Rope Rope Rope

A “Leonardo” rope machine arrived, much to my glee, and I made maybe eight-feet of some two-ply (and each ply was two-ply) rope out of some really rough sisal twine to get a feel for it. The crudeness of the twine was an issue, since all the strands that were sticking out got caught in each other, making the rope twist together prematurely.

Soon, hopefully I can make a trip to a purveyor of cheap hemp rope which I can take apart and remake, or possibly a purveyor of thick hemp beading twine.

I’ve found a tutorial for conditioning hemp rope, and I was wondering if anyone had any other tips or information. The tutorial says to use mineral oil, but I vaguely remember hearing something about jojoba oil working, and I’d rather work with a plant oil.

Over at Twisted Monk, they apparently use French palm-and-needle whipping for the ends. Upon further research palm-and-needle appears to be the longest-lasting form of whipping, and I have tried in vain to find instructions for it. The closest I’ve found is instructions for sailmaker’s whipping, but I’ve also seen some references in books that look exactly like sailmaker’s whipping, but claim to be palm-and-needle.

So does anyone know:

1. If there is a difference between French palm-and-needle and plain old palm-and-needle?
2. If there is a difference between palm-and-needle and sailmaker’s whipping?
3. If there are differences, does anyone know any resources for French palm-and-needle, and palm-and-needle whipping?
4. What the hell is the “palm” in palm-and-needle? Is it some kind of tool?

Pretty, pretty, pretty rope… I keep working the rope machine just to see the hooks spin. Sometimes I am way too easily entertained. And other times I am not easily entertained enough.

My Angst With the Scene

I’ve been saying for a good few weeks now that I was go hunt down some munches and kinky get-togethers to at least try what they were like in this area, for the benefit of being in a room full of people to whom my sexuality is not a mysterious, unknown thing. The people I live with have been amazingly accepting and encouraging. At the same time, it is not the same as being with people who understand because they share similar desires.

I kept saying I was going to look up munches, but I kept not doing it, until finally, I was like, “Dude, get on that.” The webpages I found were all out of date and had broken links, so I turned once again to Fetlife, which proved a very rich resource, but still didn’t shift my ambivalent feelings about the whole enterprise (please please please switch to something other than white on black!).

What I was not expecting was my physical reaction to reading about the groups and figuring out which ones I would like to go to. A couple of times I honestly felt sick, which I took to be some combination of my feelings about my largely disappointing experiences in the City, and my own fears about traveling a minimum of four hours by internal combustion engine technology to another City just to be stuck in the same (I am assuming, possibly erroneously, having never been) taboo-, poisonous-fabric-, title-, hierarchy-loving atmosphere. I don’t know if that’s what it’s like. But I do know that the one group I found for dominant women focused on female-supremacy (*eye roll*), required all “males” to be identify as submissives or slaves, and stated that “switch males will be removed.” Removed. Their word. Switch “females” would be tolerated, as long as they acted in the dominant role. All submissives and slaves were required to be naked at events. Their website suggests they enjoy the excessive use of corsets. It did not set up a good picture for me. An iconoclastic part of me wanted to go just so I could wear my most casual, worn clothing and be like, “Yo.”

The other groups I looked at seemed perfectly average, with no red-flags, but I still got so tight and snappy around the idea. I really dislike traveling by internal combustion engine technology. Both as a physical experience and the fact that it uses gallons of processed fossilized carboniferous period plant matter. And have I ever mentioned that I loathe Cities?

Subversive Sub took the matter by the scruff of the neck and started her own scene. I don’t have the emotional or logistical resources for that. But the mad idea of trying to organize a KinkForAll here has crossed my mind. I don’t know if I have the emotional or logistical resources for that either, but shit’s gotta change here as much as anywhere else, even if in this one tiny way.

I just realized that I have already been setting myself up to be leered at by mandoms, awkwardly approached by mansubs, and in general patronized by anyone who happens to have more revolutions around the sun than I do. Which is really not a good place to come from. Sure, those things might happen, but I don’t need to go into it fortified and armored.

I will go. We will see.

Bookstores Taunt Me

I carefully stepped into the dingy confines of a used bookstore the other day, and quickly ascertained the location of the sci-fi/fantasy section. The books were facing exclusively spine-out, so I was skimming for any title that caught my eye, rather than cover (you can judge some books by their cover. Cover artists sometimes have niche markets on certain subgenres, and you can guess a lot of how a book will go based on recognizing the style of the artist. Then again, I would never have read Song of Ice and Fire by being inspired by the covers, so it’s double-edged).

