Wait, we’re what?

I’ve got a quiet break in the action of my weekend of social butterflying and hotel-room debauchery, and to make a long story short, apparently sometime this weekend my wife and I switched.

Again. Only this time, she needs it. She aches for it. There’s a yearning in her for humiliation and submission — to me — that I have never, ever seen before. I’ve spanked her, flogged her, clamped her until she cried because she forgot the safe word, fucked her, pissed on her, and had her beg me for a facial. She has just demonstrated a need to submit that I’ve never, ever known her to have, and I’ve demonstrated a need to dominate that I didn’t know was there.

But…

As the weekend goes on, I realize that I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. I feel mean. I have no touchstone for whether or not I’m being “good dominant” or “selfish, cheesy, lisping bad maledom stereotype dominant”. More than that, I feel selfish — as a white male raised by women, who had mostly female friends during his sexual development, I was raised to give orgasms and be polite and respectful and treat women as my equals and not be a dominant fuckface. And now I’ve got a woman begging me to hurt her and be selfish and to humiliate the hell out of her. (As I write this, she’s in the shower, and I can hear her coughing up semen and piss and whatever else went into her mouth this morning.)

Shit, I don’t even know if I’m dominant. I mean, we all know I’m submissive, and I know that I’ve had an urge to switch of late — to have the power, to control, to hurt — but when it comes time to put that into practice, well, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. And she’s talking about a permanent switch…

So, I’m punch-drunk and off-balance and now I’m scrambling to figure out if I’m dominant, and if I am, to get in touch with that side of me. Because there’s part of me that wants to be that. But I’m having a hard time finding my footing here in order to get the emotional leverage to make that switch. If I’m even capable of it.

She’s out of the shower now, I’ll update more later, and fill in the background for this switch when I have time. But I’ll say that I’m a wee bit scared — of this going wrong, of this being wrong for us, and of what it may unleash inside me. I’ve spent my whole life avoiding being selfish and cruel and dominant to women, and now all of a sudden…

Liveblogging my Weekend.

My wife is in town. This is good.

She and I had a brilliant morning, absolutely fun, and I enjoyed her presence immensely. We flirted, we talked, and we just kind of absorbed each other’s presence when there wasn’t anything to say. She’s beautiful, she’s smart, and she’s a great person to spend the morning with.

Of course, then we got back to my place, and she decided to do my laundry, and I started busting her balls about how she did laundry. (This would be less of an issue, but she’s constantly commenting on how fresh my laundry smells, and how she can never get hers to be that perfect.) And I think I hit a nerve or hurt her feelings, or just took it too far, because she got mad and switched into domme mode and announced that there would be no sex now until she was ready.

My Hypocrisy

(This is kind of boring political stuff: there will be scene reports aplenty in the coming days, but I felt the need to get this off of my chest.)

I went out and bought “Yes Ma’am: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance” today, because I’m a giant coward. The editor was nice enough to offer me a free review copy, and I was all for it until I realized I’d have to offer up my address for shipping. And I thought, “Wow, I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” I’m enjoying being an anonymous figure right now, and all of a sudden I was faced with, you know, admitting that I was John Doe of West Palm, Florida. And so I just quietly waited until the local Borders got the book in, strolled over to the erotica section, grabbed a copy, and then went over to buy a book by a feminist author who I’d stumbled upon via a blog. Borders down here being what it is, the Women’s Studies section was next to the Gay and Lesbian Erotica Section, and I spent a half hour looking for my book amidst the confused shelves, scanning through bookcase after bookcase of gay porn and stories of transgendered struggles, getting weird stares from the two geeky guys sitting on the ground reading books of folklore, because somehow Women’s Studies is with imaginary myth and not with all of the other studies — African-American Studies, Asian Studies, etc.

It didn’t hit me until I was in the car, really, that I had calmly walked up in my suit and tie and purchased erotica with a credit card with my name on it without blinking, yet the idea of giving somebody my address had me nervous. I’d sat there and caught nervous glances from a couple of vanilla geek boys because they thought I was some gay guy from the beach looking for pornographic novels without blinking (and I admit to thumbing through one or two books just to see what they were like.) I hadn’t worried about the look from the girl behind the counter or the stares from the geek boys, I just calmly went about my business. But my address? Oh, no…

It’s one of those illogical quirks that you realize after the fact, and then want to punch yourself for. I end up refusing a perfectly wonderful gesture out of some bizarre shyness and then calmly look at gay porn around a bunch of increasingly nervous college freshmen without blinking.

