Sorry for the MIA

I apologize for the MIA.  A few months ago I started a small publishing company, really a micropress, in order to publish my own work.  I decided that I didn’t want to mess with traditional publishing so much, because I believe in my ability to package my own work, and market it myself.  The days of “needing” a publisher in order to get your work out there, are kinda over.  The only thing they could do is give me wider distribution.  And the kinky stuff at least, is personal enough that I’m not sure I WANT super wide distribution.

I just want to reach the readers who will most appreciate what I’ve written.   But I’m also publishing work in a different genre with my micropress, under a different name. (I’ll probably have two different imprints)  But anyway, long story short, I have been working a LOT.  And I haven’t yet had a lot of time to devote to “this” identity.

And I totally feel like someone with MPD here, or a secret agent hehe.  I haven’t fallen off the planet, I’ve just been busy and overwhelmed.  I definitely can’t maintain daily blogging here.  I do daily blogging with the other pen name.  I also haven’t decided “exactly” what I want this blog to be yet.  Right now it’s kindof personal.  But if I’m writing both fiction and nonfiction, for the public to consume, no matter how niche the market, do I really want that “out there.”  Do I want to be a bit more circumspect about it and just talk theory and philosophy?

I don’t know.  I haven’t decided yet.  And the other genre/pen name/stuff I’m doing is taking up all my brain space.  For now I’ll try to post maybe once a week and see how that goes, assuming I can remember.  I also forget to check the email tied in with this blog, so you can see where this is an issue, lol.
Anyway, I’m sorry that I just disappeared for the people who were reading my posts and liked them.  I’ve just become a little overwhelmed as of late.  I have so many ideas and plans both on how to market my work, and being part of a larger writer community trying to do the same thing, that it’s easy to get overwhelmed.  I’ve taken on more things than I can reasonably do at one time, and I probably started this blog too soon.

Honey, you didn’t invent Kink.

A discussion on another blog sparked this. There seems to be an issue where the “kink community” thinks they invented kink and therefore they get to codify it and determine what is real and what is fake. (And I use that phrase even though I know everyone who identifies as part of it isn’t like this, but when I say this in quotes like that, I’m talking about the people who have appointed themselves our “leaders” whether asked for or not.)

Dominance and submission have always been with us. Always. While I fully recognize the fact that homosexuality exists, femdom exists, malesub exists, and people who are so equal in their relationship there is no other term for them but “vanilla” exist, and all those things are valid expressions of humanity … the vast majority of human beings, females tend to feel a biological drive/urge to submit, and males tend to feel a biological drive/urge to dominate.

This has caused many problems. For people who don’t feel these majority drives, they’ve been made to feel somehow less human or worthy. Which isn’t true. Something being the most common expression of something isn’t the same thing as the other expressions being wrong. But the very existence of differences makes the mandating of male domination over females abusive. And even if that tendency existed in all people, there is still too much room for abuse of that power when it is turned into not only “biological law” but “legal law.”

So we had these things like the women’s movement, which I think did many wonderful things, but then crossed the river into crazyland. And a lot of people don’t know their roles anymore. I’m not talking about the people who are naturally not a part of the male dom/female sub schema. I’m talking about people who ARE, but their cultural indoctrination has made it shameful.

Women now tend to angst if they want to serve a man. Oh the horrors! Not that! I mean we haven’t evolved that way for survival or anything. (sarcasm.) Somehow it is “shameful” to be nurturing, to want to take care of a household, to want to please a man. Kink or no kink. We haven’t even gotten to kink yet.

Men also tend to angst. Our culture looks at men as monsters and dolts. They’re either too moronic to handle their own lives, or they’re just monsters waiting to crawl out of their caves and attack the village. Men aren’t allowed to be dominant because it could “lead to abuse.”

If I listened to the “warning signs” pamphlets for domestic violence, I would be cautioned to run far far away. Almost every expression of dominance, even completely non-violent expressions, just an assertion/signal of who is top dog, is “abuse.” We’ve so “abused” the term abuse, that now, while women can happily berate their husbands who are holding their purses in the middle of the mall or grocery store, if a man said half the shit women say, it would be labeled: “verbal/emotional abuse” and of course we all know that’s just a tiny microstep away from physical abuse.

So this leaves, IMO a lot of discontent amongst the sexes, and a lot of sex lives that dry up within the first few years of marriage. I mean how can such an institution survive when women aren’t allowed to please their men even if they want to, because it’s just not feminist. And men aren’t allowed to take their woman in hand, no matter how gently or lovingly, without being two steps away from Monsterville.

