Three days ago my arousal was physical. I was wet, and actively wanting sex with Bema as opposed to sex with me. Sometimes that’s not the case. Sometimes I want sex with me and not sex with Bema. Which sometimes drives Bema nuts because with my libido for non-s/m-d/s sex already being pretty low, it seems to further limit when I want sex with Bema (which I’m not convinced is actually the case).

Yesterday and today though… I wanted sex with me, or, rather, what being able to fully focus on my fantasies and not the other person I’m sharing the experience with could give me. Thing was, I haven’t actually been physically aroused. It was a surprise, expecting to be wet and ready because how else could my body respond to the sheer arousal that was driving me to not be able to concentrate on well, anything else? But pretty dry vagina. Unresponsive clitoris.

I was d/s horny. I was s/m horny. Orgasm took the edge off, but really it was just an endorphin bandaid. I don’t need sex. I need to beat the crap out of someone. I need to push someone against a wall, and hold them down. I need their energy responding so willingly, hungrily to my own. Bema would probably be willing to go through some of the motions, might even get something out of it. Bema is not available right now. Even if they were, I doubt it would be quite enough.

I don’t feel angry. I don’t feel desperate. I don’t feel devastatingly alone. I do feel sad, fairly often, that I don’t have that in my life right now. I do hold on to the belief that it will be there at some point.

So… new layer of self-understanding, no direct relief in sight. Progress?

It’s personally relevant because of my relationship with Daos, Bema’s long term partner. We’ve gone through stages where Daos wanted to kill me, ignored me, verbally abused me, or treated me with manic cheerfulness. I took a lot of this extremely personally. Which was my choice. My feelings of hurt or rejection or judgment are my own shit to deal with. Because I know Daos. And I know that Daos is not actually a crazy, hateful person. That’s my own judgment and hurt bouncing right back. It’s all an expression of pain, and it’s a pain that I can’t fix, couldn’t fix even if Bema and I were not sexually and emotionally involved. I got to a point where even when my relationship with Daos was going smoothly and was superficially friendly that I was closed off to Daos. I just wanted the interaction to be over.

I spent some time away from both of them, and was able to get more of a big-picture image of things. The agreement the three of us have about how Bema and I interact in public and how we interact in front of Daos (which is to say, we don’t. Another post) was, and is, not working for me. And I was looking for all these practical, surface-level ways to fix it. Then I finally realized that the surface stuff isn’t going to fix it. I sat down with Daos and told them, “I think it all comes down to this: We have to have a real relationship. It doesn’t mean we have to be lovers, or best-buddies. It just has to be real, and open, or we’re going to go splat. I want to be open in my relationship with you. That’s the energy I want to put into this. Everything else will fall out from there.”

And things have shifted. A lot. It’s not perfect. It’s not ideal. I still question whether Bema and I not being affectionate or sexual in front of Daos is actually helping Daos. It’s a dialogue that’s ongoing. But when I look back to where we started a year ago- Wow. We went from Daos wanting to kill me, vetoing me, and me feeling like a devastated child to really being able to see each other and the challenges we’re both facing. And part of the reason we’ve gotten where we are is because Bema and I took it slow, and we did a lot to be sensitive to Daos’ emotional turmoil. And Daos, for their part, let go of a lot of control, and jumped off quite a few personal cliffs, and no one’s gone splat yet.

Caveat: Half the time being “sensitive” to Daos’ pain meant Bema and I were really just suppressing ourselves, and letting Daos control the situation. That was healthy for exactly none of us. And I reached a point where I just had to say, “I’m not making a stand. I am against no one. But I am standing. This is what I want, this is what I feel, and I can’t fix your pain by not acting on it.” But other times it was simply recognizing that this is a process, one that takes time and energy and mishaps and learning and talking and feeling and listening and it’s just messy.

And someone asked me to ask around the online community for resources about transitioning into poly, so, whatcha got?

