Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

In which, in celebration of Halloween, I try to write Hentai. Warning, if sex, bugs, or tentacles freak you out, you should really skip this post entirely. It’s also far from my best writing.

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It was dark in the corridor. Too dark to see more than a few inches in front of my face. My friends had gotten far enough ahead of me that I couldn’t make out their shapes, and I cursed the fit of whimsy that had made me agree to go into the haunted mansion. I hate haunted houses. Horror movies do nothing for me, and I firmly believe that if fear isn’t going to be a prelude to sex then it can stay the hell out of my psyche. Still, when I turned the corner and the hands reached out of the wall behind me, I screamed, and the sound was swallowed, utterly, in the velvety blanket of the dark.

I don’t know why I noticed it, given that there were fingers wrapped around my biceps, wrists, and ankles, but the way my voice was eaten by the air felt wrong. It was unnatural. My scream should have bounced along the hallway the way it had when the skeleton swung across the entry way or the actor dressed like a goblin stuck his head out of the stomach of a plastic corpse. Instead it was sucked away into silence. I screamed again, as I felt the hands dragging me backwards into the black, and it must have been my imagination but I swear I saw the night itself come and soothe the sound away.

Quiet. Everywhere quiet. The darkness now was complete, and I began to struggle against the implacable hands that were dragging me back into the warm, dense night.

“Sssssstop,” I heard. The syllables slid straight into my brain and I couldn’t move. Something large moved up behind me, too warm, too big to be human, and I shuddered. The hands tightened on my limbs and, as my fear grew, my body began to react to the combination of touch and terror and I began to feel slick dampness forming between my thighs. “Oh yessssss,” the voice continued, “thisss one will sssserve,” and my spine twitched as a long, rough, sandpaper dry tongue rasped across the top of my spine. “Thisss one will sssserve very well.”

The hands, all six of them, pulled me back against the figure behind me. I felt its skin writhe, and then I felt myself covered in thousands of little crawling feet. I screamed and screamed again, the sound eaten by the darkness the second it left my throat, as what seemed like thousands of bugs crawled across my skin and devoured my clothing, occasionally getting carried away in their hunger and taking a bite of the pale flesh beneath. They were everywhere, and it seemed like hours of horror passed before I was left naked and mewling in the being’s arms, spots of blood clinging to my skin like paint, as I felt them swarm back over me and into the creature they had come from.

My body twitched repeatedly as that same sandpaper tongue licked up the drops of blood, leaving raw angry patches of skin behind. It rasped once, in passing, between my legs, and I realized to my horror that there was part of me that was actually enjoying this nightmare. As I shivered and began to cry, the tongue moved up to taste my tears, and I felt something in the creature behind me begin to shift. What I had thought were hands around my ankles began to slide, and twine, and shift their way up my legs, wrapping me like snakes. The skin that covered them was rough, abrasive, but they seemed to secrete some sort of slime that helped them drag their way along my flesh. I felt one slide, burning, inside my cunt, and as it did I screamed and came. It pulsed inside me and swelled to fill me as I felt the other tentacle push inside me from behind.

They moved inside me and I cried out, over and over. Each time it felt like they were sucking more of the liquid warmth from inside my body, and as tears poured down my face they were devoured too. When it felt like there was nothing left inside me, no energy, no moisture, barely even any life, the creature withdrew, and as it departed I shuddered again on the floor.

Suddenly, I could hear myself crying.

Sometimes the human body baffles me.

Given a choice between intensely painful and intensely pleasurable stimuli, I have a significantly easier time processing the first. Purely on the basis of my ability to handle sensation, I am far more likely to safeword on sexual touch than on pain. My pain threshold is pretty high, and I often get off on taking pain to points that I should probably consider “a bit too much” precisely because it is a bit too much. Plus, I frequently contextually transform intense pain into sensual or sexual pleasure. I am, after all, a masochist. Intensity is good.

