What's a Nice Boy Like Me Doing in a DUNGEON?
So if you've been reading these things, you've probably got some idea of how I perceive myself: kinda sweet, bit on the prim side, warm and loving when people open up to me and share, a bit reserved otherwise, serious and righteous in a confidently cheerful sort of way... Sexually more of a reactive person than an initiator, shy about my appetite, not a prude about casual sex but prefer sex with an emotional connection, cautious about sex if I don't feel understood and appreciated, naughty but not dirty, playful and inclined towards mutual teasing more than full-on power conflict in my erogenous interactions, require emotional safety and trust to be with someone that way. Basically a pretty typical good-girl-grown-up sort of person, albeit incidentally male.
Not really your conventional poster-person for the whip and chain scene.
Hey, I used to laugh at that stuff. About how so many people would gravitate towards such a narrow and almost ritualistic uniform set of behaviors and appearances and whatnot. A fetish fetish! You know, how it's not merely about pain, it's about the giving and receiving of pain with a small and specific set of devices, those spanking paddles and those BDSM whips. Not ice picks or pliers or hot match heads. And just LITTLE pain, soft little whacks. And how it's not merely about power and restraint and semi-involuntary sexual experiences, it's about the restraining of people with the same silly little velcro cuffs to tie your partner to the bedpost and the silly stuff about 'master' this and 'mistress that' and the person being tied up is having done to them exactly what they want, or as much of it as they can get the other person to do, yeah right, domination and submission. And those silly clothes, the Victoria's Secret meets Goth Girl underwear and black leather and high heel shoes, let's all dress that way, sure. That's the impression I had of BDSM from the bits and pieces of it that had been exposed to the light of the vanilla-world day, and yes I giggled at it and no I didn't picture myself getting involved in it.
Hmm. Well. SOME people reading the above paragraph are no doubt nudging their friends and partners and saying "He should have been at that dungeon scene last Friday, with the lawn darts and the cattle prods and the human corsetting... 'little' pain indeed". Indeed, nudging their friends and partners with something sharp and pokey, or perhaps hitting them with something heavy and thuddy. It's true, my sense of what BDSM was like was heavily influenced by people playing around the very edges of it, sort of the precursors to the Fifty Shades of Grey folks, and oh yes there are people whose seriousness for pain and power-play aren't quite so trivial. The costumes are considerably more varied, too, by the way.
But that doesn't really explain what I'm doing there. I may have been laughing dismissively at BDSM for their little pats and taps and their little velcro wrist cuffs, but it wasn't because I was craving a good bashing with a baseball bat or wanted to penetrate my partner with a potato peeler or anything. And as for power play, I've always been a radical egalitarian, fervently committed to absolute equality, no way you'd find me seeking out domination and submission, uh uh. The everyday world is already overly full of the eroticization of power over other people, polarized gender roles manifesting as male domination and female submission, and me, I'm trying to get AWAY from all that! And nope, don't need no pointy red high heel on my throat or some dominatrix bossing me around, either, I had my share of bossy authoritarian coercive adults as a militant children's libber, nope, what I want is trust and intimacy and open honest sharing of feelings, THAT'S what I get off on.
Well, folks, a funny thing happens in the gently carpeted hallways of the Nice. I first intuited it back during my first run at being a college student, when I was on a life-plan path that would have required me to spend a decade or longer in school working towards professionalism, without necessarily including any girlfriend until far later:
> Why on earth had I thought it would be a good idea to go to the
> University of Mississippi? To join the AIR FORCE for a scholarship?
> To tie myself to what looked like a decade of financial dependence on
> my parents? To live in this stuffy old-fashioned place and never meet
> any girls until I graduate eons from now with an advanced graduate
> degree making me a professional, since there are no jobs for people
> with a bachelors' degree in astronomy (what, they're going to pay you
> to look at the stars?), learning lots of math and physics (yeah THAT'S
> a real good fit for my talents and interests)? So that when I finally
> get a professional degree, after, of course, repaying my debt to the
> AIR FORCE by doing a stint of active service for a year or two (oh
> yeah, military me, for sure) maybe some stuffy well-dressed girl will
> marry me if I support her financially, and then she'll let me do it to
> her.
It may not be immediately obvious in the context of that paragraph, but the most worrisome image there is that of the partner who participates in sex as a kind of largesse, a dispensation to the deserving, a favor, perhaps a kindness, perhaps a more hard-nosed exchange but at any rate not participating in it for her own reasons, her own cravings and selfish wants.
