O Self

Real Life Femdom Party: Wildcard’s Birthday Spanking

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Balloons!Last Saturday I helped hold a celebration for my Gentleman Nemesis’s birthday. It was a simple, casual six person dinner-and-company-affair, with two other femdom couples. That’s right guys, a real life femdom party- but maybe not completely like the kinds you see in porn. Also, we had tacos. :9

The founding kernel for this event was organizing a proper, mean birthday spanking for Wildcard. The first misconception to throw out, if you’re trying to imagine this, is something ultra high protocol in a classy mansion or high end loft. Although Wildcard’s residence is plenty homey and tasteful, the reality of secret BDSM is how well we blend in. The subs did not arrive on leashes, and the only fetish-y thing was that I decided to wear my corset, which is a steel bone and satin number in severe black, but this was as much because I don’t have many occasions to have my waist cranked down by 3.5 inches. Everyone else, on the other hand, came in comfortable, casual clothing, the sort of stuff where you won’t feel silly or awkward. None of the female doms or male subs have a thing for cross dressing, so there were no submissive sissy maids simpering over tea. Sorry, I know, trés disappointing for a certain hopeful number of you.

The guest list was some familiar faces: LadyCobra, Vosko, Ballbuster and Mr. Sub, which meant two other couples with solid dynamics. Once again, I really have to say they emphasizes how you can all be technically on the same page but have radically different ways to do things. It’s also possibly one of the best parts of playing with other people because you get such a wide range of dynamics and outcomes.

Powerhouse couple Ballbuster and Mr. Sub have had years to build their dynamic together. They’re real proof that some of the meanest, hardest play is built on a strong foundation of love and mutual support. Their style is also something that developed together, with definite switch tendencies in Mr. Sub that mean that when he’s not otherwise occupied in the sub role he’s eager to give input. With two minds put to the task, a lot of predicaments and pure wanton sadism pops up, and he’s as eager to share it with any and everyone else as his dom. On the flip side, with that sort of regular play partner, in scene Ballbuster runs things hard and fast, with intense cruelty and no warm ups- then again Mr. Sub takes a lot to get him down, and his idea of after care if bouncing around all pumped up, while the dom flops, exhausted in a corner. If you need to imagine them: Think huge toys, heavy pain and hard humiliation. With a sub like Mr. Sub it’s quite clear where Ballbuster learned her confidence- she doesn’t seem to worry about pulling out all the stops and the effect is spectacular. Also she went as a pink pixie fairy last halloween- take that how you will.

Meanwhile, LadyCobra and Vosko’s dynamic is a lot more characterized by LadyCobra’s attentive preciseness to detail. Vosko is a lot more vulnerable in play, and while he’s got a great sense of humour and strong public persona- in kink he’s got a softness there (and incidentally is the baby of our little group of libertines), which is not to say he is a wimp, but rather that there’s much more of an impression of fragility there while he’s being given fierce looking bruises. Paradoxically, by appearance, he’s also the sort of massive Scotsman that gave the ancient Romans second thoughts, and would not be out of place among a line up of metal fans. He’s well matched by LadyCobra who is, as I described before, incredibly technically precise and proper, with impeccable scene control. If anyone’s going to make “traditional” kink look good it’s her. She’s also very, very good at bringing just the right level of pain or strictness the moment needs, and making her approach to a submissive or bottom fit with just what the sub can take, all without making her subtle adjustments obvious.

Organizing an event is mostly complicated by the shyness that’s inherent in trying to get other people up in your sexuality without creeping them out or getting creeped out. Everyone’s needs and desires are intensely personal, so I’m always careful about presuming too much. Suffice to say, these things never happen with any sort of script or expectations beyond good taste and common sense. We agreed to a round robin, each of the guys in the sub role would get beat, birthday style, with each dom, and the implement of her choice, one whack for each year.

Wildcard was perfectly happy to share his day, because he’s one of the least selfish people I know. (Well, perhaps he’s nursing secret grumbles, but I don’t think he’d ever dream of vocalizing them if he did.) He also provided the homemade pork tacos, which sounds dirty, but actually was more that he’s an amazing cook- food which the guest inhaled, and I made a white cake with chocolate ganache and a caramel middle. I mention this because having fun is key, and if you want to organize your own party, keep in mind that you will have more fun if want to spend time with the people you play with outside of being kinky with, and at them. But, back to the beating and the humiliation!

