Falling off horses, and gate-keeping at bdsm meetings

Posted on March 17, 2015 by jaime

Falling off horses

Even bad holidays are holidays, and holidays end. So I stood on the road with my suitcase waiting for the country bus that would, eventually, take to the airport that would take me home. My uncle and aunt waited with me, not overwhelmed with grief that I was going. Samantha was there too, not grieving either, but giving me the full force of her disdain. She was good at disdain. She wished me a good trip, going home.

So I was sadder, though not much wiser. Still, I had two new pieces of knowledge.

The first was that girls didn’t pick guys for their niceness or their intelligence or whatever. It was something subtler, that Greg had and I didn’t. He was a shit, and he was sexy. I could whine about that, or I could try to work out ways of being sexy myself, while still being me.

“Thou wilt never come for pity;

Thou mayest come for pleasure.”

If I really liked girls, and it was clear that I did, then I’d have to be someone girls enjoyed hanging around with. I had no idea how to go about that, but at least the project was clear.

Ruth is stranger than Richard.

The other thing I learnt was even more depressing, because there seemed to be nothing much I could do about it. It was that there was no reason to think that even I met a a submissive girl, or woman, and we got on well, she’d want the same things as me.

Bdsm is a big tent, and it includes all sorts of tastes, desires and practices. They’re not always going to be compatible.

At the time that seemed like bad news.

Of course, as you know, you can almost always find common ground with a lover, and you can pervert them in your direction, and they can teach you a few of their own favourite things. I just didn’t know that yet.

Bdsm meetings

Girl in fishnets

So – and now I’m going back to something I said in those posts about running bdsm meetings, especially this one – the fact that bdsm is a big tent also means that it’s hard to draw lines about who is and who isn’t into bdsm. And that woman Ruby, who came to my bdsm meet’n’greet wearing a fishing net, and who got dissed for only being interested in getting spanked and fucked, is definitely inside the tent and under the umbrella.

If anyone wants to identify with us, it seems to me that (except for people who advocate non-consensual practices) we don’t need gatekeepers to keep them out.

Falling off horses and bdsm 3

Posted on March 15, 2015 by jaime

So up in that hiding place on the upper floor I read, “But Henry never understood about gloves. He’ll give a swift beating followed by sex, but nothing kinky.”

I liked that line, mostly for the outrageousness of the goes-without-saying assumption that there’s nothing kinky about “a swift beating followed by sex”. It was an insouciant joke, and though I didn’t know the word I knew I liked the style.

But there was also some bad news in it, for me. The woman narrating the story was submissive, but she dismissed her husband as an unsatisfactory lover because he wasn’t sexually responsive to gloves.

Bond effortlessly established his dominance with his purple mink glove.

I wasn’t a gloves man either, nor even a glove-fancying eleven-year old. These days I have a pair of leather gloves that I use for spanking and stroking girls who like the feel of leather a lot. But that’s more to indulge a submissive than because of any strong interest in gloves or leather on my part.

But in that shed the gloves reference made me suspect that life was going to be even harder for me than I’d come to expect.

At the time I wanted a girlfriend, who I imagined as a girl prepared to cuddle me, and to talk about important things with.

I also wanted to discover all that newly appeared girl stuff, like breasts and amazing phenomena like Samantha’s arse in tight Jodhpurs. And then I wanted to feel myself in the body of that girl who liked me enough to want to take me on board.

Those were my main ambitions, and they spent a lot of time haunting my waking and sleeping dreams. They seemed hard enough to achieve. I’d just failed spectacularly with Samantha, where a completely unworthy rival – I thought – had succeeded.

It didn’t seem much to ask.

But then there were the other things I wanted. I was a dom, though I didn’t know the word. (The only word I knew was “sadist”, which didn’t really capture what I was like or what I wanted. I’d read some Sade, and I was – and am – no admirer of the Marquis.) But I wanted to find a submissive girl, who wanted the things I wanted to do with and to her. She’d want to be spanked, that dream girl, and tied, and to kneel with her hands and ankles tied together. Waiting for me to decide what I’d do with her.

So I’d somehow have to meet a submissive girl. There had to be at least one, somewhere in the world. I hoped so, anyway.

But the gloves line taught me, suddenly, that finding a submissive girl was only half of my task, though that seemed impossible enough. But what if I found that submissive girl and what she wanted was to be dressed in tight corsets and long black gloves, or wrapped in plastic, and tied in amazingly complicated ways? I’d seen images of that sort of thing, and they’d puzzled more than excited me. What if it turned out that the submissive girl I finally met didn’t want any of the relatively simple things I wanted? What if I didn’t enjoy the things she liked?

