From Gordon:

Richard is now out of intensive care and in a regular hospital room, and is now showing only slight signs of confusion.

The other night, I was touching Joscelin’s balls casually as we sat in his room, and I tickled him by mistake.  He covered his balls with his hand, and I said, “Move your hand.”  I had to say it three times before he moved it.

I seriously considered punishing him on the spot, and I wish I had.  It would have been powerful and hot to have done it like that.  But somehow I didn’t quite pull the trigger, so instead I punished him tonight - three strokes, not too serious.

The funny thing is, he’s back in the thick of thesis madness, and I have all of this pent-up sadism, and I had to remind myself not to let the sadism influence the punishment too much.  If I’d been hitting him some multiple of ten times, I could have been sadistically satisfied, but to make three strokes really satisfying for me, in this mood, I’d have to hit him way harder than is actually appropriate for the circumstances (which include being at his house, where he is separated by his roommates by paper-thin walls, but also just the general punishment thing we do; I don’t go nuts).

I have never before punished him for not letting me do something immediately, though it arises fairly often.  Like most people, he wants to protect himself from surprising or challenging sensations, and if we’re not in a scene and I haven’t prepared him verbally, he’ll often prevent me from doing something (tickling, pinching, grabbing, hitting) unless I directly order him to move his hand or whatever.  And I’ve always been pretty happy to just order him.  The ordering is itself hot.

What we haven’t had a chance to discuss yet, and what I’m a bit surprised he hasn’t brought up, is whether my punishing him for this is deeply OK, or whether he needs some kind of allowance for moments of panic/self-defense - an allowance of time to think and submit.

In my fantasy world, I’d reach over for a grab, he would shy away or cover himself, I would say, “Move your hand,” and he would obey me immediately, but with difficulty.  I don’t actually (at least at this moment) want the self-protective instinct to go away.  It might seem like it would be hot to imagine him not even having that boundary with me, but in truth, I think him having to fight it is sexier.

That generalizes, too.  I want him to submit to me, but I want it to take effort.  If he really didn’t care what I did to him and was actually completely aligned with my will, I think I’d be (a) concerned, and (b) bored.  It is the willful aspect of submission that is the most hot.

Ahem.  Returning to my previous point, I wonder if he needs some kind of protocol or way to say “Please give me a moment to arrange myself mentally” (short of a safeword), or if it’s really fine for me to insist on instant compliance with defense-dropping.

We should talk about this during a break in the thesis madness.

Have others of you been wondering where Richard went to? I knew he was dealing with some medical issues and so when he dropped off the face of the earth I got pretty worried. Yesterday I finally emailed his bookstore to see if someone would let me know what was going on with him. I got this response:

Richard went into the ER about the middle of last month. When the nurses ran admission tests on him they found that his oxygen level was extremely low. He was transferred to intensive care, where he is now. He was lucid for the first two days, but then was completely out of it- he didn’t know where he was or what was going on, didn’t recognize me, etc. I don’t know what caused this. This went on for over a week, during which time he was getting oxygen through a breathing tube, with no real change in his condition. Two days ago, however, he made a major turn for the better. He now recognizes me, is awake and alert and able to carry on conversations but is still confused- when I talked to him yesterday, for example, he said “I was over at your house yesterday,” which he obviously wasn’t. So he still has a long way to go, but I’m finally optimistic that he’s on the path to recovery and will be able to get through this. How long the process will take, however, I have no idea.

Scary, but not as bad as I’d feared.  Warm healing thoughts for Richard, please.  The Internets aren’t the same without him.

Joscelin and I don’t just do S&M; we have a d/s relationship.  And because d/s is often represented in somewhat crazy, fantasy-based ways, I like to occasionally recap how that works for us.

In our case, the dominance and submission is 24/7 (as they say), but it’s not of unlimited scope.  He is always my slave, but in addition to having limits, there are areas to which my reach does not extend.  For instance, I am not allowed to interfere with his work.

