Paradoxical

My idea of myself in a BDSM relationship lies in the intersection between my fantasies of myself as a unbreakable hero and a corrupted slave.

I know that sounds weird.

When I was growing up, I was fascinated by heroes who took beatings, who were broken down to nothing, and came out of it stronger. Who found some…inner strength, some spark, to carry on even in the face of a furious beatdown that left them on the edge of death. Bruce Willis in “Die Hard.” Mel Gibson in the first “Lethal Weapon.” Arnold in “Predator.” The superhero Daredevil in the “Born Again” arc. Cowboys and cops and superheroes. I was fascinated by the ability to survive, to be strong in the face of superior power, to be alive when the dust settles. To bleed and not fall.

The recipe is simple: Take one man. Maybe a normal guy, maybe a supercop, whatever. Then, have him beaten. Have everything he loves taken away from him. Hurt him. Torture him. Gloat over him. Break him down to nothing. And then, at the end, watch him stand up, indomitable. Watch him overcome all of the odds, watch him get past his beating, see him still standing.

I wanted to be that guy. I wanted to be tested, I wanted to be tortured, and I wanted to be still standing. I wanted to take the beating. I wanted to be put through a psychological ringer. And I wanted to still be standing at the end of it. “See? I’m strong. I am a man.”

On the other side of the fence, there was me being “the good guy.” I tried to be noble. I tried to give. I tried to always be there for people. I was the rebound-guy girls could get over their boyfriends with. I used to be the guy my best friend’s girl could come to and whose shoulder she could cry on, even as I tried to deny the erection in my pants. I was the guy who was always dependable, who always stayed sober so everybody else could party, always there when you wanted to talk or needed help.

And inside me, there was this seed, this little germ of a fantasy. And that fantasy was about being weak. About not being noble. About being selfish and hungry and saying, “Fuck my friends. I’m going to fuck their girlfriends when they come over for solace. Fuck sitting around at parties, I’m going to let somebody else watch out for me for a change. Fuck being there for people, I want to think about me. My needs. My hunger. My desires.”

I wanted to be weak. I wanted to be ignoble. I wanted to screw over my friends and fuck their vulnerable girlfriends, and have a good time doing it. The turning point for me was one night, when my best friend’s girl was drinking with me, and they had just broken up as we were all heading out of town in the middle years between junior college and college, and I admitted I always wanted her, and she said, “Every time I went over to your house after he was an asshole to me, I wanted you to fuck me. And you never did. You could have had me so many times.”

Doh. I made sure to make up for lost time later on but still…it kind of smarted. My friends were dicks, and they had mindless, remorseless fun. I was a good guy, and I ended up with girls who were terrible for me. I missed out on a bunch of stuff, by being too nice. Too selfless. I should have been selfish, just a bit. I should have been weak.

***

At the intersection of that guy who takes a beating, who sacrifices, and that guy who is weak and who is lustful and selfish and who craves sensation, there’s where I am now.

I am finally in a position to show my strength by letting myself be beaten, by letting myself be pushed to the breaking point, by letting myself be hurt and torn down and rebuilt. I can be pushed to the limit, and show that I’m strong enough to take it. I can be spit on and degraded and mastered and overwhelmed and overcome, and at the end of it, I’m still standing. That’s the point of masochism — I can show that pain doesn’t hurt. Or — more properly — that it hurts, but I am strong enough to take it. It’s what I’ve always wanted — to be tortured and heroic and strong. That’s part of what gets me off — my own strength, my endurance, my desire to show my wife that however hard she can hit me, I can take it.

At the same time, there’s the part of me who wants to give in. Who wants to crawl on his knees to the bad girl, who wants to ignore his responsibilities and fuck her. Who wants to be corrupted. Who wants to be used. Who wants to wallow in his own weakness and moral depravity.

Yeah, I said it: Depravity. Because as much as I can honestly say BDSM has been good for me, as much as it’s made me confident and self-assured and sexually sated, as much as it’s been healthy — I can also say that there’s a great big goddamn turn-on about being humiliated. Used. Cursed at. Objectified. Pissed on and sodomized and bled and turned into a cheap fucking toy for another person. To be, in short, a slut. (I want to live in a world where that word loses its gender connotations and I can have it.) To be used and hungry for more when it’s all done. To be weak and selfish and happy in my own degradation.

