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.