Rambles and Stream of Consciousness

I feel neither coherent nor productive, so you’re getting a stream of consciousness while I continue my sick leave from gainful employment. What did you do today? I corrected my insurer who flipped my name “Is this Leslie Pearl?” No.

I don’t feel particularly good. The stomach ache is abating into nausea instead of immobilizing pangs. I still don’t particularly want to eat anything and carry my mood about like a heavy object. I think dealing with the absolute bullshit I had piled up (double anti-sexual assault shit in two volunteering groups, an absolute imbecile outing me on fetlife, my abusive grandmother popping clogs, a family member having a meltdown on my doorstep and work sucking awfully) explains my worn out state but I need to figure out how to get from hiding on the couch in a blanket burrito watching Hannibal to going back to my job and careering for cash monies.

I realized I wasn’t writing anymore which kinda bugged me, so you get this. Ramblings.

I’m told I’m beautiful, a lot. Wildcard also easily draws in the attraction of women, and wears it with a constant sort of “are you having me on?!” background disbelief, like he’s not entirely sure why. His good looks are easy to explain- he has gigantic eyes, heavy lidded with long lashes, a perfect nose and the spacing of his teeth make his mouth push his lips into a sensual pout. When he’s not thinking about anything but an exciting idea his eyes get sparkly and intense, dark and compelling. He’s not just handsome, he’s pretty.

He wears his beard and his hair knowing what suit him. The beard’s always short cropped, straight lines following the hollow under his cheeks, the hair’s something stylish and classic- he’s willing to pay more at a salon and listen to good advice from an expert. His clothes are picked to suit him, with a sort of Captain America Vintage Prep vibe.

Myself I don’t know why I am perceived as beautiful. Many, many women get told that by men, but I draw in more than my female peers seem to report. It’s not a subject you’re supposed to embrace- and I don’t have the slenderness to assume a professional, non-sexual modeling career in in my future. But I look like the girls in all the porn, a white brunette, thinner than the average, nice but not particularly large breasts, small waist, massive hips and buttocks. Women deny the number of my hips when I do sizing “NO! Your hips are not 38″ around!” (Or 40″ if I’m running fatter.) I seem to unintentionally gain and lose the same 15 pounds based on my health. Right now I’m sick and my breasts are smaller.

My hair is, under the 4C dye I refresh every few weeks, salt and pepper. I’m thirty-one, and the first greys came at 16 or so. I don’t particularly like it, and turn it back to a brown that’s almost black, to match my eyebrows.

When Wildcard and I have sex, he seldom penetrates my vagina. Usually he achieves orgasm in some combination of hand-and-mouth. He does not go down on me, and I dislike oral sex. When he does penetrate me, it’s hard for me to fit him inside. My clit bangs out orgasms in minutes of the right kind of touching, but my vagina is a tense creature that coils itself up, especially without regular insertions. He finds it so stimulating he has to stay still inside me and half pulled out, and that hurts. He’s just too physically large to rest with the head of his penis in the antechamber of my vagina and not to the wider point of full insertions.

I’ve never found a solution that the speed I like being done at is the speed by which guys come. It’s not a failure in the guy, it’s just the sort of stroke that gets them off gets me off. I don’t like sex where the guy just goes and goes and goes forever though.

I noticed that everything that’s idealized about female orgasms is discouraged in men. If you are a woman people want you to come constantly, ideally basically at will. If you’re a guy everything is piled on not coming and there’s nothing treated more sad than being able to come from imagination. It gets called “premature ejaculation”.

When I was a child I learned about kegels, and can do them easily to this day. They make no difference other than entertaining partners, apparently providing novelty. Squinch. Squinch.

I know I like anal stimulation, and I would probably enjoy anal sex, but the prep and getting me relaxed enough is so fundamentally un-sexy. So the subject comes up and then passes along.

I tie him up sometimes, with velcro cuffs, or make him a rope harness, cinched tight. He likes it when it’s tightly squeezing around the base of his cock and balls. These harnesses serve virtually no restraining purpose. Lingerie. When a friend started a panties for people who have packages company I bought him a pair. They don’t feel feminine on him and he likes being stroked through the black mesh. I don’t like thongs on men.

I like fucking fully clothed or without taking off the sexy lingerie I like wearing. I have stocking fetish.

I like bad language in bed, I like aggression and wrestling. I want a sort of dirtiness that I don’t intrinsically believe in. I read a lot of erotica on the darker end of the spectrum where the genders don’t matter but the victim experiences a fundamental loss of control that’s often permanently damaging. I don’t like castration stories though. My fantasy victims are used by multiple partner but aroused by it- I separate arousal from consent and fantasize about non-con.

I had a lot of cybersex in my life, which translates into writing porn well. People prefer sentimental emotional erotica over mechanical erotica. Feelings matter.

I have not been inspired to write erotica in a while. I made a few stabs at it, but the tension is missing and I want to tease out what is going on there.

