Leather History and Revisionism...

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Choking...with a long awaited story...

I actually feel kind of bad about posting right now. One of the girls noted I had a detractor back in April. I sent an ameliorative note, but it seems like I'm trying to push the blog ahead just to pave that under. I don't moderate comments here and never intend to, and anonymous posting is fine.

It's the busy season and I have little time to post. More in the fall and all next year when things are easier.

Anyway, truth is I just wanted to push this article. It was written by a guy on Fetlife. Amusing story is he e-mailed me about it, but it was in the middle of the first summer production. Truth to tell I'm a novice and couldn't have added much, but it still pleased me to be asked.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-14/the-sexual-appeal-of-choking/2/


On a that note...I've been promising various people I'd post this story for more than a year now. I'd like to thank certain people who helped with editing it, and gave me remarks...you know who you are and my appreciation is genuine.

The disclaimer: it's a composite, it's not about anyone, including anyone who happens to share the same name. I picked a girl's name that wasn't the name of anyone I'd known in years. That worked well...

At any rate, it's out and public. It may go onto other media, but for now the damn story finally has a URL and that's good enough for me.

http://www.gordonsdrysin.com/jennifer.htm

Non-Consensual Figging Scene

Non-Consensual Figging Scene

Note - comments on this page are disabled, because it is a very high hit on Google, and was attracting spam. Feel free to comment on other posts.

So first of all, I should explain what figging is. I suspect most everyone reading this already knows, but I’ll be short column inches if I don’t. “Figging” is the practice of inserting ginger into the anus or vagina.

Wikipedia, that repository of all human trivia, gives a reference from the The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, originally by Francis Grose where it is spelt “feauging” or “to feague.”

So the first thing is that it has nothing to do with figs, those widely worshipped fruits of the ficus tree that we of the first world know only as that kind of strange and disturbing sweet brownish stuff in Nabisco Fig Newtons. Despite the obvious symbolic relationship between the filling of a fig newton and the contents of the anus, figging has nothing to do with the fruit of the ficus. I except of course the Australians who use a fig paste made by Kraft Foods as an after shave.
Figging comes from the German word “fegen” which means “to polish.” I am lying about the after shave, but you thought for a moment it might be true, didn’t you. I’m not sure how closely fegen relates to ficken, but the folk etymologist in me wants badly for there to be a relationship.

Figgging is the practice of sticking a bit of peeled ginger up the ass which produces a fairly strong burning sensation, but unlike say Tabasco sauce or a heated object, does not do any lasting harm.

This practice was not originally, as surprising as this may be, applied to humans. It was originally applied to horses. I originally heard this from S. who knew about it from before the proliferation of BDSM and well before Wikipedia. S. told me that it was applied to horses to make them run faster in races, but apparently this is not precisely the case. It was applied to horses because it makes them move around a lot and hold their heads and tails high. This is a trait that is associated with young and energetic horses. Since in the time before mortgage scams and used cars the only really good fraud in the human race was selling decrepit horses for too much money, every little trick counted and this is a good one. The practice is used in competition where it makes horses show better, but every civilized club or league outlaws it, and there are even tests for it.

Apparently veterinarians say that the actual trick is to put it in the vagina of a mare. It will stay there longer, and the behaviors are actually better. They also say it’s cruel and a bad practice. But, you know, if you’re going to anyway, you might as well get the most bang for your buck, right?

Figging is supposed to have been a popular BDSM practice in the Victorian era…circa “The Pearl.” If you don’t know what I mean by “The Pearl,” I’ll comment that a lot of places will sell it to you for five dollars as an ebook, but you can read it free here: http://www.folklore.ms/html/books_and_MSS/1870s/1879-1880_the_pearl_journal/issue_01_-_july_1879/index.htm

Soo….

I use toy cleaner or the dishwasher fairly regularly, but don’t always have them with me. If a toy is (and most are) relegated to use on one girl, if we’re at a hotel or on the road and I don’t have a good cleaner, I’ll wash it off with warm soapy water. I realize that’s not medically hygienic, but I’m doing roughly the same thing with my hand and it’s going in the same place. We’re not looking at any huge contamination issues here. It’s not the best way to clean a toy but beats leaving it dirty on the bedside table.

So a given girl uses a given toy. And being the nice fellow I am, while she’s recovering I clean up the scene. And this includes rinsing the toy, washing it with just a little lather of soap, rinsing it off carefully and setting it on a clean hotel washcloth to dry.

