makes me feel good.  As I write, I am sometimes aware of how my various practices will strike some of the other people I respect – especially the things that will probably turn them off.

But I think in reality it’s just not like that.  See, I am sitting here at my computer, and to me, the rest of you are all in your groups or whatever, which I am or am not a part of.  But in real life you are each sitting at your own computers and we are all intermingled.  Even if I think Ranat is the coolest person ever, nothing about that causes me not to read Being Her Knight if I want to.  This isn’t high school and I can’t be excluded from the Popular Kids because I am seen talking to an uncool person.  (I haven’t met Ranat, but something tells me that this imaginary casting of her as a “Popular Kid” would be amusing.)

What we do have is freedom of association.  We’re all free to try to practice our kinks, and to write our blogs, and to read the blogs we like, and to sympathize with and enjoy the people who are more like us, and to (yes) critique the people who use Arthurian honorifics if we want.  Having a blog means that some people will think you’re fantastic and some people will empathize with you and some people will think you’re a fucking idiot.

If you don’t want people to have opinions about your private life then write it in a goddamn diary.