The shame of being a dom 1

Posted on September 7, 2014 by jaime

I was at a party with a lot of people who could be called queer. There were gays, and lesbians, some transgender people, there were people from the local sex workers’ union (because it was a party; they weren’t working), people wearing nothing but ropes and duct tape, there were perverts like me, there were lots of academic sex researchers, and so on.

I was talking to a woman who worked for the sex workers’ union, and she asked me what my kink was. I figured that because she’d asked me a question like that, and because of the sort of party it was, and because of how hard it is to negotiate the politics of sex work, she’d be aware of all the debates about the sexual politics of bdsm.

In particular, that when women choose to be submissive, they are no less assertive, and no less feminist than dommes, or than women who don’t have any involvement with bdsm. Similarly, male doms can be no less feminist, or feminist-supporting, than submissive men or men who don’t engage with bdsm at all.

I said “no less feminist”: I mean, that’s if they choose to identify with feminism. Most but not all submissives I’ve known do identify themselves as feminists, but I’ve also known submissives who despise feminism, and submissives who see it as politics and Just Don’t Have Any Fucks to Give. But being a feminist and being a submissive are both choices that people can make, and plenty of women and men choose both.

Old Bum-chin says, “Never hit a submissive. Unless she doesn’t do as she’s told.”

So anyway, I was talking to a woman engaged in the politics of sex work, and she asked me my kink. Well, one of the things that bigots say about bdsm is that “it’s just men hitting women”. But I was certain that this woman would know that bdsm practices are much more varied than, er, impact play, and that it’s not about men doing things to women; it can be women doing things to men, or men doing things to other men, or women dominating women, or any multi-partner combination you can think of.

So I said, in my best Cary Grant voice, “Well, personally, I get off on telling women what to do, and hitting them if they disobey.”

Of course, that’s true, in a way, though it doesn’t represent all the things I like, or the warm and loving context I prefer to have the dark deeds embedded in. But it was a parody answer, with a bit of transgression thrown in, and I thought it was mildly funny.

Anyway, she said, “Eew-ya”, as if I’d said something about putting fluffy kittens into microwaves, and she found someone else to talk to. Now, it could be because she thought my joke wasn’t funny, or it could be because she hates male doms. I think it was a bit of both, but especially the bit about hating male doms.

Chloe’s game: the 21st and final instalment

Posted on September 6, 2014 by jaime

“Women’s Prison II: Night of the Warden”: a searing indictment of today’s prison conditions and recidivism rates.

That became our new life. On some weekends we played Naughty schoolgirl and strict teacher. There were other games, of which Women’s Prison II: Night of the Warden was best. (There was no Women’s Prison I.)

The thing with role-playing was to keep the format stupid, so there could be nothing of interest in the game itself. We didn’t want to develop a storyline or care about characters. The games freed us to explore darker bdsm territory while maintaining normal life the rest of the time.

Serious play was for the weekends. On weeknights Chloe got spanked or I’d take my belt to her as for the sensuality of it, before and during sex.

Chloe encouraged me to experiment. I became better at keeping our sexual plays moving, and at seeming to control what happened while making sure that Chloe’s pleasures and preferences were well indulged.

I learned to give commands with apparent conviction, and – within these games – without embarrassment or political guilt. I learned to pause impressively, rather than dithering, when I couldn’t think of what to say or do next. It was acting from the William Shatner school but – like Shatner’s acting – it worked well enough.

Libertines at the altar. (Illustration from “Therese Philosophe”, 1748.)

I sometimes tried earnest conversation with Chloe about how our play could be defended politically, but she thought that my worries about it were my problem. She was merciless when she encountered sexist men, but she had no interest in ideology or activism. Chloe loathed authoritarianism, irrationalism, hypocrisy, stupidity and wilful ignorance, which meant she was not ideally placed to take much interest in political campaigns, except where they touched on science and got in its way.

