Superstition

I’ve been wanting to blog about this for a while. It’s kind of embarrassing, but I’ve been completely unable to work through it on my own, so I’m throwing it out there.

My wife and I are trying to have another kid. We love kids; our daughter is possibly the greatest thing in the world. We are fantastic parents, with good boundaries and good genes and – generally speaking – a lot of love to give. My wife is 35, so the longer we wait the more things get difficult. She’s decided to cancel her Master’s program in order to do this — she wants to be able to focus on having a baby, maintaining her career, etc. There will be time enough for the Master’s later, if she still wants it, but right now, this is what we want more than anything.

So, we have a lot of sex. She’s very dominant about it, telling me when it’s time to go back to the room and complaining loudly when real life intrudes, which it does often due to her work schedule and the child we already have. It is — as I said in my blog post earlier today — usually “stolen moments” sex. But it’s good, and it’s rough, and she’s all achey afterwards, which she has always said is the sign of a solid fuck. We’ve tried to have a few scenes, but — and I’m going to be utterly honest here — I sometimes beg off of the possibility of a scene if I know she’s ovulating.

The problem is — and the title of the post is — that I feel superstitious about having kinky sex when we’re trying to conceive. I know, this is total bullshit, it’s all in my head, but in the back of my brain, I think, “Does the fact that the sex we had tonight was kinky, if it leads to conception, mean anything?” Will the spirit of the child come out different because I was pegged and beaten and burned before I fertilized the egg? Or is it genetic? Does the act not matter, but the fact that it’s me matter? Submissive masochistic me?

I’ve been very open about the fact that my sexually submissive feelings stem from long before puberty — they are, as certain ancient peoples would frame it, “bred in the bone.” There’s no magic moment where I got kinked. No “lightbulb” experience where my mom spanked me too hard or my babysitter tied me to the bed because I was a bad boy. I suspect — as near as someone can think about these things — that I’m simply predisposed toward sexual submission, toward masochism. There’s a wire somewhere that connects A to C instead of B, and *wham* I’m submissive instead of whatever normal people are (if they’re anything. I admit I’m oversimplifying to a great degree.)

So does that get passed on to my son? Does my daughter have a higher likelihood of being dominant because of my wife? Is it not gender-linked? Is there a kink gene? Less scientifically phrased than that, does the nature of the sex I’m having mean something different if a child is conceived that night? Is my future offspring going to be different because before fertilizing the ovum, I licked feet and begged for punishment and entered subspace?

The answer is, “Of course not.” It’s the height of superstition to think that just because I was flogged and spanked and wore a bit and bridle while getting pegged that the sex after all of that kink will mean something different — a different sperm will hit the ovum, or that some kind of Lamarckian miracle will occur and the nature of the act will somehow affect the child’s genetic inheritance. It is, I think in my more reasonable moments, halfway moronic that the thought even crosses my mind, and I suspect that if I grew up in a more primitive society, I’d be worshipping fire or something.

Obviously, I know that there’s no connection. Realistically, I know that whether I have a scene before conceiving is not going to affect the baby. But in the back of my head, I get anxious. That lizard hind-brain, those primitive bits of cerebral matter passed on from Cro-Magnon man, they tell me to worry. And I know they’re wrong, but I also turn photos around in our room before a scene — not because I really believe the dead relatives and living family members in those photos are somehow “aware” the perverse sex acts going on in front of them if I don’t turn the pictures, but because on some level I’m discomfited about thinking about them, about their faces watching me while I’m beaten and abused and humiliated. And maybe that’s the real secret here — that on some level I worry about my children going through what I went through, or growing up with the same war inside their psyches over what’s “right” and what’s “dirty.”

I don’t have any answers — but I just wanted to put this out there. I know it’s stupid, I know it’s nonsense, but in the back of my head, it nags a little at me.

I Don’t Want To Belong To That Club

I’ve got a couple of things to blog about this weekend, not the least of which is the dull ache in my groin and ass from a healthy dollop of pegging and CBT my wife put me through last night. I’ve been quiet lately because most of our sex has been rather vanilla — quickies stolen in that brief window between when our daughter falls asleep and my wife is too exhausted by Christmas preparations to do anything but collapse. Luckily, last night we managed to find the perfect time to fool around, and since she was on her period but still in the mood for –as she put it — some ” rough fucking,” out came the strap-on, out came the open-hand slaps to the balls, and before I knew it I was coming so hard I had one of those comical full-body-trembling orgasms that I only ever saw in porn. I came so hard I think the noises coming out of my mouth sounded like whinnies or something.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. Tomorrow’s post will probably involve yummy details, but today’s is just about the Internet scene in general.

