I love this picture (found on Male Submission Art):

I’m a  sucker for sweet boys kissing anyway, and the bottom here is particularly cute.  Love the pajamas.  Love the sweetness!  In my mind, the blue-pajama guy is putting his slave to bed in his customary chains, with much affection.  I like the way the hands on his head are both controlling and caressing.

Mmmmmph.

The topic of “training” was raised by Joscelin again the other night. The basic gist is that training is a very hot idea for him, central to his kink, perhaps, and though it is also hot for me, it’s not generally what I’m doing or trying to do with him, and that makes him insecure and worried.

This came up a long time ago and he backed off a little bit and I stepped up a little bit and I thought everything was going fine around the training idea, but he brought it up Sunday night with some angst. And the way the conversation went was that I gave him 12 entirely different answers about it, because, honestly, it’s a complex thing, and I have a lot of answers to give. So here are some of those answers.

A lot of my own fantasies revolve around training, but it doesn’t really appeal to me to be trained in real life, at least in any way that is serious at all. (I mean in a d/s context. I like learning things in general.) With Jos, it’s hot for me to talk about training him, but it’s not something I really maintain a focus on over time.

I worry that intentionally setting out to train him in some way would just lead to us spending more of our precious, limited time together doing things that had become obligatory rather than things we actually wanted to do in that moment.

Meanwhile, when Jos gets insecure about the training thing, and starts asking me about it a whole lot, including a lot during sex, I stop knowing what I think at all and it gets really difficult. I compared this to someone continually asking you if you really love them. After a while you start doubting whether you feel what they (apparently) need you to feel and after a while longer you don’t know what you feel at all.

Also, Jos tends to focus on training the inside of his head, if you will, perhaps because I don’t overtly train him to do anything, and I think inside-his-head training is not that interesting for me. (What I mean is, for instance, training him to accept my control over his orgasms, or training him to see his pleasure as secondary to mine.) I sort of prefer an idea like “you will do what I say and what’s inside your head is your own business.” I mean, as hot fantasy concepts [that may or may not work in reality] go, that one is hotter to me than the idea that I will take over his mind.

As for training him to do actual things, I worry that everything I would want to train him to do is probably a limit, or else would take more time than he is willing to put in, or is a misuse of my powers. There are ways I want to change him into someone he isn’t, and I don’t know how many of those desires are OK versus deeply dysfunctional in a way that d/s can’t help with. And I tend to be terrified to make these kinds of suggestions.

We did agree last night to get rid of our idea that we don’t use orgasm control for reward or punishment, which he remembers (probably correctly) as an early insistence of mine.

I do think his insecurity over his sexuality is a problem, and I want to tell him something that he once told me about different insecurities, namely, I see your sexuality as valuable and desirable, but if you don’t, that’s not a hole that I can fill. I think he should focus more on recognizing the value of his sexuality and not have that be dependent on my valuing of it.

A recent picture on Male Submission Art, and the accompanying text, caught my eye today.  Here is the picture:

and here is some of what its creator, Kelly, wrote:

…here I explore something that I thought was interesting. The angel being the aggressor and the devil being the submissive. The other way around would have been fairly an obvious thing to depict—I think. But, this gave it a twist that made for an interesting visual.

I suppose I shouldn’t call it an “assumption” that the angel is the aggressor/dominant here, since the artist intended it that way, and he should know, but for me the image is hotter and more interesting if I imagine that the angel is actually submitting by servicing the devil in this way.  He looks like he’s doing his best and the devil is like, “C’mon, harder,” or something.

I mean, you get a reversal either way, right?  Either the angel is unexpectedly the top, or the fucker is unexpectedly the submissive.  And I find the latter reversal more interesting, perhaps because I find the idea that receiving anal sex is submissive to be more prevalent (and harmful) than the idea that a devil is more likely to sodomize you.

I know that when I get fucked, it’s Joscelin pleasuring me, and not the other way around. (Also, I can’t stop looking at that angel’s butt. Have I ever mentioned I’m into asses? For me, that objectifies the angel more, making him the likely submissive.)

Tonight was hard, and then nice, and then really good.

When I got home, I had some stuff on my mind about my life, and Jos and I talked for a while.  He was really tired and so was I.  At a certain point he snapped at me for something I said, saying, “Don’t do that.”  He apologized right away but I got hurt.  I don’t deal well with being snapped at.

After that, the conversation went to the dogs.  I was kind of trying to keep it up but he was really checked out and I was tired.  He had been playing a video game that I’d made him pause to talk to me.  I didn’t want to go be in my room.  I was too tired for anything.  He felt trapped.  He got intermittently angry.  So did I.  (Through all this, we weren’t talking much – it wasn’t like a heated argument or anything, or hardly an argument at all.  More like two tired people being miserable in each other’s presence and not sure how to get out.)

