I almost pulled the blog down. Somebody I know from another part of my life online threatened to “ruin me in real life” and one of the only things I could think about that was capable of affecting my career or whatever in real life was this blog.
Naturally, this is making me think of the nature of blogging, and being closeted and kinky vs. the risks of exposure, which I’ll blog about tomorrow. But for now, the site’s back up and I believe everything’s kosher.
It’s midnight on a Friday. The little girl is sick, so my wife is in bed with her, and occasionally I peek in and watch them both breathe. I’m listening to cult musical soundtracks — Xanadu, Phantom of the Paradise, Bugsy Malone, Rocky Horror and Shock Treatment — while surfing the web.
Last night, I was getting ready for bed next to my wife and she told me to scoot down into her arms so she could hold me. I sighed, because I was comfortable and didn’t feel like rearranging myself, and she said, “Don’t pretend that you think your place is somewhere other than in my arms.”
I moved myself down until she was holding me, her head above mine, me wrapped in her arms, her breasts underneath my chin. A dominant embrace, her owning me. “That’s right, she said. That’s your place.”
“It is.” I sighed as the feeling of being wrapped washed over me.
“You need this. You need to be controlled by a powerful woman. You’ve wanted this your entire life, and here it is: I own you.”
As she talked like that, feelings of submission and powerlessness — of being owned, of being property, but property well-cared for — washed over me. She kept talking, telling me who I was, and what I needed, and what I wanted, and soon I was falling asleep like that, owned, protected, powerless but in the arms of someone powerful.
I’m where I belong.
Twenty years ago, a Friday night like this, at midnight, I’d be at The Rocky Horror Picture Show downtown. It was shown in the gay district of San Diego, and it was…it’s hard to describe to people who came of an age of Internet communities and wired cultures. If you were transgressive, or kinky, or just had doubts about your sexuality, Rocky Horror was the place to go. I remember that even in the wild and hair-sprayed late ’80s, Rocky Horror was a place where you could go and let loose. Guys could drag with no consequences. Gay guys I knew could be out and not get shit. Women could crossdress or play with other girls or be promiscuous and nobody blinked.
And for me, Mr. Closeted Submissive, the whole idea of it — that there was a place you could be yourself if you wanted — was tempting and comforting. The movie itself, with its bisexuality and crossdressing, with its throwbacks to ’70s sex and ’50s horror movies, with its S&M gear and sexually transgressive tones — it created this temporary space where you didn’t worry about what people thought, where you could be you.
I remember seeing a beautiful person dressed as Frank N. Furter one night and not having a clue whether it was a guy or a girl. He/she had to be in her twenties or thirties — much older than me — and had two guys embracing him/her. Her/his eyes bored right into me, and I just remember thinking about how unselfconscious they all were — the men holding each other and the person dressed as Frank, gender and sexuality and place just kind of blurring.
That was the one place where I let myself yearn for what I wanted — to be submissive. To be dominated. To be owned. I had no idea I was a masochist then, but I knew I wanted a woman to control me — to collar me and make me hers until I was just a pet. To be used, to be handed off, to be humiliated and redesigned and made pleasing.
To call someone “Mistress.” To be a “pet.” I don’t know if I had the language then like I do now, but I had the unfulfilled need for it, to be a possession and to be cherished and controlled and trained. To be made perfect in the hands of a stronger person.
I remember my heart leaping out of my chest some nights, with that unfulfilled yearning to be filled and completed by another — by a powerful woman. To find a place — like the place that movie represented — where I could be myself.
And tonight, thinking back to last night, in my wife — in my Mistress’ — arms, I realize that I am complete. I am perfected in her hands. I am owned. I’ve fulfilled the promise that movie held out to me, those years ago, to live my life the way I want to, not just dream it but to be it. She has shown me that I am strong and I am powerful and that even in that strength and power and masculinity, I can be owned and dominated and controlled and still be a man. That I can be myself and still have my dreams fulfilled.
And, I can honestly say, I am happy. Happier than I’ve ever been. But it’s hitting me tonight, just how much I’ve realized the dream that I allowed myself to dream for those two hours every Friday. Maybe you can’t understand if you didn’t go to that scene at that time and place, and felt that sense of yearning like I did to find a place where you could be you, where you could be kinky or gay or trans or drag and still be accepted and loved. How for two hours you got a taste of it.
[If this is long and rambly, you'll have to forgive me -- I am out of my head on medication right now. I should be back to normal tomorrow.]