 

Vanilla-ish

So if previously I lambasted vanilla as the destroyer of relationships, on the other hand I think ‘vanilla’ is a really imprecise term in relation to kink.

For one thing, it sets up a false dichotomy. Either you are Vanilla or you are Kinky and never the twain shall meet. Or worse, Vanilla bad, Kink good. Which is hardly fair to the legion of people with happy, healthy sex lives who don’t want kink.

So, when tomcat_S, of Fetlife asked:

I want to know if submissive men still have vanilla sex (intercourse).
Personally I think it is difficult to move back to vanilla once you are too deep in BDSM as submissive man.

I had a genuinely hard time answering that one because the line between vanilla sex and not vanilla sex is, to say the least, blurry. What, after all, does vanilla sex look like? Which, by extension moves into asking, what does normal, average sex look like? People are quick to talk about sex in only one position, usually missionary, or unenthusaistic sex with hang ups. Self described refugees of vanilla talk about cessation of sex entirely, or dismal, once a month encounters where they were made to feel less than worthy for their desires. But bed death is not vanilla. It’s sad, but kinky couples get bed death too. And often the so called vanilla refugees didn’t want merely a bit more in the way of blow jobs or fingering, or sex in the garage, not the bed, they wanted their particular sexual need explored enjoyed and respected.

Kinky also isn’t just everything on the extreme end of debauched. So is it spankings? Dirty talk? Whips? Well, not everyone is interested in any particular fetish even if they are kinky, so obviously as in the instance of my pre-Divorce relationship you can have a partner who really is giving and willing in most reasonable things.

For some people, their particular fetish is the only part of their sexuality worth doing. For others, it’s a buffet with all sorts of cool stuff and no main course, one day doing D/s, the next day gentle anal, then hot wax. And yet, even needing fetish 1/4 of the time or all the time, the “vanilla” seldom goes away. Most kinky people don’t take sucking and fucking and kissing and touching off the menu, unless they have a personal preference against those activities that transcends being kinky.

And people are still kinky and fuck in missionary. It’s my favourite position. I’d be very depressed if being kinky precluded it, much less didn’t let me integrate it into my sex life. And besides, plenty of people are also making kink and vanilla kinda blurry when they do it. Check out fetlife’s barrage of amateur porn. As much as people are sharing their ropes and corsets and post scene pics, a hell of a lot of the snapshots are basically indistinguishable from regular porn. And sometimes nerve endings are nerve endings- unless I brought fetish gear to bed with me, my kinky masturbation looks a hell of a lot like vanilla masturbation because an orgasm is an orgasm no matter how you arrive there.

Context matters. Half the stuff we seem to get up to is only kinky because of the framing. When is, after all, a blow job cock worship, when is it enjoying your property and when is it just a blow job? I can’t tell you where vanilla ends and begins, only that I’m not embarassed that sometimes I’m also vanilla-ish.

The Kink Scene Is Not A Magic World (And That’s Okay!)

When you’re new to BDSM, you may have all sorts of hopes about meeting other kinky people. Especially if you’ve never really had a chance to do the things you like, it can be downright titillating to think about the sort of fun you’ll have a fetish party, or what sort of people you’ll find.

No, not these people.

BDSM societies are such a staple of pornography and erotica they’re a fetish in their own right. From the Chalet of O, to movies like Eyes Wide Shut, the idea that there’s a collective of attractive, wealthy and cultured people who share your turn ons holds a powerful draw.

Discreet, enlightened and racy. Sometimes on the cusp of legality. It can be daunting as well, especially if you are not sure what sort of mischief the scene-sters get up to.

Unfortunately, just as fiction gives us bucket-load ejaculations and  back pain free G cups, the scenes that exist are simply a collection of individuals. And being kinky doesn’t make a human inherently better. On top of that, as a sexy idea, it also causes even people within the scene to get a little ah… imaginative, and you get enduring folk myths like the importance of the Old Guard.

A digression: allegedly, at the end of the Second World War, among certain motorcycle clubs, dudes got up to gay leather S&M. The aesthetic is the kind found in illustrations by Tom of Finland. To this day, lots of people claim to be connected to this. In practice, the best they can claim is that they are inspired.

Actually, the member base is by and large more likely to share company with a sci-fi convention than society’s elite. which is not to say the elite can’t be kinky, just that there’s a lot of solidly middle class types because kink isn’t that expensive. And of course kink is not something only athletes and models get up to. You’re going to find every body type represented.

Another common assumption about the kink scene is that it’s more open minded. It is…to a point. You have to make space for people whose kinks are to shit on each, other or pretend to have incest and violent beating, alongside marrieds who just want to have an “old fashioned” relationship and trangendered people who like silk ties and feathers. On the other hand, everyone brings their own personal prejudices and everyone (even me!) would like to believe their way of doing kink is natural and everyone different is Doing It Wrong. Expect to snort your drink out your nose as people earnestly tell you that women are inherently submissive or that black people are naturally superior, and so forth. There will be the evo-psych brigade who try to justify themselves with fuzzy science, and twits who have relationships better suited to daytime television talk shows.

