I just read a synapse-stretching post by Matisse. In it, she answers a reader’s letter. Usually I very much dislike it when she does this, because her general attitude is a riff on one or more of the following: *sigh*-*you dimwit*-*I don’t know and I don’t care*-*how can you not know*-*how can you not know that I don’t care*-*sigh*. But since my own overwhelming response to the internet lately has been profound irritation, and since in this case, her bafflement seems quite justified, I repost her comment here.
Her reader asked her to explain his kink to him. Trouble is, his kink seemed to be to get nothing from friendships with women to whom he was attracted but who were not at all interested in him. I can identify. For years I went through long patches of platonic “relationships” in which I imagined myself in love and went to great lengths for the other person, and my other half mostly ignored me and my needs. It takes a lot of hard work and far more talking than I would ever have expected to do in any relationship, but Robbie meets my needs. MINE.
And I do try to meet his . . . though there is always more to do, I know.
Here’s Matisse:
You’re only 25, so nip this in the bud now and learn how to have real relationships, because whether you’re vanilla or kinky or somewhere in between, being attracted to unavailability is a recipe for frustration and unhappiness.
There are many different motivations to be a submissive, and I’m not one to say “Your motives are valid – but you over there, yours are not.” But I think a spell of good talk therapy would teach you a lot about yourself that you need to know, and then you can make a better decision about whether you really want to be controlled by another person.
There are many different motivations for being submissive. Exorcising and reveling in “bad” feelings that we shouldn’t enjoy–degradation, humiliation, pain–these all are routes to an emotional and erotic thrill that comes from (almost) being harmed. They can be cathartic, allowing those strong feelings, and the reactions to them, to take place in a safe and loving place.
But too often I read things written by women who sound like emotional masochists. As if they feel lucky that the Doms they are with grace them with their presence, their sexuality, the right to share them with other women, the right to be *nothing* to them. Literally nothing. I want to scream and hit the screen when I read this. That kind of weakness, that kind of submission, does not impress me, and I want to deny that I am submissive at all. Of course, that’s not the right reaction either. I read a wonderful thing Bitchy Jones wrote the other day about truly owning your own desires. (Well, actually it was about cock, but part of it was about desire, too.):
. . . understanding and acting on your desires can never be weak. And saying that it does doesn’t actually have anything to do with real feminism. Or any kind of equality. Having desire and acting on it is strength. Knowing your desires is to know yourself, is strength, fulfilling your desires is to acknowledge your strength.
It may well be–and must be, given the way the world works–that there are equal numbers of male submissives who lack this confidence. And I dare say that there are Doms out there (I know one or two) who have their own insecurities, their own soft spots and vulnerable places, the missing scales in their dragon-armor.
I’m not thinking of anyone or specifically when I say this. I’ve been glad to watch over the past two years and see internet and real life acquaintances grow, see Robbie and I get more comfortable and confident with each other and our own desires. But I am glad to read people say repetitively and outright what Robbie used to tell me often at the start of our relationship: “Unrequited love’s a bore.” Amen to that, baby.
Robbie and I have been together for over two and a half years now; I have been wearing his collar for almost two years. As I type this, I feel, on one level, that I have no idea how long we will be together; I frequently feel that. At the same time, the longer I wear his collar, the more a part of me it feels, and the more difficulty I have imagining my life without it and without him.
I thought it might be appropriate to spend some time reflecting on what being collared to him actually means to me. I often read other bloggers writing about what it means to them to be owned, to be a slave, to belong to someone, and I don’t feel that that applies to me. I don’t think of myself that way; I balk at many of those terms.
At the same time, every morning, when I look at myself in the mirror, my eye goes immediately to my collar. When I catch sight of myself in a window walking down the street, I see my long hair–the hair that Robbie had me grow long, for him–trailing behind me, and I think of him. When I put on makeup, when I dress myself, when I am around others, when I am by myself, I feel what Doms and subs call ownership. Just because I dislike the word doesn’t mean I don’t feel the feeling.
