Neither Exhibitionist Nor Voyeur

That doesn't seem right, does it?  I mean, if I am neither a voyeur nor an exhibitionist, how is it that I spend a significant portion of my social life having sex in semi-public settings?

My sexual rule of thumb is that, within my hard limits, I'll try pretty much anything.  If it does me no harm and gives another pleasure, why not?

Being watched while I'm getting fucked, while I'm giving head holds no special appeal for me. Watching other people have sex?  Not a turn-on.  I mean it's interesting the way most things you don't see often are interesting, but it doesn't make me tingly.  Often, it's just kind of embarrassing and horrifying (not in the fun ways).

While we're at it, I'm not really a swinger, either.  I've come to the conclusion that the sex you have with strangers is, pretty much by definition, really tame.  Lately most of what holds my sexual interest is D/s - not a particularly safe thing to explore with absolute strangers and not something that most swingers understand.

So if I am neither a voyeur nor an exhibitionist, nor a swinger either, how is it that I spend so much of my time fucking in front of an audience at swinger parties?

Short answer:  I'm fucking a Dom who's an exhibitionist.

Longer answer: I like sex just an awful lot and, well, men tap out faster than I do.  If there's a ready supply of replacement partners, that's not a bad thing.

Slightly more subtle answer: there is a great big wide ocean between "want to" and "willing". Exploring the space between those two is the most interesting part of submission for me: being led to new experiences, challenging myself, discovering new pleasures, exploring things I never imagined fully enough to have formed a desire for, And so, I attend swing parties as an act of submission. I fuck who I'm told as an act of submisison, because it pleases Adam to have me do so, because it pleases me to do what I'm told and pleases me to please him.

When I first started playing with Adam, however, this was a submission I could not concede.  As I say, I'll try anything that does me no harm if it gives another pleasure, but the potential for harm was just too high in having someone else select my sexual partners, in delegating the responsibility for assessing STD risk. Even someone I trust, even someone with expertise and experience greater than my own.  If I make a bad decision and expose myself to disease and harm, I have no one to blame but myself.  If someone else makes the wrong decision?  Couldn't do it.

When I first found out about PrEP last summer, one of my first thoughts, one of the things that made me happiest was that I finally felt safe submitting to Adam in this way, in letting him choose partners for me.  If I wake up each day protected from HIV transmission, then if we never learn the HIV status of a new partner, if new partner lies about his or her HIV status, if a condom slips or breaks, I'm still good.

When I do my talks about PrEP, I don't ever mention D/s. It's shocking enough having a fat old woman standing up in front of an audience saying that I take a prescription drug every day so I can fuck whomever I want.  I just don't know how to add that it's also so that I can fuck whomever Adam wants me to, that PrEP has allowed me to explore my submission more fully. That there was a thing Adam had wanted and now I can give it to him.  I'm actually getting a little misty right now, writing this, remembering how it felt to have my submission expand before me.

Submission and Thoughtfulness

One of the jokes in my family is that my first complete sentence was "Mommy, I can do it myself." I've always been almost pathologically independent. It's why I live alone.  It's why I resent help I didn't seek, why it's so hard for me to ask for help. Why I bristle visibly when faced with unsolicited advice.

Further, as an (even-more-)prickly youth, I even saw unsolicited assistance as a commentary on my competence,  as an accusation of weakness.  (Yeah, I know it's fucked up - therapy, medication, years of resocialization have largely corrected that particular kind of thin-skinned reaction.)  Even so, if someone just swoops in and does a thing for me - still - I'm not always as gracious or grateful as I could be.

Most humans make the mistake of thinking that our experiences and internal monologues are in some way normative.  That if we respond to a situation in a certain way (e.g. "why on earth would you think I need help with THAT?"), we think most folks would respond similarly.

So it has always been with me.  Because I really don't want your help 97% of the time, because I have often resented it when it was offered, I have made the mistake of assuming that other folks would see unsolicited offers of assistance as being equally intrusive. Like most blind spots, I didn't know I had this one until.....

...until it became my standing assignment to refresh Adam's beverage

...until it became my job to remember the names of people we meet

...until it became my responsibility to make sure the toys are put away at the end of the night (in someone else's home, no less - see if you get asked back to my house if you try to clean up for me)

...until it became my place to help Adam put his shoes and socks on.

