buncha weirdos

[Tech note: I'm reposting this because the URL got messed up.]

Kinky people amaze me.  You know that?

I read a lot of blogs.  I subscribe via RSS to 55 different BDSM-related blogs.  Fifty-five.  That is a lot, though of course some of them hardly ever have new posts.

Almost every single one of those blogs has moments, thoughts, or themes with which I sympathize.  Some men (and some women) remind me of Joscelin.  Some women (and some men) remind me of myself.  Every kinky relationship has aspects that are reflected in my relationship with Joscelin.

And yet they are all different.  I feel this most strongly when I get comments.  I absolutely love and adore comments, but so many of them recommend things that would never work in our relationship, or otherwise betray fundamental misunderstandings or different points of view.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Sometimes it makes me feel like me and Jos must be freaks in the way we carry out our relationship.  I think it’s rare that people have things spelled out quite the way we do.  But then I remember all of the probably completely inapplicable advice that I give other people, and realize that, no, we are all freaks.  We are all goddamn freaks, and the only reason that some people have non-freaky relationships is that they don’t bother to delve into them that deeply.  They’d be freaks too if they looked at things closely enough.

I have found bdsm blogs that I can’t really read, that just continually rub me the wrong way, or that I just can’t enjoy or get into.  But for the most part, even the people I disagree with, or who practice something completely different from me, come to me as bright exotic flavors that inspire my own love and play.

I’m glad you’re all out there.  Even the ones of you I think are nuts – or who think I am -  can still brighten my world.  Thanksgiving is past for us Americans, but thanks to all of you for sharing your words and your experiences.

interview me meme

I got this from Lady Julia.

Here’s how it works:

* Leave a comment for me saying, “Interview me.”
* I will respond by asking you five personal questions, which I will leave for you in my Comments section.
* If I don’t know you that well, the questions will probably be easy and fun.
* If I think I know you pretty well, then expect the questions to be a little more personal but still not toooo personal.
* To answer them, you must repost the questions along with your answers in your journal/blog. If you don’t have a journal/blog then you may answer the questions here in my comments section.
* Then if you do have a blog, make sure to include this explanation of how it works, and offer to interview anyone else who asks.

Lastly, if you’d like to interview me feel free to do so by posting the questions in the comment section of my blog or on your blog if you have one.

Meanwhile, here are my answers to the questions Lady Julia asked me:

1. Who would be on the list of women you most admire and why?

I admire my best friend for her extraordinary efficacy in accomplishing the tasks she sets herself.  I admire any woman (or person) who works to become smarter.  I admire Hillary Clinton for coming so far against the very negative images many people had of her in the 1990’s.  I admire the great women scientists of the past.

2. Describe your “I feel great” outfit. (Every woman has one – that outfit that makes her feel uber sexy.)

Hmm.  My initial response to this is to say “not me.”  But I do tend to feel a bit sexy (or hot, anyway) if I dress kind of butch.  I like seeing myself in the mirror at the gym pumping some iron in a sleeveless athletic shirt.  I like to look down and see black jeans and hiking boots.  That’s about it for me and sexy outfits :-)

3. If money, time, and physical health were such that you could do any daring activity that you chose, what three activities would you try for the first time? (You define what “daring activity” means to you.)

I’d learn the trapeze, trampoline gymnastics, and scuba diving.

4. List something that really turns you on for each of your five senses.

Sight – lean upper body muscles of men.  Smell – Joscelin’s armpits.  Hearing – sounds of pain or arousal.  Touch – stinging or slapping sensations on my ass, especially after it gets sore.  Taste – there are many I like, but none that I can think of that turn me on.

5. If you could furnish a dungeon with anything you wish, what objects would you include?

Every kind of hitty thing, especially canes.  Tables and stands that would make it easy to immobilize someone.  Chains.  Locks.  Soundproof walls.  And a cage to leave my darling in for a while…

chivalry

In Jos’s last relationship, one of the protocols was that he hold open doors for his mistress. When we discussed this very early on in my relationship, I asked him to please not do that. I said, “Of course I don’t want you to let go of the door in my face – just treat me like you would another person in general. Don’t go out of your way to open doors for me.”

When we go out, I almost always pay, for the simple reason that he is kind of a starving grad student and really can’t afford to go out at the frequency I prefer. At some point, I’d like for it to be more even. But the truth is, if I had to choose a direction of imbalance, I think I slightly prefer this one. (It’s hard to say because, frankly, money is nice too. I like to keep mine. But psychologically I prefer paying to being paid for.)

Once, the guy at our local bdsm club who I call Diet Pepsi Asshole (after a different angry incident) yelled at me, calling me a “fucking idiot” when I ventured to say that I am not a fan of chivalrous behavior. Most other people in the room also disagreed with me, though much more politely.

