Beach Bruise Bingo
After work today I went to the beach with a friend in an attempt to avoid the, at the time, 97 degree heat. We got there and without thinking I promptly took off my shirt and slathered on the sun screen. My friend looked over at me, taken aback, and said “wow you’ve got some bruises!”
I smiled knowingly.
It took him a second to pick up what I was putting down. When he figured it out he quickly said “oh! okay” and then changed the subject.
Mmm. Bruises.
Submissive Explosion
I was IM’ing with a Dom friend today while at work. At one point I said how exciting it is to feel I’m at a place in my life where I can let my sub energy out, that I have fifteen years of this energy to catch up on exploring. That’s pretty awesome. It’s also pretty daunting. It’s like starting a nuclear reaction without the benefit of “control rods” (ahem…) and a cement dome. It’s this bright flash of light and a giant explosion that I cannot help but look at, even if I occasionally feel it’s going to burn out my retinas.
There’s an article in the New York Times today about an artist who did a series of “leather clad heads” which “most immediately evoke S-and-M bondage wear.” Basically they are heads in leather hoods. The article goes on to say “displayed in a high-end shop for the sexually adventurous, they would fit right in.” I frequent shops like that, but my first reaction was “I’m not sexually adventurous.” Then of course I had to stop and think about what that means, because clearly being into bdsm and d/s isn’t what most people do for sex. But I stand by that feeling – I’m not ‘adventurous.’ I am expressing my truest self through forms that are available in our contemporary culture. D/s and bdsm for me are not about trying something new or novel. It’s about exploring inner reaches, places I’ve never allowed myself to go before, and going there with someone else. I am trying to let the light from the submissive nuclear blast shine on all deep corners of my soul.
I am curious about how this energy is expressed in our culture. Take, for instance, the ball gag. A friend once wondered aloud what it is about ball gags that we find so hot, and why that particular item has such a cult following today. Would bdsm folk who lived in the 1700s think a ball gag was hot and useful, or would they have completely different ideas of what a good sex toy is? To generalize, what is it about the leather culture that engages this part of my being? What energy is it which finds its expression in kissing someone who then I allow to bite me until I bruise? How was that energy expressed in 1722?
This past Saturday night, after I was allowed to cum and then got cleaned up, I went back to bed and was immediately directed to give a blow job. I was in heaven. He was dressed, I was naked. I had a muzzle around my neck which I had to work around to be successful at my task. Sexually I enjoy nothing more than knowing my purpose is to make someone else feel good and to let him express his Dominance. The next morning we woke up and, after a bit of snoozing, he directed me to go get in the shower and get ready for church. Once we were both dressed he unzipped and pushed me to my knees to give him head. I love that no-questions-asked energy, that “do-this-now” energy, that place where it is his prerogative to take and my responsibility to give.
This isn’t how things are expected to work in our society of equal relationships. But this isn’t the norm throughout history. There have always been power differentials in relationships. Mostly that has expressed itself in patriarchy and male dominance over women. Clearly that model isn’t ideal for many. What is clear to me is that there is no place for me to express this energy in day-to-day life. There is no place, in general, for men who have submissive feelings to express this in our culture. I wonder what affect that has on our society? Where does that energy go? How does it get subverted? Does it come out in harmful ways?
Submissive energy would be nothing without Dominant energy to compliment it. Food for additional thought: how does what I offer compliment a Dominant’s energy? How can I take what I offer (being submissive) and give it in such a way which ignites that nuclear reaction of D/s energy with a Dominant? How do we find the right control rods to make the explosion work?
Vulnerability
I was lying face down on the hotel bed as he finished tying the rope around my ankles and firmly placed my hands in the crook of my back. Moments ago he’d fastened the muzzle tightly in place, and while the rope went on I tested the gag. As I indulged my oral fixation a few things came to mind: first, my legs were really tied – I wasn’t walking or running anywhere. Second, once my hands were bound I realized that I was effectively immobilized. Third, as I chewed on the gag I found that it was firmly held in place and filled my mouth such that, along with the TV noise, nobody outside the room could possibly have heard me make a sound. All this crystallized around two sudden realizations: I was completely helpless, and I was a little bit scared.
Usually when someone ties me up the bondage doesn’t feel as secure as it did in that particular moment. Maybe a rope is looped through a plant holder on the ceiling and could be yanked off with a strong pull. Perhaps my legs aren’t bound and I have room to kick and somehow protect myself. Often times a gag is loose enough that sound, speech, and even getting it out of my mouth is possible. This time it was clear to me that he was in control – end of story. The bondage was tight, but more importantly it was applied in such a way that exuded complete authority, complete knowledge of what he was doing. He was completely dominant, and I was completely in submission. All this instilled in me a genuine taste of fear.