I had to re-define my goal. I didn’t just need to find a submissive girl, which was more than hard enough: I’d have to find the specific submissive girl who wanted what I wanted, and also wanted me.

The odds against me seemed high. Quite a bit too high. Life looked, from my rickety vantage point on the mezzanine floor of an abandoned shearing shed, likely to be grim.

Falling off horses and bdsm 2

Posted on March 13, 2015 by jaime

Farmers don’t knock old buildings down. If a farmer builds a new family home on top of the hill, then the old house near the road is used for travelling workers like shearing gangs and fruit pickers. It’ll stay there until the floor caves in and the roof sags, and the younger son starts cannibalising it for wood and corrugated iron.

So on my uncle’s farm there was a newish shearing shed, and a little further off there was the skeleton structure of the old shed, which was so ancient there were no electrical fittings for the clippers. There were manual, non-powered clippers on the bench, with other antique equipment that was probably worth a fortune, even then.

And there was about half an upper floor, where there was a press like a giant vice, with handles for two men, that compressed the wool into bales. They stored the bales up on that platform until they were taken away for auction.

Greg and Samantha were off riding somewhere. I didn’t want to think about that. The climb to the upper floor looked dangerous. Good. I’d been disappointed in lust, and I didn’t care if I was dead. And so forth.

Anyway, up on that rickety platform there was half a bale of wool still left in the press, some fleeces, a pile of woolsacks and some hay bales, stored and forgotten. So I went over to the hay bales, and found that they concealed a sort of nest. For shirkers and lovers.

And, as it turned out, wankers, because when I climbed down into this hiding place I discovered, under a sack, a small but select pile of ancient magazines, some Playboys, a few issues from the original British run of Penthouse, and some issues of something called Mayfair, which I’d never seen or heard of before.

The Penthouses were so old that the models didn’t show their pink bits, and often had a carefully placed hand or prop to cover their nipples. They made up for that with a Penthouse Forum section that seemed more explicit than in the later, more gynaecological issues. (I have no idea what Penthouse is like now. I haven’t seen one, or a Playboy, in the last twenty-odd years.)

So people claiming to be office girls wrote to Penthouse to share their experience with being spanked in the office, which they agreed to because the pay was good. Eventually, after some terrible mistake, they’d have to strip quite naked before going over the boss’s knee, and as the spanking wore on they’d have an intense, screaming orgasm. After which, as it did in Penthouse Forum letters, “one thing led to another”.

I read the best of those letters so often I memorised them. Then I moved on to the Mayfairs. It was more cheaply produced, and so the girls in the pictorials looked like girls next door who might take their clothes off because they fancied you, rather than looking like models. They were still pretty, and there was something endearing about their tiny imperfections.

The Mayfairs were twenty or thirty years old when I discovered them. The newer ones had only pictures, and headings like “Thirty tits-out, daks-down bathing babes – AND THEY’RE STARKERS!” So something had gone badly wrong with Mayfair. The older issues were more up-market, with fiction, and articles on serious topics, competing with Playboy.

There was a story in one of the older issues, called “The Inner Room”, or “The Saddle”, or something. It contained two sentences I still remember. The heroine and narrator, a devastatingly heartless and aristocratic submissive woman, puts on her gloves, and reflects ruefully about her unsatisfactory husband:

“But Henry never understood about gloves. He’ll give a swift beating followed by sex, but nothing kinky.”

Falling off horses, and bdsm 1

Posted on March 9, 2015 by jaime

I stayed on my uncle and aunt’s farm one Christmas vacation, when I was eleven. I learned a lot about falling off horses, and I learned two things about sex.

What I learned about falling off horses was that although you seem to be very far from the ground up there on horseback, hitting the ground doesn’t actually hurt that much. In fact it struck me as quite a bit less uncomfortable than staying aboard a trotting or galloping horse, at least until I learned to move with the horse and got used to the saddle.

The first thing I discovered about sex involved my horse-riding, spray-on jodhpur-wearing cousin Samantha, who was sullen, moon-faced in a pretty way, and thirteen. She was an older woman. Eleven year old boys mostly don’t go after thirteen year old girls, and I knew that it was unlikely that she’d see me as a serious sexual contender.

