What makes us tick?

Submissive Strength: Contradiction or Koan?

8 Comments
This is the fourth post in the Submissive Power series.

Recently Valery North paid me the gigantic compliment of a critical response to my blog post about submissive strength.

I came away wondering if I had contradicted myself. But dammit, I know everything I said was true!

And then. I realised. These apparent contradictions, they’re actually koans! That’s Zen Buddhist for paradoxes which help us to see a Higher Truth.

Ahem. OHM.

Koan 1: On Control

I said that I don’t want to feel in control of what happens. But I also said that I should have control over my emotions.

This paradox has an easy copout: we could just say that the boundary between the dom’s control and mine is my skull. But that’s simply not true – the wonderful thing about submitting is letting go and experiencing instead of making decisions and overthinking them. And in my case, I don’t just want the dom to be in charge of my emotions, I also want him to play with them sadistically.

But I think there is a way to resolve the apparent contradiction. You know how when something is too heavy, you can’t put it down smoothly and gently? Because you’re not really in control, you can’t hand it over in a controlled way. I think that’s what I want to be able to do with my emotions. I want to hold myself open to everything I want to experience. Everything the dom wants me to experience.

Ferns and I have been talking about the courage to be emotionally vulnerable. A lot of it depends on whether the dom inspires trust, but there’s also a big component of confidence in yourself – believing that you can take what the dom throws at you without throwing up your shields, not being afraid that you’ll hate yourself for turning into a puddle. That’s the kind of strength and control I want as a sub: the power to refrain from defending myself.

Koan 2: On Vulnerability

I’ve written about resolving not to rely on the dom for approval or forgiveness or happiness. But I’ve also written repeatedly that my kink is about desperately wanting to please the dom.

So do I want emotional independence or not?

Here I wasn’t thinking of play, but rather the day-to-day relationship. You’ll have to forgive me for not describing just how dependent and hurt and defensive and angry I got in my previous relationship, but if I had then maybe you would agree that I had to move away from 100% non-consensual dependence ALL THE TIME. I am the definition of high-maintenance. What I want is the ability to say, “He’s ignoring me right now, but that’s okay.” Joshua Tenpenny recently gave a talk where he said his master had worked to make him less emotionally vulnerable to him, and he had welcomed that because while it felt “very amazing” to be so vulnerable all the time at the beginning, it had also been “chafing”. YES. But it’s easier to motivate myself to change if I think of it as irritating to the dom.

Or, to put it positively, it’s also about making them feel loved. When you’re trying to be totally transparent about your needs and wants, that’s good up to a point – but if you’re relying on the dom to fulfil all those wants, there comes a time when it’s indistinguishable from selfishness. Ferns has described this from the dom’s point of view, and I think she’s put her finger on how I have screwed up in the past. You need reserves of strength and security, or you become the weak link in the relationship. I’m not saying there are no limits, but there must be a buffer zone of give and take. Some of it has to come from us subs some of the time.

And again, I think this is about trust as well as confidence, the dom’s worthiness as well as the sub’s strength. To be emotionally vulnerable in a real relationship, you have to be willing and able to accept hurt, knowing that neither of you will let it go too far.

I am so not there yet. But I don’t think it’s something I have to learn alone.

Thank you so much to Valery North, Joshua Tenpenny and Ferns for making me think!

 
Soapbox

Against Sapiosexual Pride

7 Comments

When I started out on FetLife, I encountered a lot of Worrying Things. Like the hordes of people declaring themselves to be sapiosexuals.

My prejudice against sapiosexuality may surprise you. After all, I threw myself at the smartest guy I ever met. He enjoyed using my mind as much as he did my body. Our intellectual chemistry remains a joy every time we meet.

It wasn’t enough. I learned the hard way that intelligence is just as shallow a quality as beauty. But dangerously deceptive. We could communicate, we could strategise fixes. But without emotional compatibility, we simply couldn’t make it work. Our arrogant faith in the power of the brain just kept us fooled for longer.

I’m not saying we should deny this sapiosexual thing. My lust for the male mind is not going to go away. But good grief, it’s not something to be proud of, any more than my thing for men who weigh less than me. Go ahead and own your sapiosexuality – heck, advertise it if you’re not trying to snag suspicious souls like me. But it doesn’t make you better than those who make it work by heartpower alone.

Without that unspoken, ineffable understanding, a good brain interface is worth about as much as good sex. If you think it means more than that, you’re fooling yourself. Not smart. At least, in my needs-to-be-more-humble opinion.

