Wednesday, 24 February 2010

Arse: Knowing my elbow from, etc.

It takes a lot to confuse me about my sexuality.

I like men. I like women. I like all shades of everything in between. I seem to be able to top and bottom and D and s, I'll try everything else that's going and if I like it, I'll do it again. That's about the size and shape of it. No confusion there.

He and I are supposed to be all about kink. My pure-sex attraction is supposed to be about kink. So when we wake up in the early hours and the odd brush of skin turns into a warm hand, the press of bodies, soft lips but no teeth and we screw like that, gentle and slow and electrifying, and then lay there kissing and stroking hair and cuddling close, intertwining bodies until we fall asleep or can't survive any longer without coffee...

...and I like it...

...this confuses me.

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

Some People have One People..

I was having a bit of an internal whinge (which became an external one, for one person, sorry about that) today about how I never seem to be able to find what I want and, in the process of explaining, realised I already have it.

I want love. I want sex, and orgasms (not one or the other, as so easily becomes the case). I want companionship, and conversation; hugs; friendship; company, love of the deserved and spontaneous AND unconditional varieties. I want lust and warmth and happiness and, whilst I see and argue for polyamory as a completely valid lifestyle choice, I seem to think I need to find all of this in one person.

How daft would that be? You risk becoming a recluse, alienating/ignoring everyone else. If it goes wrong, you've lost it all. Talk about having all your eggs in one basket.

I have all those kinds of love, I have company and peole to do things with, I have the sex (sporadically, and hey, if you want a good job done, do it yourself),I have people I can talk to about different areas of my life. Ok, I have to remember who knows what andI can't always do the bits I want with the people I would like to do it with but it's all there, right when I want it. If I fall out with someone, or the relationship changes... that's one or two spacesto fill, not all of them.

I have everything I want. I just need to remember what that is.

Thursday, 18 February 2010

Oklahoma, Pancakes and Harder

Safewords are great. I tend to find, in non-extreme play, that the mere fact one is in place means it won't get used. It takes the potential for panic away, means you know that if you genuinely want it to, everything stops so you can push yourself and let yourself enjoy things which, if you weren't confident of this circuit-break, might be a shade too heavy to enjoy.

That said, I'm fortunate enough to be playing with someone extremely conscientious of such things, who will break to check I'm alright if he thinks I'm struggling in the wrong kind of way or if something felt a little harsher to him than he meant it to. He also knows the difference, if I'm gagged, between "oh, woe is me, I am helpless" struggling, and "shit, I can't actually breathe" struggling. He knows I have a bit of a negative history too, so he likes a nice clear green light.

We set up standing safewords the other day, which is nice for both of us, should anything spontaneous happen and we're not sure we're on the same page. It makes it all so very simple: If the word's there and they haven't used it, you're good to keep going.

You need a sort of code. As well as that all-encompassing, pulling the plug, "I say [this] and it stops straight away", I tend to find a few code words for feedback work nicely. An "I'm okay, but no further," or "slower," word, and maybe a "that's good but it's too much" word. As a domme, I'm very much the beginner: I lack the confidence to push past any resistance unless I know for a fact that it's put on, and I don't know well enough how to read that yet. If I ask "more?" and the answer is "please, no, mistress" it still takes me a while to compute that this is no level of safeword and as such is in fact a yes. But I'm getting there.

I got a new crop the other day. I found it's a nightmare trying to work out how hard you're going with it, so instead of having him count one to whatever for me, I had him count each stroke between one and ten, one being "I can't feel that", five being perfect, ten being "that hurts too much to be enjoyable". Started at a two, misjudged and got a nine, then settled around a nice seven. It helped not to have to work out if yelps were a good thing or not: if he'd wanted less, he could have cranked the number up and I'd have eased off.

I saw someone in a t-shirt which said 'the safeword is "harder"' once, which amused me quite a lot, and I've also been told of games where you use a pleasure word (a yes, a please, a partner's name or something) as a safeword so as soon as you're really enjoying it, you risk them stopping, which would probably be fantastically amusing in the right game but I can imagine might be horribly confusing if it slips. That's a bit much for me, I need my words clear.

When No doesn't mean no, something has to.

Friday, 5 February 2010

Fuck "love", give me fire.

Fetish, by its very nature, is not serious. Don't get me wrong, there are some things out there you need to take fairly seriously, lest you do yourself or your partner(s) some serious damage, but it's play. You take a concept, or an element, and crank it up and up and up until it almost becomes a parody of itself, a pantomime version of whatever you feel like you shouldn't find appealing but do.

Playing at something is not the same as doing it. It's a world apart, however realistic you make a game, purely because it isn't real. It's like when you play at being princesses or soldiers as a child. A current plaything and I were discussing this the other day - people's different preferences for games as children, about how early you develop a fascination with particular subjects, and what makes different people file different concepts away as enjoyable, even at a pre-school age. How these ideas turn into fantasy, long before you even have the physical ability for sexual urges. In primary school, my friends wanted to play mums and dads, or princesses on unicorns. Only one friend and I wanted to play at kidnap and being held prisoner. I had a definite preoccupation, throughout primary school, with most forms of torture. There are things I still don't have the confidence to admit I was thinking about at such tender ages that I now recognise as pure fetish - god, the things my poor Barbies went through - and we wondered, to what extent are people born kinky? What creates this predisposition to be attracted to things outside conventional parameters, even before you realise that is what's happening?

Aforementioned play thing and I started off quite shakily. He quickly picked up that I hesitated in strange places, correctly guessed at abuse although I think he thought I'd been treated a measure worse than I had. Still, he was worried abbot crossing lines that would trigger bad memories and to be honest, so was I, but it turns out the more lines he crosses… the more I like it.

When you've been with someone who claims to adore you, who should rightfully be trying to please you, but who essentially uses you quite carelessly, gets bored and tosses you away, you can get pretty jaded. Such a pleasurable inverse, then, in someone with no pseudo-romantic agenda, taking you and dressing you up and near-visciously doing as they please with you…all the while touching you almost worshipfully, appreciating every second and determinedly pressing all the right buttons even when they're pretending not to. This is the way round it should be: it's the difference between use and "use", between feeling dirty and being told you are whilst someone's doing something which feels insanely good, and you know it's not REAL.

I had a huge problem with someone spewing out how gorgeous I was, how good they were going to make me feel, whilst looking at me with general disdain and leaving me feeling used and empty. On that basis, having someone hold me by the hair and tell me they're going to use me like a doll, whilst looking at me like they can't believe their luck, touching me with tender reverence and ensuring I'm left sated, thrilled and comfortable is almost like having an antidote applied to a venomous snakebite.

The phrase 'no contest' springs to mind...