Psychology
BDSM and Critical Theory
Author Lorelei
Hermaphroditus Intersex
Author Lorelei
Hermaphroditus_intersex
Originally uploaded by enfemmetv
I don’t know where this statue is, or if it’s just great Photoshopping. Whichever, I thank enfemmetv for allowing people to share the photo.
Geek Sex and Vice Versa
Author Lorelei
Definition: A geek is a person who cares as much or more for facts, gadgets, books, or ideas as for people. Zie may display knowledge the way others show off pictures of their grandchildren: as a way of sharing what zie most values in order to create a connection.
Unsuccessful geek social interaction:
Geek: Look at this attractive lump of knowledge! Nongeek: Who cares?
Successful geek social interaction:
Geek 1: Look at this attractive lump of knowledge! Geek 2: It is indeed attractive, as is this thematically related factoid!
This may go on to the next stage.
Geek 1: I am not familiar with that factoid, but I find the thematic relationship most satisfactory. Geek 2: Perhaps you are familiar with this inaccurate yet intriguing story. Geek 1: Yes, and I can explain how the inaccuracy was propagated. Geek 2: Would you like to have sex? Geek 1: Under certain conditions, yes. Could you be more specific? Geek 2: In privacy, without most or all clothing, using appropriate contraceptive and safety measures, and perhaps introducing certain specialized equipment and attitudes. Geek 1: Having read your blog, I am aware of the types of equipment and attitudes you prefer during sex. However, I am not entirely sure whether your chosen conditions include me. Geek 2: On this occasion they do. Geek 1: Let us have sex, then.
[They depart]
Seriously, the “geek flirt” is defined as a straight proposition. “I’d like to have sex with you.” It works quite often, and nobody needs to worry about social subtleties. Also, “No, thanks” is an acceptable answer.
You may notice a certain similarity to BDSM negotiation here. In my experience, the BDSM world and the geek world overlap to a great extent. Many BDSMers can be classified as sex geeks. (Classifying is a profoundly geeky activity.) Certainly not all sex geeks are into power or pain, but let’s face it, BDSMers have cool toys, and those always attract geeks.
Our fascination with the kink isn’t limited to doing it or having it done to us. We also love the tools and techniques of BDSM. This is why Dom/mes bond over looking at each other’s toyboxes. Showing off your toys is not primarily a dominance display, although it can have that function. Mostly it’s a way to start a conversation. This is how we connect with each other.
Dom/me 1: Look at this flogger. Heartwood. Dom/me 2: She was the best, although Metz made some great stuff too.
Sound familiar?
Study on Multiply Partnered People
Author Lorelei
Polyamory/Multi-Partnered Research Study (cross-posted; please cross-post it yourself!)
Have you ever been in romantic and/or sexual relationships with two or more people at the same time?
Were these relationships consensual among all parties, with each partner aware that you were in multiple intimate relationships?
Did at least one of these relationships last one (1) year or longer?
Do you have a workable knowledge of written English?
If you answered yes to these questions, you are invited to share your experiences by participating in research on polyamory and those who choose to openly and consensually partner with multiple people simultaneously. If you and anyone you know who is multiply partnered wish to contribute to this study, please go to the secure research website or click on the link below to complete the on-line confidential, brief (15 minute) survey.
http://spiritualpolyamory.questionpro.com
The researcher, Akhila E. A. Kolesar, is a doctoral student at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California. She may be reached at polyresearcher@yahoo.com or 1-877-433-5143.
Cautiously Optimistic
Author Lorelei
A Psychology Today blogger doesn’t actually condemn BDSM.
Maybe that’s not quite the breakthrough you were hoping for. But the piece identifies some of the issues with mainstream media’s coverage of kinky practices. The blogger, identified only by initials, also offers links to kink-positive sites, and explicitly tells her readers to make up their own minds — a stark contrast to the heavy anti-BDSM slanting of many news stories.
In a mainstream site like Psychology Today, just suggesting that we might not be dangerous lunatics counts as a win.
The Word on Safewords
Author Lorelei
What safewords can and can’t do.
The one time playing as a sub I had to safeword out of a scene, I was not capable of saying the safeword. I wasn’t gagged (in which case it would have been tapping out anyway), but I’d gotten into a psychological space where it was not emotionally possible for me to speak. To get out of it, I had to struggle out of submission and onto solid ground from which I could explain that I was not OK. So instead of gasping, “Red,” I said, clearly and quietly, “We’re going to have to stop now.” My Dom listened, and we worked through the difficulty.
Because the safeword was emotionally linked to submission, saying it would have thrown me right back into that quicksand. Being unable to speak the safeword isn’t unique to me; over the past couple of decades, I’ve seen it happen a number of times. Only once or twice with my own submissives, since I generally don’t rely on safewords. Which isn’t to say I don’t use them at all. I just don’t expect that they will work, and I certainly don’t imagine that my responsibility as a Domme starts with hearing the safeword.