I suspect that she mildly enjoyed the idea that her choice of pleasure might annoy the more puritanical kind of feminist, in something of the spirit in which eighteenth century libertines might sneak into a local church and have sex on the altar. In any case she played and helped plan our games with the kind of glee that suggested she was subverting something.

It’s not a game I’ve played for years. I don’t do any role playing any more. But it was worth doing at the time. There’s a hell of lot to be learned from it.

Schoolgirl spanking stories and sexual politics 12

Posted on September 3, 2014 by jaime

I had a French maid once. I mean, there was a maid who cleaned the apartment I was staying in, in Paris. The really surprising thing was that she wasn’t required to wear a little black dress with a dinky white apron, and totter about in ankle-breaking heels with a feather duster, saying, “Oo la la.”

Actually she was a reasonably attractive woman who wore flat sensible shoes, with a blue industrial smock and hairnet. She carried a bucket of cleaning stuff and a vacuum cleaner.

First point is: real women aren’t and shouldn’t be obliged by their employers to live up to a sexual stereotype.

Second point is: Fifi the French maid is a fun stereotype – or archetype, if you’re feeling grand – and long may she continue to make woebegone faces when Sir Stephen announces, over and over, forever, “Fifi, je te donnerais une grande fessée.” The stereotype will survive, and people will have fun and orgasms with it, even if real French maids don’t dress that way any more.

Fifi may once have had sisters in the real world, but now she doesn’t. But changes in the real world don’t affect the survival of sexual fantasy figures.

Similarly, it’s long past time to abolish school uniforms. A girl shouldn’t have to wear a flappy pleated skirt and the rest of the outfit as the price of getting an education. The standard school uniforms for both sexes were designed, I suspect, to emphasise powerlessness and the lack of adult status, and therefore to make school students more tractable in classroom settings.

When schools decided to put girls into a short, flappy costume designed to emphasise powerlessness, it’s not really surprising that that costume attracted a certain amount of sexual attention. But there’s no reason why actual girls who go to school should be made to wear the thing.

There’s evidence that you get better young adult behaviour out of school students if you let them dress like young adults.

It’s not only girls: boys shouldn’t have to wear grey serge shorts, either, but the boy uniforms are just ugly, rather than being a sexual fetish costume. Yeah, I know that there are people who have a bit of a thing for dressing their lovers, of either sex, in male school uniforms, and I salute their gender-fucking imagination. But it’s less common, so it hasn’t become a sexual stereotype.

But the girl school uniform is a sexual fetish costume, and parents and school governors know it. So they need to stop forcing girls to wear it if they don’t want to.

Schoolgirl spanking stories and sexual politics 11

Posted on September 2, 2014 by jaime

The first rule of sexual politics is that sexual stuff shouldn’t involve non-consenting parties. And especially it shouldn’t involve powerless parties who haven’t consented.

Yeah, that’s cool. There’s no denying that’s cool. But not in front of the actual girls who go to school, ok?

So the public sexualisation of schoolgirls is crap. Being an adolescent is hard enough without being marked publicly, by adults, as “naughty”, “sexy” and “hot”, and so on. Actual schoolgirls should be able to get through their day, and be miserable in their own way, without being dragged into sexual stuff that adults do with each other.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the strict teacher/naughty schoolgirl scenario.

That’s why I spent 21 posts telling the story of one roleplay game, early in my bdsm career, that taught me more about bdsm than I’d learned before. More than I’d learned in one evening before, anyway. It’s hot, and it does allow exploration of darker bdsm themes in the middle of what seems to be a silly, light-hearted game.

But the wider cultural fetishisation of schoolgirls is a bit unkind to actual girls who go to school. I don’t think “there oughta be a law” outlawing public display of hot adult women wearing school uniform. Laws like that always have more stupid effects than positive ones.

It’s just that as ethical people, perverts and sluts, we should certainly keep it well away from real, actual girls who are going through (1) adolescence, which is hard, and (2) school, which by and large sucks.