I wrote this two months ago, and a lot has changed. But as of May, this is where my relationship with Bema was at.

~~~

I was a little leery of another so-called “vanilla” partner. I kind of had the attitude of, “Been there, done that, know what I want.” But when the sexual tension between Bema and I was so strong, and I began to wonder. Really wonder if my sexuality was more fluid than I thought. I went back and forth, back and forth, for months, between “Bema is clearly not my sexual counterpart” and “I must fuck Bema now.” Part of the latter may have been due to the fact that I didn’t have sex for two decades, got to taste it for three months, then had a year dry spell. I finally realized I was never going to know what was there for us unless I just did it.

So we did.

And I was like, “What. Just. Happened.”

I was disappointed, and because I repressed that disappointment I was angry. My shit, not Bema’s. There were a variety of factors, including my unconscious expectations from my first partner, different sexual styles, our different sexualities, and our newness. It took a while for the sex to get better for me, and I was horribly confused. Sex with my first partner started out good. This may have been because I was coming off two decades of abstinence. I’m confident it’s not just a case of memories growing better with time; I checked in with my first partner’s ex-partner. It was just good sex. I also think my first partner’s sexuality was at least a few shades closer to mine than Bema’s is.

I don’t actually have radically different sex with Bema than I did with my first partner, except that there is actually more BDSM-type play with Bema because I’m in a much more confident place and Bema is very open to it. But there’s an energy difference. Bema doesn’t have the spark. My first partner did, at least a little.

The best sex I have with Bema is when I bring in rope, or enact a dominant role even though Bema isn’t submitting to me, or even bottoming. I think Bema sees it as something along the lines of bottoming, but to me it’s not. Even that energy isn’t there (except for two really, really sexy instances).

I’m more or less coming to the same conclusion I did with my first partner: That I can enjoy sex without BDSM-type elements, but I don’t want it very often. Once or twice a week, max. Bema, being firmly centered in that sexuality, wants it considerably more often.

I’ve been doing a lot of personal experimentation, poking my somewhat fluid sexuality and seeing what happens. Perhaps because I repressed almost any sexual expression for so long, my modus operendi has been to only seek sex, either with myself or another person, after I’m already horny. So I’ve been playing with being open to sex if Bema seduces me.

What’s made this tricky is that, unbeknownst to me, I’ve internalized some cultural conditioning that says I’m obligated to have sex, or that I should have sex to make someone feel better or keep them happy. To keep the peace. That is scary as fuck. Bema and I would be having a conversation about our mismatched sexualities and how to meet our respective sexual needs, and I would start getting aroused. And I wouldn’t know if I was aroused because I had real desire or if I was aroused in some subconscious effort to keep the peace. Scary. As. Fuck.

It was so scary that I would pull back emotionally and set an iron boundary that Bema felt helpless against. Bema would feel rejected and in turn pull away by becoming passive out of fear that they were forcing something on me. I would sense the passivity and encourage Bema to be more pro-active while I tried to be open to their desire for more frequent sex. But I was partially doing it to keep the peace out of fear of losing the other aspects of our intimate relationship. Add to the mix that Bema has internalized cultural conditioning of expecting sex, and we have a feedback loop of doom if we don’t pull ourselves out of it. Which is what we’re trying to do.

Bema has a lot of hurt that’s triggered by this situation. It’s not about me, or the circumstances, the hurt is about events that happened before I was ever in the picture. I know that intellectually, but part of me is terrified that without sex being central to our intimacy, Bema won’t want to be intimate at all. The thought of losing Bema’s skin, or any other expression of the profound connection I feel with them is devastating. Which helps me understand what Bema’s feeling about the possibility of us having rare or no sex. Sex is when Bema feels most connected. I feel most connected (in our particular relationship) during massage, or skin-time, or with the exchange of energy.

We’ve both been able to recognize what was happening for us, and more or less take ownership of our shit (which is always an ongoing process). I’ve really been working on not giving in to compulsions to sexually placate, and telling Bema about my sexual dissatisfaction and not secretly grow resentful.

Back to being seduced by Bema: When I tie someone up, or hurt them and get reactions, I’m pretty much instantly wet. Foreplay without d/s or s/m? It’s pretty hard for me to get aroused. It feels good, but it’s not what gets me hot and bothered. Without d/s or s/m it tends to take a lot of direct genital stimulation and fantasy on my part to get me aroused enough to have sex. I’ve always needed fantasy to orgasm, ever since I started having them with myself, with my first partner, with Bema. But now its’ like I”m compensating for the d/s or s/m energy that isn’t there by making it in my head. I think we all create the energy we’re craving, but it got to a point where it wasn’t healthy.

I finally told Bema the other day that sex just isn’t working for me. We’ve agrede to not have sex until I’m ready to rip Bema’s pants off. There are times when I honestly feel like I may never want to have sex again (I doubt this is actually true). Right now even my interest in d/s or s/m usually registers between between nil and mild interest. I’ve been having so much sex -for me, which is to say two times a week, at most- that my libido has gone on vacation. More than that, I’ve been having regular orgasms, and orgasms generally send my libido to sleep.

I’ve even played with not masturbating to “save up” my libido and help foster some sexual tension. I think a lot of times, when I’m really horny, I’m viewing Bema through submissive-tinted lenses even though that’s simply not who they are. And when I’m not independently horny it’s almost painfully obvious exactly how un-submissive Bema is. Bema’s not dominant, either. Bema does find the idea of being in charge exciting sometimes, and has some toppish fantasies I think they’re too afraid to act on. There have been times when I’ve welcomed Bema’s toppish energy because at least the energy was there, if not in my ideal proportions.

Just when I started drafting this post I had my first spontaneous fantasy in a long time. Orgasm control, strap on, collar. It wasn’t enough to inspire me to have sex, but the libido seemed to be recovering. I have masturbated once: It was real, unforced arousal, fantasizing about things that are actually hot to me in real life, not just my fantasy tropes of rape and torture. It was awesome.

When I started exploring with Bema, what I really saw for us was sensual intimacy around the powerful emotional connection we have, and maybe occasionally having sex. Even then Bema’s sexual expression of intimacy was very obvious, and stronger than mine. Bema wants sex with me bad. I love Bema’s skin, I love molding myself to them and touching and playing, and playing sexually without having sex, and maybe occasionally vigorously using Bema’s sex parts. I don’t know what kind of balance we’ll find to meet our needs, or if we will. Right now I feel at peace with that. At other times I’ve been afraid of losing the connection and sharing we have. I’ve experimented in Bema’s end of the sexual spectrum, both out of openness, and in an unhealthy attempt to keep the status quo. Now I’m going to go with my instincts, and see what happens.

