I can’t stop giggling over the fact that someone I am in the negotiation phase with just referred to my rather excessive missive on the topic of safe sex, STDs, and kink boundries as my “Terms of Service.”
Oh, double entendres, you bring me joy.
I’m totally stealing it. (Terms of service? Terms of servicing? Either way, it’s happy. Life. It’s in the little things.)
I had forgotten we had negotiated blood.
Or, more accurately, I had put it from my mind.
I knew he had the scalpels. I knew he was going to use them. I just didn’t think he was going to take them out and cut me right then. No warning. No preparation. Just sharp edges and instant fear.
The irony is that I’m the one with a fetish for blood. I don’t get to play with it that often. The part of my mind that takes responsibility for my own and my partner’s safety usually objects, but it is exciting. Talking about it with him, thinking about it, was an enormous turn on, but then it actually happened and my overwhelming emotion was terror.
One little line.
A whimper.
Another little line.
Biting my lip.
A third.
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
A fourth.
“You can.”
Five. Six. Seven. Eight little lines, and then it was over.
Fear evaporated, now I smile every time I look in the mirror to see them gracing my skin.
I am possessed of some extraordinarily unladylike traits.
First, I have a horrible case of Male Answer Syndrome – sit me in a class, and I tend to take over and want to jump in and explain everything if I don’t think the teacher is doing so fast enough (or well enough, or in enough depth, or clear enough, or if I’m bored, or if the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars….) I’m reasonably good about admitting when I don’t know something, but when I do, I want to share. I am far too fond of the sound of my own voice.
Second, I am something of a braggart, and, when I am excited, I tend to want to share.
This weekend there was a bag of 50 clothespins.
Time passed and, eventually, there was an empty bag that once contained 50 clothespins and 50 clothespins were instead on my skin.
It was agonizing.
It was overwhelming.
It was wonderful.
I have, of late, been having a weird relationship with pain. I want it, a lot, but then I’m not always capable of handling it. Impact has, in particular, often required too much of the wrong sort of attention to process, and so I’ve tended to bail out before the hitting gets good. I get to the place where I want more, want to fall over the edge, and before I do I wuss out. What I’ve wanted is to bliss out.
(Mind you, the nice thing about dating a sadist is that it has been making me feel less guilty asking for pain. Pain seems like a lot of work to ask of someone who doesn’t actively enjoy it. It still feels somewhat selfish, but… that may just be because it is. Selfish, that’s another unladylike trait to add to my list. And baby makes three.)
So the clothespins were perfect. They were layers of delicious, inescapable pain. They were just the right amount of too much to handle. I kept feeling like I wanted to go non-verbal to deal with them, but I also wanted to stay present and express how much too much they were.
I find unrelenting intensity in a non-frightening way incredibly arousing. Intensity is pretty hot for me, generally, but the combination of it not letting up and it being inflicted in a way that doesn’t make me worry about damage is particularly exciting.
It turned me into a puddle.
The other day, while negotiating a very hot scene wih a very hot man, I tripped over an unexpected detour in my mental landscape and fell into confusion.
For the first time in a very long time, I am in a relationship that involves a significant component of D/s. It is, it turns out, restructuring the pathways of my consciousness in unexpected ways. Ways that I am surprised to find reflect a feeling that I am content - or even happy.
My partner in this endeavor and I have fallen into something of a routine, and I like it. I like the disparate elements that it contains, and I like the feeling that with him I usually know what to do and how to be pleasing. It doesn’t hurt in the least that our desires are wired enough in parallel that what is pleasing to him tends to be incredibly erotic for me, although it has led to the somewhat disturbing impulse of constantly wanting to be pushed farther - more pain, more submission, more limits moving slowly out to the edges of reason.
It’s lovely.
Which brings us to that detour - unexpected and unlooked for and yet oddly fine.
It seems that there is a particular act which, in the context of a certain type of submissive interaction, I seem to be firmly associating with him. Associating with him to the point that when, in a similar situation, I am approached by a person I would objectively be interested in performing said act with in another context, I decide against it, because part of me thinks of it as his, and I like that there is something that is. Even if it is a thing that was never asked for, only claimed in words at heated moments with no expectation of the ownership lasting beyond the boundaries of that moment in time.
It’s a strange place to be standing, where I am both wanting something and not certain about having it. The other person involved has been great about my working through the pathways in my own head, which is a huge point in his favor. There are also other directions to work out there, but I am not particularly concerned that we won’t. My esteem for him has been consistently increasing the more time I spend with him, so I am content to let things move around in their own time… especially since I don’t know how permanent this detour is and how much it is simply an artifact of time and circumstance.