And so I’d like to spend some time “reviewing and renewing”, as sub lyn calls it. I want to start with Robbie’s words to me, almost two years ago, when he gave me my first collar. He made it himself, a twined winding gold wire pendant, grasping a rhinestone, hung from a leather choker. I lost it less than a month after he gave it to me–which I deeply regret–but I still have the poem that he wrote and enclosed with his gift:
Awhile back, Robbie drew my attention to this discussion on Fetlife. He has long wondered if I could have an orgasm just from giving him a blowjob, and thought that would be a rather fine thing for me to do, or to be trained to do.
On reading the thread, I did an internal and (I trusted) invisible eye-roll. I figured I would come from blowing him when he figured out a way to hook the controls on a remote vibe to the back of my throat.
Lest anyone think that I am the one getting all the pleasure, the pounding, the pampering in this relationship, I want to reassure you that Robbie gets his share (though possibly not his fair share) of attention. He can ask me for a blowjob any time, in any circumstance; he knows he has my explicit consent for that. He also requires back rubs, foot rubs, and other massages as part of the regular service I provide for him. And, as I think the number of posts here categorized under “blowjobs” show, on the whole I am very happy to provide these services. Just not, you know, ecstatic about them. Or so I thought.
So a few nights back, I was in a new kind of chest harness, trussed up tightly with by breasts bound into Madonna-like cones, kneeling with my knees spread on the ground in front of him, the object of all kinds of sadistic moves on his part, when I got my cue to start with The Oral Sex.
Lately I have been getting more and more raw in everything I do, but especially with The Oral Sex. If I don’t gag myself within the first five minutes, and work up to a rather steady gag-fest, I feel disappointed with the whole thing. I am not sure what this is about but in general, lately, I have been pushing myself rather viciously, and liking it.
Anyway . . . partway into my rather fervent throat-fucking, I started to get incredibly turned on. (I take it you all see where this is going?) Between my own sense of abandon, Robbie’s obvious enjoyment of it, and my mind’s smutty little tapes, telling me what a slut, cum-hole, cum-receptacle, yadda yadda yadda object of objectification I was, I was getting pretty turned on. Robbie was rock-hard, my hands were tied behind my back, my breasts felt as though they were going to burst, and I was finding it hard to breathe in the it’s-arousing-not-suffocating kind of way. Or so I thought.
Within seconds I was having a body-rending orgasm. My hips were bucking, my arms were pulling against their bonds, my throat was sliding, jerkily, back and forth along Robbie’s cock, and my lungs were bursting, struggling between the fact that my throat was blocked and that my abdominal muscles had spasmodic plans of their own.
My brain was loving every second of it.
Robbie, though, seemed to think otherwise, because he pushed my shoulders back hard, prying my face off his crotch, and pulled up on my torso with his considerable strength. He hauled me up from the floor, gasping and choking as I was, and held me close. “Shh,” he soothed. “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, you’re fine, you can breathe, you can breathe, it’s okay.”
I struggled for air, coughing and frothing at the mouth like a wild thing. I wanted so desperately to get back down there, back to my orgasm, back to what I had planned would be his. At times like these–and there have been a few–I get incredibly confused and frustrated at being yanked out of subspace.
“Bu-but-couahghahck!” I said.
“What?”
“But Inomnombcoughspatsktic!”
“Sh, shhh, now,” he whispered, and smoothed my long hair down against my shoulders.
“But I was cumming!” I finally managed to say, pulling back a bit to look him in the eye.
He looked straight back at me, and with his perfect deadpan, replied, “That’s no excuse.” Then he twinkled at me and I caught a grin lighting his face as he pulled me into him again and hugged me tight, until the sobs and shakes and sniffles and coughs had left me, and the shudders too, and we continued on, laughing and fucking, for the rest of the evening.
Unsurprisingly, I miss Robbie most just after seeing him . . . that, I suppose, and after not having seen him for quite awhile.
But when I leave his house and drive home, I find myself launched on a days-long jag of feeling achey, uncomfortable, out-of-sorts. I think he feels it too, because we act bizarre towards each other. We fumble for the rhythm of nightly phone calls and friendly chats that we share for most of the 3-or-4 weeks between visits. And when I fall asleep at night, I feel the ghost of his arms around me; and when I wake up in the morning, I imagine I am in his bed.