And what this quirkiness made me wonder about, afterwards, is this: Is my submission less genuine because I leave it separate from my other self? My daytime self, who’s strong and dominant and can work a room of people like they’re putty in his hands? Is my wife’s dominance less valid a reversal of gender roles because it’s limited to our private life? Is our kink less politically genuine because it’s closeted? In fact, is our kink hypocritical because all of the gender bending and power exchange we do is basically something that’s there to get us off? To get me off? Is my request that my wife dominate me and peg me and hurt me just me exerting some kind of patriarchal power over her, an expression of weakness that’s okay because I initiated it? Is our play a slap in the face of people who really are dominated unwillingly? Is our use of the word “slave” a giant, ahistorical bit of cluelessness?

Now, obviously, not everything is political. The undergrad part of me that did his tour of the Sociology department and became the darling of the Women’s Studies professors demurs, politely, and recalls that everything is political — but the older, married part of me thinks that when I undertook this journey, I was not thinking of feminism or patriarchy or what it meant on that level for me to exchange power with my wife: I was just praying and hoping that she’d be receptive to making me lick her leather boots. My actions may have had a political meaning, but it’s not something my wife or I thought of at the time, and there’s not much point in dissecting our wonderful ride to the extent that it stops being the joyful trip it’s been.

More to the point, I have to admit: there’s something of the Victorian hypocrite in me. I like being normal and dominant and vanilla on the outside, and then being tied up and beat in private. I like being manly and smelling like alpha male and then curling up at my Mistress’ feet when she taps her leg with the crop. The Victorians were prudish people, on the surface, but their sexuality roiled under constant pressure, and I think — in my mind, at least — the energy generated by being constantly contained made the release that much sweeter when it came.

To put it another way: I like that my wife sings in the church choir and is — really is — sweet and innocent and domestic in her daytime life, and a cruel, selfish and pain-loving bitch in private. I like the idea that my life is a James Ellroy version of the ’50s — clean and pretty and neat on the outside, full of dark twists and turns on the inside.

I’m good at bifurcating my life. I was an awful geek when I was younger, well before geek-chic gave playing RPGs and reading comics and liking sci-fi a veneer of coolness. My response to the stigma was to closet my geekhood deep, and go about trying to be — well, normal, except when my buddies and I got together to play D&D or see an indie-band. When all of a sudden, being a geek and a music nerd had cachet, I quietly scorned it — I had worked too hard burying the more obvious bits of my dorkiness to let the cool parts out. I knew I’d never hide all of my geekiness — it’s just too strong to bury entirely, and anyone who gets to know me privately can see it in all its glory — but I could at least get by amongst strangers without showing off my Mark of Cain shamelessly.

And now, BDSM is kind of like that. It’s another dirty, glorious secret for me to hide. Just like those nights I snuck away from my surfer-girl, geek-hating girlfriend to play D&D were wonderful because of their taboo nature, there’s something about being strong and normal at a party and knowing, in my heart, that the other me is just under the surface. The other night I was having a wonderful conversation with several beautiful girls at a banquet, and while I could appreciate their looks and their personality and their kickass intellects, I wasn’t too attracted: only my wife can give me what I need. Only my wife knows and can satisfy that part of me. The public me gets shared with everybody, but the submissive part of me is hers, and hers alone.

(Naturally, when I examine this love of double-existences in the same political light I spoke of a few paragraphs ago, part of me thinks that it’s the straight, white male’s luxury to enjoy being in a closet, whereas other people have it forced upon them. But…I can only say, I get off on what I get off on.)

Oh, and for the record, the book is delicious. If my wife didn’t have me on the masturbatory equivalent of starvation rations, I would be reading the whole book tonight…

Joviality and Fallout

My wife and I were planning budgets. I find this immensely tedious, especially when it’s a week before she comes down and I want to drop some money on new toys at the local fetish shop. I mean, how are we supposed to learn rope bondage without rope? How are my ankles to be secured without ankle cuffs? These are serious questions, and I’m a serious man engaged in a mission of great importance — forget how we’re going to pay for a new place, I need toys, dammit.