P.S. It is only fair to say that my ex has read this, and he’s not sure my argument is sound.

P.P.S. Okay, I admit it. The real reason I’ll never put sapiosexuality on my FetLife profile is why would I want a bunch of people in my inbox trying to sound smart? Ew. Much more fun to tell me I’m wrong and this is why. Pretty please? :p

1 February 2015: I have edited the text before the postscripts because I think it violated the principles of Nonviolent Communication. Not as bad as my post on Jian Ghomeshi, but it’s better to be less wrong.
What makes us tick?

Are You Strong Enough to Submit?

1 Comment
This is the third post in the Submissive Power series.

I hate clichés. Especially the way they end up being true after you scoff because no one explains why.

So it took three teachers to convince me that submission is about strength. Let’s call them Gypsy, Queenie and Rex.

Small brown dog with attitude
Gypsy had attitude. Image by McPig (CC BY 2.0)

Gypsy did not really believe in coming when called for. Treats, yes; baths, no. I don’t think we even tried. She was the only vanilla dog I’ve ever met.

German Shepherd reclining moodily
A Queenie look-alike. Image by GRVO TV (CC BY‑ND 2.0)

Queenie was so sweet, so eager to please. And she had jelly for brains. It took her six months to learn her name. We had to speak very gently to her because she would cringe piteously at the drop of a sock – literally.

German Shepherd next to a soldier holding a gun
I sing of Rex, glad and big. Image by Beverly (CC BY 2.0)

Rex was glad and big and all that a German Shepherd should be. As boss dog, he got the blame for every unlicensed pack activity. Whenever my father found a new hole in the garden, he would shout for Rex in stentorian tones.

And Rex would obey. He didn’t come galloping joyously as usual, but he didn’t run in the opposite direction like Gypsy, or dither like poor Queenie. He ran to his punishment, head down and just a little slower than usual. He was scared. But he mastered his fear, because he wanted to obey my father.

That’s courage. It’s simply about choosing to do the right thing when part of you is screaming not to. Does that sound familiar?

It’s practically the definition of kink that some part of us is shouting, “Yes yes yes!” while another part is screaming, “No no no!” [source]

All kink takes courage to face up to. But as subs, we put ourselves on the frontline every time we play, bodies bared to someone else’s whip, our fear and humiliation offered for their amusement. This is courage that you can’t fake, raw and atavistic.

Someone said it for me more than ten years ago in a long-defunct shibari website (Powerotics.com):

The submissive has NO CONTROL over the situation, the dominant’s ideas and wishes or the course of a scene.

The submssive HAS CONTROL (and should have) over her own emotions, stamina and determination, as well as her own level of perfection.

That’s not how everyone plays. But it’s pretty close to how I try to play (emotional masochism aside), because my kicks happen to come from the spectacular unfairness of forcing myself to do the unbearable at someone else’s whim. That’s why it’s so important for me to be strong enough to quell the warzone in my head.

And that’s how I want to be outside the dungeon, too. Here is something I wrote last year while reading How to Get People to Do Stuff.

I have been a slave in all my romantic relationships. I non-consensually force all this responsibility on my partners. I don’t take day-to-day responsibility for things going right, and I don’t recognise that I have options outside the relationship. I don’t try to be happy or control my internal states.

I want to learn to be a strong and ethical slave. I cannot control what my dom (or the world) throws at me. I can, and should, control how I feel about them. I have more options than making my dom aware of the problems and asking him to fix them; I can make our lives go better all by myself. I don’t rely on my dom for forgiveness or approval, because I want to give him the freedom to worry about other things. My conscience is my guide. I take responsibility for my own happiness and success. My dom controls what happens to me, but I am in control of whether my life is good.

You may wonder why I even needed to say this to myself. But if you look at my submissive icons, you will see that passivity and vulnerability are a big part of my submissive ideal. It has taken me many years and several eye-opening examples to see that independence is also crucial to this helpmeet business.

No doubt it will take me many more years to actually get there. I can already see so many things missing from what I wrote last year. It didn’t even occur to me to aim for the strength to forgive my dom for his mistakes – or to trust my own assessment of when to get out. I guess it’s nice that I’ve gained the optimism to wish for even more strength!

Yes, it means new worlds to conquer at every turn. This is the hardest thing I will ever do, always supposing I get the chance to try. Because it’s not easy to find the right teacher. But thank you, Rex, for setting me on the path.

 
What makes us tick?

