Knife edges

This knife gets me into a lot of trouble, for such a small knife. A black lacquered steel tanto given as a gift by Boy Wonder and loved ever since. It's a cunning knife, looking and feeling much sharper and much more dangerous than it actually is. For me, it's an ideal play-tool. The perceived impact is much greater than any risk of injury. The point and edge feel sharp, but in actual fact I expect that to do any damage I would actually have to bludgeon someone with the hilt. For public play, in loud and dark situations (a pox upon clubs and dungeons with black walls and red lighting) it is ideal.

Knives make me a little giddy, I'll admit. I love them and they give me butterflies both to wield and, in times past, to experience. The cool, silvery blades flash under lights like eyes glinting with desire. I love the way that feather-light touches can melt people into butter. They are objects of power, full of potential violence and menace. Shining fetishes that reach through the skin, through the flesh and deep down into the animal hind brain. I can spend a very long time playing with knives and they bring out a certain kind of focus in which I get a little lost in myself, and in the beautiful flesh before me with its perfect offering of fine, red lines. Like a child with an etch-a-sketch I will sit, absorbed.

He's sweating, lightly. Presto, with his eyes closed and deep, gorgeous pouting mouth lightly open. I can feel his breathing slow as he gradually relaxes, fading away beneath the movements of the knife. His back is smooth and an ideal canvas for what I want to do. I build up the alterations of motion. Slow and fast. Light and harder. Pressing on the throat. Hold. Hold. Hold. Release. Watch the breathing change. Different edges on the knife: the point, the blade, the reverse of the blade, the flat of the blade. The red lines appear, lightly, I coo over them: half to myself, half to him, enjoying what we are creating.

Earlier, he told me he wanted no permanent marks, and certainly that's something I'd be loathe to do to anyone, let alone someone else's partner, here in a club. But the game of marks is a different thing. I've played with him before, at Chiaroscuro's house and harder than this, with wickedly sharp needles that can do a lot of damage. We've exchanged the odd email and had a few discussions so I feel confident in what I'm doing. Idyll is watching him, watching both of us. I take a couple of breaths and catch her attention.

"Let me make him yours." I say, or words to that effect. To be honest, my focus was so entirely on the knife and his body that my words floated around me, lost. I use the tip of the knife, pressing hard enough so he can feel but knowing full well that the point was too dull to actually make more than transient marks. Certainly unable to cut the skin (like all my toys, I've tested extensively on myself). I write her name. We smile.

I hug both of them, and leave them to themselves whilst I return to Ganymede. watching him fuck Blush with a violent energy that makes me grin and think "look, no hands." Later there is water all round.

But later still, something is wrong. Presto and Idyll are crouched together upstairs. He's obviously upset, but I can't really get a response, and I'm conscious of not treading on her toes, of letting her give him whatever care she thinks he needs. They leave, and I'm conscious that things are not quite right. When Ganymede and I eventually make it home, there is a message waiting for me.

My heart sinks.

Something did go wrong. Eventually, after a series of messages, both with Presto and Idyll, including a very good face-to-face conversation we got to the bottom of it. And it raises an interesting series of points about trust, fear play and reactions. Presto started to feel very shaky and unhappy not whilst I was playing, but later, when I'd finished. Initially it was because he had thought I had actually marked him, and his fear of permanent marks runs deep, deeper than I had known. He was shaken, understandably so, at the thought that I had deliberately done something he had specifically asked me not to. When it transpired that I hadn't, his worries became guilt. Guilt that he hadn't trusted me to look after him, to listen to him and to accept his boundaries. He then became upset at his own reactions, at how his body was responding to play - both during and after. We worked out that the reason I had thought everything was fine during the episode was because at that point, everything was fine. The problems came later.

Guilt is something we all experience when we play with intense experiences. And this was a situation in which we all shared in that guilt. Me for feeling I'd caused the problem, him for his own reactions and Idyll also, because he is her responsibility and when your partner is unhappy that weighs heavily, especially when you feel it is out of your control. I also felt guilty for any upset I might have caused her. Guilt is bound up in trust and care. We don't really experience much in the way of guilt over things we don't particularly care about or feel connected to. The guilt was about perception of broken trust, of damage done to relationships as much, if not more so, than any damage done to bodies.

