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.

In A Month…

…I will be living with my wife again, for the first time in two years.

I’ll be moving up north, a decision that we’ve made jointly after long, arduous and definitely un-fun and un-sexy debate.

And we talked about it tonight — briefly, since I’ve been sick for the last two days — and I get the feeling we’re both a little nervous. Part of that nervousness is sexy, “Ohmigod, we’re going to be living together and having S&M sex whenever we want it! How will we ever stop fucking long enough for Belisarius to get a job?” nervousness. Our sex has happened in pulses of a couple days here, a week there — it’s never been something “on tap” as it were.

And part of it is that this is going to be new for us — we’ve both been tempted by the idea of 24/7, no-holds-barred, he’s-my-human-pet domination and submission, but it’s never been even remotely feasible. Until now. Will we resist the urge to take things to new extremes? Will we keep a lid on it when we’re living it every night? Will we keep pushing the envelope until I’m showing up to jobs with a black eye or scabs on my back? Will we get involved in whatever local scene there is? Will we come out to the one or two people we know up there who openly practice BDSM lifestyles?

I have to admit to a little trepidation. I love reading Dev and Eileen’s blogs, because they live in close proximity to their partners. And I love reading Mistress 160’s blog, because she and Sol cohabitate and clearly get up to all kinds of trouble. And I haven’t been able to live any of that with my wife — no building a queening stool, no being in each other’s presence for longer than a couple weeks at a time, no day-in, day-out grind of BDSM and seeing whether it remains hot and sexy when we’re not seeing each other in tiny commercial breaks from our separate lives.

But I’m happy. Because we’ll be together again, and I think we’re going to make BDSM work for us. My real issue is I suspect we’ll have to start out in an apartment when we get settled in up there, and I’m a little frightened of how we’ll make loud-hurty-sex and not have the neighbors dialing 911 every night. “That’s right officer, I heard blows, and then screams, and then moans, and now a bed creaking.”

I think I’ll celebrate our reunion with something permanent — a piercing, or that ownership tattoo I’ve wanted for so long. (Can I just say that I wish there was some male version of a corset piercing out there? God, I would love to be pierced all over for my wife, then have the piercings threaded into something sexy, but a corset piercing just doesn’t look cool and masculine enough for me. Maybe a big spider web?) And I’ll finally get that daycollar I’ve been wanting, but she’s never gotten around to buying me.

There’s always been this feeling in our play that what we’ve had are stolen moments — brief, beautiful moments of heaven that are special but so, so fleeting. Now, we face the prospect of being together, but also the fear that our sex will become routinized. And I don’t want routine — I want for it to continue to be as wonderful as it’s been. If we can figure out how to do that, I’ll be happy.

I am so happy. But just a little worried. But I also think we’re going to figure it out and it’s going to be no trouble at all to keep that spark lit, if we’re willing to put in the work.

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.

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.)

My Dark Side

I am tired of living apart from my Mistress. I’m tired of getting punishment and domination in 48-hour doses once every month or two. I know I should be grateful for what I have — for what a lot of submissive men apparently want but don’t get — but dammit, I’m frustrated.

I had planned on writing a long, honest post about why male domination scares me, to open wounds long thought healed — about why letting myself dominate my wife when she wants to switch is so hard for me, even when her need is so raw and honest and my own urge to control is so powerful. But I’m having a rough night, and I’m feeling down, and when I’m at my emotional nadir like this, when my self-loathing is at its peak — or lowest depth, so to speak — what I want is to be obliterated before Her Will. I want her to make me strip and then to collar me and then to smack my face. I want to be tortured. I want to be told to lick her feet, to kiss my way up her legs, to eat her out until she comes sloppily in my face while she absently watches porn or fucks my face with her hips, of both. To rest my head on her thigh while her orgasm dries on my face and to feel her relax and to sigh as she runs her hand through my hair and calls me a good boy.

I want to fuck her while she tortures me, her nails tearing at my chest, her thumbnail and forefinger trying to pry my nipple off, her hands scratching my stomach and my shoulders, punctuated with blows to the face that burn with pain, then ache, then numb up until the next blow. Slaps, punches, all of it, nothing is too much. I would happily wear a black eye into work, happily wear a split lip, that’s how deep my need runs. I fantasize about being forced to lie about it, to say that I fell or that I was clumsy, to cover up my dirty secret.

Thanking her for every abuse. Her cock in my mouth and then my ass, while she chokes me with a leash or with my collar, pulling on it as she grinds into me, my airway closing as I rejoice in the knowledge that I’m just a fucking object — literally, a fucking-object, something for her to use, something to put her cock in or to put into her sex, something to be used to get off. A knife on my skin, scarlet flowing into her lips, my head hazy in the glow of being food, of being something she can drink.

Floggers, crops, belts, and the switch, all used on my thighs, my ass, my back. Pain, pain, pain. Red lines that show she loves me. Clamps and blows to my balls and my cock, each one obscenely making me hot and hurt at the same time. Then, the finale, me laid out on the floor, while she pisses on me: warm, liquid disdain.

I want to be ground down into nothing. I want to be hurt and fucked and to serve and pleasure her, for my own desires not to matter except insofar as they coincide with hers, for her wickedness and cruelty to make me into a victim, a slave, a nothing.

But I can’t have it, because we’re apart. And we’re apart because of mistakes I made, bad decisions that led us to living a thousand miles from each other. This is my punishment: the discovery of BDSM, the discovery of her sadism, the discovery of her nearly divine power over me.

Divinity. That’s what dominance is, and I don’t care how ridiculous it sounds — to be like a god to the person you’re dominating. To be worshipped. To be the only thing in their world for a few brief moments, to know that you can hurt them and they’ll cry for more, that you are the only source of pleasure or love for those minutes while the scene lasts. To be everything. That’s what I want — for her, for my Mistress, to be EVERYTHING, and for me to be nothing. To be a flyspeck in her glory. To be a dustmote in her presence and dance and whirl in her wake. Yes, it’s cheesy. Yes, it’s overdramatic. But nights like tonight, when I’m alone and my need is a physical ache, where it’s a fog of depression that won’t lift until I’m hurt and humiliated and that hurt and humiliation is always out of reach — that’s what it’s like. To be unhappy and miserable and to know that it would all be better if she were only here, to hurt and control and dominate and annihilate.

Nights like tonight, I hate myself, and I know that only she can exorcise that emotion from me. Only she can wring it out, along with everything else, until I’m nothing, and then reborn as she holds me in the aftermath of the scene.

–B

Short and Sweet: Obsession and Compulsion.

I’m not talking about OCD.

I’m talking about this. I’m talking about — to save you the trouble of following the link to one of last week’s posts — wanting to be hurt and dominated so badly that your self-interest is compromised…

“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…

Pushing Boundaries

I’ve given my wife control over my orgasms again.

Amongst other things. She’s set some other rules for me to follow while I’m gone…

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…?”

Take It Like A Man

Yesterday, the wife had part of the day off due to a doctor’s appointment, so we decided to have her take the whole day off and slink back to the house for a scene.

And it was glorious. One of our best scenes ever. She ran out for her appointment, I got showered and cleaned up, and when she came back, I was waiting for her, on my knees, head bowed. She collared me with her old collar — instead of my choke-collar, this one’s a thick band of black leather — and had me go through the usual formalities. Undress her. Kiss her. Some foot worship.

Then, she put the ball-gag on me and said, “Today’s the day I put you through your paces. You wanted us to find your limits? Today’s the day.”

…