Whole Again, A Romantic Dream

I was thinking today, that on some level I’ve been broken all of my life. That there’s a hole in my heart or my soul, that it’s been cracked or fractured since before I was born. I cannot be truly happy — like I am when I submit — by myself. I cannot be truly satisfied, like I am after a BDSM scene, without being compromised and abused.

I was sexually insatiable, and have been since…Lord, I don’t know when. Before we discovered BDSM — before we discovered ourselves as people into BDSM — my wife used to get upset about it. “I can’t satisfy you,” she’d say. “It hurts me that when we’re done making love and I’m sated, you’re ready for something else. It’s like I can never fill up the hole inside you.”

That hole inside me was my submission. That hole needed someone else to fill it with their power and their presence and with pain and pleasure. I can be happy without submitting — I got by for 33 years, after all — I can live a pretty full life, but I will always be hollow and…and….partial…without it.

That part of me is empty without a master. A mistress. Whatever the word is.

The switching we’ve done lately proved that to me. I liked the power, I liked the control, and I liked making my wife happy. But I was never whole during it. And if I’m going to admit something to you, to me, and to my wife, in the back of my head, I always wanted to return to this…to submission and masochism and being whole again.

I keep hearing people talk about better worlds, where sexism is a thing of the past and kink is simply accepted for what it is, all of those dreams we all have, but if I can be selfish for a moment, my better world is one where being a slave is acceptable. (And by that I mean a BDSM slave. Fuck classical definitions of slavery, they’re fucked up and nobody wants to be a part of them, no matter what they may say.)

In this place, I could live my life as my wife’s pet at home and it wouldn’t affect how I raise my child, or getting up and going to work, or what people thought of me. In this fantastic, non-existent fantasy land, I would be whole and fulfilled all of the time. That part of me, the broken part of me that’s got a crack in it that can only be filled by another’s will, that part of me would be fixed in this world, because I could live my life in open service with no social cost. I could be honest: I am her pet. Her slave. I could wear a collar openly. People would understand how fucking broken and wrecked and hollow I am without a presence there to prop me up. Her presence. They would know, without prejudice, that I simply need a dominant, and accept that without one I’m just kind of missing something. Something small…something I can get by without…but without which, I’m simply not whole.

But I am happy with the world I’m in, because when my wife dominates me, for those precious few hours, I am whole. I am filled. I am sated. I have never felt that in all of my life until we started playing with D/s, and I have yearned for it since I was too young to even know what sex is. For those hours, I am whole and happy and joyful.

Gender and BDSM

A few weeks ago, Dev posted about gender and roles in BDSM, and then the blogger at “Let Them Eat Pro-SM Safe Spaces” followed up with just as insightful a post. I’m a little nervous following up on what they wrote, because they’re both about a billion times more eloquent than I am, but there’s been some thoughts rattling around in my head for a while, especially given my wife and I and our flirtation with switching.

When my wife is submitting, I think of her as a female submissive. I know that, on some level, she’s just a submissive. It shouldn’t be gendered. But it is. It’s gendered because we live in the world we live in, and I try to be an enlightened and relatively hangup and prejudice and sexism free person, and yet there I am, letting my wife lick my feet. Dress me. Giving her orders, making her debase herself, letting her praise me as her rightful owner. And there’s a voice in my head that’s telling me how awful this is, there’s decades of undergrad sociology ethics telling me that what we’re doing is wrong, and that it’s wrong because we live in the world we live in.

Let’s not even get into S&M with her as my sub. Spanking her, I can live with, and I don’t know why it doesn’t ping my guilt. Tit-smacking is something we both enjoy, and again, I don’t know why a blow to her breasts is arousing and not guilt-worthy. But when the whole thing turns to punishment, all of a sudden all of the abuse cases from my days doing social work come flooding back. When I smacked her once, after both of us negotiated it, I felt horrible specifically because I live in a world where men can do that, where men do do that, and it’s not negotiated.

That moment when I smacked her — even though it was consensual, even though it happened after negotiation — I was never more acutely aware of her gender. I don’t think I was that aware of her gender when I watched her give birth, because giving birth is raw biology, and I’m conditioned to think it’s natural, and smacking her was…anathema to me. It violated everything I had been raised to believe in, and a lot of self-constructed images I had about myself.

I didn’t like it. Precisely because of who we are, male and female.

It works both ways, mind. I know there’s something my wife gets off on when it comes to penetrating me — when it comes to being inside of me, whether it be with her hands or a strap-on. That I’m a male submissive, that we’re throwing out Christian household values and the normal power structure and we’re embracing a system where — if most of the people we know in our daytime lives found out about it — we’d be viewed as aberrant. That we’re not aiming for equality at all, not even giving lip service to the idea of helpmeets or equal partners, but inequality, and inequality rooted in abuse and power and sexual subservience.

I don’t know if I’m explaining this properly, since my modus operandi with the blog is to rant and not really plan or redraft, but rereading Dev’s post and the other I linked to, what I thought about was that slap, and how I was acutely aware of my maleness and my wife’s femaleness. And how she slaps me all of the time and neither of us minds, but the one time I raised my hand to her, I fell apart. And more than a little. Because of our genders. Because she was a female submissive.