I had Wildcard strip in front of us, piece by piece, folding as he went. He blushed really cutely as I made him remove every single item, except for his socks. Wildcard is ultra-slim in a trim bodied sort of way, and by affect, naturally very reserved and non-demonstrative about his feelings. He generally puts a lot of effort into his appearance- you won’t see him with his hair unseen to, or his beard untrimmed and even his casual clothing is well fitted and flattering. There’s a certain sort of pleasure I get just from mussing that perfect control in how he can present himself.

And it seems like my “take it off and fold it!” approach encouraged the others, because they soon followed suit, and Vosko was all vulnerable and stripped under much the same script, and then in his turn, Mr. Sub shucked clothes with the casualness that belays his long experience. There are not, to be frank, many chances to objectify men properly. I enjoyed it.

The best parts, for me, are always the reactions. Watching the way they take the hits, in this case posed just so, kneeling in an arm chair, with ass raised. My friends had brought their toys: paddles, bamboo canes a rubber baton and other entertaining means to smack flesh into submission. Wildcard had, for the second half of the evening, lost the right to speak unless spoken to or unless given permission. The effort was a practical one- with so many interesting people it was hard for him not to get distracted and interject into what people were saying. Charming conversationalist or not, he has an extremely hard time getting into anything approaching a submissive head state and his play collar was undergoing repairs.

I’m going to be honest and say that getting him in role or close to in role calls upon pretty much every shred of latent telepathic talent I might have in regards to reading subs (or in his case switches)- if his current job fails the guy should take up poker as a career. It’s also somewhat compounded by the sexual etiquette. I knew that he was incredibly excited to get a birthday spanking from multiple people because he told me as much, but the flirting that tends to be involved in BDSM encourages br’er rabbiting, ie other words pretending to be emphatically not into the act that you’re very much craving so the dom can feel like a meany with power over you, which means cultivating an air of reluctance. Since there’s an extra onus on dudes to be reserved in their sexual approach to avoid coming across as pushy, this can lead to kinksters behaving as shyly as a bunch of debutants.

Letting other women beat Wildcard is interesting for me, because it lets me watch how he responds. I gave him a warm up first, a bare skin, bare handed spanking to help him get ready for what was going to happen and passed him off, to go first in the chair. His fate involved his own belt laid hard against his skin, swung by Ballbuster’s hand. Then each man had his own turn following him.

The fact that Vosko was the youngest (and least spanked) did not, in any way, mean people went easy on him. Although he took less hits, it’s Wildcard who has the gentlest limits. Mr Sub, of course, needed a vicious thrashing to even make him do more than go “that’s niiiice” and go to sleep. All three men ended up with deep purple bruises, eagerly photographed and watched over as they faded over the past week.

I liked the fact that Wildcard was gently shaking a little bit, after his first third of his use. I liked that he melted into quiet vulnerability, rolling into a curled up naked ball, and that he would occasionally whisper to me. I liked that LadyCobra caught the vibe I was trying to build and worked well with it, and that Ballbuster, while she didn’t seem as into it, was patient enough to play along.

In any case, the guests seemed happy enough I can be sure there will be a repeat. Hurrah!

His Collar, My Needs

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For Christmas, I got LadyCobra (a leather worker, among her many talents) to make up a play collar in a rich, dark chocolate brown to add the Wildcard’s Christmas basket. It’s a prototype, as she expands her business, and it was something missing from the toy collection.

Why a collar? D/s involves a lot of purely-in-your head stuff. As much as I generally avoid anything with a whiff of Olde Guarde Leather and don’t like being called Mistress or otherwise dabbling too much into the Sekret And Strikt Tradition of BeeDeeEssEm shtick where there is one right way to be, but it seemed like a really practical tool for what we are trying to do.

Coming together as we did, knowing precious little, other than practically palpable physical chemistry to a degree that sends me mewling about like a cat in heat and our blissfully intellectually compatible brains, we went straight from chaste friendship to trying to figure out everything all at once in a backdrop that wasn’t what I’d describe as conducive to pacing.

Additionally, while Wildcard wasn’t a complete novice, a lot of this is pure theory to him that he wanted to try, and something that, fundamentally speaking, I only had slightly more practical experience to help us figure out what we’re doing.