~~~

So a lot as changed since I wrote that out by hand, and a lot remains the same. I want to renew my presence on the blog, both because I want to share my experience and because the online community is where I’ve found a lot of support in the past.

Next in the chronicles of the past six months, I’ll talk about the play partner I found under my nose. Seriously.

Bema and I were skin on skin today, and the way we were interacting, it wasn’t exactly d/s, but it was something similar, enough to get me partially there. Bema was lying in my arms, and I just wanted to hurt them. I wanted it, and I was able to acknowledge it without squashing it, and acknowledge that it wasn’t going to happen without feeling desperate and hurt.

Bema sensed it, and we were talking later. Bema has been doing some independent research on BDSM, examining this thing that they had no real experience or draw to until until they became involved with me. Some stuff (I don’t specifically know which) they don’t really see how it could be anything but dysfunctional. Some part of me, the part that’s hurt, wanted to react to that, but mostly I just felt cool. They have their experiences and perceptions, and I have my experiences and perceptions. If those differ (and they might not even be that different; I think a lot of shit in the BDSM subculture is fucked up and dysfunctional), my experience doesn’t become unreal.

I felt suddenly ready to share this idea that has been growing in me for a while, an unfinished idea that seeps into my consciousness occasionally, then floats away again.

It started maybe a year ago, during one of my phases of hurting so much about wanting to hurt people. This continuing question tumbling inside me, “Am I a monster?”

Then, thinking, what if I am? But what if a monster just isn’t what I thought it was?

I thought about the roles monsters play in children’s stories, not the ones meant to brainwash us into easy, malleable lines, but the ones that teach us about ourselves, the ones where the monsters are only our own reflections. Monsters show us the edges of ourselves.

Other ideas seeped in, joined, mutated, ideas about tricksters, and contraries. Those who do things backwards, do the opposite of what is expected. In hunter-gatherer and other primitive peoples, tricksters are the sacred boundary crossers. In many of those same cultures, gender-mixers and -crossers played the same role. And I wonder what role my sexuality plays in my human worldview, because I know it has one, and yet even accounting for the silent majority there seem to be so much fewer people who share my desires than those who share other common desires. It reminds me of a comment Delilah left around the time when I finally tipped over the edge into accepting and cherishing my sexuality and not thinking it was completely rooted in a legacy of cultural fucked-up-ness.

I actually *do* think of myself as engaging in some dark shit when I do some of the kink that I do. The difference is that I don’t think of darkness as a bad thing [...]. Darkness to me just means the wild, the free, the things that have been suppressed by the civilization you’re talking about when you talk about darkness.

The trouble with the wild and the free is that they often are dangerous. When my lover tests my tolerance by caning the fronts of my thighs and letting me bite into his arm to manage the pain while tears stream down his face, that’s pretty dark. When I restrict someone’s blood flow and whisper to them about how easily I could kill them and that makes them come – that’s fucking dark. It’s liberated, it’s admitting how close sex and death really are, it’s delving into parts of our psyche that are very old, and animal, and fierce. It’s not just wanting to fuck someone into a stupor, but to drink their blood while you do it.

And that’s hot, which is why I do it – not because it’s hip to play with the darkness.

At the time I was railing against the image of BDSM as taboo and dark, the way it’s commercialized and caricatured as such, but I saw her point, and looking at it through that lens, I resonated with what she said.

