I was once moving into a bdsm relationship with a girl who’d always been vanilla. I was in the process of perverting her. Mostly that consisted of my tying her up and spanking her, followed by fucking. We were almost vanilla, by most bdsm people’s standards. I didn’t care. I liked her, and I was perfectly happy to keep things at levels she was comfortable with. 

But as Doms do, and as I think even vanilla girls stepping slightly off the straight and narrow expect, I pushed carefully and not too insistently against those limits. I found some things.

For example, she was interested in being watched by another girl while she was being punished and fucked, and in being tied up and having to watch while I fucked the other girl. One of the reasons I thought I was probably right in reading that from her is that although those things are fine and fun to me, they aren’t central in my own dreams, fantasies and desires.

So my picking it up wasn’t just wishful thinking. 

But I only “knew” those desires of hers because when I had her tied up, and sometimes when we were fucking, I’d tell her stories. The stories were on various themes. But stories on those lines got particularly excited physical responses from her. She never said anything.

I thought it was too early to put her on the spot, and anyway I didn’t have another girl all lined up and ready to drop by into a threesome at the drop of a hat. It could be done but it’d take organising, and I couldn’t do that until she’d indicated she was okay with that. Even I wasn’t dumb enough to spring a Surprise! Threesome!! on her.

But I lent her a book of bdsm porn, and recommended Chapter 9. There was, I remembered, a hot scene with a man and two girls doing the kind of threesome she seemed to be comfortable with.

The heroine spent most of the scene tied and helpless while the other girl was free, and dominant to her. but it was emotionally safe for her: both girls fucked the hero and watched the other girl fucking the hero, but  they weren’t in the bed together at any time. So there was a kind of very close girl-on-girl emotional intimacy, but no actual girl-on-girel cunnilingus or fingering. 

Anyway, a couple of days later I asked her if she’d read it, and she said she had. But she wasn’t at all happy. I asked her what was wrong. 

“I didn’t know you were into knives. I mean, that’s not…”

“What? Knives? There’s no knives in that.”

“There is.”

“Bullshit. There can’t be.”

She passed me the book and I checked it. I must have read that section 50 times at least. And sure enough, there’s a bit where the other girl got the heroine’s attention by holding a knife to her throat.

I just hadn’t ever noticed.

The thing is, I hate knives and blades. It’s to do with a childhood accident; sharps give me the chills, and not the good kind. I’d always read that scene for pleasure, so I’d always just skipped the knife bit without it registering on me at all.

I think in sex men only see what we like, so that we like what we see. That’s me, for sure. 

So that’s a small warning, on using media to make explicit what you want, or to encourage your partner to be explicit about what they want. You see a bit of film, or text, and you think it’s saying something sexy and charming. but there may be a knife in there. The other person doesn’t know what you want them to notice and what to ignore. Keep your eyes open.

Postscript:

The relationship didn’t suffer much damage. My failure to notice the knife was weird but obviously real. So we had fun, and lots of hot sex. 

The threesome didn’t happen, though. 

I’ve got a novel that I expect to have finished and on the market by the end of this month. One of my beta readers said it was “like Ben Elton, but with explicit sex”. I’m happy with that as a genre.

I don’t want it to be marketed as “erotica with comedy elements”. I’d rather it was “an extremely sexy comic novel”.

Though, of course, I want it published, and once I have a publisher I don’t care if they market it as “the best thing since Nigella in the Kitchen“, so long as they give me money. 

But I was looking through Kindle, checking out bdsm books, for the marketing and the prices. There are writers out there asking for $6.99 for a semi-literate 15-page wank fantasy, and I have to say that I think they’re dreaming. For all that I think writers should be paid in diamonds, rubies, oysters, champagne and free sex, I still think asking for about $1.50 a page, for 15 pages, is eye-wateringly lazy and greedy.

On the other hand, I expect that no one buys that stuff, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. Nice try, is all.

Anyway, the other thing that struck me was the amount of anti-condom messaging, where one of the hot bits for the intended reader (the target audience seems to be women) is the bit where the male lust object tells the heroine that he’s going to fuck her hard, without a condom. 

I wondered what the hell that was about. Here are my three guesses.

1. Maybe it’s some kind of cultural side-effect of the resurgence of the religious right. Anti-birth control measures are not just getting into US laws, they’re also getting into the porn. 
2. Most people who use condoms probably don’t actually like them. I use condoms. But where we’re being sexually exclusive, been tested, and so on, skin to skin is far more intimate, more sensual, and, in the Erica Jong sense, more zipless. But the “hard, rough and unprotected” porn usually won’t even mention condoms, or the advantages of bareback. Still, maybe for once they’re being subtle.
3. A fair proportion of the books end with the heroine in advanced, blissful pregnancy. Her sexual rival – often her mother – has gone, and now she’s happy being looked after by the step-father. She didn’t get a billionaire, but at least she got a guy who owns his own home and has a job. So, like the billionaire porn, it’s partly sexual and partly an economic fantasy.

The truth is, I don’t really understand “hard, rough and unprotected” porn. When I read a sex scene in this genre, I tend to see it as something like this:

“He pushed her down and as her legs sprawled apart, helpless from her own wanton desires, with one powerful, masculine lunge he exposed her to STDs and unwanted pregnancy.”

This is not hot, to me. But obviously it is for a lot of people. I’m not being a snob and I’m not mocking. I genuinely want to understand this genre. 