Add an extra level of self imposed pressure- if he was, fresh from the land of vanilla, immersing himself with me as a guide, I of course allowed myself to get completely wound up about the fact that done wrong it might leave him with the wrong impression about some aspects of kink. Things went in little nibbles, a little impact play, a little rope- nothing big picture. Hell, roll back about six months ago and the poor man was convinced I was some sort of submissive. Whoopsies.

The other challenge for me was a desire to take him to a place, mentally, where I wasn’t sure he was capable of going, as much as he was down to try anything once. He had, at the outset, described himself as “bedroom only”. Realistically, that in itself is a fairly non-descriptive summary, since it means anything from trying to set yourself apart from the people who form their whole lives around their kink identity, to literally confining it to the immediacy of sex.

But in our case it’s not a relationship where I can simply, at any time, pull his hair and drag him to his knees to “force” him to submit to me the way I want. And I had no way of knowing precisely what his psychological construction around this is, even the means of just outright asking. He’s also fairly conservative about talking about his fantasies- I’ve not so stealthily been watching porn with him just to figure out precisely what he’s responding to.

When it comes to collar shopping, when he first got hints that was what I was plotting, he he declared “I reject any and all symbolism!” In the sort of pleased, fighty voice that suggested a certain degree of pleasure that I was going to enforce precisely what he claimed not to want. Of course I could have just gone the Pet Smart route, but the reality was that getting it custom made was one of those Things That Feels Right. It’s a play collar, but it’s got loads of symbolism attached because it’s an attempt to express my feelings. Which of course means lots of awkward fumbling, denial and blushing on my part.

But… it works, thus far.

The collar I mean, not the fumbling and getting a warm face. I mean that with it on, he’s much more focused in the moment and being where I’d like him to be. He shows it in his body language, the way he sits and curls up. Nothing is a panacea, and we’re still experimenting but it is pleasing and very good for my need to dominate.

 

Regular People Kinky Sex

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It began with a light smack upside his head. Downton Abbey in the background. Rolling around, wrestling and kissing. Fucking him, on the couch, his arms thrown up over his head, pulled taut but the leather cuffs and the soft tangle of rope, not knotted up properly in some orderly fashion, but set just to hold him helpless.

My cunt, engulfed around him, hilting repeatedly, watching the shaft vanish into the dark pelt of my hair and the lurid pink of my labia. It’s the sort of view that sticks with me, turns me on later when I think about it. He’s swearing, because I’ve been teasing him earlier, palm and fingers, circle grip that swirls and drives him to whimper and arch his back. I note those human things, the way that as he loses himself in the sensations as he comes, his abs push out, legs folding.

Before, seeking, looking for the right button. Trying slaps, spidering my fingers into his armpits in scurrying hooks, seeking him groan as my hand slides under him and the sharpness of my nails scrape his back. Later, in the shower, I will see livid curls of red, tracks of where I rent him. When I uncuffed him, he asked me to rub his upper arms, where they were sore from the pulling and tingling from how he’d pressed into the wooden curve of the couch arm.

The Darker Side Of Caretaking

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After a conversation with a friend about the challenges that we face in relationships, I’m going to talk about something I’m not good at. Which is to say, letting go with other people in a way that gets my needs met.

At it’s best, my penchant for caretaking is a good thing that is inherently rewarding for me. I’m very commonly the tea-and-blankets lady. I genuinely like looking after people and it’s good for most people around me. 

A pretty big fetish dynamic that I like is hurt-comfort. I want to fuck the person up and then patch them up after. It’s a reason why I’ve never been able to do hateful D/s, since the aftercare is pretty important to me too and the nastiness is not the end point of where things are for me- my domliness extends into cuddling them and fussing, and so forth.

Of course I think that caretaking is a very common permutation of D/s. I also think it’s significantly more common in women, because of the gender training we get to do it as a duty, but also because being the ‘mother’ is a classic route to power in a world that penalizes other forms of self promotion. “For your own good!” is a great way to control people.

