Porn is good! Erotica is ok, I guess

Way back in the late 20th century, there was a time when good liberals all agreed that pornography was bad.

What Pandora Blake, feminist spanko porn-maker, won in 2015. Honestly, they should just call it The Pandora Blake Award, from now on

Last year Pandora Blake, feminist spanko porn-maker took on anti-porn bigots and won. (Or they took her on and lost.) Honestly, they should just call this The Pandora Blake Award, from now on

The politics of that, and the weird alliance it involved between Christian right activists, feminists who claimed they opposed sex if it had men in it (plus the men they had sex with) is sad and hilarious, but that’s a topic for another day.

The movement still exists, but it’ll never wield the same social or even political power again. However, a by-product of that movement was a passionate debate over the difference between erotica and pornography.

That’s because we – meaning pretty well all humans – like looking at movies and images of sexy people, and sexy people doing sexy things. This is something we share with the other higher primates, as it turns out.

Anyway, it became necessary to say that some sexy movies or images weren’t pornography, so they’d escape any blanket condemnation or ban.

It became one of those irregular verbs:

  • he faps to horrible women-hating filth;
  • you fap to pornography;
  • I fap to erotica. 

Anyway, no-one ever managed a useful way of distinguishing these three terms. Which, for example, is this?

gretel spanked

It’s a picture of a woman glowing red from recent cruel treatment. The model’s head has been removed from the image, and the photograph invites the viewer to focus only on her ass.

Andrea Dworkin, weeping bitter tears, would have said the image steals her personhood: she’s just a body, a woman beaten. That’s the argument for it being porn.

On the other hand, the red is from a hand spanking desired and enjoyed by both parties, and her head was edited out (and her cunt obscured) to respect the model’s wishes. The spanking was given, and the photo taken, by her lover, your humble narrator and servant. It’s a record of love.

So is it erotic, or pornographic? I think it’s both, because to me there’s little difference between the words except for their rhetorical overtones. 

Aristotle, oddly enough, sorted this issue out in the 4th Century BCE, when he said that the difference between a king and a tyrant is that a tyrant is a king of whom the speaker disapproves. Following Aristotle, horrible woman-hating filthy pornography is erotica that someone disapproves of, while erotica is pornography (etc) that someone approves of.

Anyway, I think it’s a sexy image. I hope you like it.

images-8One other suggested distinction is that erotica is indirect, subtle, symbolic, and therefore good, while pornography is blatant and blunt, and therefore bad.

There’s more to be said about that. But I’m out of time.

Also space.

 

Note: This is my first ever Sinful Sunday post!

SinfulSundayLips150

Orlando thoughts: the bdsm and LGBTI communities

The rainbow flag

The rainbow flag

Sometimes people in the bdsm community – that would include me – talk about discrimination against people who are known to be involved in bdsm.

For example, there was a Cabinet Minister in New Zealand who was outed by right-wing nutters as belonging to a bdsm club. That ended his political career. 

Women who have any sort of public profile can’t afford to be open about being dom, or submissive. People wrongly think a submissive is a doormat, and no women who is outed as someone who enjoys getting a good flogging in bed, or being tied up, artfully, is going to get to have a political career. (There are many out lesbians in politics where I live, but no out submissive women.) They won’t get to be Businesswoman of the Year, either, no matter how great their achievements are. 

The BDSM Rights flag

The BDSM Rights flag

They’re also more likely to get raped, by guys who think that a submissive is a victim to be preyed upon. And in court, they will find that if they are submissive, they don’t have a right to complain about being raped or beaten up. There’s a British case where a woman was brutally raped, but her rapist’s defence established that she was into submission.

The judge said to the jury, “What was this young man to think, when he discovered a riding crop by her bed? When he saw those magazines?” The jury found the young rapist not guilty, and the judge commended their verdict. 

And so on. There are a lot of out gay men in Parliament where I live, on both sides of politics. But if I stood, and someone pointed out that I’ve been known to flog and cane women, and so on (see this blog for further details), the fact that it was for those women’s pleasure wouldn’t matter at all. I’d be de-selected as a candidate so fast it’d make my ears rotate. Widdershins. 

Adult couples outed for practicing consensual bdsm with each other, in private, have lost custody of their children as a consequence. 

So we are subject to discrimination.

