Kai (un)Restrained

Tonight I got stuck trying to define "playing." It went something to the effect of me telling DW I had really wanted to play this weekend--it was approaching the later end for such things, given that it's a work night--and he looked at me and asked, "What would you call earlier, then?"

Earlier. Earlier had been him biting and teasing me. Earlier had been him saying we had to go to the store, then changing his mind by way of rolling me over onto my back and pulling my pants off, burying his face between my legs. Earlier was him pinning my hands out at arm's length so that I couldn't pull away or cover my face or scratch at his arms when it got too intense for me to keep still. He kept me pinned when I thought I would cry. Took me to where I thought I would die... and kept going. The bed has anchor points for rope embedded in it, solid metal rings mounted on the frame. But we didn't use them... his hands were more than sufficient.

He has told me on occasion that one of his favorite things is watching me squirm. And he knows how to make me do that, without fail. Squirm, thrash, scream.... these things, I have no control over.

Earlier was allowing me brief recovery time before bending me over the bed and taking me, just before we left the apartment to get things for dinner.

Earlier... was something that I classified more as sex than play until he asked me how I would define it.

I tried to explain that, to me, "playing" has always involved doing a scene, so my definition defaults to scene-ing.

"Oh, so you want me to formalize it."

This, in short order, turned into me declaring that human beings do not prove ownership of a thing by licking it until it smells like them, and him disagreeing by way of very decisively licking my face.

This is another example, I think, of the bleed between the kink and the "normal." Certainly, most of the components of what we did would just as easily fit into vanilla sex. Going down on a girl isn't kinky, nor is bent-over-the-bed sex. But... add the other things, add the context, and something about what it is changes. Add his total control over what I felt. Add his hands pinning my wrists down. Add his direction of the situation, his maintaining his hold over me, the simple fact that I am his submissive. What it comes down to is that earlier could very easily be thought of as play, even without having a "formal" scene attached. And this is not something that I am very quick to realize. I wonder if other people ever experience this sort of disconnect.

In the end, though, I still very much look forward to the next time he collars me... and to the day when he finally tells me to kneel.

Kai Under Cover of Darkness

Sometimes, to serve me, you have to serve yourself.

There are times when the kink world bleeds into the vanilla world. I recognized this less when I was here last, when I largely measured the amount of kink in our life by how often we scened. There have been occasions when I have seen the bleed-through before: when we went out to dinner with a remote vibrator hidden in my pants, battery case concealed beneath my shirt; when the timbre of his voice changes to tell me that I'm on shaky ground and should watch what I do or say--the small things that come out of our interactions, whether expected or not. We did not play when he visited me at my parents' house, but we looked at toy stores online, talked through a BDSM checklist, and went out to buy me a leash. And the thing is, the small things do count. I didn't really think they did before, which perhaps had a lot to do with the small things being less frequent and less noticeable. Even now I wouldn't call them extremely frequent... but they are frequent enough, and I have come to value them.

Last night, DW held me on top of him, holding my wrists above his head, and gave me my first command. He has been working very hard towards getting me to finish without assistance during sex, and he made me promise to find what feels best to me, what works best for me, and to not hold myself back when I'm close. It isn't that I hold myself back on purpose... I don't even realize that I'm doing it. But we have talked at some length about orgasm control, and that can't even be attempted if I can't learn to let go all the way during sex. And so he told me in no uncertain terms that until the end of the evening, the sex was not about him. I was not allowed to think about it as being about him, was not allowed to see the goal as getting him to finish, was simply to focus on what felt good to me. As it says at the beginning of this entry, he told me that sometimes in order to serve him, I would have to serve myself.

It was strange, in a way. And it was good. And it was scary. And, in a way, it was still about him... because he was the one who told me that it was now my job to focus on and learn something about myself. I found what felt best to me and pushed myself into it, but the fact that he wanted it of me made it somehow more. He commanded me. I served him. I served me. Perhaps this is one of the ways in which dominants and submissives tie themselves together. And he told me about the different sides of me that he had seen: the submissive who takes pleasure in withstanding pain and the much smaller submissive who enjoys the pain itself; the submissive that is desperate to please and will do almost anything in order to do so; the nymphomaniac who will throw everything into sex and get lost in it. There might very well have been others... I might have forgotten. He held my gaze and I saw nothing outside of it while he spoke to me. It was like being in sub space, and I wonder now if maybe it was. It had so many aspects of a scene without actually being one, and, for me, broke down some of the boundary that has always separated play and sex.

I am uncertain as to whether or not I have said anything of significance with this entry... but I felt that it warranted a moment here all the same.

Story of Someone Who is Not Kai

Well... it's been longer than a week since I last posted, so apologies for that. I'm writing now from DW's place, which is now my place as well. I wouldn't say that I've completely moved in--I still have some stuff in boxes, plus a number of boxes that haven't gotten here yet--but I'm settled enough to start writing again... provided I continue to find things to say.

