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.

 

What Is Dominance, Anyway?

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So, I’ve talked before about the gap between expectations for dominants versus the reality of making this work for your personality. We have all done to death theorizing why femdoms appear to be in short supply, what I haven’t talked about as much is trying to describe what it is.

Dominance is a tricky beast to pin down, probably because more than anything else, it’s a feeling. It’s a simultaneous sensation of connection and detachment, usually between two people but one that blossoms under individual specific circumstances. And, unfortunately, it’s not just someone doing what you say; I don’t get a dominant thrill from each and every time I experience someone’s unsolicited compliance or even when someone in my wider life takes my food order or something.

It’s different for many people too: some people like the service aspect, where the person does things for them to make their life more fun. Some people like the obedience aspect- it’s not so much knowing that someone is out to give to you, as knowing they will do what you want, whether it is painting a fence or doing jumping jacks. Some folks like the control aspect, of which I am most into- I like the power trip and making people react. That’s what feeds it for me, regardless of how I do it.

I’m also a sadist, which is commonly paired with dominance, but doesn’t have to be. I like men in distress. I like the whimpering, the big eyes, the cowering and the vulnerability. Other people, for example service oriented doms who just want to be pampered, might find a hurt sub upsetting. And it’s a buffet, not a radio button system, so keep in mind any of my examples might apply in any way and and any level of intensity.

On the other hand, applying theory to real life practice adds an extra level of complexity.

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2013 in Review

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Wow, 2013! It’s been one year of serious and regular updating and I can say that it’s been a more than successful experiment: 40K visits, of which 28K of you were unique hits!

When I started OMissPearl, it was just as a repository for my writing, mostly created to deal with the lack of general control and exposure on Fetlife’s “writing” section. Since that time I’ve been proud to participate in a community wide dialogue between kinky folk all around the world, as well as getting some very touching feedback.

Of the course of last year I’ve gone through some pretty major life upheavals as well. In January 2013 I ended a six year relationship, a hard choice but the right one for me. in May 2013 I got a visit from Strong– although the relationship we developed didn’t last, I’ll always remember the place he had in my life fondly- then, for year end I gave things another shot, and you guys have been patiently following along with me developing something new with Wildcard.

Top Content at OMissPearl:

And here’s looking forward to another great year of writing and reading in 2014!

 

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.

e[lust] #53 -I’m in it!

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We (and by we I mean me) decided to try the e[lust] thing everyone else is doing. It’s very interesting because it’s generally writing for women and by women- although just to warn long term readers, not everything there is femdom- enjoy!

Welcome to e[lust] – The only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month. Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice or kinky discussions it’ll be here at e[lust].  Want to be included in e[lust] #54? Start with the newly updated rules, come back January 1st to submit something and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

~ This Month’s Top Three Posts ~

 

Do Not Consent

Found poem – UR so SXY

Kink is not a dirty word!

 

~ Featured Post (Molly’s Picks) ~

Being not doing; a thought about labels.

Take It For Daddy

 

 

~ Readers Choice from  Sexbytes ~

(All blogs that have a submission in this edition must re-post this digest from tip-to-toe on their blogs within 7 days. )

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More Inbox Detrius And Spanking

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It is a factor of the open and relatively accessibly nature of the internet that you will end up talking to people you never would have met outside the free flow of online communication. From feeling less alone in the company of fellow people with a shared perspective on your already uncommon sexual kinks to watching rage filled forum flame wars between an articulate but poorly informed 14 year old with infinite free time and a 45 year old academic who wouldn’t even let the kid into their classroom under normal circumstances, you end up alternating between feeling like you’re part of a fantastic global community and contemplating becoming a hermit.

And then there’s the inbox spam.

If you maintain a bunch of accounts on various kink communities, and you are female, you will receive various and sundry unsolicited messages from men. Much of these are drive by, copypasta trying the spam approach to find a femdom, case in point:

Respected Ma’am, I want to be your slave. My team viewer ID is 601 922 712 and psswd is 1101. Please accept me as your slave ma’am. I have been a sub or into this mentality ever since my puberty ma’am. I know am not privileged enough to be your slave, but please give me an opportunity ma’am. I read your profile and I want to tell you frankly that no matter how hard I try, I can never deny the fact that am longing to serve a mistress truly and be her permanent slave. Please provide me that opportunity ma’am.

(Note, if he actually read my profile he’d know that the sort of deal he’s offering is decidedly not my style, and the “team viewer” thing just feels like an accident waiting to happen). Hundreds of messages like this get sent out, much like how there’s an effort to convince you to buy cheap V1gra form Canada for potency, or my spam traps on my blog collect recycled news articles with links hawking designer goods.

Or you get the more banal:

Want a dish of ballz salad ?

Which is not so much insulting, as degrading to the twit that decided to send it out. I imagine that message was the grand achievement of the poor silly bugger’s day.

