being less my own
Right now I am in the middle of reading a bunch of books about M/s to try and puzzle out my confusion and wariness about it. The structure of authority exchange, as opposed to power exchange, seems unworkably dogmatic to me, but I’ve seen people do it really beautifully and compassionately and I’m fascinated by how that happens. My resistance stems principally from fear about putting a frame around my [everything coming to consciousness] self that would be so necessarily contingent and reliant upon somebody else. And although frames for one’s self made of people’s consciousnesses are all around, in book format and as workshops and course outlines, those can be entered and left relatively at will and carry no obligations (other than maybe trying not to drop them in the bath or interrupt them with your cell phone, and, er, the obligations of religious and political worldviews. Hm). Let’s just say they require time, but not necessarily investment or complete acquiescence.
How much sovereign self assurance does any person need? I’ve come to recognize that I’ve got very strong natural tendencies towards obedience and I often feel I have to take countermeasures against this (to avoid, for example, accidentally following the odd person with a lot of presence around at work). You may smirk, but people’s assertiveness really works on me. It’s scary how well. Unconscious surrender comes naturally to me, and I’m not convinced it’s thoroughly healthy.
I’m pretty immersive—I don’t like doing things by halves—so I have to think about probable costs and benefits of getting on board with something before I decide to invest myself in it so I don’t get unintentionally consumed. Significant word choice: my partner A. says, “I’ve never heard anyone actually refer to their supervisor as ‘the person in charge of me’ but that’s actually how you see it, isn’t it?”—and I do: I see labour more as a channeling of energy towards accomplishment than an activity to be overseen. I also relate strongly to the phrase, “getting on board with something,” because once I’ve aligned myself with another force, I don’t parcel out my investment at every step; I simply do what it takes by leaps and bounds and give what I’ve got to the finishing stroke.
I know that the M/s dynamic is not for me—I don’t need it, it doesn’t suit me, and in fact, if anything, I’m moving in the opposite direction on a separate path: learning to claim and channel more in D/s. But since my natural orientation blends conditional submission, willing service, and instinctive surrender—and it’s that last one that troubles me the most—it might benefit from some of the tools and approaches used in M/s, though certainly not as a categorical mode of relating.
Anyway, more book reviews to follow shortly. And surely more posts. :)
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Tags: D/s, gratitude, M/s
happy birthday, violetwhite
Remedios Varo, Los amantes, 1963
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grace and protocol
I’m currently trying to separate out what appeals to me about training and protocols so I have a better sense of what I think I should develop on my own, versus what I think might work well in the context of my D/s relationship. This is a sort of follow-up to all the moaning I’ve been doing about my pallid sense of entitlement and discomfort with “submitting-at”.
I know that the flex between choice and requirement is crucial to my kink. That’s where all the hot tension increases and lessens. So it seems important to understand what works best for me when it’s of my own free choosing, and what works best when it’s compulsory and binding. Examples of free-will delights include all the things I categorize as service—spontaneous small gift-giving, writing this blog, undertaking tasks voluntarily, doing self-directed research. Performing these activities makes me feel peaceful and happy; they strengthen my service-submissive orientation principally for my own pleasure. They are all things that I would strongly dislike if I had to do them because that would destroy the point. On the other hand, examples of things I appreciate because I feel compelled to do them include any task my dominant partner sets me, as well as abiding by protocols he has established. These occasionally do feel very much like exercises: things that I’m doing because I have to, because not doing them would be a violation of trust. Sometimes I really don’t feel inclined to document a super late-night orgasm, for example, but of course I will do necessarily (and I will take pleasure in my willed obedience, but it’s of a pervier variety).
The perviness of protocols is really confusing to me, kind of like trying to punish a masochist with pain. Orlando writes that anything Murre tags as a reward feels like a reward to him. I’m like this with demonstrance, too: anything that evinces my submissive devotion, for me gets coded reward. It doesn’t matter to me that my dominant partner observes me keeping protocol: the unspoken trust fuels the dynamic. Protocols for me, so far, I see as having fuctioned principally as affirmative things, like mantras—rather than being codifications of an ideal standard of manners, style, and presentation to be judged by my dominant partner, which is often how the term “protocol” in D/s is understood.
(As an aside: I found this awesome post about service/obedience/behaviour modification by Trinity [the 27 comments on it are very interesting], when I was looking for my favourite comment by Dw3t-Hthr on Ranat’s post, Altering:
It’s all well and good to say “This is the deal on offer, take it or leave it”, but if the deal on offer isn’t one that someone considers good, well, they’ll leave it. And one can frame the negotiation and the ‘I’m not getting enough out of this’ or whatever in terms of strict hierarchy in which the Rank-Up person wants to maintain possession of the Rank-Down person, or in terms of mutual negotiation between partners of equal status who also do things with power, control, service, and whatever, or in terms of one party being a valuable asset to be retained and kept up, or what have you. All kinds of things.