We started to get a little bit better – kind of remembering how to like each other – and I suggested that he finish his boss fight while I ordered a pizza, and then once the pizza came, we’d watch our scheduled TV show.  (I don’t want to bore you with all the negotiations before that.)  He thought this was a fantastic idea, as I’d known he would, and that worked out well.

During the show, after he’d eaten, I had him kneel long enough (facing the TV) to get pretty uncomfortable.

After the show, I played Mario Galaxy while he watched for a while, and then he went to bed.

And then he came back out, knelt, and started kissing my feet.  It was good.  He asked me if I would tease him a little.  As a favor.

To be honest (and you always know that phrase spells doom, right?), I didn’t really want to.  I was tired and just wanted to play my game.  But I couldn’t bear to say no.  And it wasn’t so much that I didn’t want the teasing as that I was self-conscious about being put on the spot.  Requests to display domination or be sexual are often hard for me to easily process.

I sat forward in my chair and started messing with him, though, and it was…nice and then really nice.  He was very responsive, and I also did things that straight-up felt good to me, sensual, like sucking on his nipple.  (Mmm, nipples.)  And touching his cock.  And a lot of kissing.  I got very wet.  It was pretty deep for him also.

And suddenly I was truly exhausted.  I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes, and couldn’t tell whether my dizziness was from headspace or arousal or exhaustion or all three.  And I was thirsty.  I sent him to get me water (twice, actually).

It got kind of awkward for me near the end.  He was in the submissive space of wanting more and more and I was pretty much done, but not sure how to dismiss him without hurting his feelings or making him feel unwanted.  I want to talk to him about situations like that and see how we can work it out, or how he feels about them, because it’s not like I want to say “hey, don’t linger,” and make him all scared every time he’s with me, but it would be nice to just acknowledge between us that that sometimes happens, or something.

But overall I was ragingly aroused, just tired.  He was loopily tired too, of course.

I can tell he’s making a real effort to express his submissive impulses rather than not, and it’s great.  I really, really appreciate it.  He risks feeling rejected every time he does it, I know, and that is so hard.  But it is so good.

I did make a concrete suggestion tonight, which is that sometimes when he wants to kneel, he should consider kneeling and stroking or kissing my feet or legs instead of just kneeling.  It always feels wonderful and I’m less apt to feel pressured by it.

He thanked me a million times and it was a strange feeling for me because, on the one hand, I know that feeling, I have been there, and I can appreciate it.  But at the same time, what do you say?  You’re welcome?  That makes it sound like it was a favor, which it really (ultimately) was not, and is not.  A half-naked person present himself kneeling at your feet is a gift.  And yet there are only so many times I can say, “No, thank you.”  Another thing to talk about, perhaps.

At any rate, that’s how my Friday night went.

In a comment yesterday, Joscelin wrote

I carry a persistent feeling of needing to sort of “protect” you from my sexuality. I feel that while you obviously like what you have, given the full brunt of it, you’d probably run away. To be honest, I’m pretty sure that this was an accurate assessment in the past. But constantly restraining myself in that manner makes me feel alone. It’s that alone-ness that I was struggling with.

I was very excited that he explained what he had been feeling in more detail.  And the details were themselves exciting.  And I have two answers to the question of whether I would run away if I was given the full brunt of his submission – one reassuring, and one correct.  Both are true.

I’ll start with the correct answer.  I don’t think Joscelin can be complete in a relationship without sharing his full sexuality with his partner.  So if he shows it to me, and I run away, then we really weren’t compatible.  It would still be a loss, for sure, but…it’s better to know than not, I think.

The reassuring answer is that I am pretty sure I will like the full brunt.  I can think of ways it could be to make this not true, mind you.  If the full brunt means a lot more demands, pushing, and needs, without corresponding benefits for me, then it could be a problem.  I don’t have a lot of capacity for being Yet More Dominant right now, nor do I have an endless appetite for it (i.e., even if our time were 100% leisure time, it wouldn’t be 24/7 scenes).

I say this not to be negative, but because there is always a danger in telling your partner they don’t have to exercise any care around something they’ve previously been careful about.  You don’t know what all they’ve been holding back, do you?  It might be a lot.  It might be too much, or it might be too much all at once.

But even though I’m talking in caveats, what I feel is, “There’s more?  More?  I want more.  Bring on the more!”  I feel like a dog who heard someone say “park” or “cheese.”  What cheese?  Cheese now?  Is there cheese?  Cheese!!

