Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

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.

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 have a bit of a thing for hands.

A slap across the face, hands fisted in my hair, being grabbed so hard it hurts, punching, spanking, I like how personal hands make pain.

Beat me with a flogger, a single tail, a cane, and it’s great, but there’s a sense of immediacy and intimacy that is most present when a person is hurting me with their body.

Strong hands turn me on. I like to feel both safe and overpowered. When I can fight with all my strength and be completely outclassed, it makes me wet. The other day, when I complimented someone on the strength in his fingers, he threw me on the bed, pressed his thumb into one of my intercostal muscles and said, “If I pushed hard enough, I could reach in and touch your heart.” It made me gasp.

It was incredibly hot knowing that, if he wanted to, it would take very little effort for him to break me in half.

I also associate hands with sex. If a person has strong, capable hands, I often find that I want them on my body, in my body. I’m dating a guitarist and he plays me like an instrument. I like his fingers inside me.

I like to be fucked, with fingers, with hands. I like how flexible they are, how easy it is for them to twist, to move, to change, to be too much or not enough, to tease, and to torment.

I was almost fisted a few days ago. It was incredible, up to and including the moment I got scared and backed out. I’ve been thinking about it, a lot. About pushing just a little farther. About not giving in to fear. About what it would be like to feel someone’s whole hand inside of me.

I have a bit of a thing for hands.

***Note: This piece has plot spoilers about the show Spring Awakening. If that is going to upset you, don’t read it.***

A kinky friend and I went to see the Broadway musical Spring Awakening the other day, and I was reminded both about how mainstream some BDSM is and how little that means people actually understand it. There is a scene in the play where Wendla, a young woman, talks about how she fantasizes about being beaten and then begs her friend Melchior to beat her with a switch so that she will “feel something, anything.” He eventually acquiesces and hits her. When he does, she repeatedly begs him to hit her harder until he ends up beating her with his fists and then, filled with horror at his actions, running away. This, by the way, is the controversial scene that got the original play banned for many, many years, although in this political climate I think that an earlier scene where the mother refuses to teach her daughter where babies come from may actually ring more true. But I digress…

What I found really fascinating about the scene was the audience reaction to it. A small minority of the audience - including my playmate and I, as well as the gorgeous pair of British queens sitting behind us - spent the scene giggling in recognition. We’d had that conversation, that experience, from one direction or the other. We’d fantasized about pain, understood that desire before or after we grasped our bodies’ longing for gentler sensations, and seeing it on stage was a revelation not because it was unfamiliar but because it was so completely on target. “For every masochist, God makes a sadist,” indeed. The vast majority of the audience just seemed vaguely mystified or uncomfortable, which was what I expected. Then there was the other group. The group, like the couple in front of us who were so disgusted that they talked, loudly enough for us to hear, about whether or not they should get up and leave.

I forget, sometimes, that this is often the reaction to my sexuality. Horror, disgust, derision, and an unshakeable belief that there is something wrong with me because one of the things that most profoundly sexually excites me is pain. It is bad enough, to much of society, that I am a woman who admits to liking sex, that I am aggressive about it, that I approach men, and women, with prurient intent. Still, for most of them, there is something about that they can at least understand. I may be improper, in their eyes, not womanly, not genteel, or whatever, but sex is a sensation they can generally understand desiring. The quest for the holy orgasm is sacred, or at least comprehensible. Seeking out pain, however, must be a sign of some fundamental deviance or flaw. It is proof that I am broken, and allows those who would find other reasons to despise me an easy nail on which to hang the less acceptable placards of their disgust (too smart for her own good, too loud for polite society, not pretty enough to get a normal man, too fat, too weird, too…)