In some ways, I'm almost compulsively helpful.  Hell, I chose a profession that's all about helping folks get their stuff fixed and get their jobs done. Ask any knitter if I'm not tripping over myself to help the newbies learn new stuff. But until very, very recently, it's been a passive sort of helpfulness. I'm considerate insofar as I don't make more work for people, but until very, very recently, I never thought to look around and pro-actively offer to lighten someone else's load.  Considerate, but not thoughtful.

I've noticed this newfound thoughtfulness spilling over to other areas of life.  Fetching coats and purses when the submissives had a day at the nail spa. Offering to get drinks for people who aren't Adam. Offering to help the able-bodied carry things.

Who knew that D/s would teach me better manners all around?  Help me to be a more thoughtful human?

Intimacy, Sex, BDSM

Somehow I  managed to miss a lot of lessons that other white, middle-class girls and boys just absorbed through their pores and internalized in youth. For example, I missed the day at Girl School where we learned that grooming was fun,  a social activity even. 

I must have been told that sex was wrong and that casual sex was even wronger, but - thank all the gods I don't believe in - I never internalized it.  This wasn't even adolescent bravado and rebellious fuck-you.  I just never got it.

I know lots of young girls have sex to please others, as a bargaining tool, to find acceptance or affection.  I was just curious.  I wanted to try EVERYTHING.  I always felt more powerful when I was getting some and I absolutely felt like queen of the god-damned universe when I had more than one lover.  I can still remember just how vast, how mighty I felt the first time I ever managed to have sex with more than one man in the same day - not together, mind you, just two different dates in the same day.  I felt like I had invented something.  It wasn't until I was in college that anyone tried to tell me that that wasn't nice.

I was north of 30 before I realized that people use the word "intimacy" as a euphemism for sex.  Never once crossed my mind that the two things were inherently intertwined.

In my freshman Sociology class in college, one day the prof told a story in which every person in the story was morally compromised in some way. The following discussion centered on which person in the story had committed the most grievous wrong.  The only female character had to bargain sex for something life-saving and her male partner left her after a) having put her in that position and b) learning of her infidelity.

It was a cold, cold awakening when I realized that almost everyone in the class thought that the woman was most at fault. In my mind, she was the victim, the least culpable of all the characters.  Her partner was a dick and the other dude was a sexual extortionist, a rapist.  In the class discussion, as part of my defense of her, I said, "You pay for what you need with what you have". Ummm - 19-year-old girls in Texas classrooms get a lot of negative attention after saying something like that.

In attempts to explain my evidently freakish attitude toward sex, I likened it to conversation.  There are those talks when you stay up all night with a new friend or lover, discovering each other, discovering the universe in each other.  Soul-satisfying, life-changing, truly intimate.  Conversation also includes small-talk, transactions, casual greetings and everyday courtesy.  Sex could be all of those things.  Moreover, the world needs small-talk and everyday courtesy just as much and maybe more often than it needs the soul-satisfying truly intimate kind of conversation.  

The analogy seems a little forced now, 30 years after I first articulated it. Ignoring the pretensions of youth, I never really stopped thinking this way. I never managed to really believe that sex was any more special than any other form of human interaction.  Unlikely as it is, I promise you my blind spot was real.

Now, my keenest sexual pleasures come from acts which have even greater potential for danger than merely being alone with a new man for the first time.  My style of submission is such that I really don't want to lead; I give a lot of power to my partner.  Within the boundaries of my hard limits, I want my partner to have free rein.  I know others will disagree with me on this, and I don't judge anyone whose submission takes a different form, but to me, submission isn't submission if I only obey the stuff I like. Hell, the sexiest part of submission is exploring the landscape between "want" and "willing".

Put another way, the only vote I really want is the veto power of my safeword.

I find the whole "what do you want/what do you like?" discussion with new partners endlessly frustrating.  I want to be told what to do.  Some Doms see this as frustratingly passive, a cop-out. But if I'm telling the Dom how to tie the ropes, what toy to hit me with, for how long, isn't that him submitting to me?  I have zero interest in topping from the bottom.  I want to see where I get led.