“Please, Captain, not in front of the Klingons.”

Schoolgirl spanking stories and sexual politics 10

Posted on September 1, 2014 by jaime

It’s a cold morning. Vicious wind and sheets of rain. There’s a group of schoolgirls in pleated school uniform skirts, waiting for the bus. They’re stamping and rubbing their hands. They’re freezing. A pleated skirt and a blazer over a cotton shirt aren’t nearly enough to keep the cold out.

But the Christian school they go to has a uniform and they have to wear it. They’re not allowed to wear sensible clothes for the weather conditions.

Just behind their bus shelter there’s a strip joint. It closed for the night about four hours ago, a little after three in the morning. But there are enormous paintings on the front of the building to show the punters and pedestrians what you get for your entrance fee, or membership.

So there’s a woman in a nurse’s uniform, leaning forward to show off the considerable heft of her breasts. Because, you know, nurses.

Beside her there’s an equally huge painting of a schoolgirl with an even more improbable body. She’s bending forward to present her arse to the street so the wind can blow her little pleated skirt up and show off her little white knickers, and she’s turning round to gaze at the rosy spectacle of her own arse, giving the viewer a red-lip-sticked O of surprise and a vista of her improbable breasts.

To flash both her ass and her tits that way, she’d have to have her spine made out of the same stuff as Linda Blair’s neck in The Exorcist. If she wasn’t a painting she’d be in traction for years, poor thing.

The real schoolgirls in front of that image never look behind them. That image and the word “Schoolgirls!” has been there for years. There’ve been schoolgirls waiting at that bus-stop in front of that sign for years. It probably feels like they’ve been waiting for that morning’s bus for years. The sign’s always been there.

But they don’t look at it. It’s there.

Traditional sexual consent vs bdsm consent

Posted on August 31, 2014 by jaime

When I was growing up I didn’t know any other people who had bdsm dreams and desires. I wasn’t sure if there even were any girls into bdsm in the whole world, and I was certain that there weren’t any in the farming town I grew up in. So getting consent to do bdsm-y sexual things wasn’t even an issue for me. But at least there were girls who liked sex, so I did learn the traditional script for getting consent for non-bdsm sex.

It’s a sexually asymmetrical script. That is, it’s sexist. A woman is supposed to give subtle, non-verbal signals of her interest in a man. Things that seem obvious to her, that men hardly ever even notice. A man is allowed to show sexual interest more openly.

He can gaze at a woman, make compliments, stand close to her, try to make himself helpful if she’s doing something, talk and listen to her answers, and try to be clever and funny. He’s supposed to monitor the response, not that she has to make one.

If she frowns, freezes, calls someone else over, changes the subject to something dull, sighs, looks bored, turns away, then he should go away. But if he seems to be being smiled at, he can continue. Eventually he can touch her hand, or her waist or shoulder, though avoiding areas of the body that are marked as sexual.

If she seems comfortable with that “casual” touch, he might stay with that for a time. When it seems natural, which might be a minute later but it might be days, he can try to kiss her. He’s supposed to keep his hands somewhere neutral, and leave space to back out if the kiss isn’t well received.

Ah, the universal language of flowers. Usually they say, “sorry, I spent the afternoon fucking someone else, and I feel a bit bad about that, so here’s some flowers.” Note: flowers mostly won’t get you laid, but they are good for whipping breasts.

She doesn’t have to say anything, because she doesn’t have to acknowledge that anything is happening. If she’s not pleased, she can withdraw her body, or her warmth, or tell him to fuck off. If any of those things happen he should say sorry and back away. If there are no signals either way, the man will probably pause, then move forward carefully. If he seems still to be getting smiles, then he can try for an open mouth kiss with his hand touching sexual areas: her ass, a breast. That also might happen seconds later, or days.

