Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

I am a highly suggestible person.

This, in most circumstances, is extraordinarily aggravating. I yawn when I hear someone yawn on the other end of the phone. Anytime someone mentions having to go to the bathroom, I suddenly have to go too. It’s a little ridiculous.

Still, in the context of sex and submission, I have discovered that suggestibility isn’t a bad thing at all. It means, among other things, that I am highly susceptible to conditioning… even when the conditioning isn’t intentional.

We have reached the point where when my main dominant partner touches my face in a certain way I become instantly turned on.  I don’t even know how or when it happened, but lately when his hand comes to my cheek I am suddenly wet and ready without even a thought.  I like it.

I also seem to have gotten past my orgasm issue. It turns out that what you can accidentally train yourself out of you can also accidentally train yourself back into - particularly if you have inspiring help. Why having to ask, or beg, for orgasms makes it easier to have them is inexplicable to me, but I will not look this gift horse in the mouth.

I really like the intense comfort of this submission. It’s odd to think of something that’s so often frightening or painful as comforting, but it is. It’s one relationship where I usually feel pretty confident of where I stand and what I should do and that’s lovely. It makes it easy to keep saying yes. Even when it scares me…. possibly especially when it scares me.

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:

1. She thinks it is a woman’s place to be submissive (as opposed to her choice with this person in this situation.)
2. She can not function on her own.
3. She does not have opinions or interests.
4. She doesn’t want to have to do anything in bed*****.
5. She refuses to take responsibility for her own pleasure.

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.}

It occurred to me, while driving home from a 12 hour work day that started at 4 a.m., that through this blog I have a network. What’s more, I have a network of kinky people who like to read. Or, at least, a network of people who like to read kinky things.

This realization spawned what will, on sober reflection, probably seem like a truly horrible idea. When I look back at this post tomorrow morning and ask myself what I was thinking, the obvious answer will be “I wasn’t. I had been up since 4 a.m. after getting less than 4 hours of sleep.”  Still, even though I recognize that it is a terrible idea, I’m going to act on it anyway. Why? Because there’s a tiny optimistic voice inside my head telling me that the worst thing that will happen is the complete destruction of my faith in humanity. That’s not such a big loss.

The idea in question? I’m going to ask my readers to fix me up.

Even this tired, I quake at the prospect of what horrors might appear in my inbox, but I clearly need to get outside of my current social circle and OKCupid is just not cutting the mustard.  Thus, I put my vulnerability out there for the world’s amusement and hopefully my social enrichment.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find the following sort of person to throw me at:

• A man or woman in their late twenties through mid forties who does not currently have a primary partner and is looking for someone to build a life with.
• Someone who is not adamantly opposed to the concept of eventually having children.
• A person who is accepting of polyamorous relationships and preferably has experience in them.
• Someone who is smart, kind, and capable of being (or at least tolerating the) extremely silly.
• A non-smoker.*
• A person who lives near enough to the NYC area (within 3-4 hours) that dating them is a practical option, but not someone who is allergic to leaving the 5 boroughs.

What do they get in return? The writer of this blog.

Which, really, is what makes me nervous about this whole idea.

I am not my kink.

My kink is an important part of me, but it is only a part. In day to day life, it’s not even that big a part. It’s how I have sex, and it informs my sex writing for my professional clients, but it isn’t me. I could never date someone if kink was all we had in common, or kink was all they had in their life. I’m too passionate about too many things, and that should be something they share.

The thing is… I’m not particularly looking to meet someone solely to have more hot kinky sex. Don’t get me wrong, I love hot kinky sex, but I have excellent sources for it in my, sadly non-local, boyfriend and girlfriend. What I’m looking for is someone with whom I can potentially build a Relationship**, whatever that might mean, and I want you (yes! I’m looking at you! The one sitting in front of the computer screen. Stop looking over your shoulder. No one is going to magically appear behind you.) to help me find them.

