How to do it

Review: “Anatomy of a Play Scene” by Eric Pride

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Eric Pride has left the community in the wake of pro-consent movements, stating that we have started tearing each other apart instead of standing by each other. I’m sad that he is not who I thought he was.

Review of presentation: “Anatomy of a Play Scene” by Eric Pride (DomSubFriends at Paddles NYC, 21 Feb 2013).

I had always believed that playing with a brilliantly competent stranger couldn’t be as good as playing with a loved one. But Friday’s class shook that belief.

You see, I thought it would be impossible to go from “Wow, you’re nice but I don’t know if I can do this” to “Your laughter shifts my world”. But if there was one theme of this class, it was taking the sub from point X to point Y so gently and unerringly that the sub doesn’t know she’s moved. (Male dom and female sub pronouns in this review, as in the presentation.)

I was also struck by the 2-in-1-ness of his technique. Getting the sub to relax and be invaded at the same time. Praise and humiliation in the same breath. The reassurance of the question “How are you feeling?” paired with dead neutral intonation.

That goes with the other theme of the evening: contrast. Tiny things like stopping the sensation for just long enough to intensify its return, creating emptiness to be filled by longing for connection, control, dependence. Or the most shocking moment of the night, when we were caught up in the stream of masterly seduction, and out of nowhere he knocked her sideways, and the BAM! of kneecaps hitting the floor hard was followed by endless seconds of grappling before the surrender.

Eric Pride used the words ‘dialectical forces’ to describe this manoeuvre. He made the point very clearly that there is power in flipping over suddenly to a side of your personality that people don’t usually see.

Something he mentioned, but didn’t really explain, was how you read the sub’s reactions so you know whether to push, knock down, or pull back. I guess that’s a topic for another day. But people did ask how to recognise negative signals and what to do, and his answers weren’t really answers. Instead, he talked about the importance of pre-scene fact-finding. Either prevention and instinct works so well for him that he’s never had to figure this out – or, more likely, his mindset is so purely practical that it’s hard for him not to think in terms of preventing the problem in the first place.

All in all, amazing class. It was clearly aimed at doms, but it’s nice for subs to know what is possible. If you want to keep an eye on talks in New York City, the following will be useful:

Edit: I left out the most important thing Eric Pride said: “I never forget that I’m playing with a person.” He constantly returned to the sub to re-establish connection, especially when transitioning between activities. He made it impossible to feel like an alienated body. That alone probably goes a long way towards preventing bad scenes.

Buried Treasure

Frost Nails Masochism

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Poor Robert Frost would be turning over in his grave. He probably wasn’t writing about masochism.

And yet he said it for us. How the good stuff makes you feel real and alive and more.

To Earthward

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of – was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

To speculate on what Frost was really writing about, I imagine he was trying to make sensual sound macho. This was uphill work at the time. There is a wonderful story about how he told a businessman on a train that he wrote poetry, and the businessman said unhappily, “Hell. My wife writes that stuff.”

Buried Treasure

Subverted Tropes: The Fiction of the Unexpected

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I love the traditional tropes of BDSM and slave fic – melting the dom’s dom, rescuing the fragile abused slave, Evil Is Sexy, mmmmm.

But I also love it when authors turn these tropes inside out. Here are my favourites of this kind, fan fiction and original work, free and paid. They’re all completed works that can be read as kink, but otherwise quite diverse (except for the overrepresentation of M/m).

If you’re not worried about spoiling the surprise, just skip down to the SPOILER ALERT to see the list of tropes. You’ll wonder how some of these could possibly work, but I think they do. This list is ruthlessly constrained to the stories that say something new and manage to be [cough] entertaining – at least to me.

Online Stories (i.e. Free!)

Subversive Published Authors

Other Published Stories (i.e. Not Free)

STOP

BEWARE! HERE BE SPOILERS!

Here is what those stories actually do that is so subversive.

Subs or Slaves

Doms or Masters

And Others:

What do you recommend? I had to leave out some of my favourites because I couldn’t convince myself that they were subversive/hot enough, but that doesn’t have to stop you.

What makes us tick?

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sadists

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One of my close friends is a sadist. Some of her favourite stories fall squarely into my definition of horror.

She is also terminally warm-hearted. She can’t finish reading some of my favourite stories because the ethical problems upset her so much.

And she used to worry whether she was evil.

This post is for her.

I am told that from the inside, dominance feels selfish, possessive, atavistic. As Raven Kaldera puts it, most people “don’t want to be the focus of the predator who wants to piss on them and declare them to be territory, to be hoarded and defended.” And sadism seems to add another dimension: it’s slavering at the end of the leash, you’re afraid it will eat the guests. Guy Baldwin describes the experience of topping as “this delicate balancing act on the razor’s edge between the urge to rape, pillage and destroy and the need for self-restraint”.

That is, and isn’t, how it feels from the other end. From an email I once wrote to someone special:

You know, love, I’ve been afraid to tell you how much I like it when you milk my fear and humiliation, when you draw it out so delicately with casual caresses and signals and the merest lick of your lips … it’s practically an art form how minimalist it looks. At first I didn’t know how to describe it – and then I was scared to tell you because I realised that there was a word for it, and it was sadism. But suddenly I realise that of course you would be glad that I love it, because ‘sadistic’ means enjoying every shading of my helpless responses to the subtlest finger-tap of your manipulations … and when you’re at your most sadistic we are at our most intimately connected, we live in each other’s minds.

Does it help to think of sadism that way – a form of intense attention? It’s not incompatible with caring and protection. Arguably, they’re complementary. Even as you are convincing your victim that they are less than the dust, sadism means you are cherishing them – and their every last shred of emotion.

And it really, truly goes both ways. When you’re with someone like me, it’s communion. There is nothing in the world more important than the person who’s torturing me. I want anything they want, I want it like a drowning diver wants air, I want it like pain hurts. We exist, your equal and opposite numbers. You are, literally, God’s gift to us. The longer you hesitate at the water’s edge, the longer one of us might be going lonely.

I know that not all BDSM interactions are like this. My email was about emotional sadism, but bodily pain works the same way on me. Then there is the peace of being given orders and (apparently) ignored. And that can also be a form of caring and protection. I actually get kicked out of a scene if I can’t hear an order clearly. I think it’s because I need the security of having orders; evidently I fear the responsibility for success so much that it’s an automatic turn-off. Taking all of that away from someone like me is an act of love and sacrifice.

Sadism is not about hatred or callousness. It is about love and intimacy. My cat, may she rest in peace, used to mourn deeply over mice who wouldn’t play any more. You’re smarter than a cat; you can have your mouse and play with it. Find us, and if we have respect, trust, and [cough] suitable escalation, you can cherish us and play with us again and again.

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