But lust drove me to try, and ignorance drove me to try by hanging around gazing at her, trying to find ways of being “helpful”, and being too tongue-tied to say anything amusing. So I dropped, in her esteem, from irrelevant to irritating to revolting. I told myself, once I understood that, that the age gap, in that direction, made the whole thing impossible.

That saved my pride until Greg, a boy from the nearest city, also turned up to stay. He was eleven too, but a couple of months younger than me. These things matter when you’re eleven. Anyway, he started going riding with Samantha, and I smirked to myself about how much his failure was going to embarrass him, because I’d be there to see it.

It was at this moment that my heart made a little “nk” sound.

So I came in from swimming a couple of days later, and there was Greg, sitting on the old couch on the veranda, with Samantha curled up on his lap. They were kissing. I noted with the precision of jealousy that he didn’t have his hand under her shirt.

But I knew better than to hang any remnant of my pride or hopes on that. It was only a matter of time.

My heart and pride snapping was the quietest and least important sound in the world. I’d got too close to back out without being seen so I came up, pretended not to notice their position, and enthused about my swim. I was as cheerful as anyone might seem to be, under the circumstances. There was, after all, nowhere else for me to go.

But Greg was a terrible person. He was in trouble at school for bullying, and he used to beat up his younger brother. He crept around the neighbourhood after dark and peered in the windows of women living alone. He stole things and blamed others. I found it hard to believe that he was good to Samantha. I, on the other hand, was a reasonably good person. I was gentle with people smaller than me, though I stood my ground with bullies. I had a lot to learn about riding, but at least I’d been brave about falling off horses, and got on again. I liked helping people. So clearly, being good, gentle and brave, I deserved Samantha more than Greg.

So I learned that the desire and affection of girls is not something you get as a prize, by “deserving” it. I had more to learn than that, but it was a start.

The second thing I learned about sex will have to wait till the next post.

Hosting a bdsm meet’n’greet group 3

Posted on March 3, 2015 by jaime

So, about seven years ago, when I still lived in the city, I was hosting my first ever bdsm meet’n’greet evening, and as I mentioned, this woman – I’ll call her Ruby – turned up wearing a fishing net, tiny pink knickers and little flashing red lights pinned, as badges, over her nipples. She was a cheerful, flamboyant eccentric.

I’ve always liked that in other people, and I sometimes aspire to it myself. I wasn’t feeling very flamboyant at the time, though, so I got her a glass of wine and talked to her instead.

She told me she’d driven a long way to get to this event, and somewhere out in the middle of nowhere she’d been pulled over by a cop, officially for being a tiny fraction over the speed limit, but really because the cop could see two flashing lights speeding along at nipple height, and it had looked weird.

So the cop found himself smack in the middle of a porn scenario, with his ticket book in his hand, staring down at a woman undulating all over the driver’s seat wearing flashing nipples, a sweet smile and fishing equipment. She wound down her window and said she’d certainly been a bad girl, and she was terribly sorry and ashamed for having had to be stopped, and she’d do anything to compensate him for the trouble she’d put him to.

The cop had stood there staring down at her for a good 30 seconds after that speech, and Ruby was getting her hopes up, she said, because he was a very handsome policeman. Then the cop laughed, wished her a good time at the party, wherever it was, and warned her not to drive home afterwards. And he’d waved her on.

While she was telling this story, the test of the group gathered round us. They were dressed more traditionally, as bdsm people being discrete. The submissive girls were wearing collars and plain white or plain black dresses, and the woman doms were wearing corsets and long black dresses. All the men, sadly including me, were wearing black, generally the jeans, t-shirt and jacket outfit, with boots that set airport scanners off, what with all the metal zips and rings and chains and such.

I enjoyed Ruby’s performance, but after an hour I’d had enough charming eccentricity, and I drifted away to talk to less interesting people. I was struck, though, by how much less interesting they were.

There was an on-line couple reminiscing about the cyber-spanking he’d given her the night before. I had trouble getting my head around that. They lived in the same city, and they were here together, so obviously they could meet. Even if one or both of them were married, wouldn’t they rather get together in meat-space and do real things?

I was sympathetic to the idea that something that “happened” on-line had really happened, in some sense of the word “really”.

People can fall in love with each other without ever meeting, in the flesh. When they broke up the heartache was real. I accepted that.

But choosing to do sensual things in cyber only, when the two bodies could easily hire a hotel room and lock the door behind them: that made no sense to me at all. Typed or skyped words are no substitute for the meeting of skin and skin.