And it took awhile for me to fully realize it but THIS is one of the most important areas for equality and reciprocity: I don't want it doled out to me as an act of generosity or as a gift, I want to experience someone's hunger, I want them wanting to do stuff to me because THEY get off on doing stuff to me. Oh, I'll reciprocate, you'd better believe it, I am so there with reciprocity on that. I crave my partner's responsive tinglings and I want to play with her nerve endings and make her hungrier and hornier and I want to tease and torment her and experience her appetite. Oh my... we're sort of talking about POWER here, aren't we? But but but, hey wait a minute, this paragraph started out being focused on equality!!
Paradoxically, yes, that's how it works. Power exchange can be a delightful and delicious sharing of vulnerability and appetite, experiencing being wanted and being had and done unto, stripped of self-control or stripping one's partner of theirs, and the path away from gender-specific rigid power dichotomies, if one wishes neither to be a sexual commodity on tap nor someone whose appetites are condescendingly catered to, leads not so much to some kind of sanitized NiceLand in which power plays no role but instead to an acknowledgement that it IS always going to be there but that it can be played with, openly spoken of, and deployed for mutual pleasure in a fashion that fosters mutual trust.
Right off the bat, front and dead center to my own gender concerns and experiences and considerations, the BDSM environment lets me opt out of being the sexual "prime mover", the heavy, the person doing the butch-role thing, the initiator. Unlike the overwhelming majority of possible sexual contexts, here's a place where it can be directly tossed onto the table as a new rule for a new game: you top me, OK? It need not be for always and forever, although it could be (it could be set up as a defining rule of all subsequent play, or of the relationship in its entirety; but it can also be a "tonight's rule" sort of thing).
I like relationships where we can talk about power, and I like being able to talk about power without it necessarily having to be one of those ponderous theoretical excursions into social analyses and discussions of patriarchal hegemony and whether an egalitarian impulse can survive the deterministic overarching environment and so on and so forth.
Oh, it's not a perfect panacea, don't get me wrong. I have attended kink events as someone who is clearly a male-bodied person and found that prior to any negotiations of who is doing what to whom, one still has to connect and express interest, and yes there is still a distinctive disproportional expectation that the male-bodied people will seek out those initial connections. I don't want to corrupt the minds of any similar male feminine people by leading them to think that if they attend a BDSM event there will be gangs of dommy women approaching them with deliciously malicious intent. It could happen, but the BDSM world is merely a place where power arrangements can be negotiated, it's not a world insulated and isolated from gendered expectations.
Anyway, yeah... BDSM has its usefulness for gender variant people. Oh, and I've discovered it can be fun being poked with sharp pointy things, especially if the person weilding them enjoys provoking your reactions. *blush*
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Not really your conventional poster-person for the whip and chain scene.
Hey, I used to laugh at that stuff. About how so many people would gravitate towards such a narrow and almost ritualistic uniform set of behaviors and appearances and whatnot. A fetish fetish! You know, how it's not merely about pain, it's about the giving and receiving of pain with a small and specific set of devices, those spanking paddles and those BDSM whips. Not ice picks or pliers or hot match heads. And just LITTLE pain, soft little whacks. And how it's not merely about power and restraint and semi-involuntary sexual experiences, it's about the restraining of people with the same silly little velcro cuffs to tie your partner to the bedpost and the silly stuff about 'master' this and 'mistress that' and the person being tied up is having done to them exactly what they want, or as much of it as they can get the other person to do, yeah right, domination and submission. And those silly clothes, the Victoria's Secret meets Goth Girl underwear and black leather and high heel shoes, let's all dress that way, sure. That's the impression I had of BDSM from the bits and pieces of it that had been exposed to the light of the vanilla-world day, and yes I giggled at it and no I didn't picture myself getting involved in it.
Hmm. Well. SOME people reading the above paragraph are no doubt nudging their friends and partners and saying "He should have been at that dungeon scene last Friday, with the lawn darts and the cattle prods and the human corsetting... 'little' pain indeed". Indeed, nudging their friends and partners with something sharp and pokey, or perhaps hitting them with something heavy and thuddy. It's true, my sense of what BDSM was like was heavily influenced by people playing around the very edges of it, sort of the precursors to the Fifty Shades of Grey folks, and oh yes there are people whose seriousness for pain and power-play aren't quite so trivial. The costumes are considerably more varied, too, by the way.