On the other hand, I find that often explicitly sexual touch goes very quickly from pleasurable to overwhelming. I’m not entirely certain how much of that is biological and how much of it is psychological, but it feels so strange to me that I find it easier to enjoy pain than arousal. You would think it would go the other way, and yet I had a conversation with someone (who likes to do a lot of forced orgasm play) a few months ago that suggests my response is not all that uncommon. Still, it’s somewhat bizarre from a conceptual standpoint, if not from a biological one. It makes sense, intellectually, that the body would have better systems for dealing with excesses of painful stimuli than pleasurable ones.

The nervous system is a strange little machine. Mine needs a nap so that it will survive its date tonight.

The other day, a good friend said to me that I am the only person on the planet who would actually talk about the efficacy of a kiss. I’m relatively certain that is not in fact true. I’m sure there are other people who are equally geeky about their sexual experiences and sometimes efficacy is the only logical rating measure. There are times when the categories of “good kiss” and “bad kiss” simply do not apply. When that is the case, the only thing you can do is talk about whether or not the kiss fulfilled its intended purpose.

Which begs the question, what is the intended purpose of a kiss? Is it to express attraction? Establish connection? Create an atmosphere of romance? Arouse and titillate? Encourage a desire for more kissing or other sexual contact? I suppose that, depending on the kiss, it could be any or all of the above or even something else entirely.

I would not claim to be a connoisseur of kisses, but I love kissing. Kissing is, in fact, one of my favorite activities that two people can do with their clothes on. I am, I will even admit, a bit of a kissing whore. I will kiss anyone of whom I am fond and to whom I am even remotely attracted. I will, in certain circumstances, kiss them for hours at a time. As such, although I am not a trained smoochophile, I do know, from experience, what I do and do not like in a kiss. I feel comfortable saying to myself “I like kissing X. X is a good kisser.” or “I don’t like kissing Y. It really does nothing for me.”

So color me completely confused by the fact that the other night, on my second really wonderful date with the person who inspired this post, I found myself rather extraordinarily turned on by a kiss that would not normally have pushed my buttons in any way. It wasn’t a bad kiss, not by any means. It was a kiss that simply had nothing to do with any of my usual barometers of kissing. Still, it melted me, and when it was time for me to leave I didn’t want to go, so I kept requesting one more kiss. It was a very efficient way to delay departure*.

When I spoke to my friend later, to discuss how excited I was that I had gotten to kiss the person in question, she asked me if it was a good kiss, and I paused. I said, “I don’t know, but it was most certainly an effective kiss, if you can judge the efficacy of a kiss by it’s ability to induce physical arousal,” and then she started mocking me.

I stand by my assessment. I kissed a bunch of people the other weekend, all of whom were very good kissers, and it simply reinforced my existing judgement. It was a very effective kiss, and I can not form a simple binary judgement of quality. She who mocked me can kiss my ass

–
*”This is making it much harder for me to let you leave,” he said. To which I did not respond, “Yay! I win at life!” My restraint was probably a good thing, since I think that, much to my disappointment, our third date may have been our last. The interest level seems to have waned. Alas! All I want is a nice, smart, funny partner who I don’t have to pretend to be someone else around and whose clothing I can rip off on a regular basis. I am a much happier human being when I am getting regular doses of affectionate contact. You wouldn’t think it would be quite this hard.

I’m a sucker for a good romance. No. Kill the modifier. I’m a sucker for romance, period. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, smart or cheesy, storybook love melts me in all of its many and varied forms.

There’s a new show on the CW called Valentine, and it’s probably incredibly stupid, but it’s also so ridiculously romantic that I can’t quite see past it to the dumb I’m certain must be lurking underneath. I just like the idea that not only do people have soul mates but there are forces in the universe trying to bring them together. I find it comforting. Many years ago there was a show called “Jack’s Place,” staring Hal Linden, Finola Hughes, and John Dye, that I adored for similar reasons. I’m not sure why, but, on days when I’m feeling particularly futile about my romantic prospects, fictional meddling can be ridiculously encouraging.