The always insightful Dev said in a comment to one of my posts that she was worried about our safety. Specifically, she said:
“I have a bit of concern that you’re going to end up dead because neither of you cares about safety. I hope that’s not true. Play safe.”
And that got me thinking. About safety, obviously, and whether my wife and I are “safe” or not.
On the one hand, a lot of the worries that other people have, we don’t. We’re in a long-term — thirteen years — committed, monogamous relationship. Neither of us works in a profession where we have to worry about exposure to STDs or bloodborne illnesses, and we both have training in what to do if we are exposed. When we play around with blood, we tend to rely on alcohol swabs and making sure we use clean cutting tools to minimize the risk of infection, and when it comes to swapping fluids, we’re just not that worried at all.
OTOH, I’ll be the first to admit that our attitude toward trying new things has been…not as risk-averse as some people. When we first got started, we read a lot of books on safe play, and we heard the admonitions to get a tutor before messing with knifeplay or with really high-impact play, and I read page after page about how face-slapping is one of the most dangerous activities you can do, and Lord only knows that we moved on from that to actual punches to the face this weekend.
So, are we idiots, or what?
I’m not going to rule out idiocy. I’d like to think we’re simply adventurous, and trust each other, and are ready to call it quits or get medical attention at a moment’s notice, but one man (or woman’s) adventurousness is another’s sheer, unbridled idiocy.
But I trust her. And I trust me to know my limits and safeword or safe-gesture (when I’m gagged,) and I trust our common sense. I’m floating in a veritable ocean of trust, or I couldn’t do any of this.
I’d like to think that a lot of our adventurousness is a side-effect of me being the object of our attention. I’ve been in fights — more than I care to admit — so a shot to the face by my wife, who I know is not out to hurt me, and who gives me some warning, is not as scary as it probably should be. I know I’m risking a broken cheekbone. I know there’s a chance, however small, that she slips and a piece of bone in my nose flies up into my brain and kills me dead. But I also know how many people get punched in the face and that doesn’t happen to.
I also got stabbed when I was younger in a … misunderstanding, and so her playing around with a knife, when I know she’s not cutting near anything arterial and she’s handling the knife delicately, it probably doesn’t scare me as much as it should, or would if I hadn’t already had a knife sticking out of me. It’s not like I’m daring fate to keep me from being stabbed again, but I also know and trust my wife not to be crazy with the knife. To be intent and focused and mindful.
And I’ve been struck by cars and I caught on fire once and there was this time I got tased, and another time when I got pepper-sprayed, and…no, really. I am a freakin’ wreck, when I think about it. But that background means that I’m just not as worried about getting hurt as some people.
How can I put this? Hunter S. Thompson once said that the secret behind the Hell’s Angels and most street fighters was that once you’d been in a brawl and lost a tooth or broke your nose, you weren’t afraid of being ugly. You weren’t afraid of being hurt. And once you weren’t afraid of being hurt like that, you had an edge on Joe Citizen. And that’s where I’m at — I’m just not as scared as a lot of people are over my own blood, or of getting hit, or of temporary pain. Maybe not scared enough, some people would say. I suppose this is why I’m willing to dive in head first. I don’t want to ever be where I’ve been — I don’t want to get into any more fistfights, or get stabbed, or have stupid injuries, but because I’ve had them, S&M play is on the safe side of my perspective.
Now, there are things I’m really goddamned afraid of…I blew out both my knees in high school in spectacularly bad ways, one of which involved my kneecap rotating to the other side of my leg, and years later I also tore or sprained nearly all of the tendons in my left leg between the ankle and the knee. I’m deathly afraid of leg injury, and being on my knees is intensely painful to me. And that means, paradoxically, that I’m more worried about extended kneeling than than I am getting punched in the face, honestly.
I also question just how safe this kind of lifestyle can really be, and I suppose that shows in how I act. I assume, going in, that there’s a level of risk I’m assuming, and that the risk cannot be minimized past a certain point if I want to go where we want to go. I know that so long as we’re doing whipping, clamping, slapping, bondage and play with candles and knives, there will be a chance — no matter how small — that something goes wrong and I get hurt, possibly seriously. I suppose we could go to lengths to minimize that risk, but there comes a point where I simply hope common sense will see us through — no leaving me alone, keep the paramedic shears close by, we both have first aid training…
And, here is is where I get stupid: I would be lying if I didn’t say that part of the reason why we do the things we do is because it gets us off. Knifeplay gets us off. Punches got us off. Choking, with her hands or in a bondage tie, gets us off. And slapping… slapping gets us right the fuck off. I don’t know what to do with that — the things I like tend to be the things that have a more pronounced risk.