What does it mean that we do it 24/7?  I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean.  It doesn’t mean that every moment we are together is like a scene.  It is not 24/7 kneeling, tasks, service, punishments, and so on.  (That’s a nice fantasy but would be seriously exhausting and impractical for people who have, you know, lives.)  It does mean that, as long as it’s within the bounds, I can require his submission at any time and in any way I choose.  There are no formal transitions.  I am always his Mistress.  Protocols are always in effect.

It also does not mean that Jos maintains a servile attitude towards me.  We talk, joke around, and tease each other quite viciously.  We do all of the normal things that couples do - negotiate, argue, talk about politics, watch TV, and so on.  Jos gives me plenty of crap, and I love it.

A lot of people don’t want to do “24/7″ because they think it means maintaining that scene type of energy all the time.  It doesn’t.  Of course, if Jos and I switched, or if bdsm was something we just did sometimes, then we wouldn’t run things like this.  But what 24/7 means for us is that our chosen dynamic is for real all the time.  That’s all, and that’s a lot.

A few months ago, I had some emails with Alexis in which I asked for advice about how to get Joscelin to be more trusting and relaxed with me. In the email, I also vented a bit about the frustrations of dealing with constant distrust and unfounded insecurities. The response I got, partly fueled by my venting, was very angry, and accused me of being unwilling to listen to Jos or take him seriously at all. An excerpt just to give the sense:

You can make about a hundred statements about the two of you being consensual (except, apparently, where it inconveniences you), or about this not making you “above” him or whatever other dismissals of the reality that you care to make, but his getting angry at you is a certain indication that he IS threatened. And perhaps you don’t want him to feel threatened, and perhaps you feel he just needs to get over it or get past it or realize you have this philosophy or that philosophy and so on and so forth. But hearing over and over about him being angry with you in the middle of a session just screams to me that he is scared out of his wits.

It hurt my feelings badly and was, for the most part, really off base. (I believe part of its off-base quality was a result of my having written the original email somewhat cavalierly, under the assumption that the he understood me better than was apparently the case.) When I shared it with Jos, his response was something like, “That’s nuts. I don’t know where that comes from at all.” Because, in truth, and I can say this firmly with good self-knowledge, I am actually a good listener and I take my partner’s concerns very seriously.

But, while the accusations against me were not true, the advice itself is true. It is almost beyond true. He wrote, for instance,

If you want to get to the heart of what’s got Jos freaked, you’re going to have to toss out your casual dismissives and your unwillingness to get caught up with whatever and just open your mind. No matter what he tells you, if you do not understand, it is because he’s not using the right words. It is NOT because there isn’t a solid logic behind what he’s doing. Because there is. You not understanding does not rob whatever IT is of its importance, because it is important TO HIM. The lack is in your understanding and his communication skills. Talk and talk and talk and talk to him until you both overcome those things.

There have been times in our d/s life when Jos has expressed a reservation about something, and that reservation has seemed (to me) utterly off-base, and with no possible justification. Yet after a while, it’s become clear that he actually has some very good point, often something I was unaware of and that was necessary to get on the table, or some deep contradiction that he could not (and should not) abide.

For instance, at one point we had a multiple-day conversation that began when I told him to complain less about what we do. I think my general feeling was that when he complained it made me feel bad, like he hated what we did, and I wanted him to stop making me feel bad.

His response was along the lines of, “If you don’t want me to complain, you shouldn’t do stuff that I hate.” There was a lot more communication and nuance, but when he said that, I pretty much shut down, because I felt it put me in an impossible position, because he would never be happy if I didn’t do stuff that he hated. It freaked me right out.

But his point turned out to be critically important. I cannot, in fact, have the kind of consequence-free environment where our pleasure in the relationship is based on me doing things he hates while being willfully ignorant of that fact. He very legitimately needs me to accept his discomfort and displeasure, or else we really just can’t play that way. And only within those bounds is he willing to be told not to complain.