So the same toy gets put to use the following morning. After the toy has been used, I end up applying some manual stimulation. I notice that said girl’s vagina is very tight and slightly puffy. This mystifies me. Don’t get me wrong here. I like to think of myself as a great stud as much as everyone else. But you have to have a little realism. I think to myself. “Nothing I did with personal equipment or toys last night should have resulted in chafing to the point of swelling.” I resolve to ask about this.

A little while later the event, which was not a big centerpiece fuck-fest to begin with, sort of peters out. There is discomfort. Discomfort leads to fear. There is *burning* in there. Have we done something bad? Now of course I am concerned. Lurid thoughts leap to mind. Battery leakage on one of the toys! What the hell would make for swelling and burning.

I have done a lot of things to torture girls. But when one of them is hurting, and it is obviously something real, and there is no clear cause and it cannot be put down to aches and pains…then I begin to worry, and I want to know precisely what is wrong and why.

I know my hands are clean…and…

It hits me…

I walk into the bathroom. And pick up the soap of this above average nice hotel. I tend not to be a big spender on personal travel so I’m used to places where the soap is, basically, Ivory. This is something very nice. Ginger and Orange…

Ginger and Orange…

There is relief that there is not something untoward wrong. There is also rinsing, sans soap.

And I check another list on my lifetime kink list. I have never actually done figging before. Just not one of those things that held massive appeal and most people I’ve played with put “burning” very low on their list of sexy desirable sensations.

So endeth my first…nonconsensual…figging scene.

Repo - the Genetic Opera

While this isn't specifically on topic...this is a "sin" blog rather than a "sex" blog, and Repo has high fetish value, so I'm gonna "include it in."

So I spent the weekend with S. and she suggested a Saturday night entertainment.  She said REPO  was in town, and we should go see it.  I said "sure." 

I'd heard of Repo.  It had been brought to my attention because it concerned a dystopian future where they repossessed people’s personal organs, and that happened to vaguely match a plot I’d been writing for an interactive theater presentation.   But Repo was a musical and I’m not that fond of musicals.  Also a number of people ranted and raved about it, and I’m not a big joiner.  Finally a friend who saw it wasn’t impressed by the “personal sell” element of the Road Tour.

But I didn’t have anything against it either, figured it would be amusing. 

So for people who don’t know the background, here’s the quick rundown.  Repo was an indie arts project playing in black box theatres, that managed to get a budget and a theatrical release as a project of Director Darren Lynn Bousman, best known for the  Saw franchise.  It’s a very SFX and squip heavy satire.  It’s impossible to really say what genre it is.  You could say roughly it fits into the dark musical genre associated with Assassins or Sweeny Todd.  But theatrically it shows more like Frank Miller’s Sin City, or other dark anime rendered into live action.  You might through Guillermo's Pan's Labyrinth in there too...but it's not serious, so that's a very weird divergence. 

I can understand why it's a marketing nightmare.  It's "Springtime for Hitler" level fucked up...like "Hey what if we made Pan's Labyrinth into a musical comedy."  It's the sort of thing that does well on stage but has a very fucking hard time getting in front of a film audience.

One paralell that has been invoked is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the roadshow adapts this framework, encouraging people to come out in costume.  Since the costumes include pretty hot looks for the girls, I’m generally okay with that.   For actual thematic similarity the closest thing I’ve ever seen to it was Brian De Palma’s 1974 Phantom of the Paradise.  In terms of feel and content, it struck me an awful lot like Frank Miller, but the universe complexity and themes really reminded me of  Mike Kaluta’s Starstruck (not the more recent Gaiman piece).   I think the feel may come somewhat from the fact that Starstruck was derived from an off-Broadway play by Elaine Lee, Norfleet Lee and Dale Place.   It’s darker and more “modern” than Starstruck of course, along the lines of Watchmen. 

At any rate, Repo flunked it’s test-screening badly and Lionsgate sent it straight to DVD.   It missed the mark largely because it was billed to the test audience as a horror vehicle by the Director of Saw II, and it’s not.  It’s not surprising that “Frank Miller as musical comedy” did not play well to that crowd.  It was a flop, and so like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil faced a huge issue getting released.