At my core, my sexuality doesn’t feel dark to me, or strange, or crossing any kind of boundaries. It feels like normality. And in a way, despite my self-alienation, I perceive everyone else as strange. But when I study myself in relation to the people around me, who I grow with, play with, get bitchy with, when I leave myself behind and step into them, then I can see it. I can understand how they can perceive it that way, because when I was so divorced from myself around my sexuality, I saw through the same lens, but with infinitely more judgment.

None of this is an argument about how BDSM is special and awesome and so much deeper than what anybody else does. It’s just random, utterly nonlinear driftings as I contemplate where I am in my life and where I’m going.

The trickster Coyote from Gunnerkrigg Court

But on to things more mundane.

Someone wanted to call a girl’s spa night. Waxing. Facials. Hair masks. After my initial repulsion:

“I’m not putting that gunk on my face, but I will rip the hair from your body.”

“Yesss!”

Unfortunately, they’re not a screamer. Pretty unfazed by that kind of pain. Just knowing that it hurt anyway did at least a little something for me, but really, I’m just a reaction top. But it’s still a satisfying sensation, feeling all the hair rip out. Someone else, who is a screamer said they’d let me know if they decided  to do it.

“I’d be honored to give you pleasure,” they laughed.

I’ll take it where I can get it.

I shall call my new partner Bema. Bema’s long-term partner is Daos. Daos and I are both sexually involved with Bema, but not with each other. I trigger the fuck out of Daos.

Daos and I did not know each other deeply, but it was a relationship I valued, and now it is unalterably changed. We are all doing some serious kind of relationship and personal work, which is an amazing opportunity, but sometimes it is messy, messy, messy. I tend to take Daos’ reactions to me personally, and I perceive it as rejection. Early in our exploration, I behaved very acceptingly of what Daos was going through, but with this underlying expectation that by accepting, I could change it, that Daos would stop having issues. And I had to let it go, let go of the expectation that our relationship was ever going to be the same again. Sometimes, when I feel hurt or threatened, I want to think of Daos as a crazy psycho for their reactions to me, because if Daos is a crazy psycho, I don’t have to care or empathize with what they’re going through. But in reality I know Daos’ stuff isn’t about me. It’s about stuff that happened before I was born, or in diapers. It isn’t personal. Not only that, but Daos is doing quite a lot to work with themselves on what’s coming up for them, just like I’m working on what’s coming up for me.

Funnily enough, one of the strongest things that has come up for me is the scarlet letter complex. I used to worship an ancient, undead Jewish man (essentially, a zombie). Even into my  young adulthood I expected to sign a piece of paper and hold a ceremony to legally, economically, and socially bind me to the one person I would have sex with for the rest of my life. And now, in part because I feel triggered by Daos being triggered, sometimes I feel like an adulterer. Cultural indoctrination is hilarious.

Sometimes Daos and I can communicate with a minimum of tension. Some days we just avoid each other. Have I mentioned we all live in the same building?

So that is my shit with Daos. On to Bema.

Bema does not have a submissive bone in their body. In retrospect, I understand that my first partner had at least one or two switchy bones, but we recognize now that neither of us was in the psycho-emotional place to explore as deeply as we could. We were both too afraid. But sometimes our d/s energies matched up, locked, and it was beautiful.

Bema is incredibly open to my sexuality, and to trying new things (totally game on the good, giving, and game scale). I wasn’t even sure anything could work sexually because Bema has not an iota of submissive energy, but my cunt talked me into it. Tying up someone who isn’t submissive isn’t the same as tying up someone who is. It’s fun, but the energy isn’t there. I don’t go into headspace. Our culture has so many associations with the whoever gets tied up automatically submitting, and it’s just fundamentally untrue. My submissive geiger counter registers nil. So we’re playing and exploring and learning, gradually finding out where we match up and where we don’t.

This was almost as much of a mindfuck for me as my relationship with Daos. Early on I just felt so unsure, whether I should, or would, or wanted to have sex with Bema if it wasn’t going to be d/s or s/m. I had kind of made a decision after my first partner that “Been there, done that, don’t need to do it again” about “vanilla” partners. It is now proven two out of two that I am actually capable of enjoying sex without d/s or s/m elements. I wasn’t so sure before I tried. But it’s not all I want. Having one chunk of my sexual hungers satisfied makes the others bite less sharply, but it doesn’t make them go away. I’m going to put out some more feelers for a play partner. Whenever I’ve started looking before, I was coming from a place of desperation, and it inevitably left me feeling frustrated and icky. I want to see what it’s like not coming from a place of desperation.

One thing I wasn’t prepared for, seeing as my former partner was also my first partner, was the unconscious expectations I had about sex from partner number one. Their bodies are shaped differently, they fuck differently, their parts are at different angles, their arousal patterns are different, their faces are so different when they come. We have different experiences of how long sex lasts and how often it happens and who’s the loud one.

