Body Issues

[Warning...boring talk of body issues ahead. Skip today if you want hot talk about sex. I'll throw some of that at you tomorrow.]

You know you’re a masochist when you look at other masochists’ bruises and get dreamy and goofy and wish that they were yours.

At some point, I’d really like to be comfortable enough with my body and my identity as a member of the kink-scene (or whatever the hell you call it) to post photos of myself, bruised and abused. (And “Bruised and Abused” will certainly be the name for my next blog, since Under the Boot is becoming more and more inaccurate given the lack of boots in my D/s.)

I like big women. I like small women. I like, to put it baldly, women. The thin ones are coltish, the larger ones are voluptuous, and I could find something wonderful to say and love about every woman who enters onto my radar. I’m in love with the idea of women: their ability to give birth, the way their bodies curve — except for when they don’t — the perspective they have on things that isn’t, you know, male. Old, young, thin, heavy, long-haired, short-haired, funny, serious, intense, light-hearted, pregnant, not-pregnant, I’m a fan of women.

And the good thing about the BDSM blogs I read is that you see these beautiful pictures of women, completely unafraid to show themselves, no matter their size or shape. They show themselves trussed up, they show themselves vulnerable, they show themselves bruised and battered.

You know what I don’t see? Men. (Tom Allen excepted, but that man’s a prodigy or something.) I don’t know why it is, but for some reason I don’t see a lot of the same pictures of men in femdom relationships. And I don’t see pictures of me.

Well, I see pictures of me. Heck, I’ve got a picture of my bright red ass after a beating sitting in IPhoto. I’ve got about an hour of tape of me being turned into a road map of the Interstate Highway system, all red lines criss-crossing my back, and of me having my genitals tortured while they’re bound up in a leather cord. But I’m not yet brave enough to put any of that online.

So I sit there and look at the pictures of these women and I gasp and think, “Oh, man, I would so want my ass to look like that.” Except my ass wouldn’t look like that, because I have a guy-ass, not a female ass. The end result is a disconnection from my body, to a certain extent — I’m always shocked, when watching footage of my wife hurting me or pictures of me in compromised positions, about my maleness, because my default is a feminine shape from the porn and blogs I read. And about how it’s not a mass-market maleness — there’s a gut there, my balls are huge (an ex called them “bull balls” and would just weigh them in her hands and brag about them to her friends,) my cock gooey and wet. I’m never going to get onto MenInPain.com, let’s put it that way. (Which is a waste, because I take a beating like a champ.)

And so the irony is, I think I chose the one area of fetish — that is, the BDSM blog world — where there seems to be more male body issues than female body issues. I see women with beautiful round thighs, natural figures, women who are round and full and women who are model-sized stick figures. Half-Naked Tuesday — and God bless the person who thought that up — brings me pics of women of all shapes and sizes, unashamed, glorious, and happy with themselves. And then there’s me, in my closet, worried about my ass sagging or my gut.

(There has been one picture of a male that made me think, “Oh, I definitely need to have that done to me. I want that to be my after-picture.” It’s from a party in Australia, and it’s a picture of MayMay’s back after Eileen worked him over. There’s blood and I think to myself, “I want that for myself.”)

The issue of course, is to get to where I’m happy enough with myself that I can change that. I know that sounds contradictory — to love yourself enough as you are that you can change yourself — but the other way, disliking yourself enough that you change, hasn’t exactly been a spectacular success. So I think I’m going to start loving and accepting myself and changing myself because I want better for myself, not because I utterly loathe my body.

Luckily, my wife has got enough love for my body for both of us. And she’s willing to whip the self-loathing out of me, if need be. But really, even if she gives me another transformative moment like she did with my cock, the impetus to change and the love of my own body has to come from me.