But it also feeds into a particular sort of self sacrificing martyr loop that can be inherently toxic. The script runs something like this:

You learn, pretty early on, that people need looking after. It could be physically, like if you attend to a person with a regular illness, or emotionally if you have a family member who is less than sane. It could be related to self denial in the face of poverty. For various reasons you get very good at rising to the occasion, putting other people’s needs first, being extremely accommodating, etc… The environment heavily rewards this, both by having the hysterical/hurt/helpless people around you being less splah but also a measure of control and power- that allows you to learn that you can push people’s buttons in a non-guilt inducing way, and they may even praise you too and want to be with you more when you’re in nurturing mode. Suffice to say, because this blog is self referential and i use myself as the main example or everything, I had an upbringing that encouraged subversion of the self as a virtue, as well as being accommodating to crazy to the point of getting enmeshed into it.

It’s not a bad thing for people to be loving and giving, but if you deal with lots of needful people, your own needs may not get met and you don’t experience as many reciprocal dynamics to learn off. And if life throws a lot of drama your way, situational or interpersonal, you come to associate being needy on your part as bad behaviour, especially if when you had needs you were neglected. Of course since people you love still have needs you don’t precisely develop a rejection of all neediness, but it becomes important to subvert your needs for another person. This can be an addicting sensation of power and invulnerability and may even lead you to reject overtures of others looking after you because you don’t trust its reliability, and more to the point you don’t want to be the Weak Person because that chips away from the ego- or you’ve seen people with worse shit to deal with so you feel like an imposter when you’re being nurtured.

Another draw back is that you tend to also develop a higher than average tolerance for human frailty which means that you will, for example, collect strays or form relationships with people where you’re a Jesus Girlfriend. Which is where the need-to-be-needed can exceed whether or not a relationship has anything to offer you, and serve as a way of making yourself indispensible to something that wasn’t worth the investment.

Some people also end up in a guilt-anger spiral where they exceed their tolerance or get taken advantage of while biting their tongues, presuming that the other person wouldn’t be so selfish if they didn’t need it; and then get pissed at the person and then feel wildly guilty because (s)he can’t help being a useless tit. A warning sign you’ve gone too far into the wrong side of nurturing is that you end up feeling that everyone around you ‘can’t help it’, but would be unable to find their pants without you.

It also leads to some of the usual cognitive dissonance coping skills or all the stuff every person has to deal with, caretaker or not. Since everyone does have needs, you included, it’s not uncommon to package your needs in ways that don’t make you have to give up that ego thing. If you feel lonely, for example, you find someone who needs things and go be helpful at them. If you worry about being unpopular you become the person who does stuff for everyone. If you need to break up with someone it becomes necessary to frame it in terms of “I wasn’t meeting their needs anymore”. It’s certainly a lot less insufferable than how many people cope, but it still deserves analysis.

A classic example of the dark side is thought patterns like deciding that the person can’t handle that you are upset with them, because you not getting your needs met would make them feel bad- so you pretend it’s all okay. On the flip side when you want to get territorial it’s easy to sell yourself that you are simply being self sacrificing to take over something and organize them better- I’m sure there’s at least one person who knows this who thinks I’m actually pretty needy and can’t find my own pants without help. Caveat lector; author is biased.

It also makes you extremely vulnerable to people with the exact match on the opposite pole of “I need to be looked after all times to feel secure!” Since abusive relationships often have a foundation in the other person demanding that you leap through increasingly absurd hoops to make them feel properly attended to, or the person will go splah (which can range from physical violence, to emotional abuse, to simply attacking themselves or going into incoherent self castigating hysterics, which is a particularly effective tactic against someone whose empathy is overly keyed into people) you can end up mired in some pretty nasty scenarios. I know from personal experience. Maybe, you, dear reader have seen that in action.

Not to mention that the tendency to go above and beyond the call of duty can also end up giving you fairly high standards for others- or give other people the perception that you do. So your circle of friends, lovers, etc may conclude that if you brush off small overtures of caretaking and you do such a fantastic job than anything they can muster as a mere mortal won’t impress. Or you assume that because you know you put a lot of effort into preemptively looking after people in a way that comes naturally to you, therefore your needs must be so complicated and difficult since nobody has moved in on their own to fill them. One can internalize that that nobody can, and even throw in an extra dash of shame that you must be secretly the *most* needy person ever so all the more reason to be responsible and keep it locked down, right?

Maybe this applies to you, or maybe it doesn’t- either way it’s something for me to think about and analyze. I certainly won’t stop enjoying the caretaking aspect of my personality, but I also feel like this is a phenomenon that’s worth paying attention to.