Submissive Power Is Hot Stuff

15 Comments
This is the second post in the Submissive Power series.

It is a cliché that the sub has all the “real” power. And I really, really hope it’s not true.

Yes, I can stop it any minute and yes, hotel security is a lot more likely to help me than him. (Apologies for non-inclusive language; I’m writing about my personal experience.) But good grief, when someone is looming over me with a paddle and an enigmatic smile, the last thing I want to be thinking is, “Nice job, minion!”

What I want is to please him. That’s why they call it power exchange. Because power is the ability to get what you want. And it’s true that he’s getting his wants met in spectacularly obvious ways. But that’s exactly what I want too! To make him want to hurt this creature shivering with desire, to make him laugh at my sobs, to make me crawl back for more again and again.

That’s power flowing in both directions, however deceiving appearances may be, because I am so getting what I want.

I think we’ve started losing sight of this kind of submissive power, and it’s a damn shame. When Venus In Furs was written in 1870 by the man who gave his name to masochism, it was still a new and startling idea that someone might want – desperately – to give up the power to satisfy their wants. And so the author anticipated that reaction by turning the paradox into the central theme of the whole book. Nearly a century later, The Story Of O was published, and that author too stated that her novel was about a woman not just wanting sexual slavery, but manipulating her masters into giving her exactly what she wanted.

That assertion confused the heck out of me and my reading group. We combed the book and all we saw was O being kidnapped and coerced and, at best, bullied. They even tell her, “If you don’t obey immediately, they’ll force you.” Ooh – I mean ick.

But you can’t ignore what an author says about her own book. If she says O was manipulating her masters, we’re missing something.

I have two theories about our divergent perceptions.

(1) By definition, a slave used to be someone held against their will. The mere fact that a slave could be getting exactly what she wanted was therefore enough to make people question who was really in charge – even without begging or charming or bargaining.

(2) Maybe Pauline Réage was right. Maybe those of us down here are doing something incredibly powerful by just obeying and saying “I love you.”

I have been forced to take this hypothesis seriously because my doms are so good at giving me what I want. After the second newbie had had his way with me, I decided it was past a coincidence. Yes, I’m picky, but I hit on them because they’re good people with minds and hearts, not because I think they’re good at doing something I haven’t even allowed them to try yet. And yes we negotiate, and I try my very best to hand over the user manual, and yes, there are spectacular misses – but there are also all these uncanny little things they seem to figure out by themselves.

But, you know … I am telling them.

When I fall silent. When I wait for permission. When I relax into a touch – or not.

When I look stricken and obey anyway, pupils dilated, my whole body ready to jump at the next order.

When trembling gives way to panic, when my throat does wild things without help from my mouth.

When I start biting off noises and grimacing. When I stop making any sound at all and my eye contact becomes pointedly non-committal.

I’m telling them a lot. And we’re not even counting all my flavours of thank you.

Is this manipulation? With all respect to Pauline Réage, that’s not what I would call it. Far from choreographing it for maximum effectiveness, I’m a bemused observer of my own reactions. I think I am getting better at it over time, but it doesn’t feel like something I’m learning to do. It feels like learning not to do things. Not to hide myself, not to run away, not to fight.

Is it seduction? Well, post-mortem analysis suggests that it’s certainly, um, effective. But I can tell you, it feels a lot more like the seduction is being done to me than the other way round.

Because I am getting what I want. But if all is going well, I am definitely not in control. All the specifics are, however temporarily, in someone else’s hands.

It reminds me of advice I once read about working animals: A good specimen will teach you how to train it. Just watch what it does naturally. All you have to do is connect those responses to your own will.

A German Shepherd wants to protect. A husky wants to pull. A labrador wants to fetch.

I want your pleasure to come from my suffering.

And when I’m getting what I want … you can consider us both drunk on power.

What makes us tick?

My Submissive Icons Are … Strong?!

1 Comment
This is the first post in the Submissive Power series.

Famed kink educator Midori has a brilliant exercise for identifying your style of feminine dominance.

First, she says to list all the powerful women you admire – from fiction, film, history, myth, your family, everywhere, anywhere. She had Brunnhilde, RuPaul and her grandmother, among others.

Then she says to go down the list and identify the qualities that make them so powerful for you, both light and dark. That’s your inner dom.

This is genius. But why just femme dominants? Why not everyone?

I don’t know what Midori’s answer would be. But here’s my guess. Midori is a dominant woman in a world that’s tough for dominant women. Most of our models for powerful people are male, so it’s easy to assume that in order to enact dominance, you have to act masculine. The only obvious alternative is the leather-clad dominatrix in corset and heels. This stereotype is of even less assistance in finding one’s individuality as a dominant woman. Midori is solving the problem she knows best.