I saw something by Dave Duncan, who I was introduced to in early teenage-dom through the King’s Blades trilogies. In which dudes get stabbed through the heart with their own swords to magically bind them with unbreakable loyalty to the wards they protect. Do we notice any familiar themes? Anyway, I saw “A Rose-Red City,” plucked it out of the pile, and was confronted with this cover:

What the hell?

The whims of chance are a fucking tease.

Seriously. Naked dude being subdued by minotaur, being defended by a woman(?) wielding a sparkly energy baton trailing a stream of light like a whip, with an apparent chemical dependency on make-up and hairspray. I read a couple of pages and nothing hooked me, so I put it away.

Skim, skim, skim–

Lady Pain.

What?

Read back cover. Oh. The Pain is bad. Of course. It wants to destroy the world. Of course. Eye roll.

I didn’t stay long to really dig for the jewels I’m sure were there, but I did put a lot of stuff back after reading, “[Name], [title] of [place] has lost [his/her] [symbol of divine right], and must now embark on a perilous journey to regain [his/her] [hereditary tyrannic rulership] from the [bad guys/pirates/communists/even WORSE hereditary tyranic rulership].” With a few exceptions, these days I am little interested in reading about someone’s fucking monarchy.

Hint to the sci-fi/fantasy community: There are other forms of socio-economic organization than democracy or monarchy. There are even, shockingly, societies where no one rules anyone else!!!

There are a lot of superb writers out there, and among them there are even some superb authors, and among them there are people who use cliches as a springboard for some kick-ass storytelling. No denying that. But where does this obsession with monarchies and empires come from? The sword-and-sorcery thing? Believing that those are the only “ancient” forms of socio-economic organization before the advent of Freedom (TM) and Democracy (TM)?

But that is completely random and not what this post was going to be about. I am still debating reading “A Rose-Red City” just because, seriously, that cover. Priceless.

The Frothing, Howling Rush

I keep wanting to express what I’m going through here, and drawing a blank. Possibly because for the first time in my memory I’m not analyzing my process, I’m just feeling what I’m going through. For the past four weeks, I have been a willing tumbleweed in gale-force winds, and it feels amazing, but the past few days it’s been overwhelming.

Throwing down the maximum security walls for partner started a chain reaction of coming out, and having some very in depth, long conversations with people in my community about my sexuality and gender, and specifically about sadism. Which has felt something like a dam crumbling slightly at the top, then suddenly exploding with the force of the river behind it. And I’ve just been going with it, things and feelings that I never even knew about within myself. The response has been a rather shocking level of support and acceptance, which in retrospect seems obvious. Every single day I’ve said something like, “I don’t know that I’ve ever felt his way before,” because every day I feel completely different and new, and it’s happening so damn fast.

I don’t know how to manifest what I feel, present as what I am, or what to do about any of it, except unravel and reweave my baggage as a human being.

I moved to a new sleeping place, and the past week I’ve woken up three or four times a night. My entirely life, I have always slept. Very. Deeply. I have slept through hurricanes and tornadoes (but not earthquakes). The moon is so bright in this new place, and where I slept before was dark. I’ve been having these intense, vivid dreams, of being initiated into a third gender through ceremony, of sharing a lover with my partner’s partner who was not my partner. Even when I don’t remember the dreams in the morning I immediately have this full, potent, overwhelming feeling that I associate with my process.

Last night I never stopped waking up, hovering somewhere between awakening and dreaming, rolling, tossing, moaning, rearranging the blanket, waking up exhausted.  With a headache. (What is that?) And always present is this feeling, right now revolving around my gender, a confluence of– something. I’ve started feeling like a woman again, or maybe more accurately more feminine. But more steadily in this ebbing cycle of exploration I feel like both-neither.

The other night, a woman I wrote about before as not being able to understand said to me over dinner, “You know, today I was watching two of my co-workers, and I watched one of them snap a towel at the other so hard it probably broke the skin. And he was just gleeful, totally enjoying it, and the other guy was like, ‘Oeghhhh!‘” She made a scrunched up face. “They were both laughing so hard, and I suddenly had a flash of what it was like to enjoy that, to enjoy pain, and giving it. And you know, they’ve been doing this for a while, you can always hear them, the snap of the towel –it’s loud– then laughter. They’ve been walking around in shorts with welts on their legs all summer. It was really neat to have that insight.”