And THAT?  Oh holy hell - that takes a fuckton of trust.  That is some intimate shit, even if the sex is with a casual partner.  And so, with 50 on the horizon, I finally understand what it's like to have an activity reserved for the trustworthy alone.  To need to respect and trust my partners..  To have something that is inherently (your mileage may vary) intimate.

Separation of Sex and Play

Outside the BDSM community, you hear the phrase "kinky sex" - the two ideas enmeshed.   Within the BDSM community, though, the two ideas - kink and sex - are generally discussed as distinct entities.

And for me, this is a neverending source of confusion.  For me, the two are part of a seamless whole, with kink being an expression of my sexuality. (More recently, it's come to be almost the entire definition of my sexuality, but my lack of interest in vanilla sex is the topic for another post.)

So the widely-heard prohibition "No sex in the dungeon" has always been a mystery to me.  If someone's beating me and I come, did I just break the rules?

I know I'm being intentionally obtuse and refusing to understand that when people say "sex" they mean intercourse; they mean penetration. Because, well, I spent a lot of years having awesome sex with women who were not so into the penetration. Besides, there's so much more to sex than the penetration.  

An incredibly fun Dom I've played with recently, Abel, told me that he has a rule that he doesn't have sex with someone the first time he plays with them.  That about broke my brain.  I mean if I didn't trust someone to fuck me, I certainly wouldn't trust him to tie me up and hit me.  I'm private about my body and having someone touch me is almost always a sexual signifier (like being Naked with them). So if I didn't want a Dom to touch me sexually, I'm not so sure that I want him touching me at all.

Even so, because "non-sexual play" is a thing in the community, I did try it once. Adah and I had a memorable afternoon playing with clothespins at GKENE* last August.  I certainly trust her. But that separation of sex and play didn't do it for me.  I kept wondering what was the point?  Why get all turned on with someone and NOT have sex?  There was also a limit to how much pleasure I could take in the sensation since it wasn't meant to really be a sexual encounter.

For me, BDSM is so much MORE intimate than just sex, I don't know how to want to share the one intimacy and not the other.

*GKENE = The Geeky Kink Event - New England Imagine ComicCon with a dungeon.

Better Living Through Chemistry

The subtitle on the blog says, "Kink.  PrEP.  Way too much Introspection."  So, you've seen the kink and the introspection but what is this PrEP the Smartass speaks of?

If I just give you a dictionary definition, you'll think this is a bummer of a post and won't keep reading.  So, I'll give you my subjective definiton:  PrEP is the thing that has given me back my sense of my sexual self, has encouraged me to be brave, to explore and have adventures like I did when I was a teen.  Like I've been afraid to for 30 years.

PrEP stands for "Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis)" and is a drug therapy for preventing HIV transmission. Folks who are HIV negative (like me) can take a once-daily medication as part of their safer sex practices to ensure that they stay negative.

The drug used for PrEP, Truvada, has been around for more than 10 years.  Used in conjunction with other drugs, it suppresses HIV in folks who are positive.  It's only been in the past 3 years that the FDA has approved Truvada for HIV prevention.  So it's a newER approved use, but it isn't new.

I first heard about PrEP last summer when a wonderful man I knew from college shared this article from New York Magazine on Facebook.  I haven't looked back.

At first, I thought it was too good to be true - I can just take this one little (albeit expensive) pill every day and be protected from HIV?  If that were true, I thought, then every-fucking-body would know about it.  Life-saving. World-changing.  And for reasons obscure to me, nearly completely hidden from public view.

I was an adventurous and sexually active teen.  One of the things I had heard about and hoped for about college was that it would be lots of sex and great drugs (OK - so maybe I shouldn't have gone to an engineering school, but that's a different subject).  I had my first threesome when I was 18, went to Plato's Retreat the summer before college.  I had reason to believe that adventures would continue and expand with the greater freedom of college life.

Thing is, I was a college freshman in 1984.  While AIDS had been seen in gay communities in certain urban centers before then, it was that summer between high school and college that the whole world came to hear of AIDS.  I can't tell you what a chilling effect this had on my college years.  I had so much less sex in college than I did in high school.  At the very age when I should have been exploring, should have felt free to do so, I was terrified of sex.  There was even a point in my college years when I decided never to have sex again.  I figured no one ever died from NOT having sex.