Axe recently had a post about a bit of (perhaps) intended findom gone awry, and a commenter named MJ had this to say, among other things:

I’m not entirely sure why for female domination there is an implicit expectation (in heterosexual relationships especially) that the female dominant is supposed to be paid for by the male submissive and not vice versa. While in female sub and male dominant relationships, the expectation is reversed – either the male sub typically provides for the female sub and/or has strct control over their finances/financial choices. Since I’ve mostly been involved with the queer community when it comes to BDSM, this dynamic is totally blurred and depends entirely on ther pairing, but as a female dominant that has been pro/non-pro and has played with female/male partners, I’ve found that my female subs expect/hope to be cared for/’spoiled’ financially while the male subs expect the exact opposite – and I’ve always wondered…. What accounts for this difference and am I unconsciously enforcing it somehow? Why is financial dominantion such a feminized kink, why is there sort of a tacit expectation that the male sub will overly indulge/gift/etc.

And, yeah, that. What is with that?

In the vanilla dating world, when a personal ad says something like “I want to treat a lady right” or anything about spoiling, I am so not interested. It makes me feel really icky.

Anyway, that’s just something to know about my relationship with Joscelin. We don’t do chivalry. I’d rather do it than be on the receiving end of it.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I have nothing against people pursuing their own preferences in this realm. Everyone is different. Duh.)

what I do and don’t want

Sometimes it’s hard to identify exactly what I want out of scenes.  I can enjoy a variety of things, of course, and I can enjoy some things through Joscelin’s enjoyment of them, but there are things that really get me cranked up and others that don’t.  And this has never been more salient than recently, when our scenes have seemed to be going in a bad direction for me.

Jos’s operating theory has been that he’s hurting me by saying things in scenes like “I hate this.”  He’s been saying these types of things more for several reasons, as I understand it.  One is that I’ve been pushing him very hard, making him do and endure things that he does hate.  And this fits into his kink well.  He wants (in that strange meaning of the word “want”) to be forced to do what he hates.  He wants to have no choice.

And in order to fully enjoy having no choice, and being forced to do what he hates, he needs to be sure that I know that he hates it.  He needs me to tell him that he doesn’t have to like it, but that he has to do it anyway.  It needs to be intentional.  I have to intentionally be making him do or feel something that he hates.

Let me be clear about something here.  I’m not saying that Joscelin “requires” me to do things that he hates.  I only do things in bed that I enjoy.  What I am saying is that, if I do things to him that he hates, he requires me to know and acknowledge it.  And that seems completely fair.

But I don’t think it’s the words “I hate this” that are hurting my enjoyment.  I think it’s more of a shift in the overall conception of what we’re doing, and I’m just now getting a real handle on what that is.

Some dominant women have fantasies about, for instance, kidnapping a man off the street and torturing him.  In that case, you’re talking about sheer compulsion and you would (presumably) imagine that your victim would be oppositional.  You might dream of breaking his spirit, but it doesn’t start off as a fantasy of willing submission.

But I don’t have those types of fantasies, and I basically don’t want an oppositional scene.  I don’t want the scene where I am the captor or absolute ruler and I impose my iron will on the unwilling victim despite his protests and suffering.

I want emotional intimacy.

This may not sound like a very fine distinction, but I think it is.  I do want to be able to push him and make him go where he doesn’t want to go.  I want the absolute control.  And I do not mind that he truly doesn’t want to go where I am taking him.

But it feels like what’s happening lately is that he’s responding to my pushing by retreating, or being oppositional to me, and what I want is for him to cling to me.  I want it to be more like, “Mistress, please don’t make me do this.  I don’t want to do this.”  And then I would look at him with compassion and tell him, “You can do this for me, and you have to.  I’m going to make you.  You’re going to be OK.”

That’s what works for me.  That’s what’s hot for me.

What’s tricky is thinking about how to go about getting that.  I can control my own actions, but I can’t control how my actions make Jos feel.  And it doesn’t work to make him suppress the expression of his actual feelings. (It is wrong as well as impractical.)  And I can’t change his kink alignment, which I think tends to push in the other direction.

For right now, what I am doing is not pushing him quite so hard, and also trying to take care to be more elaborate, planful, and theatrical – all things that contribute to headspace.

My favorite moments from Saturday night’s scene were the ones where he was just looking into my eyes with complete submission, wanting me to take him and use him.  It seems like lately, I take him and push him so hard that I “use up” all of his desire for it, and, while that works, it tends to make things go in the direction I don’t want.  So I am not sure how to balance these factors, especially considering that I also want to exercise my considerable sadism.  But that’s what I’m trying right now – a bit of careful treatment.

tender cruelty

One of our founding myths, mine and Joscelin’s, is about the moment at which I fell in love with him.