Me and Poly (And Monogamy, and Sorta-Monogamy)

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So, what am I, anyway? I am complicated when it comes to the subject of monogamy. Personally I don’t think I’m one of nature’s 100% monogamists, but I’m not fully cut out for full bore sharing.

A recent fetlife thread asked readers to justify monogamy, which I think is a good leaping off place. Why pair off when you can have many people?

I’ll start be saying how you set your relationships up are your own business. When it comes to polygamy style serious relationships, rather than more fluidity on who can do what to whom, the practical reality is that even in cultures where polygyny is normal and accepted (and the ones where polyandry happen are eeny-weeny and generally involve marrying several brothers) the majority of couples still live in monogamous pairings. In that case it’s usually due to division of resources, much how we associate having a mistress in the infidelity sense with a certain sort of wealthy male.

Of course poly as what us kinky folk get up to appears not to have the serious drawback of polygyny cultures- which is that an artificially maintained woman shortage makes controlling access to wives come at the detriment to the development of the women as individuals. Poly kinksters, on the other hand, tend to be well educated egalitarians who like to have complicated sex, not tribalist patriarchies, although the all too common ‘one penis policy’ phenomena is what I’d call seriously suspicious. I’m looking at you “yes you can fuck all the woman you like and me too!” dudes.

But, not digressing the point is that even in cultures with no barrier to stacking spouses, is that it tends to be the less common model because it’s harder to pull off.

Poly is perfectly valid and viable- for some people. I think if I were critical of anything it’s that multiple serious, equal significant others is really time consuming!

Now the argument is of course that love multiplies and that love is not finite, and I agree with that. However, as much as we use kids or friends as an example, plenty of people have a favoured child even if they don’t want to admit it, or a best friend among their friends.

Me going poly boyfriends means that I would need to split my needs and energy between one or more additional persons. This on top of having friends, a job, hobbies, etc. The statistical odds of having two people who also get along with each other, who meet my needs the way I want, etc… are so vanishingly slim I don’t think of it the way that I don’t plan my life around becoming a Member of Parliament or winning a lottery. And if I have a someone, I won’t be particularly obsessed with making sure we have a someone else set up just in the dynamic I envisioned. No ‘looking for a bisexual girl to complete our family’ here.

But in my personal life, I fall somewhere into the muddy waters of not purely tied up with one person for all sexual activity but not into a fully open, no questions asked deal. For one thing I have some fond, long term play friends. Technically that makes me poly in the way that all the women I’ve had sex with makes me bisexual. To be precise I have a long standing friends with benefits relationship with three people, actually. That has transcended all three of my couple relationships and given a couple more years will be longer than my longest dating relationship. Hell, my friends were extremely eager to bring Wildcard on board (and horrified I might be lost to vanilla land if I did get a boyfriend after Strong) so I gather they like me too.

And I think that we all set our limits on a spectrum, even people who ID as mono- for example some couples do not allow for porn, while others do. Of course some couples don’t allow for opposite sex friends (and some couples don’t allow for any friends at all and those ones are CRAZY!). Some couples do threesomes only. Myself, I am mostly focused on emotional fidelity and the really complicated issues of my own jealousy.

On a purely fetish perspective I like the idea of whoring my male partner out. This ranges from sending him off on his own devices, to handing him off to women on loan, like property. “You, look after her needs!”

A sticking point I’ve seen come up is when the guy has tastes that are decidedly not you, but it’s only happened to me under odd circumstances. The Ex hated my often wild witch hair and disapproved of my lack of STEM major, but I don’t think a new woman or an alternative woman is what he wanted as much as inevitable annihilation of me as an entity with a personality. Strong, on the other hand, had a major red head fetish, and his anxieties about that pretty much were the problem more so than me never having a desire to dye my hair, even if he wanted it- I didn’t feel worried about competition, but he was in a constant tizzy about how sooner or later I *would* be jealous. It turned into a case of having to ask if the person was having a relationship with me, or with their anxieties, with me serving as a prop to justify them.

In the end, in that case, after having the red head thing be brought up to the point where it was actually starting to grate on my nerves, the hardest part there was possibly not having permission to actually you know, feel something about it because I was being preemptively accommodating to someone feeling bad about me feeling bad in a hypothetical future. This, while being perfectly happy to have Strong go out on jaunts to hook up with other women for his non-sub side.

