Leniency and Discipline

Someone on FetLife recently asked a question about leniency in training. It would be inappropriate to quote precisely what was said out of that forum, but it was just exactly the question you’d expect a young Dom to ask and I can reference it as a case study without any indicators. Has a young girl as a slave, and she’s failing tasks he gives her. The question makes it clear there are tantrums, and that she has some emotional issues. There is acting out going on and he doesn’t know whether to tolerate it and try to help, or to be intolerant because the acting out is not going to stop until he stops putting up with it.

I posted in response, but then decided to turn the response into a blog post…because frankly I’m not keeping up with my posting here, so maybe recycling will help. The post doesn’t reference anybody in particular, it’s a reflection on the past ten years or so.

At any rate, I think this touches on one of the most difficult elements of acting as a Master. We all want to provide good, consistent, discipline. And for the most part we do not want to emotionally traumatize a slave or submissive.

Even if we do intend to get into someone's personality in that way, likely we mean "only under very specific circumstances where it is planned and controlled."

So a girl comes to you and wants discipline. But she has problems holding things together and there are issues with acting out. Now "by the book" may say that you simply do not tolerate any of this. If your response to an M/s situation is "what would Jack McGeorge do" the answer is probably "not tolerate the behavior" And I'm joking a bit here, not meaning to attribute things to Master Jack he never said. Though perhaps “WWJMcGD” ought to be a S/m bumper sticker or something?

I tend to think that is why a good bit of old school M/s focus says you should not love your slaves or by extension submissives. But then many of us lead complicated lives where our situations extend to people we love, long term partners, and we are not a Slave Training Academy. We look at a girl we care for. She’s nice, and dedicated, but she’s also a suburban American girl. She has a mind of her own and a certain amount of immaturity and rebelliousness. I’m describing virtually every submissive young girl in the U.S. here. She wants and desires to be a good girl, but she was not raised to be chained to a bed and she may crave it, but seldom comes out of the shopping mall ready for it, even if she thinks she is.

So she acts out. And we realize that at this point a certain amount of harsh "my way or the highway" is going to cause her to run away...and she's somebody that we feel really has a lot of potential in the long run, and that we care for, we are going to be more careful. We are not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and do something draconian that she isn't able to accept and that alienates her.

What's the problem with that? Well, let's be honest. At the point where a girl can have a tantrum and cause things to stop, or change, or get reinforcement, she is able to "top from the bottom." She is the one in control, and the power exchange has shifted. And we see an awful lot of situations where young subs who are prone to tantraumatic behavior end up with young Doms who simply are not equipped to deal with it. They engage their Dom in a dramatic game, and get feedback and it is a power struggle not a power exchange. How many times have we seen an attractive sub who was young and immature, and who seemed to have about as much control over their Dominant as vice-versa?

So there’s the line. Behave like too much of an ogre and lose the girl. Behave too leniently and lose control of the relationship.

I have a few suggestions that have worked for me:

1) Understand the concept that everyone needs emotional responses/interactions (“strokes”) and that most of us are conditioned to get our “fix” out of both positive and negative. Some people can get an awful lot of their daily requirement from negative, and this may be a shocker but girls who get a lot of their emotional strokes through negative reactions are not exactly uncommon in a community that specializes in hurting people. Try not to make punishment something that has a lot of emotional content, even negative.

2) There is a concept (Rubel references it in Protocols but I don’t think it’s original with him, and I have seen other sources for it…) of the difference between “correction” (for not completing a task) and “punishment” (for subverting the basic D/s paradigm). Correction should be common, if punishment is common there is a problem in the relationship.

3) Establish that correction and penalties are a privilege. It takes time and emotional energy to maintain a correctional system. Do not take the position that the submissive is doing you a favor by accepting your instruction and correction. Get into the mindset that you are doing her a favor by providing it.

4) Establish that acceptance of correction is a condition of getting it. Many girls (probably boys too, but …my experience…) will *ask* for consequences to be set, and then not really want to accept them. They crave structure, but cannot resist playing a power game to see if they can break the structure. This goes with the point above. “If you refuse this correction or complain about it, I will not do it again.”

5) Real punishments and most corrections should not be fun, interesting, or play. They can be eroticized, but you don’t give a girl a lot of nice thuddy “fun” spanking strokes for failure to complete tasks.

6) Establish that while correction and lower level punishment may be corporeal, high level punishment is not. It is not a “fun” scene, it is having a serious talk, the most serious element of which is “do we wish to continue this relationship.” This can be problematic with someone who seeks out drama – some girls would intrinsically be drawn to having a dramatic and intimate fight rather than sceneplay, because the emotional payoff is bigger. Disengage. Do not make your response dramatic. Insist on speaking slowly, logically, and clearly, state your issues and what you expect and be firm about it.

7) Give warnings. Make it clear you will give warnings, and that this is not a sign of weakness, but how you operate. “I have been supportive of you now. But if you have a tantrum during our next session, I am going to stop the scene, and that will be it for the night.” Make it clear that the fact that you tolerate a behavior now does not mean you always will.

8) Do not commit to any consequences unless you plan to follow through on them. But do not feel obligated to establish consequences in every case. “You may be corrected” is perfectly adequate. Do not allow yourself to be goaded into setting strict penalties if you are not certain you can or will follow through on them. It is better to be open-ended than wrong.

9) Avoid brinksmanship. You do not want to end up in a position where a submissive can force you into making a choice of disciplining them in such a way that they leave or are broken, or backing down. So don’t create situations that lead to that. Estimate what punishments the submissive can reasonably accept and keep most punishments well inside those limits. Remember that you are in the Driver’s seat. It is not the submissive’s responsibility to keep you from doing something that challenges or destroys the relationship. That’s what they pay you the big bucks for.

10) Set test cases. Find small tasks that are very easy to do. Discipline yourself enough to check up and support them. If the problem is with passive-aggressively not doing the tasks to get attention, the test cases will fail. If the problem is workload the test cases will succeed.

11) Be serious about change. Do not continue to indulge the same behaviors over and over again. This WILL require a test. If you are supportive the first time a girl has issues, she will do it again. The idea is that you warn her, and warn her seriously enough that she’s expecting the consequences and when they begin to come instead of being blindsided and just lashing out defensively, a part of her mind says “oooh…he WAS serious…” and is more prone to back down without a nuclear confrontation. But you WILL be tested and you MUST stick to your guns. Require change and do not consistently indulge the same unacceptable behaviors.

12) Confront problems head on. If you think that a task was not completed as a passive aggressive test of your authority say “did you really not have time to do this, or are you passive-aggressively testing my authority.” Do not accept a histrionic response…come back to the question, calmly and authoritatively.

13) If you cannot succeed, fail. If you end up engaged in an endless conflict of wills, you have lost anyway. It may come down to either ending the D/s component of your relationship, or if that was the relationship, ending it entirely. You must be willing to embrace this as a real possibility. As long as you do not, you are effectively “trapped” and cannot really speak with any force of will.

14) I cannot overemphasize the need to be and stay calm and chill.
I am not saying these are the best guidelines for being a Dominant. I am saying they are practical compromises that I have worked out between the fictional world of Chateau Roissy and the real world of the American suburbs where girls go to school and have jobs and you don’t have a castle to chain them in. I know there are Masters who are more demanding. But the best Masters I have seen make it clear that they do deal with emotional trauma, and they have to make some allowances for it. What they allow and how they allow it obviously differs. Being flexible is not being topped from the bottom. But it can lead to it if you do not assert yourself and act with real strength

I’ll just add here that I do think that for very serious problems mental counseling is important. Do not ever come between a submissive and her medical provider, and respect mental health issues. Joint counseling through a Kink Aware Professional could give you insight into what is a “real problem” that she cannot control and what is simply an issue of poor discipline that you must address.

The Crucible Empty

So I've been a very faithless correspondent here the last few weeks. Where "few weeks" is almost exactly two months. Two months. I have not posted in two fewking months. Or talked to anyone, or been very good about getting back to people about fetish stuff. Short notes..."I'll be back around in mid-October..."

Excuses...Uhm...I was redeployed to Mars?

So seriously, I was on the road nearly solid for a while there, and then the last two weeks have been a huge home project aimed at bringing the other big component of my life, my drama activities, into line. I've been acting as a props storage dump for the past ten years, and with my mother's death, things finally got out of hand. Theatrical props overran the house. Not just small props but big chunks of sets, walls, etc. The place became choked with furniture and unlivable. The solution was to take the cellar which was frankly an underutilized trashpile, and build rack shelving for 144 Rubbermaid storage tubs and assorted other things. But in the long run this was a huge project, and it's absorbed all my time and energy.