So therein lies my guilt. The fabled Dominant Guilt. The feeling that we have done too much, pushed someone too far, inflicted actual damage (physical or emotional) and let someone down. That our desires are "wrong" and that we are "bad" people. Worse still, because we didn't stop, we didn't read the signs that someone was in genuine distress we worry that we will not be able to do so in the future. Guilt is an ongoing risk with dominance.

It's a knife edge. For a dominant, we need to be absolutely aware of what we should and shouldn't do and then fuck with it. But not too much. And in the right way. And frankly, there is no way of being 100% sure that you are always playing in exactly the right places without agreeing every single act beforehand. And that would not work, for either the dominant or the submissive. It's a knife edge on both sides. From a submissive point of view, the difference between blissful subspace and shouting a safeword can be minuscule. It can be caused by all kinds of factors, not all of which you can be aware of in advance or forewarn anyone about. And these factors are unpredictable and will change according to context. Like the situation with myself and Presto, he had no idea he would react like that, so when he bared his back to my knife he couldn't prepare either of us for it. Similarly, my own experience of playing with him had "told" me that what I did was fine, because it was less than we'd done before.

Whenever we play with someone we enter into a relationship of trust and take on a duty of care. We agree, through whatever methods, whether actively negotiated or based on shared understandings, to go "thus far and no further". As dominants we also agree and, are in many cases expected to push towards those boundaries whilst remaining safe within them. If we always do what is entirely anticipated, there will be no thrill, no fun. The joy lies in not knowing. We use limits and negotiations to create edges for play, but not to make explicit scripts which are easy to follow and predict. Predictable is dull. We don't want to be dull, like knives, we want to be shiny. So, when we play our games with people's desires and emotions we don't reveal our cards until it's too late. That's where the power lies, and where the excitement lies also. It's also where the problems can lie. Because in order for the game to work, we need to lie. Whether with our hands as we pretend to do something we are not in fact doing, or with our words, when we tell you that we are about to do something we have specifically promised not to do, just to see you squirm, to hear you scream. And for the pleasure when we do something that feels almost identical but, crucially, is not the same thing.

Did we break your trust? When you thought that we were going to, even though we didn't? We put you through exactly the same emotions, a facsimile of the situation. We are liars. We do it on purpose. We hurt you. And although we know, intellectually, deep down, that this is all fine, this is all agreed, this is all consensual. Still, we lie, we hurt. And we like it. We tell ourselves it is a consensual lie and that we are both pretending but as time goes on I'm less and less sure about this because when I play, I'm not pretending to hurt you. I am hurting you. And you are not pretending to be hurt, it is hurting.

I'm still not sure of the answers to these questions, and I'm even less sure of what to do about it, other than keep talking, keep exploring and keep trying to balance on that knife edge.

Poly Means Many: Domestic arrangements

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - Amanda Jones, An Open Book, One Sub's Mission, More Than Nuclear, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month: Domestic arrangements.

"But how does it work, do you kiss and cuddle as well as the other stuff?"

Dinner with a friend of mine who is starting to explore the world of BDSM and we're getting into the real nuts and bolts of daily D/s life. So this month I'm going to write about how a power exchange works life and how this works in a poly context.

Ganymede recently pointed out an old post of mine on the subject of "what I want" in which I talk about Total Power Exchange, which is a form of D/s. There's a good article on it here, but in a nutshell, this is how we live. More or less. I make the rules and he lives by them. That's all very easy to say, but how does it work, and how does it work with other people? Let's start with some myth busting, as I'm in the mood, and as we go along that might help explain how it all works.

Normality rules OK. D/s relationships, and poly relationships, are a lot like other relationships. They are loving, caring and, for those in them, "normal". Ganymede and I do not spend our entire life in tight fitting black latex, with him permanently on his knees and me looking serious whilst holding a bullwhip. This is roughly the equivlant of assuming that vanilla couples in 2012 dress, talk and behave like characters from The Good Life. at all times. It's dated and it's hugely stereotyped. We do all the things that other couples do. We hold hands, we kiss, we joke about our kink, ourselves, our lives, we do silly things, we snuggle up on the sofa, we go to the cinema and we do the shopping.