Just over dinner, with everyone. It was amazing. To have that topic brought up, by someone else, over dinner.

Something came to me the other day. Partner’s partner, after overlooking this blog, said to me, “I really see no indication that you’re attracted to women.” Ever since acknowledging my attraction to other genders and sexes, I’ve felt vaguely guilty when I continue to be more consistently attracted to male people with man genders. Like I have this idea that my attraction has to be equal for all genders or I’m not doing it right. And I realized that in my fantasies, I’m not fantasizing about women per se, but people who are female. I feel more attraction toward other gendered people with female bodies than I feel for women at present. Whatever the hell ‘woman’ actually is. For some reason that factor doesn’t stop me from being consistently attracted to male people with man genders, maybe because I was socialized to. Whatever. When I think of being sexual with the women around me I draw a blank. When I think of their body types, I think hot.

The other night I tallied up very approximate rankings for how often I fantasize about which kind of people and it came out roughly like this:

1. Male people, or male men
2. People with male bodies and female genitals
3. Male people with non-man genders, especially those presenting as culturally feminine, and female people presenting as culturally masculine (I had a couple of years in my late teens where I consistently fantasized about being with transwomen and transmen)
4. Female people who felt distinctly not like women, and people with bodies somewhere on the spectrum between female and male

I am noticing that ‘woman’ is not appearing in my list. So who knows where that will end up.

While I am thinking about it, I want to pimp the book The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture by Walter L. Williams, which documents one of the alternative genders in many indigenous peoples of North America: Male people who dressed and behaved androgynously, mixing men and women’s clothing and work, usually having sex with masculine men, and for many peoples performing esteemed spiritual functions. One of the things I appreciated most was the author’s distinction between a male person being feminine, and being non-masculine, and being androgynous. In later chapters Williams drew parallels to modern urban gay subculture and other male same-sexual institutions in non-tribal societies, but on the whole I thought he did a good job of differentiating cultural identity from sexual acts. Williams wrote this before the popularization of the term Two Spirit among modern North American peoples, so he uses the term ‘berdache’, which was accepted in the anthropological community for many years, and seems to have largely been abandoned since it essentially means ‘catamite.’ He also has an annoying tendency to refer to the person who is around the cock as being the ‘passive’ sexual partner, and the person inside the anus or the mouth as the ‘active’ sexual partner, but I just had to keep reminding myself that he was using the standard terminology of his field.

Back to where I am in my process. Partner has been away for a month now, on a trip of indefinite proportions. It is sad, glad, and exciting. I’m finding myself exploring my sexuality with myself again, and my masochism has wriggled into the forefront for attention. I realized that based on my experiences bottoming I enjoy it, I would do it again, and I really see no conflict with my dominance. I’ve been untangling my fantasies, feeling for the relationship that fulfills me underlying each act and dynamic.

I’ve been wanting to start learning rope again. I was going to buy some hemp, but Zac planted the nefarious idea in my brain at the first KinkForAll that I could make my own, so I got a simple rope machine (waaaaay to lazy and unskilled at the moment to build my own). I’m feeling a lot more open to finding nearby BDSM groups than I was, so I’m going to try to find an active munch and see where it goes. Also a genderqueer group if one is near the munch and I can hit them in one fell swoop.

Because I am fell, goddamnit. Very fell.

Twice

Ever since I was seventeen I have seen a man’s face in my head. Sometimes his body type changes, sometimes he is pale, sometimes he is dark, but his face has always been the same. He became a common partner in my fantasies. I felt so strongly connected to this man that I wondered who he was.

Is he someone I’ll meet? Will he be a friend, a teacher, a brother, a partner? Do I have to find him, or will he find me? Where is he? Why do I keep seeing him, am I obsessed with this facial structure, what if I judge other men’s beauty by him, a figment of dubious origin and purpose? Where is he and why can’t I find him?

Until one day, in the middle of a lecture on permaculture of all things, I realized that maybe he was me.

And in its way, it made so much sense. Past the initial confusion of ancient lunch-ladies calling me ‘young man’ the first time I cut my hair short, I’ve always enjoyed being mistaken for a man, even flattered. I always put it down to the general feeling that the global superpower’s gender roles were extremely silly. And it would explain how compelling I found characters who regularly alternated between the binary sexes and genders when I was an adolescent. Hell, I wrote stories about it. More recently I felt intensely fascinated watching a movie with my mentor about sex-gender switching people (but I also just wanted to have sex with them).

