In which I show my true colors

[Note: for those of you who watch Lost and haven’t yet reached the Season 5 episode “He’s Our You” – SPOILER ALERT – READ NO FURTHER!]

I’ve mentioned in this space before that I have a thing for interrogation scenes, and that that fact scares me a bit. In fact, the more I’ve gotten into them, the more uncomfortable watching them on TV is, and I’m not sure if it’s discomfort in a good or a bad way.

But last night I was just delighted to watch an episode of Lost in which the always-yummy Sayid gets shackled to a tree and fed a truth serum. What starts out as something really frightening quickly turns into something almost goofy: they don’t beat Sayid or even treat him all that roughly, though there’s a marvelous physical reference to the way Sayid tortured Sawyer in the first season, when the leader of the Dharma Initiative pulls out a pair of shears to cut Sayid’s handcuffs off. (“Put out your hands,” he says, and the alert viewer recalls the way Sayid put that same instrument around Sawyer’s finger and threatened to snip it off.)

Instead the interrogator – the magnificent William Sanderson of Blade Runner fame – tells the others to open Sayid’s mouth, and puts in a sugar cube onto which he’s dropped some kind of drug. Sayid’s resultant confession is wide-eyed, soft, and reminiscent of someone on Ecstasy. “I come from the FUTURE!”

Oh, how awesome. I definitely have some guilt at times for enjoying those kinds of scenes, but I feel a bit let off the hook when they turn out like this.

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Identity management

Sorry for the long hiatus; holidays, Martian death flu, and all manner of other drama have kept me from this page. Hoping to remedy that and crank out more regular material.

Ages ago, a friend asked me how I manage privacy online. See, I have a few online identities. Some things I write are public, some aren’t. Some are under my real name, and some under this one. Some I write in a place where anyone can see it, unless I lock the post so only friends can see it. But what made this question interesting for my questioner was the fact that sometimes, I write under my real name about the same topics I cover here.

So what’s the deal? How do I decide which parts of me are public and which aren’t?

It’s probably telling that I received this question in October and still haven’t answered it.

Recently, I kind of figured out the short answer to this: as my real name, I write about topics pertaining to sexuality and relationships; as Delilah, I write about topics pertaining to my sexuality and relationships. There’s a third problem, too: there are aspects of my relationships that I consider so private and precious that I don’t even write about them here – particularly because I know that so many of my readers know me in real life. I’ve therefore published erotica under still another name, and blog in total secrecy (nobody knows the username but me) about the deepest stuff.

It’s probably also telling that I feel the need to have all of this material out there, even if nobody ever reads it or knows that it’s me writing it. What can I say: I’ve been a journaler and a maker of stories for as long as I can remember, and when I don’t write down what’s happened to me, the intensity of my experiences (which often, surprise surprise, are in the sexual realm) slip from my consciousness quickly. It’s long been important to me to have a narrative of my life, something to look back on so I can see where I’ve been and remember what’s happened to me.

My friend asked whether it ever gets weird when worlds collide: like if people I know socially start buying videos from my site, or people who have seen my writing assume things about me before meeting me. The answer to this is “sort of.” This has actually occurred a couple of times just in the past weeks. Someone who knows me socially contacted me in my capacity as Delilah for some kink consultation in person. And someone who found my writing under my real identity contacted me and seems to be assuming, because I’m poly, that I would want to meet him.

Neither of these things is “weird,” per se, but it has been and continues to be a kind of tightrope walk, figuring out what I want the whole damn world to know and what I really would rather only my friends know and what I need to write about so that someone will read it, but nobody needs to know that it’s me writing it.

I’m a great admirer of Maymay in this regard (as in many other regards), in that he has the flaming gonads to be completely out online and in every other area of his life. But even he remarks that he doesn’t write very much about the literal ins and outs of his own sex life. He’s about half a generation behind me in age, and I’m sincerely hoping that his bravery and forthrightness is a sign of things to come. For my part, though, I still can’t deal with the idea of my family finding out that I was a sex worker. I’m not sure what that says about me.

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A reminder: Topologies

I’m writing in two places now.

Go check out Topologies for the viewpoints of me and two other fab dominant women on what it means to be dominant and female.

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Bad, bad dominant

Someone just friended me on Facebook whom I haven’t seen in a while: an adorable, pigtailed, somewhat gender-queer boy I’ll call Paul. Paul is younger than I am, very smart, but generally demure around me in a way that drives me crazy. In that good way.

Looking at his picture, I’m reminded of a certain party I attended – not even a play party, but attended by many a freak – where, under the influence of several lovely cocktails, I spent some time with him kneeling at my feet while I pulled his hair. The sounds he made were absolutely delicious.

Dominance is a bit like Spanish for me: I do it better when my inhibitions are down. This isn’t to say that I generally play when I’m drunk; I hardly ever do, in fact, and I know that the party line says it’s a Bad Idea. It is to say, however, that at actual play parties, where drink isn’t allowed, I’m likely to spend a lot more time subbing. You’d think that someone who was a professional for four years would be better at asserting sexual dominance when the opportunity presented itself, but it turns out not so much. It’s a lot easier to be and do that without self-doubt when there’s someone paying you – it’s a fairly clear indicator that they want what you’ve got on offer.

Now and then I wish I had a sweet boy like that to play with from time to time. His relationship status says “It’s complicated.” A promising sign?

I’m often amused by how predictable my desires are. On the one hand, I’m a polyamorous switchy bisexual: it could be said that I don’t even have a type. But it turns out I have several, and what’s entertaining and occasionally distressing to me is how subversively heteronormative they are.