The accepting attitude of the scene also means that you have lots of marginalized people who were at the back of the line when the social skills were being handed out. After all, (almost) everyone feels creepy and awkward discussing their sexuality, so the people who are always creepy and awkward tend to slip through people’s regular radar.

And it’s a smaller group, which tends to discourage ostracizing people, even the ones who we should. This means Mr. Grabby hands, or the lady to whom honest fidelity happens to other people, and so on. The result is a world somewhere between high school and Jane Austen level “We must be nice to the neighbours, now let’s viciously gossip!” This is because it’s generally a closed loop and few people explicitly want to make a big stink, so there’s far too much reliance on whisper campaigns. Further more, the scene is just large enough, and also commercial enough, that getting someone blacklisted from everything is really, really hard.

Neither is anyone all that wise, I mean at least compared to the regular world. There’s plenty of mentor types and people who know of what they talk about, but one of the “secrets” of kink is that it’s not that hard to do kinky stuff if you take it to the places that most people do.

It’s kinda like regular sex. You want to know some basic safety rules before you go running around, but it’s also something you can generally figure out from there. The scene actually works in the opposite direction, if things are going properly, for giving you a frame of reference for questions like “I feel poopy after play what’s causing that?”

Still, it can be disillusioning. You come to be transported, and instead you meet nothing that takes you outside of your life, and discover that good advice, rather than holding you on the cusp of your limits, is things like “use lube”, “go slow” and “talk about it”.

The scene is not going to take you away to a land of hot, wealthy sophisticated people. Instead it is a testament to the possibility you can enjoy even if you’re not some sort of high society bon vivant. 

Feet & Other Things You’re Not Supposed To Be Into in BDSM

I like feet and I’m a dominant woman. This has occasionally surprised people. It’s actually relatively easy to slide under the radar as a female foot fetishist, embarrassingly so because getting quasi-orgasmic over women’s foot gear, while seen as a perversity in a man, is almost mandatory for full on gender conformity as a woman. But I’ve never been able to wax lyrical about SHOES, anymore than I ever enjoyed cheesecake (the ewwww food, not the pin ups).  I like male feet more than female feet. True I also have stocking/sock fetish, but the only people I have for company are the foot fetish guys.

When did the fetish crop up? I remember, as a kid, being at a parade and watching soldiers march and having a real interest for the shiny black boots. It was before I had much in the way of sexuality, so it was more of a symbolism/texture thing than anything erotic. At the same time I got really obsessed with learning to give foot rubs. I’m not unique, but like most women if I want to indulge this desire I’m forced to head for gay porn. Unfortunately, when it comes to ostensibly straight porn- the female gaze, when you get pandered to, is assumed to be from a kneeling position as the default.

It’s easy to develop a chip on your shoulder. Especially if you talk about how you want some good fem-dom erotica and the stuff that gets tossed your way is Sardax… which is fine if you’re a submissive male into those particular fetishes. It’s not just that the market assumes that as a female consumer you’re not into porn. The ‘romance’ section panders to female sexuality rather doggedly. But for a genre that happily hits all the fem sub bases, from 50 Shades to all the Pirate and Scottish Laird and hunky FBI agents abducting you for your own good… if you’re lucky she will get the drop on the hero once, as a plot device. And then he will be all stiff and prissy and not really take the situation very seriously. And usually escape and often turn the tables.

People pipe up that there’s lots of ebooks if I want to plunge into the sordid world of erotic romance niche porn. And there is. Probably, because I’m not that special of a snowflake. But… there’s absolutely no way to tell if it’s eyeball bleedingly bad or not.

Then there’s my masochism. I like pain. No sensual rose petal hippy sex for me. It can be a little awkward, not from a self image perspective, but getting across that I don’t want to submit, I just enjoy it if the sexual beatings between people I trust and I go both ways. Plenty of people are all liberal and tolerant and preach happily that you can call yourself a dom while caressing your own bruises, but again unless you’re in some sort of hierarchy household with alpha subs or the “head training mistress who serves the house master” trope… you’re going to be an outlier.

Anyway the point I wandered in here with is that I don’t feel like it’s straight forward when you’re unusual in the fetish clusters. You know the sort of thing I mean: sub dudes + strapons +face sitting + nasty talk or dominants + elaborate rope bondage + taking yourself too damn seriously + photographing a tatty bedspread full of knives and sex toys. Dominant woman + feet + masochism or even hell, dominant woman sometimes, if you’re not half asphyxiated in a corset and stiletto thigh boots and only interested in cunnilingus, can be a lonely little kingdom.

And somewhere out there is a stompy leatherdaddy master type into small penis humiliation  So it could be worse.