My wife’s attitude can best be summed up thus: a) we have plenty of toys, b) fuck what I want, she’s the one who gets to decide what new toys get added to the collection, and c) she’d much rather get a new place, with a dungeo…I mean, basement, than continue in our current house and have to worry about her family or our daughter walking in while Mommy and Daddy play Mistress Spanksalot and her pet, Subby.

And as she spelled out the logic behind her decision to limit our spending on new gear, I said, “Look, I’m not asking for permission. I’m going to buy new toys, and your job is not to okay the purchases, but to make yourself useful and hit me with them. Capisce?” And then I laughed, because this was supposed to be funny.

But I forgot that when we’re talking about S&M, I need to treat it — and her — with respect. Rule number 1. So instead of a laugh on the other end of the line, I hear, “Woah. Maybe I should give you a minute to think before you say another word.”

Me: “I was kidding.”

Her: “I don’t find it funny. Do you think I’m just here to get you off? Is that my role? You seem to be fucking confused.”

Me: “…No, ma’am.”

Her: “Do you want to be the dominant? Is that what this is? Are you asserting yourself by making light of our relationship?”

Me: “No, ma’am. I don’t want to be the dominant.”

Her: “…I am going to beat your ass with the switch for this. The last time is going to look like nothing compared to what you’re going to get.”

I start pleading, trying to explain I was just kidding, I was feeling my oats, and…

Her: “You can beg all you like, but you’re getting the switch.”

Me: “Can I at least ask how many swats?”

Her: “I haven’t made up my mind.”

Me: “Could you give me a ballpark?”

Her: “I’ll tell you what: every time you ask, you get ten more hits.”

Me: “So is that ten hits, or ten more in addition to the undetermined number?”

Her: “You’re at twenty or thirty extra hits now.”

Me: “Wait, you’re counting the times I asked before you made the rule? That’s not fair!”

Her: “Is that a question? It sounded like a question. Fair’s not something I care about. You ran out of fair when you decided you had some jokes to tell.”

Me: “I couldn’t handle thirty last time, and now you’re giving me thirty in addition to some other number.”

Her: “Maybe this time you’ll learn to think before you speak, hmm?”

And that was that. I was nervous and ashamed and pissed that I was going to get 30+ hits with that fucking switch and the conversation ended. It’s all good now, but…I could definitely do without the nervousness about that whipping. But I had it coming.

Protocol and Chaos and What I am

I had an interesting conversation with my wife yesterday.

I have a long drive home in traffic — upwards of an hour, usually — and so we were just chatting. I had my hands-free in and we were whiling away the hour talking about our respective days, my job hunt up north, her own job hunt, etc. And when we reached the “trivia” section of the conversation, when we’ve talked about all of the important and stuff and the conversation becomes fairly aimless and fun, I asked a question that had just popped into my head:

“Honey, what animal do you think I am?”

And without missing a beat, she said, “A wolf.”

I was shocked. I mean, every guy wants to hear that he’s a wolf or a bear or a shark or whatever, but frankly, given my place on the D/s chain with her, I expected something more friendly and controlled: a dog, a cat, a koala or something. (A koala? Really?) But a wolf?

“Really? A wolf? Why?”

She spoke matter-of-factly. “Because, you’re social, you’re incredibly oriented towards your friends and family, but you’re protective: if anybody ever tries to hurt something you love, you’ll go after them. You take care of the people around you, you’re gentle, but when push comes to shove, you’ll tear somebody’s throat out.. You’re a little wild but domestic for your family.”

And I kind of agree with that. I can see how she got there, knowing myself. And more to the point, I can see a lot of our relationship there.

My wife’s constant refrain is, “I want a man.” She wants someone to make decisions and take care of her and our daughter and to be a source of stability and comfort and safety. She wants someone who will protect her. She does not want a boy — although she’s occasionally happy to call me her boy — and she doesn’t want someone weak. She wants someone strong. And then, she wants to take that strong man and she wants to bring them to heel. To the rest of the world, he’s still a wolf. To the rest of the world, he’s still strong. But she knows he’ll never turn on her, never bite, always obey, always come running.