It is bizarre for me how new things keep popping up when I set out to explore my dominant, sadistic sexuality. It’s kind of like, “Again? Really? How could something else possibly be coming up?” Look at paragraphs twelve through fourteen of this post. That is obliviousness.

This blog began with that I’m dominant. I could finally admit that. And then that I’m a sadist. It was okay to say that too. Okay, then it became apparent I’m not straight. Oh, and by the way there is a man lurking in my head and he is me. What is this, fucking dominoes? Tip over one and eventually the rest will all fall down? I cannot even comprehend the artistry and subtlety of my self-repression to have so blithely hidden this all from myself for two decades. And I am in awe (terrified awe) of the social system that could have made it seem like a good idea to do so.

I’m don’t feel trans, -sexual or -gendered, I don’t feel queer, I don’t feel androgynous, I don’t feel Two Spirit. Those are not mine to take. I am a woman, and a man, and I feel like I have no right to say any of this. I’ve never had to live with transphobia or gender dysphoria. I don’t feel like I’m in the wrong body, I don’t feel like I’m not a woman. But I am feeling somehow fake. I have lived in straight, cisgendered privilege my entire life, and up pops another gender, demanding his life back.

I cannot even entirely think of this man as myself. He is like a separate person living in my body, with his own personality, experiences, memories. Or lack thereof, because he didn’t get to live like the girl and woman did. I think that can be a blessing. I had to grow up as a girl and a woman in this culture, and that has left its mark. The man never had to grow up in this culture as a boy and a man, which in a way, leaves him freer. On the other hand he took the brunt of much of my self-loathing. But he has so few memories. His mind is blank, and he does not yet know who he is. <– See use of third person. That is almost the only way I can relate to him right now and not feel odd.

I don’t know how to explore this. I don’t know how to manifest this, and I don’t know how to present as a man. As I wrote before, I have a hard time understanding adornment conveying information. I don’t find skirts feminine. I don’t find short hair masculine. I wear many more skirt-like pieces of cloth now than I do pants-like pieces of cloth, and my hair is considered short. I have no desire to subject myself to the discomfort of pants to fit common perceptions of masculinity. I really loathe pants.

I’ve been doing small things among the people I live with specifically reserved for male men, which has caused minor confusion. Also debates with eight-year-olds. Yesterday I brought up gender as a dinner topic, and once the discussion finally got revved up and the silence abandoned, it was a great conversation. But somehow today I just feel weird and confused, and less centered about my experience than I had been.

Hell, I still haven’t figured out how to present as a dominant woman, much less anything else.

What a muddy, mucky, confusing, beautifully diverse world.

Slightly Crumbly

Naturally, once I handed over the key to my personal pandora’s box, my partner –that very night– went and read through half the archives. They did not waste time, oh no. To which my reaction was a kind of stuttering limbo between:

AeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiGHHHHHHH!

and:

‘Okay. Looks like that wasn’t such a big deal.’

“So I’m not so into rape and torture,” they said.

“I’m not necessarily either,” I replied. I did my best to answer their questions, to describe my experiences. I found the description surprisingly hard, as if all the clear-cut word-frames I’d thought of before had flown apart. We discussed the nebulousness of kinky vocabulary and how nobody is using anything the same way. I don’t know where I will go over the tumbled wreckage of the thick, high, camouflaged walls I spent two decades building around these parts of myself. It is. I am freer than I was.

“So, do you feel rejected?” they asked, waggling their eyebrows, warming my ice-block feet between their thighs. I wiggled my toes.

I have given partner’s partner Dev and Dw3t-Hthr’s blog addresses, and told them that if they stumble across me, it’s their call if they want to read.

There are things I missed in my last comma-abusing stream of thought. Such as that I am exploring my other gender. (Being argued with by an eight-year-old about if I am a man: Priceless). That I missed participating in this loosely woven sexuality community, lopsided as it is. To just be able to talk to or read the thoughts of people where it is taken for granted that I am what I am, and that it is normal, without any explaining. To remember that there really are others who share my experience.

I realized yesterday during an unrelated emotionally intense conversation, that I am in approximately eight-million different pieces. I didn’t even know it until I had said it aloud.

