Something short to get back into the Swing of things

I know it has been some time since I posted but here goes...

My life has been pretty hectic since my last post. Things are picking up with my research, although it isn’t working properly, and I have been balancing a great deal of personal and family tragedies. I found myself sinking into a pretty deep depression. I started to question what I wanted from life. Furthermore, I started to question if I could find what I wanted in life again. You see there was a point, before I really started things with Kai, when I had what I thought I wanted. Everything was great. I was happy, enjoyed my life and wanted little else. Then things got hairy. I say hairy in the worst sense of the word. The submissive I was with started cheating and post the first and second offenses things just got bad. Not only did they get bad between us and ultimately lead to the end of the relationship but it made me bitter and closed off to others. I am unsure where I would be now had those events not happened the way that they did. They have led me to a better place in the end though. They have allowed me to fully grasp what I want out of my relationships. When it is all said and done, I want a situation where my partner and I grow together so much that we can’t be ourselves without the other. I want a submissive that can’t be who she wants to be without me, without my guidance and presence. In the same breath I want a submissive who I can’t see myself without.

What does this mean on the short term? Very little. It really just gives me a bar by which to measure my relationships and desires for the future. It is putting into words what I have felt for some time at this point. I think that will be all for this post. Hopefully I will have something fun to post very soon. Perhaps with pictures, but that really is yet to be seen. Until then…. Enjoy your fun boys and girls.

Control

Control…

The idea of control and power exchange is essential to a BDSM relationship. More specifically it is essential to the D/s side of that relationship.  But how does one find a balance of enough control and too much? This is something that is dependent on the partners involved. However, if you are new to the lifestyle and don’t know how much control you want to give or possess, this becomes an important question. Even in the almost eight years that I have been interested, investigating, and actively participating in this lifestyle it is something I am at times not sure I know. I have been in relationships where the submissive wanted me to control much, and relationships where they wanted me to control very little. I have yet to truly find where I am 100% comfortable.

I guess I can start by talking about the far end of the control spectrum in each direction and see if my thoughts collect and take me somewhere important or meaningful, or if instead they become an indistinguishable ramble that ends with me being as confused about it as I was when I started. What is too much control? Well I have in the past been asked to control great portions of a submissive’s life or at least perceived portions. Money, friends, email, websites visited, time spent out, all of these things were perceived to be under my control. Were they really under my control? Not likely, this isn’t due to a lack of willingness it is due to a time requirement on my part. When I get busy with school, work, friends, life I have a tendency to overlook the BDSM aspects of a relationship. Especially when the relationship is not a live in situation, I expected my submissive to perform X task daily; but I was working 50 hours a week, running things for my friends, dealing with payments and everything else so I didn’t check up on that task for a week. Well because of this I wasn’t illustrating my control, since that situation I have not desired to be placed in that much control. On the other end of the spectrum, I have had relationship where I only had control in the bedroom and only some of the time. This was by mutual agreement because my partner wasn’t sure how far she wanted to take it. This is close to the agreement I currently have with Kai. In the case being addressed there was no bleed over into any other aspect of life, her friends were hers, her money was hers, and her time, aside from that spent in a scene, was hers. I had no problems with this type of relationship fundamentally but I hungered for more of a sense of control. I have also had relationships that were in between these two extremes and all along the spectrum.

In the end I think I want to feel like my BDSM experience is augmenting my life not becoming it. But, at the same time I want to feel like I am on some levels in control of my partner. I will try and explain the first statement. I have dreams, aspirations, wants, and thoughts that are outside of BDSM. In truth these things are more important to me than BDSM. If for some reason I had to choose my life as a dominant or my life as a professional presentable individual, I would hands down choose the latter. BDSM would be tossed by the wayside in favor on continuing to my goals for the rest of my life. That said I don’t want my BDSM side to actively interfere with the rest of my “vanilla” life. There will be times when I have to work 60 hours weeks and during those times I can’t have a submissive that will hit the ceiling because I haven’t checked to make sure she is washing the windows daily (Yes, I know this is a foolish example but it popped into my head first so I went with it). Hopefully this illustrates my point. On the flip side of this coin I don’t want to be in a situation where I am completely in the dark about things and have no control over the way the relationship and things progress outside of my ability to end the relationship. I don’t want someone that hides their emails, friends, websites they visit, etc. I have had bad experiences in the past with these types of practices and so would just like to avoid them all together. So where is my ideal level of control? In truth I have no idea. It very much depends on the person I am with. Take Kai for instance, I can’t seem to figure out what control level I am comfortable with in regards to her. Some days I feel like I would like a lot more control over what is done and what needs to be done. Other days I think the level I have is acceptable. Part of this is a function of the relationship that she and I had before we advanced to this stage of our lives. Another part is that she rails against anyone that is trying to control her in any fashion. It seems to be a defense mechanism that she isn’t even completely aware of but, is there none the less.

