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?