Seeking.

All right folks, so here’s the deal:

As you know Bob, I stopped doing professional domination work some time back. I’m mostly on to other things.

However. Lately I’ve been having 1. a hankering, and 2. a bit of a financial squeeze. So I’m looking to potentially start seeing some people again.

Here’s the catch: Because this is no longer my primary source of income, I’m going to be limiting my practice to people I really want to see, who want to do the things I want to do. The flip side of this is that I’ll be lowering my tribute to well below the usual market.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know a bit about who and how I am: I’m basically a smart, sensual, empathic top who likes to play with responsive people. Which is to say: I’m less interested in your stoic ability to take a hard beating than I am in hearing you gasp, moan and squeal as you take it. I like men with easy subspace triggers, but I also like a bit of a power struggle.

I like my feet worshipped well, and my boots also.
I like using floggers, singletails, canes and crops, and other hitty things.
I use rope, but I’m not a huge rope top. I’m more interested in functional bondage.
I like contact: slapping, punching, pinching, squeezing, kicking, and some smothering.
I like menacing you with knives.
I like authentic interaction, like, a whole lot.

I don’t care for piss, enemas, or anything else that potentially makes a big smelly mess.
I still don’t want to do forced feminization scenes.
However, all gender presentations are welcome, and if you want to play with gender in a respectful way, that definitely turns my crank.

There’s plenty more, of course, but it all depends on who you are and what you bring. If you have interests I didn’t mention here, please, let me know, and it’s possible I’ll be into it.

Email me directly if this is of interest to you!

Read Full Post »

More thoughts on spankos

I’m still seeing clients here and there, if I meet someone I like and feel that the fantasy is something I can fulfill with integrity and a sense of fun. Plus, the money’s good. What can ya do.

The type of client I seem to keep coming back to is spankos. Not because spanking fantasies are particularly un-problematic to me; if anything, I often find the types of activities that spankos seek somewhat disturbing. But in the interest of being non-judgmental and promoting the sexual health of all individuals, I think I probably keep coming back to it because it’s problematic for me, and the problem inherent is one that is not the fault of the spankos themselves, nor even of the professionals they sometimes visit in order to indulge their fantasies. It’s a tweak I have about the rhetoric that often forms around the spanking roleplay.

The sexy idea of “I’ve been baaaad and need to be punished” is probably as old as time; the kinking of punishment into pleasure isn’t what troubles me (much, more on that later), though it’s not really what I go in for personally. Professionally, though, I’ve often found it to be a hoot to play the strict aunt or headmistress or Victorian lady doling out paddlings and canings to irrepressible “young boys.” It’s a chance to do some acting, to stretch my roleplay capacities and hone my quick responses, and often, it’s hilarious.

But what bugs me is what many of these men are wanting to be punished for. Sometimes it’s sassing an elder, sometimes it’s violating someone’s privacy, usually a girl or woman and usually involving a panty drawer or curtains carelessly left open of a summer evening. But more often than anything else, they want to be punished for masturbating.

As a staunch supporter of masturbation (stand tall and salute!), I find this a troubling trend. I think that the healthy habit of pleasuring yourself is the first step of exploring and loving your body, getting to know what you like, and being able to share a healthy sexuality with others. Granted, there are all kinds of things that people fantasize about and enact that would be horribly unhealthy in “real life,” things that they wouldn’t want to happen: rape fantasies are an excellent example, and many people fantasize about being kept as slaves in a cage in someone’s basement, but would hate it were it to really happen, even in an erotic context.

But the fetish for being spanked as a response to natural pubescent impulses troubles me because a lot of the time, it stems from true experience – an experience in which a child was punished for trying to know himself. This fantasy has the tendency to expand, too, into talk about the need for a strong female authority to control men’s wild sexual urges – which in turn recapitulates an irresponsible and misogynist narrative about how men are just beasts who can’t control themselves, and women are the moral, moderating influences who must rein them in, lest they go out and rape every woman they meet. (See also: maybe the way to prevent rape is not to stop women from wearing short skirts and drinking alcohol, but for men to STOP RAPING WOMEN.)

