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.

Dead Whores and "Lot 98"

My friend who posts as Angeline DC on Literotica has posted Chapter 2 of her story "The Bidding of Lot 98." This is the second time in a couple of weeks I've pimped one of her stories, but I should note that it's the first time she's posted anything new since August of last year, and before that it was 2002. It just so happens when it rains it pours.

For folks who follow my interactive theatre events, this is the sequel to the piece that provided the inspiration, though not the actual background for the "Holland House" scenario(s), so that may be of interest.


******************************************************
Dead Whores


Not too long ago Deborah Jeanne Palfrey went into a garden shed in Florida, put a nylon rope around her neck and spent the last few moments of her fifty two years of life kicking her life out on the end of it. For those of you who live on Mars (or to be fair in Germany), and have never heard of her, Palfrey was a madam of sorts. She didn’t own a gaudy house with Victorian furniture, but she booked call girls and provided them for sex to men in the DC area. This got her the name “Washington Madam.”

Palfrey was indicted and convicted for a welter of charges that spring from the fact that her business was illegal. When your business is illegal then doing it becomes racketeering, money laundering and using the mail for illegal purposes. For the record, Palfrey was no tyrant. She wasn’t really a madam either, she was an agent. She had clients who would pay good money and were presumably somewhat safe. She put young women with a college education and outside work in touch with them, and in return took a 50% cut, which considering she was advertiser, and ultimately carried most of the risks, seems not unfair.

Palfrey’s suicide seems to have been a willful act and maybe a comment. A woman with Palfrey’s contacts and means could not have been unable to arrange for a more painless exit, nor under any illusion that death on the end of a nylon rope would be pretty. But Palfrey had an intimate connection to another dead woman who died on the end of a rope for her crime of prostitution, Brandy Britton.

Palfrey told ABC News she would never go to Federal Prison. She’d told Washington writer Dan Moldea, who was considering writing a book about her, that “I am not going back to prison. I will commit suicide first.”

[Updated to include Palfrey's suicide note to her Mother and Sister

One might think she was cowardly, a Hollywood pampered queen unwilling to contemplate prison. But she spent eighteen months in prison for a 1993 conviction for running a Prostitution ring in California. So you have to believe that she knew what she was facing. She could expect four to six years. I do not know that if I faced being locked up as a fifty two year old man and spending the last four to six really healthy years of my life in Federal Prison, to emerge nearly sixty years old, I would not strongly consider a quicker and more permanent solution. At the very least she knew what she was facing.

But Palfrey isn't who I really want to write about. The person I really want to talk about is Brandy Britton, a person that even most friends who follow these things don't know ever existed.

Britton was a double major in biology and sociology, the first in her family to earn a degree. She was remembered as very bright. Her career suggests she was temperamental. She became a PhD and eventually ended up being dismissed from University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Britton may not have been an ideal person or an ideal employee. According to NBC News: In 1999, Britton lost her job at UMBC and filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the university. In dismissing the suit, which was is on appeal, a federal judge in Baltimore cited complaints about Britton from UMBC students and colleagues, and an accusation by the National Institutes of Health that Britton falsified data on a federally funded research project. Britton had taught sociology at the school beginning in 1994.

We don’t know much about why the gender-discrimination suit.  Normally I'm inclined to give some credit to people who bring forward gender-based suits, but the dismissal seems pretty stiff, I'm not aware UMBC has particularly bad practices, and her colleagues don't seem to have been particularly supportive.  There are statements that she’d had another suit against a previous employer.  Maybe she was wronged, and just didn't manage to make friends.  It's also possible she wasn't the sort of person you'd be sympathetic to, an embittered harridan, raging against others in her department and provoking hatreds, the sort of person everyone gives a sigh of relief to see go.

There is certainly some suggestion she was depressive and temperamental. My personal guess would be a depressive personality who covered for failures at work badly, and may have tended to come back too aggressively when questioned.  It's not an unknown pattern for people who are attracted to a secret sex life have trouble getting on well with others, particularly of the same gender in their enviornments.  The suits? I suppose if I lost my job my attorney would advise me to sue on any grounds I could come up with. If I was desperate and had a couple of kids and an expensive house, I might.

Like Palfrey you can color Britton as somebody who didn’t want to deal with how the other half lives. She was turning tricks to keep her $400 suburban home in Howard County, and working out of her house, which is probably what got her in troubles. The area she was working is not tolerant of anybody whose sexual habits stray too far from June Cleaver. And there’s a legitimate complaint about running a business in your home. But that’s small fine caliber antics.

Classically Liberal says: Busybody neighbors bare some of the responsibility. They noticed “men pulling up in fancy cars and staying only briefly”. What is missing? They didn’t notice any deterioration of the upscale neighborhood. They didn’t find drug dealers or other prostitutes hanging around outside the door. In fact they didn’t see anything except men periodically driving up to Britton’s home. But they suspected she was having sex and in America that’s practically considered tantamount to genocide. One can have sex, of course, provided they hide the fact and feel guilty about it.