That is all so obvious to me now that it’s a bit painful to write about my previous confusion. But I don’t know that it would have been cleared up if he hadn’t freaked out a bit in response to my (reasonable-seeming) request and insisted - in the face of my incredulous resistance - on making the point that needed to be made.

Through many experiences like that, I have learned that I do need to listen and, as Alexis said, allow that he probably has some good point, even if I don’t know what it is yet.

Listening in a scene is different again, and Jos and I were talking about it last night. He gave a hypothetical example where he might say something in the middle of a scene like, “Mistress, here are four things that are going on with me right now…” and then, if I just said, “OK,” and went on, he would feel like he had interrupted the scene in an unwelcome way. And, for me at least, when a communication seems unwelcome, the not-to-be-said thing becomes a kind of obsession and just thinking about it hurts me. Obviously that kind of thing doesn’t feel good to him either.

It’s important to me that a scene is not a set thing, like a play, that our job is to act out. It’s about the interaction. Some of the scene moments I treasure the most have been not just unplanned, but active interruptions of the scene. I want him to interrupt me when it’s right. (But when is it right? That I can’t answer very well, which is part of the confusion. I definitely don’t want him to feel emotional pain because he feels he shouldn’t say something. It is always fine to talk to me about something. But I don’t mean to dismiss his self-editing, which can be useful and important. It is almost impossible to formulate anything to say about this that does not sound bad in one way or another.)

Things expressed in a scene need a lot of acknowledgment. Just saying “Right” and moving on is not enough. And sometimes the things expressed are questions, and sometimes they are hard to answer, either because I know the true answer isn’t quite the one he needs to hear, or because the answer is very obvious and thus hard to present meaningfully, or because I’m just addled a bit in the heat of the moment. But god, those moments are precious, some of them.

Returning to the broader them here, our relationship really has no place for, “I’m the Mistress, so what I say goes.” It’s not that I don’t have the authority to decide many aspects, but rather that my slave longs to submit to me, but needs things to be fair, explicit, safe, and open for discussion. Being the Mistress doesn’t make the rules not apply to me. If anything, I am more bound to follow them than I would be in an egalitarian relationship. How can he trust me if I am not honest, brave, fair, and able to listen?

(Edited to give credit to my correspondent.)

Assuming you read Jos’s post about our scene, you know the basics of how it went.  I’d like to talk a little bit more about my thought process around safewording.  In case you don’t want to go read his post, the short version goes like this: We had a scene.  I was hurting him and, alternately, having him edge himself, first by hand, and later by fucking me. He came by mistake.  I had stated quite firmly that I would punish him if that happened.  I safeworded instead, more or less.

When he came, he was really distraught.  I felt disappointed over the loss of the rest of my scene, but mostly I felt sorry for him.  I wanted to take care of him.

He lay next to me, and I was afraid I was going to cry, and I asked him to put his head against my chest, both so I could hold him and so I wouldn’t be facing his eyes.  He tipped his head down and I kissed his forehead and we talked.

The conflict was between my promise/threat to punish him, and the fact that neither of us felt he had really gone anything wrong.  The rules of our relationship prohibit punishment when there has been no wrongdoing.

The position I came to a bit too late, the obvious position, was that I wouldn’t be punishing him, only beating him as a direct consequence of the orgasm.  The distinction is slight, but enough to solve the puzzle.  If I had had my wits about me, and taken time and been very calm, I would have arrived there, and we would have gotten to a very settled place together, and I would have carried it out, and I think it would have been all right.

Lying there, he said, “Mistress, I am … I am … I am… ” and my mind filled in the blank over and over with the word “angry” and I shored myself up inside to be able to handle it.  It was OK for him to be angry.  I knew it was all right.  Everything was going to be fine.  I could handle it.

When he eventually spoke, what he said instead was, “I am accepting an unfair punishment in service to you.”  (Later, he told me he hadn’t been angry at all.  Not in the slightest.)  And then he said, “I’m sorry,” sincerely, a few times, while I asked him not to be sorry, please not to.  I needed to hear it.

