Consent = The outcome of internal politics among our wants.
That’s how dominant bottoms and masochistic doms can exist. Our wants may not line up tidily with the stereotypes, but in a good scene we are all getting fulfilled. It’s just that your wants ≠ my wants.
And that’s what D/s is all about. I want ten different things before breakfast, and I want you to deny me some of them! Please don’t hurt me, please beat me, thank you [gasp] thank you. Consent isn’t just about any one of my wants. Otherwise, good grief, I’d be violating my own consent every time I obeyed my alarm clock.
Kink is a lot harder than getting up in the morning. And I think that’s why kinksters test saner than average. We are experts at conflict resolution between pain and pleasure, joy and fear, lust and taboo. I want to kiss your feet, I want to thank you for the privilege, and I don’t want regrets.
But stable politics takes work. When a nation is split down the middle like our heads, that’s when you get bloody civil war, e.g. Yugoslavia, Rwanda. Even America suffers from flip-flops between parties that don’t really want to honour each other’s international treaties – or can’t. In a kink consent context, this is traumatic for everybody, including ethical doms.
One solution, of course, is not to think too hard. But internal censorship is not the best means of achieving stability.
I like to think of all my wants sitting at a nice big round table listening to one another with transparency and compassion. They’re trying to give the Get Out Now and Regrets activists a real hearing, because sometimes they’re right.
But mostly they’re working on growing the Yes Please coalition. Because saying yes to the right person is what I want to do with whatever power I’ve got.
Everything I said in my post on Jian Ghomeshi is true.
But anger is not the way. People I respect have told me to try and hear others’ needs and wants instead.
But dammit, this one is a sociopath! Ego, charm, obliviousness, contempt – I’m not a mental health professional, but I’ve never seen a clearer case of a hollow heart. How do you sympathise with that?
Or so I told myself. Because once I really tried, I remembered that I do know what it feels like to be a sociopath, thanks to the chilling book Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas.
Worse yet – I remembered seeing myself in that book.
For the longest time I didn’t want to believe it. Sociopaths don’t feel guilt; guilt is a way of life for me. Sociopaths don’t get nervous; people spend an inordinate amount of time trying to reassure me. Sociopaths crave power; power scares the hell out of me.
But … but sometimes I’m not like that. And that horrified me, until I saw the pattern. My emotions switch off precisely when I have been hurt or disappointed past comprehension, by someone I love past reason.
None of my friends have ever seen this side of me, because they simply aren’t capable of hurting me enough. It’s only happened when I felt betrayed by three very special people, and it’s not like my usual temper, which fizzles in five minutes flat. This is more like my heart amputating them for a day or more.
I think this state of mind is what they call cold rage. And yet there is no anger. The normal responses to betrayal would be fury and sadness, but those emotions become temporarily mythical for me. Same with fear, anxiety, embarrassment. The only feeling that comes and goes is irritation. In this mood, I have pulled off my shirt in front of men just because I couldn’t be bothered to tell them to turn around. If you know me, this will be nearly impossible to imagine.
There is no lying or grandiosity, but I think brutal truths and contempt are closely related. Otherwise it’s a terrifying match with Confessions of a Sociopath. Including the weirdest symptom described by M.E. Thomas: total disregard for personal safety. She threw out all her kitchen knives, because she found herself incapable of paying enough attention to her fingers not to slice them to the bone. This is not a symptom the psychiatrists talk about. They think sociopaths are reckless novelty-seekers. I think my ex had it right when he said it’s more like they don’t care about anybody, including themselves.
This is not a nice way to live. You’re not suffering, but you’re spiralling toward self-destruction, sabotaging all chances of emotional support. And if you believe M.E. Thomas’s description of herself versus her soft-hearted brother, the cause is partly unbelievable emotional neglect in babyhood. It makes me wonder if you can turn anyone into a sociopath if you hurt them enough, early enough.
It breaks my heart, too. But nobody so far has managed to cure a sociopath with love and sympathy. Prison therapy actually backfires – those guys are more likely to re-offend! One of them had a telling nickname for therapy. Finishing school.[source]
M.E. Thomas has thought hard about how she came to be a law professor who ‘only’ ruins lives in legal ways. She gives all the credit to her parents, for their clear rules and consequences, both positive and negative. Her meagre store of self-control and planning ability goes back to that stability and predictability, an environment they created solely for their selfish convenience.