One of my favorite longstanding clients enacts multiple versions of this fantasy with me, and given our relationship and our lunches post-factum, I often have discussed this problem with him. Over time, his detailed fantasy letters began to shift: it wasn’t masturbation he was being punished for, but inappropriate, non-consensual attention to women, or being a cocky, misogynist 17-year-old asshole (one of his more entertaining incarnations), or the classic: going into a female classmate’s room and stealing panties from her drawer. We developed a story over several visits which wound up with the young man masturbating under the caring supervision of a slightly older female intern, which I thought was strangely sweet. In earlier versions of the fantasy, the boy’s ongoing discipline and recidivism ultimately ends in castration. In a later version, over lunch one day, he told me that he imagined that young man finally settling down with one of the imaginary young women we wove into our scenarios, having a healthy, female-led relationship with her. My sessions with him, to a certain extent, mirrored my own attitudes about my work – and, I like to think, began to heal that boy inside him.

I still have trouble with some of these punitive scenarios: for myself, in kink, punishment is a bad thing, so much so that it’s something I don’t really play with as a bottom. Punishment, as in the real world, is something to be avoided. For spankos and some others, the punishment is the kink, is the pleasure. There’s no teasing and denial, no finishing themselves off afterwards. It’s chastisement, smart-mouthing, face-slapping, and butt-reddening with fast, hard strokes meant to cause real pain. It’s something that I don’t fully grok, as it’s not about the pain being transformed into pleasure, or the pain being endured as part of a trial by fire, or even the pain as atonement, though I’m sure that’s part of it. And unlike a lot of kinky activity in the more leather side of the scene, it almost always seems to stem from childhood. As with foot fetishists, it’s something they knew about early and have sought for much of their lives (or began to kink on later in life).

As with the sessions with my old client, with this new client I chose to punish him for looking in his little neighbor girl’s window while she was dressing, rather than for masturbating. I always have this strange need to punish for something I feel is just, rather than for something I want to encourage. I just can’t reinforce that idea that masturbation is bad and sexuality is immoral and wrong – even in the context of a session that’s clearly sexual for the person receiving it!

There is, of course, the possibility, as with some kink, that enacting these scenarios is in part about re-framing and healing the wound. But I just never hear about that from spankos. It just always seems like a somewhat compulsive, likely ultimately harmless, and usually pretty playful thing that got kinked for them at an early age. And probably there’s nothing wrong with that. But I’m always bemused by my own reactions to these things.

What are your thoughts?

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

It never ceases to amaze me

Saw a wonderful, sweet client today. He was terribly nervous, for all the usual reasons: not wanting to get found out, worrying that his desires were strange, not believing that he could broach the topic with his wife, constantly window-shopping pro domme websites.

It amazes me how needed the services I’m now offering seem to be. I find myself, these days, in this wonderful space of healing: of validating, of normalizing, of bringing people more into themselves.

What kills me, though, is how much I talk to people about stuff that is freely available on the Internet and in books. How little people actually research, and how much time they instead spend looking at porn, or trawling pro-domme websites for gems that only very rarely exist. They’re seeking answers for what they find hot, what keeps drawing them back, in places that are designed to draw them in commercially, take their money, keep the closet door locked and avoid self-analysis.

It’s amazing how many people come to me just because they need someone they can talk to about their fetish, or because they just want to hear someone say that what they’re into is okay.

I’m thrilled to provide this service, don’t get me wrong. And when it’s appropriate, I will still recommend some of these people to particular service providers. After all, I’m not going to get everyone to ask their wives to dress them in women’s underwear and peg them. For some people, it’s just not going to be possible.

But it continues to be my ideal. The thing I strive for: to bring people’s desires out into the light, to offer them a space where it’s even possible to explore those desires with someone they love, instead of with a stranger.

It’s a weird job, but somebody’s got to do it.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

TransformativeKink.com is now live!

Friends, kinksters, countrypeople,

Tuesday Advice has been on hiatus for a bit, mainly owing to nobody sending me questions of late. It is my hope that the launch of my new site will begin to remedy that, as well as bring me new opportunities to see people who would benefit from the kind of help I can provide.

To all of those ends, I present to you: Transformative Kink!

I advise you all to go check it out. 🙂

Seriously – it’s mostly worksafe in terms of pictures, though your office’s servers may record you visiting a domain with the word “kink” in it.

But I hope you will take a look and let me know what you think.

(Also: send me your questions. 🙂

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

From the “things I never thought I’d enjoy” department…sounds?