And you get dragged into the weird psychosis of people who are looking for a wank under their terms, like the person trying their best to convince me they were an Arab woman who wanted nothing more than to send me large amounts of money to be insulted by a superior white femdom. And sent me dozens of messages, from multiple user accounts being unable to figure out why I’m just ignoring them. And pretending to be someone else telling me how I should wear my hair in pigtails. Because nothing makes a dominant woman happier than a stranger telling her how to style her hair to turn them on.

Now in “hurt me for being an Arab’s” case I’ve always had a hard time with ethnicity/race play. It’s not that I can’t be that flexible, it’s that asides from having a twitch-delete reflex about messages from people presupposing to be from North Africa and South Asia (or really anything in a particular equatorial zone) after one too many unfortunate mash notes, my inclination is to try to find a character motivation- and not being at all inclined to think of people as inherently superior/inferior on those lines, well, I’m kinda a lost cause unless you want British Empire themed porn. I could, in a fit of whimsy, colonize the hell out of you, but it would be like trying to discriminate against people from Minnesota.

Then there’s the arrogant male doms. Not content to limit themselves to harassing female subs, there’s a particular cadre of guys among whom hope springs eternal and all women are fair game, or who specifically target femdoms. They tend to come in two flavours: fast creep and slow creep.

Fast creep is the very forgettable “nees bich” bloke, or the ones who otherwise proposition everyone and everything female seeming with no particular targeting. The result comes across  like a horny blind man feeling up tree galls, and similarly show up in your inbox with the “mistress i am so submissive 2 u” messages that accumulate like chip wrappers under a poorly maintained shrubbery. You also get the men who ask you if you want a discreet chance to sub to them, or the ones who say they want to explore the other side a bit and can’t seem to understand why you don’t want to be propositioned to spank strangers. No big deal, just tedious.

Slow creep, on the other hand, doesn’t ask you to submit right out the gate, and often claims to be extending a hand of friendship, wanted or not. Then then start trying to flirt by being bossy or by mansplaining how you are Doing It Wrong. This sort of man usually goes from being vaguely like a creepy jovial uncle at you, to telling you how he can see the submissive inside just waiting to come out, or some such rot.

Once again I’m on the receiving end of another presumptuous dominant asshat’s efforts to be friendly and helpful. This one is happily dictating to me how I’m going to fail at as a dom for liking someone. He started off by asking who owns me now and how, since I have my profiles set to “no! taken!”, to discourage people only looking for a relationship bitching about me being off the market and not warning them.

Then he sent this:

Once a Mistress like you “forms an attachment” then her Mistress persona is diminished.

I dare say your gentleman nemesis now has the upper hand. That’s not to say that he will be spanking you. But you know what I mean. He’s really the one in control now. Right?  🙂

How did this slave/sub / boy come to own you so badly?

I really love it when people who have no insight into my life feel the urgent need to tell me how it is and should be run. Not only do I choose not to ID under the title of “Mistress”, the whole concept of my dominance it being a “persona” I maintain is slightly alarming. Here, he is simultaneously arguing the harmful idea that D/s is powered by differing levels of affection and mansplaining the shit out of things to me.

I mean, theoretically as far as fitting into ideals, this guy’s “Master” persona is diminished by him acting like a giant douche canoe. This is also always the problem with “find a mentor” advice, because a lot of people try to express dominance through it and nominate themselves chief guiding light where it’s unwelcome, like this eager little glowworm is trying with me.

And I suppose I should address the “Spanking” thing.

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Reader Letter: More From Crazy Jeremy!

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The guy who sent random hatemail last time appears to have become a regular fan- this time with thinly veiled rape and death threats from the comfortable anonymity of the internet, apparently after reading this scene wrap up:

(From “Jeremy Smith” or [email protected])

Subject line: What a cunt you are

Ever tried being on the receiving end of it as you say many domes do? Maybe you should be leashed just like the dog you are. Is the artists impression an accurate one? Even in a drawing, you’re better looking from the back.

Once again this poor foamy gentleman is deeply offended that I exist. By the way, that’s “Doms or Dommes” not “Domes”, Jeremy, but maybe it’s a challenge to type when your fingers are slippery with the mixture of drool, fecal matter and semen that seems to form the basis of your communication online. And yes, my dear little broccoli rot, I have have been on “the receiving end”. I know what I do feels like, in a wide capacity of what I get up to, and this is part of how I know my preferences. Also he appears greatly excited by the cartoon drawing of my ass.

Try encouraging Male Dom/female sub. Or are you one of those snotrags who tries to convey Male led D/s as domestic violence.

Why would a blog oriented around femdom focus on that? It would be like a baking blog talking about raw foods. Certainly I consider M/f a wider part of the community and you appear to be projecting some fairly serious psychological issues here. Did some social justice warrior femdom hurt your feelings some time back? It’s the second time he started whining about “Domestic Violence”. It also hints that he doesn’t read the blog and didn’t read my response last time.

As for [Your friend, who you topped with, with no identifying information, don’t worry, this creep is toothless]. The piece of shit isn’t a sick piece of shit with a name and “personality” like that? Consensual or not, the cunt is a sick piece of shit and I’D LOVE to give the whore a fucking good hiding.