That is what sociopaths need, from the horse’s mouth. Consequences. It’s not a cure. But it mitigates the damage to everyone, including themselves.
And so I say this without anger: Jian Ghomeshi does not need our sympathy or forgiveness. What he needs is simply to know that he can’t get away with this again. He doesn’t need our anger. We don’t need to bore him or entertain him.
We do need to understand him and his kind. Which is a frightening task. Gavin de Becker, security expert to presidents and celebrities, says that in order to understand a killer, we have to believe that we too are capable of killing. So I think the first step is to look into ourselves. That’s what I learnt from david stein, who originated the motto Safe Sane Consensual. He says that for any ethical issue, the most important question is not whether others are doing it wrong, but whether we ourselves are at fault.
So I ask you now: how alien is this mindset? Am I wrong to think that cold rage is something most people can experience if pushed hard enough? I know that anyone can be taught to feel like a sociopath towards the enemy we’ve learnt to regard as non-human. Auschwitz, Nanking, Rwanda. History has shown that we all have the neural circuitry to do this.
And M.E. Thomas thinks the next concentration camps might be for her kind. She asks: Why is it that normal people advocate such sociopathic measures against sociopaths?
I think the answer is obvious. They are the bogeyman in the dark. Inhuman, unknowable. That’s how we are wired to react to incapacitating terror. Pick up the axe, close our eyes and lunge.
But emotional blindness and deafness are just as mentally crippling as anger. And I have also learnt that sociopaths don’t get very much out of living their lives that way.
Most of us are lucky enough to have a choice. If we open our eyes, we can do better.
Edit: To clarify, I don’t think I’m a psychopath. But I do think that anyone in a cold rage is temporarily experiencing that state of mind, at least with respect to the object of the anger.
You say to your colleague, “I want to hate-fuck you,” and then you claim you’ve been fired for Safe Sane Consensual?
You’re a professional communicator and somehow your partners keep walking into your home unaware that you’re going to whack their heads and choke them unconscious?
You dare to identify as one of the wonderful people who cheer up crying friends with spanks and cuddles? The same ones who rack their brains figuring out more and more ways to keep my kind safe?
Dan Savage said it for me:
I oppose the demonization of consensual kinksters. I despise abusers who cover for their crimes by claiming to be consensual kinksters.
Yesterday my friend wanted to talk about how this faecal orifice stands under Canadian law. “I don’t want ANY reminder of that smug mug in my head,” I growled. But intellectual seduction works on me. He waved this law professor’s comments in front of me invitingly, and so did others, and eventually I pounced.
So I am thrilled to report that this gutter sludge is getting it on multiple counts:
1. Canadian law says consent has to be ongoing. You can change your mind any time. Like when his unfortunate dates were thinking, “Stop, no, I thought rough sex meant rough sex!”
2. Canadian law says there is no meaningful consent to bodily harm. The law professor made it sound like that means you can’t leave marks of any kind. Hmm. Well. If it gets this noisome filth what he deserves, hurray!
My friend wanted to know if the law worries me personally. Well, no, it doesn’t. And not just because I like life at the thin end of the whip. More because I’m an informed optimist. Where I live, public prosecutors apparently have a lot of latitude in deciding which cases to pursue, as well as a staggering backlog of work. They’d rather go after the real bad guys. I suspect this is a universal state of affairs.
But we don’t have to rely on the prosecutors’ good sense. The laws are not so bad either.
1. Ongoing consent essentially means that Mother Canada wants everyone to play with a safeword.I like that idea. Though I don’t even need to do it with a safeword. My doms have all stopped as soon as I said, “Huh, that feels weird.”
I have heard rumours of losers who respond, “Stop is not a safeword!” and laugh and keep going. If someone ever says it to me, that’s my cue to run. (Well, unless they’re playing to my emotional masochism, but even then they probably wouldn’t say it that way.) If you’re not a nice guy and you’re proud of it, you probably don’t try very hard to do the right thing. Next!
Edit: Please see comments below. Doesn’t change my squick, but it’s true that there’s a wide range of kinksters and scenarios.
2. Bodily harm. No marks. A lot of people aren’t going to like the sound of that. For me personally, it’s not a problem. My first dom and I went through maybe ten implements in ten years, and none of them left a mark on me. Since then, I have found out that I also enjoy acquiring bruises that take 2-3 weeks to fade. But honestly, for me there isn’t a big difference. Cake is better with frosting, but either way it’s cake.