The thing that sometimes makes it difficult to argue is that I am broken, and in the past I have used my masochism as a way to handle it. For a long time I found vanilla sexuality far more stressful than BDSM when it came to addressing my issues of risk vs. reward. In addition, I felt prettier, sexier, and more accepted in the kink community than I did among my more vanilla peers. I had discovered a community that valued differences, girls who were smart, loud, alt-pretty, weird, and ridiculous as much as those who were quiet, beautiful, normal, and sane, and I liked it. It was a glorious place to be, in part because of my flaws. But the counter-intuitive thing is this: in no way has my masochism ever rendered me broken, or wedged itself into little cracked pieces of my soul and forced them open the way that mainstream expectation has so often done. If anything, it has made me stronger, more self confident, healthier, and closer to whole. Still, the fact that I am broken makes it harder to convince people that my being a masochist has nothing to do with flaws in my character or my upbringing, holes in my psyche, active abuse, or benign neglect. It gives them an out from believing that I am just wired to like pain. That, for me, being beaten so hard I can’t sit down comfortably for three days is simply a remarkable amount of fun.

I was listening to the Spring Awakening soundtrack and thinking, earlier today, about how joyful masochism can be. Reminiscing, really, about recent experiences, playing masochist-in-the-middle, ending up in a pile of giggling, writhing, screaming biters and bitees on a floor, laughing hysterically from pain, and grinning shamelessly while cursing my head off. I don’t think most people get that - that for some of us, at least, there can be a connection between a love of pain and the possibility of simple joy (to quote another musical.) I don’t like stubbing my toe or walking into a wall* any more than anyone else does, but the skillful application of pain or other intense sensations is often the most direct neurological highway to a grand old time.

Submission often comes from a darker place in me, a place of untamed longing or restless discontent, but pure masochism is usually straightforward, light, and untainted joy. It’s transporting in the same way as getting caught up in beautiful, intricate music - some small amount of which I experienced when listening to Spring Awakening**.

*Shut up. I know it happens to the rest of you too.
**Full disclosure, I enjoyed the show a lot, but I do not think it was the brilliant masterpiece that so many reviews have implied. It was a good show with some very good music and some very strange staging and choreography - one really annoying bit of which was explained by a remarkably useful review. Since I should not have to rely on written analysis to enjoy directorial choices, I actually think I may like the soundtrack better than the performance, but I am very glad I got to see it before it closed. I have access to cheap enough tickets that I might even be convinced to go again. Especially since I now know to think of it more as a play and concert than as a standard musical, something which will drastically change my experience and expectations.

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.

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.
–
*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.

It was late.

I was tired.

I lay my head down in my friend S’s lap to take a rest while still remaining part of the conversation, and he put a clothespin on my earlobe and another on the cartilage along the top curve.

I think he expected me to protest and bite him, or something.

Instead I simply said “Huh” and squirmed a little bit.

He inquired as to the nature of my “huh,” and I explained that for some reason clothespins on my ear were really turning me on.

He was highly amused by this fact and proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes or so doing a range of things that should have been unpleasant to my ears to see if they would make me squirm more.

They did.

I actually ended up orgasming from, primarily, ear manipulation with a little bit of fully clothed dry humping and extraneous pain thrown in.

Apparently I’m part Ferengi*.

It probably didn’t hurt that this weekend coincided with the time of the month when I’ll turn on if you look at me funny, but the whole experience was still highly amusing and somewhat baffling to me. My physiology is weird. I mean, I can accept that if I want to have an orgasm with another person I’m normally going to need them to either hurt me, hold me down, or do something that my brain and body read as dominant, but the extent of the effect of hurting and otherwise violating my ears (my virgin ears!!!) was just bizarre.

I was also terribly amused when another friend, the one who would in less than 24 hours scare the crap out of me with a straight razor, came in, looked at what S. was doing, looked at my reaction to it, said “You’re being way too nice to her,” shook her head, and left. She was right, he was, but I didn’t mind. Especially since when I asked him to hurt me more he did.

I really am a play slut, although I must say that, in general, far fewer of my scenes involve orgasms than they would seem to from my tales of this past weekend. Not to say that I mind the shift…
–
*S’s joke, not mine