Kink In Exile

Fall is and has always been my favorite season. I think it started with my love of pumpkin pie, the color orange, and notebooks and went out from there. This fall, however, I am spending a lot of time reflecting on how much things have changed since I was 19. I have been very very blessed, I loved my undergrad years, but I have never missed them before. Maybe it’s time to dig out those school girl skirts and arm warmers for a spin around the block.

Some days I wonder what the success rate must be on bar pickup lines, and more importantly what the success rate of getting someone to sleep with you by insulting them must be.* I went to a bar tonight, and while I’m waiting for a friend the guy next to me starts talking to me:

Me: sipping new type of booze deciding if I like it silently
Him: “you have to shoot that”
Me: making eye contact “I’m not a shooting kind of gal”
Him “you are now”

And on it went — My way of drinking is wrong, my job is wrong, and the school I went to was wrong and still is. And btw can he have my number. And here I thought everyone’s mother taught them that to make friends they have to complement the person on something neutral and engage in light non-personal conversation. Guess not.

* As soon as I wrote that I realized that I have met plenty of people who get off on being insulted. One of the chief problems I’ve had meeting submissive men is that I treat all humans as humans until other arrangements have been made leading some people to believe I am not dominant. That said, other arrangements can certainly be made after a few minutes of polite chit chat.

I wrote the journal entry bellow a while ago but never got around to completing and posting it. However, my boy is out of the country this week and while I miss him terribly, I have caught up on all the kink blogs I don’t get around to reading when he’s around. I had a crazy ex ages ago who theorized that good porn comes out of not getting laid, and while she was a complete fruitcake when it came to some things, I think she was spot on about that one…

years ago, in an ivory tower in the north east I had a professor who told me that if I have a problem I should write through it, at it even, rather than around it. The problem, I am discovering, is that my boyfriend brings out the crazy in me. Don’t get me wrong, he most assuredly brings joy and love to my life too, but there is no question that our relationship is where all my subconscious beliefs about relationships get to play out. It is almost as if he brought my biological clock, and fairy princess dreams with him. Having rarely, if ever, suffered a bout of “does he like me” in the past, I have discovered a whole new world of “will he still like me tomorrow” insecurities. And having settled comfortably into a ethical but promiscuous existence as the other woman, I found myself confronted by other’s perceptions of me as, I don’t know, taken? Otherwise engaged?

I don’t think I’ve experienced anything quite like it before. I am in an open relationship. With very few exceptions (and I’m talking count ‘em on one hand here) my being partnered doesn’t restrict my ability to sleep with new and interesting people, and yet, it does. On-again-off-again flings I’ve had for years stopped returning my calls. People who chat me up in clubs started asking for my professional opinion rather than my list of fetishes and fancies.

I guess the counter culture didn’t prepare me to be normal :-/

I was trying to understand why I haven’t felt like posting recently. At first it was a time crunch, then a medical concern, more work deadlines, and then I didn’t feel like I had anything to write about. I didn’t want to spend all my words talking about the latest in dildo technology (though a cool new toy did get me back in the groove for this post), but I didn’t have much else to say. I realized that not only was I not spending much of my energy and resources writing about sex, I also wasn’t spending much energy exploring sex. It’s an odd shift for me.

Is this nature taking its course? The reasonable and normal result of moving to a gated community and updating my makeup to understated glam? The consequence of working in conservative cultures? Has my occasional long skirt crossed the line from community (or host country) integration to personal statement?! Or have I just shifted priorities, putting out one too many fires to keep the home fire burning?

Honestly, I couldn’t say. Am I satisfied with my sex life? Yes. Has it changed in the last two years? Yes. The reasoning behind this change probably comes down to a number of factors ranging from opportunities and availability to a sense of “been there done that.” And while I’m not interested in changing my sex life right now, I have been thinking about actions that create a space for sensuality in your (or my) life.

Ok, I won’t lie, I was at the doctor’s office the other day — one of those suburban operations where everyone seems to be trying to have a baby at 40, and picked up a copy of Conceive magazine. As you can imagine, it is all about how to boost conception – something I’m not interested in at the moment. However, it had an interesting article about being (and getting) in the mood. Sex educators, parents, and would-be parents among you may be aware that it isn’t uncommon to lose your sex drive when trying to have a baby especially if conception is proving difficult, if you are using fertility medication, or even if you are just trying to time sex to happen during fertility peaks. The Conceive article, however, had some useful if common sense tips on feeling sexy regardless of your views on children.

Tips like get more exercise, take time off, and pamper yourself are hard to argue with really. Unfortunately they can also be hard to follow. I have made and broken more exercise resolutions than I can name this year despite having several fitness options within blocks of my home (not to mention in my home). I haven’t had enough time to think about taking time off and pampering myself is one of those things that requires time and ends up at the bottom of the to-do list. Whether these are the real reasons behind my changing relationship to sex or not, I’m not sure. However, I am about to have a lot more time in my day, and I’m going to see how, if at all, that changes things.