On the other hand, some people kink on being treated as an interchangeable part who can be discarded if they don’t fit the role assigned. In which case being treated like someone with negotiating power or a valuable asset would be a drawback.
…because I wondered if there might be some kind of correlation between obedience/ideal behaviour-centred protocols and the idea of the submissive as an interchangeable part. And, likewise, between the mantra-like protocols and a view of the submissive as valuable asset. I can sense a relationship between who is determined to sit in judgement in each of these structures [ie whether the direction of the relationship is shared], whether one or both people are principally responsible for putting forth ideas, and how each of these aspects serves to move power around).
Nine years ago I was once repulsed by a dominant who bought me some stockings (which I find personally appealing to wear), but then said, “This is the uniform that all my girls wear.” I had a strong aversion to that interchangeable part assumption at the time, mostly because I didn’t find the individual to be a trustworthy or obedience-inspiring person at all. I felt over-qualified to be a simple uniform-filler and it was a total turn-off.
Now, my attitude has shifted, mostly because there is enough trust in my current D/s situation to enable me to recognize that our intentional introduction of increased formality comes from a place of shared desire, understanding and responsibility. It’s exciting.
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Tags: D/s, protocol, trust
learning from leather
Since I started this blog I’ve attended two west coast leatherwomen’s conferences and I definitely plan on attending more: I find them crazily arousing and satisfying and wonderful. I have tremendous amounts of respect for that community, which seems really strong and coherent, even though/or because of, perhaps? it’s made up of people from different backgrounds and perspectives in kink.
What nourishes me:
Dev and Andrea have posted interesting entries about their discomfort with what Dev terms the socially enforced power disparity of Old Guard leather. Perversely, I enjoy the opportunity to be on the receiving end of this kind of thing, and have my desire for subordinate status just be assumed normal and acceptable. Not so much if it were to happen in a pedagogical setting, because I believe in the value of freeing education from power dynamics as much as possible, but as an initial way of encountering a small group of people I’ve found it to be elegant and hot.
It feels much different from the other mundane sorts of nonconsent or lack of consideration about limits and boundaries you might find at any kink event—like wheelchair inaccessibility or an expectation that you’ll participate in something just by virtue of being present—because with this social presumption of subordinate status, everyone knows you clearly haven’t signed up to be treated this way, so it’s a direct opportunity to test the waters. And I like it a lot, because the unspoken extension of (and positive regard for) a submissive place for me to be is a major kink of mine. And if it weren’t, I’d just combine the law of two feet with the law of dirty look.
Much as I enjoy it, this form of initiation does complicate matters for me, though, because I’m always feeling the need to make assessments about whether my behaviour is appropriate or not. And given that my mind naturally runs along those lines, it sort of ups the ante for opportunities for self-paralysis on my part. This is related to how I clam up around dominance. It makes me even more self-conscious about expressing my thoughts, so if I think it’s unnecessary for me to express them, I won’t. That feels okay, because I quite like the sensation of being a sealed up safe of mostly rubbish and the odd undisclosed gem. But the trouble is that it makes it very difficult for the tops to see what’s inside. But see here, I will show you them: the two Big Important Things I’ve learned from leather so far:
and
Pleasingly simple, and—especially that last one—so useful.
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Tags: Mayhem!, Wicked Womyn
pain scale
I had an incredible weekend full of nourishment and hunger. I feel like I learned, and grew, a lot.
I also did a bit of bottoming this past week and got to experience all sorts of sensations including pain, delight and release.
I’ve known for a long time that I like to take my pain strong, but I just realized that the particular thing that I really like is the tapering aftereffect of heavy sensation. I like the enduring and savoury side of its bite. So, strikes that are very direct but have a bit of drag on them are especially good for me, like the waves from a caning. I had a particularly peppery caning this weekend that made me giggle because of the amazing way the ripples of pain overlapped and cascaded. It wasn’t austere; it was kind of thrummy, and my marks feel kind of like that too, now—I keep rocking back and forth on them and throwing away my cushions.
Earlier in the week I was a test subject for a friend of mine who is studying massage therapy and who had an upcoming exam on three fairly intense techniques: myofascial release, neuromuscular release, and trigger point therapy. We used a pain scale from one to five, with three being noticeable, easily tolerable intensity, four being good, strong, clearly beneficial pain moving into heavy, savoury pain, and five being very unpleasant and hard to endure—the limit. I asked at the outset if my friend would cue me for this scale, or whether it was my responsibility to provide numbers at regular intervals throughout, because I know how nonverbal and inward my reaction to pain can be—and also, when it comes to stretching and separating muscle and connective tissue, I really don’t have enough of a sense of the point at which heavy pain signals benefit vs. detriment. We decided that it would mostly be cued for me when certain nodules and bunches of tissue were pinpointed and pressure was increased, but I still had to remain very much in control of my faculties.