So out of THIS, we have the huge influx of kink. Because some men, and some women even if wired this way, can pretend. It’s not such a deep and major part of them they can’t blend and be “normal.” But for others of us…we’re at the farther end of that spectrum. The urge to submit to a dominant male, or the urge to dominate a “helpless” female, is so encoded that there is no way to fully express it, BUT with what we now call kink.

But what we now call kink is not a new invention. There were times and places when women were property. (I’m not saying this was ethical or okay as an across the boards pronouncement or didn’t lead to abuse of power, I’m just saying, what we have now isn’t how the social structure has always been.) There were times and places when men spanked their wives, and this was just common practice. Times and places where most women addressed their husbands as “Master.”

That behavior, if consensual, would be called kink today. So besides domination/submission and spanking and titles, shit we’ve always had in one form or another…what is actually different?

Well today, we have kinky stores and videos and books. We have all kinds of complicated sex toys and bondage equpiment and state of the art floggers and canes. So basically we’ve upgraded to heavy merchandising.

Props, and expressions of a thing are not the thing itself.

This is why I don’t consider myself all that “weird” or “different” from much of the population. Sexuality and power dynamics have always been a continuum from one extreme to the other. There has always been a large variety of human sexual expression.

The “kink community” has become in many places, an insular little group, in which they can convince themselves they are very “different” and “special” from the rest of the population and human hierarchy/sexual interaction. But they are not. But it’s hard for some people to accept that most people aren’t that different from them, when they can’t openly be who they are as the full expression of who they are without denigration.

But that’s society’s issue, not biology. Just because a group of people stand around all day denying their biology, doesn’t make it reality. Nature marches on. (And again, this is not to say that homosexuality or male sub or femdom is denying one’s nature or biology. While it seems to be the minority of human sexual expression, it is also natural biology in many people.)

And in the event that sounds a touch too “Gorean” for you, I hate to say this, but Norman did not “invent” this idea about evolutionary biology and the sexes. In fact, in many ways he perverted it, because life on Gor is cruel, and all his books tend to do is reinforce the idea that extreme feminism was a good thing, to protect women from such cruel use. I do get that fiction and nonfiction are different subjects, but it gets sticky with the Gor novels…but that’s a different post. This has already gotten too long.

History of the Vibrator

The vibrator has a very dirty little history, that I find not a lot of people seem to be aware of.  In the Victorian era, female hysteria was considered an actual disorder.  No no one doubts that hormonal problems can affect a woman’s moods and such, BUT, that’s a little bit different from… “When a uterus ATTACKS!”

Which was sort of the common medical belief.  That the uterus was doing all kinds of practically mystical and evil things to women. Hysterectomy was a common treatment for female hysteria, but it wasn’t the only “approved medical treatment.”  It was bad enough that surgical mutilation without real cause was considered a treatment for a woman just having emotions.  (See, because women don’t emotionally react to things the same as men do, then that made us crazy.  But when we started wearing pants and not crying in public as much, they calmed down about the issue.)

Anyway…I’m digressing.  But also building the anticipation for the WTF moment you will have if you haven’t already heard the punchline to this one.  Another treatment for female hysteria, which no doubt male doctors used more often on the pretty female patients, was “pelvic massage.”  In other words, medically approved molestation.

Doctors were putting their fingers into women’s vagina’s and “massaging” them.  Sometimes for a very long time, and often to orgasm.  Only for some weird reason, they at this time were generally ignoring the female orgasm altogether, so I guess this orgasm that they didn’t usually label as such, was seen as signs the “treatment” was working.

Of course this gets a little tedious and molesting your patients becomes less fun when it’s an everyday occurance, so some brilliant chap, invented…the vibrator.  That’s right, the vibrator was originally not a sex toy but a medical device.  It allowed doctors to molest…er treat their patients quicker, thereby allowing them to see more patients.

I swear, this is really tragic, but when I see it in my mind, all I can think is erotica or medical porno.  I mean does this not sound like the entire plot of half the medical porn out there? Who knew such porn was actually “based on a true story.”  On many true stories actually.

In time, more portable vibrators became available and they actually started to be sold in the Sears catalog of all places.  Yep, this was just a normal every day occurence.  Mommy needs to buy her vibrator to cure her female hysteria. Daddy smiles and hands her some money while the kids play in the background, the female children excited about the advances of medical science that make female hysteria less likely to involve surgical mutilation, yay!  It’s great to be a girl.