Let's play Master and servant. All relationships have roles: modes of behaviour and a general "who does what" when you are together. This happens whether you realise it or not and once things get settled then they become standard. D/s relationships have roles, but they are very conscious ones, we decide, often in a very detailed fashion, who is going to do what and how. But most of the "what" is exactly the same kinds of things that any domestic set up needs, except with a thread of kink through them. For example, I do the cooking. I love to cook, so it makes me happy, and I like to provide for my submissive. I control what he eats, how much and when. I control what goes into him. I also take care of him, making sure he eats well.

Because we have these roles, it means that adding other people into the mix is actually relatively easy in terms of people for play. We have played with Blush, for example, several times. Coming from the kink scene and knowing her in advance really helped make those dates work. We know what we are to each other and what to expect from each other. We're very much still in a dating phase, which leads us on to the final point.

What's love got to do with it? I want to make it very clear: Ganymede and I love each other very much. We look out for each other, we want to make each other happy. The way in which we express this love is mostly the same, but crucially different from what you might term "traditional relationships." We do not believe that "love" is the same as "monogamy", and we certainly don't believe that if one or the other (or both) of us wants to have sex with someone else that points to a critical flaw in our relationship. Bodies are bodies. Bodies are fun. We like playing with bodies.

Feelings for others are a different thing entirely. And that's where you have to start thinking ethically, and considering your impact on other people. We are not in a place to add someone else into our relationship in a romantic, emotional, ongoing sense. We're not ready. We don't know if we will ever be ready because we've only been together for a few months and are just getting a handle on who "we" are. We're still very new to each other and are enjoying spending time with "just us". We have so much to learn about who we are and how we work that adding other people into the mix beyond friends and play partners would be madness. Our experiences of poly have been different. We've both been in open relationships, of different kinds and I've been part of a poly V, which had limited success. It's something we have only briefly touched upon and whilst we certainly haven't closed it down as a possibility, it's something that would need to be negotiated within the context of our D/s relationship.

What I have learnt is that there are so many different types of relationships, and no hard and fast rules for what a relationship should and shouldn't look like. There is no "one true way" of loving someone, or some people, no way of living that is the gold standard beyond what works for you, as long as everyone is honest, open and happy. And that nothing is set in stone. Things change, people change. Life moves on and you learn as you go along. I know when I first wrote about what I wanted, many years ago, the idea of a TPE relationship was terrifying in terms of what I perceived as a huge weight of responsibility for someone else. I'm actually finding it very easy, to the point of being the most simple and pleasurable to manage relationship I've had. What this says to me is that how I thought TPE would work - one person, constantly issuing orders and planning everything, is not in fact, how it works for us. I imagine that any poly situation would be the same. We would find something that suited us, and others involved, and come to our own arrangements.

Public and private performances

Life is slowly, slowly, ever so slowly becoming something that you might call "normal". For a certain value of "normal" I suppose. I've moved house, settling into a routine with Ganymede (more on that in another post) and am beginning to find time to see friends and go to parties.

I had a lot of fun creating a small BDSM performance of the Masque Of The Red Death for Dandy's themed birthday party last weekend. What do you get the man who has everything? A hand-made slice of blood soaked, tongue in cheek (tongue in cheeks) kinky live art. I love doing stage shows, particularly those that have a storyline to them. For this one I re-wrote the story and committed sections of the original prose to memory - I liked the cadence and feel of a lot of the language and didn't want to paraphrase. I used pre-briefed friends in the audience to act as a dumb show: laying out the events in the tale whilst I spoke and then gave the whole thing a kinky twist.

Blush was a marvellous victim, upon whom I demonstrated - for the enjoyment of all - the symptoms of the Red Death. Stripped naked with red wax dripping from a lit candle onto her flesh represented the blood pouring from the skin. Dandy, crowned and led to the stage where he could sit on a throne was the Prince and I had a number of courtiers to fawn upon him. The audience were also the guests at the Masquerade and together with the courtiers we encouraged them to dance, drink and generally get into the debauched spirit of the whole thing. I was very flattered by the reception and made a mental note to add a bit more art to future performances.