Many women of my generation just never thought HIV was a real risk for them. But here's the thing, I got knocked up when I was in high school.  So we know that I was having unprotected sex as a teen. The guy who got me pregnant had had a very rough adolescence and had spent some of his youth on the street, earning his living the way street kids do.  The realization that I had had unprotected sex with a man who clearly had engaged in high-risk behaviors kept me from thinking of myself as exempt from HIV.

After maybe a year and a half, I eventually gave up on the idea of life-long chastity, but when I resumed sexual activity, I still carried my fear and my caution with me.  If I could have had the caution without the fear, that would have been great.  So many have lost so much more than I have to AIDS and HIV - loved ones, their own health, their own lives, dignity, privacy.  I know that my own loss has been minimal, but for 30 years, I've carried the resentment that HIV stole my youth.

Once I realized that PrEP was NOT too good to be true, I felt the weight of 30 years of fear and resentment lift.

I wept.

Here I am, at an age when folks are starting to have grandchildren, finally having the freedom and safety to express myself as the sexual person I knew I was when I was 18.

I feel like I'm myself again and I didn't even know I was missing.

Tits of Steel (Submission Isn't for Sissies, part 2)

Last time around, I talked about Adam exposing my breast in front of his partner Eve and how much strength it took for me, with my complex ideas of modesty, to permit it.

Thing is, it was a passive sort of strength, like holding your tongue.  It required inaction, permission, tolerance, but not so much volition.

The original experiment with the nipple clamp having gone well, after Adam and I had excused ourselves to the bedroom,  he brought out more and more serious nipple clamps.  Turns out, I have tits of steel or something. None of the different sets of clamps hurt at all. Definitely a strong sensation but pleasurable and not painful.  It was as if my tits were daring Adam to find something to hurt me. I could see the (very dangerous) look of an idea popping into his head.

He has one set of nipple clamps that NONE of the other subs can handle.  He asked if he could try them out on me.

Sure, why not. I'm having fun.

Adam was so impressed by what I could take from the mightiest pair of clamps, he wanted me to go out into the living room to show Eve and Lillith.

So here I am this little baby sub, practically just hatched and *I* can handle the clamps that the experienced subs can't?  I'm already feeling like a badass. (Yes, I know that submission isn't a competition, but I can't help myself.)

Adam wanted to show me off but he also knew that Eve and Lillith would both be impressed and/or jealous.

Adam held my hand, prodded, led me out of the bedroom, made me show myself.  I had to cover my face.  I hated being looked at.  I hated crossing this boundary with his spouses.

But I did it.

I had to summon up such a force of will to make myself walk out that bedroom door, to show myself, to ask them to look at me. It was one of the hardest things I've ever chosen to do.

And THAT?
THAT made me feel like the toughest bitch in the Bronx.
I felt mighty.

In the end, it doesn't actually hurt to have someone see your boobs but crossing that line?
So hard.

Yes, there was an element of showing off how I was tougher than the other gals.  I won't deny that, but it was the lesser triumph.  Mastering myself enough to do a thing that hard was one of the best and most thrilling things I've ever done.

Submission Isn't for Sissies

Unless that's your thing.  In which case, sissy on with your awesome self.

A childhood friend, Genevieve,  after reading my first few blog entries remarked that she was fascinated and surprised that I have a Dom in my life.  (I don't go so far as to say Adam is "my Dom" - that feels like overstating our relationship AND like I'm putting myself on equal footing with Lillith and Eve, his two permanent partners.)

Then Genevieve said what pretty much everyone says to me: "I just can't imagine you being a submissive".

Her and me both. As I've said all along, no one is more surprised by this than I am.

Here's the thing:  most of the female subs I've met during this adventure are a lot like me: independent, strong, smart, educated, confident. No fools or victims. No doormats. Granted, most of those gals are also fucking Adam and it may be that he has a type.  Self-selection aside, though, I do think that it takes strength, courage, and self-direction for a woman to claim every part of her sexuality.  To be honest and brave enough to say, "THIS is the kind of sex I want to have" and then going out and finding it. Whether the confidence comes from pursuing one's own sexual wants, or if pursuing and fulfilling those wants engenders confidence is a chicken-and-egg question I can't answer.

Everyone gets different things from D/s.  For me, one of the chief satisfactions is that I am so much braver with a trusted Dom at my back, someone to reinforce my own will, someone to challenge me and make me challenge myself.  A safety net. When I master myself enough to rise to a challenge, I feel like such a fucking badass.