I think part of my desire for control is a desire for a certain amount of transparency in a relationship. Because I have had trouble with cheating in the past I want to be aware of what is going on before I get stabbed in the back. That is one small part of it at least. The rest comes from my desire for my partner to be the best she can be and get the max out of things. Sometimes, in my experience the only way to achieve the max that you can is to have someone pushing you, at times pulling you kicking and screaming, to your end goal. That is my end goal, not to nitpick about every little thing I have assigned you not being done. I want to inspire a submissive to be driven, disciplined, and to go after what they want. And it is through a certain amount of control that I meet this goal. A loving friend, family member, of significant other can only go so far to motivate you. They can only say please do this I want you to be happy and this will make you happy. As a dominant I have the ability to say you will do this, you will learn to stick to the road you decided on and not give up when it gets hard or chicken out because you have to change something. I can say if you want to do X for a job then you need to be ready to do Y and Z to get there and when it comes down to it I will push you to do them. But to teach these skills and lessons you need someone willing to submit to them and learn them. If I teach you to be diligent in your work by forcing you to clean the floor and not letting you miss a spot when it becomes critical in a job that you do it a specific way and do it well you will. If I teach you to patience by withholding orgasms or making you kneel silent for a time before I give you what you want then we you need it at work to deal with someone you will have it. If I teach you how to control your spending and money by taking control of them and showing how much better it is if you learn to keep spending down then if something happens between us you can function better in the world on your own. I want control to teach, not to assign mindless tasks that foolishly keep you busy and supply you with something to do through your day.

So in short I guess I want enough control in a relationship to teach. I don’t want to feel like I have none or like I have to control every little thing in a submissive’s life.

Who is responsible for a scene?

First, I suppose I will open this post with an apology. I have been extremely busy as of late and haven’t been able to post much to my blog. Furthermore, I really haven’t had the time to process those things that I have done that are worthy of a post. So for my neglect in posting I am sorry, I will try and keep up on it more in the future, but when it comes down to it some things are more important than others. And while I love having you all here, those that follow actively and those that just visit, I need to focus on some things outside of my blog sometimes.

 

Now that said, a lot has happened in the month that I have been absent. I don’t even really know where to start. If you have been following Kai then you know some of what has happened or at least her side. Instead of saying what has happened to me in the past couple of weeks I think I will do something different. I think I will talk about sharing the burden of a scene.

 

As a Dominant I realize that I am expected to control a scene. It is my job to construct a particular scene, make sure it flows and is an enjoyable experience for both myself and my submissive. However, not all ideas for a scene should come from me. I am not an endless sinkhole of ideas and kinky things to do. I don’t know many dominants that are capable of always doing something with nothing. I know I personally prefer to hear ideas from my submissives. This doesn’t mean that your ideas will come into play the next time we scene or even at all. I just want places to start from, if you tell me you really enjoy being flogged in X place and aren’t opposed to others then I can design a scene in my head in which I bring those elements in. Merely saying that you know how to use a safeword doesn’t help me as a Dominant. In the end all it does is say that if something goes too far for you that you know how to stop it. That is near worthless when it comes to deciding on a scene to participate in or start.

 

I think in short what I am trying to say is that as a dominant it is my job to build a scene. To take control of it and make it my own, to push boundaries and make certain that both parties enjoy what is happening. As a submissive, you have the responsibility to feeding me things that I can do with you. This is especially important during the beginning of a relationship. Don’t tell me “I like flogging” because it tells me nothing about the scenes that I could create.  A better approach would be I have always wanted to be bound on my knees and flogged until my skin was a pretty red. This then gives me some boundaries that I can build from, it tells me you like intense flogging coupled with bondage. Will you be bound on your knees when you are flogged? Probably not. Might you be bound to a bed or a table or something else and flogged? Definitely. Could I push you a different direction and go for a more mental bondage? Yes. But, these things give me starting points. Could you say “I like bondage and flogging” sure, but it still isn’t as informative as providing them in a situational way. Just listing things off doesn’t give any context, and context is important. I have met many submissives that really don’t like much in the way of pain but they find flogging and things of that nature enjoyable not because of the pain but because of other mental aspects. Would you want to flog one of these submissives until her skin was cherry red? No because she would hate you for it and likely need to use a safeword during that scene. But her saying she likes flogging, and a pain related submissive saying she likes flogging sound the same if just listed out as I like flogging.