Eventually, at some point…the spell wore off.  People realized that female hysteria wasn’t actually a medical condition and that vibrators weren’t actually a treatment.  (Which isn’t to say that hormone shit isn’t relaxed a bit by masturbation and such, it is…but it’s not something a doctor should be doing in his office to random patients.  And their scientific basis was a bit off, since the uterus wasn’t creeping around and you know…stalking women or anything.)

Sears stopped carrying vibrators, though I think now they sell “personal massagers” which you know…same diff, except most of them arent’ really meant for insertion.  I guess clitoral orgasms are en vogue now for Sears and such, but vaginal orgasms are back to being shrouded in shame and mystique.

Now of course vibrators are sex toys.  They’re dirty and naughty and many women are ashamed to buy one and use them in private.  It’s kind of weird that about a century ago, they were having vibrators used on them by their friendly neighborhood doctor.  Without being able to admit to themselves that what was going on was a purely sexual act.  And not medical treatment.

We do still have sex therapists and sex surrogates who help to treat sexual dysfunction.  But whatever does or doesn’t go on or get recommended to do at home, it’s admitted to up front that it is SEXUAL.  And the patients know going in what will be discussed and they consent to engaging in such personal things.

Some references if you don’t believe me on the vibrator as device of medically approved molestation…

Female Hysteria
The Job Nobody Wanted I very much doubt this title. While it IS true that many women were sent to female midwives to this (lesbian molestation for the win), many male doctors did perform this “treatment procedure.” I’m also fairly certain that doctors found it “less tedious” when the female patient was particularly pretty.

There really are no “levels” to ownership, just different dynamics

I think the fundamental thing some people don’t understand is that needing to be owned is not the equivalent of needing to be owned by any random boob with a domination kink.

Some, like myself need to be LOVED AND OWNED. And someone who loves me, even if they have final authority and power over me, there are just some things they will not do to me. If they do those things they risk either killing the love and trust between us or ending up with someone who has stockholm syndrome and nothing more.

If love is important to a master too, and in my world it must be, then that is the cost of doing business in that way for them. Masters are not above the consequences of their actions.

In real life relationships you do not get an operating manual where everybody follows a strict protocol.  In my opinion that is not genuine human interaction.  What good is an obedient slave with no personality or thoughts of her own?  Really?  What kind of “master” even wants such a thing?

I’m not trying to be judgmental, if you do this and this is what works for you, fine, but I live in a relationship in which I am a human being.  And my master understands that. He LIKES my fight.  He LIKES that I don’t roll over like a big dumb dog over everything.  Yes, there is a point where if I push boundaries too far, I “get in trouble,” but I don’t believe there is a such thing as “topping from the bottom.”

We’re talking about a person who has control of all the finances, who houses, feeds, and clothes me. Who is like spiderman strong compared to me.  In what reality could I ever have any power he does not, in his mercy/love, give to me?

In my opinion when a slave can top from the bottom, that’s a problem on the master’s part.  Not the slave’s.  If he doesn’t like it, and he can’t train it out, either he’s ineffective, or they are incompatible.  You cannot put the onus on the slave/pet/submissive for training themselves.  You also cannot shift the burden of responsibility onto the “kink community” to train them.

Since every master has particular wants and needs in his pet/slave/submissive, almost any training she receives elsewhere has to be undone.  It’s why a lot of masters very often prefer someone who hasn’t had several other owners, because he doesn’t want to have to hear every third discussion: “But my other master did this.”

I also will not do multipet or multislave situations period. My master is as monogamous to me as I am to him. If that changed, I would “run away,” provided I still had the strength of will to do so.

What not everyone seems to understand is…in a historical context slaves were not all mentally broken. If they were, no one ever would have tried to escape. Slaves also do not always obey, they are just punished if they don’t, AND if the issue is important enough to the master to correct.

Ownership is not dependent on complete mental breaking/changing, locking in a cage, or total obedience to the point of the slave/submissive “self-dominating.”

Not every master enjoys playing with a broken toy.

Submission cannot exist without dominance, and all insistence on putting the onus on the submissive instead of any on the dominant, is unacceptable to me.

Your mileage of course may vary.  And if it does that’s because you are a unique human being in a uniqure relationship dynamic.  If whatever you’re doing works for you, wonderful, more power to you.  Just don’t go thinking it’s the “one true way.”  It isn’t.  There is no such thing.

Instability and Safety

For several months now my master and I have not lived together full time. I’ve been living like a child of divorce. Split custody between him and my parents. And it’s because I left him. I left him because things had gone to shit and I was tired. I felt like he couldn’t give me what I needed and neither of us were happy and it was wrong for both of us to continue on.