It went really well, with most sensation moving quickly through to three and then staying in the four-to-five area, and with the trigger point stuff I could feel pain shoot off in different directions which was interesting. I liked the bands of radiant heat and warmth that the pressure produced in my muscles. I felt very good afterwards, but interestingly, not nearly as spacey as I had been the previous time, I think because I knew I had to stay in my body so as to assess the sensation and use my words accurately, I couldn’t just float off. So in that way it really was like bottoming, not like submitting in the normal relaxing massage-submission way. It was good practice.
That deft, clinical, sheet-into-panties tuck is one of my favourite things.
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Tags: bottoming, communication, pain
of boxes and balls
Why it is hard for me to imagine putting myself in a position of overt submission to my dominant partner without his requesting it? Is it because of a fundamental lack of entitlement or lack of courage on my part, or is it because it strikes me as pushy or selfish and contradictory to how I define submission?
I liked this post by Sinclair about transformative energies, and it made me think that I should grow some metaphorical balls, too—to strengthen my power to enclose and contain and to guide and direct. But then I wondered, does anyone not need to do this? And is there anything inherently masculine about the energy of that kind of self-assurance—because it also strikes me as very maternal; a matrix.
A little while ago, on a date with a close friend, I confessed to him my feeling of always needing to strengthen my dominance and the more masculine side of my energy, in order to present more effectively in the workplace, for example. He said, perhaps you should accept the strength that lies in who you are. Gentle self-assurance is just as valid as a more conspicuously assertive mode of presenting, you know.
I do know. I also know that I sometimes take things on in a way that’s far too prescriptive, when upon further reflection, I come to realize that these things don’t actually apply to my situation. That’s some variant of the fundamental attribution error, I guess.
So, for example, when littlegirl’s post, opening the box, arrived in my reader, I drank it straight down like a remedy. Yes of course I need to divulge!, I took in immediately. Clearly, a lack of courage on my part in making requests means that I’m holding on to control, and therefore not submitting fully.
But then I thought about it a little more, and, thing is, I don’t have a little black patent box. I don’t have a list of fantasies to be fulfilled. I don’t have a quest. I do have a bunch of activities I’d like to try out, but as a bottom, not a submissive. My submission isn’t experimental, it’s immersively experiential.
What I do have is energy that turns on at the thought of him, a pussy that swells and throbs when I think about what he likes and when I imagine what he might like. And willingness to try and figure out how to do this.
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Tags: bottoming, D/s, submission
salience, entitlement
I want to expand upon what I posted about yesterday—that service is the way I deal with my unholy amounts of submissive desire, and that I’m cool with this being my responsibility, because it’s essentially all about me.
It is a little bit about the dynamic, but I don’t believe in having expectations when it comes to sex—too much buzzkill.
Having expectations is related to a sense of entitlement, though, and that I recognize is a bit underdeveloped in me. By entitlement, I mean the sense that I deserve or have a right to certain things automatically. I don’t come by much of that naturally. I’m much more excited by making and earning and learning—gaining and having and assuming bore me. And I don’t tend to assume I should have anything. And also, I like to be extremely self-reliant when it comes to my personal sexual growth.
Last night I had an interesting conversation with my dominant partner—I was being unusually inquisitive. The questions I asked produced all sorts of concrete answers and our exchange felt really grounding. One important thing I said was that he had control over when and where the power dynamic came into being, and therefore, in terms of when the dynamic came into play, I was waiting for cues from him. And he asked whether it was hard for me to imagine putting myself in a position of overt submission to him without his requesting it, and I said yes, because it is.
Now I am trying to work out whether that is so hard for me to imagine because it seems like a self-entitled thing to do (which I’m not comfortable with, because of my quirks, but which I could work to develop) or whether it’s counterintuitive to me because it goes against what I understand submission to be—either in terms of how I understand it personally [ie, my kink]—and/or how it’s more broadly understood in bdsm culture.
No easy answers on this one, but it’s given me a lot to think about… and a potential new direction to explore.
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Tags: D/s, submission
reading between the lines
(This is a follow-up post to my previous entry, a subject for a hard ruler, and Dev’s post, more continuity, please).
Submissives like me and Jos and Sera feel the constancy of our desire to submit, and the infrequency with which it tends to be tapped, extremely difficult to bear.
Submission is a human drive like any other—it makes sense that the force of this desire will expand and contract and in life it will only ever be satiated temporarily. I know that the “rightful place” I seek does exist permanently: it’s a small piece of dark and I’m not in a hurry to get there yet. So, submissive satisfaction is always a temporary matter and a management issue.