I guess for me the point of jealousy is whether or not the person was into me and the degree they are- like there is always going to be an alternative that is always appetizing to that person- and this won’t even always be sexual. Like people will have friends, and hobbies, and jobs, as I was talking about earlier, and I’d be a bit miffed if I lost out to a minecraft server or the like. The point where I will get insecure includes- where I think the person wishes I was X while I was Y (latest soul crushing fear: wishing I had a particular appearance characteristic, but putting up with it for my generous personality and stunning brain); and if their fondness for X precludes me, as in the case of something being more important than me.

And yet, I can’t do the “get X need met outside the couple!”  Like, there’s plenty of cases of seeing other people get what they want outside the boundaries of a relationship, either they have a kink partner in a vanilla marriage or a sexual partner to deal with an asexual significant other, etc… But for me I end up feeling if that’s a deal I’m being offered I’m liable to start looking very pointedly at the door.

And yet outsourcing doesn’t bother me if it’s a partner going elsewhere. I just want to be wanted, but i can be more flexible about their needs than how mine get met.

It’s bizarrely complex, isn’t it?

Post Mortum Of My Relationships To This Date

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So various things happened to me over the last month or two, which has strangled updates down to a trickle.  In the first place work decided to be a pain in the butt and then laid me off. Then stuff happened regarding Strong and other… stuff.

It makes me introspective about my life choices, especially in light of what i’m watching other people go through. I am of the philosophy that two people in a relationship both play a role in creating the dynamic you play out, which is not the same as shared culpability should one person abuse the other, but the dissolutions and breakups we have, and the errors we make are still valuable lessons.

Some people like the high school boys I dated, were just nice boys- the first one I was maturing from girl to woman still, and too loopy for a relationship, while the long term high school boyfriend was sweet, but the take away there I got was not to date anyone dumber than you, because you had to respect someone you’re with. Nocturnal was an exercise in working out what I should and shouldn’t tolerate. In hindsight, if you aren’t used to being respected, you can mistake neediness for being important.

With Strong and why we broke up: As far as my perspective on the situation, not all relationships are stable or meant to last, and I went into it with the suspicion that our gulf in ages meant that we were in different places but more to the point, his tendency to precisely box everything off to control it was going to fight our D/s connection, while his communication style didn’t allow for candid admission of failure. To be exact I was his training dom, a safe woman who wouldn’t gut him in the process of him finally getting to feel loved and wanted for his vulnerabilities.

As far as my part in our breakup, since I am, shall we say, not a fan of conflict, there was little I could do in this circumstance beyond letting it be as it would be. I’d like to think I’m still a net positive on his life. And and I forecasted, from our initial connection where I crawled into his head, that was unsustainable, and he got himself increasingly walled off to the point where, as of the end of June, I was dealing with manufacturing my own happiness again. Which is to say, a very gentle  and lucky way to find yourself breaking ties with someone.

For a brief few months before that, Strong had the rare gift of being able to have more impact on my happiness than I could have on it independently, and then I went back to making me happy. I dissolved our D/s agreement when I was no longer helping him, but also as a confirmation that I had learned some of the lessons I was supposed to learn from the Ex.

The Ex is one of those cases where it can be hard to talk about it because of how embarrassed and ashamed that sort of banal awful makes you feel when you survive it. It can be completely inexplicable- how did I let someone treat me like an idiot domestic servant, deny me sleep to the point of contributing to academic issues with my education and exacerbating my emotional health problems, while letting them so terrorize me that I completely unable to resist them? They are not, what you’d describe, as intimidating.

Well, the profoundly fucked up childhood I grew up with sure as heck did not help. Let’s be honest, when you learn your relationship models from a situation with abuse and enablers, it makes it much easier to ignore the what-the-fuck-are-we-doing?! feelings the insanity of an abusive dynamic engenders until you are enmeshed. That’s a hard other thing to talk about, because I don’t want sympathy for the shit that occurred at this juncture, and I’m leery of being treated like I’m dangerously crazy because I survived it- or not being taken seriously because someone hurt me.

The Ex was, to be honest about things, not all bad, but he was a horrible match for my own anxieties and vulnerabilities. If, in a love match, you can feel like you found a key for your lock, the Ex and I meshed his issues and controlling streak with my yielding , appeasing approach. Yes, while a dom (TM), generally speaking I tend to take stuff that’s not in my control and let it slide. I’m not one of those True Leaders people like to brag about being.