***

Two almost mutually exclusive impulses. To be strong. To be weak. To be loved and respected, and to be despised and degraded, by the same person. Somehow, that paradox is what makes it hot. I can be strong and heroic even as I let myself be weak and humiliated. I can let her own me and yet rejoice in my ability to be standing when it’s all done.

And on some level, I know my wife has similar conflicting impulses: to care for me. To own me and treasure me and love me. But also to hurt, and not worry about holding back. To spit on and degrade me. To be the bad girl instead of the good girl, and to be strong instead of timid. To selfishly hurt for her own pleasure instead of being loving and gentle.

I don’t know if anybody else has these paradoxes feeding into their BDSM, but I do. Oh, man, I do.

Ignoring the Wires

I reread the post I wrote last night, about making my wife recite that she’s a slave and a whore a set number of times, of her fantasies of humiliation, of my orders that she fall asleep dreaming of being bound and fucked by me, of her texting me for permission before she spends money and to check in.

And here’s the problem: There are moments when I stop and think about the whole male dominance thing and I think, “That’s lame.” I mean, the recitation thing is clearly me playing at her reaching some kind of self-hypnotic state, the orders about what to think about as she drifts off to sleep are all about me thinking I can control her dreams, the control of the money goes into her desire to fall into domestic slavery ’50’s housewife-style, where Ward works and June stays home in pearls and functions as a perfect mother to the children and a total whore in bed. (Ward and June had hot sex. We all know it.)

If I look too close at us flying across the air, I see the wires. When I think about my clumsy attempts at mindfuckery in order to become her world, I see those strings holding the acrobats up. And when I see the wires, the illusion is ruined. I’m aware that it’s not Superman, it’s a guy in a leotard with red underwear worn inside instead of out. It’s not the actress who plays Lois Lane, it’s her stunt-double. There’s something unreal about it. I start wondering if my dominance is a fraud, if all the people reading the blog know it’s a fraud, if…the most important if…my wife thinks it’s a fraud.

But then I think, “We are doing nothing more or less than what she did to me when I was subbing for her.” The intrusive control. The orders to masturbate only at appointed times, the idea that I should request the right to come and that she controlled my orgasms. Beatings because I wasn’t living up to expectations. Boot worship, yummy, humiliating, prostrating boot worship and foot worship. A strap-on in the ass while I’m cursed for being a bitch and a whore and my every plea for more cock is raised up to the light to show that I’m a dirty, needy, male slut. Flogging. Blood. Painful blows to the face to bring on my orgasm. Golden showers as she stood over me and talked about how I was worth less because I’d swallowed her piss and all of the other women out there would smell her mark.

(Her pee is actually not odorous. I suddenly feel the urge to point that out.)

She wants from me only what she gave me. Maybe less, because her tolerance for masochism is far lower than mine, even if her tolerance for submission play runs deeper. Was my headspace an illusion? Was my buy-in to the mindfucks she put me through a fraud? Were my orgasms — hell, the constant, unending, pre-come drip from my cock the minute we started playing, which lasted from start to finish and made me wet like women get wet, so that my wife would grasp my cock and gasp — was that a lie?

No, no, fuck no. My submission was — is — beautiful and honest and it came from a place that was just like my heart, only darker and self-annihilating. The nights I spent curled up into a ball, my insides torn up because all I wanted was for my Mistress to be here to hurt me and piss on me and fuck me, those were real. And when I think about it, my dominance is real. I want her to recite her little devotional because I want to own her headspace. I want to drive her into that place where I went, where the world recedes and all that’s left is the object of your obsession. I want to be that to her — her World. Her Master. I want to get as close to owning her body and mind and soul as humanly possible.

Because that’s what she did — she owned me. Body. Soul. Mind She still does. If she called me up on the phone again and used the voice, I would respond. I would obey. No matter how far we drift into Maledom and Femsub, we’re also still Mistress and Slave. When I think about how far I would go for her…what taboos I’ve set up that I would break for her. The self-harm I would do at her command, the degree of pain and punishment I would take for her to show her my strength…

I am hers. Always.

But I want her to be mine, right now. And she wants to be.

In essence, I want her to be for me what I am for her — a postulant, a worshipper, a slave who has learned to love the lash and love their master and whose will to say no is a distant thing. I remember that feeling — where the word “no” was something that if I uttered it, it would mean leaving the golden glow of her power and dominance, and so I didn’t need “no.” She was better than the ability to say no — she was better than choice, even though she hurt and humiliated and controlled.