In truth, that is a moment, a speech act, that I feel I will treasure always, not for its honesty but because the choice to submit to an unfair punishment is deep for me.  I don’t know how to explain it better than that.

He went to the bathroom, and I lay in the bed.  My thought process went something like this:

I don’t want to do this.  (I do want to do this.)

It’s hot and right.  (It’s wrong.)

It’s what I said I would do.

He feels it’s unfair.  I’m all mixed up inside.

This might be wrong.

If I realize later that it was wrong, I’ll feel terrible.  I won’t be able to handle the guilt.

I just shouldn’t do it.  I shouldn’t do it not knowing if it’s right.  I regret things like that later.

But I can’t not do it.  I just told him I was going to.

I want off this train.

No.  If I do this, I’m going to need care from him afterwards.  That’s not OK.

Oh, wow.  OK.  That’s a good reason not to do it.  Good.  I’ll tell him when he comes back.

God, please don’t let him come back saying he won’t do it, or with some other thought.  Let me speak first.

He came back, and I had him lie back down, which he wasn’t expecting, and I said, “I’m not going to punish you.”

“I’ll abide by whatever decision you’ve made, of course, Mistress, but let me just say this” he said, but I held up my hand before he could continue.

“My decision,” I said, “is that I should do this, because I said I would, and because I need you to know, when I say it, that I’ll really do it.  I need the constraint to be real.  But I’m basically safewording.”

And then aftercare.  Once he seemed fine, I let go and cried a little bit, and he held me.  I cried for making him fail, and I cried for not having the strength to make a real decision in the aftermath.

It was a few hours before bedtime, and we stayed up watching some TV, and went on an hour-long walk in a dark and spooky park.  We varied between normal and light-hearted and both being a little bit mixed up and emotional.

While he wrote his post, I read a textbook and tried not to think about what he might write.  I imagined the worst.  I imagined him writing that he felt unsafe or abused by my needing care after the scene, by my flakiness.  I took a very hot bath and tried to remind myself of his love and submission and that everything was, or would be, fine, no matter what he wrote or felt or thought.  And when he finished and I read the post, it warmed my heart and reassured me in every possible way.

He spent the night, and we had mutual orgasms lying side by side later.  Licit, good, clean orgasms.  I told him not to come before I said I was close.  His sounds as he held back from coming were hot.  After we came, after we turned off the lights, I had him hold and pet me a bit more.  I had little fears and pains with no words to them.

But I woke up this morning happy and pain-free.  In love.  And feeling (unilaterally, at least) closer to him than ever.

If you want to know a bit about how my weekend went, go read this godawful beautiful post by Joscelin. Please.

It might seem obvious that a top ought to know what they are doing. You don’t want someone doing something dangerous to you if they’re incompetent. But the truth is, the physical skills of SM are mostly optional. You only need to know how to use a singletail if you want to use one. There are plenty of ways to bind and cause pain that require almost no skill at all. Leather cuffs are about as complicated as putting on a belt. Chains and carabiners from the hardware store don’t require fancy knots or instruction. A back scratcher, wooden spoon, or any other kind of small stick can be wielded by anyone. Sandpaper. Soap. Candles. Feathers. With common sense and the motor skills of a normal adult you can safely cause quite a variety of sensations.

What is more difficult, and more mandatory, is knowing what you are doing to your partner. How much are you hurting him (or her)? How close is he to safewording? Is this type of sensation easy for him to take, or does it scare him and thus hurt him all out of proportion? What is making him uncomfortable that you might not have intended? What might he be afraid of in this situation? Is this going to leave a mark?

I’ve found with Joscelin that the most important question I need to have in mind is, what might he be afraid of? I’m sure this isn’t true of everyone, but he tends to develop emotional fears during a scene, and if I can address them unprompted, it improves the scene by an amazing amount.

