The lady vanishes

So, where have I been? I'm writing less (here and on Twitter) and going out on the London scene less - one does not always lead to the other, but seeing people is often a good stimulus for writing, and vice versa.

The short answer is, naturally, Ganymede. The longer answer requires a little more consideration. Majeste once said to me that when she found the one, the real one, who would adore her, and match her in all the ways she deserves she would simply vanish from the scene and that would be that. The dating, the munches, the clubs: they were a means to an end. I've never quite believed that. Perhaps the selfish part of me wanted to believe that we, and by extension I mean me, were interesting and fun enough to keep her around for the social element, for the friendship. That no matter how amazing and wonderful someone was how could they compare to our cocktails, clubbing and public acts of seduction and sadism?

And yet, here I am. A domestic animal of one stripe or another. At home as the sunshine filters in through the window, drinking black coffee from china cups whilst the boy sleeps naked in the next room. I have vanished. The free time I have is time to spend with him. If there are places to go to, people to see, we will go together or if not, then probably not at all. My spare time has evaporated into longer mornings and later evenings of not actually doing anything in particular, but doing it with him. Everyone does this, so I'm told, and so it appears I am no different to everyone else. We do the things that couples do. We make house. It's a house with D/s rules, but it's making house all the same. It is wonderful and he is beautiful. Life is very good.

Life, however has changed.

I cannot remember the last fetish club or munch I attended, the last time I got suited and booted and went out to play merry hell. When I gathered with the rest of the Tribe and chinked champagne flutes, thinking "fuck them all" before heading off into the night. Perhaps it's the effect of the weather, which has been oppressing us all, yet it's not for lack of invitations - I've been turning things down and cancelling left right and centre. My apologies. Mea culpa. My life is changing. Perhaps it is the simple fact that for the first time in many years I have my own partner, who is not part of the scene and is new to me, and I am to him. That we are each others.

Life is very full of "us" - I nearly wrote that we are full of ourselves, which may well be true in that irritating couple fashion. We live together and for tedious real-life reasons this has happened much quicker than we would have wanted, out of need rather than choice. The space I had originally selected to be mine, to give me that much needed private space is our space. Sometimes this is wonderful. But living with someone, especially someone you are in a D/s relationship - or any relationship, including deep friendships - takes time and energy. And we all have a finite resource of these things.

Play has become private, I've already noted I'm going out less and less. It has also become rarer and that is something I've been turning over and over in my mind. Trying to work out why and to rationalise how I feel about this. I know I'm anxious about it, it makes me feel like less of a dominant and therefore less sexy, less confident, less "good" as a partner. I'm not getting what I want either, yet at the same time I don't especially feel able to deliver. Sex is easier, of course. Sex requires less in the way of finding kit, assembling things and making sure straps are in the right place. Kinky sex is complicated. But kinky sex is also amazing and energising.

So why am I not doing it?

There have been spates of illnesses and recovery from the IUD took time. But scenes are about more than feeling physically capable. They are a lot about mood and mental, emotional space. Which I don't actually have a lot of. Without the space to prepare, and to enjoy the pleasure of anticipation I feel less and less in the mood. I'm very poor at adhoc play, for me a lot of the joy and the power is in the planning, and I like long scenes with good beginnings, middles and ends. I'm a performance junkie, and want to give a good show, for myself, for others so not being able to do this means I don't really want to do it at all. No half measures. Perfectionism. Wanting to and not being able to makes me feel uncomfortable, in the way that not going to the gym when you have planned to exercise is worse than ignoring the gym completely.

What I do need, it seems is a bit of a break. There have been a lot of changes in my life, in quite short order, and all of them have been good, positive changes - house move, relationship, career improvements - but they have been big, and I have not given them time to sink in or take stock of how I live now. In a strange way, I'm overwhelmed, and that feeling of things being too much is not a good space in which to be dominant (or submissive, actually - although sometimes it can feel like it's helping). First, master yourself. Then master others.

So I'm going to take sometime to do just that. Which means that the next few months will be rather introspective, and also rather sporadic - I'm hoping to write every two weeks or so - and look forward to the journey.

IUD

A little segue into the world of contraception, a side-line in kinky sexual exploration that follows on from the phrase "fluid-bound". In a world of people who grew up with the terrifying tombstone AIDS campaigns of the 80s and now practice all kinds of putting-things-in-each-other (as a catch-all term for non-vanilla, non-monogamous sex it won't catch on, I don't think) with all kinds-of-people we have become accustomed to insisting that condoms are put on everything, that antibacterial gel and cleaner is one of life's essential fluids alongside gin and coffee and to look askance at situations where sexual fluids might mingle. Certainly within Kinksville, it is the height of (unacceptable) risk play to attempt otherwise and marks you out as a dangerous, unsafe person.

