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.