And after Orlando, I thought, is it unthinkable that someone fired by by some mix of religious frenzy, hatred and (perhaps) self-loathing, could go and shoot up a bdsm club, mainly involving heterosexuals. And I had to say that it’s not unthinkable.

In the local bdsm club, I’ve seen submissive women fucked publicly by their masters (under the table, where the club staff can’t see them), men and women almost naked on the whipping frame, male and female doms leading their boy or girl on a leash, and so on. So, yes, I can imagine some holy nutcase with a gun deciding to cleanse the earth one pervert at a time, by blasting us all to hell.

Holy book (one of them) and Golden Shower

Holy book (one of them) and Golden Shower

We’ll politely ignore, for now, the fact that the holy books of the Judaic, Christian and Muslim monotheisms specifically endorse keeping man and women as slaves, and women in particular as sex slaves.

But, hey, they only endorse non-consensual, real slavery and rape. When there’s consent and mutual pleasure involved, that’s perverted.

Anyway, let’s ignore that.

 

But there are distinctions between the shit rained upon LGBTI people and bdsm people. For example, I remember when I was new to the internet, going to an IRC bdsm chat-room. An American woman took a fancy to my … typing, I guess, and enticed me into her own chatroom.  

A little later I started getting hate messages from Nazis, attempted hacking attacks, flooding and various other kinds of cyber-bullying. Then one of them looked at this chatroom I was in, and he apologised. The American woman had named her chatroom #bendover, and the Nazis had thought it was a gay room. When they realised that it was a bdsm room, and mostly involving women submissives and male doms, they had no problem with us. 

I can’t say I felt good about that. I feel better when Nazis hate me.

The rainbow and loving

The rainbow and loving

But it does illustrate that people into bdsm have various advantages over gays and lesbians, and so on, in relation to persecution. I can go out with a slavegirl, who is wearing my collar and a slavegirl anklet, and a flappy little tartan skirt with no knickers, so she knows she risks giving a flash of recently-caned arse of she isn’t careful, holding hands, and no-one will notice.

Except maybe someone else who’s into bdsm and can see and read the signs. We risk getting smiled at, in a conspiratorial way.

But if I were a gay man, holding hands with my loved one, outside the city and a few safe suburbs, would mean risking getting beaten up. The risk of getting killed just for that is small, but it’s not zero. A lot of people hate and fear all kinds of sexual differences. Gays, lesbians, transgender people and intersex people cop the worst of it; there’s no doubt of that.

So we, as fellow perverts in the world’s eyes, need to make sure we stand up for each other. That damn rainbow, we’re part of it whether we like it or not. 

There’s also the issue of cross-over. Gay men and lesbians make up a tiny proportion on the population as a whole, about two-three per cent. But they make up a bigger proportion of the bdsm community: about 8-10 per cent. So we need to be together, politically. 

The attack in Orlando, and other violent or repressive acts of homophobia are aimed at a minority sexuality that I’m not part of. But they’re still an attack on all sexual difference: I could have been in that club, or a similarly motivated killer could have come to mine. 

Gays and lesbians are fighting for equality, particularly in relation to marriage, and people involved in bdsm are fighting to remove ridiculous anti-bdsm censorship laws. Though boringly straight, I’ve written submissions to Parliamentary Select Committees in relation to gay decriminalisation, and marriage equality, and I’ve been on marches and so on.

The rainbow and living

The rainbow and living

I’ve written a book that (among other things) summarises the current state of research into the effects of porn, and of bdsm porn in particular, which tends to tear the ground out from under the people who want to censor and silence our media. I hope it’ll have some impact. Both kinds of activism are part of the same project, really.

Anyway, attacks on one of us, or one segment of us, are attacks on all of us. We need to share griefs, and share our determination and energy to fight back. 

Because the people who hate us, hate us all, more or less equally.

Psychoanalytic wibble about bdsm 3: Michel Foucault!

Uncle Fester

Uncle Fester

“From the moment that Sade delivered its first words and marked out, in a single discourse, the boundaries of what suddenly became its kingdom, the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is absent, and where all of our actions are addressed to this absence in a profanation which at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression.”

 

That’s from Michel Foucault’s Aesthetics: Method and Epistomology.

That’s nicely gaseous, but Sade didn’t really mark out the language of sexuality. It’s a really stupid claim to make, and you’d only make it if you knew that your fans were all flying with their bullshit-detectors switched off.  