The irony is, of course, that my devotion to storybook romance is probably at the root of my perennially single status. My ideas of what relationships should be like were shaped by books, tv shows, and films rather than by reality. Particularly with well written books, I get so lost in the story that it becomes more real than real life. I live the protagonists’ failures and successes, loves and losses. Then I come back to the real world and am reminded, once again, that life rarely conforms to my sense of character, drama, or plot. People aren’t characters in novels. They don’t always serve to move the story along, and they often actively fail to do the things you expect. Plus, in my experience, the course of love not only does not run smooth, it tends to either dry up entirely or flood your basement.

No wonder I read my eyes out and watch ridiculously romantic tv shows. I love my brain candy. I just have to remember not to ingest so much that I get heart-burn.

I enjoy being taken advantage of. In fact, I must admit to taking unabashed pleasure in what I like to think of as Opportunistic Top Syndrome*…
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What is OTS? This condition, heretofore undescribed in the medical literature, refers to the propensity of certain individuals to take shameless advantage of pre-existing bruises in order to inflict the maximum amount of pain with the minimum amount of effort. In certain circles this condition is also known as LTS – lazy top syndrome – but current research has suggested that this moniker may actually discourage such forms of abuse instead of simply egging on the individuals in question to inflict additional damage, as was initially reported by earlier observers of this phenomenon (personal communication A.N. Mous.)

Quite interestingly, OTS is often observed in individuals who are not, otherwise, terribly inclined to the infliction of painful stimuli (referred to, in these cases, as sOTS – solely opportunistic topping syndrome). Apparently the fact that the damage has already been done induces a sort of disinhibition cascade that encourages Emphatic Poking accompanied by the occasional Evil Grin. This phenomenon has initiated several debates as to whether the sOTS individuals are, in fact, not actually normally interested in the generation of pain or are simply unwilling to do their own dirty work (see online responses to: Cookie, IM et al (2006)”The Switchy Snarkfest,” BDSM Quarterly 42(1):37-49.) More charitably inclined researchers have put forth the hypothesis that sOTS is actually far more closely related to Reaction Junkieism than OTS. Reaction junkies are thought to be aroused less by the infliction of pain than by the elicitation of a strong reaction – which can also be obtained through sensual or sexual stimuli. Although the origins of the sOTS phenomenon would seem of little relevance to its victims, they speak to the overall levels of sexual sadism present in the population, a statistic which is of great interest indeed.

Additional research is clearly needed in this area, not only to further elucidate the nature of the previously described conditions but to explore other related syndromes including the insidious MMS – masturbatory masochistic squirming – often found in the individuals who are the primary victims of OTS and sOTS sufferers. Early signs of MMS include choosing to sit on unpadded surfaces when comfortable chairs are available, strategic self-poking, and excessively vigorous leaning on solid objects. If you see an individual suffering from these disturbing predilections, remember that they need your help. Be wary, however, as it has been suggested that MMS is actually the form of OTS seen in carriers who, for some reason, are not fully susceptible to the disease’s pernicious influence.

The author is still extremely well supplied with the bruises necessary for continuing her studies of OTS, and she intends to pursue her research while doing so remains practical. She emphatically denies, however, suffering from any form of MMS and insists that all fidgeting merely reflects an underlying psychological resistance to remaining immobile.

Study subjects are being earnestly recruited. Volunteer screening will be done via e-mail. Compensation is negotiable.
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*Ooops. I seem to have found my digression far more entertaining to pursue than my original point.

A comment on Eileen’s post on gifts reminded me of another reason that I often have so much trouble understanding the alternative perspective on the issue. For me, submission is a sexual orientation rather than a relationship orientation. I can not imagine negotiating an all-encompassing (as opposed to strictly play based) relationship that was fundamentally structured around power exchange, no matter how much I enjoy power exchange in the bedroom.