So, I've been saying for a while that I wanted to do an entry on Story of O, and maybe it's time I finally got around to doing that. Every time I think about this entry I get a little bit intimidated, because O deserves genuine critique on both a literary and psychological level and I don't feel this is something I can effectively provide. Or rather, if I treated this as a research paper or serious analysis I could, but what I'd like to do now is just give some of my opinions and impressions about it. Keep in mind that I haven't read any criticism/analysis of O beyond what is included in the Sabine d'Estree translation (preface by Jean Paulhan, "A Note on Story of O" by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues), so if anything I'm saying has already been said... well, I am unaware of it.

I first read Story of O when I was last staying with DW, probably around this past February. I had heard of it, but not read it; in fact, my only impression of it revolved around one of my friends saying that they had once thought of it as a sort of warm, fuzzy beginners' guide to BDSM, and my other friends reacting in shock and disbelief. So, I figured that the book was centered around some pretty hardcore themes... and that my friend might have had a strange induction into the BDSM world.

Within the first few pages, I knew I was right--at least about the book content. But the degree of right that I was was... shocking? Upsetting? Throughout the book's prefaces, notes, and introductions, it is referred to as "a dangerous book." At least one of the writers who calls it so seems to approach it from the angle of: it is dangerous because it says something true. And perhaps it does say true things. When I told DW how wrong I felt the book was, he said that though the actions taken in the story might be bad, it does provide a certain window into the mind of a submissive. And this I think could be true. O is a submissive. She is one all the way through to her core and out again. She draws power and confidence from the abuse of her body, in a way that seems to make her transcend the world as we see and understand it; the world that she walks through grows farther and farther away from what most people would consider "reality." Even when she is in her apartment or at work, there is a certain element of "underground" that stays with her and separates her from her physical environment. And, in the "alternate ending" of the story, she chooses to die rather than live without her dominant... to which he grants his permission. In the final chapter leading up to that ending, wherein she is the Owl, there seems little of the "real" left in her at all. That, I think, is what I mean when I say that her submission allows her to transcend the world. At any rate, it is an aspect of herself that she carries and owns and so thoroughly embraces that it consumes her. In debasing herself, she becomes stronger.

But... what is done to her is terrible. She is taken to a place where her dominant and lover abandons her to be repeatedly raped and beaten, is reclaimed only to be given away and eventually forgotten about by the man who did the giving, is marked for life with the insignia of her new master who--in aforementioned "alternate ending"--ultimately decides that he no longer wants her. This is a vast paring down of the events of the book, obviously, but her interaction with the events that take place read less like erotica and more like a fascinating study on Stockholm Syndrome. She embraces a life which is forced on her--embraces it thoroughly--but that does not, in my mind, negate the abuse and dehumanization which brought her there. While I saw flashes in her of things that made sense to me on a personal level, I felt little more than revulsion in regards to the world she was brought into and the actions perpetrated on her.

I suppose that one could say that she had a choice. That she could have refused Roissy from the beginning. That she could have simply broken the thrall with the simple action of leaving. One could also say that her natural tendencies were taken advantage of and manipulated to produce desired results. One could say that she wanted it, say she was brainwashed, say she was psychologically abused. Say she was a True Submissive. Say she was insane. But when I was reading, all I could really think was that what was being done to her was monstrous.

So... what aspect is it that makes this book "dangerous"? Is it because it is BDSM erotica? Rape-fantasy erotica? Is it because it encourages an acceptance of taking joy in submission? Because it perpetrates the idea that being a dominant means dehumanizing and exercising complete control over your submissive? Paulhan thinks he knows... but Paulhan makes a mistake in saying that O proves something about women in general, not about submissives:

"At last a woman who admits it! Who admits what? Something that women have always refused till now to admit (and today more than ever before). Something that men have always reproached them with: that they never cease obeying their nature, the call of their blood, that everything in them, even their minds, is sex. That they have constantly to be nourished, constantly washed and made up, constantly beaten. That all they need is a good master, one who is not too lax or kind: for the moment we make any show of tenderness they draw upon it, turning all the zest, joy, and character at their command to make others love them. In short, that we must, when we go to see them, take a whip along."

Actually, I would not even say that this statement is something that O proves about submissives... I would not say that O proves anything about any category of people. The character of O isn't Women, isn't Submissives, isn't Victims. O is O, and even at her most dehumanized there is something that makes her herself.

I don't know how convoluted I have gotten in this entry, or how my thoughts may have contradicted each other, or even if I have said everything I wanted to say. There is one other thing, though, that I think is worth noting... if only for the fact that it does not appear in any of the notes preceding the story: the perfectness of O's name in expressing what she is. Maybe it never needed stating, which is why it wasn't noted, but see... it is open. It is inclusive. It is empty and waiting. And it can never close.