So when I was a pro domme, there were things I simply Would Not Do. Some of them were about legality: I didn’t have legally-defined sex with my clients. Others (and that last one too, in a way) were about my own boundaries: I didn’t have strap-on sex with clients because I liked it too much and found it too intimate. Still others I didn’t do because of a lack of expertise: needleplay falls into this category, though I’d still love to try it. And then there were the things that just squicked me: I would not give enemas, change diapers, do saline injections, deal with poop or sound urethras.

Well.

I still don’t deal with poop, or at least not in a sexy way. And the other things pretty much still stand. But…oh dear. I seem to have found a new kink in urethral sounding.

It started with a conversation about strange sexual things done during childhood…and before I knew it I was playing around with a very clean thermometer, a lube shooter, and one of my favorite cocks…and my oh my. He actually wasn’t sure how he felt about it in terms of sensation, but said he’d do just about anything for the look I had on my face.

Soon he’d sent me an article on the difference between urethral sounds and uterine dilators, then proceeded to order this nifty silicone toy in the shape of a nail from Mr. S, and this set of uterine dilators, which tend to be cheaper, smoother, shorter and straighter than actual sounds. Not to mention getting all those sizes in one pack! Yee!

Last night I got to play with the dilators for the first time, scrubbing up all doctor-like, using surgical lube, then forgetting all the kinky medical details and marveling at the beauty and power of a smooth piece of cold curved steel sliding seamlessly into the end of his cock…watching him shudder and breathe sharp as it dropped all the way down to his balls. It’s one beautiful thing to fuck a man in the ass. It’s quite another to fuck him in the very thing he usually uses to fuck.

Were I still in the business, I think this would go squarely on the “too intimate for clients” list. Wow.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

The one time I did – Part 2

[Part 1 is here.]

I’ve taken the cuffs off of him and for a moment we’re equals, dropped lightly out of the scene and into a few seconds of friendly conversation, laced with compassion and care.

“I haven’t been to that place in a long time,” he tells me again. “I so needed it.”

“I’m not done with you yet,” I remind him with a smirk. “Are you ready to go on?”

The flogging wasn’t even that severe; it was something about the thuddy pressure, the rhythmic nature of it, his surrender, that made him break. His back is reddened but not welted, and I can tell that he can take a lot more. I take the four-foot singletail out of my bag and order him onto his hands and knees on the bed.

In an instant he is down again, dropped into that swimming pool I know so well, the place of buzzy-headed wordlessness. I start swinging the whip back and forth across his ass, leaving little red trails in perfect horizontal formation. He breathes, managing the pain, arching his back, rolling his hips, letting it flow up his spine. I start throwing the whip and leaving fiery vertical cuts to cross the stripes I’ve already made, throwing it harder, harder, harder, not playing at the speed of sound but getting little low-pitched thaps out of the cracker and sweet whimpers, at a higher and higher pitch, out of him.

I see him start to shiver again, the muscles tense, the breathing quicken. This is the place where I always hedge: do I keep going? I back off a little, slow down, give him more time to process each strike, but then I feel what his body wants, feel that need again from him, and I ramp back up until he breaks a second time, falling face-down on the bed.

I put the whip down and slowly approach. His back is hot, his ass scorching, under my cool hand. I succumb to an impulse I rarely have with clients: to lay my body on top of his, to hold and comfort him. Finally I turn him over, and there’s a moment when I see his cock, hard and short and thick, and think of what it would be like to suck it, to let him fuck me. It comes to mind only because he doesn’t look at me with challenge in his eyes, because his submission is so complete. From the moment we met he has been respectful, classy, considerate, and now he is opened, vulnerable, and more beautiful than I dared to notice.

The moment passes, and again we find ourselves in gentle cameraderie, sitting on the bed together and talking. I ask him if he wants to stop here, or go on with something else; we have perhaps a half hour remaining.

He had told me that strap-on play was very important to him, and I had told him that I don’t do it, but he hired me anyway. On some strange hunch I brought my equipment along, and at the beginning I laid everything out on the bed – “just in case.”

“Please,” he asks me now, not quite back in that submissive headspace but not looking me in the eyes either, “could we play with your strap-on?”

I’m still conflicted about it, knowing the boundaries I generally set for myself and feeling them pushed, but knowing, too, that I deliberately brought it and flaunted it, perhaps in the hopes that I’d get to use it with someone I found attractive. I agree to let him suck it, but don’t make any promises about fucking him.