But the nature of brilliant solutions is that they have applications beyond their original design. So I thought I’d try it for myself as a female sub.

The results floored me.

Submissive Femme icon Submissive Femme Attributes
Eva Ibbotson’s heroines Unaffected, open, helpful, enthusiastic
Teresa Teng, singer Sweetness, appeal, desire to please
Noraniza Idris, singer Decorous seductiveness, grace
Monsoon Wedding maid Modest, decorous, passive
Comic female impersonator Coy, artificial, demure, flattering
King and Clown: female impersonator Abject, shy sub smile, doesn’t expect, timid but takes bold action in extremis
One of my friends (when crossdressing) Vulnerable, embarrassed, endearing
Kurosawa women Terrifying power from superhuman restraint
Daughter of the Samurai Strength in subordination
Gone with the Wind: Ellen 贤妻良母 (wise wife, kind mother), unselfish, velvet strength, serenity amidst turbulence
A mother I met once Constant benevolence, not confrontational
A Little Princess Grave propriety with superiors, kindness to inferiors
A moment with one of my teachers (a nun) Terrifying authority from humility
Pauline Réage Unassuming confidence and clear-sightedness, devotion without bitterness

Executive summary: Quiet strength, demure seductiveness, and appealing vulnerability.

Yes. So much yes. Which stuns me because I would never have said it that way without Midori’s help.

And my icons! I knew they were important to me. But I never sat down and looked at the whole list together.

Surprise the first: Asian. The first names that leapt to mind were like a tour of Asia. I have spent my life immersed in Anglophone culture, high and low, and somehow I rejected all of this when constructing my core sense of submission.

I had no idea. But I should have known. I have a real thing for kowtowing. And the first safeword I chose wasn’t just Chinese, it was an archaic term of respect for one’s husband that might best be translated as “my lord”.

Did I imprint, or am I fetishising my heritage?

Surprise the second: No one from my family. Practically no one from real life. Or even my country. In fact, barely anything I encountered in my childhood, or even before university. But I knew it when I saw it.

My God, I really do live in my head. In some other century.

Last and greatest surprise: Good grief, why are all my submissive icons so strong?

At first I thought it was just pre-selection bias. No one becomes a film star without personality; no one writes a novel about a weak heroine.

But. I have a heap of female icons who weren’t on my list because they’re not submissive: Gong Li, Julie Andrews, Aung San Suu Kyi. And my list does include women in bit parts, because that’s where servants usually go in someone else’s drama. No, these really are my submissive icons.

And then there are all the women I didn’t even consider. The heroine of the seminal rape romance The Flame and the Flower. Every single slavegirl of Gor. All tears and rage – wilful, but not strong. They weren’t submissive, they were powerless.

In contrast, look at my icons, steering their loved ones with a look or a smile. Declining even to notice the sword at their necks. Total mastery of their submission.

Who wouldn’t want to be them?

And I’m not. In submissive mode I am a quaking puddle. Authority, grace, decorum? Nope. Laughable confusion. Argh.

But some of my icons are vulnerable. And the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated them – and myself. Because it was a hard road to abject submission. To take off my hard-earned poise along with my clothes, that took me years. So that’s what I want. The power to make myself powerless. And I’m partway there.

I think it is this incredibly fragile middle ground between strength and vulnerability that this exercise is great for uncovering. Not the stereotype handed to you on a platter, but the elusive flavour of your own aspirations. Because I never thought about it, but this really is my dynamic. When I play, it’s always about forcing myself to submit. Never being forced, never fighting. I guess my kink is about mastering myself to meet someone else’s wishes.

God knows I’m not there yet. But thank you, Midori, for helping me to see what I want to become!

Teresa Teng, “When Will You Return?” (no English subtitles)

Noraniza Idris, “Dikir Puteri” (no English subtitles)

Gong-gil from The King and the Clown (subtitled)

Lady Kaede from Kurosawa’s Ran (subtitled)

TMI

Resolutions: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Leave a comment

Ah, New Year resolutions. I wasn’t going to make any. But then Sciophilous inspired me, and I realised that I’ve been making resolutions all along. This is a good time to record them.

In this past year, I resolved to:

1) Accept that I tend to be a slave in relationships, and change from being a dependent slave to a strong one. Not just reporting problems, but helping to solve them. Being a helpmeet, not a liability.