In public, things have been very good. In private, perhaps less so.

Of late I've been feeling a little sub-par in my own dominance. Play with Ganymede has been patchy. Don't get me wrong, the sex is amazing and the kinky sex particularly so, especially where sexual service, bondage or sensory deprivation (or all three) is concerned. Anything involving fucking is bordering on some of the best sex I've ever had.

But "pure" play is much more miss than hit. And that's where the dominant worries come in. We've tried some things that have not quite worked or have just resulted in feelings of upset, discomfort of "meh." None of which are ideal outcomes, particularly as a dominant of a new submissive, and a new to BDSM submissive. I am responsible, for him, that's part of the power exchange. I get his service, I take on responsibility or power, if you will. I consider myself to be part mentor, part tutor, part provider of horrible, wonderful things and his enjoyment of all things kink is mediated through me. I decided what, when, how and who we play with.

So when things don't work out I often feel as if it is my fault - my fault for not knowing him well enough, for not controlling the situation enough, or for just not reading him right. I'm not worried about us, or about our relationship. We're very well matched and well connected. What I'm concerned about is whether my idea of dominance is based on my experiences as a submissive - in short, I'm delivering the dominance that I enjoyed. Which makes sense, as my goal is to give him the sort of satisfaction that I experienced when I was submissive. And I want that satisfaction for myself, as a dominant. And recently, I haven't been feeling that way. If I'm not giving "good" dominance then I feel as if I've failed.

But what have I "failed" at? We've tried things and they haven't worked. There was no real way of knowing in advance whether they would or wouldn't. Some of the things I like, he will never like because we are not the same. And replicating other relationships with new people is never a good idea. It's difficult though, because your first dominant, your first D/s relationship sets the scene, as it were. It gives you your first thrills and contexts for how to have a different sort of sexual relationship. And these ideas and actions become ingrained, with time. That's part of how D/s works, how S&M play works - we substitute for sexuality.

Logically, there are no hard and fast rules about what a D/s relationship "should" look like, or what people "should" do when they are involved in those relationships. Yet we all have in our minds an image of what a D/s relationship is, what people do. There's part of me that feels that without doing those things I'm somehow being less of a dominant to him, giving him less of the type of play that he might expect. Breaking out of these patterns is proving harder than I'd imagined, especially with someone new. I would have thought that a partner without preconceptions would be ideal, a tabula rasa on which for me to make my mark. However, I'm finding that because a lot is new to him, there's a lot to try, and a lot to fail at, because he doesn't have experience or context. And that means more for me, and more pressure I'm putting on myself, to deliver better scenes to compensate for the failed ones.

And that's without even thinking about the emotional side.

When scenes that break down because he's not enjoying himself or it's getting awkward, then I feel terrible. It's like an anti-orgasm: entirely the opposite of the kind of satisfaction, pride and confidence I get from a good stage performance. I feel annoyed, frustrated and guilty. My dominance is part of me, it feeds my sense of self. If I don't think I'm a good dominant, I feel unhappy just as if I was struggling at work, or having arguments with my friends or family.

Nothing in life is without a resolution, and communication is a big part of making this issue go away. Getting him to talk about his feelings is proving a bit of a challenge, but on the other hand I've never struggled talking about mine, and sharing them is a good start. I'm going to try and revisit some of our earlier, extensive emails and lists of red, amber, green activities and see if we can re-build a new dynamic that fits better with the things we now know we both enjoy and we can look to explore or expand upon other kinds of play that we might not have tried yet.

Submissive styles

A conversation with a friend of mine recently helped me understand one of my own concerns about the type and response to S&M play with Ganymede. She's a switch, like me, and talked about how she "flies" when she is submitting - we spent a while waxing lyrical over the deep joys of letting go, bottoming out, closing your eyes and just being done to - rather in the manner of women discussing cakes they had enjoyed eating. But in this case, our memories of pleasure were laced with current disappointments. Neither of us felt that we were giving our partners the same depth of submission, the same overwhelming sensations or crazy, head swimming, lost-from-the-universe jouissance.