For the record, fear and trust taste really good together.
At the suggestion of the president of my company today I watched a TED talk about the power of vulnerability. It’s twenty minutes long, but if you have the chance I highly recommend watching it. In the talk the speaker said her research found that people who feel “whole-hearted,” who feel that they are worthy of love from other people, are people who are willing to take risks. They are people who are willing to dive into something and say “I’m not sure if this will work out, but I’m willing to try.” Like the speaker I have a very difficult time putting myself in a place where I am vulnerable – I play it safe and don’t get myself into risky physical or emotional situations. Part of my recent growth has been to realize it’s okay to open up. It’s okay to ask questions which reveal something about my soul to strangers. It’s okay to take a chance on a new relationship with rules you’ve never tried before. If I don’t do these things, how can I possibly live with my whole heart?
He eventually decided that the rope on my wrists wasn’t going to work out. He flipped me over and, with my right arm pressed under his left side and my left arm held by his left arm, he began to play with me. Biting is one of his favorite activities, and I am really starting to enjoy it myself. Lying next to him helped me feel safe and helped me breathe through the pain in a way I haven’t before. The gag helped too as I felt free to vocalize as much as I wanted. After some time he pulled down my jeans and jock and started edging me. If I allowed my thoughts to stray for an instant, maybe to how great the muzzle felt on my face, I’d almost blow my wad. I kept trying to say through the gag “I’m about to cum.” Later he told me he didn’t know what I was saying, but I was making some pretty neat sounds. As I’d try to say something muffled he’d think “that’s right, bitch.”
One thing led to another and we eventually turned off the light and curled up together. Even though I wanted to I didn’t sleep with the muzzle on as I actually needed to get some shut eye. I was still in sub-space and remember sighing contentedly as we laid together. I loved how my head felt resting on his chest, how I was naked and he was not, how morning would come and we’d go to church together. I felt physically vulnerable but, more importantly, emotionally vulnerable. I think that is what really makes the difference.
That, and having a face stuffed full of gag. =)
Staying Alive
So, in the “am I the only person who never heard of this movie” category…
Did anyone else know there was a sequel to Saturday Night Fever called Staying Alive? The final dance sequence has some pseudo-bondage-on-the-dance-floor, but I am astounded that I have never, ever heard of this movie.
I feel I am no longer in Kansas.
Where To Begin?
I don’t even know where to begin. After a whirlwind weekend which fulfilled long-standing fantasies and ended with yet another great conversation, where can one possibly begin? This will require multiple posts.
The best place to start is him. For the sake of this blog I’ll call him Luke. He is taller than me – just enough that the perfect place for me to kiss him is the side of his neck. He’s got jet black hair and is clean-shaven. He recently ran a marathon and works out regularly and has the most amazing arms which are perfect for holding me down while… oh, sorry, you probably want to actually know ABOUT him. Right.
He works full-time as a musician and can have great conversations about music and religion and geology and many other topics. He wrote his senor psychology paper on bdsm and religion. He’s taken me to church twice now, where he is the perfect gentleman to the au-naturale, blue-haired ladies. I’ve met some of his friends and he’s meet a few of mine. He’s very open about his history, his family, his friends, and where he is in his life. He flagrantly disregards use of the Oxford comma. I can forgive this this fault because, well, nobody’s perfect, right?
I recently spent ten days at a monastic retreat and just returned to the real world. We made plans to hang out Saturday night into Sunday and ended up bouncing around the city Saturday evening. At one point he turned to me and said “so at this point the ball is in your court. I really want to be in a relationship with you. So I’ll leave that with you. If you want to have that conversation, let me know.” So I waited about 3.7 milliseconds and then pounced on him for a kiss (we were in his car) and told him that was a conversation I very much wanted to have. Lots of smiling and kissing ensued.
We continued that conversation on the way home from church. I will be away for the next six weeks and so we talked about how that will work and also how we’d structure a relationship in terms of it being open in some aspects. I was able to recognize and verbalize that while I am happy to allow the kink/bdsm side of our relationship to be open, I also want to retain at least some aspect of physicality just between us. So the conclusion was (and he left it up to what I want) that we are open to playing with other people (together and apart), if we play with other people we’ll share that with each other, and we will keep vanilla sex between us.