Britton was publicly humiliated when the Howard County Police trolled her, set her up, raided her and arrested her. Interestingly her reaction seems to have been a war between defiance and despair. She cited a book on sex work and demanded a jury trial. I remember reading about the case and had hopes that despite all the safeguards in our criminal system against anyone actually getting a word out to question the basic validity of the laws we might see an extremely well educated, self-confident, sex worker with a clue as to the ability of the word “jury nullification” to bring a courtroom to a halt, take the stand in an open trial. She’d lose of course, but the punishment wouldn’t be that severe.

In her mind she’d already lost. Her finances were hopeless, and a local blogger believes that she was still doing sex work shortly before her trial to raise money. Her attorney says her house was in foreclosure.

I wish she’d fought, but it is a bit much to ask any human being to put themselves into the dehumanizing three ring circus of a court for our benefit. A part of me thinks she was cowardly. Palfrey thought she was cowardly and said it in very nearly so many words.

But there is more here than meets the eye. The Post says: She was a sharp researcher whose dissertation focused on abused and battered women who then found herself, a few years ago, filing domestic-violence charges against her second husband: "He . . . tied me up with strapping tape" and "stabbed me in the neck," she told police…. [Afriend] talked about Britton's fears that she would lose the house where she had raised two children, now grown, as a single parent and where she had been living with her two potbellied pigs, dog and two cats.

While anyone can end up with an abuser, her dissertation topic and subsequent choices suggest a pattern of abuse in her life. In the end the Law was her final abuser.

Britton had other signs of instability. Close friends suggest she was paranoiac. “…she believed, "they" were tapping her phones and bugging her home. It was too much, she said, and she found herself thinking: " 'I'm going to lay down and die. I'm so depressed.' "

In the end flight won out over fight. She hanged herself in the home she feared losing.

She’d worked for Palfrey, who was well aware of her death. The Chicago Tribune says Last year, Palfrey said she, too, was humiliated by her prostitution charges, but said: "I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of."

One cannot help but think that Britton was strongly on her mind in those last few minutes, before not breathing became her principal concern. In the end the two women died for the same sin…providing a sexual service to Washington men.

Monica Hesse had a rather compassionate writeup in the Post. She described the fate that befell the recipients of these services:

Maybe we feel sad because of the gendered irony. The powerful men whose names surfaced in the scandal, the ones who did not appear in the courtroom, who did not have to discuss their menstrual cycles publicly, have all remained unscathed.

David Vitter is still that good-looking junior senator from Louisiana. Harlan K. Ullman (creator of "shock and awe") is listed as a senior associate on the Web site of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Former State Department official Randall L. Tobias, who previously oversaw AIDS relief, promoting abstinence and a policy requiring grant recipients to swear they opposed prostitution, slunk back to Indiana after his resignation. There, he was appointed president of the board of the Indianapolis Airport Authority. The city's mayor said that America "believed in second chances."

Britton’s attorney, Flohr who said she was “kind and generous” asked “Her death underscores an important question: Was the public benefited at all by the resources spent on her arrest and prosecution?”

I wanted to write a rant on the injustice of the whole thing and instead wrote an obituary. I think this speaks for itself.

Now here is my two cents. These women committed the crime of having sex with strangers. They provided a service I’ve used. They took risks to make the service available and found plenty of consumers. Aside from scandal caused by legal investigation, they didn’t hurt anyone. Moralists can argue that they “hurt” the fabric of society by providing outlets for sex other than married life. For my part I am going to defer to Tristan Taormino who wrote better than I did about Eliot Spitzer’s choices in her Voice column.

All I will say is this. Brandy Britton may have been depressive, and had financial trouble. But I do not think that there is any serious chance that either of these women would be dead if it was not the case that our country makes prostitution a crime.

In most civilized countries, including Canada and Britain, neither woman was doing anything seriously criminal. Palfrey could be charged under “Procuring and living off the income of prostitution” In Canada, but enforcement is sporadic and rare, as the law is aimed at street pimps. A few changes to her operation to make it a portal would probably bring it under Candian Law. Britton would have had to do outcall, which I think we’d agree is not unreasonable.

I am not aware that life, or the state of morals in these countries is any worse than life here. And if it was, is it worth dying for.

It’s not just that. Humiliation comes up in the case of both women. Why should sex-work be humiliating? At best, some of the great courtesans of history are famous and honored. At worst, working the street, I don’t see it as any worse than any other low wage job. But we don’t treat it that way. Society provides plenty of people as customers to prostitutes, but it is humiliating to be one. I understand the social structures that dictated that approach, but like many things it needs to change.

I tend to take prostitution for granted. I dealt with it back in street days, and know from anecdotes and discussions that it’s much safer and more civilized in the era of Craigslist.

But in the end there are still people who get punished and they are not the people like me who use the services. They are the girls who provide them. And when it happens it makes my blood boil and I want to hurt someone but there is nobody to hurt and it would not do any good. So I write a blog post and preach to the choir. But on some level I feel if even one more person knows about these things, maybe it will matter.

So that's all I have to say. That I don't think this is right and it makes me ashamed for us all.