A Post About Safety

First I would like to say I am sorry for my lack of posting of late. For awhile I just couldn’t think of something to post about, once I found a topic I never made the time to post.  So here is my apology, not that there are too many people that are following my blog but for those that do there it is.

 

So I had a couple of things that I wanted to post about but I will only choose one for today. A friend of mine asked me to make a post about safety. This isn’t unusual for me as I have led some discussions on the matter and it is something that is very important to me. I could go on at length about where it is okay to strike someone and the risks involved with many BDSM related activities. But, I think a post like that would miss the true mark of the topic I was asked to post about. The concern for a topic about safety came from viewing pictures in which a submissive was, I am assuming, caned until it caused lacerations on her skin. Now for most of you the BDSM mantra of “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” come to mind almost immediately. Here was the question that my friend posed, “Which of those three words do you put the most importance in?” Does the fact that such a beating was consensual make it okay? Or is there a certain line where, no matter how much consent there is, a set of actions is unsafe? Do you question the sanity of the people involved in such an action? Personally, I have never liked the “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” motto, now let me qualify why. It has nothing to do with not liking the idea that your play needs to be all of those things. Rather, it comes from perceptions and people’s desire to force their ideas of safe and sane onto others. Nothing that you do as a BDSM practitioner is completely safe. The idea of safety is taking calculated risks and knowing the ways to keep your play as safe as possible. If you do those things then I consider your play safe. If both you and your submissive know the dangers of playing with electricity and are properly prepared if something were to go wrong then you are playing safe. It doesn’t matter that electricity is more of an edge play than say for instance light bondage.  That being said there are some things where I think the risk outweighs any benefit that you get from the play. If it is very likely that playing a way will cause lasting damage to your partner or yourself then that method of play isn’t safe. Granted this is my opinion but I think it is fairly good all in all, take for instance using metal cuffs in a situation where your partner will be putting weight on them. This type of action is very likely to cause tendon or nerve damage to your partner, therefore, isn’t safe to be done.

 

So I guess the safety thing that I want to hit on is know what you are doing. There are many things out there that I do that others would probably consider unsafe. For instance, I enjoy electrical play for many people this is something that should never be done because of the risks involved. In my case, I have spent a great deal of time looking into the risks involved and what all can be done and what should be avoided. I know the most basic rules like, when using toys that send current through the skin never cross the heart.  I also know about the toys I use, I know for instance that a violet wand has many fail safes built in that make it difficult to impossible for straight current from your standard socket to enter the body. I keep my equipment in proper working condition so that these fail safes are maintained. 

 

In the end, you should never want to do serious damage to your partner. I don’t mean this to bad mouth people into things like branding or scars. What I mean is you should never want to beat your submissive so badly that she starts to experience kidney failure (Yes that is possible). You shouldn’t want to do something to your submissive that will make them unable to write properly or use their hands. As a partner hopefully you care about them enough to avoid these things and would never play with them in a way that could cause lasting damage to their ability to function.  That is where I draw the solid line of safety. If something you are doing could cause serious permanent damage and you aren’t aware of the potential and doing everything you can to avoid that damage you are being unsafe. To the couple that would want to play with a cane like that I can only ask a few questions. Are you trained in first aid to deal with the lacerations that were caused? Do the two of you know that intense beatings like that can cause a huge dumping of myoglobin into the blood that can lead to kidney damage? Are you keeping a close eye on your submissive after a beating like that to look for sluggishness and signs of the things that could go wrong? If the answer to these is yes, then congratulations you were inside the bounds of what I would consider your right as a couple. Is what you were doing risky? Hell yes, but you know the risks and are doing what you can to prevent, avoid, and treat the problems that may come up. If the answer to any of those is no, well my friends you are doing something that could change your lives forever, and not in a good way. 

Thoughts on Control and Submission

I have recently run into a small problem. It is about the way I think about power exchange compared to the way others may think about it. Most people I have encountered believe that a submissive must choose their dominant. I share this opinion and think that each person must find the person they trust and can submit to on their own. In the end it must be the submissive’s choice as to who they submit to. Now this is the point that I have found that I conflict with some others, on some level Kai included. I am not totally sure why this is perhaps is it just me being overly cautious, or perhaps there is something else to it.