Within the confines of a relationship, the situation is different, and the marker point of deciding to remove the barrier methods between you is a division line that signals the importance, in some respects, of you to each other. You go through a very clear process of trips to the clinic to make sure you are all clear and then you discuss the options. In my case hormonal contraceptives were something of use and value before I realised quite how much better my life was without them. The idea of having to take a pill every single day to stop my body from doing something it was designed to do seems odd to me, and whilst I am not against the use of chemicals for exploration, improvement and enhancement, or for when one is ill, I don't really want to take more than is required. So for me, it was the copper coil or IUD.

I spoke to a few friends who had one implanted, and also did some online research, then quickly stopped after reading a number of the comments. If there's one thing that experience has taught me, it's that different people react in very different ways to objects inserted inside them, and descriptions of pain are also deeply subjective.

I take Ganymede along to the clinic at the appointed time, thanking my stars once again that I live in a civilised country which provides these services for free. He is unable to actually come into the room with me because the doctor is training someone else, so I find myself in the interesting position of being a teaching tool. It won't be the first time. I'm nervous, but probably not in the sense that the doctor expects. After all, I'm entirely sure that I will have experienced worse pain and stranger procedures. However, I have never done this before and things which are new are unsettling. She is kind, and obviously very experienced, which puts me at ease. She explains the procedure and shows me an example IUD, alongside a detailed description of what is going to happen, how it might feel and what I need to know. I feel very well looked after.

Then, the time comes to step behind the plastic curtain, remove my skirt and underwear and lie down on the tissue paper, legs up in the grey stirrups, feeling exposed in that particular way when you remove only part of your clothing to reveal your cunt.
"This might feel a little strange". She isn't wrong, but I smile anyway, thinking of all the things that I've done to other people, that have been done to me, that might well also constitute strange.

The process is in two parts. First, she measures and checks. The anticipated speculum comes out, I'm intrigued to note that there are different sizes, and one which is for taller women such as myself. The cool of the metal and the firm click as it sits in place is familiar, although it has been a while since I've felt it. She puts on gloves and inserts a finger, feeling for any abnormalities, which fortunately she does not find. She also checks the size of my cervix and the measures the depth with a plastic sound. The sensation of the sound sliding inside my vagina is neither here nor there and, frankly, expected. When it goes through the opening of my cervix things get interesting. It doesn't hurt. It is very weird. I think I giggle, which I attempt to subdue, lest I put the good doctor off. I am delighted, in a certain sense, at the new feeling. It's not nice, and certainly not pleasurable, but it does feel different. There is a sliding sensation, not dissimilar to the growing pressure of having a hard cock or dildo pushed inside you, except it's deeper. Much deeper. And not quite right.

My body clenches and I break out into a light sweat at the strangeness of it. It's weird, plain and simple. All of my nerves and muscles are telling me that something is in a place it shouldn't be and I get that rising half-panic from my animal hind-brain which tells me I need to get it out. I hush my less evolved self into a calmed silence, shutting my eyes and focusing on how it feels. I struggle to describe it. It is an intimate, awkward, invasive feeling. I'm trapped in place, aware of the fragility of the moment and the process - what will happen if I buck or twist in the wrong way? The plastic is smooth and thin and I can imagine a line being drawn upwards, inside me. She draws the sound out again and notes a measurement. My body relaxes again, and I breathe out.

The next stage is implanting the IUD itself. There are a series of painkilling options offered beforehand. As my cervix is somewhat dilated we opt for a painkilling gel, rather than an injection. I'm glad I took a couple of ibuprofen beforehand, under the advice of my friends.

The implantation is pretty similar to the measurement. The gel goes in, thick and cool, and once again there's that curious sensation of an unfamiliar space within me filling up. It is at once exciting and deeply disconcerting. This part of me that I cannot see, that I can very rarely feel, is making itself known. The IUD is put inside me and then opened out to form the T shape. Two threads trail out of the cervix and sit at the top of the vagina. I'll be able to check the IUD is in place by feeling for them. Already I'm starting to cramp. Yes, definitely some pain but not unbearable, and a little bit of bleeding. I head home for a lie down, with instructions not to have sex or do anything that might "unsettle" my cervix for seven days.

In all honesty, that was probably the hardest part of the procedure. After four days I cracked and demanded an excess of orgasm from the mouth of Ganymede, which he provided, amused and satisfied by the power behind them (abstinence can do that, as well as increase sensitivity).

A few weeks later and it seems to have settled down nicely. In the first few days I got that uncomfortable, swollen pressure and soreness akin to period pains, stronger than I'm used to, but not the end of the world. The main problem was that ongoing pain makes you tired, and that was quite wearing, plus the intermittent bleeding plus associated mucus was unpleasant and annoying but easily solved: I'm a practical person at heart, and not squeamish. Another lesson from BDSM.