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Nor can you really say that the language of sexuality lifts us into the night where god is absent. After all, people who believe in gods don’t think their gods, or the one they believe in, are absent, while people who don’t believe in gods may not be worrying much about the absence of other people’s god’s.

Not when they’re getting busy with the language of sexuality.

But when he wrote about the profanation that at once identifies the absence of God, dissipates the absence of God, exhausts itself in the absence of God, and restores the absence of God to the empty purity of the absence of God’s transgression, Foucault raised a really interesting question: when you translate French foutaise into English bullshit, how can you tell if the two meaninglessnesses are the same?

(I dunno. Ask a swan.)

27_swan-(Read-Only)

 

Psychoanalytic wibble about bdsm 2: Deleuze & Guattari!

Continuing our series on complete vacuous wibble on bdsm by Freud-inspired writers from twentieth century France, this one is concerned with “masochism”. Take it away, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari!

D & G: Delouse is on the left, demonstrating the 1970s French idea of a comb-over, Guattari, on the right, accessorises

D & G: Deleuze is on the left, demonstrating the 1970s French idea of a comb-over. Guattari, on the right, accessorises

“What is certain is that the masochist has made himself a BwO [Body without Organs] under such conditions that the BwO can no longer be populated by anything but intensities of pain, pain waves. It is false to say that the masochist is looking for pain but just as false to say that he is looking for pleasure in a particularly suspensive or roundabout way. The masochist is looking for a kind of BwO that only pain can fill, or travel over, due to the very conditions under which that BwO was constituted. Pains are populations, packs, modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert that he engenders and augments .”

From A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, The Althone Press, London, 1988, page 152.

Leaving aside the question of whether things like “king-Masochist-in-the-desert” actually mean anything, and the question of whether it means anything to say that pains are modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert, there’s a bigger problem when D & G talk about “masochism”.

Particularly nasty weather! "Leda and the Swan": photo by Ralph Gibson

Particularly nasty weather! “Leda and the Swan”: photo by Ralph Gibson

In their writings, words like “sadism” and “masochism” are sometimes used to mean “resemblance to the character or works of Sade, or Sacher-Masoch”, and sometimes used in some of the many other common meanings, some of which have something to do with sexual desires and tastes and some of which do not. Deleuze and Guattari slip from one meaning to another without ever indicating what either word is intended to mean at any particular moment.

But once you’ve written that a body without organs can only be populated by pain waves, and you didn’t immediately groan and delete it, then it hardly matters what you think you mean.

Oh bugger it, let’s have another hot swan.

"Ahh, tickle your arse with a feather," shouted Zeus. Sculpture by Igor Zeinalov

“Ahh, tickle your arse with a feather,” ejaculated Zeus. Sculpture by Igor Zeinalov

Psychoanalytic wibble about bdsm: 1 Jacques Lacan!

I’m nearly finished revising the bdsm book. So I’ll be a bit busy for a couple of days, getting it done. I’ll be back to Raylene’s story shortly. I know it’s stopped at a dramatic moment, but we’ll get there.. 

In the meantime, and for your amusement,  here are three pieces of utter wibble written about bdsm by French writers of different Freudian schools. We never asked them to. Anyway, let’s start with Jacques Lacan! 

Leda fucked by Zeus, having transformed himself into a swan. Little-known fact: swans have penises.

“How can those terrified fingers push/  The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?”  Leda fucked by Zeus, who’d transformed himself into a swan for the purpose. Little-known water-fowl fact: swans have penises. (So, by the way, do mallards, including Donald Duck. Lucky Daisy.)

“One might think that Kant is there under the pressure of what he hears too closely, not of Sade, but of that mysticism that is Sade’s home, in the sigh that chokes at what it foresees, to have seen that his God is without figure: Grimmigkeit? Sade says: Supreme Being in spitefulness.

But pfutt! Schwärmereien: black swarms, we drive you out, to return you to the function of the presence of the Sadean ghost.”

That’s from “Kant avec Sade”, by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Any paragraph of it is much like any other. 

“Grimmigkeit”, by the way, means ferocity, while “Schwärmereien” means rapturous or fanatical intensities, but is a pun on “Schwärmen”, meaning swarms. There may also be an allusion to “Schwänen” (swans), as black swans are celebrated in philosophical circles for disproving the proposition that all swans are white. Lacan was celebrated for his wit, in Lacanian circles.