I am a dominant and a sadist looking for ways to meet my needs with no idea how. I have just torn down the maximum security fences that I started building when I was three. I am in a new place, beginning a new life, that I don’t know if I will continue or move on from. I am stumbling along trying to learn how to live with the people around me in an intimate and meaningful way. Through various small events and interactions, the line between my old life and my new life has become smudged, and it’s not as comfortable as when there was a clean break. I am a maker longing to make, and I don’t know how to share what I make, and I fear what I make will not be wanted. I do not know my role in a dying world, my responsibilities to the land or my responsibilities to myself. I don’t feel like an emotional wreck, but I am not entirely together either.

Right now it just feels like this vaguely uncomfortable, toe-stubbing stage that I’m bound to go through until all these aspects of my life begin to coalesce again. In the eye in the back of my brain, I see something like jewel-toned stained glass.

I Am Just Woozy Enough From Sneezing My Face of to Step Off the Cliff

Ahoy.

Much has happened of late. I have changed, the world has changed, and everything is changing.

Transitioning into a new part of my life I’ve dropped off contact with some of my friends just because I needed the space, and I’ve been picking up the loose ends as I find myself feeling more settled. My oldest friend is going to war for no reason other than they have no sense of self-worth. I haven’t talked to my mentor in months, and I miss him.

I have met my partner’s former and possible future partner (this is oversimplifying the matter). I also live with my partner’s partner, and work with them every day and am building my own relationship with them. I have begun speaking a language other than English again, and I have gotten sick for the fourth time in six months when I’ve never before gotten sick more than once a year.

I have explored parts of my sexuality in gorgeous, deep ways, and others have been set aside.

My sadism is hungry.

In seeking to relate to my dominance in and of itself, with no submissive mirrors, I actually forgot for a while what it felt like to be dominant in relation to a submissive person. Recently, I found myself stalled by the fact that I didn’t know how to autonomously meet my needs around pain and submission and bondage, and there is no one around me to relate to on those levels of intimacy. I stuck myself in a feed-back loop of terror around sharing the details of this to anyone, including my partner, my partner’s partner, and people who I think would understand even less. These needs, these desires, building, with no way to release them, making me feel like I was coming apart at my edges, like I would burst apart. My hands were almost shaking.

Sharing this, in generalities, with my partner (who found me reading Maymay’s blog and remembered the title as ‘Maybe Harmed– But Not Permanently’), my partner’s partner, and someone who probably wouldn’t have understood at all, but was willing to listen to what little I could bring myself to say aloud. Partner’s partner wants to read stories of peoples lives with dominance and submission, sadism, masochism, and I want to give them Dev’s address, but I am afraid of it leading back to here.

Weeks before that, being triggered and suddenly catapulted into the old, very old, bitter shame and self-loathing and self-punishment I inflicted on myself for having rape fantasies and torture fantasies when so many of the people I loved had been raped and abused. My most secret shame, that I had never told anyone in context, that I thought I never would tell, or at least not for years. Waiting laying beside me, touching me as I shuddered it out in tears and snot, my partner listened as I shared my childhood convictions that I was a sick, evil monstrosity, the most devastating of traitors because I betrayed my friends with my desires. And just being held, and treated very matter of factly, and my partner telling me in amusement that it might be sexist, but I was simply too small and non-threatening to be skeevy. Rarely has that factor worked in my favor so well.

Back to the nearly shaking hands, no knowing how to get the pain I craved, my partner revealing that they suspected I found our sex boring, that if I had all these others desires how could I be satisfied without them. Afraid, emotionally garbled, trying to explain that just because I had needs/desires that weren’t being met didn’t mean I found the ones that were met unsatisfying.

“Not all my eggs are in one basket. Just because one basket hasn’t been satisfied doesn’t mean the other isn’t.

“But why would you want your eggs in different baskets, when you could have more eggs in one basket and make an omelet?”

Then to today, partner’s curiosity about my ’secret blog,’ my desire to share all of myself, my fear of them seeing everything here, uncensored, sometimes idiotic, bitter, uncomplimentary, esoteric, ungrounded. Partner, goading me to share all of myself, not just in halves or parts, but in that way that challenges me to do what I want to do anyway, rather than shrinking away in fear of rejection.

“Maybe if I just tell you now, showing you the blog won’t seem like such a big deal.”

Minutes go by.

“And… scene,” they say.

