Thursday, July 17, 2008

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.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Rambling Notes, Fetlife, Ugly Art...

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