I enjoy sexual submission. I even enjoy service. I can not, however, wrap my head around the mindset that leads to someone saying “I insist that anyone is entitled to produce value with their livestock.” about himself, (which is not, in any way, a criticism of that individual. From all evidence the relationship in question is far more successful than any I have ever been involved in. For which I applaud them… I just don’t get it.) I like negotiated power exchange. I love giving up control of my body, my mind, my will for specific periods of time. The thought of doing it permanently, however, makes me queasy. I can play at slave, I could not be one. My autonomy is too important to me. My career, my ambition, my work, my self, I will not cede willingly to another’s control.

24/7 power exchange is not something I foresee ever engaging in… at least not for much longer than 96/4. Even though what I often love so much about BDSM is giving up control, giving up will, and giving up the power to choose, these things are only so valuable to me because I value their counterparts so highly from day to day. I come from the type of upbringing where if something is too easy you have to question whether or not it’s worth doing. My submission is both easy and horribly, horribly hard. If you ask me what I hold most dear about myself, it’s the very things that in submission I give to someone else. There’s a reason why for the first couple of years I was involved in the scene I identified solely as a smart ass masochist. Submission attracted me, but it also scared the crap out of me. Any reader of this blog can tell how much I love it, but I also love and value the rest of my life. I can’t imagine trusting someone else to manage that for me. I can barely pull it off, sometimes, myself.

One thing that particularly goes against the grain for me, in many of the TPE relationships I have observed, is that it often seems like the dominant’s responsibility to see to the improvement of the submissive – encourage them to go to school, do their work, study whatever skills the Master or Mistress values. That’s totally alien to my world view, in which it is my responsibility to make myself the best person possible - in whatever areas I need or desire to excel. Make suggestions to me, absolutely, if there’s something you think I could benefit from learning, but direct my studies? I know best how I work and learn. Honestly, I find the whole concept infantalizing, and I want a partner, not a parent. Besides, I’m making my living as a creative professional, because I am scarily motivated and I’ve spent a lifetime preparing and working to achieve the success I have. The thought of putting all those years of work into someone else’s hands is almost abhorrent. If I had to be told to study, work, apply for jobs, rehearse, etc.*, I would never have gotten to where I am or be who I am.

Different strokes for different folks, and god only knows that probably 90 percent or more of the population have lives that are far more straightforward than mine. They get up, go to work, come home, and live their life in the hours between obeisance to an employer’s schedule. They don’t live to work; they work to live, which is probably a healthier mindset, but it isn’t mine. Still, I can see how that could make it easier to turn your life over to someone else’s care. It’s just not my kink, and that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be. My kinks don’t have to be their kinks either.

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*Mind you, I had an ex whose wife was in charge of telling him to do all these things… so I recognize that this is not, by any means, solely an issue in the realm of TPE. Similarly, I recognize that there are adults who need people to be their parents in order to function in their daily lives. I just don’t want to be one of them, or be in a relationship with one of them. I value independance/self-motivation too strongly - both my own and as a quality in others to respect. I feel like I should clarify this by saying that I’m talking about “people who can take care of themselves, but don’t” rather than “people who have an actual physical or emotional disability that prevents self-care and honestly need help.” The second is an entirely different issue. It’s the lack of motivation that I have problems with. Nothing makes me as impatient with someone as hearing them repeatedly say “I want to accomplish X,” while not making any sincere effort to do so. If you insist you want to be a professional actor but haven’t gone on an audition in two years… it’s very difficult for me to take your insistence as anything other than hyperbole. You have to work for the things you want.

1. Poly wanna cracker:

As I wrote the last time I was musing on polyamory, I’m not firmly in one camp or the other when it comes to relationship structure. I can do monogomy or I can do polyamory, and I have been drawn to both at different times throughout my life. Spending time as I did over the weekend, however, with a lot of poly people whose relationships really seem to work, always pushes me over a little farther onto the poly side of the scales. It’s always nice to see such an abundance of shmoop, and while I don’t think that monogamy in inimical to shmoop, it can be rather restrictive in determining who any given person gets to be shmoopy with. Shmoop shared is shmoop mutiplied… or something like that.