There was also the problem that some of the things that work in cyber, like naughty pranks and giggly cheekiness, work better in text that in real life, unless the performers have a certain amount of acting ability. So, I’m afraid, I found them embarrassing.

The were male doms swapping woodwork tips, for making St Andrews Crosses, whipping benches and so on.

There was a group discussing football. I just never found a way to care about football.

I’d already known it in the abstract but this really drove it home to me: just because you have a kink in common with someone, there’s no reason to expect that you’ll have anything else.

So I was trying to be a good host, but the whole thing was making me feel a little low, a little wan. I met the bdsm community, or one segment of it, and I was bored shitless.

And then Ruby left. That’s when it got weird.

Running a bdsm meet’n’greet group 2

Posted on February 28, 2015 by jaime

The group I’m hosting up in the mountains is going fine. Numbers are low, but that means I get to finish off the champagne and runny cheeses afterwards. But it’s a talky group, with interesting people in it. And they spend the time chatting, sometimes about bdsm and sometimes about other topics. And they all get on.

I mention that because this is actually the second time I’ve run a group. The first time I was still living in the city. I agreed to take on the running of the group because the guy who’d been doing it for years had got a bit sick of it, and I was feeling public-spirited.

Like this, only with guys

The venue was an old pub that was once what was called a “bloodhouse”, the sort of pub that – in its day – had sawdust on the floor for soaking up the patrons’ blood, also urine and vom. There was a trench that ran down the edge of one wall, and at the bottom of the bar, so that when the evening was over and the bouncer had frog-walked the last drunk out into the small cold hours, you could clean the place with a hose.

In the morning you’d put out new sawdust and you were ready for business. People would say that the morning’s sawdust was last night’s furniture, hurr hurr hurr.

But that was then. These days the place was quiet except for the gambling machines at one corner of the room, and the occasional cackle or groan from the old men and ladies who sat nursing a single beer as long as possible while feeding coins into the machines.

Some time ago some optimistic manager had put in comfortable leather chairs and dark wood tables. But they never succeeded in getting new clientele. The old people slumped in front of the machines weren’t going to be shifted, and it was never going to be a trendy wine bar while they held their corner.

So I liked the place. We were welcome customers, and no-one was going to hear us talk, or object to discussions about soft versus hard floggers and comparing notes on ropes and so on.

I advertised on-line that the group was still going, and I sat, as promised, with a bunch of artificial red roses propped up in a beer glass.

I’m going to tell a story about a woman who turned up wearing a fishing net, and two little flashing lights, one over each nipple. But I’ll do it later.

Running a BDSM meet’n’greet group

Posted on February 21, 2015 by jaime

I’m running a monthly meeting for bdsm people, to talk, drink, eat runny smelly cheeses, and other things, and meet each other.

Initially I started an on-line group for people in my mountains, simply because there wasn’t one. It didn’t take any work to set it up, and get it started with a couple of posts. After a while people wanted to meet for real, so I called a munch in a local, rather grand hotel.

It had a turnout of maybe ten people, which is okay for a start. But the venue was a problem. The food was pricey (and very ordinary), and, because I’d put the munch in the foyer, near the fireplace, you could only order drinks from the champagne bar. So they were expensive too.

But the real problem is that assorted families were in the foyer too, and they’d brought their kids along. Kids love watching fires. So one of our group would be discussing, oh, let’s say, the electrification of nipple clamps, and a couple of boys aged ten and twelve would suddenly turn up to stare into the fire while listening to the adults.

And then, I expect, go back the the family and ask, “Mommy, what’s a butt plug?”

So we’d fall silent whenever kids showed up. A lot of kids did. It was awkward.

I said I’d find a private venue next time. I did some hunting around, and found that any hireable meeting space or social space was hideously expensive. It was far too much for me to pay just out of generosity, but if I charged people who turned up a share of the cost then no-one would show.

So months passed while I refurbished my library, which had been flooded in the spring. That wasn’t just a matter of getting new carpets and shelving. It also meant digging a trench below the level of the library floor and putting in piping to take any water away. And doing various other drainage and water management things that involved sink holes, pipes, gravel paths, and so on.

Finally, late last year, it was done, and I had the first bdsm library munch.

Which I’ll tell you about in a couple of days.

Do welfare mothers make better lovers?

Posted on February 13, 2015 by jaime

I live in a village of about 7,000 people. I checked some demographic information when I was thinking of buying a place here. The population is mostly people of Scottish and German descent. I used to find it weird, after living in the city, how seldom I see brown or black people round the village, except those who’ve come up to the mountains as tourists. I’ve got used to it, though it does mean there’s no decent Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese or Lebanese food for about 100 kilometers in any direction.