Still, I do need to flinch and gasp before wonderful things start happening inside. And I know there are other people who need more. So yes, marks are an issue.
But seriously? I mean, hickeys? And how about martial arts practice? Bodily harm has to leave some room for interpretation, or else.
As it happens, black belts and black hankies pretty much agree on where to draw the line. Bruises: So what? You know they’ll heal. (And if you’re an exception, then you’re an exception.) But that innocent-looking rope making pretty patterns on your wrists? It’s entirely possible to do that wrong, and then you lose your grip and your ability to type – for one week, two weeks, six months, or years, maybe forever.
Now that is doing it wrong. That’s why I’m leery of suffocation and waterboarding and torches and sharp things. Air and water and fire and blood – that’s where you take your chances even when you are trying damn hard to do it right.
And yet people still do that stuff. In the dojo as well as the dungeon. Judo students practice choking until you black out. Jet Li once accidentally sliced his own head open in an wushu competition. They know the risks, and they know they can do it right.
Sometimes people try their best and get it wrong. You don’t want it to happen, but it does happen. So you get the hospital bills. You offer your contrition and support, if wanted.
And you make your walk of shame over to Rope Incident Reports, a BDSM institution which makes my heart burst with pride. We need more forums like that.
But if you got it very, very wrong and the maimed party knows you weren’t trying? If you think it’s a good idea to tell them to lighten up?
That’s when the victims of your fun want to report you. And that’s when I want the Royal Canadian Mounted Police riding through the dungeon.
Go get ’em, Mounties!
P.S. Yes, I think he’s guilty. He hasn’t even tried to deny flirting with concussions. And what kind of chamber pot defends himself by pointing out that he’s interviewed Barbra Streisand?
You know the story. It’s a classic of our tribe. The heroine is first brought to a château of sexual slavery by her lover, then given to another man, with interludes of lust for other women. The tale ends with her reduction to a naked, masked party ornament.
And she glories in it. In the detached and recursively reflective voice of a French intellectual. Because, of course, she was. Pauline Réage, author of The Story of O, was also Dominique Aury, one of the leading lights of the postwar French literary scene.
Also Anne Desclos, a single mother who lived with her parents.
Also the lifelong lover of her equally brilliant colleague, Jean Paulhan, whom she met in the Résistance.
You can watch interviews with her in the documentary Writer of O. So I did, and at first I could not make sense of what I was seeing.
A literary giant who chose a pen-name that resounds etymologically with power and gold? A woman who liked to dress as a prostitute and walk the streets at night? [source]
And her face is a shy version of Anne Frank’s three-cornered zest for life. She has the exact same smile as a young woman and as a little old lady – now mischievous, now shrinking from attention, always open and innocent.
This confused the heck out of me. But it actually kind of fits with what her publisher and lover said about her book. Which I thought I had read.
“The Story of O is a very decent book. It simply recounts a story, a tale of scandalous doings, but it does so without the slightest excess.”
“In O, there also blows some indefinable, always pure and violent spirit, endless and unadulterated.”
Decency? Purity?
But yes, it’s there. And they put their finger on it, that’s exactly how it differs from its pornographic neighbours. There is no titillation, no leering. Just love and desire and submission. That is the alchemy which transforms innocence into bacchanalia intact.
And now it makes sense. Of course there is no prurience, because that is impossible without shame.
Of course she liked the eyes of men on her body in the shiny black knee-length dress of a prostitute, because it was about feeling powerless and available to their desire. (But always with a male friend to act as lookout. Sensible girl.)
And of course she could go to work as a senior editor alongside Albert Camus with that timid and friendly smile, because she had total confidence within her chosen posture of modesty and humility.
We think of innocence as ignorance. But in her case it was the opposite. She had read Sade, and this is all she had to say about him:
“So it was that Sade’s castles, discovered long after I had silently built my own, never surprised me, as I was not surprised by the discovery of his society, The Friends of Crime: I already had my own secret society, however minor and inoffensive. But Sade made me realise that we are all jailers, and all in prison, in that there is always someone within us whom we enchain, whom we imprison, whom we silence.”
She’s talking about 120 Days of Sodom. The Friends of Crime consume faeces incessantly. Children are tortured to death in the most horrible ways. Most kinksters who encounter this text trip over themselves in haste to disavow Sade as one of us. But the young Pauline Réage recognised kinship, and wasn’t even shocked.