2. Whip cracker:

I got single-tailed three four five (six?) times over the weekend. I love single tails - even if I can’t quite keep track of how many of them I was hit with. Only one of those was actually a single-tail scene (rather than a single-tail interlude, or a single-tail en passant, or … I’m out of other things it could be,) and it was really nice (all but one of them were, honestly.) I was quite sad that I had to call it short because I had promised someone else they could birthday single-tail me and I wanted to make certain I had enough skin left for someone whose skills I wasn’t cognizant of. But while it lasted, it was lovely. Slice, slice, slice. Fire, intensity, pain. Yum. I wonder if people, in general, appreciate how much of a skill inflicting good pain is. It doesn’t simply require good technical skill with a particular implement, it requires some level of ability to read the person you’re inflicting it on so that you can tune it to something they enjoy or, if you want to, something that they don’t. I’m so not a top that I often feel guilty taking up the time of someone whose doing a really good job of beating me, since I have trouble imagining that they’re enjoying hurting me as much as I’m enjoying being hurt.

3. Crack(er)ing up

Laughing in scene, or in scene spaces, is joyful - if sometimes unexpected. It’s not so much a matter of “why do it if it doesn’t make you happy?”- since there are different ways of being happy and different things one can get out of a scene depending on the headspace with which one goes into it - as a matter of “a different way of enjoying it.” Shared laughter is just fun, as well as being a damn good ab work out. Serious is good, but so is silly. I’m still looking forward to doing that piercing scene with googly eye beads at some point…

4. Vanilla wafers

I’d like to pretend that I had something profound to say about vanilla sex here, but mostly I just wanted to put vanilla wafers into my box of crackers. Cuddling is good! Everyone should have regular smooching! There we go. Nom nom!

5. Totally crackers

I have 2-3 more substantial posts that are stalled on technicalities. Hopefully one or more of them will get off the ground sometime soon. It depends on how much work I feel like avoiding, and if I can write my way around the roadblocks.

I was thoroughly and soundly beaten in honor of the Dreaded Birthday. I do believe the final inventory was as follows.

1. A beating, up to my birthday and back, mostly with a razor strop
2. Spanking on my pubic bone up to my birthday
3. The Fibonacci spanking
4. The caning that was probably 4-5 times my birthday with the creative counting (fun!)
5. Light thwappings upon the arm to my birthday
6. A hysterically funny beating with 5 different implements of destruction (my birthday was conveniently divisible by 5)
7. A slightly nerve-wracking singletailing to my birthday
8. A really relaxing flogging (LOVE that flogger) and singletailing to, I think, well above my birthday, but I stopped counting at that point. (Followed, immediately, by a remarkably competent singletailing by someone who, if I understood things correctly, had never hit someone with a singletail before… but that wasn’t a birthday beating so it doesn’t get its own bullet point on this particular list.)
9. Being knife scored to my birthday and then beaten, on the thigh, with the flat of a long knife/short sword to slightly more than my birthday (maybe 1.5x? I was kind of spacey at that point so I’m not really sure how much of a pain in the ass I was being.)

I think that’s the whole list of Birthday Doom. Other things happened as well, many of them quite delightful, quite painful, quite ridiculous, or all of the above, and some of them will certainly make it into this blog, but I wanted to memorialize the Birthday Beatings before I forgot any of them (I hope I managed… I have a terrible feeling I forgot someone, since I’ve already had to edit twice) so that if I feel a little bit down on the actual day I can look back on this weekend and get all smiley. Or, honestly, sit down on something solid and smile, because I can’t imagine I’m going to be all healed by then. I’m so incredibly glad that I canceled my doctors’ appts. tomorrow. I am shades of purple and stripey all over that make me incredibly happy, but would probably cause my gynecologist to make notes in my file suggesting I need to be committed.