Lacan preserved Freud’s incoherent definition of “sadism”, failing to distinguish between sexual practices and violence enacted for non-sexual reasons.

The psychoanalyst as James Bond villain: Jacques Lacan

The psychoanalyst as James Bond villain: Jacques Lacan

Lacan’s own career offers an example of this confusion. Lacan treated his followers with contempt that was, arguably, justified by the quality of the work they admired, but in addition he mentally and physically abused vulnerable patients, which is perhaps less forgivable. Lacan’s abuse escalated to open, violent beatings of mentally ill people.

Other psychoanalysts described Lacan’s assaults on patients as “sadistic”. 

In reality it’s unlikely that Lacan derived any sexual satisfactions from beating his patients. He was not a “sadist”; he was simply an unpleasant bully whose violence went unchecked because he headed a cult.

One picture of Lacan is enough for any blog. So let's go out on a picture of a prick: swan's penis. Pfut, indeed!

One picture of Lacan is enough for any blog. So let’s go out on a picture of a prick. A swan’s penis. Pfutt, indeed!

 

Limits? (I pissed on a girl, and I didn’t like it.) Food for thought #10

The Food For Thought team has asked these three questions:

Food for thought #10: Limits questions

If4tf_button1s there something, (or things), that you would absolutely say no to in a sexual context?

What are your limits? Are they hard? Soft?

Have your limits changed over time?

Response

I have a personal ad on Fetlife, and I tell readers that I won’t have anything to do with shit, or urine, or knives or pins or sharps. Or animals. I also mention that I’m only interested in women, sexually, and that I’m a dom and I don’t switch. 

All of that’s still true and I feel no need to change any off it. But the edges can get fuzzier than I’d expected when I wrote it. 

For example, I’d prefer to have nothing to do with shit, in a sexual context. But I’ve already mentioned cleaning around the asshole of a girl I’d just buggered, because she’d leaked a bit. That’s not scat, because there was no shit-related pleasure in it for me, or her. It was just a job that needed to be done, quietly and discreetly.

I dealt with it by switching off part of my reaction for the duration. I’ve worked on farms, and I’ve cleaned shit from sheep and cattle, where it’s necessary to prevent flies from breeding. And there’s a mental attitude you get where you do what’s necessary, with a kind of detached benevolence until the necessary is done. So I could refine my statement so it reads, “Well, yes: I’ll deal with shit in some sexual contexts, but not for pleasure.”

I’ve found that I will do things that don’t attract me, if the submissive really wants me to. Once, under severe begging from a submissive girl I was just short of in love with, I pissed in her mouth and then, more generally, on her body. (She’d moved to the bath for the experiment.)

My thought at the time was, “Well, this is a new and unsexy experience, but it is taboo-breaking, isn’t it?”

So I felt that detached irony again: I was there and not-there, simultaneously. There was a kind of kindness there, and I like to be kind, but there was nothing erotic in it for me. But though I pushed that limit, it’s still there. It was a one-off, never repeated. 

I suppose I could amend “I won’t do anything sexual with urine” to read, “I won’t do anything quasi-sexual involving piss ever again.” But then I’d have to tell the story above to explain that, and I don’t feel like it. So I’ll let the current wording stand. It’s still true.

See? Sharp's erotica. Some people like it, but it's not for me.

Sharp’s erotica. Some people like it, but it’s not for me. (Confession: just a cheap joke. I’ve never read any Olive Sharp.)

As for sharps, I have an absolute horror of them. I once got cut quite badly when I was a child. It was just an accident, but to this day I feel a little cold chill in the pit of my stomach whenever I’m confronted with a sharp blade. I don’t let it interfere with anything I have to do, but there’s no way I could make it part of something pleasurable. I won’t cut or stick anyone with a blade, and I expect the same courtesy to be extended to me. 

So there’s no change at all in my attitude to sharps: they’re always off-limits. Oh, and animals are still right out, too. And so are shit and piss. Except that I’ll clean them away when it’s my responsibility.

So I guess my limits can be pushed a little, but they’re still hard limits. 

Terence

No-one really knows what Terence looked like. The Vatican, and Wikipedia, pretend this is his portrait.

Terence is a Roman comic playwright. He borrowed and translated that line from the Greek comic playwright Menander. No-one really knows what Terence looked like. The Vatican, and Wikipedia, pretend this is his portrait.

