A little reflective self-admission…

There’s a line from a Pete Townsend song which goes something like, “I just wanna be misunderstood/wanna be feared in my neighborhood.”

At some point, you wake up and realize the guy you want to be is not the guy you are. In high school, I wanted to be Heathcliff from “Wuthering Heights,” but instead of brooding and intense and silent, I was…well, snarky. What would today be referred to as an “ironic hipster,” but which back then was basically called “a dick.”

When other people were in college I was on a self-destructive rampage across the country, you know, like you do. Even on a nationwide journey of annihilation, I was still a cocky smartass, it just led to a lot more fights and lots more hookups, because when you’re not afraid to get your ass kicked, you’re certainly not afraid of rejection buy some girl in a nightclub parking lot. Clinical depression and utter sexual fearlessness are kind of hand-in-hand.

At some point, I woke up and realized that I was never going to be cool. I was never going to be brooding and intense. I’m cool with that. Around ten years ago, I kind of got really cool with just being me.

Ugh, what am I trying to get at here?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that something my wife and I haven’t done is let me be me during a scene. I want to be broken. I want to be smartassed and cocky and witty and then I want to be broken right the fuck down and trained to be obedient. There are times when I don’t want to be meek and mild and submissive, and yet — I still want the beating and the dominance.

I’m good at being submissive, I’m good at the “Yes, Mistress” spiel, but what I really want — at least today — is to be a challenge. To be me, sarcastic ol’ me, and to be shown who’s boss. I mean, I’ll admit it — what I’m talking about is one of those cocky torture scenes out of a spy or action film. Let’s be honest — Daniel Craig getting beaten with a rope in “Casino Royale” was all kinds of hot, especially when you sub out (pardon the pun) Eva Green for the guy actually doing the torturing. Laughing in the pain, smarting off. That’s what I’m talking about — Eva Green beating me with a knotted rope just kind of gets me there, even if I suspect I look more like Brendan Gleeson than Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.

We can add Sawyer from “Lost” to this list. Nobody gets tortured or ass-whipped with greater sarcasm than Sawyer. And maybe Bruce Campbell from the season finale of “Burn Notice” last season.

Bravery and humor in the face of pain and torture. Yes. That’s what I’m talking about. Challenging Mistress, standing up to her, until she breaks me right the fuck down. Because that’s the key element, isn’t it? I need to be broken. I need to be crushed. I need her to show me her strength and her skill with a knife and knotted rope. I don’t even mind a punch in the face or a couple hands around my throat.

(Can I just take a moment to say that being choked is ridiculously hot? It took me a while to get the wife to warm up to it, but holy shit, to feel her long, sexy and manicured fingers around my throat, for no air to pass through, to see the intense look on her face — and it’s so intense, her eyes sharp and unblinking — ugh. It’s just perfect. She’s crazy strong when she wants to be. And knives — I cannot think of my wife approaching me with a knife without getting hard as an oak. That can’t be natural, can it? I mean, I’ve been basically sexually programmed to wait patiently to be cut up, there’s a trick they don’t teach you in Catholic Pre-Marriage Counseling.)

Now, I suspect that this impulse to be tortured while smarting off just happens to be one of those drives that’s more masochistic than submissive — there’s nothing submissive in what I’m talking about, is there? But there’s plenty of pain. And it makes me roll around in my head how elastic all this is (and frankly, whether the freedom to be so mercurial in our kink would have existed in another time.) I like being submissive, I like being masochistic, I like being both, once in a while I like being dominant or sadistic. My wife loves being dominant, sadistic, but once in a while feels the urge to submit — but she can’t stand pain. I need to draw one of those charts to cross-reference what we’re capable of. Maybe a Venn diagram, perhaps.

Whatever. Give me a chair, some knotted rope, and a woman with some patience and a thick skin, and then leave me naked and ungagged. I will make my own fun, I tell you. I may be bleeding and bruised afterwards — yes, please — but I will be very, very happy.

(And once again, why do I not see this in BDSM porn? There is so much damn room to work, why do we limit the palette to what amounts to black and white? Angry women and meek guys. We can do better than this.)