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.)

Why Do I Crave It?

This weekend, we had a meeting at work, and the head of our little part of the company made sure to consult me on every issue. Publicly. I remember holding my tongue on one aspect of the debate, and the guy chairing the meeting started to move on, when all of a sudden, the boss said, “Hold up…[B], what are your thoughts?” We discussed it over drinks, later, and he was frank: “I think you’re integral to the company. I respect your opinion on these things, and so does everybody else. You’re one of those guys that everybody looks up to.”

A few days earlier, one of my superiors was telling me that I was the hardest worker they’d had at my level. She was amazed at my work ethic, which is high praise considering the kind of people I work with. And last weekend, a pair of friends had commented that I was simply the nicest person they know — a good friend, patient, intelligent, always there with a kind word. It’s been a positive lovefest.

And so on, and so forth. I’m not perfect — God, I have too many balls in the air right now, for sure, and I feel like I could do a hundred times better if I had the time — but clearly, I’m respected. I’m well-liked. The public persona I live in most of the time is having a bellwether year.

So why is it that I crave being dominated and humiliated? Why is it that on some level — not at work, not out with friends, but somewhere in my life — I need to be owned and diminished and annihilated? To be made small and docile? To be lectured and beaten and controlled? To be a thing? Why is it that my comfort with being the guy I am in public and my public success have skyrocketed since I started being a slave in private?

The weird thing is, it doesn’t bother me. I’ve commented again and again that somehow, the paradoxes inherent in the BDSM lifestyle don’t bother me. Somehow, I can get through the day working hard at being the best, being a leader, being respected, and then come home — or at least visit home — and be humiliated and subjugated and dominated.

During one of our last scenes, my wife made me suck her cock (as usual. I mean, when the strap-on goes on, I can expect to go down on it.) She loves the sight of me trying to take it all in, for her it’s all visual-thrills-and-emotional-and-psychological-pleasure. There are no nerve endings in her cock, but the sight of her husband gagging on a dildo, my eyes staring wide and eager and hoping for some murmur of appreciation, hanging on her every word as she talks me through it — it sends her there. Forget how far back we’re setting feminism, screw what it says about the homophobia in the average American male’s subconscious, we both get off on me, on my knees, drool running down my chin as she fucks my face and I pray and wish that she’ll give me some sign that I’m a good cocksucker.

Cocksucker. Slave. Pet. I get dizzy thinking about her names for me. The feel of the collar on my neck, the little leash we bought a few months ago pulling on it, the way my jaws stretch to accomodate the ball-gag. The sight of her towering over me as I lick her feet or her ass.

Humiliation. At work, I’m strong and driven and successful. At home, I’m a loving husband and father. In private, though, I’m a groveling, sniveling, sex slave. I begged her on the phone the other night to let me drink her piss next time I see her — I hate it, the taste is awful, I want to gag, but it seems so hot, so humiliating, hot because I dislike it, the ultimate expression of her ownership and power and my own subservience. The ultimate expression that I want to not matter. And that’s what gets her off, too — I know that piss is problematic, that she makes me use mouthwash and brush a bunch after I have it in my mouth, that the whole scene stops for us to shower, that she finds the whole thing, on some level, distasteful — but that I also know when I’m there, eyes staring up at her, mouth open, and she unleashes it on me, that she gets off on it to an extreme level.

Is it the secretive nature of the thing that makes it so hot? The double-life? Is it instead, the way I can unwind, unleash my inner-weakness? Why is it that I can smoothly go from being hungry and dominant at work to a sniveling worm in the presence of my Mistress? And why is it that my wife can be publicly quiet and formal and so-so conservative, and then in private she uses me as a sex-toy, an animal, something to be hurt and derided?

It’s hard for me to tell how this works — or should work — from other blogs, because most blogs seem to be written by people who are not-so-into the double life aspect of it. They seem to be cool and relaxed and sexually liberal in their public personas, even if they keep the specifics to a minimum. (This could be a misread on my part.) But we’re literally living a double-life — and the gulf between me-as-powerful-male and me-as-Mistress’-pet seems to be widening. There’s no conflict, but I just marvel — why is it that as my daytime life gets better, and I become more accustomed to being the man I want to be, that the part of me that’s involved in BDSM gets stronger, and craves more and deeper levels of pain and domination?

Or am I just really screwed up?

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.”