With all that ironed out I said, “yes, I want to be in a relationship with you.” =)
(Note: he was driving, so hand holding ensued instead of kissing.)
Deciding to be in a relationship is awesome and scary and exhilarating all at once. Because of the timing (my being away for the summer) we’ve of had to make it work in small bursts rather than things growing as naturally as they might otherwise. I am looking forward to being back and seeing how things will work when we have the luxury of time. In addition, having an open relationship is a fairly wild, new, and scary experiment for me. What makes it feel safe is that I am deeply impressed with his ability to communicate. I trust that if things change with him he will tell me, and that I will be able to tell him what my needs are. I see it as a work in progress, and as long as communication and trust are at the heart of things, I don’t see how we can lose.
Before he took me to the subway station we were sitting on a couch chatting with two of my friends. He casually put his arm across the back of the couch and gently rubbed the back of my neck. It was a small, intimate gesture and it made me feel really good. He was attentive to me even while we made small talk with my friends. It was really sweet.
Six weeks is a long time!
1847 Bondage Hotness
Bondage was just as hot in 1847 as it is today…
Buddha Camp
So, I just got back from ten days at a retreat at a Buddhist monastery, a class to fulfill a requirement for my grad program. It was an extremely intense experience, not the least of which was because one of the precepts we followed for the ten days was complete celibacy (even with ourselves). So, I have all kinds of pent up energy.
I have lots to think about and process, and on more than one occasion wished I’d had my computer so I could write blog posts about various topics. I’m glad, though, I had ten screen-free days; I didn’t miss my computer one little bit. That’s an empowering and good realization.
I sat down just now thinking I was going to start writing the first in a series of reflections about the synergies between what I experienced at Buddha Camp and submissive sexuality, but my mind is running wild and can’t focus just now. Eventually I want to talk about celibacy/chastity and the positive use of sexual energy which is stored up over a period of time, bowing, and what I find in common between letting go as a spiritual practice and giving up control as a sexual practice.
Yay for being home!
Montana Sam
I was at a talk this week given by a Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition. As an aside she spoke about how people in Tibet often refer to people with nicknames based on where they are from, and said that this would be like calling someone “Tex” or “Montana.” For some reason I liked “Montana” and decided that, if I were a cowboy, I’d be “Montana Sam.” It sounds way more butch than I could ever pull off, but I like it. =)
Shower Thoughts
It occurred to me in the shower this morning that one reason for hesitancy or trepidation about entering some form of open relationship is that in my life (reflecting our society) one of the pillars of definition of a relationship is ‘the person with whom I am exclusively having sex.’ Pitching that out the window, then, begs the question, ‘what else do I use to define a relationship?’ This is a fairly obvious statement, but these things usually don’t occur to me until I encounter them in my own life.
So, as food for my own thought, how do I delimit the lines of a relationship aside from sex? Clearly there are many others, but it’s interesting how much emphasis we put on the monogamy piece.
Dialogue
Yesterday I had a really good conversation about wants / desires / needs for a relationship. It was somewhat (largely) unexpected, and “hypothetical” in nature, but it gave me the opportunity to say, in person, to a someone who actually lives nearby and who I find exceedingly physically and emotionally attractive, what I want out of a relationship which would involve kink. Some parts were easy, some parts were difficult. We both shared parts of our lives which left us vulnerable. I was pleased with my ability to voice where I am and what I want. I was open and honest about what I need, without feeling I had to accommodate anything he said. This was aided by his explicit statement that he was not expecting my answers to match his.
In the context of my chat with Ryan, it was helpful for me to have to say out loud how much D/s I want outside the bedroom, although looking back I don’t know how clear I was about it with myself or with him. At one point I said that, not having had an actual relationship where kink was the primary expression of sexuality, it’d be hard for me to know if in-bed would be enough or if I’d still want more D/s interaction out of bed. When I write here, and chat with Dom friends online, that part of me comes out fairly strongly. I don’t know if a little will go a long way, or if perhaps it wouldn’t go long enough. Surely when I re-read previous posts I see this is a major theme. All that said, it would be foolish at this very early stage to be overly worried without first having tried things out.