Early in our relationship, I think his most common in-scene fear was that I didn’t really want what I was doing. You can connect this in an unbroken line to his most common current fear - that I don’t know what effect I’m really having. (Isn’t this post beautifully circular?) If I am hurting him, and think he’s just enjoying it in a masochistic way, and he’s not - in reality he is suffering something he really does not enjoy at all, in service to me - then that’s a screw-up. It is a kind of betrayal. And it is something that he fears.

I used to get a lot of questions along the unbroken line I mentioned. Do you really want this? Are we going back to vanilla later? Are you enjoying this? Did you hit me at that angle because you wanted to? Did you mean to hit me in the same place five times in a row? Are you intentionally scratching me harder than you ever have before? Do you know how hard this is for me? Am I your slave?

I know him now. I can often imagine the fears he might be having, and stave them off with simple words. I know this is hard for you. I’m going to hit you here over and over. I don’t need you to enjoy this - it’s OK if you hate it. I own you. This is so good. Your pain is so beautiful. I’m almost finished. We’ll have aftercare next.

And I know some of the other things that can happen to him. Brushing the hair from his face can be a big relief for him, at no cost for me. (I don’t get off on him being annoyed by little inconveniences, generally.) If he’s chained spread-eagle to the bed he might get cold. He needs a lot of water. When I’m hurting him, I listen to see if he’s remembering to breathe, and I remind him if I need to.

This is all about paying attention and learning, and it’s important no matter what kind of activities you do. If our d/s consisted of me giving him chore lists and expectations about household service to me, it would be the same way.

I was reading All For Her the other day, and he said something like “I know this is not supposed to be work for the domme.” And I understand the feeling, and don’t mean to pick on him, but, since when?

So is it worth it? Am I making it sound like all work and no fun? For me, it is worth it by a huge margin, and a lot of the work I also find pleasurable. But you know what? Making sure it’s worth it is another one of my responsibilities to Joscelin. If I do something that doesn’t work, and that is hard for him, then it’s basically wasting his service. It happens, and will always happen, because that’s just life. But I pay attention to that too. If it doesn’t serve me we don’t do it.

This whole dynamic is part of why I fear for couples where a would-be submissive partner is trying to convince the other to become dominant. Some people have a vision where this works, where the submissive one makes himself useful in such a way that it is a clear benefit and not a cost to the partner, who merely has to sort of go along with being dominant, but it’s not that way in my world. If I didn’t love Jos’s pain, if I didn’t crave his utter submission, if that slave look in his eyes didn’t make me want to reach in and pull more out with both fists, if it didn’t melt me all over…yeah. I wouldn’t do it.

I wasn’t in the mood to hurt Joscelin last night.  I wasn’t sure what kind of a scene might be nice, but I kind of winged it, and it worked out rather beautifully.

We were chatting in the living room and I told him to go into the bedroom, strip, kneel, and wait for me with his eyes closed.  I came in a few minutes later and told him he wasn’t allowed to speak.  I used a 15′ piece of rope to make about a 3′ leash, which I attached to his collar while his eyes were still closed.  I pulled him to a standing position.  And then I bound his wrists together with another piece of rope.

I let him open his eyes and get into bed with me, reminding him that he still couldn’t talk.  I had him roll over, and I bound his lower legs together with a 50′ piece of rope, winding the rope back and forth similar to this video by Two Knotty Boys, which I used as an idea:

It took a while to tie it, and I hoped it would be as entrancing and relaxing to him as it would have been for me.

When I was done, I spent some time just lying with him, touching him some.  I never allowed him to talk.  I made him go down on me, which I’ve been doing more lately, giving him the practice and (non-explicit) training.  And then I had him fuck me, for which I unbound his wrists.

When we fuck, it is basically always the same way.  He is on top.  He moves exactly the way that pleases me the most, while fighting off his own orgasm.  He is my slave.  I sometimes grab at him, or hurt him - sometimes very badly.  I sometimes do things he enjoys.  But it is always about me.  And, as so often, I did not let him come in the end.

