The Nicest Humiliation, II: Exposed and Jangly Nerve Endings

More discussion of an embarrassingly intimate moment. You’ve been warned. Follow the link for more, or come back tomorrow as I talk about something less vulnerable…

Last night’s post about my wife, a sex toy, and fifteen years of anxiety and insecurity was one of the more embarrassing posts I’ve ever written, because it was all about my own hangups, and a really, really intimate moment that — I suspect — if you weren’t there for, if you didn’t know the participants, wouldn’t resonate with you like it did me.

Which is natural. I read about scenes where it gets so intense that one or more of the participants bursts into tears, and I know much of that moment is grounded in the way the two people know each other, the environment, the moment, the kiss of the toys used, the pressure of a hand on shoulder. BDSM is — and this is something I never thought about or realized when I dreamed about starting a D/s relationship with my wife — incredibly revelatory, if you let it. Boundaries in your relationship are going to shift and change. You are going to be open and exposed and vulnerable to your partner, if you don’t watch out. It’s not just vanilla sex with whips and terms of address. (Although that’s not really fair, is it: vanilla sex was revelatory for us, too, at the beginning of our relationship. I remember having sex and afterwards, in the closeness of the afterglow, there’d be fights or tears or secrets revealed or just the two of us, brought closer.)

But BDSM, for us, at least, it’s like an intimacy nuke.

And not just for the sub. I was talking to my wife yesterday about her fantasies, and there are sides of her that I never dreamed exist. Sides that want to burn me, tattoo me, find a sub she doesn’t love like she does me just to break him down to nothing and then build him up again as a gift for a friend. She dreams of ownership and power and permission to do anything she wants, and she knows that in me, she’s found someone who will give her that permission, and it’s something scary for us both.

When she’s not paying attention, when her guard drops, she says things that are so intense and filled with longing and so deep into dominance that it blows my mind. She knows me so well after twelve years — and we’ve had great communication about most things for those twelve years — that there are no defenses up, no shields to keep out the things that are too dark or too scary. When she lets slip about collaring me with a burning hot collar to see the way it sears my skin, she doesn’t flinch afterwards — yesterday she said, “I think I want to tattoo chains around your neck, just under where a shirt collar would be, where the choke chain would burn you.” And her voice is husky and choked with emotion. She’s raw, exposed, tense with longing and desire and the need to own me even more than she does.

And me…there are barriers that drop, and I want to keep them secret, but we talk about our fantasies, about where are boundaries are moving, and they spill out. And I’m ashamed that she makes me forget who I was, and makes me more into the man I am now, if you get my meaning. She peels away the old me. The old me blows away like dead leaves and what’s left behind is somebody I don’t know, sometimes. Yesterday, I talked about sharing her with another sub, and told her I wanted her to cut me, to carve her name into me somewhere with a sharp knife, and she was startled by the need…”I don’t know how I’d react to all the blood, honey…” and all I could say was, “It’s okay, we never have to do it…” while my throat was choked up and all I could do is think, “Why the fuck am I saying this? Why am I telling her this freaky and visceral and blood-soaked fantasy? Just so I can have her name scratched into my skin somewhere?”

Evil. That’s what she calls it when she has these thoughts. “I want to do something — I’d love to do this — but isn’t it evil to fantasize about just breaking somebody and rewriting them?” she said yesterday. And evil is a strong word, but is it so off-base? Because she’s letting this thing she’s had buried inside her out to play with me, something I think — on some level — she’s ashamed of, or at least a little afraid of.

And the incident I recounted last night in my last post, about her fucking me with the dildo that was the size and shape of my penis — that’s exactly what I’m talking about. My anxieties and shame and nervousness were longterm and deeply rooted, and she knew every inch of them. She’s known them as only a soulmate can. And she went in with a silicone cock, and her words, and the power she’d assumed over my health and my pain and she went in and rewrote part of me. And on one level — the mere recounting of it — it’s just her fucking me with a dildo while she gave me a handjob, and the things she said, like, “I’m fucking you with your cock,” are almost cheesy, because they’re so out there, and in the open, and on the nose. If I reread last night’s post with the eyes of somebody who wasn’t there, I kind of cringe for the author.

But between she and I, with our raw and jangling nerve endings, it was something deeper: she was in there rooting around in things that go back to my adolescence, with things I had assumed were part of the very fabric of who I am, and in doing so, I saw this side of her: somebody who knows me so well, who has such power over me that she could go in and make me apologize for my shame. She told me: I need a man. I don’t want your issues. So the issues go away as she deliberately hurts me with something resembling my cock, and I realize just how naked I am before her.

A week after that scene, I thanked her for it. Because it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders — or out of my pants? — and I felt wonderful. But underneath that thanks is the realization that I am naked and utterly exposed before her, and combined with the power she has over me: she can do anything. Sometimes, I really think she can do anything she wants with me. And it’s only evil if she misuses it.