I have no plans tonight, and I can think of little to do except perhaps to curl up with a glass of wine and some reading. He tells me it’s a waste of energy and emotion to wish that things were different than they are, and I know he’s right. But right after I see him, just after I am home, I sometimes give myself permission to indulge in those silly, wasteful wishes, and I think about what I would do if he were here, instead of there.
Often, in the two-and-a-half years that Robbie and I have been exploring the world of perversion together, one of us would become nervous that the other was not really interested in kink. (I finally read enough to realize that this was a relatively common fear, like worrying constantly about whether you really love the other person more. At the end of the day, as long as you are both kinky and both in love, it’s all good.)
Enter Franklin Veaux, the man whose really helpful intro-to-BDSM pages started us off in our internet meanderings, google-searches, frothing emails, and frantic scenes.
Veaux has recently published a map of the world of fetishes, which, he says, has been getting a lot of attention. You can see it here. I am proud to say that both Robbie and I have almost all the imaginable fetishes, minus a few of the more disturbing ones (but I’ll even admit to a few disturbing fantasies–the ones beyond the Squick Peaks, in his drawing. It doesn’t bother me to say I have them, as long as you don’t know what they are.)
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to continue my exploration.
We had had a huge, delicious, celebratory meal with family. We were stuffed. We had washed two loads of dishes, cleaned the kitchen, and tucked everything in its place. We sat down for coffee and looked at each other. It was 8 o’clock on a Saturday night. We hadn’t made plans. All there was to do was have sex.
“I’ll walk the dog if you want to wrap up down here, turn the computer off, and meet me upstairs,” he said.
“Or . . . ” I started.
“Or?” he prompted. I have a strange way of becoming tongue-tied around him which is the product of of awe plus nerves, or something. I finally managed to squeak out that I thought that maybe, possibly, if he wanted, and wasn’t too tired, we could go for a little walk ourselves–not too far.
After a moment’s consideration, he answered, “Okay. But I’ll still walk the dog and you can still turn everything off, and we can walk a bit together after.”
I felt like jumping up and down with excitement–I hadn’t thought he would say yes to what I perceived as a rather romantic, happily-settled-couple activity. And I certainly hadn’t expected him to look so amazingly sexy when I finally got myself out the door. He had boots on, and he was leaning up against a truck, arms crossed. He took one look at the sweater I was wearing and said: “That’s not warm enough. Put on my winter coat.”
“Are you sure?” I said. I tend to think that wearing too much warm clothing is a sin.
He shot me a look and his voice came back as pure command. “I’m sure.” I figured out then that we might be outside some time.
* * *
We sat on stones at the bottom of the field on his property, looking up at his house in the bright moonlight. Then I sat on the stone, bare-assed, for awhile. We talked. I got on my hands and knees to blow him. And then, again, just like the night before, his hands were all over me, inside me, rubbing my clit, fingering my ass. For some reason he stopped, looked around, picked up a few stones. He hefted one, bigger than his fist, in his hand.
“What I should do is maybe find a rock about half this size,” he said, and bent down to the ground again so I couldn’t see what he was doing, “and take it, and push it up inside of you, and just grind it into you.”
And with that he thrust his fingers inside me and reached for my g-spot. He pushed, hard. I gasped. “Does that hurt?” he asked.
“No! It feels amazing!”
And it did. In my mind, I imagined him rubbing a small, smooth pebble against my swollen tissues. I imagined him pushing harder and harder–he is always thrilled to see how much I can “take”. I saw his excitement and it aroused me more, and he pushed more, and we were caught in a heightening circle. I leaned back on the rock and felt my head press into the chicken-wire fence behind me, felt the fence bow out. As I leaned into it more, branches and leaves crowded into my field of vision; my hair piled up around my cheeks and ears into a halo framing what I could see, and in the middle was his face, aroused, lustful, curious.
I thought of all the rape fantasies I’d ever had as a girl, fantasies of being caught by brigands or soldiers in a woods in some far off time and place, dragged off fighting and crying, perhaps saved at the last moment but a knight-rescuer, perhaps not discovered until too late. Now it was happening, and my ravisher had the face of someone I loved. Robbie was tearing at my insides, flesh and stone together, and it was too much, wonderfully too much.