No shame, no fear. She simply took it for granted that horrible desires are universal. And in order to be at peace with that, you need utter faith in your moral sense about which ones to act on in real life. She had that. Do we?
To her contemporaries, it seemed incredible that a woman broke this barrier. But I think maybe it almost had to be a woman, it had to be a submissive. Someone whose whole cultural milieu made sense of submission as the only acceptable form of love and desire for her gender. Someone who saw no contradiction between the joy of sexual victimisation and obedience to a moral sense.
“Whence came to me those oft-repeated reveries, those slow musings just before falling asleep, always the same ones, in which the purest and wildest love always sanctioned, or rather always demanded, the most frightful surrender, in which childish images of chains and whips added to constraint the symbols of constraint, I’m not sure which.”
Childish?
Sade knew he was evil. Pauline Réage knew she was not. She saw the drive for self-destruction in her own novel, and it didn’t rip her apart, because she saw the same thing in Quietist mysticism. In one interview she observed that there is nothing more immodest than prayer, because it puts you at the mercy of something or someone else.
Yes, I am absolutely her fangirl now. One of my doms called me their time machine into the past. In a world where kink means sex, it feels so good to find someone else who thinks of submission and sexual desire as love and outraged modesty.
Of course the match is not perfect by any means. Some of it is just our kinks. She’s the kind of sub who is into her own submission; for me it is someone else’s sadism. And I just can’t get that excited about women.
But I’m not that brave, either. She acknowledged frightening moralities: the slave’s manipulation of the master, the vindictive thrill of betrayal, the fulfilment of self-abnegation in death. Plus a thousand other paradoxes, some of which have become clichés, while others have yet to be rediscovered.
Most alien of all, she never mentions the strangeness of sexual submission alongside intellectual equality. Maybe it’s because she couldn’t risk betraying her identity; maybe it’s because she and her lover could so easily fill in the blanks while she read it aloud to him. [source]
But I think the answer is much simpler. Maybe it was a time when this wasn’t strange, because there was no equality between men and women.
And this is a big gap for me, because by God I love it when my pride is outraged alongside my modesty. So I’m glad that our canon now also includes Carrie’s Story and its sequel, which are all about this incongruity and form a brilliant commentary on O.
But no one has yet dethroned “the most ardent love letter any man has ever received.” [source] I’m so relieved that Jean Paulhan appreciated what he was getting.
Part 1 of this post reported on the second-most common complaint from tops, “Give me real reactions, dammit!”
On behalf of all of us down here, I protested that we are good boys and girls and we are (mostly) not doing it on purpose. According to a kinky friend who wrangles minds for a living, what I was describing sounds more like dissociation.
So I nodded sagely back at her and asked, “What can we do about it?”
Edited to add: These half-measures are not going to work for someone who is experiencing extreme dissociation, e.g. panic attack or catatonia. They just need the scene to TERMINATE, whether or not they are capable of safewording. Thank you to Ginger Nic of Switch Studies for pointing this out in her comment below.
1. Mindfulness Is All
Faced with my cry from the heart, my friendly neighbourhood mind-wrangler responded by assuming an air of gnomic beatitude and intoning, “Mindfulness.” Then she dissolved into giggles because she knew I would react to that.
Groan. Groan groan GROAN. I swear this is the exact same answer I get from her every bloody time I ask for advice. First it was for chronic pain. Then it was ADD. And now kink? Next time I’ll ask about interior decoration and take bets.
But in the case of dissociation, it does make sense. Mindfulness is about improving awareness of your own body and mind via meditative techniques. (And more.) If you want to be present for some of the most stressful moments of your life, it does make sense to practise first.
And strangely enough, getting into a scene really is sort of like meditating. Like so. (Thanks, Little Guide to Getting Tied Up!)
Focus on your partner. Gaze adoringly into their eyes, or the next best body part. Even if they’re not gazing back.
Or focus on your own body. If you’re getting pain/sensation from the top, try to be open to it. Let it take over your world.
Check in with yourself. Is this how you want to be feeling? (This one applies before, during and after the scene.)
Don’t try them all at the same time! Now that’s a good way of getting distracted.
If you’re lucky, the top will remind you to do these things. Or make you aware of your own reactions: “Did you know you’re trembling?” Or “I like that high-pitched sound you make. That one.” But it’s nice to know how to do it yourself.