Tentacles

Idyll asked me to shed some light on the subject of tentacles and my ongoing love-affair with them. I'm not the only one. A deeply unscientific series of twitter conversations provoked much the same reaction from other perverts.

Tentacles ooze, slick and pervasive. They invade. They insert. They are extremely flexible probe, poke, suck, hold and cling. They move in a strange, beautiful way when underwater, and an alien, unsettling fashion when on land. There are eight of them, a vast improvement on our four limbs. Some of them are used as substitutes for penises.

BDSM and kinky sex is a lot about the look and feel of curious things, especially those things set in opposition to skin, flesh and bone. Materials like latex, leather and metal form a huge part of our kit and clothing. We like things that are strange, that feel not-like-human and that send people out of their comfort zone, away from what is normal, usual and expected. Tentacles, with their slippery, suction-cup covered mass also provoke reactions of shock and horror, with their air of otherworldliness, thanks in no small part to the writings of Lovecraft and other writers who followed similar suit.

However, it is within Edo period japan that the connection between tentacles and the erotic has its root. The classic piece cited is The Dream Of the Fisherman's wife, a ukiyo-e print from the 1800s, portraying a woman receiving a lot of sexual attention from a very large (and very giving) octopus. This is theorised as a porn version of the famous legend of Princess Tamatori who stole jewels from a sea dragon and his tentacled servants. What is important to note about these early pictures is that images of women entwined with sexual tentacles was not uncommon and that certainly within Dream the act is consensual - rather than the expected forced penetration via tentacles, the octopus is giving her head and concentrating on giving her pleasure.

It's later, particularly within anime that the non-consensual and forced erotic elements we are more familiar with come into play in works like Urotsukidoji. This brings the Japanese tentacle back into the realms of the unheimlich and the sinister, which matches more with the western viewpoint - something not-of-this-world which invades. The tentacle carries the motif of the alien, and certainly it is within a lot of sci-fi in both eastern and western culture that we find representations of all kinds of tentacles moving from the violent and terrifying such as the tentacles in the martians in War Of The Worlds, the face-huggers in the Alien franchise who penetrate and grip using tentacle-like protrusions through to the cheeky and humorous in the reproductive tentacles of the Centauri race in Babylon 5. This isn't limited to animals - there's the infamous angry, molesting tree in The Evil Dead and to my mind, the whip-like protrusions of the Triffids in the John Wyndam novel have much of the tentacle about them. And let's face it, perverts love whips.

Fetish is the process of finding sexual those things which traditionally not sexual - with the interesting knock on effect that over time that which is fetishised can become representative of sexuality, such as the high-heeled shoe. Tentacles are certainly part of BDSM fetish not least because of their shape, but also because of their association with monsters. It's common to see them used when representing evil characters, especially as it gives undertones - or overtones - of monstrous and unnatural sexuality. In fact, tentacles have become something of a shorthand for making things unusually horrible or weird. There's a nice article on that here.

On a personal note, it's relatively common knowledge that, alongside a tail, a set of internal tentacles would be top of my list of body modifications should medical science get around to providing us with these much-needed physical improvements. Until such a day, my desires are confined to this rather lovely glass tentacle dildo, longing after this dress, and working on a tentacle tattoo.

Poly Means Many: What is love?

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: Love.

I've written on love in general before, as a Valentine's post for the Gender and Sex social. This time, it's personal: I can theorise on love for a very long time, I can theorise on a lot of things for a very long tme, but let's get down to the practicalities this time. I am actually in love, which changes your perspective on things and instead of wanting to throw half-bricks at endorphin glowing couples walking hand-in-hand on the street I'm actually more likely to be one of them. Being in love is amazing, it makes you feel indestructable, special and very happy, who wouldn't want to feel like that?

It can also be a very dangerous and challenging emotion, making you say and do things you might not otherwise do because of the intensity of your feelings for another person. Perhaps this is doubly true of relationships that are non-conventional, such as open relationships and BDSM relationships. I'm inclined to say this is partly because you add more feelings when you add more people or more "stuff" (if we can broadly categorise S&M play as "stuff" for the moment and you are prepared to forgive me).

I also think that we are less socially prepared for them, generally people do not grow up in a world where such relationships are considered normal, so we have less space and freedom in our day-to-day conversations to discuss them and work through and feelings. It's unlikely, for example, that I might be able to casually say in conversation to people who did not know me, that I was feeling a bit sad that a playdate was cancelled because my partner and I were looking forward to it. All kinds of inferrences would have been drawn, including the idea that my relationship with Ganymede must be failing or somehow not working in order for us to be looking outside for some "spice", but most telling of all is the idea that we could not possibly be in love if we were fucking other people.