I've also been working towards my final estate transaction, in which I lose over $100k. Now wait for it. That's the good part and I count myself happy about it, because in the current realty market, that's pretty good. Cash has been tight, and that keeps me busy. Not a lot of luxury time. Never has a man been happier to have a disastrously bad transaction occur.

Still it's been a while since I've written. Where a while is approximately one sixth of a year. I have a vanity as an author, I don't like to write until I have something good to say, and apparently I'm not brilliant enough to have something good to say twice a week. Or in two months.

So we return with a funny story. It may be lame, but at least I'm typing.

Recently went to the Crucible with M. Wasn't a big trip or anything, we had a weekend date, and found there was an open club night decided to go. Her apartment is not ideal for play, and we were staying home for budgetary reasons dealing with the aforementioned real-estate transaction, so it was a chance to mess with equipment a bit on an off night.

The club as empty. I don't mean "well it was a light night." I mean it was us and the staff. And they outnumbered us.

Eventually I think two other couples were there. One couple was a solitaire who was waiting for her partner, so there was a loooonnnngggg....period when it was just us and about three to four people who were on staff.

Positive side. They were mostly people I knew at least to talk to and are great people. Negative side. They were mostly people I knew at least to talk to.

You wouldn't think so, but it's kind of daunting to do a scene in the middle of a warehouse-sized open space with about five people who are basically working, and who you vaguely know.

I wanna stress that the staff was great, that’s why this is funny not disastrous. They were cool, encouraging, and nonchalant. But…it’s still just plain weird to have an entire sex club the size of a decent-sized High School Gym pretty much to yourself. To be one of the only four people in DC who decided to be kinky that night.

That's not normal, Likely other stuff drawing people off, and Saturday was expected to be big, there were already preparations underway for the crowd. Didn't look at the calendar to see what else was up, but I know there was "stuff."

So…normally it’s “what equipment can we get.”

But suddenly it’s like “well, of all the equipment in the club, what do we feel comfortable using in a large open space.” It’s a wet dream for an extreme humiliation player or an intense exhibitionist. “Just so you know, we are absolutely the ONLY THING to watch here, other than the clock, so let's stand here in the middle of this big open basketball court space...” No pressure.

It was just funny. Because of course there was no reason to have sudden performance anxiety. And in the long run, we didn’t. We played around downstairs, did some training routines, went upstairs, generally made use of the place. But…there was just this kind of niggling feeling of…it being weird. I think it’s sort of like rehearsing a play. It’s fine to be doing the play in front of a packed house. And it’s fine to be doing it in front of your Director and crew. But doing it in front of six or seven people who you kind of know and are there doing other work…is just kind of weird. Like smoking when nobody else is, or drinking when nobody else is and it isn't your tab.

“Scuse me, mind if I'm violently kinky…”

I once knew a guy who had a response to "do you mind if I smoke...it makes me more comfortable." His response was to start unzipping his fly and say "not at all...do you mind if I jerk off...I find it makes me more comfortable..."

No matter how kinky we think we are, we have some social wiring that says "uhm...dude...what the fuck..."

In the long run it was actually a nice low-key night and the staff folks were great and courteous and friendly as always.

To make things weirder, a very normal looking guy…not at all fetish, showed up and was looking around. He wasn’t your standard club gawker…the sort who stares your scene and maybe decides to masturbate (hey, be fair, you’re playing in public…you’re there to entertain if somebody chooses to whack off). Though at the risk of digressing, the guy at Power Exchange in San Francisco who got obtrusively close to a scene with S. and began making rather loud “cock-a-doodle-doo” noises may have been kind of over the top.

But this guy was fine. He was pretty normal seeming, and looked a little out of place, kept a respectful distance. Once I realized he wasn’t with anybody and wasn’t setting up stuff for tomorrow night, I tried to put on a bit of a show for him. Honestly it was kind of fun.

He’d actually already gotten disappointed (any other night dude, I have NEVER seen the place that dead, even on a Friday…just coincidence), and was heading out, but couldn’t seem to get a cab to find the place. He was from out of town, and was kinda disappointed as he’d wanted to see a real live sex/fetish club. I was glad we’d performed a little. We gave him a ride back to Navy Yard as he seemed harmless enough.

So, the next time I’m at Crucible on a Saturday and trying hard not to curse under my breath because the only toy I can find open is that one ubiquitous spanking bench that there are like seventy of and is always the one thing you can find open…I’ll remember the most recent trip and….be glad that there are a few other people to blend with. There is safety and anonymity in numbers.

MAsT - Masters, slaves, and volunteer management

As anyone I talk to knows, and as I’ve posted here, I’m pretty much immersed in a project until the end of the month, so I’ve been very scarce. That said I wanted to take a moment to just post a few thumbnails about MAsT in DC. There have been some good posts on FetLife as well.

The big question of course is “what was it like.” I had some fears about this. At the risk of being cruel (because sometimes I am), let’s look at the overall “scene.” There are times I look around and feel a deep kinship and sense of shared purpose with everyone in it. But there are other times I have looked around and said “what the fuck. Who are these losers.” Obviously I’m not talking about most people in the community, and I push community as hard as anyone I know. But (and I know there are readers who’ve never done scene events), don’t you ever look around and some of the geekier, less socialized people sort of stick out and you think “Christ, I’m associated with these people.” I have enough geek antecedents as it is, without hanging out with the losers. Because the scene attracts a certain layer of people who are there because it’s “what they can get,” or even “with wild hopes to gawk and stare.”

My life has changed a lot in the past few years. I’ve gone from saying that “well slavery is an okay choice but not my choice right now (I’m too good a lawyer to ever have to eat my own words…I know how to weasel-word)” to having recently agreed to enter into a term M/s relationship with M. It was always the case that I said that “I am not against it, but it requires time on the part of the Dominant partner commensurate with the commitment by the submissive partner.” I still feel that way – one reason I wanted to attend MAsT. I like to learn. But I also realized that improving my abilities to maintain relationships as a Dominant goes across the board. However much I pretend to be just a bully and bastard, the fact is that a lot of thought has to go into acting as a dominant. But it is the same thought. What enriches one relationship enriches them all. Currently the M/s dynamic is a deepening of an existing dynamic and I feel very strongly about that.

So what was my fear? I was going to a Conference run by MAsT devoted to people who maintain a Master/slave or very strong D/s identification. What if they were the losers among the losers? I mean slavery. To paraphrase Harlan Ellison “I was raised a nice white protestant boy from a Washington suburb.” Slavery was something bad we had a war over once upon a time, and gentlemen open doors for ladies (more about that later).

What if the people that I met were asses? About a year ago, when I was still just developing my protocols, I’d searched out “SlaveMaster” Mike McDade’s protocols because they came heavily recommended. I had pretty much just skipped the first few paragraphs because every protocol I’d seen had some flowery intro on the joys of slavery, and I just wanted the technical information. However, I referenced them to a writer friend, a very smart sort of girl, who was working on some fiction. She was…not impressed…by “SlaveMaster.” When I read the intro, I kind of wasn’t either. What if these people came off as jerks? Technically this didn’t matter to me, but…to be working on a certain lifestyle for a year, and find maybe that the people who had influenced you were not people you respected?

I should have used some logic. MAsT is a cerebrally oriented conference with no sex workshops (not that I’m against those) and no internal play space. So people attending had three disposing factors

a) With probably only a handful of exceptions, they were in a working M/s or D/s relationship. That means that somebody in the world was willing to live with them/deal with them on a regular basis.

b) The echelon of kind of skanky people who have never played and probably never will but are there to watch was gone. There was nothing to watch.

c) People without two brain cells that fire at the same time do not attend weekend-long conferences where all there is to do is talk about the theory of social power dynamics.

As you can probably tell from this, I was reasonably impressed with the crowd. I am not going to tell you that they were Hollywood actors, and that it was a scene from some “Story of O” movie. But overall the lowest element of the unsocialized seem to have fallen out the bottom, and the result was not better than the people you’d see at Camp Crucible or BR, but among the better of those people.

I also needn’t have worried about the speakers, and people I met who were published or leaders. M/s is actually a pretty small pond. I met a substantial cross section of the names I know and recognize from writing and reference.

I should add that most attendees use titles. One tends to refer to “Master Joe” or “slave jill.” The thing to understand is that there’s no focus and no particular tone to it. It’s not like Bwahahah ‘MASTER’ and ‘you worthless slave..” People just use the titles, like saying “Lieutenant Joe “ and “Sergeant jill.” They roll off naturally and without much emphasis. Not having put a title on my badge (because I really don’t like being pretentious) ended up being a bit awkward at dinner, so likely next time I will.

This is really a fairly small and somewhat new community. Serious D/s comes heavily from the Gay leather community (though we can see elements of it in the straight community even as far back as Weimar Germany), and does not share all the elements of the mainline “scene.” It seems to be generally conceded that the Community represented by MAsT really got its start at MAsT really started with the Southeast Leatherfest in 1999.