I've used that word deliberately, more on gendered reactions to sex later, hold that thought. Kristeva theorised that jouissance is a type of writing that only women were capable of performing, which interested me in terms of gendered sexual expression in BDSM. Capitalising on previous theories about how men are not taught how to express their sexual side in the way that women are - with the knock-on effect that women are overly sexualised or only valued for their sexuality and men find it hard to express submissive desire because sexual availability is seen as "feminine". This leads us on to the worrying assumption that women are "naturally" submissive, and men are "naturally" dominant. A point which is bunk, pure and simple. However, this is a social perception, and it's also a reflection of how different gender roles are assigned. What this means is that it can often be easier for women to be sexually submissive than men and that whilst many men desire sexual submission it can trigger complications, including a difficulty in "properly" submitting as well as other thoughts on guilt, shame and their own masculinity.


Could it be that men find submission harder than women? Are there tools and techniques we can use to help get over these barriers? Conversation helps. As always. Communicate and try and understand not "what is wrong" but "what submission looks and feels like". It could well be that it's a simple case of different people having different experiences, however it could be that there is something deeper driving it. Gender aside, everyone responds to play differently and that we can't expect others to have matching responses to ours. Pleasure looks different in different bodies. Just as certain people are warmer or cooler on different toys, sensations and situations so too submission looks different in other minds.

Reassuring her helped reassure myself. We both worried that we hadn't been able to give our partners that experience of sub space we ourselves had enjoyed so much and felt like worse dominants for it. But being practical, I know that I am good at what I do, I'm very skilled and experienced in both practical and psychological techniques of control, pleasure and pain. I know my partner, we talk a lot and although we are still relatively knew, I know a lot of his buttons and the more we play, the better we get.

Yet, there is also another factor. Just as dominance is an art that needs to be learnt so is submission. The practice of relinquishing control and thereby generating sexual pleasure is not as innate as some people think. There is a huge gap between the fantasy of doing something and the reality of doing it - or to be more precise, having it done to you. Certainly the desire to do it has to be there in the first place, but a lot of these feelings - physical, mental and emotional - are strange when done for the first time and unfamiliar sensations take some getting used to. The more you do it, the better you get at it and the more deeply you are able to participate. Of course, like natural athletes there are people who are just born to BDSM, who melt under a firm touch or thrill to the feel of twitching flesh under their hands. Their minds and bodies need kink like fish need water. For most people, BDSM can be an exciting addition to their lives, and their sex lives, but it isn't a need, they can - and do - play every now and then with kinky things, but it's icing on the cake. For perverts, it's the cake. And the icing. And the box the cake came in. And the cake shop. 

Ganymede is new to BDSM and D/s relationships with their hurt / comfort equilibrium of power exchange, rules of living and sexual activities that emphasises these power roles. Although we have fallen very easily into this way of living, in many ways this is sometimes not helpful. Not everything we do will be as easy for him, or as "natural" as others. My own experience and desires are only useful to a point because all they really do is outline what I want and what I like. Similarly, because he is new, we have to accept - and anticipate - that he might not be the same kind of submissive as I am. 

To take a simple example, he likes verbal abuse, which I hate, he can grin and say "yes, I am a complete slut." in a way I would never have been able to do. To give a more complex one, the concept of serving me is one that he loves, wholeheartedly, especially sexual service. He is always available for me to fuck, whenever I want, for example. The physicality of this is familiar, he's had sex with people before, the difference is his ability to chose when, who and how, which is now denied to him. The denial is tempered with the fact that he wants to be used in this way. Pain, however, is still relatively unfamiliar, and not as keenly associated with desire. He doesn't have a high pain tolerance. It's something to be used sparingly, and it's something that he suffers through, because I'm a sadist...


But not that much of a sadist that I want my bottom to suffer needlessly. I'm a trainer, first and foremost and that means a reliance on the tools of carrot and stick. In order for me to enjoy what I'm doing, I need to know that he enjoying it, even if he's not enjoying all of it, or even if he is only enjoying it because of the context.
   

Playing with people

As part of the process of training Ganymede, and because (frankly) I'd missed playing with her, I invited Blush over for a BDSM threesome this weekend. Group sex is always a bit of a gamble, group kink is even more so. Not only do you need to have participants who are sexually interested in each other but they also have to by psychologically attuned. I place my bets every time I introduce Ganymede to someone else, it's not just about what affect a new body, a new person might have on him, it's about what effect my playing with that person might have and the fact that whenever you include any additional partners you always change the dynamic.