How does your lifestyle support or interfere with your sex life? Have you made any lifestyle changes specifically to address some component of your sex life? If so what were they?

There is a pretty popular belief that as soon as you try to explain why you haven’t posted in a while your blog explodes in a flaming ball of logic, your readers take you off their RSS feeds and you disappear. I have to say, I am tempted to make excuses:

Gradschool ate my brain.
Work ate my brain.
I was catching up on my reading/sleep/crazy plan to take over the world.

The real reason I haven’t posted though, has a shaved head and a goatee. I love my boy, but it turns out that being in a relationship is not conducive to sex blogging. First there are the sordid details I don’t want to share with the whole wide world. Maybe they are private, but more likely, they need context. They are imbued with the moods and details of our every day existence, and it is really hard to write something in the spirit it was done without that context.

Moreover, relationships are by definition stable, and stability leads to less newness, less “wow I never saw that before I should blog about it.” On the other hand, this is also new and somewhat uncharted territory for me. What I am hoping will save this blog is spring. Spring is when I, and many others, develop a sudden and overwhelming crush on the world. It’s when I look around in hopes of shacking up with someone new, call the people I haven’t spoken to all year and flirt it up on the dance floor. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always Craigslist…

It’s a snippet of a street poetry slam in the mission that I caught while waiting for a hot man to take me to a sleazy bar with good beer and a dark back room.

And the evening was, if not what I expected, good medicine for the settling down bug.

I was reading this post on Biochemistry and a Submissive Girl, and thinking about how the bloggers I follow haven’t been posting as much. It makes me sad because a lot of my inspiration comes from these amazing, insightful, sexy people. What happened?

I know a number of us have started or ended significant relationships over the last year. I know I have. And then there are other life factors, work dissertations, thesis proposals. But you know, I miss the good old days.

If you’re a blogger what causes you to write more or less frequently?

I don’t think so. Ok, so I’m particularly in work-head today having dressed up like a grown up for a meeting with my creative director, but this post isn’t really about dress code. This is a post, one of many, about being so many other things before I’m a domme. In this post Advo discusses his real estate agent as a possible domme, and you know, it bothers me. Not that he is attracted to her all together but that what draws his attention and fuels the post is not the introduction of a competent and experienced agent but rather that of the possibility of a dominant woman. I’ve seen this elsewhere too — the appraising post, the idle chatter on a submissive man’s blog about whether the grumpy bus driver/lady at the cafe/secretary is secretly dominant.

It makes me wonder if people think this way about me? If they hear “human computer interaction…” and tune out to thoughts of being beaten with looped optical fiber. I hope not. I can’t imagine that an interaction with anyone who doesn’t see me as a complete holistic being and is not paying for the privilege of seeing only what they want to see will go far. The bottom line is that it’s downright offensive and if you are going presume to be submissive you could start with a little bit of respect of the kind you afford any other business contact.

I just found out that Flagg passed away earlier in the week.  Coupled with the death of Jack McGeorge in August this feels overwhelming.  These were not people who were close to me by any stretch.  These were people whose talks I attended at the occasional BDSM conference, but more importantly they were part of what grounds the BDSM community for me.    Seeing them pass brings to mind not only their dedication to creating a space where BDSM could exist but also the good will of everyone who has taken the time to teach, show, and explain.  It makes me think of the people who opened doors for kink in general and for me personally, and their passing leaves me at a loss.

I guess this is just a very long way to say thank you…

I get off on hurting my boy.  I get off in that very viseral sexual way when I see him grit his teeth against the pain or watch the bruises come up, but I also get off in some other more emotional way when I know he is taking the pain because he wants to please me.  And then I feel guilty, and that’s the weird part.  I don’t feel guilty about hurting other people.  I might feel guilty if, heaven forbid, I hurt them in a bad way, or hurt them in a way they didn’t like, but I don’t feel guilty about the act of hurting — they get off on it and so do I.

But I feel guilty about hurting my boy.  It is as if my desire to protect my pet from harm extends to a desire to protect him from the pain I inflict.  I do not, mind, feel guilty if he resists, or if he teases or taunts me (all in good humor), but rather I feel guilty when he is good.  I feel guilty precisely because he is good, because he subjects himself to pain for my pleasure, and this makes him precious to me.  It’s a strange kind of guilt too.  Not the kind you are meant to feel over being mean to another human being (”what have I done” guilt), but rather that kind of pang of regret or loss you feel when you notice you’ve damaged a precious heirloom.

I feel bad for him.  Look at this lovely creature who does so much to please me and what does he get in return?  Torture.  And I know on some level he enjoys it in that strange and complicated way that BDSM allows us to enjoy the things we hate.  I know he wouldn’t allow it if he did not enjoy some part of it.  He asks me to hurt him, and I get off on hurting him and I still feel bad about huring him.  Why, pray tell, does my brain work this way and do others feel similarly?