So, yeah, we might actually be unsafe. I don’t know. But we do try not to be too unsafe. And so far, the high has been worth the risk, when balanced against what we do to mitigate it.
As we approach our one year anniversary of the first time we had a really successful scene, I’ve been musing on pegging, partly inspired by following a bunch of links at Maymay’s.
I like pegging. I like girls with cocks. I don’t feel like my heterosexuality is threatened by this, no matter how many times my vanilla friends proclaim that anything going “up the down staircase” means you’re a [insert slang term for homosexual here.] For those guys, a finger creeping into your backdoor somehow reverses the polarity on your batteries, and *boom* you now crave man-ass. If their conception of pegging is to be believed, an actual cock-like simulacra being shoved into your ass will send you screaming into the arms of the nearest single gay man, who will flip you around and take you, hard and mewling, on the bench of your local gym — you know, like they do.
My wife and I have spent a year messing around with pegging, and I can honestly say I’m no more gay or bi than I was before, which is to say, not much. I keep thinking that I should be enlightened and groove on all of the repressed straight white male desires that I see in mainstream femdom — cuckolding, for instance, or forced bi — but every time I see it, I realize that it holds no interest for me. Honestly, when I really look at cuck porn — and I’ve seen a couple here and there as it slides more into mainstream erotica and porn — the variations of it tweak me the wrong way, especially the racial elements. I’ve got too many black male friends to get any mileage out of the whole “White women are always a millimeter away from throwing themselves into the arms of the sexually superior black male” vibe that seems to underlie it. If it gets you off, great — but it’s just not my scene.
But anyway, there is, apparently, no connection between having a strap-on forced up your ass by a powerful woman and a sudden, unexplained craving for real cock. Admittedly, my study is not scientific.
More to the point, my wife and I have had to explore pegging together. My wife is quite open about the fact that the fake cock is a power symbol — that the weight at her crotch, the weapon-like nature of it, gets her off. There’s this cudgel where her sex is, this battering ram, and it forces its way into my ass. And that’s not the end of it — she then gets to grip me, usually while I’m in an immensely submissive posture on my hands and knees, and just grind and thrust against me while I grunt underneath her.
She doesn’t care about the symbolism, she doesn’t care that she associates the male sex organ with power, she doesn’t care that it doesn’t actually involve clitoral or vaginal stimulation — that it’s not actually her organs doing the work, but a prosthetic — she loves it. She’s unapologetic. To her, her cock is a weapon used to objectify and batter me, and she doesn’t much care what anybody else thinks, because — as she puts it — it’s just too fun.
On my end, it’s taken us some time to find out what and why and how pegging works. On the purely physiological end, it’s pretty obvious — the prostate is a very sensitive place, and a largish cock-like structure shoved in there and rocked around is good fun. But there’s all of the other baggage — do I want to be one of those transparently selfish men ruining Bitchy Jones’ femdom? Is this all about my elevation of the cock above penis-on-vagina sex?
After long, exhaustive study in our home lab, I can honestly say that pegging has not supplanted penis-on-vagina sex. We still have the same amount of the latter that we had before, and if anything, it’s better now.
Psychologically, my wife’s cock is not a surrogate for a guy’s cock. This is not my “second best” way to try to maintain my straight-card while secretly reveling in my bi nature. I don’t get off on being called a slang term for gays while she bangs me — we’ve tried that once, tried to introduce the whole “you’re gay while my cock is in you” schtick, and midway through it, I remember turning and saying, “You know, that isn’t doing anything for me but making me feel weird.” (There was more grunting involved, mind. I was getting pegged, after all.)
And she replied, “Oh, thank God. I was getting bored with that already.”
(Part of our problem with that is the only gay guy in our lives is probably the flat-out manliest guy I know. The testosterone comes off this man in waves. Imagine if your only contact with homosexuality was the most alpha of males you know, and see if you could still connect “homosexuality” with queeny weakness or femininity during a scene. As if either of those have anything to do with real submission or actual real life homosexuality anyway.)
Eventually, sometime around March, I think pegging stopped being “about” anything but pegging for us. She puts on her battering ram or whatever it is, she bangs the hell out of me, and in so doing she overpowers me. If she’s not in the mood to thrust with her hips, she uses the dildo like a knife, stabbing me in the ass. She can use her strap-on or the feeldoe or even the handle to the flogger, but the result is the same — angry penetration that gives us both pleasure. It’s about violence and power and pleasure and all of the rest of it — sexual and gender politics, vanilla assumptions about what a “man” does, all of the rest of that bullshit — has nothing to do with it anymore for us. The space we’ve carved out for pegging is…I don’t know, just ours.