Let me get this straight, you are bellowing incoherent profanity, advocating my rape and murder and implying you want to non-consensually beat women and somehow we’re the “sick” ones? Back to me now!

Why don’t sick shits like you ever get raped and murdered? Shouldn’t be a crime if it ever did to the likes of you filth.

Well, because there is such a thing like the rule of law. But more to the point you are clearly madder than a hatter and your humour value is rapidly diminishing as you go straight to advocating the death of your fellow humans. Which, you might be surprised, is actually illegal in most civilized corners of the world.

Does that club (or any other one you attend) cater to Male Dom/ female sub? Or are you just too scared and sexist to see or even acknowledge it. There’s plenty of outlets for it, both on the web and in real life, so F UCK YOU, YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT.

Yes, the club was a mixed gender party. People like yourself are not invited, and by this I mean obviously insane blithering morons. Also we see that the meat of his argument is repeated here, that he thinks my preference for femdom invalidates his for maledom. I’m pretty sure when he types out this screeds he feels deeply threatened and frightened that I will personally beat him.

But- Take That! I have been told that maledom exists! Evidently there are brave freedom fighterdoing errrmmm… just what I do but with more breast bondage/hitting and less cbt? Jeeze, Jeremy, I would have never figured that out without you!

Current evidence from other femdoms who’ve dealt with his screeching tirades, primarily through twitter but also in blog comments such as at Divorce Darling, is that his IP puts him somewhere in the UK, possibly Manchester. I’m pretty sure the language choices confirm that- he’s got that particular sort of mad British thing going on.

Obviously Jeremy Smith sounds like a pseudonym, but it’s largely irrelevant whether or not it is. He has one reason to exist and that’s to spray virtual spittle at female dominants, usually with cries of how unattractive they are (without having seen them) and the vaguely through to blantently misogynistic language of someone who is more desperately trying to hurt someone through any means possible and is trying everything to hope something sticks. According to Jeremy I am ugly, stupid and… he wishes I were a femsub.

One can infer from very much drive by comment/email behaviour that he’s not actually interested in conversing regarding his pet cause of messaging all the femdoms to shit in their inboxes. Often, in other people hate messages, he considers it a checkmate to ask if we’ve ever done this stuff as the victim, which is just confusing. Obviously the fact that there’s a guy so lost in his own madness that he thinks I need to have rape and murder wished on me (which from context he’s probably also wanking about) it’s kinda disturbing, but his ability to generate fear is hampered from his lack of specificity.

This one’s for you, Jeremy- take it way, Clever Pie!

The Big Mistake Even Good Submissive Men Make When Looking For A Femdom

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Male subs, stop asking for the relationship you don’t actually want with a dominant woman.

This pertains to you, the guy who is thoughtfully and carefully filling out a profile to put his best foot forward on the internet, or sending out your messages nervously and respectfully as you can, to try to convince what you see as a rare, nice femdom woman that she should be into you, or at least not knee jerk delete your greeting. This is talking to the guy who tells people, as reassuringly as he can, that he is “very submissive” and will do anything to make them happy while trying hard not to rule anything out by being specific. Or the guy who helpfully fills out that he’ll do house chores, chauffeur her around, anything really, as long as she will just deign to accept him or even talk to him. Or the person who petitions women like he should be apologizing for wasting the carbon than makes up his body mass.

Not all of you sub guys should actually be doing this. It’s actually hurting your chances at making a human connection.

Yes, it’s not a good idea to lead with a barrage of demands, and nobody likes a laundry list of fetishes in their inbox or a partner who has how you’ll act all mapped out. But, if you’re at all a long time reader of this blog, you probably aren’t dealing with the level of selfishness or stupid, which leads you to message women with “wanna meet at my hotel while I’m in town for business and spank me and fuck my ass?!”. 

I’m talking about the fact that a lot of sub guys prepare themselves to please an internalized idea of what a femdom is. In most people’s minds, that’s a very client-and-pro styled relationship, where the assumption is that the woman is not willing and eager in her own right. It’s, at the very least, a hyper exaggeration of the idea that nice girls really don’t wanna and need to be bribed and cajoled into it. I’ve rattled that cage often enough this should be old hat right now, that a lot of us dominan women love it for its own sake. However, what isn’t being said, but needs to be said is this-

A lot of you guys aren’t actually into either being unpaid domestic workers or Mr. Everybody’s Servile Cur and you are still selling yourself that way because you think that’s the Right Thing to Do. For every silly boob who writes me calling me “Mistress Goddess Lady Divine” because he wants it to be true, there’s a not so silly bloke who thinks I simply delete anyone who doesn’t address me like I was some sort of fantasy nobility and thinks it’s a protocol thing he has to go through because otherwise he’s not a Good Submissive (TM). And it’s past time we stopped demanding every guy with a submissive fantasy act like a simpering sycophant or an emotional masochist before the relationship even gets off the ground. Afterwards? That’s up to you- but before? This trend is not helping.

Real life example time:

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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?