So basically I’m in a glorious mess, one  that I’m grateful to be a part of, and also frightened. Stay tuned.

My counterpart in the last V, aware of my current situation and remembering us being in a very similar one, showed me this, upon which I winced loudly.

The big ones that haven’t been trimmed down, when they get all dehydrated and wrinkly but still have some heft. Hold the skinny end and hit with the top. Very satisfying impact. I bruise really easy, and I usually sport half a dozen bruises I couldn’t tell you where they came from. One day I couldn’t figure out why I had all these regular bruises up my thighs, and suddenly I burst out laughing. After explaining, my housemates teased me for the rest of the day.

Fir Bough

Pretty good makeshift flogger. Unbalanced, and you  have to be careful about the whippy ends and wrapping, but  nice impact/sting.

Screw Bolt

The big six-inch ones with reall fine threads. Feels really good scraped down an arm, or across palms and fingers. Not sharp enough to draw blood, but sharp enough to leave white lines like a plowed field.

Not body kissing. Not throat kissing and teasing the fine hairs on someone’s skin with lips. Not just pressing lips together.

It’s so common it just gets called “kissing,” as if everyone will know what you mean when you say it. It took me two decades to do it, and then I did, and I find myself the odd man out.

I’m not so into it.

Seriously.

Boyfriend. Devastated.

People kept telling me that it was an acquired taste, and that I would like it eventually. Everyone likes it. Everyone.

During one conversation my boyfriend was laying out all this evidence for the human desire for tongue-in-mouth kissing, and I finally said, “Basically it’s like I’ve told you I’m lesbian, and you’re trying to convince me I’d realize I’m straight if I’d just try it long enough to get used to it.”

The one I really like to whip out when people are telling me why I should like kissing is the theory that kissing evolved from an affection shared between mothers and babies from the practice of premasticating food. Then watch their cultural indigestion from paranoia of associating children with anything they consider sexual. Vengeful I can be.

Now I kind of think of french kissing the way many people think of kinky sex. “Okay, now that we really know each other and really trust each other, let’s do something completely crazy like tie each other up with scarves and blindfold each other.”

Only it’s: “Okay, now that we really know each other and really trust each other, let’s do something really fucking insane like stick our tongues in each others’ mouths.”

A faster way to spread communicable diseases, I know not.

Seriously. What a weird fucking practice. With all their gnarly diseases crossing species barriers left and right, I’m surprised agriculturalist and pastoralist population centers of civilization survived it.

I did learn to enjoy that kind of kissing with partner, and I was almost always in a state where I was incredibly present with my dominance, usually in the throes of sex. It was an expression for my aggression and sadism and dominance. Biting soft parts, claiming someone –possessing someone– in such a physically intimate way. There’s just something about claiming someone’s mouth that’s incredibly powerful for me, because in a way it’s a more intimate orifice than my cunt. To be physically locked face to face with someone, cutting off one of your options to breathe. It almost seems suicidal.

Okay, so I guess there are other ways to do it. It all feels pretty weird though.

I found one example that was rather terribly written and had a very poorly developed supernatural world, but had one fascinating, brilliant concept: A bold, assertive submissive man who asked for what he wanted and stood up for himself. There was one scene where the dominant woman of the triad made him come, then refused to let him give her an orgasm. Not because it was hot d/s, but because she was terrified of being vulnerable. She blew him off, and he basically said, “You know where I am. If you’re really as brave as you think you are, come get me.” And left.

And I was like, “Wow.”

Despite this moment of win, the clear dominance/submission dynamic, the triad, and some bondage and beating, the sex scenes really did not flow and it was not even remotely erotic for me.

Reading porn in such concentration has highlighted the many things people say that are supposed to be erotic that strike me as… completely off the wall. It’s just… weird. Like one person wrote it thinking it was a good idea, having never actually experienced what they were writing about, and the next person, also having never experienced what they were writing about took the first person at their word and thought that was reality, and on and on it goes. It’s like there’s a list of stock phrases for written porn that everyone feels obligated to use for some reason.

“There was not a spare ounce of fat on [pronoun's] body.”

I read this, and I blink. And I wonder, “So… are they fucking a concentration camp victim? Did I miss something of the backstory while skimming?” I don’t think people know what it means to not have body fat. And it keeps getting worse with the insane anti-fat diet mentality the North American super-power has been getting into the last few decades.

Reality: Humans carry fat. We need fat to live. Fat is good. It is delicious. It’s what our brains run on.

I’m not talking Big, Beautiful Women or fat as an identity, I’m talking biological necessity. Every trim, athletic, fit person you see has fat. What’s more, they have spare body fat, because we’re designed to carry spare calories just in case. I have seen a male body at 4% body fat and it is not pretty. For a female body the equivalent is 10%.