I’ve always been proud of holding and applying Terence’s line: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”: “I am a human being. I consider that nothing human is foreign to me.”

Sadly, when it comes to getting sexual pleasure from sharps, animals, scat and urine, I’m not only out, myself, but I don’t really see how it could be much fun for anyone else. So although those are still human desires, they’re all still foreign to me.

I think that’s a fault, not a virtue, because it’s a failure of imagination and a lack of empathy. But there it is, anyway. 

 

“On your back: get your knees up, keep them spread”: Doms giving oral sex 2

When a dom gives oral sex to their submissive, the submissive isn’t in control. They may be enjoying themselves, but they’re still subjected. They serve by giving over their body for the dom to lick them or suck them, but they do that to provide a conduit for the dom’s pleasure. 

Woman dom gets oral sex from male submissive: the dom is in charge

Woman dom gets oral sex from male submissive: the dom is in charge

When the submissive gives their dom oral sex, the submissive is serving. Their kneeling or otherwise subservient position, their wearing of a collar or a leash, their nudity while the dom may be partly clothed, all signal their submissive status.

The odd thing, in bdsm, is that when the dom gives their submissive oral sex, the submissive is still serving.

The submissive provides his or her body for the dom’s use. It’s a more indulgent use of the submissive’s body than some of the things a dom may do to their submissive, but it’s still use.

The male dom licks the submissive woman's cunt. And the dom, as ever, is in charge

Male dom licks submissive woman’s cunt. The dom, as ever, is in charge

The submissive’s reactions – whether or not they will get to come, for example – are controlled by their dom.

Their posture, their movements and their breathing are all controlled by the dam’s instructions, and by the pressure and the withdrawal of the dom’s mouth on the most sensitive parts of the submissive’s body.

The submissive’s body is the dom’s tongue-puppet.  

I’m mainly talking about symbolism and rhetoric, which are unusually important in bdsm compared to other sexualities. The truth is that when I go down on my slavegirl, my main motivations are that I like her cunt and I love her, and I want her to feel good. But it’s hotter for both of us if she can submit to me as well as submitting to her physical pleasure. 

So doms and submissives may perform exactly the same actions, and yet the imagery and meaning will be utterly different. There’s nothing either dom or sub, my mom would have said, but thinking makes it so. 

[That’s the end of the bdsm and oral sex sequence. We’ll be getting back to the Raylene saga soon. Will she get more of the strap? Will she get publicly humiliated? Will she get that cup of tea she asked for? Watch this space.]

“On your back, knees up, keep them spread”: Doms giving oral sex

But most doms want to lick their submissive’s cunt, or suck his cock, from time to time, for its own sake. Well, if you don’t like your submissive’s genitals a lot, what are you doing in a relationship? 

When doms use their mouths on their submissive’s bits, some things will be different – compared to non-bdsm oral sex – about the physical arrangement of their bodies.

A woman dom dodging the whole, "Can I do my slave and still stay dolly?" issue.

A woman dom dodging the whole, “Can I do my slave and still stay domly?” issue.

For example, I suspect that not many doms will drop to their knees to pleasure their submissive. For a dom, getting on your knees is a step too far. I like my metaphors mixed,  don’t you?

So doms will push or command their submissives onto their backs, and usually keep their heads higher than the submissive’s body. Or most of their heads.

Even when they’re giving good head, de-doop de-doop de-doop woooo…  

A dom who worries about bdsm symbolism can do extra things, like inserting a plug in the submissive’s ass, tying their arms to the bed frame, or giving them a long painful discipline session beforehand so that pain and its delicious aftermath precede pleasure.

Those things all help to set the mood for the submissive’s little treat.

slave presenting herself to be lickedI’m more likely just to use the soft, growly version of the command voice to set the mood and help the submissive feel she’s in her proper place. The commands I give are for her to lie on her back, lift her knees and keep them wide apart, and present her cunt forward as hard as she can. That helps set it within the dom/submissive framework, and allows us the freedom to act naturally from there on.

Speaking of “act naturally”, some Christians, like the voters of the State of Georgia, where oral sex is still a crime, think of it as an unnatural vice. But they should ask a zoologist about that. Don’t tell ISIS, but they’re going to have to behead one hell of a lot of animals if they want a purer world. May have wandered off the point, there. Hope no-one noticed.