But having my cock sucked is my downfall.

I strap on the leather harness, with my purple cock through it, and set it in place, feeling the way it connects with my body and becomes an extension of me. At these moments I never feel dominant: I feel exposed, naked and rampant. Powerful, perhaps, but flayed: unveiled in the kind of power that terrifies. With my cock on I feel like a predator in the heat of the kill, and at the same time I fear the foolishness of it, the ridiculous spectacle of a woman wearing a rubber dick. This is another of my secrets about this act, my reluctance in sharing it with strangers: what if they see that I’m like a tiger wearing a baby bonnet – or worse, like a sheep wearing a wolf suit?

But with the object of desire in place he falls into role again as easily as breathing. I put my hand back in his curls and help/force him to his knees in front of me, and he takes the purple cock – my cock – into his mouth and sucks.

Sucking my cock is a sure way to plug it even more deeply into my body: watching someone suck it, suck it earnestly and treat it like it’s real, makes it real. Some part of me extends outward, fills the space the cock occupies, ennervates it and animates it, and all at once I’m not just shoving a silicone cock I have strapped to my body with leather down your throat. I’m fucking your mouth.

I fuck his mouth a little and watch his eyes tear as he looks up at me. I feel the abandon start to rise in me, the wetness and the growling and the fear, the fear of how I’ll let go, coming and snarling and shooting my energy into this person I don’t know, scaring him maybe, giving away my life force, and I pull him back by the hair. He looks at me with that pleading in his eyes that I can’t refuse. “Please fuck me,” he whispers, “just a little. Please.”

I pull him onto the bed and order him back onto his hands and knees. “Back up,” I say, and he backs his muscular ass toward the end of the bed so I can stand while I fuck. I grab a glove and the thick lube I’ve brought and my black-gloved finger finds his hole and pushes, swirls around the opening, finds him warm and ready and yearning.

I slide into him and he makes that sound, that sound that is only made by men who are being fucked in the ass because they want it. That half-whimper, half-moan, that fucking beautiful sound of abandon and pleasure and fear and yearning and taboos busted all over the floor.

He fucks back into me and I hold his hips with one gloved hand and one bare one, guiding him onto my curved purple cock, filling his guts. I start to feel it building in me again, the unreal reality of my cock squeezed by his tight little asshole, the fucking miracle of my cock disappearing inside him, the sounds he’s making – and then he’s asking me if he can touch himself and yes, of course, play with your cock but don’t come until I tell you, and I feel dizzy and tunnel-visioned and I don’t want to come, I can’t come, not here, not with him, and why not, but I want to, but I hold back and keep control, letting him find his abandon without taking my own.

“Please may I come?” he gasps, and what can I say but yes, fucking come for me, and he does, crying out, his sounds like someone dying of sex, and I fear the tears again but there’s nothing, only silence and softness and I pull out of him, humbled, a little embarrassed, happy that I had him that way and not face-up, where he couldn’t see my face, the struggle, the loss of composure.

Immediately I take the harness off and begin to bring the scene down; somehow I can’t cuddle him now, it’s too intimate, but I speak gently and let him recover in his own time. He thanks me and I thank him again, and we slowly recover our roles – or recover from them.

It’s awkward, saying goodbye. I’d like to see him again and I know that that can’t happen except at his instigation. Even if we do, it won’t be me he sees. Not the me who would like to fuck him again, without money exchanging hands, without the need to hold back, to wear a corset while I do it, to play, as I sometimes have to, at loving less.

:: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

The one time I did – Part 1

He was sitting at the chic hotel bar when I walked in: compact, muscular, with a tanned face that bespoke Greek heritage, perhaps, with bright green eyes. More attractive, needless to say, than my clients generally were. Younger, too. The problem with this is that such men tend to be obnoxious, to ask more of me than I’m willing to give, to push my boundaries. Like they’re doing me a favor.

Not this one. He’s kind, offers to buy me a drink, which I decline. He’s well-read, and a Burner. He has a low key but confident way about him that I like. I could tell this would be one of those rare instances where the client is someone I would have happily played with for free, but would never have the guts to approach at a party.