The love you have for a partner, a lover, a boyfriend, a girlfriend is enshrined as singular, whole and all-encompassing within commonly held principles. Take marriage - they are the one who you "foresake others" for. There is no space within this to add other people, so any emotional connection you might have for someone else, in a romantic, sexual sense, is seen as something which is taken away from the (presumably) finite pile of love that you have for your partner. Because love is a measurable resource, of course, and it needs to be hoarded like gold, rather than it being capable of expanding to fill whatever room you can create for it. We know, we absolutely know that you can love lots of friends, and lots of family members, and lots of cats. We also know (more or less, depending on where you are in the world, and, sadly, whether you are a man or a woman) that you can have sex with lots of people and, assuming you are a decent human being, remain on good terms. Where we come terribly, awfully, unstuck as a society is the idea that you could do both at once.

Part of the problem is the idea where putting specific bits of yourself into someone else and wriggling about was inherently an act of love? At its most basic, fucking is a kind of physical intimacy and pleasure, which can make everyone feel good, if done well, and shitty if done wrong. Just because I fuck you, doesn't mean I love you. I can do both, but I don't have to. BDSM opens up a very large palette of colours that constitute "fucking". When Ganymede sticks his cock in Blush, at my behest, I am fucking her. He is my submissive, my slave and therefore my tool.

The types of feelings you have towards people can affect the type of play you are able to enjoy.
The connection between owner and slave is very powerful, and whilst many D/s relationships are also loving relationships some of them are explicity not. Just as I can fuck someone and not love them, I can also dominate someone and not love them. In fact, there are situations where being in love with someone can actually make it more difficult to deliver very intense, very hard scenes - particularly those involving extremes of emotional or physical cruelty. I know many perverts for whom certain types of play can only be done to strangers or friendly partners.

BDSM adds further complexity (or interest) when it comes to loving more than one person. That sense of wholeness and complete isolation from everyone else which is conferred upon typical monomogamous relationships is intensified in owner/slave relationships. More than being the only one for each other, one partner is explicity, overtly and entirely owned by the other. Everything is done at the, and for the, pleasure of the dominant partner. There is a difficulty then, between being that special and wonderful owned thing (for the submissive) or the all-powerful benefactor (for the dominant) when other people are involved.

There is are some logic problems to be overcome in building open, many-partnered D/s relationships. Often these are resolved through hierarchy, planning and protocol. A master holds the key for many slaves, for example, or a slave is sent for training by a specific mistress, a pervert who switches may be the dominant for one person and the submissive of another. There are lots and lots of permeutations. But these only describe the theories for how something can be done and look great on paper - especially within the pages of exciteable books written by people with no real knowledge - yet they do not always match up to reality.

People have feelings and desires and expectations. They also have lives which are not always, entirely, centered around their sexual practices. They need to go to work, to the shops, perhaps to look after their children. Real life relationships are not easily expressed by a diagram. All kinds of emotions will surface, not least jealousy, which we've already discussed, but many sorts of feelings which perhaps could not have been anticipated.

The sensation of feeling entirely owned or owning someone can often be destroyed or made very difficult when the reality is different. I struggled when I was dating people who had other partners with whom they had a stronger connection. I would often feel that our play was less important or less valuable, or that it was a game - something which was only done when we were together. Another good example is a friend of mine who hated the idea of being part of a hareem set-up for her dominant: she would feel one-of-many and abandonned, less special. A sentiment I can certainly empathise with.

A lot of it is to do with assumptions, and BDSM is rife with assumptions, just like any kind of human interaction. The idea that a submissive "should be" happy with another partner within their relationship purely because their dominant likes them, for example. They might well put up with it, out of love or service to their dominant, but they may never actually enjoy it and be happy within that relationship. Regardless of whether they might like to, or whether it would be "easier". This is an all-too-common problem within V relationships especially, whereby one partner is seeing t is impossible to make someone be happy about something - emotions are not as easily commanded as people.

This is not to say that BDSM and open relationships are not compatible, merely that they are not always easy bedfellows, and that the negotiations and discussions involved should always include the possibility that they will not work out. I know some very successful BDSM group set-ups and the leather family for example, can offer the best of both worlds - a supportive and loving (in all kinds of sense of the word) group which also provides training for all things kink. One of the nice things about leather family set-ups is that they are often dynamic, they assume that people will grow and change, that submissives may become dominant, that dominants may desire to submit. Because BDSM, and love, now I come to think of it, is something which offers you the potential to learn so much about yourself and your interactions with others, it is absurd to think that you will not be changed by the experience. When people change they often find that the environments they are in do not match what they now need so relationships which provide for this, and which even anticipate this, can give a really strong, positive framework for everyone involved.

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.