Theatres are sockets that studios put movies into to make money.   You pick the movies that are going to fill a 200 seat theatre to 200 people.  Not that are going to fill it to 50 people.   It’s true hype and advertising play a role.  But while I don’t agree it is the worst movie ever made, I can see it having real trouble finding a clear advertising method and an audience.  I’m not sure the people who went to see Sin City would like it, and I’m not sure who you’d sell it to.  One thing to understand about movies is just how fucking enormous releases are.  Sin City cost $40 million (a lot more than Repo’s 8m,) but grossed 158 million worldwide.  You can have a TV show, or Broadway show that a fuckload less people are interested in that is still very profitable.   Movies need a big audience to be anything other than arthouse films.  I suspect that Repo’s gore makes it hard to play in art houses like the Landmark E St. Cinema.  And frankly that’s a big drawback.  I can’t say “everybody is going to love this show,” because unlike say Sweeny Todd, if you are not okay with seeing human skin cut open and blood spurt out this is going to freak you right the fuck out.  It's not incredibly far afield in either tone or gore from Kill Bill, but it's a lot more fantastic and it's a musical.

At any rate, Director Darren Lynn Bousman and Writer Terrence Zdunich are touring around with lead Alexa Vega to try and generate a cult following.  Intentionally or not there's a sort of push for it as a new Rocky Horror, and they want to see a bigger big-screen release.  I think it’s a noble goal, and I doubt it’s really profiting Bousman, though it may be the best thing Zudnich can be doing for himself right now.  If you've read Terry Gilliam's The Battle for Brazil  you have some idea of how these things work. 

They make a good show and it’s fun and friendly.  People who know me know that I’m not big on actresses.  I don’t care much about them…my fandom stops with Ingrid Bergman, Myrna Loy, Katherine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich.   A friend of mine got me half sold on Julie Christie.  But that’s about it.  That said, Alexa Vega kinda kicks ass.  She’s got a commanding personality which is not something you usually hear said about actresses.  When she takes charge, vocally, you actually feel it, and that’s sometimes very hard to do with a pretty girl especially one who’s playing young.  I’m gonna like the girl of course, it’s me, but she’s a cut above. 

I was pleased to meet them all where “meet” = seeing their presentation and passing about nine words in the lobby on the way to the gents.  All friendly words though.

So this film is not without talent.  The big names in the film other than Alexa Vega (who was in Spy Kids and is apparently now on Broadway in Hairspray) are Paris Hilton and Anthony Head (who played Giles on Buffy for folks like me not good with names). Paul Sorvino (Law and Order) rounds out the bill.

There's also apparently a cameo by Joan Jett though I missed it.

The music is pretty fucked up in a good way.  Sarah Brightman actually has a screen role as does Ogre of Skinny Puppy.  But I think a real chunk of the sell is the soundtrack. You’ve got David Lee Roth's in studio guitarist Brian Young, the frontman from Filter, the drummer from Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros, the rhythm guitarist from Guns n' Roses,  David J Haskins the bassist from Bauhaus and Daniel Ash of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets.  It also includes Ozzy's bassist Blasko, the drummer from Rob Zombie, POE ("Hey Pretty"), and Rami Jaffee, who has played with The Wallflowers, Foo Fighters, Soul Asylum and Pearl Jam. 

The producers were Yoshiki (who I've never heard of but is apparently big in Japan the way Elvis was big in the U.S.) and Joseph Bishara who produces Glenn Danzig, which kinda figures.

So what did I think of it?

Well…I did not walk out thinking “this is the greatest fucking movie ever made…I am obsessed with it.”   But I think it has the power to grow on you.  There’s a lot of rich complexity of the sort that you see in Pan’s Labyrinth that feels like there's a world behind it.  It feels strongly like it was made from a comic or graphic-novel media. 

The music was the same way.  It's complex and despite it all not all that catchy except for "Zydrate Anatomy."  Some of it really seems to suborn music for story which since it claims to be an opera you can't complain about.

But I think it grows on you.  It's rich and there's enough there for two watchings.  It's a fascinating world, and in the end you've only sort of licked the dark corners of it. 

I think it's destined to become a cult classic, though I doubt it will ever see a major theatrical release.  It's got some serious chops and if it seems a little scratchy in places, it's really beautiful in others.  And it draws you back.  Sin City was pretty, but I'll be damned if I remember more than one or two scenes. It was a comic book - bubblegum.  I suspect I'll remember Repo ten years from now in pretty good detail.

It's worth buying rather than pirating, and I'd strongly recommend it (out on DVD and Blu-Ray on the 20th).  It isn't often art is "something else" and Repo is definitely something else.

Additions to Website - Positions List

Not a lot of news from me in the past month or so. Life has been confused and busy. A lot of travel (more on that later) and a good bit of time under the weather.

I've had the Protocols Manual on the website for quite a while, and I've had a lot of requests for the graphics of the positions set.

I've uploaded the current draft of the Positions document. I hope it's helpful

More content to follow

http://www.gordonsdrysin.com

Leniency and Discipline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a few suggestions that have worked for me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crucible Empty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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