At the time of my initial stumble, and even now a few days later, the thing that most worried me (and to his credit, my partner) was whether the detour was a pathology, a dangerous dead end pathway that could pose a hazard to my long term relationship goals - which require finding a partner other than my much adored girlfriend and the two men in question. I don’t think it is. I can easily imagine other situations, other people, other contexts, other times when it wouldn’t be a problem at all. It was just that in that time, that place, that situation… it was
We shall see what we shall see. In the mean time, as I pick myself up and dust myself off and continue wandering through life, I am content to see the residue of my most pleasant calamity embedded in my skin.
I am not comfortable with women* who need to be taken care of by men (or other women) because they are incapable of taking care of themselves**.
I am particularly not comfortable with such women seeking out, or ending up in, D/s relationships that seem to further rob them of any personal power.
All of this came up in a conversation last week with two girlfriends when we were discussing some of our issues with TPE and submission and the varying ways in which they made each of us twitchy.
As I have mentioned before, I did not start out in the scene as a submissive. When I first started playing, more than 10 years ago, I did so mostly as a smart ass masochist, although I officially identified as a switch. I was shocked when I discovered, 3-4 years in that I had a strongly submissive side. I am even more surprised, these many years later, that it is now so much of a part of how I identify, sexually, and how I play.
I still maintain that what makes my submission valuable is that it’s an active choice, and the times that watching or reading about other people’s submission makes me nervous is when it seems like it isn’t. In situations like that, I worry that makes it far too easy for D/s to turn into abuse or, only somewhat more benignly, a way to enable a person’s weaknesses or bad habits.
I recognize that this judgment comes from a place of privilege, but I am uncomfortable watching people do things that make them less. I’m not talking about humiliation scenes or pony play or situations that subjectively may seem degrading but are actively chosen with an informed mind and an open heart. I am talking about things people do to avoid the responsibilities of life.
There’s a fine line there. Part of what I enjoy about submission is that it allows me to take time to escape all the worries and stresses of day to day living and focus all my energy on simply being pleasing to another human being. It’s lovely to not even have to think about if something is what I want, just whether or not it’s in my capacity to give. Then, when I leave submission, I feel stronger and happier and more able to do the things I need***.
On the other hand I have seen far too many people in submissive relationships that make them weaker, less confident, and less competent. The way I was raised tells me that if you are the sort of person who is afraid to speak up for yourself, a good relationship would be with someone who helps you conquer that fear and encourages your voice rather than with someone who makes you even more afraid to ask for the things you need. They end up in submission not to find a part of themselves, but to lose one. It’s the difference, in my mind, between “I choose to give myself to you” and “I give myself to you because if I don’t I’ll have to be myself, think for myself, and take care of myself and that’s hard.”
Part of all of this, I suppose, is a pathology I will admit I own. I am terrified of needing people, terrified of counting on them, terrified that I will start to rely on them and then someday they will no longer be there. I am pathologically**** self-contained. I can not believe that there is anyone in my life who I will not sooner or later lose and, as such, I can not structure my life so that it requires anyone other than myself for success. I hate asking for help and I hate needing help and I’d rather poke myself in the eye with a fork than choose to work on a group project or anything that needs to be run by committee.
Still, mostly I am judgmental because I am proud, I am capable, I am smart, and I am strong… and I don’t want people to think that my submission takes any of that away. I don’t want someone to look at me and see a woman who is submissive because:
I want them to look at me and see a smart, outspoken, opinionated, successful feminist who loves sex and chooses, sometimes, to find her pleasure in the satisfaction of someone else’s.
–
*Men either, but it’s more often women.
**Unless they have a mental or physical disability that inhibits self-care. I can understand that. What makes me twitchy is when it feels like learned incompetence.
***As well as, sometimes, sore, spent, and desperately in need of a nap.
****I choose the word intentionally. Pathologically meaning a behavior that is unhealthy or maladaptive.
*****Someone I recently went out on a few dates with equated “submissive” with “lazy do me queen”
I’ve been a bad sex blogger. Even though I’ve had some amazing sex over the past few months, summer is not my season. I am a pale and pasty creature who does not like the heat from the sun or the burning agony of its glare. This means that I spend much of my time coating myself in ointments an unguents to try and avoid turning tomato red from sunburn, bug bites, or both… and consequently that I do not feel terribly sexy. That makes it hard to write in this blog, especially when so much of my energy has been going towards writing about sex for money*. (Writing for money about sex? Getting paid to write about sex, as opposed to doing it for fun. ) In addition to writing two professional (well, one and a half… the second one isn’t actually monetized yet) sexuality related blogs and putting together a syllabus for another sexuality related course, I’ve sold five pieces of erotic fiction in the past few months as well as a whole pile of sexuality-related non-fiction. In other words? I’ve been busy. Still, I feel bad about letting my writing here slide, and so I’m currently working on a post that will take this blog back to it’s introspective roots.
Watch this space.
I’m not out of the game yet.
*The rest of my energy, ironically, has been going to aerial acrobatics in the form of silks and lyra/cerceau classes. Why ironically? Because aerial acrobatics classes make me feel very strong and sexy, but leave me too sore and exhausted to do anything about it.
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