It was the second time that I topped him, which was separated by some months from the first time. I took it easy in the beginning, and at some point he told me that I could go a lot harder. And I did.

Eventually he was lying on his back on the floor and I had been beating his inner thighs, and was about to do so some more, and he asked me, if I was going to do that, could I please hold his hand? And I did. I held his hand while I hurt him.

And that, mythically at least, is the moment I fell in love with him. It was that moment of being both tender and cruel, of feeling myself perilously balanced between mercy and sadism. That is one of the feelings that most strongly draws me towards what we do.

My best friend once commented [something like] that some of what I do with Jos sounds like the mom who abuses her child and then comforts and soothes it. Hearing that didn’t make me feel great, but there really is some relationship – I recognize that. (Of course, a lot of what we bdsm folks do could be related to various parenting-related things, and it usually ends up sounding very sick and abusive. That’s a whole ‘nother post, though.)

It’s not that I’m simply both a sadist and a normal compassionate person. I specifically kink for the blend. The way that the sadist/bottom relationship works in my mind uses these feelings. I want to describe it, but with the caveat that how my fantasies are is not necessarily a realistic way that a relationship could work, and I don’t think this describes how Jos actually feels or responds to me. This is just how it would go with my fantasy victim.

See, what I want is for my partner to let me put them in a very painful situation where they have to struggle with fear, but I want them* to do it with trust. Specifically, I want them to cling to me for help, as their only lifeline in the struggle. I want them to surrender to me innocently.

As a kid, I saw a tv show about kids with cancer. One of the kids had a spinal tap, which is a very painful procedure, and afterwards he thanked the doctors for holding him down. I can’t actually remember if I saw this myself or if my mom told me about it, but it hit a real nerve for me, and has stayed with me all these years. I want it to be like that.

And on my side, I want to ache with mercy and compassion while enjoying being sadistic. Some kinds of my play take on a kind of medical feeling, like I’m some kind of demented nurse, doing this painful thing for your own good, but with sympathy.

Afterwards, I want to gather the bottom into my arms and soothe them and make everything better. (I need this particular dynamic far more than Jos, so it’s not usually how our aftercare actually goes.) If Jos would cry in my arms it would be particularly touching and wonderful.

I suppose this is why, when he needs reassurance during a scene, it makes such a sweet memory for me.

It’s a bit weird writing about the very deepest insides of one’s kink. It’s one thing to say, to an audience of more or less likeminded people, “I beat my boyfriend”, and another thing to talk about how it really feels and looks on the inside. It’s kind of an intrinsically sick thing, and I’m just happy there are people in the world with corresponding kinks that allow me to exercise this consensually. Because it is so good.

(*Got a problem with singular they? Not me. I see no reason to reject this venerable English usage.)

tabasco

It was an odd turn of events.

Friday night, Joscelin was crazy horny, and I was talking to him online, and I got turned on by the fact that he couldn’t come because I wasn’t giving him permission, and I went and masturbated and came within about a minute.  And what I thought about was having tabasco put on my clit, which actually happened (and was fantastically exciting) during the switch weekend.

I went back to the computer and told him about this, and he said, “I WANT that,” and a bit later we decided he should come over and help me clean the house (because carpet cleaners were coming Saturday) and I told him I would do the tabasco because I just didn’t want him to miss out on it.  (We’ve done it before, but not for months and months.)

When we got back to my place, I had him strip down to his collar and stand against the wall, feet slightly apart, palms at his sides pressed against the wall.  (I tried out this position first, and determined that one’s shoulders might become critically sore, so I gave him the option, when that happened, of putting his hands behind the small of his back instead, which he did after a bit.)  I forbade him to leave that position.  I wanted him to feel exposed and helpless.

So I had the tabasco sauce in this little tub, which is more convenient than a bottle.  I made sure he was hard (he was, and stayed so through the entire scene) and began applying it, very conservatively at first.  In contrast to the times I’ve done tabasco in the past, I was calm and very clearly in control of what I was doing.

I started with the sensitive front part of his dick – where the callous/sore spot strip is because that’s where he rubs it when he masturbates.  I was applying very little of the tabasco – just enough to barely wet my fingertip each time, with pauses in between.  I applied a little bit to the back rim of his glans, which burned a lot.  And I wrapped my finger several times around the glans, avoiding the urethra.

All of this burned him, and I made him stand still and not move his legs the way one does when one’s dick is on fire.  At some point, I went to put what I thought was the final dollop along the front of his dick again.  I had a fair amount.

He felt nothing.  “I am flying,” he said.

“You can’t feel that?”

“I can’t feel anything.”