I think it also helps to remember that it’s not our job to enjoy what is happening. Our mission is simply to experience it. But really experience it.
And if something is getting in the way of that, we can do something about it. If you realise you’re scared or distracted: “Sir, I keep worrying about marks, but I don’t want to stop.” (Thanks, Little Guide to Getting Tied Up!) Or if you’re bored or angry: “Ma’am, I’m losing the headspace. Could you help me?” (Thanks, PlaySpace!)
Because I do think the top can help a lot. See below.
2. Make Me Feel Safe
Personally, when I dissociate from the pain or exposure, my most immediate desire is for the top to say, “Put your clothes back on. We’re stopping for now.”
I fully concede that this is not the most intuitive way to get whimpers and tears. If I were a top, I’d probably try to crack that stoicism by hitting harder. And here I am suggesting that you put the strap down?
But it makes complete sense from down here. Dissociation is a defence mechanism against stress and danger. The direct solution is security and relaxation.
I do realise it’s hard to figure out whether to whack harder or let up. In my case, “not enough” and “TOO MUCH!” both look like bland indifference. How can you tell them apart?
You can’t tell. But you can ask. It doesn’t have to sound un-domly if you both know that you get to decide what to do with the information.
And there’s more than one way to help the bottom feel safe enough to react. Privacy helps me, but someone else might only be able to relax with witnesses around. Or sometimes it’s enough to simply reassure us that it’s okay to let go and make noises. (Thanks, PlaySpace!)
Yes, occasionally you’ll have to shut down all the way and reboot, but it’s actually pretty rare. Dialling it back, cuddling or breaks will usually be enough – even without the addition of clothes.
3. Try Something Else
My gnomic and mirthful mind-wrangler approved of my suggestion above. But then she asked, “What did Mr Gasp Shake Thank You do when you stopped reacting?”
Blink. “Well, first he kept whacking me. Then he tried hitting not so hard in the same place. Then he hit me somewhere else. And actually, that was enough.” I thought harder. “Come to think of it, he got out the cane when I stopped reacting to the interrogation, too. I was so sure it wouldn’t work, but it did.”
I still don’t know why it works. Maybe all the fear is concentrated on one thing and you can trick the mind if you switch to something that previously felt safe?
My kinky mind-wrangler approved of this strategy, too. She said exactly the same thing as the doms at PlaySpace: “That’s a good rule of thumb. If it’s not working, try something different.”
I would never have come up with this one myself, nor would I have believed that it would work. But given the proof upon my own body, it is my absolute favourite.
Let me be honest. It’s not because it is time-efficient. It’s because the sub doesn’t even have to know it’s happening.
And then maybe you can trick us again by coming back to the scary activity later?
Summary
So there you have it. Everything I know about the Road to Interesting Noises. Or should I say Being Present and Attentive for Your Own Torment and Subjugation?
The number one top complaint is definitely “I can’t read your mind!” But it gets stiff competition from its close cousin: “Give me real reactions, dammit!”
This I can sympathise with. Scening is all about what’s going on in the bottom’s head. Me and my kind naturally have privileged access to this contested territory, but tops need external validation, poor souls.
But I do have a question. What are these not-real reactions? Faked overreactions? Because I haven’t seen them. I’m sure they do happen – my experience is extremely limited. But to me it looks like the far more common problem is lack of reaction.
And it’s not simply willful repression. I was utterly baffled when I watched my first demo classes, because again and again, bottoms said they weren’t scared, though we could all see them shaking. And I don’t think they were lying. Because when I myself was in the hot seat, I didn’t even know I was trembling.
So it’s not just a few stoic bottoms. To some extent, I think it’s all of us.
Why on earth does this happen? I scratched my head for months and couldn’t work it out. But luckily one of my kinky friends wrangles people’s minds for a living. I took my confusion to her and she nodded sagely. “Dissociation.”
Huh. That makes a lot of sense. I used to think dissociation meant full-blown multiple personality disorder, or the fugue states beloved of mystery authors because even the murderer doesn’t know he’s done it. But according to The Myth of Sanity by Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, everyone experiences dissociation. Maybe not the kind of rage that makes you wonder who smashed all the dishes. But it also counts if you’ve ever commuted on autopilot while consumed with grief or anxiety.
In my case, dissociation is a very old friend. As I’ve said before, writing about pre-scene jitters:
I was mostly terrified that I wouldn’t be terrified. I know me. When I miss a plane, I shrug and call the airline. When I get dumped, I smile and give my best wishes. And so forth. I have a long history of shutting down in emotional crisis.