And when I think about it like that the wires disappear, and our D/s play with the man as the dominant becomes true and real, and not a fraud at all. Fucking with her head doesn’t seem like play acting, it seems like something that we both need. And want.

If that makes any sense. I’m so hot writing about what I want from her — that level of subservience and slavery — that I’m off to masturbate.

“I Want A Man.”

My wife arrived in town two nights ago, my daughter in tow, and due to the layout of our hotel suite, privacy has not been the problem I thought it was. Nice separate rooms, soundproofing, and an early bedtime have meant that we’ve gotten to play Mistress and slave a couple of times without having to risk exposures.

And play we have, albeit with some serious discussions sprinkled throughout. My wife has taken total control this trip — she’s the final arbiter of where we go, what we do, how I do everything from get showered to go to work. This is probably as close to a preview of what a total exchange of power would be like as I’m going to get. And she’s clearly happy with it.

And the thing is…

Dirty Submissive Fantasy

I have this fantasy…

When I was in high school, a girl and several guys got suspended for a blow job party. I don’t know what else to call it. They snuck into the school theater, and the guys all sat in a row of seats and the girl — I actually knew her pretty well — just blew all of them. One at a time, moving down the row, sucking somebody’s cock until they came, then moving on to the next. Apparently, they got caught or the administration got wind of it because somebody bragged or ratted, and they all caught time off. (I don’t want to think what would have happened in the ’90s or nowadays with a case like that.) I talked to a few of the guys afterwards, and they were universally dismissive of the girl. She wasn’t that hot they told me, wasn’t that smart, and as far as they were concerned, she was just a way to get off.

And I remember hearing that, and thinking, “Oh, man…why do I envy her…?”

Thank you, BDSM

I’ve occasionally talked about my vanilla days, but I haven’t really talked about my wife’s vanilla days.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably think my wife is some insatiable sex-goddess who can pound my ass for hours, then beat me, then have me satisfy her, then beat me some more, then have me satisfy her some more, wash, rinse, repeat. And, frankly, that’s kinda true. I remember during our first session involving the 5 Ps. She’d had sex with me, pissed on me, bathed me, then collared me for the first time, fucked me in my ass for the first time after forcing me to fellate her cock, then forced me to go down on her while she was still wearing the strap-on, then rode me while I was in shackles until I came, then forced me to eat my own cream-pie. Laying there, physically exhausted in her arms, I sighed as she held me. Then she turned to me and said, “I’m ready for the next round.” I groaned. Never before in our 12 years of marriage had she ever hit my limits. I begged for ten minutes to rest. An erection was a remote mountaintop, unreachable without a long journey — and I wanted a nap before I attempted it.

She grabbed my cock, squeezing it, causing me to writhe, and said, “If you don’t give it up, I will take it. Do you understand?” My cock started to harden, because being taken by my Mistress is hot.

But that’s not the wife I was used to…

“Don’t look at me.”

I’m in the middle of my week home, which means in addition to Thanksgiving turkey and family time and visits to relatives, I’ve also been fucked, flogged, whipped with a belt, struck repeatedly with a riding crop just about everwhere, cuffed, shackled, sodomized, urinated on, and gagged…

Is it all about me?

So, my last post got my wife and I talking.  And as I posted in the comments section, one of the things she said to me was, “If it’s all about me, what if I don’t want to be mean to you?” And she’s right.  

If she wants to be a kind and adorable cutie-pie while whipping the living shit out of me, if I’m the one subbing and making such a big noise about how happy I am when it’s all about her will, her wishes — I should take it.   I have no idea how it would work, but that’s neither here nor there — if I’m trumpeting about how my happiness is centered on obeying her wishes, then they should be her wishes.  Not mine.  I should be content with who she is, who she wants to be, and let that drive us.  

Shopping Sprees.

My wife lets me do the shopping, for a couple of reasons. 

First, toys are going to be used on me.  The strap-on, she signed off on it, but really, her attitude is that it’s going up my ass, so I should pick it out.  We went to a fetish store for a lot of other things — her first corset, shackles, handcuffs — and the rest of it we had picked up in local stores, like the dog collar and the little tag on it that says whose property I am.    

Like good little perverts, we’re adding to our toychest.  She got a PO Box — just in case her family snoops through her mail — and wending their way to her are our first ball gag, gaily colored because happy colors make me more comfortable while I’m getting hurt; our first flogger, again, in a nice purple; and two beautiful outfits.