Across the board, let me tell you what I feared and did not find, at all. People behaving like jackasses. Self-important “masters” and “experts” who had ‘tude. I have seldom met a more polite, generally unassuming bunch of people. I did not meet anyone identified as a leader of the community…or really anybody…who seemed pretentious. Everyone who was speaking, teaching, etc., was very down to earth and un-selfassuming. You have this fear I think that to act like a “true Dom” you are going to have to be an asshole. Not open doors for ladies. Be arrogant and dismissive. Or people will think you are weak. I never could bring myself to do that, and what I found is that absolutely nobody else who is anyone even remotely respected does either. They are polite, realistic, practical, very reasonable, friendly, and generally have a good sense of humor without “lessening” their dedication. It seems that if you actually walk the walk, you don’t need to talk the talk quite as loud.

I also expected to see a lot of…kind of ugly dynamics. You know the ones you see where X is the Dom and Y is the partner, and Z is the other partner and they are saying everything is okay but you can tell there were just tears in the hotel room, and that there is a cloud of drama floating around and that there is a lot of rivalry and upset over power exchange, and everyone is not okay?

Not much of that. I saw a lot of couples/triads/households that exuded stability and calm. I heard more people talk about problems and issues and having to deal with them, but seem to be doing it from a place of calm than I did people talking about how stable they were while clearly doing it from a place of instability, and I see that a lot in other places.

I am sure not everyone was in a good place relationship wise, or was having a good weekend. But the average seemed pretty high, and the amount of rather genuine self-analytic talk I heard was…refreshing.

“Dr. Bob” – Robert Rubel (who pronounces his own name “ruble” like the Russian money, though everyone else seems to pronounce it “roo-bell”) was a tremendously personable man and a convincing speaker. He also is very outspoken about the fact that he has Asperger’s Syndrome. To some extent he writes on and analyzes relationships and communication because they didn’t “just come naturally” to him, and he had to figure them out. I found him an engaging speaker in person, and the one or two things that came across as a little “quirky” made sense. He has a very good sense of self and proportion. “Somebody asked me why I have my slave re-dedicate herself, why we do our re-dedication ritual every twenty four hours, every day…the answer is that I am a hard man to live with…”

Master Taino I knew nothing about other than that he has an Academy, that he’s well known, has some good comments, articles, interviews online and is often cited and seems respected. I found out quickly this is because he’s just a very engaging guy. He’s incredibly matter of fact and practical and manages to seem…like he gives a fuck…without being weak. He has a thick Puerto Rican accent and you can imagine him saying “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.” I found him very charming. I think it would be very hard not to like him. I think his best quote…and it’s hard to quote him without wanting to imitate his accent because it is a part of his charm…was when someone asked him if when he brought a new slave into his household the other boys (his household is all gay though the academy does have women’s weekends) , voted or had a veto. He shook his head and said…”Well, a veto…no…but…” then smiled very warmly “you no wanna shoot yourself in the foot either…” That was I think a model for the weekend. The triumph of common sense. Nobody I talked to believed that Protocol Manuals, or Slave Training built relationships. Building blocks yes, but there was an understanding that they were tools, not magic bullets.

There were some other people I met and didn’t get to speak with much, but found I warmed to strongly. Sir Stephen of Chicago MAsT who is one of the few people who does not wear a lot of leather (he models his household on a Victorian household and tends to dress either in formal dress, or at least formally), was also someone I took an immediate liking to. He is the sort of guy who you don’t need imagination to know has never dressed in drag in his life and has no desire to. Yet on a sort of dare, he let himself be conned into dressing in drag (yes it was probably rehearsed) to raise about $985 for the Travel Fund. He was a good sport about it, and that impressed me. Throughout the weekend when he spoke you got the feel of someone with solid common sense and a very strong tendency not to over-react.

On a side note, I was very impressed with the dinner conversation. We bought tickets to the Banquet in hopes of meeting people and making contacts. We were lucky enough to be seated with Master Alex Keppeler, the Director Emeritus of MAsT; Master Gallad from Chicago, and slave Kelly, as well as several other fascinating folks. The tone of the conversation was very high. Master Gallad had some very sound ideas on better electronic information distribution, and I was very impressed at his clarity and vision. I’ve been to a lot of leather events, and this was really a very…high end…discussion. Meaningful topics of concern rather than social networking. I was impressed at the tone.

Not everything is perfect. Master Skip Chasey opened the weekend with a keynote address, talking about incivility and worrying that it threatened to destroy our community. Clearly he was alluding to harms and feuds among the leadership. I know these things exist and are often hidden from outsiders. I have no doubt they affected some well known guests who no longer attend at all, and are responsible for the dilution and collapse of some MAsT chapters. At a guess, I’d have to think that our region is not the worst for these tensions.

I am not competent to say whether or not Master Skip (people call him that) is entirely correct. He is widely respected, being an instructor at APEX Academy/Butchmann’s. His personal focus is a very spiritual path, which I find admirable but don’t heavily associate with.

One point that did concern me was a strong statement that “the S/m community are outsiders among the outsiders. …other Scene people consider us suspect. “ Master Skip went on to say that When the Second Leather Leadership Conference in 1998 included language in its statement on “The Difference Between SM and Abuse" that could be construed to define S/m relationships as inherently abusive, "the leadership" responded "and I quote…those people are on the fence. We don't care about them." It’s a little disconcerting to hear this without a citation, and I’d be very interested in knowing who said it and in what context. For folks who like to follow these things, I’ve found a statement attributed to LLC3 in SF, but that’s not the same as LLC 2 in NYC. The http://www.the-crucible.com/bdsm.htm

Clearly this guy is not the sort of person who lies, and I am certain the comments he remembers are true, though knowing the run of small group politics, I’d like to know who said it and to what level they really spoke for the leadership of the whole. At the very least one message is clear. The Community in general is not as supportive of M/s in all places as it is in our region.

His focal point right now, seemed to be a concern with a push towards defining a common lexicon. His argument was that an attempt to standardize terms cannot help by also standardize dogma and doctrine, and thus narrow the range of what is acceptable allowing “common practice” to become a club that can be used to beat and ostracize. He is against a common doctrine, and therefore against defining a common lexicon. I tend to disagree that doctrine automatically heavily follows doctrine. I think that in some areas it does, but against that you have the overwhelming pervasive force of the interwebz, yahooism, and people publishing whatever they feel like. If any group really pushes to become the “one true way” I think in today’s market they quickly perish.

While I’m not an expert on MAsT and cannot deny that Master Skip knows far more about it than I probably ever will, I am a fair expert on volunteer group dynamics. And I have never been one to get too alarmed when someone sounded a fire alarm. I understand that coming from the spiritual standpoint he does, gossip and backbiting in the community are very disheartening to Master Skip, and I don’t think any of us like that. But as a student of volunteer group dynamics I also know that these things always have been and always will be a part of every small group.

The one fault I had is that Master Skip did not present a very strong answer to “are we to have no standards,” and admitted he didn’t have one. Earlier another presenter gave the case of a Dom he knew in the southwest. This Dominant picked up a slave who wanted to get very serious very quickly. Soon however, the slave (a girl in this case) got online and began blogging about her Master’s abusiveness (real, not the good kind) and this Dominant found himself unwelcome in several clubs and organizations. In the long run it turns out that the slave admitted to being diagnosed with Bipolar disorder and MPD, and had a dissociative young girl personality who she felt posted things “when she wasn’t there,” or some such. The presenter (I don’t recall who it was) had an acquaintance or household member who knew this girl and knew she had these issues and basically said “why didn’t you ask before you went out with her.” The point being that clearly somewhere there is a line between gossip and fair warning in our communities and that trying not to backbite and bad mouth each other does not mean precisely sitting still and watching a train wreck without even giving a word of warning. I could have used a practical discussion of the ethics of that more than a high-minded pitch against it.

If nothing else though the keynote pointed me at this excellent article by Chris M. on Leather Ethics: Civility And Incivility in The Scene. Some of the best points came from this article, with attribution, including the observation that

Some scenefolk, in an effort to appear imperial (kingly, of high standard, worthy of respect) conduct themselves in a manner that is imperious (overbearing, bossy, judgmental). A surprising number of scene-folk are born to this confusion. Some attain it after a few years in the community, as they assume community leadership positions, or when they decide they should be recognized as authorities, if not superiors. While some clearly feel that imperious behavior demonstrates expertise, importance, and intelligence, in truth it almost never fails to alienate potential friends and play partners, making the offender look bad.