I don’t expect Jos to just fling the whole package at me, but I can’t wait to talk more about it, and I’m excited at the thought of more stuff to explore together.

It occurred to me yesterday to wonder if Jos’s fears that his feelings are not enough for me might be projection – as in, the psychological process where you attribute your own feelings or thoughts to others.  (I should probably find out someday whether the existence of projection is empirically supported, but at any rate, I find that I engage in it myself relatively often.)

I ask this because what he describes himself as not feeling for me (some “deep feeling of partnership” that he felt in his first, doomed relationship right away) seems nebulous, while what he fears that I don’t feel (owner love) is much more vivid and concrete.

So, Joscelin: do you think you might worry that you don’t feel what I need you to feel because, in fact, you think I might not feel what you need me to feel?

Mistress Matisse was kind enough to point out to me that someone on FetLife has my post on topping from the bottom extensively quoted without attribution as part of his profile (which reads like a paper poorly plagiarized from the Internet, as it no doubt is).  Maybe I shouldn’t care, but it irritates me.  I love being quoted but I expect attribution.  I sent him an email (on FetLife):

Hi,

I noticed (it was pointed out to me) that a lot of your profile is quoted from my blog, http://devastatingyet.wordpress.com/. I don’t mind, but I would appreciate an attribution for using my words.

Thanks!

Dev

to which he responded

Well, thank you for giving http://devastatingyet.wordpress.com/ for me to read … be I never been to this site before….

I do get a lot of emails that refer to alot of BDSM, asking if this may be true … but I am reading through the link you gave me and I have not found thing educational that I would like to quote.

By I will keep reading through it and if I find a quote of your I will delete it …

Thank you,

Sir. Sexy Cruiser

After I pointed out the specific post (it’s not subtle), he wrote

Well, I see we both like to quote Dan Savage and Sigmund Fraud, so it seem we both agree on quoting their quotes and did footnoted the domain source which I agree with you where they come from…

Thank you for pointing it out …

Sir. SEXY CRUISER

I suppose he’s probably a non-native speaker rather than illiterate, but whatever.  I reported him to admin for his copyright violation.  (No, adding an incorrect Freud attribution to my words does not help.)

Violacious wrote an amazing post about subjugation as love yesterday.  A couple of things she wrote were strongly reminiscent of Joscelin; one of them was this:

Being ruthlessly subjugated is gratifying because it both endorses my devotion, and gives me a (rightful) place to be.

Jos is enormously moved by the idea of having a rightful place to be, and I think it’s a desire that remains largely unsatisfied for him.  (It surely doesn’t help that my initial response to the idea, way back when he first started talking about it, was something along the lines of a blank stare.)  Giving him a place to be (in a broad sense) is something I can do for limited periods, like at Thunder, when I think about it, but can’t (so far) maintain in everyday life.  And so it is part of a great group of things that aren’t continuous in our relationship.

I can’t help but feel that it is somewhat natural that the slave maintains a more continual awareness of the dynamic than does the master.  Surely something that can happen without your willing it is more salient than something you have to choose.  Every time I walk by a pencil, the pencil knows I may pick it up and use it, but I’m only aware of the pencil if I want to write something; otherwise it is just part of my environment going by.  Likewise, I don’t maintain continual awareness of the fact that Jos is my slave, since using him as a slave only happens when I choose it.

And yet the feeling of untapped submission is really hard from the submissive’s side.  At least, it was hard for me, and it is hard for Jos.  (Perhaps the pencil suffers as well, mutely calling out to me as I callously pass.)

One thing Jos said Sunday night was that he feels that if his submission were truly desired, then surely I would call upon it more often.  When watching TV, I might have him kneel between a particular set of commercials, for instance.  There are many ways I could call it forth for my enjoyment, if I really do enjoy it.  (I do.)

And yet somehow it is not that easy or simple for me.  I am not always in the mood to be drawn into a power dynamic exercise, which is all interwoven with sex.  Putting him into headspace requires me to maintain an appropriate affect as well.  It is like sex – stimulating, exciting, but requiring of special energy and purpose.

The kind of thing commenters would suggest is probably that I make up more rules or protocols – things he could do (would be required to do) on his own, without needing energy from me, that could satisfy this need.  And I think he wants those things too.  But I fear them turning hollow, and I worry that I won’t keep up my end of the deal by continuing to appreciate and notice and demand them, and then they’ll just become disappointments for him and vague guilty feelings for me.

I don’t know.  The submission is beautiful when I get it, and at least in theory I always want more (and I certainly always feel that I want more), but revealed preferences suggest otherwise.  I wish I knew how to bridge the gap.