Can anybody help?

Julian “I’m Wearing You” Assange

One other point, since we’re talking about condoms.

If you get sexual consent by agreeing to use a condom, and then don’t use a condom without informing your partner, the law on obtaining consent by deception is clear in pretty much all jurisdictions in the world.

If you do that, you’re a rapist.

The legendary and wonderful Molly was a bit irritated by my saying that, in one sense, submission is simple. See  here.

This isn’t another instalment in an argument. Peace has broken out. I love and admire Molly, and she thinks I’m sort of ok.

I meant that obeying an order is usually simple physically (psychologically is a whole different question). Therefore a dom may say his or her order is “simple” to obey. While deliberately ignoring how far from simple it is, in psychological or political terms, or in any way other than physically.

That is, a submissive doesn’t need to be an Olympic athlete to bend over a desk. But there are many other reasons why that may be difficult for the submissive. When the dom says it’s “simple”, he or she is deliberately ignoring a lot of complicated things,

What’s worse, the dom is ignoring those psychological truths for fun and sexual pleasure.

But doms, even twoo-doms, often don’t tell the absolute truth, in a scene. For example, a dom might say the submissive is a silly girl, or silly boy, when the dom knows perfectly well that the submissive is anything but silly.

But being put down a little can make the scene hotter for some submissives, so things like “you silly girl” get said. Sometimes what a dom says, in the heat of the moment, is intended to create a scene and make it sexier. When we’re doing that, we are not on oath.

Anyway, I want to explain why the stories in this blog are written the way they are. 

The first issue is that almost all of what I write in this blog is based on things that actually happened. I’m only one of the people who took part in that experience, so there’s a whole story or side of a story that isn’t told.

There’s always at least one woman involved in the story. Sometimes there might be two or three perspectives on my actions as a male dom. But I can only write as me, and what I did and what I saw, heard and felt.

An observant dom learns a lot by paying attention in a scene, but it’s still not telepathy. The submissive is another person, with their own thoughts and feelings. 

When I write about a woman (or women if it was a threesome or some other complicated arrangement), I think I have three duties. 

1 I have to preserve their privacy. She (or they) shouldn’t be identifiable, not even by people who know who I am. I change things, cunningly, to make sure that people, sexual partners in particular, preserve their anonymity. I can’t give an example of what I do, for obvious reasons, but sometimes I’m pretty damn clever about that. 

2 I should write about the information the woman or the women gave me about what she/they thought and felt about what was going on.

In writing that, I should always respect those women as people, sexual human beings, and never write about them as male fantasy figures. Though I should write about how sexy they were/are, and the pleasure they gave me and (though it sounds immodest even to mention it) the pleasure I gave them.

3 I should not presume to speak for them. If a woman came, I can say that she came. If she said something nice to me, or critical, I can tell you that. But I can’t presume to get into her mind and tell you what she thought.

I can report responses, actions, things said by the submissive. i try to do that in a way that gives a real sense of both her and me, and makes it reasonably clear what she thought, in general terms. That includes when she was thinking I’m being an idiot, which i try to be honest about.

So I’ll write about her words and sounds and movements of her body, which say a lot, but I ain’t no ventriloquist. And she ain’t no sock puppet.  

So in this blog you get bits of my inner monologue, but not of hers. To me, that silence is an act, or omission, of respect. 

On Sinful Sunday I wrote the words, “submission is simple”. 

Those words aren’t entirely true, to put it mildly. I put them in the post because they are, or can be, part of the dialogue between dominant and submissive. The dom may say, “It’s simple. You just have to do as you’re told. I’ll look after the rest.” 

It’s only a limited sense in which submission is simple. If you are the submissive, and your session is going well, and the dom and sub are in synch with each other, then the submissive’s choices are indeed simple. If the dom says, “bend over the table”, or “onto your knees,” or simply, “stay there, don’t speak and don’t move”, the submissive knows what he or she has to do, and does it. 

Simples! 

But the process of acknowledging one’s own submissive desires, as you become sexually active, or at least thinking and desiring sexually, is not simple. That can be a long and hard process, as my acknowledging my own domness was.

The process of going from ordinary head space to a submissive head space, in the interaction between dominant and submissive: that’s not simple at all.

Doms do things that they think will help the submissive make that transition, which vary from person to person. Currently, I give lots of hugs and cuddles and the occasional smack on the bottom, and lots of praise and reassurance, slowly heading to the first use of the command voice. That’s with my lovely girl. If it were a different submissive the approach would be different. 

Like any dom, I can only provide an atmosphere in which it might feel both safe and sexy to submit. The mental work of shutting off the usual rush of thoughts, focussing on the moment and then “dropping”: that’s done by the submissive. 

As a non-switch I don’t have direct, personal access to what moving into the submissive headspace is like.

But just as submissives know things that help bring out the domness in their lover, doms know a certain amount about how submission works and even (imaginatively) what it feels like to enter it.

All lovers work out as much as they can about how and what their partner is feeling, drawing on lovers’ intuition, observation, sand listening.  

So when I said, “submission is simple”, I meant it as a piece of dom rhetoric, the sort of thing that I might (and do) say to the woman in that photo, at about that moment. It focusses only on the part of submission (being told what to do, and doing it) that is – in one sense – simple. 

After that it gets philosophical: nothing is simple, and yet everything is simple.