That came up again later in the weekend. At the MAsT meeting at the end one of the participants…a young fellow…made a rather impulsive but impassioned statement about the fear that this would “get out” into the larger world. That we practice M/s safely, respectfully, but that if this became a pervasive paradigm in the modern culture there could be terrible results. Sir Stephen with an admirable sense of proportion did not seem too concerned about MAsT overturning the western cultural paradigm. On a group level he said “well yes, people will want to do things differently and they’ll break off into other groups and then those groups will also break off as things progress,” suggesting that the process was natural and inevitable. I thought this was demonstrating a very admirable sense of how small group dynamics work.

On a personal level, MAsT was very interesting to me. People who know me know that I am not much of a touchy-feely person and that I tend to only express emotions with people I have a strong rapport with and consider that to be a very private matter.

If I had one revelation over the weekend it is that I have been in an M/s relationship for the past twenty years. S/m is Volunteer management. Seriously. Volunteer management is building excellence and getting performance from people whose only motivation for doing the job is its fulfillment and the praise you give them. S/m is the same thing.

MAsT was interesting because it presented a really solid set of pictures of people with successful multiple partner relationships that had extended in some cases for twenty years, and in some cases their lifetime…there was a session on dealing with grief and death in an S/m household/family. Certainly I had known this was possible. That my own relationships were not inherently doomed to burnout and failure. But as I said, “it is one thing to be told the world is round and another to meet a man who has sailed to Cathay or the Japans and returned to tell of it.” The weekend made it very real to me, and I also learned a lot. This was practical stuff and I appreciated everything I was able to learn and every experience I was able to benefit from.

Fetlife, myself as a Dom, revelations about women, and bondage straps...

So it seems these days the only time I get to write in this blog is on the train. And realistically I ought to be doing other things, but it’s seductive just to ignore them. This will be the last post (such as it is) for two weeks. Next week is a production week for me, and there’s no way anything is going to get posted. I joined all the blog forums on fetlife.com, and haven’t posted my blog because I thought it would be nice if I had some content. When I get back to this in a couple of weeks, I’m going to start a blogroll, as I’ve been seeing a lot of blogs I liked.

So again, this is not the world’s most informative post. Tidbits rather than substance.

Last blog I praised Fetlife, so now I’m going to post my only gripe. I’d like a different logon page or the ability to default a followed forum link in e-mail to a different logon. Honestly I kind of like the photo. And my PC at work is positioned so I actually don’t worry too much about people seeing what’s on my screen. But having come up with a nice ambiguous name that is less obvious than “bondage.com” why have a logon that means that nobody who worries about NSFW issues will dare follow a forum link during working hours. I understand the people in cubes with somebody two feet away aren’t going to. But I think the restrained girl is a little daunting even to people with more slackitude. I have a lot of slack (for the moment…as always a little prayer with that), but I try to think of people who don’t.

I’ve recently come to some interesting conclusions about myself as a Dominant. I’m not going to try to parse them into text until at least after the current production goes down, but I have a much better understanding of myself and what makes me tick, what makes me want to hurt people. I have a better understanding of where some of my extreme fetishes come from, and why they’re arousing to me. My only note for the present is that I came to these realizations almost exclusively through working with girls, and not any one particular girl. I think if I hadn’t been able to see myself reflected in several different girls, I would never have understood these things. My real point here is that if it is the role of a Dominant to help a submissive grow, understand, and become more conscious of her motivations and needs, it is also the case that a Dominant should grow too. I feel like I mature every year, and no matter how “good” I may think I am (and I tend to be realistic about that), every sixth months I can look back and see that my understandings as a Dominant have matured greatly over half a year.

I’ll eventually write about this, because as much as I am fascinated at delving into the minds of submissives…or at least the girls that end up being special to me…most of them have expressed a desire to know what makes me tick.

So that was some non-information huh? “I’ll tell you later”…bad Dom, no doing non-consensual sceneplay with your Blog.

I’ve also come to some interesting realizations about women. Over the past five years I have come to believe that a certain number of things are true about how women think, act, behave and respond sexually.

I don’t think these things are demeaning, however I think some of them could be put in a very demeaning light. To be fair some things I think are true of men could be put in a demeaning light too.

It is unpopular and not politically correct to believe in gender differences. Especially if you're at Harvard, Tufts has a little more slack for it. For years, I felt somewhat of a fraud. I consider myself to be a feminist, and a fairly old-school feminist. I believe in equality for women in all regards. And to a part of me it was very difficult to reconcile this with the fact that in acting as a Dominant I exploited mental characteristics and social characteristics that I was aware occurred more rarely or not at all in men. On the other hand, the social Darwinist in me said that these things must be true, because they worked, and empiricism beats theory under field conditions.

But one of the first girls I really spent a lot of time around as an adult considered Desmond Morris to be approximately the antichrist, and was, by inference, horrified by Dennett or Steve Pinker. The fact that there is a school of “difference feminism” doesn’t actually make things better. It’s not associated with heavyweight scientists, but rather philosophers and with the Catholic Church, which is not an entity I deeply desire to associate myself with.

On the other hand, I’m not really an adherent more than incidentally of Sartre or de Beauvoir. But empirically most of what they say bears out in my experience. But I’ve sought for a long time to connect my empirical evidence with modern science. I’ve recently come to two conclusions.

I honestly think that modern science on gender differences is poor, or rather underdeveloped. Since conspiracy theories are almost universally bullshit, there has to be a good, plausible, reason for this. I think there is. It’s an explosive topic that is certain to be a lightning rod for criticism. A single misstep or overstatement could damage or break a scientific/academic career. A liberal professor who finds that nobody but Bob Jones University will touch him or her is in a bit of a bind. On the other hand, there’s very little payoff. Stem-cell research may be controversial, but any research company can see a world of incredibly lucrative patents floating just on the horizon. The only remuneration in gender difference research is maybe writing a book, and that’s not the world’s most profitable undertaking. Sure there’s some interest in the corporate world because of work relations, and I suspect that market drives what research there is, and there is some. But in the long run except maybe in advertising (and we know far more about women’s perceptions than anything else because of this), there isn’t a big market for it. Most of us are fine not knowing.

I keep in touch with the sciences, if only to have conversation topics at cocktail parties. I’m just not big on following sports, and end up talking to the smart people who hang around the bar drinking too much and know too many words.

Over the years I read a lot of flat statements that I'll paraphrase as “modern sociology has found very few real differences between the genders. They are mostly mythical.” I reject that because it doesn’t even allow for “nurture” differences due to upbringing, and anyone with a couple of functional brain cells left can figure out that those must exist.

I’m not obsessed with the idea that women are biologically different from men in terms of thought processes. But I’m a historian by training, and it’s clear to me that over millennia, until the last blink of a historical eye, women were constrained by things men weren’t. Childbirth, child-rearing, nursing, and death in childbirth. Men were constrained by those things in different way because the children didn’t end up in their literal laps. Most other species have behaviors that make this process central to them, and the fact that we’re more complex than penguins doesn’t mean that these facts don’t shape our psychology. And a few centuries of writing and Starbucks don’t erase those behaviors. From a Dominant’s perspective, nature or nurture is an “eh” question. Empirically, what’s true is true.

That said, in really digging in I’ve found more support for my empiric observations than not. There is good research out there. If you look around you can find plenty of writing about Simon Baron-Cohen's theory that women are better at empathetic thought, and men better at systematic and analytical thought, and linguistics professor Deborah Tannen’s popular works suggesting differences in conversational styles in women and men. A special bow to Tannen for being a local out of Georgetown U by the way.

Moderately little of the scientific focus has been on sexual differences, but again, sex-based science is not actually all that lucrative. Amateurs usually manage to produce sexual content just fine without help from modern science, and it’s garish and hard to get grants for.

Still, all scientific support aside, I’ve run up against studies that suggested that this or that behavior was pretty evenly distributed between women and men, and my reaction was “no that’s overwhelmingly more common in women.”

My recent realization is that from a scientific point of view, my empirical evidence is limited. I’m familiar with the behaviors of young, sexually active, relatively cosmopolitan women, with a bias towards intelligence and education (and being American or European). I’m perfectly willing to accept the concept that statistically these do not represent an even distribution of the population.

On the other hand they apply to the people I’d be interested in as partners (in the theoretical sense of “circle of people who would be acceptable” not “people I’m pursuing”), and to a significant percentage of the other women in my social circles. In a larger way the same objection applies to Tannen’s work. There’s a suggestion that it’s true, but only among women of a certain background and socio-economic status.

So I can accept the limits of my empiricism. My theories of behavior don’t apply to all women, just most of the ones I know and would sleep with, and their extended circles of friends. But it allows me to accept without too much reservation that within my skewed population sample, most of the things I have observed are statistically, if not invariably, true. That’s called “market segmentation.” It increases my confidence not to constantly be questioning "why do I see this quality all the time when I'm told it only exists in half the population." The answer is "well, I'm not Domming...or even having sushi with...that half the population."