I came rather violently, as best I can recall given my recent sexual amensia. Finally I sat up, pulled myself together, and looked at him. He had that kind of proud, cat-that-ate-the-cream smile on his face that he gets when he has managed to get the better of me, sexually. I smiled back. “Did you–” I started. “Was that actually a rock in your hand?”
He looked at me and almost shook his head in disbelief. “No,” he said simply, without adding “you fuckwit.” But he also gave me another smile, that one that seems to wonder, as I do, what can top what just happened, given that we know something will.
I got to Robbie’s Friday night after an unutterably long drive. (Note to self: don’t leave the city at rush hour on a holiday weekend. I arrived at 2:10am after 10 hours of solid driving; 7 is the norm.) I was sure we were both too tired to fuck and in the car on the way up I even toyed with the idea of safewording if he insisted. I didn’t think he would.
Obviously, I was wrong. After being apart for awhile his need for me is so intense it’s like an aura around him. I can taste it and smell it on him–and he swears he can taste it and smell it on me. He must be right, because no matter how “not in the mood” I am from the driving, on seeing him I am mostly instantly interested.
Lately, our play together has been so amazing that I don’t even remember it. I’d love to write about it, but I’m not sure what to say about three hours of fucking and 22 orgasms (two for him, something like 20 for me). I can’t really distill a particular narrative out of it. All I can collect are moments: me sitting, bare-assed, in front of him on a plastic chair with my legs spread wide. Me totally losing control as he hand-fucked me and squirting all over the concrete patio beneath me. Him smoking, drinking whisky, and toying with my cunt, saying, “This is so interesting, I want to spend more time here talking and playing–but you need to get fucked and I need to get blown.” Him telling me all kinds of raunchy fantasies, whispering in my ears . . .
At one point he whispered one of his favorite phrases: “You are sooooo fucked.” I used to think all this meant was that I was in trouble for something. Then I thought it meant a lot of pain. Now I understand that the trouble is a game, the pain is pleasure, and the “so fucked” is literal. He wants me fucked “every which way and loose,” as he says. He delights in taking me over every edge, getting me to be greedy, watching me take his fucking in all kinds of ways.
I remember him, in the bathroom, brushing my hair gently, as though entranced, before grabbing me by the throat and making me look at myself in the mirror. Him kissing me all over; hand-fucking me again; attaching clothespins to my nipples and labia; kindly letting me choke myself on his cock, repeatedly. Him lying on top of me in bed, and behind me, and in back of me.
And I remember coming again and again, wild with the pleasure that comes when every nerve seems to be firing orgasms. And I was so totally, utterly, and profoundly fucked.
Lovely trinity-pup tagged me for this meme.I like memes, but only if they have to do with sex, and so I took the liberty of tweaking this one a bit.I transformed it the way we used to in graduate school when we were playing party games that we found dull—if the game involved a question, we’d add “in bed” to the end of it, and then laugh uproariously at the result.(It is beyond astounding to me to think we were in our 20s at the time, instead of our teens.)
In that same puerile and immature spirit, I added “in bed” to pup’s questions, which made some of them nonsensical, but I persevered!Herewith my answers:
What are the last three songs you downloaded in bed?
I don’t download songs in bed, nor do I text in bed, nor do anything much in bed besides read, sleep, and screw.But these songs get me in the mood to do the last of those:
• Sexual Healing by Marvin Gay –sexy to me because you’d have to be dead not to think it was sexy
• Viva la Vida by ColdPlay—sexy to me because the singer in the song sounds to me like a Roman general
• Figured You Out by Nickelback—sexy to me because Robbie loves it for its twisted lyrics
What are the last three places you visited in bed?
This one also doesn’t make sense when you add “in bed” to it, but these are the last three best places for fucking I visited were—aside from Robbie’s house, of course.
• Saratoga Springs, NY
• Montreal
• Mexico
What are your three favorite movies in bed?
I’ve seen my share of sexy movies, but it’s especially nice to watch them with someone you know you’ll be heading off to bed with.The three that stirred me the most, emotionally and physically, were:
• Secretary
• The Lover
• Lust, Caution
What are your three favorite possessions in bed?
