Kai10寿司 (kaiten-zushi)

A little while back, I joined an online kink/fetish community. I did so in large part because I have never been part of one, and I wanted to experience an outlet into the wider population of the kink world. DW has had experiences with online communities in the past and has more or less given of on them and put them behind him, but he had no problem with me putting myself out there and checking the scene out for myself.

Thus far, the community has proven to have the same sorts of pros and cons as any community. I love the debate, the variety of viewpoints, the range of subjects to read about… It’s really nice to be able to see what other people think about in the realm of kink. You get the types who have the sort of “my way or the highway” mentality about how BDSM is supposed to work, those who make a point of acknowledging that everyone’s views on/experiences with the “lifestyle” are different, those who are covert with their presences, those who unabashedly porn it up… Just so many people, so many different ways of thinking, so many things that poking around there makes me think about. It’s not quite tantamount to real-life exposure, but it’s something that I’m glad I have access to.

One of the things that I have noticed around there is the prevalence of polyamorous relationships. I had some friends in college who went that route, and others who just went for the “open relationship” model, and out of them I couldn’t have pinpointed many that seemed like they worked. That’s not meant to be a commentary on whether or not polyamory is a good idea… it’s just my personal observation of how it was when I was in school. At any rate, I suppose I was surprised at how many instances of it I saw online, almost like it was the trendy thing in the scene at the time. I have very little idea as to whether or not that’s true, though I would venture to say that there are people who are in legit poly relationships because that’s what does it for them, and those who do it because it seems like what all the “cool kids” are doing. (I mentally compare this a bit to people who are bisexual vs. those who try to be or say they are bisexual because, let’s face it… it did become trendy at some point.)

I further noticed, even before it actually became a discussion topic on a couple of the boards, that there were people on both the polyamorous and monogamous sides of things who seemed to feel very much like their way was “better” than the other. There would be monogamists who argued moral superiority, polyamorists who argued that embracing a wider view made them more evolved, and then everyone in the middle with their many and varied opinions ranging the entire spectrum. At one point, a debate surfaced regarding the possible existence of submissives who agreed to polyamorous relationships simply because if they did not, their Dominants would sleep around anyway… and then lie about it. It was a fascinating discussion, and it made me examine my own feelings on the issue.

Now, it is not my intent here to critique other people’s opinions about whether polyamory is awesome, evil, or whatever else have you. These are just my thoughts about something that I had not, in all honesty, given much thought to before.

• As far as I’m aware, polyamory is a term describing the ability to love more than one person. Also, I was advised way back in the day—courtesy of the kink club I belonged to in college—that in a polyamorous relationship (as opposed to an “open relationship”) all partners should be aware of each other and accept one another as part of the relationship. One friend of mine at the time was quite vocally against what she termed L-shaped relationships, where one person is in a relationship with the other two, but those two have no relationship to each other. I have a feeling that, although I’m sure exceptions exist, an L-shaped relationship—full disclosure or not—would be a large-scale communication mistake waiting to happen.
• Based on the aforementioned definition of what a polyamorous relationship should be, such a relationship should never be used as an excuse or a reason to sleep around. Unless you’re informing your main partner(s) of everyone else you’re having sex with and get their approval, that’s really not a polyamorous relationship. That’s just… well, sleeping around. Or an open relationship, depending on what you and your partner’s parameters are.
• I dislike the idea of a Dominant setting down a ground-rule that, while he or she is allowed to have multiple partners, his or her submissive(s) is/are not. If it comes out of mutual agreement, that’s cool… I can shelve it under the “Your Kink is Not My Kink” heading. But if it’s a demand with no room for debate, I find it kind of tweaky.
• I don’t think that men specifically have more of a “need” to be polyamorous or have multiple sexual partners. Sure, back in the good old days of early humanity the pride of lions model (i.e. one male in charge of many females) was practical and necessary, but modern man (with all of his evolved higher intelligence and social awareness) shouldn’t be allowed to use his genetic ancestry as an excuse. Again, if both primary partners agree that he’s allowed to sleep around, fine, but I don’t really buy into the “But I have to sleep with lots of women because that’s what men are built to do!” defense. It’s kind of like saying, “But I have to be pregnant all the time because that’s what women are built to do!”
• I believe that polyamory can actually work quite well if everyone involved communicates and knows what’s going on. It can’t work, though, if anyone in the relationship isn’t actually poly. It’s like telling everyone you’re a bisexual female until you realize that, try as you might, you’re just not sexually attracted to that girl you’re hooking up with. I suppose the point here is that if you don’t think you’re actually wired for poly, don’t try to convince yourself that you are… you’ll most likely just end up getting hurt, and hurting other people as well.
• Polyamory… is just not for me. I know that I can be attracted to more than one person at a time, but that’s not about love and it’s not about choosing a partner. Do I think that the monogamous route is “better”? No: the “better” configuration is whichever one works best for the person/people in the relationship. I’m quite content with a single partner who has no other partners besides me.
• I don’t think being monogamous means you’re never allowed to have a threesome or do a scene with another play partner. I don’t know how I would handle either of these things—though I try hard not to be, I know I can get jealous—but unless you’re in a relationship with that third person or that play partner I’m pretty sure you can still call yourself monogamous.
• I don’t think that poly is a necessity where kink is concerned. You don’t have to do it just because “everybody else” is.