So if someone doesn’t have a spare ounce of fat, they probably don’t have the energy to be fucking, because they have entered the death stages of starvation. And that’s not so hot to me. Besides, aesthetically, I like fat. I like bellies and asses and boobs and not emaciated skeletons. I am a thin, light-framed, reasonably fit person and I carry fat. I went on a ten day cleanse where I was only getting about 600 calories a day, and I still had full breasts, a belly, and a jiggle in the ass.

Which leads me to:

The “firm ass”

This is… confusing to me. And maybe it’s all just a matter of interpretation of what “firm” means. When I think “firm” in terms of flesh, I think of something like the feeling of squeezing a ripe mango. Like the muscle of deltoids, or a tensed bicep. And most asses are not… firm. Except when tensed. And it would be very uncomfortable to walk around like that all day (some people do, because they carry their stress in their hips and butt, and it causes them all sorts of leg and back problems). And kind of the allure of the ass (to me), is that it is, indeed, soft. Squeezable. Malleable. Ever-so-elastic when smacked. It even, deities-forbid, jiggles.

On a similar subject–

The male ass as “two globes.” Especially firm, high ones.

This throws me off every time I read it, forcing me to picture the perfectly hemispherical nature of the character’s ass cheeks, and to wonder how it’s anatomically possible.

I do, in fact, know two people (male) who have this kind of ass, or what I imagine this kind of ass would look like in real life. And honestly it looks a little weird at first. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s their body type and appreciate it for what it is.

The firm, pert, high, proud breasts.

This I blame on a culture that thinks breast-binding for everyone who has them is normal.

Breasts are not naturally… high. They are affected by gravity. Namely, they go down. They flatten out when we lay down, and slide into our arm pits. This is not the bad, hideous, horrible, shameful, to-be-avoided-at-all-costs-including-cutting-parts-of-your-body-off thing that we have been taught. It is natural.

The process is retarded for some by the donning of bras. I used to think bra-encased boobs looked perfectly normal, including my own. When I finally shucked the thing, and especially when I started living with other women who hardly ever wore bras, my perspective changed radically. Now when I see boobs in bras, I stare.

Not because it’s hot. But because it looks so weird to see an abrupt shelf sticking out from just under someone’s clavicles (in the case of sports bras), or the effect regular bras have even on small boobs, which has a similar aesthetic to when I was a child and I put balls from the McDonald’s play pen up my shirt to simulate adult secondary sex characteristics.

It’s also very bizarre to me to not be able to see someone’s nipples through their shirt.

And you know, my boobs do ride lower than they would if I wore a bra. They will sag when I begin breast-feeding, and as I grow older. This is a beautiful thing.

The breasts that are a perfect handful.

So nothing actually bothers be about this one, and I like the image, but I’m surprised by how often this gets repeated in porn/romance novels. The “small but perfect” shtick seems an encouraging alternative to the “only double D’s are beautiful” stereotype, but I wonder at our lack of creativity in describing our bodies.

Her “juices.”

My cunt. Is not. A turkey.

Every time I read about vaginal lubrication as “juices” I get so grossed out. I guess for a lot of people it’s very erotic, so your mileage may vary. When I think of juices, I think of meat (dead, butchered) roasting slowly in an oven or over a fire. I don’t think of my vagina. “Wet” and “slick” are very hot for me, but for some reason I cannot handle the juices.

Pussy.

Again, your mileage may vary. This word seems to do it for a lot of people. But pussy is never hot in reference to my vagina, and usually not in reference to someone else’s. I really just prefer cunt. Short, strong, simple, kind of like an onomatopoeia for the shape. Pussy just sounds kind of silly, kind of humiliating to me, which is why it seems to creep into my humiliation fantasies about a submissive person describing me fucking their pussy.

Adjusting to the length and girth of a cock.

Okay, so this can happen to a degree, both in vaginas and rectums. But it is a finite process. The vagina is only so long, so stretchy, and then it ends. It is not an endlessly stretchy continuum. This is even more true for the rectum, which, arguably, was never designed for cock.

Sad as it is, you can’t always go in to the hilt. Personally, I have a short vagina, so I haven’t been able to have jar-your-bones-thrusting-sex without feeling like I’ve been punched in the cervix with the head of a hammer. It’s kind of frustrating that seven inches is considered “average” in the sex-toy world. But in written porn whoever’s being penetrated always seems to be stretching and adjusting and able to take every inch at thirty-mile-an-hour speeds. Me, I see a huge cock and I either get grossed out or intimidated.