He’s booked me for three hours, and I can think of worse things to do with that time than explore the kinks of this rather yummy specimen. He tells me that he usually tops, but from time to time, he feels the need to let go, to let someone else be in control. I usually worry about this, again with the concern that he’ll be bratty or try to make me switch. But something tells me that this is a different sort of person.

The hotel is downtown, one of the swanker places in the Manhattan style – sleek black and silver, not ornate old wood. The room is spacious and inviting, and now that we’ve had our talk we start right in.

When he undresses I see that he takes care of himself, and also that he is one of those men who is never quite thin: shortish, barrel-chested, thick all over but not hairy. The hair on his head is short and curly and lovely to grab and pull.

There is something beautiful about a usually-dominant man submitting. The sincerity and thoroughness of the surrender, in this case, almost steals my breath. Many men have dropped to their knees in front of me and kissed and licked my boots. It’s all part of the script. Dig me, such subs seem to say, I know what it’s all about, how it’s done. This man knows both sides of the coin, and the way he gives over, drops his eyes, trembles in fear and anticipation, is immensely moving. When I grab his hair he actually whimpers, and is immediately in the headspace I want him in.

I love boot worship when it’s done well; when it’s not, it’s a total bore. It’s hard to say what it is that makes it well-done: I only know that when it is, it makes me wet. It’s something about the way the sub becomes absorbed in the act, doesn’t always have, literally or figuratively, one eye on me to see how I’m reacting. The boots in that moment are me, and the truly gifted bootlicker isn’t doing it only for my pleasure. His head is swimming with desire, his vision is blurred with only the blackness of leather or vinyl in its scope, his nose and tongue are full of the scent, his mouth working slowly and with focus. Most importantly, he doesn’t have that puppy-dog approval-whore thing going on: none of that aren’t I a great submissive? crap. I’m not interested in how well you play your role. I’m interested in you, and how your desires mesh with mine.

This man is with me, in the way that clients rarely are. We have seen each other, in this conversation that we shared. There is spark, here. His need for submission is great, and yet the expression of that need is specific. He is both well-trained – the way he moves is graceful yet without pretense – and totally responsive.

I’m loving this, but it’s time to move on. I’ve found a way to jury-rig dog leashes over the bathroom door and I string him up with cuffs, standing, and begin to flog his broad brown back.

I love to flog, but it’s the rare client that loves it like I do. It becomes clear, quickly, that he is one of these gems, and I go at him with a zen-like yet ever intensifying rhythm. I don’t know how long I stand there, swinging my right arm in figure-eights, harder and harder, watching his back redden and his muscles tighten and loosen, listening to him gasp and whimper and moan. Fuck. Now and then I ease off, rub his back with a cool hand, press my body into his back, my thigh against his ass, between his legs. I think, at one point, that I’ve gone too far, and I check in with him.

“Please,” he whispers as I hold my head next to his, run my nails down over his ass. “Please, more.” He doesn’t, can’t, look at me, but his body tells the whole story and it’s true. I back up and start swinging again, a few strokes to work back up to the level I’d stopped at, then harder and harder. He starts to shake, muscles spasming, hands clenching at the cuffs, and I can feel the energy flowing between us, the way his want draws the blows from me, the way I feel his need, the need I’ve so often felt myself, for just one more, one more, one more…

And then he breaks, and he’s sobbing, half-hanging from the dog-leashes and barely holding himself up. I stop swinging and move to him again, my arm wrapping up under his arm, around his chest, pressing his heart. My body against his back, feeling the waves of his tears passing through me. There is no shame here. Only release. Only love, in that strange sense that it can happen in one encounter, the true exchange between two people in a moment.

When he calms down, he tells me, “That hasn’t happened in a long time. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” I tell him, and we take a rest. But there is still so much time to go…

[Part 2.]

:: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

Strap-ons: Yet Another Alternate View

So it may come as a surprise to no one that now that I’ve quit the pro-domming business, I’ve been having wicked fantasies about doing terrible, terrible things to lovely boys and men. I mean, it’s like the old joke about the gynecologist, right?

Well, sort of. See, I’ve had a thing about Not Doing Strap-On Sex At Work for the entirety of my tenure as a pro. It was just something I didn’t do. Now, part of the reason I didn’t do it was because it crosses the line into sex: in the state of Massachusetts, if you penetrate an orifice with anything, it’s defined as sex. Good law, for a lot of reasons: it was developed in order to make rape cases where some Neanderthal fucks stuck a shot glass into a woman prosecutable. But problematic law for people doing domination, where one of the most popular items on the menu is being fucked in the ass with a dildo.