This has become quite long-winded, so I think it’s time to close it out. In short, polyamory is not for me. It’s really not about who’s right, who’s more evolved, who’s kinkier, or whatever else have you. It’s a preference and a lifestyle… and it honestly just shouldn’t be used as an excuse to have sex with everyone.

As always, comments are welcome.

Kai Clashes With Her Dominant Sometimes... Which is Probably to be Expected

Sometimes it’s difficult to be an emotional submissive with a logic-based Dominant. Not bad, mind you, but difficult. I’ll set myself to writing an entry about something that I feel strongly about—you’ve probably figured out by now that I’m very opinionated at least some of the time—and later have it brought to my attention that instead of “addressing the issue at hand,” I’m standing on a soap-box talking about why I feel a certain way rather than directly examining the subject.

At that point, of course, I get frustrated. I get upset, even though I tell myself that I shouldn’t. And the reason I get upset is that something I feel very strongly about is being taken apart logically in front of me, divorced from emotional content and personal investment.

The other reason I get upset is that he’s most often right about things like that.

There is something that is simultaneously enjoyable and maddening about being partnered to a scientist. Sometimes I love that difference, and sometimes it feels like running up against a brick wall.

Upon reading my entry about gender identity, gender preference, and D/s configuration, DW told me in no uncertain terms that there were, in fact, biological bases for all of these things, and therefore it was erroneous to assume that the fact of me being female has nothing to do with the fact of me being a submissive. He said that within species which contain males and females, the males are dominant… and that humans, despite having developed higher intelligence, don’t get to claim exemption. Biology is full of exceptions, accounting for the existence of male submissives, female Dominants, and whatever other configurations one might come across, but my claim that there is no relationship between the two was found to be faulty because I addressed the whole issue via personal viewpoints and opinions instead of fact.

Gender identity is a very personal issue for me. It isn’t that I want to be a male rather than a female, but… I do feel very strongly about socially-constructed views on how gender should dictate what a person’s role is. So, being as emotionally invested in it as I am, it wasn’t exactly easy to hear that I had invalidated at least part of my argument by failing to take into account the idea that there is a biological basis for things like this.

When conversations like this happen, and I get frustrated by being countered with logic and research, I tell myself after the fact that this is me being pushed to think in different directions and accept things that I did not know or consider before, even when they are at odds with how I feel. It would be easier if I were being countered with another opinion, but oftentimes it isn’t opinion that I come up against. Or it’s opinion bolstered by fact. So I have to consider different angles, different information, different approaches.

Sometimes, it drives me crazy.

On the other hand, I always know that I am safe with him. He knows the limitations of the human body, what can and cannot be “safely” done with it, how much impact is within reasonable parameters and how much will cause permanent damage. He knows that certain types or amplitudes of play will cause the kidneys to fail, and knows the process by which this happens. I trust this man to take care of me, because he understands the technical aspects of what can and can’t, should and shouldn’t be done with a body. After knowing somebody like this, who has the wherewithal to apply science to BDSM, I doubt I would ever feel truly safe in the hands of a Dominant who does not.

I love my logical, scientist Dominant.

Even though sometimes we just don’t see eye to eye.

Kai Under Pressure

I’m not entirely certain what the point of this entry is going to be. I’ve been thinking about it and trying to figure out if there’s something overarching that I can say with it, but even now I’m just not sure. Maybe it’s just a little bit of a story, something that happened in the course of my relationship with DW and which therefore has a place here. It’s probably not even an interesting story… but here we go, all the same.