I mentioned, in my previous post, my (now confirmed) hypothesis that what I’m calling “subjugation” is one of Joscelin’s ways of submissively loving me, and one of the ways he fears that I don’t understand/appreciate/desire/reciprocate.  What I mean by “subjugation” – and this is crucial to why I think he thinks I don’t get it as a kind of love – is something in which I am perceived as distant, alien, and possessed of my own, unknowable motivations.

I may not be accurately describing anything that he actually feels, mind you.  I’m guessing a bit blindly, though he seemed to confirm what I was saying yesterday.

I don’t think empathy is the only way to understand another’s feelings, but it’s certainly a starting point.  What I want, really badly, is for Jos to describe this feeling to me, to tell me what it’s like for him.  What does it feel like?  What thoughts go along with it, encourage it?  What kinds of thoughts are anathema to it, or don’t fit into its worldview?  I want the goods.

When I imagine feeling what I imagine he feels towards someone, I get something that I don’t think is what he’s talking about.  The dominant who is tormenting me from an emotional distance is either someone I really don’t care about, in which case I am bottoming and not really thinking or feeling about that other person at all, but just absorbed in my own experience, or, if I were close to the person and experienced this kind of alienation, I think it would be like Violacious described in her comment, frightening and possibly damaging.

In the first case, it’s definitely not a form of love, and in the second case, it’s the kind of love that would break and harm me – a helpless love opening a black hole of need within me.

When we switch and Jos really hurts me, then…what do I feel?  I don’t feel deep intimacy, generally, nor am I kind of ignoring him the way I might with someone I just met and am having a scene with at the club.  I like when he seems stern and tormenting.  I feel submissive to him in those moments.  But I don’t think I feel ruthlessly subjugated in the way that I’m talking about here.  I don’t feel like there is no mercy for me in the universe, or like I am the plaything of an overlord.

What I feel in those moments is the reciprocal of what I feel when I’m really deliberately hurting Joscelin – either mindless sensation, or a feeling that he’s making me endure something that I have to go through for some reason.  (That’s one of my kinks, if you recall – a kind of caretaking while hurting someone.  Like a nurse, trainer, or priest who has to do something painful to you for your own good.  Mmm, hot.)

Clearly there are times when we play (me on top) where I am doing that nurse/trainer/priest hurting-you-for-your-own-good thing to Joscelin, comforting him while I hurt him, and on his side he’s being tormented as a plaything for my (unempathized-with) pleasure.  That seems fine to me – his view is more or less what’s actually happening, after all.  The fact that my compassionate act is part of the torment is all right, since it really is an act.

I don’t know.  There are a million lenses through which to view what we do, to conceptualize something that is really about feelings and experiences in the moment, and that often involves an altered headspace anyway.  But I really do hope that Jos will sit down and tell me about his feelings, in as much detail as he can muster.

Joscelin and I spent all day Saturday together, basically having a holiday from life, and then late this afternoon, he came to me, as I watched football, knelt, and let me know that, if I wanted to do anything with him at some point, whatever it might be, he was available.

So a bit later I got some chains and I bound him in a pretty uncomfortable position (wrists and ankles chained behind his back and connected between his legs to a cock ring) and left him on the living room floor at my feet for quite a while, moaning and grunting in discomfort, while I played a video game and watched some more TV.

When I unchained him, we went to my room, where we fucked.  The fucking was intense and awesome – we talked about his helpless position and I hurt his nipples – and then I asked him to distract himself so he could fuck me better without coming, and so I could zone out and just feel the lovely sensation of getting fucked.

At some point it became too much for him and he told me wanted to come, and he begged me to let him come, over and over.  And I said no over and over.  He said that he wanted to disobey me and come anyway, and I told him not to.  (He has never done that.)  He was really unusually frustrated.  When I told him to stop, he protested heartily, even slipping back in at one point.  I think there was some roaring.

I was going to have him fuck me with his fingers while I made myself come with my vibrator, and I usually put nipple clamps on him for that, but when I went to put them on, he begged me not to.  He seemed sincere.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s not a limit,” he admitted.

“I know,” I said, and put them back down on the table.

He got a little bit upset, distraught maybe, and ended up asking me to put them on him, but I didn’t.  I had my (very explosive) orgasm and then we went into aftercare.

Immediately after lying down he started to cry, and he cried for a long time.  I wanted to hold him tight, but he often doesn’t want to be held in situations like that, so I only touched his arm or head a little bit.  I was keeping myself very calm.

“What are you feeling?” I asked at one point.

“I can’t tell you,” he said.

After a long pause, I said, “If you can’t tell me, it sounds like you should tell me.”