2) Relax. Literally. Physical tension was at the root of all my pain issues.

3) Stop. When I’m thirsty. When nature calls. When it hurts. When I could finish it if I just kept going. When I could keep all my promises if I just kept going. When my blog was going so well and my readers were depending on me to keep going with regular updates … you get the idea.

4) Start again.

And I did. I’m better at every single one of those things. I rebooted my whole life. This is the hardest thing I have ever done, except for living through the crash in the first place.

But the rewards have been commensurate. It’s so good to be me again. And better this time.

Funny fact: I learnt to solve every single one of those problems for blogging first, before I was able to apply the solution to the rest of my life. All hail the power of the blog!

So obviously I’d better blog my resolutions for the New Year. (Please forget the ones I tweeted. This is the new improved stuff.)

1) Make my life easier and better. Because I’ve learnt to go easier on myself, but I think now it’s time to make life go easier on me. And I can, if I step back and review the big picture, if I install habits and rewards. Because self-control works better with humility, fun and gratitude. Which goes with Resolution 2.

2) Live life like I have a master. I’ve already been doing this a little, because there is no quicker way to make me do that which seems impossible than “What would a master want me to do?”

But now that I’m in better shape, I’d like to get to the next level. Interacting with experienced slaves has been an education. And I can start learning so many of those things right now! I can figure out how they make it so easy to set up a restaurant date. I can notice my friends’ preferences. I can pick a piece of furniture to play master and orient my movements and facial expression around it. Sounds like fun!

That’s where I stopped last night. Then I suddenly remembered reading that once upon a time, teenage girls used to solemnly swear to be nicer to grandma. Now they solemnly swear to lose 10 lbs. That’s not right! And oh horrors, am I one of them? This must be remedied!

3) Choose the right. I ran into this Mormon saying in a heartbreaking, heartwarming fanfic. I love it and I’m terrified of it. It makes mincemeat of the notion that you can be a good person now and forever. It says it’s always a struggle, but you can always do it – if you’re strong enough.

Well, I want to work on my moral muscle. I have learnt so much about the right thing to do from Nonviolent Communication and Aung San Suu Kyi this year. Now I need to make myself actually do it.

This is not enough. What I admired so much about Sciophilous’s resolutions was their concreteness. So I made a lot of action plans.

Taking stock of my life every Monday night. Remembering to move as gracefully as I can, all the time. Noticing when I haven’t chosen the right, and rewarding myself with clicker training. Submitting nagging worries for advice. Being kind to my aches. Making ten to-do lists and checking them every time I –

No.

I succeeded in changing many things about myself this year, and this is not how I did it. Let’s do what works. Which is: Focus on one thing at a time.

I really, really wanted that one thing to be the gracefulness thing. Because dammit, there are intrinsic rewards to imagining a master’s eyes upon me all the time!

But then I thought I’d better be sensible and address those aches. Ugh. Boring. I’ve been addressing them all year long. Believe it or not, it’s become second nature to pick up the soap bottle with both hands.

No, it’s got to be something new. Thanks, ADD.

So I picked taking stock. Because mindfulness is ridiculously hard for me, and it’s the foundation of everything else. And because when Wondermark made a comic about to-do lists, it was All Too True.

In a sense, I guess I’m making a resolution to make resolutions. Cringe. Oh well, we all have to start somewhere!

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Apocryphally, Einstein

Good luck to us!

Bloggery

2014: Don’t Lose the Answers

Leave a comment

I have a confession. My favourite reading matter is this very blog.

But I swear, it’s not just because I am so vain! It’s also because my memory is a sieve. It’s so bad that once when I was asked for a personal motto, I immediately ad-libbed, “Question Everything. Don’t Lose the Answers.”

It’s particularly bad with kink, because it’s so partitioned off from the rest of real life. I’ve had so many questions for so many years, and it’s only recently that I’ve discovered the books and friends who have helped me work through possible answers. (Thanks, guys!)

So I made a cheat sheet for what I’ve learnt here this year. Ahem!

Abject Submission

What Makes Us Tick?

Safety and Ethics

Reality Check

How to Do It

I Did It

Buried Treasure

My Favourite Quotes

What a year. I’m looking forward to more.

See you in 2015!

How to do it

Communicating While Submissive: Teaser

2 Comments
Today I am a guest blogger on Submissive Guide! With an essay that was Written in Blood.

Doms keep telling us that they’re not mind-readers, so we have to communicate. But it’s hard! Especially when it’s something they might not want to hear.