At some point last week, I ended up spontaneously getting very upset over the prospect (read: fear) that we were going to lose our D/s dynamic and I was going to end up in a relationship that, for whatever reason, just didn’t incorporate it. It started, I suppose, over dinner, with him telling me that sometimes he felt like he didn’t have a lot to work from with me. DW has always based his scenes (and out-of scene play) on things that he knows about his partner, be it things that he has personally observed, things that his partner has directly told him, or things that he has inferred from conversation or action. One specific thing that troubled him with me was that I don’t have specific fantasies about scene-ing or playing, which gives him less material to work from. I got frustrated, in part because the last time that we had a long talk about where we were at with the dynamic, he had reassured me that he was still working on figuring me out and that I didn’t have anything to worry about. Things like this are a process, and he had things that he wanted to be sure of before pushing forward. And then, in the course of talking over dinner, I started feeling like things had just stalled out in that process…. And I felt like the reason for it was something that was my fault.

I didn’t cry in public, which I suppose counts for something, but I ended up breaking down in the car in the apartment parking lot. Maybe it was stupid and maybe it wasn’t, but I just felt like something was going to happen and we were going to discover that we’re too different to make this aspect work. I told him that I was upset because I was giving him everything I knew how to, but because there were still certain things that I just couldn’t provide—like fantasies about potential scenes or progressions that I liked—it was my fault that we couldn’t move forward. He told me that that wasn’t true… The problem was that I work differently from the other submissives he’s had in the past, and the things that worked for them just don’t work as well for me. He said that the fact that he hasn’t found the right patterns and triggers for me is hardly my fault, so I shouldn’t be upset about it. For my part, though, I still don’t like that there are things that I can’t quite give. I can tell him all about things that I like and what I like about them, but I can’t tell him much about my preferences for scene progressions because, let’s face it, I rarely subbed for the same person twice back in college. The scenes were all quite casual, and none of them much resembled each other. So, in the end, anything like a preferred pattern or sequence that I could tell him about would, in essence, be a guess.

It is an unavoidable fact that I am not the same as the women he’s been with before. I am reminded of this whenever I decide to ask him where we stand in the D/s aspect of things. I want to play more, I want to keep this part of us alive, but somehow there’s always something I feel I’m not doing or elsewise not living up to. The day after, I wrote him an email while he was at work, with some speculation about combinations of things that I thought would work for me in scenes. It wasn’t very thorough, and some of it was fairly obvious, but I really felt like I needed to offer something, to do what I could to hold up my end of things.

The biggest thing that I took from our conversation is that his not having me completely figured out is not my fault. I don’t know that I completely believe this, but I’m trying to. And even if it isn’t my fault, I’m sure that there’s some way in which I could be helping. I’ve made a fair amount of progress on the issue of offering versus expecting him to take, which I’m fairly pleased with, so I suppose the next thing to work on is to come up with more definitive information that I can give him to assist in scene-building. I’ve always been wary about helping with scene-building because I don’t want to necessarily know what a scene contains, nor do I want to be in control of it, but his view on it is that I can give a framework that he can then mould and change and build on. So… I have to learn to make things that can be built on.

It’s hard to not feel a little bad about being difficult to figure out, though.

Kai is Female. Kai is Submissive. These Facts are Unrelated.

Sometimes I wish I had more contact with male submissives. This might seem like a strange thing to wish for, but it’s true. I was friends with a couple of them in college, both of whom had enough switch in them to act as my Dominants on the few occasions when we scened together. One of them had his own steady Dominant (he and I almost ended up dating… neither of us really tied BDSM play to relationships, so there was no conflict), and the other had used to be his girlfriend’s sub before they broke up. Both topped me in scenes, true, but they had more submissive in them than Dominant and that was likely the role in which they were more comfortable. One of them is now (as far as I know) living a more vanilla lifestyle, and the other I have no idea about at all… though I imagine he still retains an interest in play.

I suppose my thoughts on this are more related to societal gender roles than anything else. I do not like the fact that this is true, because I keep my BDSM separate from my views on gender and gender-identity. As a bit of background, for those reading this who do not know me personally, I’ve always had a bit of a fluctuating view on gender, and for a long time I’ve been much more comfortable projecting a certain amount of masculine or androgynous mannerisms than I have been projecting feminine mannerisms. This is just me and how I view myself. It is impossible to really concisely explain the tangled web of issues, influences, factors, and finer points of how I perceive myself as a gendered individual, but perhaps I can pare it down to some relevant bullet points for the time being.