But that doesn't really explain what I'm doing there. I may have been laughing dismissively at BDSM for their little pats and taps and their little velcro wrist cuffs, but it wasn't because I was craving a good bashing with a baseball bat or wanted to penetrate my partner with a potato peeler or anything. And as for power play, I've always been a radical egalitarian, fervently committed to absolute equality, no way you'd find me seeking out domination and submission, uh uh. The everyday world is already overly full of the eroticization of power over other people, polarized gender roles manifesting as male domination and female submission, and me, I'm trying to get AWAY from all that! And nope, don't need no pointy red high heel on my throat or some dominatrix bossing me around, either, I had my share of bossy authoritarian coercive adults as a militant children's libber, nope, what I want is trust and intimacy and open honest sharing of feelings, THAT'S what I get off on.
Well, folks, a funny thing happens in the gently carpeted hallways of the Nice. I first intuited it back during my first run at being a college student, when I was on a life-plan path that would have required me to spend a decade or longer in school working towards professionalism, without necessarily including any girlfriend until far later:
> Why on earth had I thought it would be a good idea to go to the
> University of Mississippi? To join the AIR FORCE for a scholarship?
> To tie myself to what looked like a decade of financial dependence on
> my parents? To live in this stuffy old-fashioned place and never meet
> any girls until I graduate eons from now with an advanced graduate
> degree making me a professional, since there are no jobs for people
> with a bachelors' degree in astronomy (what, they're going to pay you
> to look at the stars?), learning lots of math and physics (yeah THAT'S
> a real good fit for my talents and interests)? So that when I finally
> get a professional degree, after, of course, repaying my debt to the
> AIR FORCE by doing a stint of active service for a year or two (oh
> yeah, military me, for sure) maybe some stuffy well-dressed girl will
> marry me if I support her financially, and then she'll let me do it to
> her.
It may not be immediately obvious in the context of that paragraph, but the most worrisome image there is that of the partner who participates in sex as a kind of largesse, a dispensation to the deserving, a favor, perhaps a kindness, perhaps a more hard-nosed exchange but at any rate not participating in it for her own reasons, her own cravings and selfish wants.
And it took awhile for me to fully realize it but THIS is one of the most important areas for equality and reciprocity: I don't want it doled out to me as an act of generosity or as a gift, I want to experience someone's hunger, I want them wanting to do stuff to me because THEY get off on doing stuff to me. Oh, I'll reciprocate, you'd better believe it, I am so there with reciprocity on that. I crave my partner's responsive tinglings and I want to play with her nerve endings and make her hungrier and hornier and I want to tease and torment her and experience her appetite. Oh my... we're sort of talking about POWER here, aren't we? But but but, hey wait a minute, this paragraph started out being focused on equality!!
Paradoxically, yes, that's how it works. Power exchange can be a delightful and delicious sharing of vulnerability and appetite, experiencing being wanted and being had and done unto, stripped of self-control or stripping one's partner of theirs, and the path away from gender-specific rigid power dichotomies, if one wishes neither to be a sexual commodity on tap nor someone whose appetites are condescendingly catered to, leads not so much to some kind of sanitized NiceLand in which power plays no role but instead to an acknowledgement that it IS always going to be there but that it can be played with, openly spoken of, and deployed for mutual pleasure in a fashion that fosters mutual trust.
Right off the bat, front and dead center to my own gender concerns and experiences and considerations, the BDSM environment lets me opt out of being the sexual "prime mover", the heavy, the person doing the butch-role thing, the initiator. Unlike the overwhelming majority of possible sexual contexts, here's a place where it can be directly tossed onto the table as a new rule for a new game: you top me, OK? It need not be for always and forever, although it could be (it could be set up as a defining rule of all subsequent play, or of the relationship in its entirety; but it can also be a "tonight's rule" sort of thing).
I like relationships where we can talk about power, and I like being able to talk about power without it necessarily having to be one of those ponderous theoretical excursions into social analyses and discussions of patriarchal hegemony and whether an egalitarian impulse can survive the deterministic overarching environment and so on and so forth.
Oh, it's not a perfect panacea, don't get me wrong. I have attended kink events as someone who is clearly a male-bodied person and found that prior to any negotiations of who is doing what to whom, one still has to connect and express interest, and yes there is still a distinctive disproportional expectation that the male-bodied people will seek out those initial connections. I don't want to corrupt the minds of any similar male feminine people by leading them to think that if they attend a BDSM event there will be gangs of dommy women approaching them with deliciously malicious intent. It could happen, but the BDSM world is merely a place where power arrangements can be negotiated, it's not a world insulated and isolated from gendered expectations.
Anyway, yeah... BDSM has its usefulness for gender variant people. Oh, and I've discovered it can be fun being poked with sharp pointy things, especially if the person weilding them enjoys provoking your reactions. *blush*
--------
Index of all Blog Posts