Baggage Handling

I, as constant readers of this column may have guessed by now, have a lot of issues.

Fears of the Gimp. Issues about the size of my penis (since dealt with by my wife.) Issues about an event that happened when I was fifteen or sixteen. As I read the blogs of folks into BDSM, I’m always struck at how…well-balanced they are. How normal. I mean, seriously, do Goose & Gander have any hangups at all? It’s like the perfect relationship. Eileen and May? Even my wife is calm and serene, like a bodhisattva of kink. And here I am, like a neuroses-prone BDSM version of Woody Allen, only non-Jewish and without the somewhat offputting stepdaughter thing.

I sometimes wonder if I would do this much self-examination, this much of what I can only call “neurosis archaeology,” if I didn’t have the blog. But I’m a thinker. I ruminate. I ponder. My wife is much more at ease with flying by the seat of her pants, but I spend a lot of time just thinking and musing and trying to figure it all out.

I just want to be free of hangups. And to be honest, I’m getting there. It’s amazing how much stuff from my first few steps into mature sexuality, things that happened in high school or college, affect my ability to be at ease with my sexuality twenty years later. It’s absurd, really — everybody has bad experiences, but somehow all of mine accreted around my subconscious and formed this kind of shell of hangups, and for me to become truly at ease with being a dominant, a switch, a sub, I feel like I have to go rooting around in there, hold all of the issues up to the light and see, in the end, that they don’t fucking matter at all.

Or more to the point, I want to hold them up and let my wife excise them. She’s so good at that. She’s like a domme with a PhD in psychology or something: sado-masochistic psychoanalysis. I mean, she sodomized my insecurity about my penis out of me, imagine what she’ll do with everything else?

(As an aside, on the issue of my fear of The Gimp: I am fascinated by This Girl’s blog. The extreme boundary of BDSM for me is not knifeplay or 24/7 or anything like that, it’s masks. I’m going to come out and say that I get a pure-raw fear reaction of masks in BDSM play, to the extent that I can actually feel my stomach tighten. And This Girl’s blog is heavy on the latex, and heavy on the masks, and yet I can only marvel at her relationship with her Master. I would pay good money for my wife and I to achieve that level of comfort in our play, to just go that deep. It’s probably one of the more interesting — and to be frank, hottest — blogs I read, but those masks still unnerve me, and I’m not sure if it makes the blog slightly offputting for me, or somehow hotter, because they’re so comfortable with something I have such a visceral reaction to.)

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 800 lb. Gorilla

I was reading this blog post a few days ago at A Place to Draw Blood Laughing and this paragraph in particular struck a chord with me:

If I wanted to, I could make all kinds of trickle-down analyses of how the roles of my parents led to my kinkiness, and so on and so forth. I don’t particularly want to, and I have no burning desire to know why I am what I am. It’s easy enough to see that their lives influenced my understanding of gender role fluidity, creating an awareness of mixed partnerships of responsibility and tradition rather than handing me off into the world with a simple role reversal. But I don’t think I’m a dom because I have a corporate exec for a mother. I also had a mother for a mother, you know, the kind of mother who makes really good Thai food and likes to play online Scrabble. In short, just a person with some labels attached to her, like me.

And while I didn’t think about it too much this weekend while knee deep in sex and submission and all of the fun stuff, I’ll admit that on the plane ride home, while holding the plane up in the sky with only my sheer willpower, I thought about it, a lot. Because Eileen is skating around my 800-lb. gorilla. The question that used to be phrased in my mind, “What’s wrong with you?” is now phrased a far more healthy-but-still-scary “How did I get like this?” and I still don’t have an answer.

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.  

The Big Scare…

I know this will make three blog posts in one day, but I suppose with me it’s feast or famine.  But I read something today that really struck a chord with me.

 ”The Big Scare” is the blog post I’ve been trying to write for the last week, but just haven’t found the words.  And then, today, I read a blogpost at Let Them Eat Pro-SM Safe Spaces, which is itself a comment on a post at Alas, a Blog .  And both of the posts basically got me to the level of introspection I needed to write about “The Big Scare.”