That’s probably a cold and rather corporate way to look at it, but then, consider who’s blog you’re reading? See this is what I mean when I tell girls I’m not a nice person and they smile and tell me I am.

I haven’t gone much into detail about what things I have observed to be true. I’ll save that for another post too. I’ve alluded above to Baron-Cohen (no idea if he’s any relation), and Tannen, but of course my personal observations are more sexual and more oriented towards dominance and submission issues. I’ll recall here a conversation I once had with a Domme who said flatly than far more men than women were submissive, where I tend to feel more women than men are submissive. Clearly we must both be on to something at least in terms of observations within our marketing segment. So both of those things must be somewhat true.

A very simplistic (and thus open to much valid criticism) paraphrase of my overall take might be that women are biased towards social dominance, and men towards physical dominance, though neither of these is absolutes, and everyone has them in some measure. For what it’s worth I believe that being a good all around Dominant requires working against these norms to some extent, in the case of both genders, and clearly I believe that there are good female and male Dominants.

My final note for the day is that there is more use than one for bondage straps. My luggage for longer ends up being a standard roller-suitcase (toybag) with a small duffel on top of it (toiletries and clothes). I’m also usually carrying a laptop and another bag of some sort. On the MARC I want to sit at the one seat with the power outlet so I can work on the laptop. This does not put me next to the one cubby capable of taking luggage the size and rough weight of some of the girls I know.

And of course the bag is top heavy and wants to flop over every time the train moves, so you can’t just sit it in an aisle. However, I found that bondage straps made a lovely way to strap it to the support post for the seat. And it stayed there nicely.

The entire trip.

Rambling Notes, Fetlife, Ugly Art...

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Starting a D/s Relationship

So this is the time of year when I don’t have time for doing blog writing. So posts get few and far between. It’s been a trying month, but never because of any of the people in it. Everyone has been the very best sort of people and I appreciate that. A lot of very nice surprises all around. I seldom complain about my life but when it comes to people around me I have nothing to complain about.

On a couple of occasions in the past two years, I’ve been asked questions or wanted to talk about the course of a starting D/s relationship. What I have observed to be true. So I admit this is a rewrite for time, but it bears repeating, and I think I have polished this piece better than either of the ones it is drawn from.

There is no firmly fixed way to start a D/s relationship. I don’t tend to be a big “scene” player, going to clubs to do just one scene with a girl. I’m not averse to it, I just don’t end up doing that sort of play very often. So mostly it’s been about meeting girls and establishing a relationship and plan.

It's up in the air whether to meet and do a session the first time. I tend to like to just meet and talk, make the girl wait until next time. If she’s up for it, the waiting will be good, and if she is not, it will give her time to rethink and back out. I always like to give plenty of opportunities for a girl to back out. I suppose you could think this isn’t “domly.” I know there is a certain amount of wanting you to push her up against the wall and take her. But I think because you are going to be violent are going to be controlling, then coercion becomes a real issue. And the solution to coercion is to allow an out, that doesn’t hurt.

Yes, I’ve lost girls that way. Given them outs to walk away and they were scared enough to take them. And yes in a couple of cases I’m kind of sorry. But in the long run I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So for a first session, ideally I like to meet for a drink or chat, then go someplace private for a few minutes and go over the things you can't do in public. Give a very short version of the experience of being under control, being ordered. Kneeling, a few positions, what it's like to be *looked* at that way. Maybe some handling. Not much more. Then go to drinks or dinner. After that I make an offer to go back and do a short session, because by then it's a lot more comfortable. I’ve never had anyone who stuck around for the first part who didn’t go back for the second. But I do think it affects comfort level to have a breather. I can’t always work it that way, but…it is something to do.

Typically any introductory session is going to be pretty light. And this in itself can be a problem. Usually it works out okay. Because you have a girl coming in saying “yeah baby hurt me,” but by the time they are there with toys laid out and your hands on them, they’re feeling a lot of fear and excitement, and anything you do is going to get a reaction. But still there can be problems, especially if there has been play before in fantasy…chat, e-mail, whatever. So you can have a girl who is being very hard on herself because she’s not doing those things she fantasized about. She can even be let down because I’m not doing them to her, even if on another level she would freak if I did, because she isn’t ready for it yet. A Dominant cannot rely on an inexperienced submissive to know what they are ready for, and yet cannot go too soft. You have to push, but just hard enough. I tend to start with a lot of discipline, positions, to convey a feeling of being controlled, to bring out submission. Because that gets you away from “I so suck because this hurts instead of feeling good…”

If I'm any good. this clicks…and she doesn't care how "well" she's doing, only that she's doing. Usually this is a pretty powerful experience. The mindset you want is to get a submissive girl into “space” so that she isn’t thinking about what she is doing anymore in a critical fashion, or if she is it’s a very immediate critical fashion. “Am I pleasing this moment,” not “do I suck as a person, am I fucking up…” You want all that gone…you want her acting not judging. It's hard to believe that a scene with just control and discipline can be a good exciting scene, but it can.

Not every submissive wants the same thing. The key to understand here is that there are two levels going on. One which is the stimulus she wants and one the gratification she wants. The stimulus can be control, pain, discipline, humiliation, restraint, fear, or any number of other things.

But there is something beyond that. On some level, there is also a need for attention, validation, catharsis and regeneration. And that can be a real trick because often even if that is an emotional need or desire, the girl won’t admit it, or isn’t okay with wanting it. Doesn’t think she should need it, or doesn’t think she deserves it.

Generally once she has fallen into submissive “space” it becomes easier to accept those things. And if you are a good Dominant, to me, you are not just about beating the girl or getting your rocks off. You are figuring out which of these things she needs and figuring out how to get it into her in such a way that she doesn’t feel guilty about it. In simplest example, maybe she needs to be hit hard enough that she can hear she is a good girl without feeling guilty, or maybe she needs to please you or debase herself in front of you enough to understand you really meant it. Those are horrible oversimplifications of course.

But the Dominant is there to be something solid and fill a need inside the submissive, and I think in most cases that requires functioning on both levels of awareness.

The other reason not to press a first session too hard is that the submissive is learning whether or not she can trust the Dom to pace things, to take control. To do what he says.

Once that trust has been gained the first time, there is something I tend to think of as the “break point.” I cannot say exactly when it occurs, I think it must be different for every girl. Sometime between thirty minutes and about 3-4 sessions. The girl suddenly is comfortable with where she is and wants to do more. Often this reads “a lot more”

To my mind, this is the second point where experience matters, because she isn't really READY to do everything she thinks she can. She's going to need time to process after every new thing. But she may not realize it may want to go crazy and do everything at once. So despite the fact that Doms are not mind-readers, you need to learn her well enough to be a mind-reader by this point and you have *got* to be able to tell what she's ready for and what she's not.

I think this is a point where the rollercoaster can get going pretty fast. If you are doing it fairly well, the girl is accelerating into it full force, may feel pretty much like she's in freefall. Which is a great feeling as long as she knows her Dom is in control. And as long as he’s right there.

But, crash happens. First there is an inevitable time when a girl feels that she is actually in over her head, fears she can't slow down.

Again this is something to learn, and it’s an area where the more experience I get I feel the better I do. Because you are trying to not hold her back, or slow her down, but not letting her head go under water, or let her go too fast and crash. And crash is going to happen. Because we don’t live in the Story of O, and eventually time comes to go back to work or dorm or home or whatever. And the emotions going on are real, and they are chemical and there is a lot of very real stuff happening in the mind and when those chemicals ebb away there is going to be some feeling of “crash.”

I think as a Dom you have to be prepared for the fact that you can become pretty central to a girl during this time. You need to at least be able to do a decent impression of rock solid reliable. The girl can become pretty obsessed. The same behaviors that go with love apply here. Obsessive thought, focus.
There is the potential for damage. If the girl has other boyfriends, they can even lose interest in everything but the D/s relationship. Let other things fall. And be very moody when they are not around the Dominant and “up” to the point of being in danger of crashing when they are.

This is the point where girls first tell their Doms they love them, and mean it. And a good Dom has to not get carried away, not take advantage of the girl during this time. But he also has to not lose his shit and his ability to be a Dom to her. A lot of things can happen here.

A Dom can get tender and lose his ability to control the girl and hurt her, and turn into a boyfriend, and the SM or D/s element can peter out. Become “just a boyfriend” Perhaps that isn’t so bad. But it means giving up on meeting the girl’s needs as a Dominant, and to me that has aspects of a broken promise.

There are no rules or guarantees. I have seen girls drop boyfriends or husbands and never look back. I have seen girls date a “vanilla” partner healthily all through this period, or even begin exploring other BDSM relationships. It depends. Like any new hobby, a girl can get obsessive about BDSM in general and there is some need her to keep her social and turned outward. The BDSM relationship can become very focal.