“Hmm.”  I told him to watch me, and I poured some tabasco from the tub into the palm of my hand – about a quarter-sized puddle, I guess.  A teaspoon, perhaps.  An order of magnitude greater than what I’d already done.  And I walked over to him.  And I wrapped my hand around his dick and I slathered it all over.

It burned pretty bad, from what I gather.  But he took it extremely well and didn’t appear to struggle much.

After it began to subside, I took him into bed with me for some aftercare.  But he was high and didn’t want to come down and just wanted pain.  And I remembered how when I begged him to continue the scene when he was topping me, he did, so when he told me how much he wanted to feel the terrible clover clamps, I put them on him.

If it hadn’t been clear already, it became clear that he really was high, because the clamps, which usually cause him much agony…didn’t.  (Naturally, I squeezed them until they did.)

When we did enter aftercare proper, he was terrified of coming down hard, and asked me to try to ease him down somehow.  I did some thinking (actually while the clamps were still on) about how to do that, and what I ended up doing was just basically making out with him.  Pinning him down, drawing him to me, and kissing him was the thing that seemed most intermediate between a scene and just lying quietly together.  And it seemed to work all right – he came down in a nice way.

And as he came down, we talked about intensity and safewords.  And that led to a conversation the next day in which our understanding changed slightly, but you will have to wait to hear about that.

combine blogs?

Jos suggested the other day that we might combine blogs. In this way, his occasional posts would get as many readers as my more frequent ones.

My feelings are mixed only in that I feel a bit territorial about this space.

What do you guys think? Would you like to see Jos’s posts here?

and then sometimes…

…I get search requests that are just completely wrong:

domme seattle forced feminization heels

Richard update

Says Gordon:

Richard has now been discharged from the hospital to his home.

no choice

Joscelin and I almost didn’t have a scene Saturday night. I knew I was feeling a bit insecure going into it, but I thought I would be fine, and I really wanted to hurt him (in the sexy way). So I was going to proceed.

And then he asked me to tell him that he had no choice.

Two things happened. First, to say that he has no choice is a lie. He has the right to withdraw consent, and even if I were a wacko, he is strong enough to enforce that right. I know that he chooses to be my slave every day. I value that. And you might think, yeah, he knows that, just tell him what he needs to hear, but I can’t reassure him with a lie in that kind of way. Besides being forbidden by the terms of our relationship, it’s quite likely he’ll ask a follow-up question that I then won’t be able to answer.

Second, the request pinged my insecurities, and I realized I wasn’t really OK to go forward with a scene I knew would be hard for him. I saw that if he asked me something like “Is it OK that I hate this?” I would be hurt, and when that’s true, I can’t go and do things to him that he’ll hate. It just can’t be like that.

Well, so, we had a long conversation in which I cried a little bit, and after that, I was fine, and we did have a scene, and it went well and I was very pleased. But what I want to write about is the first thing – the question of his choice.

We talked about this again last night. I wanted us to talk through it, and I wasn’t afraid, because I know we have almost completely the same understanding of our relationship. I just wanted to come to a mutual understanding so that I could truthfully tell him what he needed to hear.

I hadn’t realized how much fear he had about this. Almost his first statement was something like, “I need to know I have no choice. If I have a choice, then a scene like Saturday’s is bad, pointless, just not anything that I need or want at all.”

“Well, now that we have that nice ultimatum, let’s talk,” I said. (I said this gently; it sounds harsher in print.)

We know that he has the right to withdraw consent. We also know that he has limits. So I tried to imagine a situation where something was not a limit, and he refused simply because he did not want to do it. (This may seem like a distinction without a difference – “limit” versus “something he doesn’t want to do” – but it is not. You’ll have to trust us on that for now.) It was hard to imagine, because he simply wouldn’t do that. And it was clear to me that if he did, it wouldn’t be acceptable. It feels unthinkable. I felt this was a good sign for his cause.

I told him this, and he agreed that we had the same understanding. “It’s clear to me what you’d have to do if I did that,” he said.

“Well, yeah, it’s obvious,” I said. He looked at me questioningly, so I said (such a coward), “Well, I don’t want to guess wrong, so tell me.”

“I would have to give you your collar back,” he said.

“Yeah.” And that was exactly what I had imagined he was thinking. It is indeed obvious. (I will add the caveat that I would not break up our d/s over an occasional instance like this. But there would be consequences.)

So I agreed with him on the issue of choice, given what we meant by it. And he told me, yes, that’s what he needs, and “You have no choice” is a shorthand for that, and a shorthand that he needs.

I felt like the issue was pretty settled, but a couple of minutes later I did say “You have no choice,” and he kind of collapsed (although we were already lying down) from relief.

“Wow, you really were scared about this,” I said.

“Yeah!” (Duh!)

“As my slave, you have no choice,” I repeated. “There. That’s true AND short.”