Shibari Workshop, Domain, Erotic Fiction

So at the urging of err hmmm...certain people, I have resurrected the old erotic fiction site, and got most of the material back up. There's an "Erotic Fiction" link on the left. This blog also has a domain now Gordonsdrysin.com which will host a permanent link to the Protocols and some other resources as well as the fiction. I'm probably going to float some of it to Literotica, but I don't think that Roncevalles belongs there.

The only thing I don't have is the 1928 Chapter 1 story. It once existed, got killed on my PC because it was composed at a bad time before I backed up to the Lee server, and is not in the Wayback Machine because it was never linked to a top level site. That's a shame, because I think that the Laura Roth/1938 stories were pretentious and amateurish for several reasons, though they were the first time I let any real brutality emerge in my writing. 1928 was an effort to try the same project, but without the pretention of writing from a female POV, and with a bit more honesty and clarity. But fate seems to have decided it is not to be. If anyone happens to have cached it, I'd be grateful, but I don't expect so, it wasn't up for long.

Except for Cocktail Date, I feel awkward showing most of the old work, but there is still a lot I like about the Laura Roth story, so, I'm going to let it stand as a monument to my youth.

The other more recent story is undergoing final revision which consists of getting someone I respect to tell me it's not pathetic. After that likely it will appear here.

Dark Odyssey - Shibari Workshop

It’s time to start backtracking through the notes I made on Workshops at Dark Odyssey, or it’s going to be time for Camp Crucible, and I’ll just be hopelessly behind.

So I‘ve already mentioned that the first workshop I attended at DO was the ropework introduction taught by Shibari Warrior. He’s a decent guy. I’d expected somebody who looked like Bruce Lee but he’s a pretty average looking Caucasian guy who doesn’t even look much like David Carradine in makeup. All practicality.

And he had a couple of pretty good practical hints I got, before I ditched due to my minimal interest in tying up another guy I didn’t know well.

For those joining this program already in progress, a refresher:

I audited the Shibari class, because honestly my ropework is not that great. I’d hoped to pick up a lot of teaching on rope. This was my one bit of moral cowardice. I went through the first half, but then they wanted people to pair up. S. wasn’t onsite yet, and I just didn’t feel like practicing ropework with a guy. I know, I know, I’m homophobic. Sorry, it’s some sort of bizarre aesthetic. I think I’d feel more comfortable sucking a guy’s cock than fumbling through ropework I don’t do well with a guy I didn’t know. Probably vanity.

Maybe I have an inferiority complex over my ropework. I visualize that I’ll have some girl tied up and this huge Japanese cross between a Sumo Wrestler and “The Big Unit” is going to come up to me with a rope and growl. “Your shibari is no good!” like in a bad kung-fu movie. In the worst versions of this vision his mouth appears to be moving in a way that doesn’t match his words. Seriously I’ve mostly dealt in just making women hold still. There is something deeply satisfying to me about a woman who is restrained because she is obeying your will. That said, tying up has it’s place, and you can’t do everything with chain.

So a couple of useful things to pass along.

1) People get cold from constriction. At some point I will inflict my rant on “cold weather scenes” but the bottom line is that people who are tied up get cold even more quickly than those who aren’t. So you can be fine and your sub can be freezing. Fluffy blankets. Warm playspace.


2) If you are doing ropework, you carry EMT shears. Right, we all know this. This is so that if things go pear-shaped we can cut the girl out before something bad happens, with the maximal application of bad being “she chokes to death and dies because you got a rope around her neck,” and any number of other unpleasant variations dangling underneath. These accidents don’t happen too often, but when they do, you want scissors. Rope is replaceable, your play partner is not

I can pick that up reading the internet. This is the sort of detail I actually go to classes to learn:

So our teacher pointed out that when he started out, he went to the trouble of getting a pair of black handled EMT shears. Because they look cooler than the white ones.

Now he uses white. Why? Because in a dark club in a dark bag the black handled ones stick out exactly like a camouflaged sniper in the jungle, which is to say not at all.

I additionally keep my shears in my blood kit. The blood kit (this contains needles, scalpels, mini-sharps container, etc.) is the only bag that’s not black. It’s bright red. So it’s easy to find. Also easy to tell someone else to grab “the red one.” I looked the other night and they weren’t there. Moved to the front pocket. Not a good thing.

He also talked about the quality of the shears. These are the shears that will cut roughly anything. He basically made the point they will cut anything once. If you use them to cut one rope they are probably fine. If you use them to cut someone out of constriction throw them away.

Also carry more than one pair (need to fix that). A certain number of them are crap and don’t work. You don’t know which so two from different manufacturers is a good idea. But he stressed, since they have short useful lifetimes, testing them is not necessarily the answer.

“Jay Wiseman may test his but cutting a penny and they will cut a penny. But I don’t know that after Jay has cut a penny with them, I’d want to rely on them to ever cut anything else.” Not me, just quoting. No offense to the redoubtable Mr. Wiseman.

Favorite other quote from the session was “Practice makes pervert” which the instructor said we could quote him on but wasn’t original.

I’d have learned more if I stayed around. I really need to work on rope. I know some people who are decent at it, but it’s just never been my specialty. Time to learn, really….