Baggage Handling

I, as constant readers of this column may have guessed by now, have a lot of issues.

Fears of the Gimp. Issues about the size of my penis (since dealt with by my wife.) Issues about an event that happened when I was fifteen or sixteen. As I read the blogs of folks into BDSM, I’m always struck at how…well-balanced they are. How normal. I mean, seriously, do Goose & Gander have any hangups at all? It’s like the perfect relationship. Eileen and May? Even my wife is calm and serene, like a bodhisattva of kink. And here I am, like a neuroses-prone BDSM version of Woody Allen, only non-Jewish and without the somewhat offputting stepdaughter thing.

I sometimes wonder if I would do this much self-examination, this much of what I can only call “neurosis archaeology,” if I didn’t have the blog. But I’m a thinker. I ruminate. I ponder. My wife is much more at ease with flying by the seat of her pants, but I spend a lot of time just thinking and musing and trying to figure it all out.

I just want to be free of hangups. And to be honest, I’m getting there. It’s amazing how much stuff from my first few steps into mature sexuality, things that happened in high school or college, affect my ability to be at ease with my sexuality twenty years later. It’s absurd, really — everybody has bad experiences, but somehow all of mine accreted around my subconscious and formed this kind of shell of hangups, and for me to become truly at ease with being a dominant, a switch, a sub, I feel like I have to go rooting around in there, hold all of the issues up to the light and see, in the end, that they don’t fucking matter at all.

Or more to the point, I want to hold them up and let my wife excise them. She’s so good at that. She’s like a domme with a PhD in psychology or something: sado-masochistic psychoanalysis. I mean, she sodomized my insecurity about my penis out of me, imagine what she’ll do with everything else?

(As an aside, on the issue of my fear of The Gimp: I am fascinated by This Girl’s blog. The extreme boundary of BDSM for me is not knifeplay or 24/7 or anything like that, it’s masks. I’m going to come out and say that I get a pure-raw fear reaction of masks in BDSM play, to the extent that I can actually feel my stomach tighten. And This Girl’s blog is heavy on the latex, and heavy on the masks, and yet I can only marvel at her relationship with her Master. I would pay good money for my wife and I to achieve that level of comfort in our play, to just go that deep. It’s probably one of the more interesting — and to be frank, hottest — blogs I read, but those masks still unnerve me, and I’m not sure if it makes the blog slightly offputting for me, or somehow hotter, because they’re so comfortable with something I have such a visceral reaction to.)