I am a smart-ass masochist. I can provide evidence in favor of this assertion in the form of a brief description of something that happened last night. The Fibonacci spanking described in the comments of the last post isn’t, after all, conclusive. That could have been entirely the fault of the, admittedly ridiculous, top (who may be my long lost twin brother - our brains work in scarily similar patterns.) No, I would like to relate to you the tale of the birthday beating that followed it, which was with someone I had never played with before, but whom I had been obnoxiously objectifying for several hours (There was SHINY clothing involved. I have poor impulse control. What can I say… other than that “I have poor impulse control.” may be my new catch phrase) who turned around to my objectifying comment, walked over, and said “Aren’t people supposed to be hitting you with things 192* times?” To which I said, “Yes.”

So, the person in question started hitting me, and I start counting, and when I got to 189 (i.e. Birthday - 3) I said, “I’ve forgotten what number we were at. It was either 189 or 2. I vote for 2!” and started counting back up to my Birthday again. This happened several more times until I gave up any pretense of counting and just used Birthday-1 as an “I may have to stop soon” number… but kept going back from 191 to 87 or 46 or some other random number depending on how happy I was at any given moment. It was FUN. I am a pain in the ass, which, given where I was being beaten, is a particularly apt thing to be.

I have awesome marks. It’s going to hurt to sit down for days and days and days. That makes me wiggle. They may even last to my actual birthday, which would make me the happiest person ever.
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*192 is not my real age. However, since numbers are important for the telling of this tale I thought a need to provide one.

Given that it’s my birthday next week, and one that I’m not looking forward to at that, I’ve made it my mission for the weekend to get as many birthday beatings as possible. Fortunately, this mission is aided by the fact that I am at a gathering where there are lots of kinky people and beatings are in good supply. Still, in the course of my first two, (three? Once I got beaten up to my new age and then back down the other side.) I discovered some unfortunate complications to my brilliant plan to get beaten senseless this weekend…

1. When asked to count, it is very difficult for me to count without enumerating interesting facts about the numbers: “Prime” “Perfect Square” “Product of Two Primes.”

This is bad for several reasons. First off, it makes the top think that you’re not paying sufficient attention to the beating - which is not necessarily true. I just really like numbers. If I have to talk about them anyway I might as well get the most out of it. Second, when you’re being beaten by someone who has taught math more recently than you’ve taken it you sometimes get screwed by your own initiative. I was forced to go back twice because I kept screwing up the perfect triangle, since I had completely forgotten what a perfect triangle _was_. Oh endorphins, you are so not good for my brain!

2. I get so distracted thinking about the numbers that I… lose track of the numbers.

Not once in those three tries did I make it to my birthday correctly. Yes, I am an adult woman with a DEGREE IN MATHEMATICS who can not count. I’d blame the beatings, but it would just be an excuse… and a dishonest one at that.

In other words… I appear to already be senseless. No beatings required. *sigh*

This is further proven by the fact that my brain has decided to like giggle-space again - the place in my head where people hitting me makes me cackle like a madwoman. This used to be the case all the time, but giggle-space is not terribly compatible with sub-space and I’ve been playing in sub-space more often lately than just getting ridiculous beatings. (In sub-space being hit with things makes me horny. In giggle-space it makes me happy. ) Although, come to think of it, the piercing scene I posted pictures of way back when also sent me into mad giggle-space. It’s fun to be a masochist. Everyone should try it. Even though people look at you funny when pain makes you cackle. Still, I’m kind of used to that.

3. I’m surrounded by people just as geeky, or even geekier, than I am (, and can I say how happy it makes me to be surrounded by people who are insanely sexy both in body and in brain? YUM.) This means that they come up with horrible suggestions… like factorial beatings. Fortunately, utterly impractical at my advanced age. Still… slightly scary. In the hot way.