I had reasonable hopes of good odds on this one. Blush and I have a natural connection, the sadist in me matches perfectly with the masochist in her, and she is a good submissive fit for my dominance. I knew that I was using the often flawed argument of "well, I like both of them, so they must both like each other." Fortunately I was right.

The order of the evening was a long, drawn out session of co-subbing (for them) and co-ordinating wonderful, dreadful things (for me). We relaxed into it, I had all the space and time in the world and no intention of rushing. We met for dinner and drinks and then had coffee and liqueur whilst the heating went on and food was digested at the Citadel of Kink. I was whispering silent noises of happiness at the luxury of being able to do this, without worry of interruption and the level of security and control this had offered me.  It felt like civilisation.

We discussed, briefly, over dinner what people may or may not be interested in doing. Both of them trust me and neither of them wanted to ruin the surprise so I let the conversation linger briefly on what they might expect. All the better to warm up their anticipation.

Once everything else was warmed up, I moved on to play. We opened up one of the boxes of tricks, and I showed Blush all of the new kit I had acquired since we last played together. I had the remarkable fortune of being gifted a very large bag of some very high quality bondage kit, including a couple of pieces that I have only seen rarely. Her eyes widened and she made a pleasing "oooh" sound. Together with Ganymede, I stripped her down, displaying her body for him, removing stockings and suspenders and applying thick, black buckled leather wrist and ankle cuffs, designed for suspension. This set has three large straps and the wrist pieces almost resemble gauntlets or boxing gloves. She ginned widely as they went on. I set the boy to work licking her cunt whilst I blindfolded her and applied a set of clover clamps to her breasts, then used a pinwheel at the top of her cunt, just above where he was licking.

Once he was in place, I stripped him down and spanked his exposed bottom encouragingly. The game of co-subbing is about balance and contact. Keeping both submissives entertained at the right levels so that neither feels "left out" in a way that would be inappropriate - as opposed to, say, a game of abandonment, or cuckolding, or voyeurism. For a dominant, this means twice the work, in theory, but if it works well it is absolutely twice the fun. And of course, I was able to use them both as toys for the other. Hierarchy, spoken or unspoken, is one of the best ways to help frame what you might do. I knew that Blush would recoil at doing anything which was toppy or dominant, but that Ganymede might appreciate being used as a tool of violence. So that was how I arranged the situation. He was my spare pair of hands, a way of acting upon her flesh. She was my way of giving him pleasure, without having to do so myself, and I made her suck his cock whilst I smiled at him from across the room.

There is an absolute joy in making other bodies sing to your tune, to move them this way and the other, leading them on a merry dance through all kinds of pleasures and pain. I clipped them together at the neck, watching them kiss with the satisfaction of the world's greatest pornographer. Personalised sex acts, just for me. I changed their positions, putting his cock inside her and locking her wrists around his back. He fucked. I gagged him and watched his face as she, teasingly, kissed the hardened leather covering his mouth. Finally, I slid a plug inside him and, pressing in with me knee, ground him into her. 


"This is how missionary sex works, right?"


Later, we put a leather arm sleeve on Blush, which arched her back and pressed her breasts out for more torture. I slipped the latex hood onto Ganymede and put him on his back, then made her straddle his face whilst I fucked him. I remember thinking that perhaps this was an ideal girls' night in, with both of us using him for our pleasure and me kissing her whilst I ran my nails down her back, reminding her of their sharpness and cruelty. When he came, he came hard, the orgasm shuddering through his body. Together, Blush and I, smiling, gently removed the hood and held him until he came back to the room, to the world and to himself with a grin so wide it threatened to split his face in half.


Perhaps one of the more intimate moments came later, when, natural as if it had been something we always did, we showered, turned down the bed and all went to sleep together. In the morning, Ganymede tidied, I made breakfast and coffee whilst Blush went out for croissants. We sat together on rugs and cushions and discussed the night before, agreeing to future dates, and future possibilities.