“I can’t tell you yet,” he said.

“OK.”  So I waited.

A long, long, long, and emotional conversation ensued.  When he distracted himself during the fucking, he thought he kind of fell out of headspace, so that he wasn’t where he should have been emotionally to cope with the denial.  And then everything became, for him, a referendum on his submission, and it seemed like I was angry or disappointed a lot of times, even though he didn’t think (as he told me this) that that was true.

“Oh god,” he said at one point.  “You’ll empathize with this.”

“What?”

“I’m thinking about you being angry at me.”

“I’m not.  At all,” I said.

“I know.”

But he was really emotional and distraught.

“I’m going to choose one point on the circle and start there,” he said.  “And when I get to the end” – he traced the circle in the air with his finger – “it’s going to be kind of scary.  But when I start, it’s going to be terrifying.”

“All right,” I said.

I can’t remember the whole circle to distinguish it from the rest of the conversation, but the start, the part that was supposed to be terrifying was something like, “I have always felt there was something missing between us, a deep feeling of partnership that I don’t have with you.  And I had that within two weeks of meeting [his first real girlfriend], and it was why I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.”

I was able to stay really calm through all of this, and able (amazingly) to remember that he was talking about himself and not about me.

He tensed up some more at one point, crying a little, and said, “I’m thinking about how hurt you’re going to be about this when you stop having to take care of me.”  (He knew, of course, that was I staying ultra-calm because we were in aftercare and I was trying to take care of him.)

“You’re, like, playing over what you’ve said to me and hearing how it sounds?” I guessed.

“Yeah, maybe…something like that.”

Jos has a problem, or the sensation of a problem, that I don’t know what to think about.  It came up today and it comes up very occasionally – maybe twice a year or so in a big way.  It seems to be something like this

• there is something missing in his feelings towards me
• he felt that missing thing with the other girlfriend, but maybe just because she was the first one?
• or maybe it’s that he’s only afraid that if I knew what he felt, it wouldn’t be enough for me
• but he’s crazy in love with me and deliriously happy being with me
• or maybe it’s that he is afraid his submissive kind of love is not what I want
• if I understood the submission and the way he really felt, would it be what I want, or just weird, bad, unwanted?
• maybe his fear about that is why he doesn’t feel the deep partnership, and if he could relax then he would feel it

That may have been the content of the circle he described.

I don’t know what to think about this.  Nobody has ever loved me the way that he does, truly, and everything I’ve seen from him tells me that it’s everything I need.  Yet when a man tells you there is something missing in his feelings, I think you should listen.  (In general I think you should always listen to emotional bad news, because it’s probably being understated.)

And yet I know he is also, as he puts it, “a guilt bucket,” and inclined to think that whatever he feels is wrong.

“I’ll never regret this.  Any of it,” I said.  And what I meant (which he understood, but you, dear reader, may not) is that, whatever he feels, and however it turns out, it’s been good for me, it’s been wonderful, and there is nothing I could learn about his feelings that would make that not so.

He felt healed by me saying it.

As for the submissive feelings…I do think that Jos has submissive feelings that aren’t the kind I have when I’m submissive, and that are part of his love for me, and that I don’t fully understand.  But every glimmer I see of those feelings attracts and makes me want more and more of them.  I really do not feel there is any cause to worry that Jos has submissive feelings that I would find unwelcome.

Of course, not finding someone’s feelings unwelcome is not enough, is it?  If you tell someone you love them and they say that’s all right with them, you’ll probably be devastated, and so it’s not really enough for me to be just generally down with Jos’s submissive feelings.  But the evidence from our history and the feeling in my heart is that I want and love those feelings, and don’t merely find them acceptable.

I hypothesized to him that one of the feelings he worries about is his feeling of subjugation to me, which is a kind of alienating feeling that is not really intimate in nature – his love towards me as a distant or impersonal (it’s hard to put into words) tormentor.  And I said that he probably thought I would not like that feeling because it is not intimate and loving in the normal way.

He confirmed that he does have that feeling, and he does worry about it in exactly that way.  And I confirmed that I don’t understand that feeling as a form of love, that at best I can understand being willing to be made to feel that way because you love someone.  And I hurt him by saying that, but we both know this honesty is the only path forward.  But hurting him made me cry from pent up emotion over the whole conversation and because, in that moment, the idea of him being hurt through (perceived) rejection of his submissive feelings was just a horrible thing to contemplate.  I never want that.

“We just leveled up,” he said afterwards.

I feel spent, drained, like I spent all day crying.  But I don’t think things are bad or that there was any actual bad news in all of that, and fortunately it is bedtime.