Bet you haven’t seen those two words next to each other very often.

What I mean is this. I am fairly femmy in appearance – very femmy, in fact, aside from the fact that I’m six feet tall and have a large frame. I like to be dominated by men who are manly: handsome, square-jawed men who look terrible in drag. I like commanding voices, sharp words, and cock.

I like, also, to be dominated by women who are manly: butch, short-haired women and bois in suits and ties who grab and take and twist and initiate. I like commanding voices, sharp words, and cock.

I like to dominate women who are more femme than I am. Girls in frilly dresses, with long hair to tangle my hands in and full breasts for me to alternately suck on and slap around, women who let their heads loll back and close their eyes as they part their lips. Makeup to mess up. Little intakes of breath and noises of pleasure. They bring out my butch, and I like to wear leather and strap on my silicone with them.

And I like to dominate men who are a little femmy, too. Not the humiliated sissy slut; as I’ve mentioned before, the kink of self-loathing is not my thing. But boys who look androgynous and sweet in skirts. Boys who can pull off pigtails, but still look like boys. Boys who blush and cast their eyes down when I flirt with them, and who turn to butter when I pull their heads back by the hair. Boys who start out demure but scream and buck and beg when they’re being fucked in the ass.

Growl. Now I’ve distracted myself.

But seriously. It almost bothers me. I’m queer in so many ways, and yet in my sex I continually enact the traditional binary in non-traditional ways.

What do you notice about the ways your sexuality recapitulates, or doesn’t, the expected norms?
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Switching

I’ve always had a thing for topping dominant men. There’s just something so delicious about taking someone who’s caused you so much pain and pleasure and making them squirm.

Even nicer, though, is topping other switches. Switches are some of my favorite people to play with, actually, and I’m lucky to be in a scene where not a ton of value is placed on identifying as “pure top” or “true submissive.” While I know a few people who would never think of picking up a paddle, and a few others who would laugh in my face if I asked to tie them down, most of the folks I know either truly enjoy both roles, or at least occasionally dabble in the role that isn’t usual for them.

The neatest thing about it, I think, is that switches who can fully engage in both roles already know what both roles feel like. It makes them more sensitive to the difficulties and insecurities each role can bring up, and allows them both to help the other party along if he or she is inexperienced, and to fully surrender or take control in the role they’ve chosen.

Submission is always a gift, but it feels like an extra-special gift to me when I’m given it by the one who spends most of his time domming me.

There can be few better ways to spend an afternoon then sliding gloved fingers in and out of my usual dominant, gently guiding his hands away from his cock to keep him from distracting himself, watching him shudder and sigh and build, burying myself inside his body, nearly blind with the chemical rush of control and pleasure, hand becoming cock pouring love into him and out again into me, then, instead of letting him fuck my mouth, sucking him off actively while I press on his prostate for all I’m worth, forcing him to explode in my mouth.

As I curled up on his chest, my cunt soaking from the waves of power and his pleasure, so closely linked to mine now, I told him, “That was a completely satisfying sexual experience.” I hadn’t actually physically had an orgasm. But I spend a lot of time with him worshipping his body and letting him manhandle mine. The opportunity to invade the body I worship is an opportunity for even greater sacredness.

Tomorrow he’ll be ordering me to my knees again. But now and then I can revel in the precious gift of his submission.

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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…

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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. 🙂

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A simple but amusing thing…

Does anyone else, when commenting on BDSM blogs, find it only slightly but consistently amusing when they finish their post and hit the button marked “Submit”?

I swear, it gives me a little chuckle every time.

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So, now what do I do?

I made an announcement recently that I’m quitting the domming business. So, you might ask, what am I doing now?

I’ve added a new permanent page to this blog which describes the services I’m currently providing in some detail.

Check it out.

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In which I call it quits

Dear everyone,

I quit. The end.

But seriously, folks.

This is the part where I let you all know that I’m moving on. I’ve known for a while that I’m done with this work in its current incarnation, and that it’s time for me to do something that’s more in line with my values and desires.

So this is me, letting you know that no, I won’t spank you so hard that you cry and not give you a safeword. I won’t make a video where I humiliate you by treating you like a dog. No, I won’t pretend to be the nurse to your twelve-year-old boy, take your rectal temperature and then beat you for masturbating. I won’t let you worship my feet, nor will I trample over your body with stiletto heels. Not anymore.

But I will answer your questions about kink and sex. And I will offer personal coaching for singles and couples to help you learn how to be safely kinky together, in your really-real life. And I will still do limited types of sessions that are about atonement, transformation, and healing.

I have decided that I am done having sex with strange men. And yes, I know: according to strict legal definitions, I am not having sex with my clients. But it would be disingenuous for me to suggest that what I do isn’t a type of sex, or isn’t about sex. It is, most of the time, almost entirely about sex. It’s about power, yes. And control. And sometimes about peculiar fetishes that most people wouldn’t recognize as sex.

But the men I see get naked, and get hard. They breathe hard and become excited. Sometimes I enjoy what I’m doing, and I breathe hard and get excited, too. Sometimes I get wet from the screaming. At the end of 95% of sessions, the man jerks off until he comes.

We are having a kind of sex. And I have finally realized that having this level of connection with virtual strangers is too intimate for me.

Watch this space. My new website is coming, and with it, I hope, a new era of doing the kind of work that I feel will make a difference in the world, and in people’s relationships. No more compartmentalization. It’s time to become more fully ourselves.

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