Some girls seek out 24-7 relationships during this period. They want to be totally controlled all the time. I honestly tend to think that means they aren't getting enough from their Dom in sessions, but…I can also see some reason for it. I tend to think that a girl in this period isn't ready for 24-7 even if she's really disposed that way, and it is her Dom's responsibility to hold her in contact with the real world till she gets through the first rush. Then if she's still serious about 24-7 maybe it's worth talking. But I find once the first flush is off, for most girls so is the need for their lives to center on it. I may be wrong though. That may be a reflection of my immaturity as a Dom that I am not “ready” to move a girl directly into a 24-7 setting. If so it is a limit I can live with at this point in my life.

There's no getting around this period, really. I’ve heard it said that the person needs to be mature, but I am far from certain that immaturity makes it worse, or that age makes it much better. Experience can make it better, but that only comes by going through this. It's just a matter of how strong the two people involved are, and how well the Dominant partner can handle the shifts.

The initial flush does end. I can't say how long it goes on, exactly. I tend to think twelve to fourteen sessions, which could be anywhere from a month to a year or even more. It feels like it won't end but it does. The pace cools, it's not as central anymore, other things start being more focal.

This is the final point where an inexperienced Dom can crash things. Because they can be jealous as hell that the girl is starting to look at other people, isn't as focused on him, on the interaction. The trick here is to understand that this means the relationship is maturing, and get it stable without letting it go out.
That's a trick and not an easy one. Knowing a girl's mind helps. Paying attention helps. Having a fucking sense of humor about things helps. A little fatalism doesn't hurt.
If you get through this final shift, things are usually pretty stable. By now the girl has a firm grounding, knows much more about what she wants, and is getting things she never got before and feeling okay about them.

She begins to be in control of her own submission, rather than her Dominant controlling it for her, and that makes her able to make much more critical choices about her life. This can also be exciting because it means the Dominant can push her harder now, because he’s not constantly fearing coercion

It is my experience that a good Dom is still very central, but his submissive is going to have a lot more ability to make decisions for herself, and much more able to feel confident saying "I want to do this, I don't want to do that."

You can't say really until you reach this point where things are going. Some girls are going to step to another Dominant. Most are at least going to experiment.

Others are going to form a close bond and stay with their first Dom. A Dom has to go through that middle period, hear the things that the girl says, understand they are true, and also understand that how things are at the end is going to be determined by how well he did on keeping the girl's trust, and how much he really clicks with her in terms of sexual excitement, and being able to keep pushing her in ways that make her come hard.

Possibly the hardest thing is that in most situations the words “I love you “ have been used. And you need to be able to hear them, respond to them, know the girl means them and also not delude yourself that alone will keep the relationship going after the initial glow wears off. If you have not deepened that into something else, then you will find the words dry up and blow away. They aren’t lies but they are truths of the moment not truths that last forever unless they are cultivated.

So that is sort of the first phase of submission…I think if it is successful that at the end of that you see the relationship broadening out into an experience that can really push to higher peaks and has a huge amount of potential, because that’s really the period for trust to set in and the initial frenzy to wear into building excitement. I think you can preserve sexual excitement well through this initial period, if you understand that you need to work at it, that it isn’t automatic or easy.

So anyway, for what it may or may not be worth that’s my observation on the patterns that D/s relationships tend to go through. I don’t think there is a right or wrong and I am not saying it is this way for everyone, just that it has been my experience.

Home for the moment...a few preliminary notes on Camp...

Back off the road from a very long month. The whole summer is going to be like that, so between now and MaST I am not sure how many posts we’ll see. I’m on the road again in just two weeks for a non-kink event out in the Midwest, and running interactive theatre events up in Pennsylvania all summer.

I wanted to post a very brief writeup on Camp Crucible. There were promises of pictures but the ones up on the website publicly are still the 2007 photos as far as I can tell, so I’d waited a bit, but you know how these things go.

This was my first time at Camp Crucible. It runs at Camp W. near the Pennsylvania Border, which is a very nice facility. I’d been to Leather Retreat, which runs (or at least at the time was running this was a few years back) at the same Camp in Northern Maryland where several other notable local non-kink events run. I’m being squirrely here because obviously the last thing these places want is a bunch of people showing up to gawk or protest on one of these event weekends. I’ve never heard of the slightest problem, but these are private events and so they keep their locations private.

That said, I like the Crucible site a lot. It’s hilly, but it’s also almost entirely wooded and shady and that was nice. It was cold the first couple of nights, cold enough the first night that outdoor play was out of the question unless freezing to death was your scene. Even the dungeons (which are basically the camp’s sports buildings) were fucking cold. We ran a very tenuous scene frantically trying to sidle the equipment up to one of those two big propane heaters like they use in outdoor cafes, and it wasn’t very comfortable. The noise level was also high enough that I missed a safeword, which led us to be a bit more careful about signaling. I’ve never had that problem before in a club, but clearly it is an issue. It’s hard enough for somebody to safeword in the first place, even “yellow” for minor adjustments, and it is no good at all if you can’t hear them. I’m becoming a fan of having passive signals…hand clenches, things where the bottom has to be pro-active in responding so that you can tell what is going on. Fortunately I read body language I didn’t like and did a check fairly shortly after…it’s worth noting that I think that’s important. I’ve had people feel that “checking” on condition during a scene isn’t very “domly” but I think it just makes sense and I don’t think you have to be a milquetoast about it.

My rant about cold-weather scenes some other time. Fortunately the weather improved.

I am not going to say too much about experiences yet. I was there with m. which I think most folks know if it matters to them at all, and she had some first time experiences. I’ll mention two because they were public and there’s no secret to them, which is getting suspended by our friend Steve B, and doing fireplay with the appropriately named “Pyrosadist” who also taught me a neat trick with 100% alcohol and a spray bottle which is going to show up in live theatre in the near future. There was also a cutting which I don't think is any big secret, and we may see pictures of here at some point. It's been shown around a bit, and matched the flag we had for our campsite.

The alcohol fire trick produces a very impressive dragon’s breath like cloud of flame, very little heat. You can play with alcohol fire a lot and do interesting things with it. One particularly cool effect was drawing lines of alcohol on the skin and setting them off so that waves of fire travel along the skin…it’s impressive. All this doesn’t really burn because alcohol burns too fast and too cool to burn. But you need to have some idea what you’re doing. For all my playing with fire in a big way (note the scars on my right hand) I have never done much fireplay in BDSM, possibly because all the fires of my misspent youth and production career were bigger and hotter. One of my few confirmed and witnessed skills is to know just about exactly how big the fireball from a gasoline blast is going to be. I tend to use the good Boy Scout method of starting campfires. A gallon of gasoline and a stick with a rag on it…boom…instant campfire. Me nature boy. That’s a four dollar firestarter now.

Steve B did several suspensions over the course of the weekend and was kind enough to teach me a little about rope. I am actually not as bad as I envision myself, I just have this ideal that comes from watching too many really talented people. You keep watching David Ortiz and you get convinced you can’t hit a softball, because you sure as hell don’t hit it like that. Got to watch a couple of very interesting suspensions including one in saran wrap.

Unless you “buy out” you do four hours of camp service. I signed up for taxi driving, because natch, I used to be a hack. Had a celebrity passenger (Ted Kennedy), a heart attack, and decided to get out before I got the woman having a baby. Or shot. People talk about dangerous jobs, but statistically cab driving is one of the most dangerous jobs you can have. Wasn’t ever too bad for me, I got threatened with a knife once, but I talked the guy down and even got a fare and an apology. He was messed up, but who isn’t from time to time.

Taxis are golf carts, which are just kind of fun to drive. How can you not have fun driving a golf cart. It’s like being a kid again and having a go-cart. I never had a go-cart, but starting at a tender age I drove tractors in the summer which was the redneck version of go-carts, only they actually did useful work. Mowing mostly in my case.

Anyway, I began driving full loops and was eventually told not to drive through the rather tricky back of the camp. In retrospect this makes sense, as it was probably not a drive for everybody but you have to have some sense about things like that. Slow and steady. Had only one minor accident. A well-known local mistress and her pony (male, huge, in full tack that must have cost more than one of my mortgage payments), were getting off. I felt the ease up on the back that tells me that the passenger has stepped off and started to pull away. Well that was actually the hundred pound or so bag of harness coming off and I had to stop before I tossed him off, one hoof on and one hoof off. I concluded I did fine with human passengers but was still having a little trouble with livestock. Not my usual trade.

A word or two about ponies. A lot of outdoor events feature big Pony Shows. For folks who don’t know about this, Pony Play is where you have humans dress up as (somewhat sexualized) ponies. These aren’t the current year’s photos, but they should give you a good idea. Ponies and Some More Ponies At least a half dozen of these folks were present this year as well.