For the most part, though, the legal thing was more of an excuse for me not to have to address the real issue, which was that doing strap-on sex was too intimate for me. It was one of the boundaries I set for myself early on, because I didn’t want to be having sex with my clients. I was aware that the other things I was doing were sexual, but I didn’t realize until later the subtle effects that it would have on me. I was prescient enough to know, however, that having strap-on sex with clients would be too much for me.

Why, you might ask? Well, here’s where I break from the crowd completely. I fully appreciate Bitchy’s complaint that strap-ons are not only weird because they imply that power and sexual dominance = having a cock (which I agree is a crock of shit), but that they don’t provide any pleasure to the wielder. I also am pleased with Eileen’s reply wherein she sings the praises of strap-ons as separate from gender identity and recommends them as a tool of dominance comparable to a singletail, a needle, or a fist. But nobody I’ve yet stumbled across (except for, perhaps, Sinclair, but the butch perspective there isn’t one that gets a lot of play in BDSM circles) has gone into anything resembling my own experience of the act.

That is, I fucking love it and it makes me come, in a way that nothing else can.

Because get this: I have a cock. I always have a cock, whether I’m strapping one on or not. It’s non-corporeal, of course, but it’s part of, if you will, my energetic anatomy. Without getting too deeply into spiritual experience, it is a simple fact that at times, I can feel myself penetrating another human being, even when I am not physically doing so. And yes, they feel it too – the force of my will and intention pressing into their bodies, invading them.

For me, the energetics of topping someone will sometimes bring out the hidden masculine in me. I suppose if I wanted to be all Jungian about it, I’d call it my animus. I become more aggressive, my voice deepens, and the desire to possess rips through me. When I strap on a cock, it becomes a very real extension of my body, and when I fuck with it, I don’t want a vibrator inside the harness or anything penetrating me – I just want to fuck. It’s usually not too long into the action that I start to come and come, in a way that even feels distinctly masculine: unlike the internally focused waves that thrash through me when, say, I’m being fisted, I feel energy shooting out from me, into the other person, as white lightning shoots up my spine.

Now. I’ve been reluctant to talk about this, in part because it seems a bit woo-woo, but also in part because I don’t want to give the impression that I think dominance is essentially male, or that penetration is essentially dominant, or any of those bugaboos that come up when we talk about female dominance and try to separate it from gender.

But I do want to record my experience here, because I don’t see a lot of women out there talking about how intensely pleasurable strap-on sex can be for the woman wielding. I also know that my experience is not every woman’s experience – far from it.

But I am out here, feeling this, experiencing this genuinely as part of my rather complex sexuality. For the record, I also often come sympathetically when fisting someone. But this experience is entirely different, separate. It is, at least in part, about awakening my masculine self, my butch self, which is buried deep in a seriously femme facade.

And this is why I didn’t do it at work. I couldn’t fuck men I didn’t know any more than I could let them fuck me. And there weren’t many men (not any, by my last count) that wanted me to fuck them while I wore jeans and a leather vest and boots.

But incidentally…if you are such a man, comment here. I’ve been having the most remarkable fantasies lately…

:: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

Why I Stopped: or, Integration is the Watch Word

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I stopped doing professional domination per se, and the more I talk about it with friends and loved ones, the clearer it becomes.

So I thought I’d talk about it here a bit.

When I talk about this, I talk about a number of different reasonings for quitting: the work was no longer serving me, the work was subtly harming me, I was concerned about the effect I was having in the world. But what it all comes down to is one concept that permeates all the smaller reasons: I seek greater integration.

In the world. Reading Bitchy started it for me: an increased awareness, or rather putting words to the awareness, that the world I was involved in is fucked up beyond belief. While I often disagree with her categorical statements (which, to her credit, she spends a lot of time qualifying by reminding readers that they apply only to her), I felt something huge come together in my head when I first started reading her. I’d always had the feeling, since I started the pro work over four years ago, that there was something that felt vaguely wrong about it to me. I watched other pros interact with their long-term slaves and felt uncomfortable. I was unassuaged by those dommes’ assurances that the slaves “loved it” when they got bitched out, yelled at, treated like indentured-servant dirt. At the time I figured, “hey, not my kink” and resolved not to do things that way. But I continued to be creeped out by what I saw: pro-seeking submissive males’ total deference to all women, whether earned or not (so-called “female supremacy;” I came to call it “pedestalizing”); many pro dommes’ senses of entitlement and ungluedness from the real world (my mentors in this business were rare exceptions, which is possibly why they wanted to help me to begin with); and the overall unsexiness, to me, of the whole thing. It’s worth noting that I got fewer clients, both in-person and on Niteflirt, because I wasn’t willing to be a total bitch.