Many of the people I have talked to, and that isn’t saying much as my pool is limited, believe that once the submissive makes it known in some fashion they are interested it is the part of the dominant to take control of them. In the context of a single, planned out scene in which the parameters are laid out before hand I can agree with this statement. In those cases there is a clear beginning of the power exchange and an end, you only need submit or be in control for that set period and much of what is going on is predetermined at least in part. Now here is the place that I seem to deviate, in the context of a long term relationship I think it is important for the submissive to make some kind of gesture aside from a passive display of interest.  I think this is due to the amount of commitment that is required on both sides of the equation.  In the context of a long term play relationship the boundaries between vanilla and BDSM are blurred and sometimes do not exist. There really is often no defining moment between play and not, the scenes just flow into your daily life. As a dominant I would like my submissive to know that she is getting into that type of situation. I sit and tell them what they are getting into and then they need to choose to commit to it or not. After they have made the choice and offered their submission in a tangible way then I will begin to take things from them as I see fit and scenes will just materialize out of thin air. But, until they decide to take that step I feel that taking their control outside of the boundaries of a pre-discussed scene is something akin to rape. It is forcing someone to do something that they may not be completely willing to do. To put it in a non-sexual way if you imply that I can take something and I do, but the offer really wasn’t there it is still stealing and I am guilty of the crime. If you give me the object and say take it whenever you want, then I am no longer stealing from you and I have no problems taking it if I need or want it.

Some people might say that this diminishes my strength as a dominant because I am unwilling to take and use what I want. If you ask anyone that has scened with me in the past you would find that they don’t think me less of a dominant and many of them have really loved the times that we have spent together in scenes. I think that the way I approach things actually makes me a more responsible dominant and better than I would be if I merely took what I wanted all of the time. In the end to be a good dominant I believe that you must have the submissive’s best interests at heart. In doing things my way I hope to be able to say that I have Kai’s best interests at heart when we play and when we think about our relationship. I can say that in the past I have had my submissives best interests at heart and I hope that many of them learned from me and can say that they truly enjoyed our time together and that after we parted ways they still thought about me in a good fashion. 

In the end, I am not sure if my method is the correct one, or that there is a single correct method because as I said each person much find their own way. I do know that the method I choose is what has worked for me and is my method, and I don’t see it changing in the near future. Perhaps you disagree with it, or you have a different method that you choose to employ. I encourage you to post here if you have a different method or you just want to talk about mine.

More about Breakups and Support

I know I have been slacking when it comes to posting this month and I will try and make amends in the future. I have been a little busy getting used to the things that have been changing of late. I want to use this post to respond to the comments on my previous post. So if it doesn’t seem to make much sense to you check those out first.

 

The post was about breakups and the way that they “should” be done. The comment that was left was that in the context of BDSM the submissive has a much harder time with the break up. Now that was later amended by saying that they could argue with themselves on the subject, but I wanted to take a moment and address it in my own way.  First, I would like to thank someone for taking the first steps and commenting on a post. It is nice to feel like someone other than Kai is reading my thoughts and willing to share their own. If more of you read this I encourage you to comment as well, for one it will give me things to write about when I come up short on a topic, but it may also help you find answers or get another point of view.

 

Now onto the topic at hand, I guess. Do I think that a submissive will have a hard time with a breakup? Yes, I know submissives have a very hard time with breakups and I know that there is a lot of damage that can be done if the breakup is handled poorly. Everyone tends to feel like they aren’t good enough when they are left by someone else, submissives perhaps more than others. I personally can’t say. In the end the person that is on the receiving end of a breakup always feels like they weren’t good enough, this is try whether they be the dominant partner or the submissive.  Now which side is more damaged by the breakup? That is something that is really hard to say, it depends on the situation. This I can say, submissives often tend to show their hurt more, they wear it on their sleeves as it were, in contrast the dominant partner usually tries to internalize the hurt and keep it to themselves. I don’t think it is right to say that one side is hurt more than the other.