More importantly, she knows that once she breaks him, he will never allow someone else to break him. Wolves, my wife like to occasionally point out, mate for life.

Related to this: I like reading other blogs, and I was catching up on one I haven’t read in a while but which I love to peruse, Mickimichele’s. And she’s got her Master’s protocol for her on the website, right there, in black and white. And I was thinking, “Why don’t we have a protocol?” Protocols and contracts give the slave an idea of expectations — they let the submissive know, “Here’s what I, the Master/Mistress/Whatever wants from you, the servant.” Dev and Jos have a protocol, too, and Dev has spoken about it.

Protocols and contracts establish the boundaries and obligations of a relationship, even if they’re only one-sided. When my wife and I tried switching places, I realized that with her, I’d need a contract or a protocol — that there’d have to be signals and cues about when she’s supposed to be a slave and obedient. I feel comfortable with those kinds of boundaries — I like being on notice.

We don’t have a protocol or a contract, precisely because she doesn’t want those boundaries or for me to be on notice. There are two reasons for this. One, my wife likes to fly by the seat of her pants. She wants to be free to do whatever she feels like, and she doesn’t want to be caged by ritual and expectations of behavior. Domme activity for her is about not being a slave to anybody’s desires but her own, not being bound by anything but her own whim.

And as for contracts, she knows I spend my day parsing language and that there’s not a M/s contract in the world that I couldn’t make my bitch in five minutes flat. She knows I could lawyer my way out of any clause in a slave contract; so she cuts through the bullshit by simply not having one. Her word is Law, and it is what she says it is. I can’t really argue about her intent, or my expectations, if she’s simply going to hold up her hand and say to me, “My intent is something I know and you don’t, and your expectations don’t matter — only mine do.”

So I don’t know what her expectations are except what I can divine them by her statements and actions, by what she lets me hear and see. She doesn’t let me in. And this idea of wanting a man, wanting a wolf, of me being that man and that wolf — it’s my only insight into what she wants from me. She doesn’t mind breaking me — she doesn’t think less of me after crushing me under her heel. Because it’s her, crushing me. She’s allowed to break her man in two. That’s the zone of safety she creates around our play: I can be human. I can be weak. I can allow myself to break under the switch and use the safeword. That doesn’t compromise her image of me. I’m allowed to suffer under the ordeal she creates for me, because she wants to know she owns me and can crush me.

But now I know that there’s no conflict for her in me being a man outside of the context of our D/s. Now I know that no matter how much I crawl in her presence — outside of it, I’m allowed to be a man. I’m expected to be a man. And I feel very comfortable with that. Happy to know what’s expected of me.

I Hate It…

My wife and I are fighting.

We’re making Big Important Decisions about our future — what my career is going to do, where we’re going to live, especially in light of the recession — and we squabbled a bit tonight. And what kills me is, I feel like I need to be Big Strong Alpha Male and just push through an agenda, and take charge, and make my way and drag her by the hand. You know, the part of me I’ve been calling Daytime Me.

But when we fight, and I’m laying in bed, the submissive part of me just quails at the idea that I might disappoint her or hurt her or anger her. We didn’t go to bed angry tonight after our phone call, but we didn’t go to bed as in synch as we normally do, and it tears me up. Because I feel split down the middle — Submissive Pet and Man of the House. How do I reconcile them? How do I balance the competing needs? Because the real problem is, the more I try to be Man of the House, the more urgent the urge to submit gets.

I feel like — and this is going to sound dramatic, but I have to say it because this is how it makes sense to me — I feel like the Submissive Pet part of me is a demon that needs frequent exorcism, and once he’s been taken care of, through pain and pleasure, then my head is clear and I can be Man of the House with no fear or regret or doubt. The pressure inside me builds and I just want to be hurt and dominated and crushed and then, when it’s all over, my head is clear and I can think again.

That pain and humiliation opens my head. It makes me strong by proving that I am strong.

The worst part is, my wife has issues of her own right now up there, and I know that nothing would make her feel better than to hurt me. I know that if I could just hand her a whip and present my back, she’d flog me and she’d relax. She’d melt, the tension leaving her, the world outside being left behind in a fog of my moans and her sweat as she works to stripe me. During our vanilla days, orgasms would take forever as she fought to stop thinking about the world outside — bills, our daughter, her family, work. Now that we’re into BDSM, there’s a purity and a focus to her thoughts during sex. The world doesn’t intrude. It’s just her, and me. The Evil Queen, and her willing servant.