Citadel of Kink

Perverts, as I've said before, are in many ways a subset of geeks. We like strange things, with peculiar names, we spend a lot of money on mysterious sounding and looking "kit", we like the colour black, bandy together in groups to teach each other outre activities and go to odd clubs in odd outfits whilst people give us odd looks on public transport.

Codes and safe spaces are important to geeks and perverts alike. Ways of naming things that make sense to people that are "in the know" and indicate that these things, these places are safe for "people like us". The codes, and the places, are chosen in particular ways, depending on their use.

Recently, I've been looking for a new place to live and have finally found one. I'm in the very happy situation of (finally) being able to have a place just to myself, which means I can select location and all kinds of other details based on exactly what I want - within reason, and budget. Naturally, what I really want is a warehouse conversion apartment with a huge glass wall overlooking the Thames, brick walls and a series of iron girders to tie people to. For the moment and until I have made my fortune in this gold-paved city, I get the one thing every pervert really, really needs.

Privacy.

Domination relies on you being able to exert and manage control. Control of environment is key to giving a safe (regardless of whether it seems safe or not) space for all kinds of play. Simple things like managing temperature, music, where the furniture is, how the kit is laid out, lighting levels. These all create the space for play and having your own place makes all of that much, much easier. In my experience, the harder, heavier and, let's be honest, noisier, the play is going to be, the more privacy and the more control you need to maintain over what's around you. It also means that you can be a bit more adhoc, if suddenly you feel the need to drag a naked submissive, kicking and screaming to the bathroom to drench them in icy water, you can. 

Knowing you are alone in a space can instantly make you feel relaxed, and it's much easier to deliver a good scene if you feel relaxed. When you have a place to yourself it can become "yours", and the sense of ownership and singular ownership at that is something that benefits the dominant persuasion - we like having things to ourselves, like cats with cream. The worry about being interrupted - whether it's someone just knocking on the door to see if you are OK, or being able to overhear conversations in another room - can be seriously scene-breaking to your concentration, especially if you are trying to maintain some kind of mood. It's one thing to manufacture the belief in your submissive or bottom that they might be interrupted, or suddenly exposed, but you need to have control over that exposure. Further, I think it is unfair and to a certain extent a little unethical to make other people participate in kinky activities if they haven't chosen to. Doing things like having a partner on a lead, or kneeling at your feet when you are watching the television can make life with flatmates uncomfortable. No matter how accommodating, lovely or understanding those flatmates are, ultimately they are not in a D/s relationship with your partner.


And that's even assuming that you have the luxury, as I have had for many years, of lovely, understanding flatmates.

There are other things that perverts need, and whilst looking for a place I have made a reasonable list of them. Windows and outdoor areas that aren't overlooked, as few and far neighbours as possible (having people call the police is never good, and the human ear is very well attuned to the noise of other people in pain), strong floors and sturdy ceilings, easily cleaned flooring, good water pressure, interesting cupboards that can be locked from the outside, lots of storage space for all that kit, landlords that are very "hands off", access to the centre of town for clubbing and ease of returning in a taxi. Security is also important, partly because it's always nice to feel safe, but also because it gives a good look and feel to the place. Nothing says "pervert" quite like locks, bars and chains.   

I've lucked out and managed to find a place on the top floor of a building that has no other flats in it, and is on the end of a block. I have my own metal gate, then a door which leads up my own private stairwell and to another door. The windows overlook rooftops. Over here in Kinksville, there is something of a naming convention with our places of residence, that they all have their own little code names to indicate their particular flavour and style of perversion, such as The House Of Rope (THOR). No prizes for guessing who lives there.

So, it is with a happy, and heady grin, looking forward to luring people over for days and nights of terrible things, that I can announce I've got a Citadel Of Kink. Or COK, for short. No sniggering at the back...


...oh, go on then.
 

The words that make you mine

"Tell me what I am, again."

And I do.

It's the words that get him, every time. I swear that with a little more practise, a little more conditioning I could make Ganymede come by lulling him with a litany of filth. Another way that we connect, another way he operates as my mirror. He needs to hear me put him in his place, contextualise him (textualise him) frame those feelings he is experiencing in terms of what he is to me, make that building desire flood out through a stream of consciousness fantasy that is also a reflection of our reality. I talk him to orgasm.