I don’t get to wear these to bed anymore, but if it were up to me, my favorite possessions in bed would be jeans, a barely-there bra, and a long necklace.They all are ways to wickedly tease, which is, come to think of it, why I don’t get to wear them.Robbie likes to do the teasing himself.
The three things I do get to wear to bed that I love are my black boots, my camisoles, and my garter belts.
My collar would be on this list, but I tend to think of it as Robbie’s possession rather than mine.
What three things can you not live without in bed?
• A blanket
• Padding for the floor
• A place to go to the bathroom when I wake up at 3am
I think I’m a simple girl.I also think this list cries out for a kind of captive-in-dungeon scene.
What would be your three wishes in bed?
This is extremely difficult, because I already get so many of the things I want, so many things I never imagined I could ask for, and so many things I never imagined.
• More oral sex (really, who wouldn’t wish for that?)
• More chances to switch with Robbie
• More rope—lots and lots and lots of rope
What three things haven’t you done yet in bed?
• Had sex in a car (uh, in bed?)
• Done the paint-each-other-with-chocolate thing
• Given a long, slow, soup-to-nuts handjob
What are your three favorite dishes in bed?
My three favorite dishes in bed would be the same things we tend to snack on after sex : berries and cream; chocolate cake; bread and cheese.
Come to think of it, these are the three dishes that I might want to bring to bed, too.
Which three celebrities would you most like to hang out with in bed?
I thought of gorgeous celebrities here, but I realized that I’d just be too nervous to go to bed with them.I think I’d need at least drinks and dinner before the shock and awe wore off.
• Whoopi Goldberg.She cracks me up.I don’t want to sleep with her though, just maybe have a pajama party.
• Steve Martin.He cracks me up and I want to sleep with him.
• Demetri Martin.Because I obviously should stick with comedians–if I’m going to feel awkward with a strange, famous person, at least I can laugh about it.
Name three things that freak you out in bed.
• Centipedes
• Bedmates who have sleep apnea and briefly stop breathing while asleep.I don’t mind them, I just worry over them.
• Oftentimes, waking up
Name three unusual things you are good at in bed.
• Toe sucking
• Face massages
• Sharing the covers
Which three things are you coveting in bed?
• A bigger and higher bed, perhaps with dowels or rods at the head and foot
• The foot-of-the-bed blanket chest-cum-toy-box with pop-up screen for in-bed viewing of pr0n that Robbie keeps talking about building
My three regular readers may have noticed that things have been kind of slow here for a week or three. I am fine except for a kind of verbal clog. I have a lot to say about me, Robbie, submission, kink–and also politics, the environment, and life. I just haven’t felt like saying them here.
I’m not sure why that is, and I find myself oddly uninterested in exploring the psychological possibilities. Experience tells that I probably already know what is behind my reluctance to write–and by probably, I mean, with 99.5% certitude. I suspect that I feel someone expects something from me here; I’m not sure whether I can provide that something, so at the moment I’m irritated and unwilling to make the effort. The fact that I don’t really know what the something might be makes it all the easier to abandon the struggle. After all, if I don’t know how do things right, everything I do has the potential for being wrong.
(Side note: are submissive and perfectionist synonyms, or are they two separate but often intersecting sets?)
In any case, I have been toying these past few weeks with the idea of starting the dread “vanilla blog”–the sexless blog, the blog the family can read. I don’t think I genuinely want to. That is, I don’t think the answer to not feeling like writing here is to open a new space, where I also may not feel like writing.
I didn’t realize how much this question of a new internet identity was on my mind until last night, when I had one of my obnoxiously transparent dreams. (Had I lived in fin-de-siecle Vienna and been as neurotic as I am today, I still would have passed on the interpretive services of Dr. Freud. My dreams are so overt in their symbolism that a third-grader could “decode” them.)
I dreamed aag had started a new blog. She had dropped her trademark violet theme and she had simple text as her only header. It read:
aag
~ some of you know me from elsewhere on the web.some of you are meeting me here for the first time.whoever you are and wherever you are from, welcome.
Below those words was blank space and room for comments. The oddest thing, that dream–the idea of a writer both embracing and abandoning an identity, claiming and relinquishing words. Maybe that’s the definition of writer’s block.
Whatever it is, I’m over it–for today, at the very least.
Letters from a Seraglio 