-Expressing my feminine side makes me feel weak.

-Expressing my masculine side makes me feel in control and unafraid.

-I still have days (fewer now than when I was in college) that the image I see in the mirror does not quite match up with the self-image that exists in my mind.

-I am against the concrete setting of social gender roles, particularly when doing so is more discriminatory than it is a reflection of what people actually wish to be doing.

I feel like I’m on slightly slippery ground here, because I don’t particularly want to be lumped in with radical feminists or women who hate men or women who think that women are better than men etc. etc. None of these are the case. The issue is more like I hate it when women are told that they have to be a certain way or do a certain thing because they are women. If your thing is to keep house and cook for your partner, cool. You should do that. If your thing is to work as a high-level executive and know all the ins and outs of a business enterprise, you should do that. If your thing is to put three hours into making yourself look pretty every day, right on. If your thing is to wear jeans and t-shirts and spend your days drafting new layouts for parking lots, go to it. The point is that all types of women exist, and one set of standards doesn’t fit all; it should just be about doing what you’re good at and/or what makes you happy, not about, “You’re female, therefore you are supposed to do this thing.” I can even accept it when DW says that women’s bodies are less biologically suited to strenuous physical tasks than men’s bodies. Why? Because it’s true. Sure, you’ve got your female bodybuilders and such, but your average male is always going to be bigger and stronger than your average female. Does this mean that women are weak or that they can’t play sports or have physically demanding jobs? Of course not. It’s simply an issue of BY DEFAULT these are differences which exist physically between men and women.

Make sense so far?

The bit where this gets into my desire to know more male submissives is based around the number of female submissives I have seen around—predominantly on the internet. For me, one’s choice to be/orientation as a submissive has nothing to do with gender or gender expectations. It’s kind of like how sexuality isn’t actually rooted in gender-identity: You’ve got your men who like women, women who like men, men who like men, women who like women, plus all of the non-binary configurations that you find out there. Being female doesn’t automatically equate to being sexually attracted to males. Likewise, being female doesn’t automatically equate to being a submissive. This is evidenced by the existence of female dominants and male submissives. A woman being the submissive of a male Dominant doesn’t indicate that women are naturally submissive to men, and it doesn’t indicate the “natural order of things.” It is a preference and a role that lies outside of the purview of defining what a man or a woman is “supposed to be.”

I have been thinking about this more because lately I’ve seen/heard a couple of female submissives say that they have an easier time submitting to men because men are “naturally dominant.” Personally, I take issue with this idea. I accept that there are specific women who feel this way about their interactions with men, and that’s fine. What I don’t like is this being made as a blanket statement. It’s like when I took issue with the preface to Story of O, in which Jean Paulhan used it to make a sweeping generalization about the nature of women rather than the nature of submissives. Actually, I’m not a fan of sweeping generalizations in any context ( < / end sweeping generalization>), but I suppose what really concerns me is the idea that there could be any number of people out there who think that women choose to be submissives because of some primal instinct to occupy a position inferior to men, to serve men, to cater to men, when really it’s just the desire to put oneself in the hands of a dominant figure, gender aside. One of the people I was most submissive to in my past was another woman, so there is no way to convince me that female submissives do it to occupy their “rightful place” in regards to males.

And so… I want to know more male submissives so that I can feel like this balance exists. I want to talk to people who are submissives who can be so without being concerned that it will be interpreted as something they should inherently do based on their biological form. I want to know if submissive men ever feel the inverse of this: That society would look down on them for wanting to put themselves at the feet of a woman, or at the feet of another man, because this is not what men are “supposed to do.”

I do not think that my being female has anything to do with my being a submissive. I do not think that anyone’s biological sex or gender-identity has anything to do with being a submissive. Or with being a Dominant, for that matter. I do think that there are people out there who think that they are related, though… Perhaps they are even the same people who think that proclaiming their Dominant status grants them the right to tell any submissive they meet to get on their knees, or that a D/s relationship = a sanctioned abusive relationship. Or, perhaps they are people who are established in the “scene,” whose own personal views on BDSM have been formed by their personal views of societal gender roles. I, myself, do not know.

But, being a female submissive, sometimes I feel very much like I want to know males who have taken this position.