How do you determine the point at which a drive becomes pathological? Large amounts of yearning don’t cut it: that’s just the normal response to desire. Feeling weakened, vulnerable, self-loathing or unduly anxious could be good signs if these bad feelings didn’t come along with, you know, being a sensitive human being, which some submissive people are fairly likely to be. For myself, I know that insecurity about whether my submissiveness is appreciated or not runs at about 5% in the background of my normal life and bumps up to 80% of my worry when several small areas of my life simultaneously come to a head (yeah not in that awesome way). I can always ask for reassurance. There’s no need for me to be so proud.
How do you depathologize the power of being kept in suspense? You redirect it into pleasure. In my case, that’s where service comes in—writing here, thinking about stuff in order to understand myself/better help myself and others, keeping protocol, learning the odd useful skill like how to properly fold fitted sheets (there’s one true way) and coil rope (two ways!), and generally being on the lookout for possible gaps that perhaps I can helpfully fill. It elates me to do that stuff—especially the genuinely useful interchange, and the skills development.
And that is the main reason why the “slave” label is not for me—because my kink is not to be possessed or controlled entirely, it’s to serve willingly.
sentient :p
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Tags: pencil, service, submission
a subject for a hard ruler
(This is a response to Dev’s post, subjugation as love. I feel a bit strange about putting this stuff into words, but I also feel sort of compelled to, out of curiosity).
Because of the connection between my dominant partner and I, I feel that “subjugation” thing pretty strongly. It’s definitely a key aspect of submissiveness for me. It’s tied into headspace, unlike service, which is another side of my submission but which feels more like a sort of constant or “entire” type of emotional orientation—like a kind of very intentional longing to meet unstated desires.
Subjugation in itself doesn’t feel to me like an externally directed force, like love, or honour. It’s a more selfish form of pleasure (if the sensation of self-dissolution can be called selfish, which seems all right to me). I crave it. Service, I also crave—but that is the externalized force of me-being-subject; it’s like expressing the pleasure of loving and being loved through fucking, except, instead, it conveys the pleasure of being subjected through acts of service. So if service is a way to express love or honour felt by being made subject—subjugation is more of a stand-alone delight.
Willing subjugation facilitates devotion, though. And that is extremely legible:
He looked at me with his beautiful subby eyes… (via)
I am devoted to my dominant partner and that makes me feel like he is (as Dev characterizes her idea of Joscelin’s perception of her), “distant, alien and possessed of unknowable motivations”—except that I would describe my version as: elevated, numinous, and possessed of his own, unknowable motivations. This kind of devoted perception I have of him surrounds him when he’s being dominant. The rest of the time, it still exists, but in a muted version that I’d describe as a form of very deep, human respect. Polite equals is what I think we would be if I didn’t always want to skew towards the power dynamic, but I get so much pleasure from the devotion that I tend not to want to turn it (or have it turned) off.
Subjugation feels to me like deliberate positive reinforcement for this devotion, because that is when he formally takes it.
Fuck, it’s crazily hot. It makes me want to kneel all over the place.
The scary thing is the worry that this kind of submissive response “isn’t asked for” and isn’t wanted. Anxiety about that is very frightening and possibly damaging. It isn’t necessarily a helpless love that opens a black hole of need, though, so long as there’s some sort of structure to ensure the submissive partner doesn’t get insecure and all stymied by self-doubt (I’ve got a sweet little protocol to follow for this now). But beyond that—also, basically, to keep on with this, I am prepared to accept that there will come moments when I will need to bury my pride and just ask.
Thoughts that are anathema to my feelings of submissive devotion are things to do with fallibility like, *big breath* “my dominant partner doesn’t know what he’s doing” or something of that ilk, any sort of disrespect or ethical infringement (like not telling him I broke the bowl. Well, I guess I did think about that. But there was never any question that I wouldn’t tell him), making negative judgements (although I do always assess what happens between us) and contradicting him. The contradictions thing is important because I’ve come to realize that I cannot have a meaningful debate with him when the power dynamic is on, or when I’m invested in protecting that power dynamic because that’s my default setting.
Thoughts that go along with those devoted feelings aren’t really thoughts. For me, the devotion is just a known. My biggest desire is to communicate that known to him, which is why when he is dominant with me, it is a rush. Because he’s then taking the power I’m giving, and it makes me feel baseline strong and secure, with peaks of agitated eagerness-to-please and valleys of calm bliss. None of that worry.
Being ruthlessly subjugated is gratifying because it both endorses my devotion, and gives me a (rightful) place to be. I feel like all there is is mercy. I don’t feel deep intimacy, although it’s certainly an intimate experience. Mostly, I feel a great deal of joyful gratitude, and peace.
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Tags: D/s, devotion, submission
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