Working myself up to it.

Telling them things I had already told them before, but in depth, in detail. My desires for sexual control, my love of pain, that what I enjoy as a masochist is different than what I enjoy as a sadist, my fetish for slavery, my love of whips, that I have hurt a man until he wept and it was beautiful, that I have handcuffed and hurt a man until he was so far in an altered state he could not speak, and it was intimate and full of trust. That I have been tied up and flogged and manhandled, and it was one of the most profound experience of my life to have faith in another person that I would not be harmed. Explaining the alternative uses for binder paper clips, that singletails do not necessarily leave scars. And I think, good god, that I am actually going to show them this, what am I thinking.

After we talked they went to spend time with friends, and I do not know all that they are thinking, or feeling, I do not know if I have triggered them, and I think, with some convincing, that it is okay. I know that this is the way I want to live. I want to give all of myself, and doing it is so terrifying.

But it’s going to happen like it’s going to happen, and I would rather do this than not.

Writing this, with no regard to grammar, syntax, conjunctions, or the ethical use of commas, or even fucking tense.

Hey, you.

Here it is.

“Relinquishing Control and Gaining Power”

Lissy wrote a really enlightening follow-up to my post on Power and Control. Despite having gone and made this tediously long point that the fulcrum of my sexuality is about the exchange of control, not power, I still felt like there was some kind of imbalance. And it was to find balance that I shucked the power=hierarchy-and-only-one-person-has-it paradigm in the first place. I was saying that I thought both dominant and submissive partners have power (ability), and that I desired submissive partners to give me their control (power to exercise), which felt slightly odd even after I wrote it. Lissy to the rescue.

I desire to hand control over for the purposes of gaining greater personal power, which I do not define as control over others, but as control over myself. Further, I want my partner to also be personally empowered by our dynamic, in that I seek through the exercise of control in a D/S dynamic a result greater than the sum of its parts with returns going equally to the parties involved. Which is what I think is implied by Dw3t-Hthr’s suggested terminology of ‘power synergy’.

[...]

Following the thinking that both parties bring power to a D/S dynamic, it then occurred to me that both parties also exercise control. Of course its easy to see that the dominant member of the equation exercises control, but the submissive also exercises control- self control. Not to say that dominant’s don’t also exercise self-control but in terms of the creation of a D/S dynamic I’m thinking the self control a submissive exercises over themselves is just as important as the external control that they allow a dominant to apply to them. Though conversely it could be seen that submissive’s exercise external control over dominants by way of limits and safe-words which requires them to exercise self control…

[...]

[T]his also, to my mind, allows for a conception of submission as active, freeing it from another of the commonly made patriarchal associations that of passivity. Which is certainly much more in line with the way I experience submission.

When I submit I feel powerful and if I’m not feeling powerful I find it difficult to submit… I’ve spent some time thinking about this and I think it comes down to most of the time when I’m feeling powerless its because I’m feeling… not in control… when I’m not in control of myself I can’t submit. Controlling myself in order to submit to Master’s… suggestions, orders and dictates… is not a passive activity, it requires what in my dynamic is termed ‘mindfulness’

‘Tis lovely, and you can read the rest here.

SPACE. The Final Frontier That We Will Never See Because of the Kessler Syndrome

Ahoy spoilers. Avoid if you haven’t seen the new Star Trek and are planning to.

So I got my dose of benevolent militaristic, fascist view of western hegemony gone too far. And it was fun. I hesitate to say good, since there was so little of substance, but it was worth paying a few bucks to see on a big screen.

I’m trying to resist the temptation to pick the movie apart, since I honestly did enjoy myself. But I am also one picky motherfucker when it comes to my Star Trek.

But, points in the movie’s favor:

• Excellent dialogue. The overlapping arguing was really well-done, and I thought most of the actors did really good deliveries.
• Spock beating the shit out of Jim will never get old.
• I can totally buy the Spock-Uhura thing, because there are several episodes of the original series where you can see they have rapport. I can’t remember the episode, but there is one point where Spock is playing a harp and Uhura is singing along and it is nice. I thought the actors in the new movie pulled off the intimacy and affection very realistically.
• That Quinto dude makes a good Vulcan. Even a very attractive one. And anyone who can make ‘Live long and prosper’ sound like ‘Fuck you’ gets mad points.
• Karl Urban pulled off Bones more or less. The scene where he smuggles Jim on the Enterprise was hilarious.
• Some of the space shots were very artfully done, letting you see the whole picture rather than zooming in and cutting shots a lot.
• SHINY.