Words bind us. Words define us. They make, take and describe us: literally make copies of ourselves in language. The words we use become our double. And the double up the impact of any sensation we as dominants might wish to create. After all, training is a learning experience and one always follows up the action with the linguistic lesson, you never just tell, you never just do. You show. So as well as what I'm doing, and I'm doing a lot as you may have guessed from the sparse amounts of blogging recently, I'm also putting a lot of work into words. 

We have contractual words. The words that make up our agreement to each other. And words for each other. There are rules for frequency and types of words - I require an email every Monday with what he is up to. There are forbidden words such as Mistress. There are even new words that slip out of our minds and into our tongues and out into the world. Words that neither of us has used in that way for anyone else before. Queen. Feed. Hello. Yes. Words that without context are silly or strange or even - dare I say it? - normal. But to us, for us, they become special. The tone and placement of these words makes them magic, language that is transformative, that flips the switch and says "this place now is a different place". Like putting a collar around his neck, I can do the same with words.  

There's method in my madness. I assure you. But madness in the method. After all, what sane person would want such a thing? What sane person would want me to do such a thing? Yet, he wants it, I want it, we want it. To turn a real, unique and wonderful human being into a toy, a pet, a sexualised automated slave. What I am doing is deep and complicated and a not-very-nice-thing. I'm programming. I'm indoctrinating (again, with the words, to fill with learning). I'm conditioning. And I'm hanging on to the fact that he has consented, that he has offered, that he wants me to do this to him as evidence that I am not entirely cruel or monstrous. 

Partly. Perhaps.

I've yet to really experience that cloud of "dominant guilt" and maybe that's a black mark on my character or maybe my own adventures as a submissive have made me more accepting of suffering in others because I know how much I liked it, needed it, wanted it. There is also another context. What I am doing, although unique to us, is not exactly unique.

Everyone trains everyone else. They just don't always call it that.

The world is full, if you choose to look, and I've looked (oh I've looked!) of all kinds of linguistic experience like this. Training through words, through a re-telling. Of times and places where people have agreed to be reshaped, to be remade. In many instances they have paid for the privilege: think of therapies such as CBT or NLP, or of self-help courses run around retraining your self-image. All kinds of experiences are, in fact, a narrative, with different terminology used to distinguish roles, carve out the insiders from the outsiders, create new ways of looking at the world by renaming. Groups are narratives. Relationships are narratives. A BDSM relationship is a narrative. The distinction is in the kind of story you are telling.

Over coffee with Majeste this weekend she referred to me as Cinderella, in my fairy-tale search for the right one. The collar fitted, I suppose, in the end. But the moment where the metal snaps shut, or the glass slipper slides onto the bare, delicate foot (something I've always found a little chilling, in more ways than one) is exactly the opposite of a Happy Ending. We are at the beginning, and the story has only just started.

In many ways I feel as if this is marking a new phase in my writing. Not only am I writing very much from the top, and with someone who is committed to a long term D/s relationship, but the type of relationship, and the types of experiences we are having are a lot more normalised. Rather than dates or affairs or hotel assignations (wonderful and hedonistic as they were) I have a partner. Not just for an hour or two, or when they have time, or in between other partners. The same has also been true of me, I've been casual with people when perhaps they wanted more. Been less-than when they wanted more. Things have been too hot, too cold and not quite right. Slippers have not fitted.

Instead I have Ganymede. I have a life, or a potential life. One where someone is always my slave. I have a boy who wants me to dominate his thoughts, to own him mind, body and soul. Sometimes the scale of it takes my breath away, because it is epic. I off-handedly referred to D/s as "like love, but harder" to a vanilla friend of mine only later realising that I truly meant it as such. 

Most of this is a very long-winded way of saying that what I'm doing right now is very big, and in many ways very new. Just as Ganymede is new to BDSM I am also new to him, and to the scale of what we are doing to each other, with each other. There's a lot of NRE floating around as well as that crazy, not-real sensation that good, hard D/s does to you anyway. So I'm likely to be updating less frequently. But it's worth it. Trust me.