The world of pro dommes and paying submissives was severely un-integrated, it seemed to me. As a marketplace, that world divorced for me what was sexy about female dominance and male submission and consistently revealed itself to me as chiefly a monetary exchange, in which the woman received monetary gain, and the man received a simulacrum of the pleasure of true submission to a loving partner. Just another aspect of the world’s oldest profession, I suppose, but I was never fully comfortable moving in that world. I didn’t travel much, found going to parties geared toward pro relationships uncomfortable, and only really dipped my toes into creating femdom porn. I’m still wondering if I’ll ever make videos again; if I do, I’m curious to see what would happen if I did them on my own terms, rather than trying to cater to the market. Which brings up another point: it’s curious to me that the biggest market for femdom porn is also the world of forced feminization, heavy humiliation, and female supremacy. Where, I wonder along with Roberta Flack, is the love?

In my sessions. Once in a while I would have a real connection with a client – a feeling of mutual attraction resulting in a really fun session for both of us. When this happened I was often left feeling a little sad: here was someone I’d happily play with for free, in “real life,” and I’d never even be able to tell him my real name, and he probably wouldn’t want to know it.

And that was the best of times. Most of the time, I felt kind of like a jukebox. Men I mostly found unattractive would pay me to enact various scripts in the standard femdom canon, and I would enact them well and spiritedly, but leave sessions feeling drained. I’m always amused when I read memoirs that include the subject doing pro domme work, and they talk about how easy it was. Sure, if you don’t have any feelings, I guess. The sessions I had with men I wasn’t attracted to left me with various feelings: the worst was feeling totally creeped out, which luckily didn’t happen often. But most of the time I again felt sad: many of these men were afraid to reveal their kinks to their partners, were in essence cheating on their wives, or had told their partners about it and it had made them sick. While I was happy to be able to provide a service that these men could not have fulfilled elsewhere, I was frustrated to be contributing to a culture of dis-integration, to be essentially putting a band-aid on the gaping wound of self-hatred these men were often bearing. Again, the woundedness of the pro world impressed itself upon me: the availability of pro dommes props up the idea that being a submissive man is shameful and needs to be hidden away from real life.

It was always a great joy when I saw the rare client who was brand new to kink and wanted to try it out safely, or whose partner knew what he was doing and approved but was uninterested herself, or who was clearly at peace with his submissive desires and only sought a professional because it was what was practical in the moment. If only these were the norm.

But in myself. I found my true desires becoming decoupled from my actions. Things I used to enjoy: dressing up in fetish gear, receiving foot worship, flogging someone – became associated with work and desexualized. Contact I had with people at work was in fact intimate, but I knew the boundaries of that intimacy and cut it off from my heart and head. That leaked over into my personal life, where I started finding true intimacy more difficult to engage in.

Integration. Connecting the heart, the crotch, and the head. Connecting sexual desire with the rest of life. Connecting sex to intimacy, submission to respect, domination to desire.

Someone I love dearly said it outright the other night, in a way I never could have myself: “Essentially, you were doing something that was against your nature.”

Yes. I’ve never been one for casual sex. I’ve had whirlwind romances, but I’ve never been much for sex with strangers, particularly if it wasn’t going to be followed up on. I have a general rule: if I don’t think I’ll want to do it again, I don’t tend to do it the first time.

I knew the danger of this going into this work, which is why I had very strong boundaries about not having sex with clients. But I didn’t realize to what extent I was having sex with clients: this work is a kind of sex, too, at least if you’re doing it right.

And that’s why I’m taking the work in the direction I’m taking it: I want to truly help people, not just keep them limping along. I never wanted to be a triage doctor; I wanted to be someone who helps the mostly healthy achieve optimum health.

And I no longer want to have sex with strangers for money. I want to help strangers have better sex with each other.