Points deducted from the movie’s favor:

• Should not have been an action movie. Big mistake. Marketing ploys suck.
• What a lame bad-guy. ‘You killed my woman pregnant with my child and now I seek revenge?’ Seriously? Old. Contrived. Bullshit.
• Planetary annihilation? Use some fucking subtlety.
• The most fleeting of casual of observations will reveal that William Shatner has brown eyes and brown hair with occasional blonde-ish highlights, and DeForest Kelley had blue eyes. I seriously think that the decision to make Jim conform to a viral Western aesthetic of blonde and blue-eyed is essentially creepy aryan racism.
• I’m so glad that Lady Amanda and Winona Kirk got to be real people, not just desperate manikin mothers. Winona Ryder looked like she would pass out from breathing too deeply of the blistering Vulcan air, not like she had the gumption to bitch-slap her son for refusing to save his father’s life.
• I don’t know what the hell accent Karl Urban used, but it ain’t Georgian.

Things I am ambivalent about:

• Sarek was so… nice. Inviting his son to express emotions. This from the man who disowned his child for rejecting the Vulcan Science Academy. Then again, losing one’s planet and mate could soften up even that kind of hard-ass.
• What about the whole Jim witnessing genocide on Tarsus IV? That was central to his character development. How are they going to work that in to the alternate universe?
• I was really interested when I realized they were maintaining the alternate universe. The typical Star Trek trope when the time-line gets screwed up is to go and make it ‘right’ again, so horrible events x and z will not happen, or return to the ‘right’ dimension. Not so in this movie. Which is, of course, a perfect set up for more movies or a new TV show with the original characters. I do not know how I feel about this, but I will always welcome the chance to see Spock go bat-shit Pon Farr again. Yeh-heh-esssss….

All in all, I highly enjoyed myself, but I wish Abrams would have stuck to the spirit of the story, which is that Star Trek is about people, not events. Events are only a medium.

But like, Spock. Yes. Shiny.

Altering

In exploring this new dynamic between me and partner, there has been a lot of learning to work with another person, with a different communication style, different and sometimes overlapping sexual desires, different priorities, different wants, different needs. These are all probably obvious things integral to any sexual relationship, but my inexperience is making it all new and profound. It is both shnazzy and sometimes uncomfortable. Deep conditioning I didn’t even know about pops up when I least expect, which is both uncomfortable and good, because then I can work on getting rid of it.

My masochism has unexpectedly reared its head, making demands like “Scratch me! Bite me! Now! FEED ME.” I took my flogger to myself once, but it’s not nearly as good as when someone else does it, because swinging it over your shoulders you can only really hit two spots.

Interestingly, lately I’ve met more discomfort about my masochism than my sadism. Unexpected. “I like to give pain to other people” is met with “Uh-huh,” and a look that suggests with sufficient counseling I would get over it. “I like to give pain to myself” gets hysterical giggling, the covering of eyes, and “Let’s not talk about it!” Had the good-pain/bad-pain discussion yesterday.

One of the things that really threw me as the dynamic began was the fact that I didn’t reach my dominant headspace. When I first started exploring with other people, I reached that space and took it for granted that, ‘Oh, this is what they call topspace.’ And then suddenly I didn’t have that, and I was like, “Uhhhh… What?” I realized how much I wanted and needed that, if not in this relationship, then in others. I tried describing reaching that altered psycho-emotional-bodily state to a couple of non-kinky people, and the best way they could understand it was as a transcendental spiritual state. Which, maybe it is, but it’s certainly not any more spiritual than anything else. Eating and walking are spiritual too.

I did reach the headspace with my partner once. We were not having sex at the time, but then again we almost were. Usually pain has been the catalyst for getting me in headspace, but I wasn’t hurting them at all, wasn’t even fantasizing about pain. I was feeling dominant, and that they were mine, and that my lungs had expanded to fill my entire body and I was breathing through my skin. And that I was breathing them into my skin. They weren’t submitting to me, or even bottoming to me, but they were responding, and on some level I’ve never reached before we were matching up in our interaction.

Before I was suddenly bereft of it, I thought that the headspace was the headspace, and that it was this solid, static thing, when now I’m realizing that I was just paddling in the first few feet of water. I profoundly want to explore this space, where it goes, how deep it goes, where the boundaries and limits are, how those boundaries can be stretched, and what kind of spiritual gymnastics I can do there.

