Tuesday, June 24, 2008

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.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

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….