I never really paid a lot of attention to Pony Play, though I know a couple of very accomplished and decorated trainers. I do have a few observations.

Pony Play has a lot of flash. The entire camp stops for the Pony Show and nearly everybody comes to watch. So it’s a natural place for exhibitionists. It’s clear to me that while the original urge of this may have been a fetish towards dehumanization, that’s a very small part of it now. You see some players in the very elaborate boots that turn feet into hooves but you also see girls in sexy heels, with just a slight equine accentuation to their costuming, and the tack.

I think Pony Play is a very upbeat area of kink. Most of the folks seem to have fun with it, and I see more smiling pony girls than about anything else. The men range from looking fierce to smiles, but everyone seems to have a good time.

I am beginning to think every girl looks better in tack, because…women in leather…what’s not to like.

To describe it briefly performances are about evenly divided between “serious dedication to pony play” and “looking cute and having fun.” Conformation Awards seem to go to those who present a more “equine” presentation, while Gymkhana Awards go to those who do dance routines, etc. (And no, I don’t know if it’s O-Mok-see out in California or not. ) There is also a division between routines performed harnessed to a cart, and those that are performed without.

There were some very sexy routines and some outstandingly comedic ones…one of which a girl trained by someone I know won an award for. And another friend was Grand Champion, which was very nice to see and certainly something she deserved.

As a side note to folks who are not firmly embedded in the kink community. I don't think that you particularly have to have the slightest interest in bestiality, real or feigned, to think Pony Play is fun. I am certain that there are people into it who have bestial fantasies, but...that's hardly key to it. Nothing wrong with that, but it's clearly not a requirement for buy-in. We all associate with animals, power, and animalistic tendencies from time to time, and there is a lot of grace in horses. I think the statement often goes no further than that.

Anyway, I think it sounds a little weird if you haven’t seen it, but…the best thing I can explain it is mix a bit of equine fetish with a lot of Las Vegas. It’s showgirls (and boys) and that’s always kind of fun. The carts are available afterwards to give ladies a ride to the afternoon tea, which I should have arranged for m., but we were a little pressed for time. The tea is a ladies-only affair, so I got a bit of rest.

A comment somebody made is that they felt there was a very strong “family” feel to Camp Crucible, and I think that’s true. I also see that Dark Odyssey is now running LR, so I have high hopes for that as well. Like I can afford three or four big leather events next year. But there is a nice family feel.

There was a nice little garden area outside the Dining Hall, and if you showed up about an hour early there would generally be some sort of show going on, by which I mean people fucking, or engaged in some other activity of the sort. Not much beating. That was for other areas, the Oasis was a bit too calm for that...a few nice bites...I managed to arrange at least one bit of entertainment there myself, about which I won't say too much more, not really having had time to talk it over with the young lady in question.

There was a good friendly feel. I met some new people I’d corresponded with online, and seen around Crucible, but not really known, including someone who looks *interesting* to play with. You know who you are. Also…let’s see if I can tell this story without references.

So standing in the dining hall, a guy recognizes me. It takes me a moment to recognize him, I get it when he references Annandale High School, which we both attended. The one in Fairfax County around here, not the one in Donald Fagen’s song, alas. So we chat for a while and he’s very active with BR, and sceneplay. We begin to talk about what a small world it is. I am talking about doing interactive theatre and other stuff and not having as much time as I’d like. He mentions “one of the girls at our table’s regular S/O is actually at a convention in Baltimore this weekend.”

I blink. “That would be R?”

He says “Yes how did you know…”

I reply “the girl I’m here with is dating him…”

So I introduce them and they get along well, which is good. M. now believes that everyone who went to Annandale is a confirmed pervert…

And she may be right….

Notes from Camp Crucible

As most of our readers here know, I'm at Camp Crucible this weekend with m. I'd anticipated not posting till I returned, but the program book claims that the nightly slideshows, photographed during the day by Pheroscope photography will be posted to the Crucible website, and it suggests we tell our friends to go there to "see what they're missing." So far it doesn't look like anything new has been posted, but I'll float the link out anyway: http://campcrucible.com/Voyage/front.html

Gods help us if they use my savage visage on film...not the best advertisement. The lovely m. has declined to be photographed. Last night's slide show featured two people that some of our dear readers may recognize, and one photo was actually pretty flattering.

Driven to Tears with Sarah Sloan

This is almost certainly the last post before Camp Crucible. I'm still going to recap the Dark Odyssey workshops, but I'll probably insert some Camp material as well.

So recapping Sarah Sloan's saturday morning workshop “Driven to Tears.”

A couple of notes from this workshop. Sarah mentioned Tristan’s new site. OpeningUp.net which is aimed at , polyamory. Good source.

Sarah also put in a good word for the sex/kink aware professionals site. Professionals, particularly Psychologists and Counselors, are very important, and this is an excellent site for finding a professional who can meet your needs in a non-judgmental fashion.

This was probably one of the best workshops of the weekend, and I’ve mentioned I love Sarah as a presenter. This probably came closest at really getting into some of the aspects of psychological play that I’ve found drive me. I left this workshop very emotionally jazzed, and that was notwithstanding the bloody mary I sucked down on the way out the door. It was more intellectual than some of the other workshops. Said Sarah “I like to use big words. If I paid $20,000 a year to learn a word, I like to use it.”

I think it’s going to be very difficult to give a linear account of this workshop because it wasn’t that linear. There was some audience participation and just a lot of interesting bits and pieces.

Sarah plays as both a top and bottom, and got her start in the formal leather community in Richmond, so spent a lot of time in gay bars polishing boots (as we’ll learn later). She was very forthcoming about her own emotions and experiences. One of the early anecdotes she related…and this was a very anecdotal workshop, was of a period a few years back where she found herself in an endless cycle of being in pain and was unable to cry.

I want to mention that Sarah is a pretty together person from appearances. You always get that in the Community…people who appear very together on the surface but clearly have some significant pain in the depths. But she’s not somebody who gives off an atmosphere of fragility. She talks very clearly and calmly about these things, and is entertaining and generally pretty upbeat.

At any rate, she called a top she knew, I believe I recall that she said he was a gay male top, and said, to paraphrase “Could you come over and beat me till I cry”

He was hesitant at first, and she discovered that it was because he was afraid of promising her that anything was going to change after the scene. I could feel this very strongly as it’s always been an issue for me. What happens if you do your damndest and fail to move someone. Again we’re hitting this old school approach of just beating someone very hard, but I think it’s true of mental play as well, and Sarah’s workshop went far afield of simple beatings.

At the time it was about the strongest beating she had taken, though she said, “I have since been beaten harder”…her summary “I wanted him to continue to hit me until he literally though my body wouldn’t take it anymore or until I told him to stop. “

This provided a foundation to talk about serious edgeplay of all sorts. The push in this workshop though wasn’t of flying or sending people away, but more the psychological aspects that are so important to me in terms of extreme play.

There was a lot of discussion on the trust issues. Sarah tackled what I see as the core dichotomy of being a Dominant: “How you are going to balance their need to trust you with inducing fear in them. “ This is an issue from the bottom point of view as well. “If you have to monitor ‘you’re hitting me too hard’ you can’t really let go and trust the top. Bottoms can’t let go when they do let go, Bottoms stop being picky”

“It’s an Inherent contradiction. I want to instill fear, but I want them to be able to trust me.”

Illustrating she mentioned a woman who had told her “What I need in a top is the exact opposite of what I need in a husband. I need to feel loved by my husband and afraid of my top.”

I think there’s room for feeling loved by the top to, but it’s something to be very careful with.

Some useful point of reference. Sarah suggested “the Top needs to know what you look like when you’re good, and what you look like when you’re not good. If when you push back against the restraints you’re struggling because you like it, or because you are really trying to get away and can’t safeword.” This hit something that I’ve always observed. Every submissive has different signatures, different tells, in how she responds to stimulus, so that you can tell by looking if she is processing it, or if things are going south. Learning to read an individual girl’s “tells” is sometimes difficult, but always rewarding, because it broadens the play you can risk doing.

There was talk of a lot of various types of extreme scenes, including psychological touchstones like incest and humiliation. One comment I thought was interesting is that “there is no outside gauge of success or failure on humiliation play.”

Sarah also mentioned “I know a lot of people who say they don’t or you should never use SM scenes as a way to process through rape, etc. Maybe so, but that’s going to happen. It’s going to jump up and hit you sooner or later if you keep playing.” And there is no reason it cannot be intentional. “You don’t have to get raped by a stranger to relive a rape experience”

I got a few interesting rules out of this workshop. Sarah suggested that it’s not uncommon to have a fairly big crash about three days after a big scene, which she usually handles with alone time. She also suggested following up a successful intense scene with something pretty light. She suggested ways to give a partner aftercare chores that help buffer them against crashing, like “get rest, eat a kit kat bar,”

There was some talk of the spiritual side too, with references to Raven Caldera who writes about BDSM as a spiritual tool through an “Ordeal Path.” Again, I’m not against it and I can think of worse things, but one reason I am involved in emotional release through sexual play is that I left behind the concept of emotional release and catharsis through religion and seek it through drama and intimate relationships with other human beings. So reintroducing religion into that equation isn’t something I’m really interested in.