If that’s well received then sexual consent is usually assumed, though the man can lose consent by doing something stupid and off-putting. From that point the woman can withdraw consent, but she has to be explicit about doing so. That’s the version I was taught by girls and, I suppose, my parents. There’s another version of the script in which the woman isn’t allowed to withdraw consent once she’s shown any sort of keenness. It’s a script that doesn’t have much trouble turning rapey.

The man who’s advanced to this point and been accepted no longer has a moral right to stop. For a man to bow out at this stage, within this script, is nasty, hurtful and humiliating behavior.

These scripts are like dancing, because they allow creative variations, and some people can perform them gracefully while others are crap at them. Still, they’re based on the idea that women shouldn’t want and shouldn’t be able to show sexual interest or desire too quickly or easily, or too openly.

In the script’s harshest forms a woman only has the right to be silent or else to stop a man’s advance, and a man may have moved from eye contact to sexual touching with nothing more than her inaction as his indication of consent. The script maximizes opportunities for men and women to misunderstand each other and hurt each other. It seems designed to create misunderstanding.

When I was a child, before I knew about this script, I’d assumed that men and women would be frank with each other about their sexual interest or lack of it. A woman or a man would plainly declare their interest and the other person would give them an honest and open response. If they were both interested, they’d talk about what they wanted and then get on with it, doing their best to find and give pleasure as they’d agreed.

Yeah, what a silly idea. But the funny thing is that this is pretty much how consent is negotiated in bdsm. People who enjoy bdsm generally avoid ambiguity over sexual desire and intentions.

This may be because we’re usually more specific about the kind of partner we’re looking for. We usually prefer one sex and some specifications about appearance, as non-bdsm people do, but as well as that we’re usually looking for a dominant or submissive partner in particular, and within that group we’re looking for someone prefers the specific practices that we like, and to roughly the same degree of intensity.

Also, the consequences of miscommunication can be greater in bdsm. So in bdsm courtship people tend to be explicit about what they want and who they want it with.

Even before I knew the rules of bdsm courtship, I knew that I kind of disapproved of the rules of non-bdsm courtship. The bdsm world seems to have taken a far less sexist approach, and a much more ethical one.

That is, it’s better in principle. Assholes, liars, manipulators, nutters and rapists can still misuse any system, but at least in bdsm the ground rules are fairer and clearer.

What do people think?

Chloe’s game 18

Posted on August 28, 2014 by jaime

Naughty schoolgirl and strict teacher is one of the tackiest scenarios in all pornography. It’s silly, clichéd, and politically suspect. But it had just introduced me to pleasures that I intended to explore and repeat.

I’d liked Chloe’s obedience, playful though it had been. I’d liked giving orders. Chloe’s show of respectful surrender, sir, and the way I’d asserted myself in response: that was exciting.

I hadn’t used a real instrument before. I hadn’t made a woman raise her voice in pain before. Both had overjoyed me. I wasn’t quite comfortable with the fact that Chloe’s cries of pain had turned me on, but I couldn’t deny it.

There was a hairbrush and a ruler in that drawer, and I knew that I’d use both on Chloe, hard, before this weekend was over. I wanted to hear her song of pain again and again, and to hurt and fuck and comfort the girl who sang it.

The game might be silly, but it took me to darker and more truthful places than I’d ever been before.

Till then I’d always tried to maintain and emphasise equality between my partners and me, even during bdsm sex. I’d get permission before I hurt her or tied her, not only before any session, but before proceeding with any action during a session. Consent had to be continuously asserted.

But Chloe had simply given me her submission and put me in control. Submission turned out to be more exciting than permission.

I wanted more of it. Within that game I could have it, and Chloe could have her pleasures, while – outside the game – we maintained the equality that we both believed in.

Chloe’s game 17

Posted on August 27, 2014 by jaime

At a signal from Chloe – she said, “Are you going to fuck me”, with slight impatience, rather than, “Please fuck me, sir”, which told me that the game was over and we were back in propriae personae – I helped her up, embraced and praised her, and helped get that uniform off, undoing buttons and tugging with clumsy impatience, then shed my own clothes and pulled her to bed.