Questions I Never Thought I’d Ask…

I have come to realize something important:  BDSM has made me ask questions I never thought I’d need to ask.  The most important off which right now is, “How exactly does one go shopping for a bit?” 

The Evil Twin.

                I’m in the middle of my three day visit with my wife, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my last post, as well as the concept of the Evil Twin.

                Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was a hoary old television concept revolving around evil twins.  Most sitcoms dug it up at least once, and in a couple of cases, the Evil Twin was a recurring character.  Blonde housewife Samantha from “Bewitched” had her raven-haired and hedonistic cousin Serena who looked exactly like her; Jeannie from “I Dream of Jeannie” had one; hell, even Boss Hogg from “The Dukes of Hazzard” had a good twin. 

                I have come to the realization this weekend that I’m dealing with my wife’s Evil Twin. 

                My wife is “sweet.”  I have openly told a few friends when they ask what we’re doing this weekend that my wife is going to beat me with a belt, and the same response happens each time: “Right, guy.”  Because while a few friends may suspect I’m kinky, my wife is the very model of the sweet and happy suburban vanilla homemaker.  She has an easy smile, she bakes cookies and cakes to relax, and she sings in the church choir when she’s not helping small children learn their vowels.  She is, by anyone’s definition of the term, a good girl.  A buddy of mine said, “Anybody who doesn’t like your wife is suspect.  She’s the nicest person I ever met.”  She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t curse, she cries whenever anybody wins a contest or whenever something good happens for them.  (Extreme Home Makeover is off-limits.)  She bustles.  She listens to Christmas music whenever she can.  She’s just plain nice.

                This afternoon, everybody’s favorite nice girl beat me with a belt until my ass was a bright red after making me wait for the beating, naked as the day I was born, in front of an open window.  Nobody saw anything from the low-traffic rural road our house overlooks, but it was the fear of somebody seeing which added a certain jittery frisson to the whole scenario.  I was bent over an easy chair, my pants and underwear around my ankles.  My ass was angled upwards, and then she showed up with one of my belts, looped around her hand, and started hitting.  I counted after each blow, my voice quavering and getting slightly higher and more panicky with each shot.  We’d determined yesterday that when she really, really puts her wrist into and gets a good “whap” on the belt, I can take six shots of it before it really begins to hurt and I want to scream a little bit.  As a sign of my devotion to her, I had taken ten last night.  Today, fifteen.  She paused after the eleventh strike to ask, “Did I hear a safeword?  Was that [the safeword]?”  There was no safeword, of course; she was hitting me so hard that I was only capable of high pitched little grunts when I wasn’t biting down with each blow.  She just wanted me to beg a little for the next few lashes.  And…I did. 

                Oh, God, I begged this “good girl” for every single bit of pain she’s given me this weekend.  I got down on my hands and knees and crawled to her, kissing and licking her manicured soccer-mom toes while begging her to draw blood with her fingernails, leaving jagged lines of bloody scratches all over my chest, and then I pleaded for her to piss all over my chest, the sting of her urine burning into those scratches.  I begged for smacks to the face, clamps placed on the nipples, balls and penis, and at some point, I thanked her for playing a new game of hers: Submissive-as-object, where she puts on headphones and blocks the sight and sound of me with a pillow or sheet while watching a porno.  I’m nothing but a sex-toy, and while she occasionally barks out an order – “Harder,” “slower,” “a bit lower,” “don’t do the thing with the circles,” for the most part it’s just her and her entertainment until she comes, at which point I’m allowed to sit next to her until she’s ready to try something else.  It’s an interesting feeling to be so isolated while giving someone else pleasure.

                So, yes, I’ve come to the opinion that my wife has neatly bifurcated herself into Happy Homemaker and Evil Twin.  The happy homemaker went out to dinner with me and a friend last night and spent the evening teaching my daughter how to count, while my buddy and I chatted about fantasy football and politics at my old job.  The Evil Twin turned to me while my daughter was talking to our friend midway through the meal, and whispered in my ear, “I am going to tear your ass to ribbons with that belt.  Can you handle that?”  I tried not to let my face display the mingled fear and arousal and simply nodded yes.  Today, at my wife’s sisters house, my wife sang nursery rhymes with all of the pre-schoolers.  On her way to go into another room to get a  juicebox, she leaned into me, never breaking her smile or stride, and said, “Tonight, you’re going to get fucked with [her pet name for our strap-on].”  All I could do is gulp and pray the pre-come and erection wouldn’t show through my pants. 