More on oral sex and bdsm shortly. 

“Kneel!” Oral sex and bdsm 3

He's standing, and clothed, and free, being sucked. She's kneeling, naked, bound, and never too far from her next whipping. A non-bdsm observer would understand why he's happy, but not why she's in ecstasy too.

He’s standing, and clothed, and free, being sucked. She’s kneeling, naked, bound, and never too far from her next whipping: and she serves him. A non-bdsm observer would understand why he’s happy, but not why she’s in ecstasy too.

So a submissive giving oral sex may have bound wrists and ankles, or have his or her ass glowing from a recent paddling, and may know that the dom they’re pleasuring will take a riding crop or other implement of punishment to them, passionately and fiercely, if they make a mistake or show any lack of enthusiasm. These things aren’t true of non-bdsm oral sex.

There are subtler differences. The absence of the expectation that the person who serves will get their turn is one. That’s up to the dom, who may decide – for disciplinary reasons or just for the mischief of it – that the submissive doesn’t get to come at all.

It always feels a little wrong to me, if I refuse orgasm to a submissive girl who’s pleasured me so sweetly. But these days when I decide she’s not going to be allowed her own release, it feels like the fun kind of wrong. She’s frustrated, humiliated and turned on, and I feel a kind of glee. It’s good, not to be a gentleman dom: not all the time. It’s good to be king, too.

He's happy too.

He’s happy too.

So there’s no way, when a submissive sucks or licks her or his dom to orgasm, that the partners feel like they’re equals. Oral sex, in bdsm, seems as though it was especially designed to emphasise the power imbalance between them, the dom’s conquest and the submissive’s surrender. 

It’s these symbolic things that give oral sex its special significance in bdsm.

But … what happens to all that symbolic meaning when the dom decides to suck or lick his or her submissive?

“Kneel!” Oral sex and bdsm 2

In non-bdsm oral sex there’s an expectation that the partners will do each other, taking a roughly equal number of turns to give and receive. In bdsm oral sex, there are no expectations except that what the dom says is how it is. The submissive does what he or she is told and earns no reward points for that, except perhaps for the relief of not being punished when he or she performs well.

Not quite what I meant by "taking turns".

Not quite what I meant by “taking turns”.

If you’re going to have a sort of orgasmic equality, then you will generally need to take turns. Even women – and I suppose men – who really love to suck cock can seldom come from that alone. Once I’d have said never: but then I encountered a woman who could come, with nothing touching her cunt but the air, at the moment I released into her mouth and she swallowed. So it can be done.

These days, if I want the submissive to come while she’s sucking me, I’ll lie on my back with my legs open. She lies on her front, with her mouth on my cock and her legs straddling my right leg, with her cunt pressed against my knee. If she’s a good girl and a good rider, then I’ll let her get herself off while she works on my cock. 

My instinct, usually, is to make the woman come after serving me, because I like the sight and sounds and smells of female orgasm, and why should I deny myself that? Anyway, after an orgasm I’m generally in a benevolent mood. But I came to realise that I shouldn’t always succumb to that kindly meant impulse. Cruel can be kinder.

When denying a submissive an orgasm, always be mindful of the safety of your own genitals

When denying a submissive an orgasm, always be mindful of the safety of your own genitals

I’ll never forget the first time I came in a submissive girl’s mouth and then – once she’d cleaned me, still sucking – put my cock back inside my pants and zipped up. Her expression of shocked disbelief was priceless. But before that moment we’d talked a lot about how her role in life was to serve me, and that what she desired didn’t matter or count at all. She’d loved being told that, and she found it a very sexy idea, but it wasn’t until I denied her the orgasm she’d expected that it felt real to her.

Orgasm denial’s a very intimate control over a submissive which, in my experience, most submissives hate but also love. It makes the submissive very aware, over a long period, of their submission, especially when they’re pleasuring their master or mistress, and dealing with their owner’s orgasm while knowing they won’t be allowed any release themselves.

That combination of sexual yearning and self-awareness of their own submission is, it’s always seemed to me, one of a submissive’s key pleasures. One-sided, blatantly unfair oral sex is one good way to drive that awareness home. The dom’s duty is to give his or her submissive plenty of opportunities to feel sexually needing, and subordinate.  

More to come, on bdsm and oral sex.