And I don’t even know it’s happening till it goes away. I just freeze into total indifference to the crisis trigger. Scares the hell out of my ex-doms. They’ve never met this brisk, friendly grown-up before.
But then they’ve seen me dissociate when I’m scening, too, just a bit differently. Too much pain, too much real fear, and all the interesting noises shut off like a tap. Same with the grovelling gratitude, the wide eyes and trembling. Instead you get my vanilla reaction to pain and danger, which resembles nothing so much as sardonic sports commentator trying very hard for saintly patience. If you can’t imagine how that plays out, let me refer you to my CollarMe review.
Obviously this is no fun at all for the top. But believe me, it’s no fun from down here, either. I love losing my vanilla observer – in fact, it’s one of the best things about scening. When it works, I am 100% present and reacting. With the laser focus of a deer in the headlights, in fact. Dissociation is the opposite of that. It’s a hedgehog curling up when poked. Great defence mechanism against stress. But it gets in the way of our fun, dammit!
So what can we do about it?
The kinky mind-wrangler and I do have some ideas. But I’d love to hear yours first.
My response: “You mean I can do that? YES PLEASE LET ME OBEY.”
As you probably know, he’s a trans writer-activist-therapist and a great-granddaddy of our community. About a week ago he finally gave his partner permission to explain that he hasn’t been active lately because his medical problems have gotten really serious.
And they’re heartbreaking. For instance, he needs cataract surgery and Medicare won’t help because he’s under 65. And he has uterine fibroids, it’s gotten to the point of intense daily pain, but it’s really hard for transmen to get gynaecological healthcare.
The pain sounds crippling – and I haven’t even reported all of it – but it’s totally treatable. He’s only 60.
This is our chance to help someone who has done so much for our community. To give just one example, the San Francisco Chronicle says he was instrumental in getting lesbian feminists to accept erotica and S&M back in the 70s and 80s. And he did it partly by getting them to say, “Oh my God, this is HOT, let’s NOT ban it.”
Myself, I have been his undying fangirl ever since running into his poetry. Obviously I like that he writes evocatively about my favourite things. But the poems that really knocked me flat were the ones about service and the butch-femme dynamic. Those are things I never thought I’d understand, and Patrick Califia made me feel them from the inside.
And then I found his brilliant chapters on anal fisting and masochism in The Ultimate Guide to Kink. My God, the heart and genius and skill of the man. And I haven’t even read his classic works Sensuous Magic or Macho Sluts.
So I am under Strong Encouragement to write this appeal for medical help. Because of course, the people whom I respect have even greater respect for Patrick Califia, since they know so much more about him.
But the word is not out on FetLife, precisely because Patrick Califia is that much of an old-timer. So please share the GiveForward webpage where you can donate and find out more from his partner? Or the Facebook note by Patrick Califia himself.
Because I think there are so many people who want to help and just don’t know yet. If only because we want more of his amazing books!
Welcome to Elust #62 –
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Oh, and I don’t drink. Alcohol, coffee OR soft drinks. Ick.
Obviously, I’m secretly Mormon, I just haven’t told me yet. Though I hear Mormons are allowed to wear more makeup than this. And dance.
EYES
I can’t look at Kinky & Popular. Female vanilla naked female almost-vanilla naked female vanilla. Run away!
Do you know the main drawback of having erotica authors as Twitter friends? It’s shiny male vanilla chest male vanilla chest male vanilla yawwwwwwwwn GAG.
I can’t do play parties. But I can demo bottom for a packed classroom. I mean, obviously. When I turn into jelly I’m giving you everything. The least you can do is stare. Yes, that means you in the back as well!
ORIGINS
I grew up in one of the most hierarchical, sex-negative societies in the sort-of-developed world. And I get terribly homesick for the munchers back home. Isn’t self-selection amazing?
I also grew up in one of the most unfiltered families in the world. My male classmates refused to sing obscene songs for my edification. My father and brothers obliged.
When I was about ten, I asked my father, “What would you do if one of us lived with someone before we got married?” He answered, “Well, we would be very sad, but we would still love you.”
My parents have also said, at various times: “It’s good that you defer to your husband! Of course you should finish your thesis before having children! If you want to get a divorce, don’t worry about us, we support you 100%!”