Yoga and yoghurt in the mountains

A really high proportion of the people up here are single mothers. The single mothers are here because of the property prices: you can afford to live up here, with a bedroom or two for the kids, after a divorce or separation. And there’s a single mother’s mafia, a network who get each other bargains, and swap garden produce, clothes and that sort of thing, to keep living costs down.

Also, according to Neil Young so it must be true, welfare mothers make better lovers.(It’s a great song, by the way, and I recommend the version on Weld. If you ever wondered, “how much noise can Crazy Horse really make?”, this demonstrates that the answer is, “More than you could ever imagine, in your wildest dreams.”)

There’s a temptation to go all man-of-the-world when you hear bumper stickers like that: ah, yes, that welfare mother, the colours her face turns when you’re in her bed and the kids are in theirs, just a wall away, and she’s trying to suppress orgasmic screams. Her sexual abandonment and need, when you’re just got an hour left before the kids get back from school.

She has various kinds of wisdom, that come from having loved and had to leave a man, and another kind that comes with responsibility for children, that lead to a willingness to see the world and people as they are. That’s sexy too.

The man of the world says something like this, and he sighs with pleasurable reminiscence. He has a sip of whisky, breathes out and says, again, “Ahhh, yes.” I could do that. I’ve even got a library with a leather armchair.

But it’s bullshit, of course. Not because single mothers aren’t great lovers. But then, you could make up just as reasonable a story about nurses, or teachers, or librarians making better lovers. It’s one of those statements that sounds like knowledge but doesn’t really mean anything.

I’ve never known a woman bank middle-manager, or travel agent or public service policy writer, who wasn’t a brilliant lover. I guess I’m just not a man of the world.

Anyway, I started this train of thought because I was going to write something about running a bdsm meet’n’greet group up in these mountains, and what that’s like. But I’ll come to that next time.

Back to work: and Freudian fingers on the Iphone

Posted on February 6, 2015 by jaime

Holidays are over. I’ve got projects, including at least one where I have no idea how to do what I’ve contracted to. But they wanted me, so that’s that.

I’ll learn how to do the job, and I’ll get a nice transfer of funds, with love, from them to me. (Cue mouth organ break.)

Anyway, here’s what happened yesterday. A pretty girl I’d been flirting with, months ago, sent me this:

(It’s just an internet image, which is why I’m prepared to reproduce it here.) Anyway, we’d called it off, but ended on friendly terms, so I thought that was an encouraging sign: she missed me and wanted to pick up where we left off. I felt very cheery. She’d expressed some interest in the leather, semi-flexible instruments, so I sent her this:

“Have case, will travel.”

Anyway, she sent me another message, which went, approximately, “WTF? Nice to hear from you, but why you just text me? & why that?”

So I realised she’d been texting some other guy, and she’d accidentally sent the picture to me. She’s the sort of girl who’d be horrified to realise she’d done that, so I decided not to embarrass her by explaining. (She doesn’t read this blog). I just apologised. Rush of blood to the head, or something, I said. So there you are.

2015 and the love of a dominant for a submissive

Posted on January 2, 2015 by jaime

2014 was perhaps the worst year of my life. My mother died, my father lost his senses, and I lost my slavegirl, the woman I loved. I wasn’t prepared for that stuff, and hadn’t guarded myself against how much it was going to hurt. As years go, 2014 sucked, for me (I hope you had a better time). I spent a lot of 2014 grieving.

To have and to hold. And to love.

It’s probably wrong to say so, since death, dementia and the loss of love are all weighty events, important in anyone’s life. A man should grieve. But I’m bored with it now. I’m bored with my sad self. I’m bored with grief.

I know that love doesn’t happen because you look for it. I even know that love seems to hide when you’re looking, and it only comes to you when you’ve given up. I don’t know why this is, but it’s what life has taught me.

But I’m ready to give my love to a submissive woman, and I know that I need the love of a submissive woman for her dominant.

This isn’t a personal ad, and I won’t be doing much about it, for various reasons. I’m not mystical, but I do believe that Lao Tzu was right about some things: there are things you cannot strive for. You can only make yourself ready for them if they come to you.

But love and lust is my wish for 2015.

Jerusalem Mortimer: Between the Lines

Jerusalem Mortimer wants a word

Category Archives: Personal – my pathetic life