If you have someone you think I’d get on with like a house on fire (or, preferably, like chocolate and peanut butter mixed together in a heavenly confection of rich satisfaction,) show them this blog. I think that my writing, even here where it is mostly about sex, gives a pretty good idea of who I am Then encourage them to send me an e-mail*** that demonstrates they are a person of wit, wisdom, and weirdness, and we’ll see how it goes from there.

If nothing else, hopefully this experience will provide fertile fodder for future posts… even if the subtext of every single one of them is “Dear lords! What have I DONE?!?!?!”

Yours in Sleep Deprivation,

Rona

–

*_{Although I don’t  believe in the custom-order model of dating, both my father and my aunt died horrible deaths from smoking related cancers. Falling in love with a smoker is therefore not an acceptable life choice for me.}

_{**A Relationship that would hopefully involve a lot of the hot kinky sex, but I’m not a “jump into bed first, think about it later” sort of girl. I am a “get excited over someone’s brain, work up a good quantity of lust for them, have a detailed conversation about safer sex and STD testing, and then jump into bed with them” sort of girl… although I do put out faster for a good beating.}

_{***Encourage me to realize that there was no e-mail address for me anywhere on this page until 5 seconds ago. Somehow it got lost when I migrated. Oops.}

The fact is that, even though I am a workaholic who can often barely stand to step away from the computer for 4 hours at a time, I would be quite happy to spend a few days chained naked at the foot of my lovers’ bed… as long as I was confined by a snack-length chain. Long enough to get to the kitchen for snacks is also more than long enough to get to the other necessities, and so we have agreed that, in theory, that this is a reasonable condition. Also? There’s something inexplicably delightful about the phrase “snack-length chain.” It’s impossible for me to speak or hear it without smiling. The perfect combination of submission, preparation, and whimsy.

I haven’t been involved in a relationship involving this much D/s in a while - not in at least a decade, possibly not ever. I really like it. As I’ve grown more comfortable in my sexuality over the past few years I’ve learned that I don’t need power dynamics and pain to enjoy sex, but I’m still unquestionably an intensity junkie and I really like not being in control.

The simple fact is that everything is easier when it’s about doing it for someone else. Excesses of pain, excesses of pleasure are transmuted from horrible and overwhelming by the phrases “But I like it” or “Because I want to.” It’s insanely hot to see my partner get visibly excited by causing me pain or otherwise taking control. I can’t explain it, but getting to see that look is totally worth the price of admission. It takes my head to very dangerous places where voices whisper in my ear “what wouldn’t you let him do?” and instead of being chastened by them I kind of want to find out.

The snack-length chain, however, isn’t about that fear or about how much I enjoy playing with someone who enjoys testing my limits for his own enjoyment (no matter how nice those both are.) I think it’s mostly about feeling wanted and feeling safe in that. Not to mention the thought of the  sheer, sybaritic bliss of spending days wearing nothing but restraints with nothing to worry about except how to be the most pleasing and nothing to occupy my mind except for thoughts about how next I’m going to be used.

Gods but that thought is hot. Committing myself to being completely available for pain, for sex, for someone else’s pleasure for a more extended amount of time than just an isolated scene.  Even if nothing happened, the waiting itself would be exciting, not knowing what, if anything, would occur or when. Knowing I’d have no say in whether it would.  Yum. I know how my brain works. I’d likely muse myself into a frenzy of alternating lust and fear… and when it all wore off  I could test the limits of my snack-length chain.

I’ve gotten lazy in my old age.

I almost never bother to actually negotiate my scenes, even with new partners.

It makes life so much more interesting.

It becomes all about saying yes.

A hand on my cheek, about to slap, “Yes.”

A cane poised over my ass, ready to fall, “Yes.”

A voice asking “May I?” “Yes.”

One learns to expect the unexpected.

I wouldn’t recommend this style of play to anyone new to the scene. It helps that I’m very clear about my ability to stop something I object to, even if I have to drag myself out of my happy place to do so. I find it odd that I can go completely non-verbal… until I have a need to communicate something that requires words, at which point I can get those words out and then lapse back into babbling incoherence.

I do like having partners who can reduce me to babbling incoherence.  Not only is it enjoyable for me, but people seem to take such pleasure in shutting me up.