Sex and Violence

I’ve been constantly discovering blogs lately, including a few by pro-dommes and lifestyle dominant women, whose approaches differ drastically from my wife’s. Mistress Victoria X, for instance, has been a fun read. If I see an address pop up as linking in, I tend to check it out, and my personal blog roll on my Mac is like, 50 blogs at this point. (Although some of them are infrequent posters.)

I’ve also been rediscovering old blogs that I lost somewhere along the way, probably when I switched from my PC to a Mac and the RSS list didn’t export properly. One of those blogs is Almost Magic, which I quickly started catching up on. While scrolling through the archives, I came across a post I’d never read before, about how her kink and sex are separate — they’re not intertwined. And then Maymay posted a link to his blog in her comments, where he said much the same thing.

Now, both of those posts predate my first submissive play with my wife, and were off my radar during my first real forays into the BDSM blogosphere. And so both posts, despite their age, pack this kind of, “Whoah!” punch for me, because, man, I had no idea that people could separate their kink from their sexual pleasure. For me, being hit hurts and is pleasurable at the same time — the pain is this bright, indeterminate thing that makes me get harder and wetter even while it, you know, hurts.

And hurting me makes my wife wet. Pain — receiving it, in my case, and dealing it out in hers — is sexualized. But it’s sexualized only in a sexual context, in a context of submission. I don’t get off having my blood drawn or getting a prostate exam. Being hurt sexually, though, causes my cock to get harder, to the extent that my wife will sometimes strike me as hard as she can while we’re fucking in order to feel my cock swell inside of her, and even as she does it, I can feel her muscles tighten and her sex get wetter. Repeated blows to my face drive us both closer to orgasm, and sometimes will push her into a frenzy where she just starts slapping. I can’t count how many times at this point that I’ve come with a swollen and numb face because she — hell, we — both got off on me being a punching bag.

Now, naturally, everybody interprets their kink differently. But I can’t for the life of me figure out why I eroticize pain so deeply, why I sexualize submission and self-annihilation. My first submissive fantasies date back to childhood, well before puberty. My first masochistic instincts officially date back to my wife and I and our second scene. But when I think back, I can remember that my first real lover — not the girl I had nightmarish, awful, fumbling sex with, but the first girl I had fun, no-strings-attached sex with — would always scratch me at orgasm. She would wrap her long, coltish legs around my body and dig her fingernails into my back and just drag them over me. We had sex all of the time — she actually failed several of her classes that semester because we never left her apartment — and so a week into our sexual relationship, my back was crisscrossed with scabs and bloody furrows. And I remember — clearly — being proud every time that pain happened, because it meant I had pleased her, it meant I had made her come.

But there’s a huge difference between scratching and the new kinds of torture we play with now, and even if I can psychoanalyze myself to the extent that I can hypothesize where my masochism comes from, I can’t figure out why my wife gets juicy-close-to-coming-ohmigod-I-have-to-masturbate-on-you-slave excited when she hits me. My wife is, well, normal. The classic American background. Normal family. No abuse. No kink. No craziness. Just…a paragon of middle-American virtue. And yet somehow, she’s wired so that hitting me with a crop drives her near to orgasm, so that a few swipes of her clit after she beats me leave her shuddering and coming.

Is it nature or nurture? Is it hardwired into us at birth, or something we learn? Is it the product of our experiences? Is it natural? I think those questions need to be answered. I don’t think I have those answers — I can’t even puzzle out why I’m wired into the submissive masochist I am, or why my wife is the dominant sadist she’s turned out to be, and as I read more and more blogs like Almost Magic or May’s, I realize that there’s more under the sun than I’d ever dreamed.