 

Now I am going to discuss something that may seem off topic but in honesty it really isn’t. I will do my personal best to try and tie it in at the end. I am going to jump to a discussion of community. In the communities that I have been a part of it seems that you have a very strong sense of unity between the submissives in the community. They are very good at building a support network for each other; they become very tight knit and protective of one another. This I feel is a very good thing and more dominants should do similar things. I have seen this unit of submissives warn a new comer about a certain dominant. They never shy away from standing up for a submissive that is being abused in a way that is detrimental to her health. These groups provide a great service in the community. They help to teach those new to BDSM how to look out for their safety and how to learn to do things the correct way. They become your mentors, friends, and so much more, when you are learning the ropes of the lifestyle these things are priceless. Now dominants really don’t seem to have this sort of community, for some reason they end up being a more solitary lot. We don’t really band together and talk about bad submissives or people that like to top from the bottom. Dominants don’t usually take the new guy under their wing and teach him how to do it right. I know that I was left to figure things out mostly for myself. I watched and listened and found things that I liked and others I did not but I never had someone teach me how to do it. In fact most of my education, as it were, came from submissives. In my case many of them were switches and I learned some from watching them play and some from topping them. We would talk about things afterwards and I learned that way.

 

Now trying to tie this all together, in the end the best things for breakups is a good support network. Whether that be family, friends, or what have you, those people will keep you going strong. If you are into BDSM then it is probably best if your support group at least include some people that are also into the scene. That way they can keep your spirits up when you start to get down on yourself about your abilities as a submissive or dominant. I hope that helps to clarify a little bit about who I think takes the brunt of the breakup pain.

Thoughts about Break ups

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the break ups I have gone through in the past. This isn’t for any of the bad reasons that you might associate with thinking about break ups, it is partly because of a post that Kai put up a bit ago about losing a dominant and because I have just been thinking. On a lot of levels I think it should be the goal of a dominant to leave their partner in a better place than where they found them. That said I have been asking myself if I have done that in my past, not only with BDSM relationships but with all relationships. I would like to think that I have in all cases but I guess you could argue that in one I didn’t do as well as I could have. Now this isn’t to say that the break ups weren’t difficult or that there was no emotion on either side. I would be lying if I told you that one, or both sides didn’t shed tears and feel bad that it was over.  When I say “Leaving a person in a better place than you found them”, I mean that you should leave them in a position where they are more comfortable with themselves and better off mentally and emotionally.

Some people might say that this ideology means I have a “hero” complex or the desire to fix someone. This couldn’t really be farther from the truth. Do I like helping my friends and partners? Yes I do. Do I need someone with problems in order to start a relationship? No I do not. I do believe that everyone can grow and change and that these are good things. I have gotten several of my past partners past blocks that they had against relationships and loving another person. I have helped my friends over come self-esteem problems etc. These are the things I mean when I say you need to leave a person in a better place than where you found them.

In thinking about the things I have done for others I wish some of them would have had the courtesy to return the favor. As many of you have probably read I have had some pretty rough break ups that did some decent damage to my self-image and caused me several problems. I am allowing myself to get off topic and move into some place where I don’t want this post to go so I am going to bring it back to the track. The importance of trying to leave your partner in a better place that you found them, which is the main point I was making in this post. Ideally, this should be the way you think about any relationship whether vanilla or not, but so many people don’t think it is that important. In the context of BDSM it is important to leave a submissive in a place where they can trust again and be willing to give themselves again. If you fail at this simple part of the equation then you haven’t done your job as a dominant. Instead of helping someone to grow and learn you have made them lock a part of themselves away. The same could be applied to vanilla relationships, and I have seen it in some of my friends. If a person is hurt enough, and it a way that can be generalized to all people they will do so and never want to put themselves into a position to be hurt again. This is a problem that I was having until recently, even now though I find myself fighting the desire to hide away on occasion. I was terrified of being hurt again, worse yet being hurt in the same way as I was previously. It is not a good place to be and you miss out on many of the things that you enjoy in life.

I guess the point I am trying to make is a break up is there so that both parties can move on to find something that is good for both of them. It isn’t there to hurt your partner. If you aren’t happy in a relationship then you need to be straight about it and tell your partner before you sleep with someone else, find someone else, or just let something happen. In my life I have dealt with my own share of lying, both on the doing and receiving end. What I can say is that it doesn’t make life easier or simpler for anyone. That said, if you want someone to be honest with you, then you have to be possessed of the control to keep your cool. Nothing scares people more than the thought that by being honest they will get nothing but a large scale freak out. The times that I lied it was always to spare both the recipient and myself the trouble of a large scale freak out. This is due to personally not wanting to deal with it and knowing that if I was forced to deal with a freak out I would be mean. That is a problem I have, if you start freaking out on me for being honest with you then I have a tendency to pull out all the stops and let you hear the brutal side of the truth. So for those of your that are my friends that read this let that be known.

I think I will leave this post there, open ended sort of, in order to try and attract comments.