What Do You Want from a Sub?
Author Lorelei
Everyone has a different idea of the perfect submissive. (Thank heaven — otherwise there would be a stampede in the direction of one or two, and everyone else would be wretched.) I’m curious as to which of the various qualities and behaviors are most important to you — and why.
Here are some possibilities:
Service Obedience Masochism Surrender any others?
My idea of service is relatively limited. Getting me tea when I ask for it — that’s a large percentage. Picking up library books, say. Those are things I might do for a sub who was tired or over-stressed, though then it wouldn’t be service, it would be nurturing, and done from a Domme perspective.
Obedience is important, but it has never been a big issue — I expect to get it, my subs expect to give it, and I don’t play resistance games. You wanna be forced, find someone else.
Masochism is nice. I’m a sadist, and I do love playing with someone who gets off on the pain I love to dish out. On the other hand, I also need to give bad pain occasionally, to push hard, to test the quality that is most important to me: Surrender.
What I want from a sub (male or female — I’ve had both) is not pampering or obeying my lightest wish, but something considerably harder to define — surrender. I want to be able to play with my sub like a toy — touch, tease, hurt, fuck, taste, do anything I want, when I want it. I want to be able to evoke fear and ecstasy.
Likewise, I want to get to know all the sub’s deepest inner emotional buttons, and I want to be able to work with those buttons. To push a sub hard, emotionally and physically. To gain their love and loyalty and surrender. I want to probe my sub’s inner self, to discover all the secrets, and to love their pain and shame. As my sub surrenders, I can further and further explore these depths.
Building that kind of trust takes time and love. The sub and I need to be on the same emotional wavelength. But to me it’s incredibly satisfying. Service is fine, obedience is cool, and I looooove playing hard — but to me, that’s not what matters most.
So what matters most to you? What do you like?
Are Toybags Necessary?
Author Lorelei
And now, a word from an old friend:
With all due respect, Mistress, do you really need all this stuff just to get off? And if so, what does it say about the role of industrial production in sex? How dependent are we on merchandise for human connection? How mechanized does sex need to be? (Zappa made fun of this kind of thing his whole career with constructions like the “mutant Gypsy industrial vacuum cleaner.”) Your catalog strikes me as little more than the plastic-and-leather underbelly of the James Bond movies or Playboy magazine, which also equate sex with shiny toys. Is the world of kink just another brand?
Whew. Good, tough interesting question from my old friend Clark. Like Clark Kent, he’s a mild-mannered reporter who secretly has superpowers. There are reasons Lois Lane smiles a lot.
The short answer is: No, I don’t need it all just to get off. The irreducible minimum is just myself and my imagination. The practical basics for two-person sex aren’t expanded much from that: I need my partner, plus a choice of my voice, lips, tongue, hands, or teeth. That’s about it.
But there are two very different problems behind Clark’s somewhat acid query.
One is about the toys and my attitude toward them. The other is about BDSM itself.
I’ll freely admit I posted that list partly in self-mockery (because it is ridiculous to carry that much equipment around), partly in pride. I’ve never known a Top yet who didn’t want to show off the toybag a bit. Partly it’s because most of the Tops I know (including myself) are geeks, and “Hey, look at this gadget” is an invitation to a primary geek social interaction.
Plenty of people have the Playboy/007 attitude Clark refers to: the idea that the toys themselves are more important than the human connection. I’ve always loathed that sort of materialist status-chasing.
I admit to a certain wry affection for the sweet little Goth kids who flaunt the look but don’t have the faintest idea what any of it means. Part of that feeling is based on amusement, part on knowing that a certain percentage of them are really kinky and just don’t know the words yet for what they crave. Anyway, 19-year-olds are allowed to have props. It’s part of self-exploration.
My toys are not props, nor are they status symbols. A brand-new flogger may excite me with the potential it evokes, or it may please the sensualist and craftswoman in me with fine balance, rich color, a smoothly braided grip, the luxurious thickness of its falls. But until I’ve used it, no toy is more to me than a thing made well or badly of leather, suede, steel, or wood. Afterward it is blessed by the use. These things become close to sacred because they are the symbols for the connection between Domme and sub, outward and visible signs of the inward intensity of experience within a scene. So what’s the point of all the toys?
1. They’re fun. 2. They signal a serious scene. 3. Serious scenes are part of building the intimacy of the relationship.
Packing the toybag serves the same purpose in the kinky relationship that a dozen roses or a candlelit dinner serves in more vanilla settings. It’s a promise of attention to be paid, intimate secrets exchanged, passion aroused and sated. And yes, there are people who are so fixated on roses or paddles that they forget the person they’re with.