I moved back in with my parents. I hated him actively and with a loathing impossible to quantify for 3 months. We sent each other some very nasty emails. (though truth be told, most of his were defending himself against me. I was very angry.) We came to a grudging truce.

Then one night I needed help with my firewall. The guy I was ’sort of seeing’ but it wasn’t that serious, and quite frankly I didn’t really like him (yes I know, that’s awful. I was sad and lonely, sue me.) he was too busy to help. So I IM’d my master (who obviously wasn’t my master at that time, but that’s how I reference him in this blog, silleh.)

He helped. And somehow we started flirting. And he’d dealt with a lot of issues that were coming between us. And then we starting wondering what our relationship would have been if we hadn’t had the walls between us that we’d had. We’d previously lived in a half vanilla/half kinky world until I couldn’t stand it anymore, our communication broke down even further.

Sometimes I think if we’d been totally vanilla, we would never have noticed it at all. So many seem to think it’s normal for the honeymoon phase to end and the sexual desire to dry up. That it’s normal to drift and not understand each other, to not want to touch each other or be close.

But we weren’t vanilla. And when freaking finally all the stars aligned right for us to have what we both wanted and needed, well, we were separated and hated each other. And dammit we just weren’t having that. We had to find out what we could have had.

And that brings us to where we are now. At first I stayed at my parent’s house and just went to my master’s house on the weekends. We had a lot of trust to rebuild. A lot of intimacy to re-engage. A lot of conversations to have. I had to know that this new version of my master wasn’t just a “I promise I’ll be a better man, baby” story girls always seem to gobble up with a spoon.

It wasn’t, but it took months of fear that he was going to revert back to the man who’d neglected me. And before you think he is or was a bad person, there really were legitimate reasons, a few things I did that exacerbated it, but largely it had nothing to do with me at all. Nor did it have anything to do with him being a bad man, it was just an unfortunate emotional situation that I unknowingly walked into. And no, I won’t share it because it’s not my story to tell.

Some weekends driving me back to my parents house, I hated him. I wondered what the hell I was doing with him. We couldn’t possibly work. But very slowly, month by month, we aired out all our dirty laundry and came back to a place where we missed each other all the time.

Now we want to live together full time. The only thing standing between us is the water heater. It’s been on the fritz for awhile now, and I can’t live without hot water, and it’s impractical to drive me to my parents’ house for a shower every single night. The water heater issue hasn’t been really a “money” issue, but a “time” issue. He’s been very overworked lately.

But finally, freaking finally, he’s gotten everything taken care of, to where he can actually GET the water heater and install it. So that’s being ordered. And then, holy crap hopefully in the next week or so I’ll be back with him for good.

I hate this living in two houses business. This isn’t normal. Now i know how a divorce kid feels. And this is NOT okay. When you live in two places but feel that neither one of them is really and truly your home, you feel like an orphan or a stray. This is not a happy way to live. It’s been very stressful, very unstable.

I feel safest when my collar is on and I’m under his control. And when I have to take it off to go back to another house on Monday morning, I hate it more each week, and it feels like the safety and stability is ripped out from under me.

The Wall of Resistance

I know that this month my hormones have gone wonky (I know this because there are various signs that indicate it, both physical and emotional.)  And I’m sure that may be playing a big role. (In fact I’m fairly certain I’ve gone off the deep end of crazy.)  What I do know is….I have hit the wall of resistance, we are drifting in a raft on the sea of lack of communication, and this shit has to stop.

There is no finger to point blame at anyone in particular.  It’s just…we’re both in a funk.  We’re both annoyed and frustrated.  And over a couple of different issues I am at a point where I am unlikely to just submit.  Period.  I’m also unlikely to not resent being forced to submit.

Certain issues need to be worked out before we are back in happy kink land.  For now we’re almost borderline vanilla.  And I’ll tell you, I don’t give a flying fuck about that.

I’ve mentioned before that on the vanilla end of the spectrum people think I’m “abused” (and they think this about anyone who isn’t just “playing BDSM” on occasion in a way that fits their vanilla standard of “kinky but still okay”)  And hardcore kinky people seem to think anyone who ever just needs a fucking break from it all, isn’t “real.”

But I’m living in the real world.  And in the real world there are some days when I don’t WANT someone telling me what to do, or being in charge of me.  And that makes me whatever the hell it makes me.  But right now, I am NOT happy.  Maybe that will change in a few days, or after a good long talk/cuddle which I’m sure we’re going to have to clear the air.