Chloe wouldn’t let her strapped skin touch the sheet, let alone lie on her back. I wanted to fuck her from behind, sinking my cock between her glowing buttocks, but she ruled that out too. She wanted nothing harder than air to touch her bottom. So I lay on my back and let her straddle me.

She leaned down to kiss me and didn’t break the kiss while she lowered herself onto my cock, filling herself.

Then she sat up to ride, her nipples drawing pink spirals in the air as she bounced above me.

One last surge of cruelty took me as she was close to coming, and I reached back and smacked her burning skin while she grunted and galloped; and for the first time in months she made her crying and hiccoughing noise, as she came and fell forward onto me.

But this time there was laughter in the mix.

Chloe rested on me and I held her until she snored gently, her nose healthily cold against my neck. I lay awake and considered my new experiences.

Chloe’s game 15

Posted on August 25, 2014 by jaime

Chloe turned her head away when my arm moved, fixing her gaze on the chair seat. The strap landed with an astonishingly loud crack, wrapping itself round the lower slopes of Chloe’s buttocks.

The effect was dramatic. Chloe’s head shot up, and she sang out “heee-uuu”. On one hearing, that soprano cry became one of my sexual tastes. I wanted to hear it again.

I also liked the shockwave in Chloe’s flesh, as the heavy strap impacted, though because she was fit it lasted only a second. I watched the miracle of her skin changing colour, a brilliant pink stripe emerging, blooming like a stop-motion flower, about three inches across, with sharply defined edges.

It bobbed and weaved, that stripe, as Chloe’s hips bucked in the seconds after that impact, throwing off the pain like a horse trying to throw a rider.

I waited until she’d settled and arched her bottom up again. I aimed to leave the next stripe just above the first, neither overlapping nor leaving a gap. That was misplaced confidence; no-one should expect to land a strap accurately without practice. The strap landed high, leaving a sloping welt across the top of Chloe’s left buttock and wrapping painfully high across her right hip. Chloe’s cry was higher in pitch and volume. It was the wrong sort of pain.

But I swallowed the apology I wanted to speak, because it would break the mood and make things worse. I said, in the harshest, angriest voice I could manage, “Get that bottom up, girl. You’re getting strapped. And keep still!”

That was kinder.

For the third stroke, and all those subsequent, I aimed for the fleshiest part of her buttocks, reasoning that since my aim was lousy I’d achieve a reasonable spread of strokes just by accident, and that at least the strokes would land somewhere well padded.

Chloe’s game 14

Posted on August 24, 2014 by jaime

Chloe’s hands gripped the seat as fiercely as the sides of a dentist’s chair. She was excited but she was, naturally, fearful. Chloe looked up at me as I raised the strap. I felt its weight rest over my shoulder and down my back, and gazed at her, measuring.

When I swung my arm down, and first deliberately hurt and marked Chloe with that strap, we’d both be different people. And after we’d done that, we’d do it again, and again, as it became something that we did: Jaime whips Chloe with a leather strap, you know, they do that.

I wanted to say something important but I could only think of clichés from the texts.

“All right, Chloe, you’ve asked for a good strapping” – at least that was true within the game and outside it – “and now you’re going to get it. I want you to be a brave girl for me. And … um … I expect you to stay in position. If you let go of the chair, Chloe, I’ll start the strokes again. Understood?”

Chloe was having trouble speaking. But she managed to say, hoarse-throated, “Yes, sir, I understand.”

“If you get up, I’ll start again and double the number of strokes. Do you hear me?”

Chloe heard me, sir. Not that the threat had any meaning. I hadn’t thought about how many strokes – I’d call them lashes, the next time I spoke of them – I was going to give her, so there was no number to double.

I hoped Chloe thought that all this waiting had been stylishly cruel, but it was time to stop thinking. I took a breath and swung the strap laterally through the air.