The toys and the play they signal strengthen the bond between Domme and sub. So no, they are not (for me) a barrier to intimacy, nor a substitute for it.
And that, neatly enough, leads to the hidden question. “Are the toys necessary?” means “Is the kink necessary?” — a question Clark is entitled to ask, because when I was 19 (but not a Goth — they weren’t invented yet) he and I were lovers. That’s more than two decades ago, but we’re still good friends. And he has to wonder how a woman who spent an entire summer fucking him with such verve and enthusiasm and inventiveness could have turned into a pervert for whom all sexual expression must take place in the context of a BDSM relationship.
Honey, I don’t know. I know that the craving was there, even then, but I couldn’t name it or admit most of it, even to myself. I know that when I was younger, it was a lot easier to keep different parts of myself in separate boxes. These days I can’t do that. I can’t let someone into my sexuality without letting them into my life. I need to trust a lover. And one of the things that I need from a lover is genuine recognition. S/he has to know who I really am before I can open myself.
Who I really am is a sadist, a playful, affectionate, passionate sadist who laughs while she hurts men or women to the point of tears. I don’t cause unnecessary nonconsensual pain these days if I can help it, but what I do with consensual pain turns some people green. Don’t watch if you don’t like it. What I do makes me come. It makes my partners come, too, when they’re done screaming.
Who I really am is a Domme, a woman who needs her lover’s willing surrender, who discovers and explores and *loves* all her partner’s darkness, who loves and accepts his shame, fear, self-doubt, who will force a submissive to her knees in an airport. I love taking a submissive to a physical and emotional point where they can’t even decide what to order in a restaurant. Yes, I always bring them back, but I cherish the confusion and weakness, the blurred enormous eyes of someone who is so deeply dived they don’t remember their own name.
Of course, I am more than a sadist, more than a Domme. I’m a writer, a reader, a baker of bread, a good and loving sister, a warm friend, a devout if unorthodox goddess-centered Christian.
It took a lot for me to come to grips with my own nature. I’m not willing anymore to make love with someone who can’t deal with that part of me. It’s too important. That is one intimacy that is always present, in the foreground or background of any sexual expression.
Types of Scene
Author Lorelei
Doing a demo might as well not be a scene at all, in terms of my sexual arousal. It’s pure expertise, which has its own keen intellectual pleasure, but no visceral lust, no emotional involvement. One exception was the knifeplay scene at Folsom Street fair a few years ago, where I kept actually getting into it. Mmm, nice. But that was Karen whose clothes I was cutting away. Part of the reason is that in a demo, your attention is divided between the reactions of the audience and the sub, plus using whatever tricky skill is being presented.
Playing with a friend’s sub — usually done as co-Topping — is almost like a game of tennis, except that I wear a lot more clothes and am considerably better at it. It’s an exhilarating physical sport. Though of course I do aftercare, the main emotional stuff gets dealt with by the Domme in residence. It makes me feel high but not sexual toward the sub; on the other hand, Karen often gets extra on a night when I’ve helped with someone else’s scene.
Some scenes are pure emotion: deeply D/s scenes in which the thrill is exerting pure control, guiding an emotional breakthrough, feeling the sub’s surrender. Often they take little physical effort and don’t demand the sheer technical expertise of, say, Japanese bondage. But they’re high-demand scenes anyway, because by God you’d better know your sub, and yourself, and be willing to handle any landmines that come up. As the Domme, you’re not riding the emotional rollercoaster. You’re designing and building it while the sub rides it. And I do mean *while* — this requires powerful self-control, sometimes instantaneous changes of direction, and the knife-edge awareness of your sub’s emotional state.
Playing with my own sub — Karen, these days, or the Ex in the old days — can be intellectually, emotionally, and physically intense. There were watersports scenes with the Ex that were just astonishing for both of us. (Though things didn’t work out, and the final few years were sheer hell, there were some good moments.)
Playing with someone I like and care about (like the other day) is both emotionally and sadistically satisfying. . . . to a limited extent. Like a good dessert. A wonderful treat, a work of art in its own right, not good as a steady diet, but sometimes just exactly what you want.
What was really powerful for me in that scene wasn’t just the thrill of playing. It was in the tender emotional connection we established during the negotiation, strengthened during play, and expressed during aftercare. Real intimacy there: not romance, not really sexual at all (though sex can be a road to it, just as play can). From now on we’ll be good friends, but always with that invisible bond of loyalty and care that you get when you’ve taken someone through hell.
And all done while I stayed completely dressed. But this leads into the murky question of what sex is, and how a scene like that can be erotic for me without getting so much as a quick grope. Later, later.