I asked this over at Thumper’s, but why is it ’subspace’ and ‘topspace?’ I have never heard of ‘bottomspace’ or ‘domspace.’ What does that signify, if anything?

Dw3t Hthr was discussing how safewords did not work for her because:

The thing with me and safewords is that if I’m in a position where I might want to use one, I’m almost certainly not in a position where I’m capable of using one. (The other thing with me and safewords is that if I’m verbality-enabled, I’m quite competent to say, “You don’t want to be doing that” or something similar about a boundary-crossing behaviour, and I’m not generally engaged in stuff that would require something other than plain language to communicate.) I alter state so significantly that the safety latch option doesn’t come up on possible options.

She described her own subspace as:

my-mind-is-blown-open-my-god-it’s-full-of-stars-and-kittens

And then she said this:

For someone like me, for whom nonverbal trust state is one of the fundamental components – indeed one of the desired goals – of submission, trying to frame that all through the safeword lens breaks it.

And Violacious said something very similar.

D/s, I think, is intrinsically about the place where consent meets trust meets faith. In the deep thick smouldering submissive moment, for me faith overtakes the power of meaningful consent, which is why trust placed in my partner is crucial to act as an intermediary between those two terms.

What all of this brings up for me is that I want that. I want to be able to go that deep into my dominant headspace. But as Dw3t Hthr says about her space:

And this is a giant lump of dangerous mental juju to propose to drop on someone, asking them to hold that safe space, to create that dissolved and fluid state and to keep it from being ripped apart. This is not easy, and this is not a small magic. But where does one learn this shit?

And now I’m going to go to a place where I might get yelled at my some submissive people. I have no idea if this is entirely un-PC.

I’ve heard reference to dominant people holding a safe space for submissive people many times, which I’m willing and eager to do. But what about submissive partners holding a safe space for dominant partners? Granted I’ve only played in the shallows of headspace, but I have never gone so deep that I could not become verbal again, pull myself out at the sound of a safeword or even the idea that my partner was feeling bad-pain and not good-pain. And it’s not that I want to reach a place where I couldn’t respect a safeword if it was given. For me safewords have worked very well as a mutually clear way of communicating boundaries with someone I don’t necessarily know very well. If I needed to, I would safeword as a dominant.

I’ve discussed this with a group of dominants when I was living in the City (the starting topic was aftercare for dominants/tops), and most of the responses I got were that the dominant/top partner is the one responsible for both themselves and the submissive/bottom, while the submissive/bottom is only responsible for themselves, and sometimes not even then, because they’re in subspace. And on one level this makes sense to me, because many times the dominant/top is the one doing the tying up, the beating, the sexy verbal thrashing. But on another, much more personal level, it doesn’t make sense to me that one partner can go as deep as they need while the other partner holds the safe space for them, and the other partner can’t.

How would that work, someone, a possibly tied-up someone possibly faced with an implement of smacking, hold a safe-space for a dominant person, so they can go as deep as they need? I imagine some people would say it’s dangerous, since the one is tied up and all and the other has an implement. But really, I don’t think that if I sank as deep as I could go into my dominance I would start carving bacon out of someone. I don’t think I would lose my ability to recognize physical, emotional, and mental boundaries and read body-language. Of course, d/s in no way has to include binding or smacking, but for many people it does, and I enjoy both.

Graydon said in the comments of Dw3t Hthr’s post on safewords,

I don’t think “submissive” is always the right term; sometimes what is wanted, or what’s going on, might be better described as “responsibility transfer”. The point is not to do what you’re told; the point is not to have to decide.

I don’t think Graydon was discussing responsibility in the same way I am here, but it’s another place where I’ve encountered the idea one partner is supposed to be responsible for everything so the other doesn’t have to be. I’m projecting d/s on that, which I’m not sure is what they meant.

So I’m really curious to see what any of you might have to say on the subject, if you’ve ever encountered it in yourselves, your partners, or others. Where and when can the responsibility shift from a dominant partner to a submissive partner? How can a dominant person go deep into their headspace while still being cognizant of the logistics of their partner’s subspace,  joint angles and circulation, and application of pain? Should that responsibility always be the dominant person’s? Can a dominant partner have that level of immersive experience while still holding that kind of responsibility?