For example, maybe the second or third time I went to play with Adam, he answered the door naked.  Both of his partners were home. Adam, Eve and I sat and chatted in the living room. I was terrifically uncomfortable with the fact that he was sitting naked on the sofa between Eve and me. Yes, both Eve and I had already seen him naked, but nudity  is a boundary I choose to relax with only with my lover, so having him naked while socializing with his - for all intents and purposes - spouse was difficult for me.  Turns out, it was the smallest challenge of the day.

While we were chatting, Adam picks up a nipple clamp from the coffee table, reaches into my blouse and takes my breast out to put the nipple clamp on. Many folks find the idea of a nipple clamp horrifying. That wasn't my issue.  Being exposed in front of Eve, however, was. I have a philosophy of being willing to try anything that can't harm me and so I had to keep telling myself that there really was no harm in it. Having my flesh exposed in the living room was no more harmful than having it exposed in the bedroom. Eve's eyes couldn't do me any damage.  She's seen boobs before.  She HAS boobs of her own.  But I was So Uncomfortable.  Blushing like a beet.

It took more strength than I knew I had to sit still and allow myself to be exposed like that.

And THAT - breaking the rules about nudity and exposure, mastering myself, the show of strength?  All of that was tremendously sexy.  The real turn-on was how brave I had to be to do it.

So, that's what I mean when I say that submission makes me feel like a badass. I've never had to be so tough before.  I've never had such a chance to routinely prove to myself just how strong I can be and when I do, it is HOT AS FUCK.

In the BDSM world, it's almost a cliche to say that submission is empowering or liberating, but when I got finished telling this story to Genevieve, her response was, "It sounds like being submissive is actually empowering you."

She may have also expressed a little curiosity about D/s.

Naked

Years ago, I was on the periphery of a circle of friends whose main group activity was skinny-dipping at Hippie Hollow.   At the time, the king of these naked nerds was my best friend's boyfriend.   Wanting me to feel welcome and included, King and his roommate invited me to join them for naked sunbathing many times.

"Thanks, but no.  Not my kind of thing."

"You don't have to be naked.  You can wear a swimsuit."

I never quite knew how to explain that modesty wasn't the issue. Boundaries were. I could cover my own flesh, but my friends would still be exposed.

Around about the same time, another very close friend met the man who would become her husband at another skinny-dipping event (evidently,  none of my fiends of that era were capable of keeping their clothes on for very long). They are still married and one of my favorite couples.

For myself, though, I never understood how they managed to generate any sexual tension given that they were naked when they met.  Where's the mystery? The discovery? Like getting an unwrapped gift.  Like reading the last page of a novel first.

Fast forward 20-odd years and a significant portion of my dating life is spent having sex in semi-public places.  I spend more time than the average gal naked in public, among strangers.  Still, I have this prohibition against non-sexual nudity.  I like that taking my clothes off with another is a sexual signifier.   I like the fact that disrobing is something I do with just a few (yeah, I'll wait while you finish laughing).

My reluctance to bare myself for non-lovers has nothing to do with being a prude.  Paradoxically,  it's because I'm such a pervert that I want to preserve the sexual significance of nudity.  I never want the act of taking my clothes off to become pedestrian; I never want to lose the sense of exposure, of excitement,  of - dare I say it? - intimacy to be stripped from the act of stripping.

Is it so very odd that I choose not to have the intimacy of nudity with non-sexual friends?

How to Pour Water

A few weeks back, I was at Adam's house and he sent me to the kitchen to fetch him some lemonade.

I poured Adam the last of the lemonade in the pitcher. Being a dutiful sub, I took it upon myself to make more lemonade without being asked (someday, we should discuss how submission has made me a more thoughtful person all around, but that's a blog for another day). 

When I bring Adam his drink, he remarks that he heard the water running - did I make more lemonade?  Expecting to hear "good girl", the "Yes, Sir" fair flew out my mouth.

"How far did you fill up the pitcher?"

*sigh* I had made the lemonade wrong - too weak.

Later, lemonade finished, Adam sent me back to the kitchen to fetch him some water (he wouldnt drink my weakass lemonade) and this time the water pitcher was nearly empty.  Again, being a dutiful sub, I refill the water pitcher without prompting. I GOT this, I say to myself.  On the way back to the living room, I'm even getting my smartass remark all ready about how this time I know I couldn't have messed up. Who can mess up water?