The good news is that there is always a submissive way to say it. And you never have to compromise the message. Here is what I wish I’d known ten years ago.

Continue Reading →

What makes us tick?

Condescension, or Kindness from Above

12 Comments

I remember the day my first dom taught me to beg.

My initial attempts were ludicrous. “Please, sir …” Frantic mental efforts, not aided by his casually travelling hands. “You’re … very strong …”

I remember the moment when his gigantic brain figured out that I didn’t even know how to do it. He stopped, and then the focus was ever so slightly warmed by amusement.

And my world shifted as he said, so very very gently, “You don’t need to flatter me. Just react. Make noises when I touch you.”

Oh God, the shame. I had got it so very wrong. And oh God, the gratitude. He didn’t just not laugh at my incompetence, he was going to pretend he wasn’t even surprised by it.

(And yes, I know his interpretation of “beg” was unconventional, but I wasn’t going to argue.)

I’ve had a few more of those moments lately. The split second after I forced myself to answer someone’s question about exactly what I do in the shower. Or when he helped me figure out which of two equally humiliating positions was more comfortable for my wretched joints. Or when he put on his coat, gave me a long look, and then said quietly, “You may kiss my boots.”

So much kindness. And it’s the power dynamic that makes it so. When someone stands there opening and shutting her mouth like a goldfish, an equal doesn’t incline his head and say, very gently, “You can say it.” Or when she exclaims, “I am so sorry I got the time wrong by ONE WHOLE MINUTE!” an equal doesn’t smile and reassure her that it’s quite all right.

I didn’t tell him that it was a joke. I was too overwhelmed by his real message: I know I could hurt you, really hurt you, and I’m going to protect you instead.

This is why people used to say, gratefully, “The Queen was so condescending – she spoke to me for five minutes!” Because condescension used to mean simply kindness from a superior. And when inequality is taken for granted, kindness from above is a good thing.

But the world has changed. My tenth-grade classmates and I were horrified when our Moral Education textbooks announced that a good Confucian husband should be kind to his wife and bring her presents. We didn’t know how to articulate our outrage at the time, but we knew that kindness was for dogs and cats.

So I wonder if vanilla kindness will die the same tarry death as condescension. In fact, I think it’s already started. There was a time when any cat could be called “poor kitty”, in exactly the same friendly, neutral way you might address a subordinate as “honest Iago”. But nowadays it’s “good doggy” or “clever boy”. That’s how squeamish we have become about kindness to unequals, even animals and children.

This is my problem with equality: we don’t have it. We live in a world brimful of inequality. And I think our uneasiness makes it worse. Denying one’s privilege doesn’t make it go away. Forgetting your power just means you’ll hurt someone by accident. If you are serious about addressing inequality in whatever form, there is no alternative to noblesse oblige.

And this is what I love about BDSM. This is why I am so moved by the question, “If I give you a safeword, will you be able to use it?” That’s someone who knows I’m in his power, who knows he could traumatise me without even realising it. Never mind whether he should have that kind of power over me; I want him to know he does.

Because I can’t live without that inequality. I love the subjugation, the brusque orders and sadistic humiliation. If I don’t have it, I’ll go looking for it.

But it’s best when the cruelty and kindness come together. Pain and fear remind me who’s up there and who’s down here, yes. But it’s the patience and encouragement that I remember for weeks, months, years afterwards. So much trust, so much safety, so much certainty.

Yes, I like the big stick – everything about it – but the part about walking softly has a very special place in my heart.

e[lust]

e[lust] #64 – Molly picked me!

2 Comments

Welcome to Elust #64 – The only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month. Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice or kinky discussions it’ll be here at Elust. Want to be included in Elust #65? Start with the rules, come back December 1st to submit something and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

On a special note I want to mention that the judges voting on Elust is often very close, this month more than most. You all do such fine work that it is very hard for us to come up with the final results.

– This Month’s Top Three Posts –

Ownership: On Sexuality & Feminine Relations
Tool Time
Seven – A Fairytale of Sorts

– Featured Post (Molly’s Picks) –

The Love Letter of O ← This is me!
To My Single Submissive Friends – Be Brave

– Readers Choice from Sexbytes –

*You really should consider adding your popular posts here too*
What S/He Said: Pressing Stop

All blogs that have a submission in this edition must re-post this digest from tip-to-toe on their blogs within 7 days. Re-posting the photo is optional and the use of the “read more…” tag is allowable after this point. Thank you, and enjoy!

Continue reading →

1
1
Accept
Decline
http://google.ca

Accept Decline