If you’re going to get all metaphorical about stuff, I’m a water person. I don’t make walls, I flow around stuff and find my own level. I can certainly be disturbed, but just as much as I can get all choppy and disturbed on the surface, but I can also take in and soak things pretty well.

Strong was an earth person, who put walls up absolutely everywhere, and locks people into them. The Ex? Fire, maybe? At once burning bright, but so fragile, needing to be sheltered and to consume constantly to survive. All appetites and needs, which was fascinating to my dominant/nurturing streak, but no brakes on the devouring aspect.

Wow, this is getting long. I’ll continue after the jump.

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Myself, and Moving On

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Pretty, pretty...

Let’s talk about my love life, these days, shall we?

My nails bite into his back, but he takes them, sharp as they are, and he is unbreakable. His skin in thick, the muscle underneath taut to the point of hardness. I stab and press and nothing makes him yield, but gradually, with my strength into it, I feel the start of a pliancy. He’s tough, and there’s a challenge there, beyond simply getting a reaction, to help melt away the wiry solidity into something completely supple.

I’m white as a snowdrop against the sallow-sand colour of his skin, my body soft where he is hard and rough. Our bodies slide together in a way that meets and balances, although he is taller, I can lift him without excessive effort, not just because of his lightness but because I’ve always been fairly strong for a woman. My head fits well against his chest, nestled against his shoulder, and my arms around him, seatbelt-safe. His hands, casually playing around my waist, find the exact place on my spine where the muscles and bone carry things too heavily, pressing until the always-ache I’ve learned to ignore lets go.

I lean over the foot of his bed, stretching, and watch his slender, straight legs, upside down. I like to look at the ratio between the spareness of his body and the breadth of his shoulders. I like the way his eyes are hooded and long lashed, and the delicate sculpting of his nose. I like the gravel in his voice, and the way he looks at me, sometimes wanting, sometimes with a hesitant vulnerability like he’s not sure quite what he’s doing, but most times just hard to read as he’s usually pretty closed off. That, in itself, is a challenge, since I’m used to being the one knocking reactions out of people.

We try little bedroom games, what works and what doesn’t, but just as much, we talk about all the things that tell who you are, a few pieces every time, and twine up together, in a lock-knot of limbs.

I am happy, although it’s very much a situation built on shifting silt, as mercurial as one might expect given the circumstances. It’s not a safe and stable meeting, and I don’t feel sure footed with him, at once sharing myself with as much flayed honesty as I can and on the other hand, keeping some restrictions on the impulsivity and carnal impishness that defines me. We are not sure what we are doing, not sure what I am, other than that I am there and present at this moment, where I can help.

So I make myself into the safe, accepting stillness that I learned how to be a long time ago, and I tell him that for now, I’m in charge, until the storm has passed us by. On the balance, the trade off is knowing him with nothing in the way of illusions, in the rawness of a crisis, and finding nothing lacking in him or his response to it. So there’s that.

Love Me Properly

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So Strong and I had a candid post mortum tonight about the failure of our relationship and I made sure to be honest about where life has taken me. I am in an odd dilemma, to be loved, by many, but not quite in the way that I wish.

I find myself playing with hearts, accidentally. Perhaps spurred by Strong’s instance that I look elsewhere to get my needs met, my deck is overloaded with people who I’m afraid of hurting, with one wildcard that has to play himself. Tease and denial comes easily with dominance, and yet when it comes with suitors, excessive insistence of my glory sends me scattering. I hate the idea of having victims who aren’t willingly tying themselves to the post, but are doing it for desire for something more. Maybe that’s part of what makes me deeply suspicious of acts of service, more so than I should be?

And I had my heart taken, accidentally, as if it were book picked up by error, but then the borrower had become engrossed in reading what he found. Unfortunately that’s a situation that’s providing my least favourite thing in interpersonal relationships: waiting on someone else’s will and willpower. I am not, but nature, good at that kind of patience. Trust is not a natural part of my makeup, least of all trust and faith and others (not with my independence levels), nor do I like passivity. But, regardless, the situation the gentleman has is something where if I try to intervene I’m in the wrong. I can’t lift a single finger, not to push or to beckon.