Afterwards - after this perhaps hour or two of enforced silence - I let him speak.  He was deep into submission from the restrictions, the bondage, and the control.  I felt like I advanced the cause of controlling him just that little bit more.  And it was the scene I’d wanted - gentle, a bit technical, manipulative.  Beautiful.

I wrote in my last post about Saturday night, and the ways it was hard. I spent yesterday evening with Jos - our first chance to talk about it since that night, really. I needed some emotional support, and he gave it.

We were talking about what it is like to hurt him, why it’s scary. “I care about you,” I said. “And I know you need this. But when I’m hurting you it’s not because I want to give you something you need.”

He brought up Sex Geek’s wonderful post about the beast.  “That must be what it’s like,” he said.  “You have the beast inside you, but you’re standing next to it, and you’re stronger than it is.  And I trust you that way more and more.”

The thing is, that’s true, but it’s also a romanticized version of the truth.  It’s like a fairy tale you tell the submissives at night to help them sleep.  “It’s OK, honey.  I’m right here.  I won’t let the beast really hurt you.”

When I’m hitting him, it’s not quite like that.  I’m just one entity, not two.  The processes - the one that says “yes, more, hurt him, yeah, like that, no, he can take a little more” and the one that is more like “oh, ouch, be careful, yeah, he’s a real person in there, he can really feel that, is he going to safeword if I do that again?” - they don’t run concurrently.  They kind of switch back and forth.  And even that doesn’t convey the way that it’s all muddled up together.

Well, if you’re reading this, you’re most likely human, so you know what it is to be one of us humans.  In all partner interactions, it is easy to be selfish and harder to consider the other person’s perspective and needs.  And your head is always a muddle of different thoughts, feelings, and motivations.

So there are rules and boundaries and checkpoints in my head designed to keep Joscelin safe, but they don’t always completely work.  But Saturday night, I was pretty well in control, I think.  I don’t think I actually lost myself in there.  I felt hot-blooded but sane.  I was paying attention.

And he feels good about the scene that we had, which is (frankly) a big relief.  I told him that it seemed like afterwards he felt that I’d abused him, and he said he understood why it seemed that way, but that he didn’t.  He was struggling with a lot of feelings that conflicted with his thoughts.  And I supported him well at that time.

I am happy - truly, joyfully happy - to be able to support him after a scene, no matter what mood he ends up in, even when it is scary like Saturday was.  And I feel bad that I ended up needing so much care myself, once he was all fixed up and happy again.

“I hope that my needing all this care doesn’t make it harder for you the next time you’re feeling really bad after a scene.  Because I know this is one of the things you’re afraid of - that you’ll freak me out.  And, obviously, you did.  But I don’t care,” I said.

“I’ll be honest.  It might come up.  I might bring it up sometime when I’m feeling really bad.  But try not to let it hurt you.  In fact, if you just said something at the time like, ‘Yes, this is difficult for me, but I’m willing to do it and it’s fine with me,’ that would reassure me tremendously,” he said.

“I will,” I said.  And a bit later, “Thanks for letting me know that it might come up later like that.”

“Yeah.  My classic technique of reassuring through honesty.”

“It doesn’t usually work,” I said.  “But this time it’s OK.”

“It should work, because I know if you knew the truth, there is nothing scary here.  The truth is really good.  Everything is good.”  (I don’t know how this can be, but when he says it I believe him.)

I had been ready for a whole different conversation - one where he was angry about Saturday night’s scene or, if not angry, still needing to talk to me about things that hadn’t been OK.  I’m ready for those conversations whenever they occur, which they will from time to time.  I’m ready to listen and evaluate, respond honestly, and make changes if that’s what we decide.

What I wanted him to know most last night was that by asking, essentially, “Are you angry?” I was not saying it’s not ok if you’re angry or you better not be angry.  I just needed to know, to go ahead and have the conversation and process things.  And, yes, it’s hard.  But it’s worth it.

It is all worth it.