Help me help you. 🙂

:: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »

Questioning Desires: A place for sissies and worms?

I realize lately that I’ve been feeling an uncomfortable internal conflict over two major lines of thought I’ve been reading in the blogrolls.

One: the argument that those of us who are kinky and whole have been having with the radical feminists over whether submission is okay for women (In case you’ve been sleeping: the kinkyfeminists say yes, the radfems say you must be brainwashed by the patriarchy).

The other: why is the general image of male submission, and for that matter, female dominance, so fucked up that both truly dominant women and truly submissive males almost don’t want to identify as such and feel that their sexualities are being hijacked?

Now, it’s certainly true that one of the reasons I stopped doing professional domination is because I wanted to stop contributing to the mainstream image of what female dominance and male submission is. With a few lovely exceptions, it was hurting me to be involved in a business that consistently objectified both the client and me, without allowing for true sexual fulfillment for either of us.

I made a post recently about the wacky ignore lines that are available on Niteflirt. I came to the conclusion that ignore lines, along with financial domination, have the same ethical problems for me as heavy humiliation play, only with the added bonus that I would feel like a schmuck for taking their money for doing nothing. Ignoring seems like the end result of the kind of humiliation play I don’t like to engage in: the “you are a worthless disgusting pathetic small-penised worm beneath my queenly notice” variety. It hurts me that this type of request is so popular for certain submissive men, particularly those that seek professionals. Especially since many of the men who want financial domination include a very scary real-life aspect of wanting me to financially destroy them, which I could definitely never do. It’s not too large a distance between “i’m a worthless piece of shit beneath your heel” and “I want to be actually destroyed,” and so I was never comfortable going down that road with my clients.

Yet the thing that keeps itching at my brain is this: if we decide that (as Tom Allen puts it) “sissified sissy maids who insist on talking about their sissy clitty,” men who want to be treated like dirt, and even men who want to have their money taken from them and to be ignored by the object of their worship are all suffering from the delusion that their sexuality is not okay and so they are punishing themselves for it, then are we not invalidating what may be their true desires just as cavalierly as the radfems invalidate the desires and agency of submissive women?

It’s a stretch, I know. And I think the answer lies in how one separates a kink from a pathology. If you are, say, an insensitive prick at work and you treat women like shit, and you go to a dominatrix who treats you like shit for an hour, and then you go back to work and at least for a while you’re a little nicer…well, maybe that kind of domination is doing some good in the world, and maybe those desires are healing. If instead, however, you’re that same prick and you pay a dominatrix to expunge your prickitude so you can go back and be a prick some more, then that seems control-freaky and pathological to me. By the same token: if you enjoy buying a dominatrix gifts and sending her money because you have a lot of money and enjoy showing your admiration in that way without asking anything in return, then that’s cool (these, I must advise those who are considering pro domination, are definitely the unicorns of the paying male submissive world). If instead you send a dominatrix gifts without clearing it with her and then start demanding a bunch of her attention in obsessive ways, or if you send your entire paycheck to a dominatrix each week and are therefore living in a cardboard box, there might be something wrong with you.

But what about the place of the desire for being made to feel less-than in a non-monetary D/s relationship? I don’t want to play make-fun-of-the-small-willy, but I’m sure there are people who truly do. While I find the entire sissy-maid thing distasteful and sexist, I know that there are dominant women out there who do not find it so, and believe it is their prerogative to play with sissy maids. And while I got sick of wearing corsets and heels all the time, I used to get a lot of enjoyment out of decking myself out in traditional fetishwear (until I was obligated to, which is the issue, of course). After all, there are sexist dynamics reflected in male dom/female sub SM play as well, and while I think it’s important to beware of abuse, I also will fight tooth and nail to defend the right of healthy submissive women to do their thing.

I want to reclaim the masculinity and power of the submissive man as much as anyone. But might there also be room for the stereotypical submissive man in there, a way to reframe his desires without destroying them? That is: I’m sick and tired, too, of there being only one idea of what a female dominant is, of what a male submissive is, and that being representative of those entire sexualities. It’s a huge and monolithic image to do battle with, and I want to do my part to encourage greater diversity. But I also think it’s dangerous to decide that the people who really want those things can only be either pathological or participating in a monetized script.

Your comments wanted.

:: :: :: :: :: ::

Read Full Post »