It makes me think about love as it should be, for me. I’ve never been about being impressed with expensive gifts. The Ex, the one I spent six years with, compared my needs to being that of a pet rock- I never made demands, not for jewellery, flowers or fancy dinners (I like eating, but I’m not good at taking)- and honestly, I was an expert at self sacrificing care taking for him. And yet, my way of love has been about doing on the small scale. That doesn’t really fit stereotypical D/s femdom well- my ‘tribute’ wishlist is a joke loaded with beef jerky.

And yet, I bought myself tea roses this week, my favourite. Strong charmed me with unexpected chocolates, once upon a time, and once, a boy charmed me, by passing me a cheap chocolate egg. Compliments get me blushing. Somewhere is a chink in that armour. I want the romance, I just don’t want to feel it’s a big deal.

To love my properly, it seems, takes courage, self confidence, occasional capacity to cruelty, and yet acts of kindness. I need someone who can yield to me where I want it, but stand for me and with me when I need it. If that ends in me being a spinster maiden aunt in the end, so be it.

(amendment)

Shut up Tashi. 😛

On The Single Life- Or Why I Don’t Think Online Dating Is For Me

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So things ended with Strong. Sadness documented in other posts.

We never had monogamy, but I never got further than play with friends and a spot of light molestation. It didn’t feel right, up until it was basically over with Strong, and at that point the relationship falling apart just meant I felt frustrated and neglected. And small amounts of drama occurred which I will explain later.

Somewhere along the way I acquired one of those online dating profiles. Under the general theory that I’m a tough cookie who won’t let a little setback having to break up with someone after many patient months get me down, I busily answered questions (allowing them to conclude I was much more kinky than the average, as well as independent and not very romantic, not sure how I feel about that last part) and took some flattering selfies. From there I set out to tentatively find out what exactly the boys were like out there with an eye to being open minded. My head’s a little messed up by stuff, but it couldn’t hurt, right?

For an extra oomph I seeded my profile with hints of my precise brand of kinkiness, and set about with the rating of profiles that okcupid gently nudges you to do. And lo and behold I got a message.

“Is your name [Pearl]?”

Okay. There’s no way that is going to end well. And no, it did not…

Read more

Well, fuck. (Breakups)

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So, Strong and I broke up. No story this Friday, just a post mortum.

Leaving most personal details out of it, it just wasn’t working anymore, which makes me incredibly sad. More so since I didn’t stop caring about the poor bastard, we just lost the mutual connection. Somewhere along the way, it died.

Ferns basically has the crux of the challenge for dominants, that without submission there is nothing. You can have a relationship, but it’s a stunted one with an under current of frustration. Breaking up with him meant leaving the hope that if I was just a bit more patient he’d come back to me.

But there’s that bugger chemistry. When you feel like submission is being handed out like a cookie, and the person is too busy giving you what they think they want, you stop feeling that glow of empowerment. To describe the situation, of course, doesn’t give Strong a fair chance to defend himself. He tried to be what he thought I wanted to the best of his ability.

But the problem may also be a matter of style. Submission, for me, is seduced out or ripped out. I find I tend to be drawn to the switch-y ones, in part because of my masochism, but also because of that sense of victory. Ha. I bet I probably sound like a cliché. Every dominant likes to think they’re special and that their submissive does not fall easily.

(Well, actually I’m not so sure about that, since I fake ‘submissive’ really well and I do not act fighty)

But for me, a guy who is all service and obedience from the start makes me feel like I’ve been asked to scale a sheer wall of glass. When I met Strong, he was emphatically not in a submissive position. The chemistry grew up around his desire just for me and we created something that was unique to us.

And yet there’s the gulf that often comes up between expectation of how a sub should act and  what the dom wants. In his case, I think he choked, and got too focused on being the perfect boyfriend. We always had a problem that way, for example I would provide a rule I wanted to put into place and he would take it and run with it and turn it into something his. Which makes it not about me, but about doing things his way.

On the other hand some of this is normal. I may have been too demanding and distance is bloody hard. And I really need to feel like I have the person’s full attention when I want it, which may be pretty hard to pull off all the time.

Regardless, he was, in many ways, extremely good for me and I don’t regret that he was part of my life. He came in as a friend, and I hope we’ll stay that way after we’ve had a chance to lick our respective wounds.