A better framing for me in regards to this sort of edge/emotional play was “liminal space” http://parole.aporee.org/work/hier.php3?spec_id=19650&words_id=900 a fascinating concept I’ve been doing a bit of reading on. I think in this context the concept is to push into a mental and emotional space where transition can happen. This fits in better than strict spirituality with the idea that BDSM is a powerful vehicle for catharsis, and the focus of this workshop was Physical/Mental/Emotional catharsis.

One thing I found very constructive is that Sarah was not afraid to phrase hard questions. She also had a sense of humor, talking about a very analytical partner who will not stop talking during scene…so she gags him.

Some questions that were asked is “How far is far enough” and the comment was made that “You can only get so far into people’s heads,” a truth I’ve felt and lived. There was also discussion of thinking seriously about what you get out of extreme emotional play from either side.

There was a warning that this is not the sort of casual play you can just walk away from. Sarah felt you need to keep in some degree of contact, check in and make sure that your partner was doing alright, mentally and potentially physically… “Take them to the hospital a few days later when that hand doesn’t feel better.”

Talking about intense scenes, Sarah described a scene where after considerable discussion a breath control play partner asked her to choke him to unconsciousness…something that makes this a particularly relevant post with the release of Choking Jennifer in the erotic fiction area.

All in all it was a great workshop and I love Sarah as a presenter. Quotes by the way are attributed with permission.

Grand Theft Auto

So apparently all you need to know about dating is actually available through Grand Theft Auto. Who'd have thunk...

"[I]f you kill a girl through abuse, she will no longer be your girlfriend."

Serious Pain Sluts

Continuing my run through the workshops of Dark Odyssey, I am going to talk a little about Dossie Easton’s “Bottomless Pits: Serious Pain Sluts,” workshop.

I loved the concept of this workshop. The truth is that most of my partners aren’t/ and have not been serious pain sluts. I’m fine with that. I absolutely do not think you judge a submissive by how much pain they can “take” you judge them by what they do with whatever pain they choose to take. And if that is none at all, it’s still fine. D/s is not necessarily about pain at all. Even when I jokingly use the term “pain slut” really I don’t mean it in the full sense. It’s flattering to a girl and a woman who has taken a good bit of pain may like to hear it. But you know there are levels.

Still I’m intrigued by the concept, and I have played with one or two girls who did have a strong appetite for being hurt a lot, as opposed to just being hurt.

I have tremendous respect for Dossie Easton. For folks who don’t recognize her name, she’s a family therapist based in San Francisco, CA. Easton is the co-author with Catherine Liszt (Janet Hardy) of The Ethical Slut, Radical Ecstasy; When Someone You Love is Kinky, The New Topping Book; and The New Bottoming Book. Dossie and Cathy were my introduction to reading about BDSM, and born in 1944, Dossie is a legend in the leather community. Ethical Slut is sort of the quintessential starter book for Polyamory and even if I don't agree with all of it, I think it's a huge starting place, and has done a lot of people a world of good in just making them feel it's a normal, healthy lifestyle. Dossie's Bachelor Thesis says it all Sex is Nice and Pleasure is Good for You.

Easton is frank about her experiences with childhood abuse. She talked about a scene gone bad, where she “came to believe that it was actually non-consensual.” In that scene, she said “I am mostly looking at my father and saying ‘see how hard you can beat me motherfucker.’” This reminded me of a comment in Sarah’s workshop (which we’ll get to in a day or two) where she mentioned that “it is fine to say that you are not looking to re-enact rape, or abuse, that you’ve experienced. But one day they are going to come up.”

That said, the workshop wasn't quite what I'd hoped. It really concentrated an awful lot on the heroics of flogging. I think it was reflective of a sort of older generation of BDSM which revolved around flogger and whip heroics the way that Metal revolved around guitar heroics. Easton is sort of the Pete Townshend of getting flogged (how’s that for taking an analogy one step further than it should ever have been taken).

There was also an undercurrent of spirituality that’s a bit foreign to me. I respect people’s spiritual beliefs, but…I don’t get much involved in church religion and I don’t get much involved in alt-religion.

So lets focus on the good things I did get out of the workshop. First there was a reminder of a lovely quote from e.e. cummings about his promiscuous wife “She was a woman upon whom many men might go like a ship….” However I think the quote may underestimate the original bitterness of cummings sentiments.

A lot of the workshop focused on the concept of going to what Dossie calls “the forever place,” which is sort of an intense verison of flying.

Obviously this is somebody who knows whereof she speaks. She was beaten 7hrs 15 min without a break for her 48th birthday and 5 hours for her 50th. More significant than her professional creds may be a reference from a “Y” gym in SF, where a person who had never met Easton told a friend of hers that she was doing badly at tennis because she had “Dossie arm.” To have one’s name enshrined as someone who wears out arms may be a formidable quality in a bottom.

There was some good practical discussion of the problem that submissives who are “flying” don’t want to stop and Doms who try to make them stop are going to cause problems. “They think if they hit you harder you are going to want them to stop. And the sub is not going to want to stop. So how do you put scenes together.” Along those lines the comment “If a top is overprotective of a bottom that bottom cannot fly. But you must be willing to stop.”

There are other technical issues as well. The typical technique is to relax the shoulders and neck and use breath control to process pain. The recommendation is that you do something that is going to be really painful at the end of an exhale (this also limits the amount of air available for a scream). But the technique isn’t always what is needed. “Someone was telling me not to strain, and at that moment I was too endorphined to feel it unless I strained against it.”

There was discussion of the philosophical concept explored in some recent writing that pain is a natural visceral experience that our society has lost connection with because we are so good at avoiding it.

There was a general commentary on Doms who stop scenes because they are uncomfortable with them, and then blame it on the sub. An observant audience member said “it pisses me off when a top tells me ‘you need to stop’ when it is them that needs to stop.” This can be amplified by abuse. “Don’t tell bottoms that they are being a greedy pig if you are a top and you are worn out and have to stop. Bottoms already feel guilty for the attention they get.” The recommendation was a simple “We have to stop now," or "I need to stop."

One problem with these scenes is that there is not an obvious way to close. Dossie points out that “sometimes going to sex will close the scene, but sometimes it is disappointing,” and that if they’re disappointed coming off the high then equating sex with disappointment is not necessarily the thing you want. She also said that’s its common for orgasm to bring you out of “the space.”

Dossie recalled one scene where she was topping and the submissive seemed to feel a sense of failure calling yellow and saying “I can’t take anymore.” She said “I want five more will you give them to me” and said “Those five strokes made it from a failure into a triumph.” I recalled a very similar ending to a scene one evening…

One suggestion for ending scenes was to start counting strokes. “Counting strokes starts to bring the scene down and makes it finite” Having used that myself to end scenes that involved a lot of impact play where I didn't have a natural stop point, I'm very fond of that idea.

A bit of attention was given to the fact that subs in these situations forget safewords. One good suggestion was a Feedback safeword. “I will squeeze your hand. The harder you squeeze back, the more okay you are.”

All in all there was a lot to learn here, from practical advice “make sure everyone pees in advance,” to technique “moving into someone’s personal space is very effective,” to theory “sometimes it’s good to know what the vulnerabilities are…shared vulnerabilities are amazingly intimate.”

It was a good workshop and there was a lot to learn. I’d hoped to get a bit more into the psychology of pain sluttery, and the drives behind it, but what was presented was useful and the demo was well worth taking notes on as well.

I took away one other lesson as well. I think there are two trunks of BDSM play. One aims at creating an inner experience through a certain detachment. When you are being beaten for five or six hours by various people, I don’t think the relationship is with the person doing the beating. You are not controlling them. They may be getting something out of it, but that thing is a little distant for me.

I prefer the second trunk of BDSM, one that demands and promotes presence. Where there is an intimate experience between me and the girl I am working with, because I am who I am, and she is who she is.

I don’t want to deride “flying,” I think it has it’s place. But it’s not my core kink and I came out of this workshop understanding that better.

Advertising Note: It's seldom that an advertising campaign really hits home with me. I thought the Budweiser frogs were kind of funny, and sure the Gekko is cute. The Caveman can be amusing. But honestly none of those really gripped me. I never collected frog paraphenalia or watched the Caveman's Youtube videos. But now there is AT&T with "More Bars in More Places." That's an advertising campaign I can get behind.