She gets off on pinning me — holding my face to the bed, her hand on my neck and forcing me down, and thrusting inside me while I’m all resistance and tension. She gets off on the violence — stabbing me with her cock, while holding it or it rests inside her sex or while it’s strapped to her. And she gets off the weight, the way it makes her feel, the way I have to face away from her while she does it, my face pointed to the wall when it isn’t forced down. And I get off on her getting off, I get off on the power, the violence, the way her demeanor changes.
And we’re okay with that.
Naturally, this cuts off a lot of pegging porn for us, because it comes with a hell of a lot of baggage. I imagine swinging husbands who just like to watch their wife get pleasure have probably had a lot of porn ruined by the new cuck scene. But it’s okay, because it’s working for us.
I don’t have a lot of time to write tonight, but I’ve got about ten minutes to talk about what happened.
My wife hasn’t read my blog in a while — she hasn’t had net access at her new job, which is where she likes to read, away from me, where she can digest everything without my presence. She asked me to tell her about my last few posts, though, and I told her about my fantasies of being punched, of black eyes, of torture and abuse. Until now, she’s only punched me in the thighs, on the ass, in the arms and chest. Never in the face.
Tonight she called me into the bedroom and said, “So you want to be punched in the face, do you?”
I kept my eyes low, and said, “Yes. I can’t explain it. I know it’s weird.”
I saw her clench her fist and she took a swing at me, a solid roundhouse. The blow connected high up on my cheek — not incredibly hard, but a solid blow from somebody who’s probably never gotten into a fight in her life. My head snapped a little to the side. I think my eye started to water from the sudden pain, and there was a white flare under my eye when she struck me.
“How was that?,” she asked. She was smiling. Smiling after hitting her spouse of over a decade in the face with a closed fist. Her blow had been relaxed but pretty good for an amateur, and she hadn’t thought twice about it — she just let her arm roll out toward me and hit me in the face. It amazed me, a little, when I thought about it later — I don’t know that I could ever punch someone I loved in the face. But she did it, calmly, happily, with no regrets. It’s why I love her — the way she shows cruelty and yet never flags or wavers in her love for me. It’s paradoxical — she loves me so much she will hurt me for our mutual pleasure. She loves me so much that my pain doesn’t stop her from doing what she needs to for us. It’s…incredible. I’m not strong enough to do that.
“It was good…” I whispered, to answer her question, after I had a moment to process everything — the pain, the look in her eyes, my sudden erection.
“But…?” she asked.
“You…can go a little harder if you want,” I said, slowly.
Her other fist clenched and she swung again. This was a better shot, more solid, right on my other cheek, between jaw and cheekbone.
It took a second, but I said, “Thank you, Mistress.”
She was laughing — I don’t know why. I think it was the absurdity of it all, how we’d reached this place where I was now taking shots to the face from her. “Did it feel good?,” she asked.
“It hurt. But I like it. I can’t tell you how that works. Did it get you off?” I asked.
She stepped closer to me and started stroking my cheeks, where she punched me. “No, it doesn’t do much for me. I’m more of a slap girl.” I looked up at her and her eyes were glinting. I knew what would come next.
She raised her hand, open, and snapped it with her shoulder behind it, it down across my cheek. My head snapped, hard, and instantly there was an explosion of pain about a dozen times worse than the punch. The skin on my face numbed up where she hit it, but the bone underneath ached and my jaw hurt. “I like slapping you,” she said excitedly. She brought her other hand up and struck me on the other side of my face. I could feel my cock twitch and throb in the aftermath of it, these strong, powerful blows that were like something out of a torture scene.
What was interesting about this — beyond how aroused I got, and how the session ended with me on the bed, my face in her lap, bringing her to a wonderful climax — was simply how much submission was involved. I’m no street fighter, but I’ve been in a few brawls, I’ve taken martial arts classes, and I saw those punches coming. I saw the slaps coming. And I forced myself not to catch her hand or block the blows. I forced myself not to turn my head. I forced myself to breathe out and relax and accept her punches.
It took an effort of will to keep my reflexes from kicking in. It took active submission to say to myself, “My wife is going to hit me — maybe very hard — and I’m going to keep my head where it is, I’m not going to tense up, and I’m going to relax and fucking take it. Not because I’m tough, not because it won’t hurt, not because I’m some kind of big man, but because I’m a slave and it is my job to take her punches and her slaps and not move.” I didn’t want to make this about me being strong…I wanted to make this about me being subservient. I didn’t want to be strong. I wanted to cede my manhood to my submission. I wanted my taking these punches to be my act of devotion to her, my tribute to her. And so as she swung, I let my breath exhale and waited for the stars to appear in my eyes.