I occasionally moderate Another Site. I won’t go into too much detail, but it’s a general lifestyle forum for generally normal-ish folks, although there’s a healthy kinky contingent on the forum, made up of about a hundred people. And of those hundred or so, there’s probably about a dozen who are very vocal about being kinky. Their primary identifier is that they’re kinky. They talk about it. They advertise it. A few of them, I suspect, are more kinky in theory than practice, but I’m not going to judge over much. I was that way for years.

And recently, for reasons why I won’t go into, the forum drew the ire of a half-dozen or so of the really kinky posters. And I found myself watching something amazing happen: I found myself being vilified for being vanilla. That was the insult that got thrown my way: I was vanilla. I had been conditioned by the mainstream to be ashamed of kinky desires, and so I was holding these people back. I was a tool of the oppressors and a hater of the freedom-loving kinksters out there. Nasty emails got sent my way, people said awful shit to me, and most of it was framed as: You are not as evolved as us.

Now, here’s the thing: outside of one or two people I’ve trusted, no one there knows about this blog. Over the last few months, perhaps because of my shame about how I reacted to thinking I was being outed, I decided that I’d be honest with a handful of friends. I’m kinky. My wife is kinky. We do things in bed that are fun and a bit scary. I haven’t asked anybody to join us, I haven’t gone into too much detail (other than a few jokes,) but of the friends who can handle it and who would care at all, I’ve been more honest than I was in the past. Partly it’s because these people have known us forever, and they can see the change in the dynamic between my wife an I. They want to know why my wife’s changed, why I’ve changed, and the only way to explain it is delicately.

But I don’t share details on the Internet under my real name: I have a good job with prospects, my wife in a very sensitive position, and neither of us wants a Google search pulling up details of the last time she started playing tic-tac-toe on my skin with a knife. I may tell a handful of friends — but I don’t put it out there for everybody.

So I was put into a position where my instinct when confronted by these people was, “Vanilla? Me? Oh, yeah?” And then to share gory details. But soon after, a more significant thought came up:

Why do I care if these folks think I’m vanilla? What do I have to prove to them? Why do I feel the need to say, “I’m part of the club, too!”? Because I’m not sure I want to belong to the kind of club where vanilla is an insult.

That sounds weird, but look: I admit that what my wife and I get up to is off the beaten path. Last night she sodomized me and punched me in the balls. But that’s our thing. It makes us happy. All my life I had a hole in my self that BDSM finally filled. All her life my wife had an empty spot that kink exposed and turned into something that I think is terrible and beautiful. Kink made us happy. BDSM has improved our marriage, and our marriage was really, really good to begin with. But I don’t think that because my vanilla friends don’t get off on CBT and interrogation scenes and pegging and Mistress/slave relationships that they’re diminished. I don’t think it’s a contest. Occasionally, I’ll read a blog and look at some young man’s bloody back or the description of a woman beating her spouse, and I envy them — I envy where they can go and how far they’ve come and how much pain they can take — but it’s not like I’ll feel like a failure if I don’t reach that lofty height, if I don’t involve myself in a public scene or try some extreme practice. My goal in pursuing kink is my happiness. My satisfaction. Not to prove something to others. If I had responded to those people like I’d wanted, tried to prove my bona-fides, I suspect I’d regret it. Because it’s not about them. It’s about me, and my wife, and occasionally our family doctor as we try to figure out how far a urethra can be stretched during a torture scene.

(Speaking of which, we actually found a kink-friendly family doctor, who has answered all our — er, my wife’s — questions about the limits to which her human punching bag can be pushed.)

I don’t know if I’m saying this properly — when I drafted this post last night in my head, it sounded much smoother. But effectively, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t need to prove anything to anybody, and while I’m about as far from vanilla as you can get, I don’t actually care to measure dicks, so to speak. Partly that’s because no matter how kinky I get — and I like to think my wife and I are bold experimenters, in our own way — we’re always going to be behind the more hardcore people. There are folks out there living 24/7 master slave dynamics, and it makes me hot, but I admit I’m not there yet. There are people out there whose masters nail their body parts to boards, and although I get goofy horny thinking about my wife just using my body as a toy, we are most emphatically not there yet. There’s a lot we want to try — sounds, for instance, have loomed large in my wife’s imagination — but we’re not there yet. And I’m okay with that. It’s not about breaking barriers, it’s about having fun. And me being hurt.

Kink to me — at least the kind I practice in my bedroom — is not something to freak the mundanes with, or some badge that I show to prove I’m better than somebody who’s “vanilla.” It’s something I do because I need it, because it makes me happy, because it feels an honest to God void I had in my life.

And tomorrow I’ll post again! Someday soon, I hope to be posting again at my old rate of posts. And to start immersing myself in kink blogs again.