Rule 1
Rule 1: Do not email anyone who visits your website saying, "Hey, I saw you were on my site and looking at X," no matter how much you believe it may be the hot girl from the fetish convention you just got back from.
ShibariCon was amazing this year. I really enjoyed the way I wasn't working the event, and after some careful coaching, I started finding "play partners" everywhere. That term is a bit misleading though, since it implies sexuality. Rope work with strangers this weekend was much less focused on sexuality, and much more about simply tying people up for the sheer fun of it. I don't really know where it came from, but Shibari really has become a kind of fetish for me - it is something that I now do for it's own sake.
Intriguingly, although I attended every class session (and that's 14 sessions over four days, starting ungodly early in the morning), only two of those courses were "about rope." The other 12 classes I attended were all about the psychology of bondage: why you do it, how to talk to strangers about what they want out of a session, how to move beyond the strangely rigid classification system of Top/Dominant/Corporal/etc, how to coordinate your scenes, how to negotiate boundaries and still keep it sexy.
Oh, and here's something completely fucked up: out of 500 people from across the world, united only by our mutual interest in rope, I was not the only person there with a Winnie The Pooh tattoo! Uncle P has TWO of them, in color!
I also finally met Cunning Minx of Poly Weekly fame, and OH MY GOD is she hot! It's very strange meeting someone whose voice you've been listening to for months, especially an attractive single woman who so clearly elucidates many of my own interests and beliefs. Nor is my ability to separate fiction from reality helped by the fact that she lives in Chicago. I don't know what's more disturbing: trying to separate my empathy for the woman on the airwaves from the attraction to the woman in front of me, or that while watching her, stripped naked, playing with others, I was fantasizing about late-night conversations in the park with her. Dammit, I am not here to contemplate relationships! I'm here to have sex with strangers who refuse to tell me their names (that was really hot, by the way)!
Don't be fooled by the tangents, by the way. The incredibly attractive woman whose email address I am illicitly in possession of is NOT the bodacious Ms Minx, but a completely different fine-looking woman who apparently thinks of me as "the really hot note-taker," because of my frantic scribbling during one of the classes by Lee Harrington,. Lee, incidentally, is currently trying to have text-message sex with me while his flight is delayed.
The underlying message of the weekend, for me, was one speaking to my fears and self-doubts, and calling them dirty names. I have carefully navigated the course of my life to a place that is as free from judgment and potential condemnation as it is possible to get without cutting yourself off entirely from other human beings. In such a place, fear and feelings of inadequacy, of self-depreciation, ought to have no power over me. Is it so surprising, then, that so many people joined me in learning how to overcome such demons under the guise of rope fetishism?
ShibariCon was amazing this year. I really enjoyed the way I wasn't working the event, and after some careful coaching, I started finding "play partners" everywhere. That term is a bit misleading though, since it implies sexuality. Rope work with strangers this weekend was much less focused on sexuality, and much more about simply tying people up for the sheer fun of it. I don't really know where it came from, but Shibari really has become a kind of fetish for me - it is something that I now do for it's own sake.
Intriguingly, although I attended every class session (and that's 14 sessions over four days, starting ungodly early in the morning), only two of those courses were "about rope." The other 12 classes I attended were all about the psychology of bondage: why you do it, how to talk to strangers about what they want out of a session, how to move beyond the strangely rigid classification system of Top/Dominant/Corporal/etc, how to coordinate your scenes, how to negotiate boundaries and still keep it sexy.
Oh, and here's something completely fucked up: out of 500 people from across the world, united only by our mutual interest in rope, I was not the only person there with a Winnie The Pooh tattoo! Uncle P has TWO of them, in color!
I also finally met Cunning Minx of Poly Weekly fame, and OH MY GOD is she hot! It's very strange meeting someone whose voice you've been listening to for months, especially an attractive single woman who so clearly elucidates many of my own interests and beliefs. Nor is my ability to separate fiction from reality helped by the fact that she lives in Chicago. I don't know what's more disturbing: trying to separate my empathy for the woman on the airwaves from the attraction to the woman in front of me, or that while watching her, stripped naked, playing with others, I was fantasizing about late-night conversations in the park with her. Dammit, I am not here to contemplate relationships! I'm here to have sex with strangers who refuse to tell me their names (that was really hot, by the way)!
Don't be fooled by the tangents, by the way. The incredibly attractive woman whose email address I am illicitly in possession of is NOT the bodacious Ms Minx, but a completely different fine-looking woman who apparently thinks of me as "the really hot note-taker," because of my frantic scribbling during one of the classes by Lee Harrington,. Lee, incidentally, is currently trying to have text-message sex with me while his flight is delayed.
The underlying message of the weekend, for me, was one speaking to my fears and self-doubts, and calling them dirty names. I have carefully navigated the course of my life to a place that is as free from judgment and potential condemnation as it is possible to get without cutting yourself off entirely from other human beings. In such a place, fear and feelings of inadequacy, of self-depreciation, ought to have no power over me. Is it so surprising, then, that so many people joined me in learning how to overcome such demons under the guise of rope fetishism?