She let me rest after her orgasm, and I lay there, my face on the pillow, aching from where she’d punched and slapped me. My cheekbones felt swollen, and they’re still tender now, hours later.
After a while, she climbed into bed and held me. I told her I want a black eye one day. She said, “What will you tell people?” And then she laughed, and said, “Tell them I hit you. No one will ever believe I could do that.”
“But I know better,” I said. “I know you better than anyone.”
“Yes,” she said, and kissed my cheek, right where she’d hit me. “You do.”
We just found a lovely place. It fits all of our criteria, except it’s a townhouse. On the other hand, it’s a well-insulated townhouse — dare I say it, a soundproof townhouse.
More importantly, it has a wonderful kitchen with lots of counter space and new appliances. There’s even enough room for us to install an island in the center of the kitchen for my wife to use during food-prep.
I know this sounds odd, talking about how the woman who dominates me ruthlessly will be preparing food for me, but food is her bliss and her skill — she is a very talented cook. If I suggested — even for a minute — that cooking is not dommey (or whatever the heck the adjective is,) she will beat the hell out of me. *Which means I should probably add it on my list of things to do tomorrow.)
More likely, though, I’ll get a lecture about how domme-y is whatever she says it is, similar to the “flannel pajamas” discussion we had a few months ago. I’m the punk in this relationship, I don’t get to say what is and isn’t acceptable. If she wants to say that ducky-slippers are part and parcel of being a dominant, I had better be ready to deep throat some rubber duck slippers.
Anyway, back to the townhouse — it has a basement. A finished basement. And in this basement is a bedroom, and this bedroom has the most marvelous ceiling. The owners plastered up the ductwork and pipes, which protruded lower than the rest of the ceiling in there because it’s next to the furnace and A/C. The result is that the ceiling actually has four, rectangular recesses or alcoves that have a slightly higher ceiling in their middles than the rest of the room, and are just high enough for me to stretch up my arms if I stand on tip-toes. If we put an eyehook or some anchors up in one or more of them, it’d be easy for me to be suspended by my arms either in the center of the room or against the walls. With multiple anchors, we could probably do a full suspension on me. I modeled a pose just that when no one was looking — held my arms up, wrists crossed, my hands in one of the ceiling alcoves while I stood on toe-tips, and looked at my wife. She stared at me and then got the most delicious smile I’ve ever seen — like her little Grinchy heart got three sizes too big.
It’s quiet, isolated, the room isn’t against the side of the townhouse where neighbors will live and it’s right next to the furnace/laundry room, and that means that we can be very loud indeed. It’s far enough from our daughter’s room where we can get up to serious beating on me. It’s really just perfect.
The problem is, it’s expensive. Not totally out of our range given our new jobs, but more than we thought about paying. It’ll mean seriously cutting back on extras that we’ve gotten spoiled by — cable and TiVo and eating out and new clothes. My suits will have to last a lot longer. My 14-year old car will have to make it a couple more winters. We’ll have to forget about watching anything but the basic network stations, if we decide to have a TV at all. We have no furniture, so the place will be spartan until we nickel-and-dime some as we go.
Talking about this made me realize, even in our current circumstances, just how much consumer nonsense we buy into. But my wife laid it all down on the way home when I worried about all of the things we’d be giving up to afford the place:
“You can have those luxuries, or you can get your ass-whipped, by me, whenever I want. You can have all of those things that we always say that we don’t really need, or you can have the space and the time to be my slave. You can sleep in your collar or you can have the trappings of a normal life.”
And when she puts it like that, it’s no choice at all. Fuck all of the toys we used to have. This is the rabbit hole I’ve always said I want to jump down — and I don’t think twice about giving up the accoutrements of boring normal vanilla society for wearing a collar in our bed. Trading all the new toys my friends buy with their salaries as tech-guys for being chained to a wall in a basement of our own, being beaten by my Mistress. There’s nothing wrong with TiVos and a car manufactured in the last decade, nothing wrong with being a vanilla consumer — but it seems I’m going to have to choose between that and BDSM, and like I said: for me, for us, that’s not a choice at all.
There’s nothing wrong with consumer society. I like toys. I’m a geeky guy, I want the new Dark City on Blu-Ray. But I would sell every CD and DVD I own to live this life. And I think it’s finally in our reach.