I had this idea — to give her a bunch of lancets, the kind you buy at a pharmacy for diabetes kits — and just let her stick them in my back, writing a word or two, the lancets all sticking up and spelling out some word, my name or her name or the word “Pet.” She would leave them in, maybe pat them or touch them once in a while, jar them a little, each movement against them making me writhe. She could twist them in their sockets. She could pluck them out, saying, “He loves me, he loves me not…” like I was some bizarre flower with bloody petals.

I know I need to be strong and step up, and I will. I will do this. I’ve been working my ass off the last two days to catch up on all of my work, to get my head clear and my schedule open so I can take a minute or two to really just start working on hashing out our future. I want to carve out that future and take care of her. I want to be the man she needs. But it’s a simple fact that the man she needs occasionally needs to be hurt and tortured and fucked and pissed on, and once in a while, maybe used as a pincushion, her sitting on my back as I hold myself up on hands and knees, popping lancets in and out of my skin, one by one…

Always On Her Mind…

Just a quick note about a conversation the wife and I had this morning.

She had gone to a friend’s bridal shower and won prizes in several of the little games that got played. And while looking through the prize box, she saw a nice candle, scented, in a glass jar. And according to her, the first thing that came to her mind is, “I would really like to burn my husband with that.” She grabbed it, imagining the wax pooling at the top of the jar and then just being *splashed* over my private places.

Later on, she saw a necklace of some kind with a little heart on it somewhere, and she assured me that out of nowhere, the image of the chain and the heart wrapped around my cock as a kind of leash jumped into her head unbidden, and she had to have one.

All of which is reassuring. I’ve said before that my wife is something of an enigma to me — does she dream about hurting me? Does she go into headspace when she hurts me? Does she fantasize about S&M? It’s a rare occasion when she lets me inside her thought processes (thus explaining her reticence about writing a blog of her own or chiming in here.) To hear that she sees things and thinks, “I’m going to use that to hurt my man,” well, that’s unspeakably hot. I don’t doubt her commitment to Sparkle Motion — er, our BDSM relationship — but it’s good to hear that it haunts her head the same way that it does mine.

Of course, another reason why I’m interested is because she’ll be down to see me for a few days next week, which means shopping sprees at sex-shops and violent, painful sex in anonymous hotel rooms punctuated by trips out for Latin American food and the odd dinner with my local friends. My real question is, how the heck is she going to get her favorite knife across state lines and then into my skin? I already healed the last batch of cuts…

So Where Are We Now…?

I spent the last four posts talking about our weekend for a reason. (Okay, I was also bragging a bit — two reasons.) But really, the last two times we’ve gotten together, and the attendant scenes that went along with them, have been an evolution in our relationship, a kind of shining path to…where ever it is that we are now.

So where are we?

Like I said, I think my definition of what I am has changed, even if the word used to name it hasn’t.

I’m her slave.

And being a slave means, for me, not being able to say no anymore. I can say “I can’t,” but I won’t say no. I don’t know if I can. It’s not like I’ve been brainwashed into this, it’s not some mystic transformation. This is not some weird mind-control erotica. But it’s a choice I’m making based on where we’re at: she’s tested me. She’s sipped my blood and whipped me worse than I’ve ever been whipped before — even in fistfights — and I haven’t said “no,” and I haven’t said “stop” unless it’s because she’s pushed me passed my breaking point and the plea to stop is coming from something beneath my conscious mind.

No, wait, it isn’t a choice I’ve made consciously, because I don’t recall making a choice. I think it’s more like a place I’ve reached, while on a journey. It’s the Land-of-Do-As-She-Pleases. It’s the place where all of the bullshit stuff is stripped away and she sits on me and I become a pincushion or a medical experiment or something to drink, and it’s the most intimate thing in the world. I’ve never been as close to another person as I am with her during these scenes. And I’ve never been as…moved by another person’s will, never been as comfortable in my own skin, or with giving up control, as I am then.