We talked about what would it mean to have a space built into the relationship to play with other people. This seems terrifying on the surface. At a stage when I’m so excited about knowing him, it was difficult to have a conversation with him about sharing him with other men. Then there’s a part of me which feels insecure, which says “I want to be enough for you.” And yet once poked a bit having an open relationship offers some interesting options. I think it honestly acknowledges the reality of male sexuality and human psychology. If done right it would be a safety valve which completely monogamous relationships do not have. One option we talked about was having kink be the play space but keeping vanilla sex in the relationship. One of the things I like about having this kind of discussion is the amount of creativity it allows in defining a relationship. Our society does not give us much of an opportunity to do this. It feels very new, like I’m going about it in a rather blind manner. Again, it seems foolish to worry too much about something which I haven’t tried yet. Fair enough, I say.
I will say it does feel kind of strange having this kind of foundational conversation so early in getting to know someone. But since in large part (on my side anyway) this is creating something new as it goes along, there are no road signs to look at and not many model relationships to emulate. Since there are no rules to follow and it would be almost dangerous to make assumptions in this kind of uncharted territory, we have to make things clear very early. And, in that regard, it feels good that we can have an open discussion so early in knowing one another.
Aside from the pleasure of voicing these things to an in-person guy with whom I have been out on previous dates and with whom there is mutual interest, most exciting to me was the palpable sense of possibility. Me? In a relationship with a hot Dom guy? With an emotionally mature, secure, affirming relationship at the middle? What an amazing hypothetical opportunity.
Dom Thinking
I am lucky to have some really great Dom friends who I chat with online on a regular basis. Today I was chatting with Ryan and he said some of the most thoughtful, cogent things about D/s relationships which I’ve heard in a long time. I as able to hear them in a way I haven’t been able to before, although I’m sure he (and others) have said things like this to me before.
At one point in the conversation we chatted about his experiences with his boyfriend who he lived with in a D/s relationship for over two years. Here are a few snippets:
2:36:21 PM Ryan: Yes, it can work!
2:36:36 PM Ryan: it’s just a matter of finding the right person and the right dynamic
2:37:05 PM Ryan: and two people who aren’t afraid to be what they are.
2:38:30 PM Ryan: in a way it actually made the “normal” part a lot easier, because I knew I could set rules, expectations, make decisions, run things, and he knew I’d bet there to do that and that he’d follow those rules. The power split was actually the easiest part for us. It was the . . . interests and life goals and personality stuff . . that messed us up eventually
With regard to my talking about how I’m feeling free to be myself:
2:42:07 PM Ryan: you have to be what you are. and you have to want to be what you are. So, being in a vanilla relationship is usually bad on both fronts. You get into it because you think you can be something else, and don’t want to be that something else, but what you try to be is . . . not you
2:42:33 PM Ryan: and you can’t have a relationship based on that sort of personal fraud.
The conversation then shifted to talking about the benefits of a D/s relationship that works:
2:45:28 PM Ryan: so we’re equal in the sense that we’re both fully formed creatures (sons of God, to borrow from churchspeak) but, in a relationship, power is always tricky. and BDSM solves those things, while allowing both parties to achieve their best — in and out of the house
2:46:43 PM Ryan: sub guys, I think, do better in their jobs and spiritual lives, etc., if there’s someone keeping them in line, and we Doms do better with someone to watch over and take care of little details
2:47:20 PM Ryan: having those sorts of needs met make us more successful people, I think. which is why it’s not just about playing and having kinky sex to me
2:50:44 PM Ryan: and I think the commitment has to be to loving my boy and seeing what he does as just as important and powerful as what I do, only inverted
2:51:48 PM Ryan: and for me, an “equal” relationship in the traditional sense, it just isn’t going to work. I need a boy kneeling at my feet, ready and willing to do whatever I say, and to keep safe and to help him become the best person – sub and otherwise – he can be.
2:54:27 PM Ryan: I think submission is a really remarkable thing, really. I’m glad I’m Dom, but subs are pretty awesome creatures
I was really moved when he said what it’s about for him is having a commitment to loving his boy. How often do you hear that in the context of conversations about D/s? Also, it made me smile to hear that he thinks “subs are pretty awesome creatures.” =)
When I broke up with my boyfriend from college, he told me that he thought maybe the best thing for me would be to be someone’s house boy for a while. I don’t just want to be someone’s house boy, but I think that I’m much more ready to accept that part of my life than I have been before. It feels terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time.
Thank you Sir!
Lunchtime Poll: Which Quark Are You?
I almost went to school to study chemistry, and I have always been interested in chemistry and particle physics.
So, today’s lunchtime poll: Which quark (in lavender below) are you?
24 July 2011 | Categories: Lunchtime Poll, Running Commentary | 1 Comment »