ETA: And…in five minutes, the wall is coming down.  I think we very swiftly solved part of the problem.  I’m hormonal, and he’s not getting enough sleep.  Mix these and yeah, we’re gonna be in a funk.

We’re physically apart a lot overnight.  I’m not here during the week right now.  He hasn’t been sleeping well. (1 or 2 hours a night during the week.)  I was here Thursday night and he slept like a baby.  I didn’t even go to bed when he did that night.  I was just in the house.  That’s so fucking sweet I can’t even be mad at him anymore.  It’s not even him, it’s this shitty situation we find ourselves in.  How can I be mad at a man who sleeps better when I’m in the same building as him overnight?  I can’t.  I’m too damn sappy.  That is my achilles heel.

24/7 Pirate/Wench

Western culture divides shit up into “real” and “make believe” according to very weird and very literal lines, which sometimes causes people to behave in strange ways so they can justify their life experiences as “real.” Because somehow experiences that don’t fall under “real” aren’t seen as valid in this culture.

I’m not so sure I would call most D/s or M/s situations as simple as “role-playing,” unless one considers any role they take on in life to be role-playing. Because when you do something 24/7 how long is it before you become what you’re doing? Human beings can only tolerate so much cognitive dissonance, so after awhile there is a level of reality, even at times when it wasn’t originally intended. (I’m thinking of couples who start out “playing” with BDSM, who later move into an ownership or D/s type dynamic where they would hardly call it “playing” anymore.)

I tend to think of strict role-playing when Master/slave is a role play along the lines of a Pirate/wench game. One of you isn’t really a pirate and the other a wench, it’s just make believe. But the words master and slave are somewhat different because they have a level of ‘literal reality’ but also a level of metaphor and symbol and I think that someone can internalize a feeling of belonging to someone and being their property, or of owning someone and it’s much more real than any pirate/wench game is ever going to be even if you have a big ship and real doubloons.

I don’t think anyone really internalizes a feeling of being a pirate or a wench. Of course I could be wrong. Pirates and wenches, speak up or forever hold your peace.

Those Crazy BDSMers

Apparently some people are deeply confused on what is and is not a psychological pathology. Because some people in the kink community have a history of being abused as children or raped it is assumed somehow that they are practicing some form of BDSM because they are sick and twisted mentally.

Hmmm. Well I’ve seen a few articles/studies that would suggest many people who do have a history of abuse are able to practice BDSM safely and in a way that is personally healing to them, assuming they find a healthy person to either play with or form a kink style relationship with. As opposed to another abuser who will further victimize them and compound the problem.

What makes something a pathology in the realm of psychology isn’t if “you think it’s weird.” It’s not if “you wouldn’t like it.” It is if it negatively affects one’s larger world. Does it create depression, low self esteem, suicidal tendencies, inability to cope with any aspect of life? No? Then in what way is it a sign of mental illness?

Most of the people I know who are in healthy kinky relationships are confident, happy, well-adjusted human beings. In what reality does this define pathology?

We live in a society where people somehow think their preferences equal mental stability. You can do everything “normal” on the outside and be deeply troubled. Likewise you can live in what the outside world views as a psychologically fucked up relationship dynamic, and be more lucid, happy, and stable than most of the population.

High Stakes

So the past couple of days I have been an insufferable brat.  I don’t know why.  I just occasionally go through these stages where I’m the queen of resistance.  I truly think hormones play a role, and that’s not a cop out.  I have a genuine hormonal imbalance.

Anyway.  So I was up to 12 whacks with the cane.  We’re playing this card game called Phase 10 and I got real cocky about how lucky I am at cards.  So we bet.  If I won, I get 9 whacks.  If I lost I got 15.

I won.

Phew.

So then we play another game.  If I lost I’d get 12 (and the whole thing would have been a pointless exercise in stress.)  If I won I got 6.

I won again.  Needless to say, I quit while I was ahead.

Now if I can manage not to be a brat the rest of the weekend I’ll be good.

What do you want to bet?

Shopping for Canes

Okay, so generally speaking we are low-rent when it comes to things to beat my ass with.  Up until this point we’ve used wooden dowel rods for canes.  However, he keeps breaking them on my ass.

So today he finally decided he’s ready to go for what we are going to call an “equipment upgrade.”

So we were shopping online for canes.  Holy Crap some of them are scary.  And of course those are the ones he wants.  Because he’s evil.

But then we come across this pink sparkly cane.  I kid you not.  And he says: “No, I want something that looks like a real cane, not something you’d beat Strawberry Shortcake with.”

hahahahahahaha