Me.

Oh, I did just fine refilling the pitcher.  It was the glass of water I had screwed up.  I had filled it too full and Adam spilled on himself as he took it from me.

Evidently, my beverage education had some gaps in it.

I have lots and lots of incredibly supportive vanilla friends.  They enjoy my stories of slutty adventures.  Most are agreed that they would not, for example, care to have their asses beaten to bruising or fuck strangers in a club because their date told them to, but they figure sexual tastes differ and if it makes me happy, all is well.

What disturbs them, what puzzles them most is the domestic service.  Frankly, it puzzles me too.  My general guideline is that if an act does me no harm and gives a lover pleasure, I'll give it a try.

I know that there are subs who live for service.  I'm not one of them.  Sometimes just the word "service" rankles.  Other times, I'm really proud of myself for pouring a glass of water correctly.

No One is More Surprised By This Than I Am

A friend recently told me that she laughs every time she hears my name and "submissive" in the same breath.

Her and me both, I can tell you. As the title says, NO ONE is more surprised by this than I am.

Lots of folks in the BDSM community will tell you that they always knew something different about themselves before they found a way/the courage to explore their desires in real life. Not me.

When I was in grad school, I took a young lover.  Young enough that he had grown up with porn on the internet (at 49, this was definitely NOT the case in my own adolescence) and had a very different idea of what was common or even normative than I did.  He was a big man - a foot taller than I am and broad in the shoulders. He played kind of rough and was enough bigger than I am to fling me around like a ragdoll, to dominate me physically with ease.

He bit me.  He bruised me.  That was the first time anyone had left a mark on my body since I was a teenager coming home with hickeys.  And it was hot.  It was so fucking hot, I have no words.  To the man in my bed, his marks on my skin represented a sad lack of control; he saw every one as a failure.  I'm honest enough with myself - then and now - to know that it was exactly the loss of control that did it for me.  That he wanted me So Much that he couldn't be gentle if he wanted to be.  

That was my first step down this path and it was only about 10 years ago.  Some describe me as a late bloomer but that phrase implies a lack of confidence to pursue my own desires.  Until the day I got that first bruise, I had No Idea that this could be a thing I would want.  That it was a thing anyone wanted.  Given what a slut I've always been, my own innocence is kind of amazing.

I was disturbed by how much it turned me on to be manhandled.  Too disturbed, in fact, to examine it or pursue it right away.  How did this fit with my feminism?  What did it say about me?  Was my own independence a sham?  I'm still working on these questions.

I'd love to know what your own origin stories are like.

Single Girl?

Recently, on the way to making my main point in a story, I said something to my friend Cain about being a single girl.  His surprise was startling to me.

"Really? You think of yourself as single?"

"Well, what the hell else would I be?"

I've always thought of myself as a single girl. Footloose and fancy-free.  A bachelor with a little black book.  Slut about town.  A free agent.

Cain's heard many of my slutty adventures over the past 6 months or so; how could my characterization of myself as "single" mystify him?

Part of his bafflement stemmed from the fact that my relationship with one of my lovers has a strong D/s component, and many Doms are a little more  - what?  territorial?  controlling? - than Adam is with me or with any of his subs. The idea that I could have a Dom in my life and still think of myself as a free agent was the puzzling bit.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I'm out to dinner with a couple of other subs including my friend Adah, telling the story I just told you about Cain.  And Adah jumps in with, "Wait, what?  You identify as single?"

Her take on it was completely different from Cain's. She said she would have seen me as "SoloPoly" (a term I had never heard until that moment and while apt in its precision seems to be kind of burdensome in its specificity).

Adah tells me that when she hears women describe themelves as single, she hears "looking for Mr. Right", which I admit, is not an accurate description of how I have arranged my social life.  She summed it up by saying that to her, single was like being on the first rung, about to climb Relationship Ladder, rather than a declaration of "nah, I'm not going to climb that ladder."

Single to me is light-hearted, an affirmation of freedom, not an expression of being lonely or unfulfilled in my relationships. After all, I'm the one who made the choice to be a lifelong single girl.

What does "single" say to you?