The only thing that has ever come close to the degree of emotional power that I feel with my wife during these moments are “milestones” in my daughter’s life — her birth, her first words, her making up a song for me, etc., and those are of a completely different tone. And not only that, but these moments with my wife happen with incredible frequency. Not every time we scene, but often enough where I think that she and I both are addicted. No, I know we are.

I talked my wife into trying D/s with very little hope she’d embrace it, and precious little idea of what it would eventually become. My idea of BDSM was showy, online fetish-model photo-shoots. And my idea of myself was a boot-fetish submissive. It certainly wasn’t a guy wearing his wife’s name scrawled in blood on his chest. Or a guy who got pegged. Or a guy who stayed in a state of constant near-ejaculation because his wife was hitting his balls with a crop.

I feel like I’ve hit a…I don’t want to say plateau. Even as I reach this acceptance of my situation, I realize that we’re on the cusp of new things — cockrings and bondage being two big ones. We’re not stopping. But I realize — and more importantly, my wife realizes — who we are, and what we’re capable of. The fact that she could strike me with anger in her heart, even if it wasn’t “abusive” anger, and that I would take it, and accept it, and get off on it — that’s a big moment. That’s what I’d call a defining moment in our relationship. So not a plateau, but a milestone.

So here we are. After seven or eight months, we’ve reached the end of the beginning. I’ve seen what she’s capable of — I’ve seen what I’m capable of letting her do — and I’m alright with it. And more importantly, she’s become strong and dominant and cruel and she’s alright with that side of her. She’s okay with seeing me genuinely writhe in pain with tears in my eyes, because she trusts me to safeword if I need to, and trusts herself to stop if and when I do that*. The door is open for … for everything now.

*My wife commented that I didn’t point out that when she punished me the other night, she stopped the split second I safeworded. She was quite proud of her self-control, and she deserves props for it, because she’s told me she was in a very heated, frenetic, and “rage”-filled — her word — headspace. So, here’s a note about it, because I think it’s very important that she get some congratulations for it, and I think the fact that she did so influenced my confidence in her abilities as a sadist.

I realize that I could stop this blog tomorrow. I started it to work through a lot of issues involving my fear of the Gimp and my worries about where all this comes from, and because the blogosphere around here was my only tie to the larger BDSM community. But I don’t want to, because I know that even though I’ve hit a milestone, the journey’s not over. The trip’s just beginning. She’s coming down in the next week, and I hope to take her up to Fetish Factory and buy some more bondage toys and our first cockring or ball-tie and maybe some kind of shock-unit.

But what’s important is, I realize who I am. Who she is. I’ve always called myself a slave on this blog — but it’s only in the last week that I finally realized what slavery means to us.

PS: I will most definitely be updating my blogroll and the blog to mark the occasion of this kind of happy milestone, so if you know I read your blog — and there are a lot of you whose blogs I read that I haven’t added yet — then know my next step is to get that done.

Thanks for reading, everybody.

He’s All Tied Up Right Now…

Monday comes, and we take our daughter to daycare. My wife calls in sick. We had planned to meet with someone from the place I was trying to get hired at, to talk about the job and what it entailed, but they had never called us. So when we get home and she gets right to business: “Do you mind being an object for me?”

Of course I don’t. The last few days have convinced me that my place is on my knees, her place above me. I’m a slave. She owns me. There’s no saying “no,” anymore –there’s simply “I can’t.” And saying that I can’t do something is an admission of weakness, and her man isn’t weak unless she beats me down like she did with the switch.

(Graphic sex follows. You’re warned.)

The Safe Word, part 2: A Minute Later.

My wife had just finished whipping me with the plastic switch she had decided was best suited for punishment purposes. It was roughly two and a half feet long and as wide around as a pencil, and like getting whipped with a car antenna. She had been in a cool rage as she beat me, and I had been hurting so bad that I had forgotten there even was a safeword until she threw it out to me like a life-preserver. Knowing I loathed being weak, knowing the safeword represents weakness to me, she held it up and offered me a choice: continue with the beating I was taking, or safeword out. Submit and be strong, or give up and be broken.

In the face of the stinging pain, the seemingly endless whipping, I grasped at the safeword. And although I didn’t realize it that second, the whole relationship subtly changed.