The idea of someone being able to endlessly take my cock has played a part in my fantasies, especially early on when I actually started masturbating, because of the idea of how much their body is giving and changing shape to accommodate me, how much they are being invaded in a very vulnerable place, how out of control they are. It’s hot for as long as it takes to realize that it’s not a realistic expectation for the human body.

The satiny, silky texture of erect cock.

Even though “satiny” and “silky” strike me as over-the-top, in this case I find them absolutely accurate. I am utterly fascinated by the texture of an erection. There is simply nothing else like it. And it is indeed silky, and satiny. Whodathunkit.

Constantly saying each other’s names.

I guess the idea of saying someone’s name in the throes of sex is hot on some level for me. Haven’t actually experienced it. In a couple of the porn stories I’ve been reading, the characters do it constantly. Repetitively. Leaving me thinking, “Less talking more fucking!”

~~~

I was, of course, the most valuable thing there. I took little pleasure from it, only a sort of grim amusement.

Nor was I precisely sure why I was so valuable. But the bids kept getting higher.

The highest bidder enjoyed me very thoroughly over the next year and a half on that planet. He was not so bad as it could have been. I was lonely, and weary of being used, but I was never particularly abused. I did not object and obeyed instructions because I knew the consequences of disobeying. I didn’t really remember those consequences, but I knew that being used as a hole to come in three times a day was a better fate.

He was profoundly pissed when he lost me in a game of droughts. My naked back was the game table and one of the other players was close to coming in my mouth, so all I could really think as I frantically tried to determine who had won was, “Shit.”

My owner had lent me to her the day before as one of the other amenities of his grand gala. I had never been in the hands of a sadist before. I had been used roughly and callously, abused for circumstances and events out of my control, and ruthlessly trained, but I had never been given to someone who enjoyed pain for pain’s sake.

If it was torture, it was a very curious mode of torture, though I was only partly able to appreciate it at the time, my wrists strung up above me, trying to process the intense sensations she enjoyed inflicting on my body.

She never took me beyond my threshold for pain. After the first half hour I knew that had she wanted to, she could have turned me into a sticky smear of mindless gibbering. And I knew she could have done it without maiming me. And I suspected, half-feverishly, that had she exerted some effort, she could have done it without leaving a mark.

Every time I was ready to burst into tears if I had to bear another moment of it or take another blow, she stopped or removed whatever was the current source of pain. She would watch me, gasping, struggling to recollect myself, half a smile on her face.

She did make me bleed, though never in accident. Very deliberately, with a wicked little knife with an edge like paper. Every cut stung madly, and hazily watching the blood trickle down my chest was mesmerizing.

She untied me completely to take my ass, leaving coils embossed on my arms and ankles, and even had I been inclined to fight, I don’t think I could have.

Even while she slid her fingers into me it was becoming clear that she was devastatingly good at this. My penis, so far uninvolved except as the occasional recipient of blows, vicious pinching, and to my near panic, fire, began to swell painfully against the confines of the chastity ring.

She had me on my back, knees, spread, and she laughed softly as she saw. Moving up to prop herself above my hips, she leaned down and took the head of my cock gently in her lips. I flinched, groaning, and my balls tightened painfully against the ring constricting them.

“Please,” I gasped as she licked down my shaft, making my partial erection harder and more painful. “Not with the chastity on.”

She smiled at me, and gave me a blow job that would have sent me to ecstasy if I hadn’t been in the ring. I did cry then, desperately trying to endure as she licked and sucked my most sensitive places, the chastity ring biting deep into my flesh.

I watched, breathing hard, as she pushed one end of a dildo into herself, and strapped the other end in place. I lifted my legs up to give her better access, because it was simply easier, and less uncomfortable.

Arrowing her cock into my anus, she eased herself in, retreating when I bit my lip, little progressions and retreats until she was all the way in my body. She held my thighs, looking down at me almost with amusement. Maybe I imagined it. I was exhausted.

She fucked my ass like it was her sole purpose to pleasure me. She found the right angle and she kept it, taking me exactly as deep and hard as I liked it. Loved it. I gasped, bucking against her, moaning in pleasure and torment.

My pleasure, of course, brought my pain, my cock and testicles madly straining against metal. The chastity ring also meant there was absolutely no chance I would come. And I wanted to come. Badly. My owner milked the semen from me occasionally when the look in my eyes grew “a little too crazed.” He would remove the chastity ring and take my ass until I was dripping. I hardly ever stayed hard when he fucked me. Once he had hooked me up to a fucking machine, the wickedly curved phallus almost two inches in diameter, and watched as the hydraulic piston punched it into me at the same bruising angle for over an hour and I was a weeping mess. I hadn’t come in nearly a year, and that had been an accident, quickly ruined lest I enjoy it.