                All of this leads me back to  my last post about The Big Scare…my nervousness about getting into BDSM because of all of the images I’d let into my skull about what BDSM “is,” like it was some monolithic lifestyle like the Boy Scouts or something.  And that image, no matter how inaccurate of the larger subculture, informed both my wife and my own images of what we were getting into.  We were careful to set boundaries before we did our first D/s session together, which came down to this:

1)      No pain or violence to one another.

2)      No collars, because collars are something you put on dogs.

3)      No humiliation, because I’m her equal, I’m just letting her take control during sex.

4)      No infantilism, cross-dressing or messing about with pee.

5)      No ball gags or “pro-dommey” outfits.  (I’m calling them that, her attitude was that she just didn’t like the accoutrements that she saw on TV.)

                Those rules were mostly for her.  I was right there with her on number 1 and 4, but I was interested in 2 and 3.  But for her to be comfortable, I was willing to write all that stuff off.  If I just got her to boss me around and let me lick her boots, I felt like, “Hey, it’s moreD/s  than I’ve gotten in the last twenty years, it’ll be enough.”  And our first session went according to plan.

                But I’d underestimated our Evil Twins.  Because the first rule to fall was number 1.  Watching somebody flog somebody else is off-putting if you’ve never really messed around with pain-play, but we started with a little nipple-pulling and spanking, and by this weekend, my wife was lamenting the lack of a flogger or a riding crop in our arsenal, but was willing to make do with the belt.  (If anybody knows who has a good selection of crops, let me know, because it’s her Christmas gift, she’s decided.)

                Rule number 2 was the second one to go.  At first after she vacillated on this rule, she insisted that we avoid an actual dog collar or choke chain and go with a slave collar, because she felt the dog collar was too humiliating to me.  For the record, we were together for an hour after she decided to allow me a collar before she was gleefully fitting me with a choke-chain at “Petsmart” and then having a dog-tag engraved with my name and her own name under “Property of…”  A few hours after that, she was calling me her dog and her bitch as she plowed into my ass with “her cock,” as she calls it, neatly taking care of Rule 3. 

                We’re still not interested in the child’s play or dress-up, but there was pee-a-plenty, so Rule 4 has gone away at least in part, and we bought a shower curtain this trip to make cleanup easier and let us move out of the bathtub and onto the floor of our room.  (If anybody knows of any special mats or anything for this, let us know, please.)

                As for the ball-gags, she’s still worried about blocking my airways, but she’s comfortable with dirty panties being used as a gag, and her first clothing purchase was a PVC corset and garter belt to wear under a Catholic schoolgirl’s outfit she bought, a pleasant nod to my own love of her dressed up like a dirty soccer-mom stripper. 

                All of the things that freaked us out and scared us weren’t so scary as we edged our way into the shallow end of the pool.  We’re still far from the deep end, but we’re making progress.  When I read a lot of other blogs – hell, just about every other BDSM blog I come across – and people talk about 24/7 or what they’re up to, I can appreciate that the wife and I are still newcomers.  We’re still, as I like to call it, “amateur hour.”   I mean, we’re not yet ready to enter Mistress160’s “best marks” contest or anything, although I’m quite proud of my little network of scratches and gashes and the angry pain in my ass as I sit here and write this.  There’s no way I’m ever gonna tell somebody who’s been doing this for years that I’m as good at it as they are, or have the same pain threshold. 

                But all of the monolithic scariness that I talked about last blog isn’t that monolithic when the individual pieces are broken down into landmarks on a road-trip.  I’m not saying we’re ever going to break some of the other boundaries – we don’t really want to, and we’ve got plenty of ground to cover with just what we’re doing  – but a lot of the things that made us hesitant about doing any of this are actually insanely fun when we give them the old college try.  My wife would never have dreamt of hitting me during our first session, but now she’s sneaking me every few hours to tan my ass somewhere with my belt.  (While I was writing that sentence, she came out and asked me to type something up for her – I mentioned that it hurts to sit down after my last whipping, and she said, “Good.”  And smiled her little home-maker smile, which is so much more ominous with an evil glint.) 

                So, it’s been a good weekend.  And while we’re not in the deep end yet, we’re not out of our depth, which is just as important.  We’re happy, and that’s all I want out of this.

Next time, probably a nice little report on the weekend and various fun things we haven’t done before.