I’ve thought about applying to a Master/slave household. The hardest part was my mother’s voice in my head: “You want to be a CONCUBINE?”
CONVERSIONS
The strident atheist Richard Dawkins converted me from agnosticism to more-or-less Buddhism. But my God, what would I do without Christian profanity?
Welcoming munchers keep asking me, “Is this your first time here?” I answer, “No, I was at this munch 10/15 years ago.” The ones who can still speak after that usually say something like, “Were you ten years old?!?”
While not munching, I got ten years of real-life BDSM experience. Practically all of it was with one dom. Counting generously, I’ve had two or three tops altogether. Am I experienced? Am I a wannabe? I really have no idea.
I’ve come out to 20 vanilla friends. Two of them said, “Me too!” Two more have since joined in while I wittered about making their lives harder. What am I, a gateway drug?
MEN
Let’s just say my vanilla experience looks a lot like my BDSM experience.
I try to get a wife’s permission before coming out to a male friend. Because you know, sex is going to be mentioned. I mean, alluded to.
I do believe in kindness to men/doms. So I am conscientious about turning them down flat. Quite a few say thank you.
ONLINE
I kind of hate writing. But by God I love formatting.
If I’m out to you, then you know about this blog. Tops. Brothers. College roommates. Convent schoolmates. Colleagues. Ex-student. Ex-professor. Ex. How else would they have vetted the posts where I mentioned them?
Having said that, on FetLife I’m officially 94 years old in Antarctica, and I won’t tell you my nationality (yet).
People say I am terrifyingly honest in this blog. Are you joking? This stuff is easy. But vanilla details about sticky pink skin – now that’s scary.
The hellishly hard part is saying what I want. Have you noticed that I tell you a lot about fiction and nothing about my own fantasies? I. Just. Can’t. Say.
It.
I’m just weird.
Or am I? You tell me.
Because I think I make complete sense. You get all or nothing. Or both.
Irregular updates from now on. Sorry, real life comes first!
If you hang out with female kinksters, then you’ve heard us complain about the messages we get from strange men. They’re not all awful. But the net badness corrodes the soul.
Getting a message that is not just nice, but really special.
That last almost never happens. After a while you stop believing it might happen.
But it does happen.
I have permission to share this message with you.
Subject: You intrigue me quite a bit
Hello. I’m pretty sure we’ve never met. I was trying to decide if I wanted to go to ______ tomorrow, and saw that you were going. After checking your profile, I immediately found someone who seems to have intelligently thought about her desires and needs, and how it all fits in with her world view. And I haven’t even read all of your writings yet or read through your blog.
Well, actually I just went back and read through the rest of your writings, because I wasn’t sure how to proceed.
I would very much like to meet you, talk to you, and get to know you. Certainly, for just a small profile on Fetlife, there is no telling whether you’re really my type, or if I’m really your type.
Here is my side: you are obviously highly intelligent and introspective, which to me, puts far greater value in earning your submission, if I ever do. For me, being granted power is only a big turn on if it is from someone whom I can respect. An example for me is when I was driving back from ______ with a sort of partner at the time. She is probably one of the women I respect the most – I met her when we were ______, and she and incredibly smart, athletic, and far better at a lot of things then I ever will be. I made a request of her that was kind of stupid, whose only purpose was to make the drive home more uncomfortable for her, and to my surprise, she said yes immediately. That was one of the quickest and most intense bursts of arousal I have ever experienced. I’ve had others kneel at my feet and serve me, and it was just a ho-hum experience, because I had not developed any respect for them.
How do I play? It depends on the person, the setting, and the mood. I do a lot of ropework, both for the challenge of things, and for its flexibility. I like to use my body and my mind – grappling, wrestling, and general rough handling are things I quite enjoy doing. I also enjoy coming up with predicaments for whomever I am playing with.
Anyways, I can probably think of many more paragraphs to write, but it’s not going to be much use until we sound each other out in person. Please let me know if you’d be interested in meeting and talking for a bit and seeing how we get along tomorrow at ______.
I hope you are doing well, and look forward to your reply.
Sincerely,
______
Here’s to the good guys. Thank you for you.
Anything else I say about this message would be too personal. So my friend @Sciophilous has suggested linking to other resources: Captain Awkward (for all genders), Dr. Nerdlove (man to man), and The Ferrett (man to everyone).
![e[lust] #62 – Reality and Shame](https://abjectsub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/candles-180-square1.jpg)