She had the remote to remove the ring. I could see it on the table beside the bed. I moaned, gripping the sheets, and whined in denial when she pulled out. My half-flaccid penis bobbed weakly.

Sweating, trembling a little, I stared up at her uncomprehendingly when she straddled me, her cock gone. Holding my cock straight between two fingers, she rubbed it between her wet lips. I nearly bit through my lip.

“No,” I moaned. “Not like this. I can fuck you with a strap-on if you don’t want me to be pleasured, or–” My breath hitched, and my head and shoulders lurched up in misery as she carefully sank around me with a smile. She began to fuck my half-hard, excruciatingly sensitive cock, pounding blood trapped behind the ring. I groaned and whimpered, wanting to fill her, feel her stretched around my cock. I wanted to explode, in misery, orgasm, something, anything.

I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to come so badly. I wanted to fuck her ’til she came then come deep inside her.

When she told me to fuck her, though, I nearly cried again.

She lifted herself up, and in mindless terror-need-pain-lust I bucked my hips, moving up and into her, again and again. She pressed herself against me, taking my sore nipple in her mouth, and bit me so hard I barely restrained myself from knocking her off. She never let go as I desperately fucked her, wrapping my arms around her back, until she came, jamming her cunt around me and convulsing against my poor, bruised genitals until I cried out.

She returned me to my owner, who had a very expensive drink in one hand, with a light comment about my satisfactory performance. He was amused by my small wounds.

I serviced a group of his business associates next, taking them two at a time, one in my mouth, one in my ass, my cock still straining, weeping pre-cum. They, the silly gits, though it was because of them. I was angry for a while, before the monotony overwhelmed me.

So when I realized, as the drought player came salty and bitter on my tongue, exactly who had won me, I thought, “Shit. Shit.”

I did, for the first time in months.

But this isn’t about that, though it was a catalyst.

I want to talk about the unspoken wonder of interacting with a person who is psychologically present with their submission, the energy, the classic, unmistakable, undeniable, joyful recognition.

I was able to, for the first time in a year, and half that again.

This isn’t about that either, though it was also a catalyst.

I want to talk about submissive captors and dominant prisoners, assertive submission and a model of d/s flipped suddenly horizontal. About wildness and inner gardens growing suddenly past the skin, ephemeral branching reaching into the tangible world, obscuring the differences, making the physical world seem paler, somehow less complete. I want to talk about the melding of my inner and outer realities into the whole in which I walk, about paths which go deeper than I ever expected. But they feel lighter, in a way I can’t describe.

I want to talk about stories and how the boundaries that separate them from reality are only illusions. We are our stories, our stories are us. I am craving to express stories, to share in that way what I am not often able to share when touching. I want to flood the world with reams of words of what I feel, let it loose to worm its way into the human consciousness, altering by a sliver the flavor of broken mirrors of my desires, connecting, here, there again, until we connect and connect and connect and the broken mirrors are only a memory.

I want to talk about being a man and how hard that is for me to express, how lonely I feel in the incredible intimacy I am gifted with, and this loneliness is because I cannot face myself, embrace myself, pull myself out of myself and into my whole, my reality, my inner garden sprung suddenly out, vines eating away at the edges of my vision.

I want to talk about laughing, and safe spaces, and how each and every one is the lick of a wave which will crash higher and higher until we are so inundated we will never remember the drought.

I want to talk about the things that I know and yet have never experienced and so don’t allow myself to know but I know them, they are me have always been me have always been us, our humanity.

I am sorry it is so hard for me to talk to you.

(I am talking to my man)

I am sorry it is so hard for me to reach.

(Sadist)

We will not always been so hungry.

(Dominant)

We are whole and alive.

(Woman)

I want to talk about the compartmentalization of my self, about translating every idea and thought and feeling I have ever had into someone else’s language. I want to talk about violence and ritual, my relationship with pain and the smoldering sensation behind my sternum when I allow myself to be what I am. I want to relate and understand, and be related to and understood and I see glimmers, flashes, not the whole thing only the sign that it’s there, I see now.

I want to beat someone until they cry. I want to cut someone and make them bleed until they slip so far into that space they cannot speak. I want to hurt someone. I want to tie them and take them in their vulnerable inside places, their exposed outer places. I want to make them mine and crawl inside their skin  and still have them only belong to themselves.

I want to hurt someone.

I want to hurt someone.

I want to hurt someone.

I am saying this and it is not a demand, not a battlecry, not a whimper or a hope, it is a statement of my being without decision of value and a sense of creeping wonder.

I love pain.

I love accepting control.

I love sliding into that space where to kill you would be as natural as to fuck you except there’s no reason to, only the acknowledgment of danger.

I am alive.

I have to keep reminding myself.