The Queen's Chair

One of my classmates in graduate school is a very accomplished pro-domme, who recently opened her studio/dungeon space to us for summer readings.  We go once or twice a month and read things that we're working on, mostly for classmate feedback and to get some experience reading our work aloud.  Most of the people attending know what she does for a living, so the suspension gear and the locked black cabinets didn't take anyone by surprise.  

However, while she did a pretty good job of clearing the space of anything that might freak out the newbies, there were little telltale signs that I picked out immediately.  If I hadn't known she was a pro-domme, these things would have clued me in:

1.  Her houseboy, dressed in street clothes, was stationed in the kitchen to keep our drinks refreshed and serve us appetizers.  While people thought he was just a friend or boyfriend of hers, I could tell from his submissive demeanor and his dropped eyes exactly what his status was.

2.  The space was spotless.  Immaculate.  Like someone, perhaps a someone dressed in nothing but sissy maid gear, had gone over every inch of the floor and counter space with a scrubbing sponge.  

3.  She had a chair at the front of the room which we were supposed to sit in when we were reading in front of the crowd.  No one really looked closely at the chair except for me.  I think she had it custom-made, because I've never seen one quite like that, but the chair was split along the base to allow for someone, perhaps that same someone in sissy maid gear, to kneel below it and perhaps offer up his mouth for.....what, I wonder?  Worship and adoration?  I giggled to myself as I watched my classmates going up to read, with absolutely no idea what that chair is usually used for.  

After the reading, I had a really pleasant conversation with her, just the usual shop talk exchanged between two women who like to be on top.  At some point, I think we're going to try and have dinner together -- we've met casually before at grad school functions, but we've never been in close proximity, so we haven't had a chance to get to know each other.  She seems like my sort of person though -- strong, confident, comfortable in her own skin.  She has a certain serenity about her that I like.

In other news, I've been having such a good time with my little pet that I have hardly thought about writing this blog.  We've been having a leisurely summer, with little day trips on the weekends, nice dinners out together, and plenty of time pulling out our favorite toys.  I'm happy to report that I'm in a healthy D/s relationship at last -- so healthy, in fact, that D/s is definitely not the focal point all the time.  (Side note:  While some people can certainly live 24/7, I find that things work out much better when you find the blend that's right for you -- and 24/7 is not right for me.  I like an equal at the dinner table, to share my thoughts with.)  We have a lot in common beyond our sexual compatibility, and I think both of us were pleasantly surprised by how things have blossomed in the last few months.  A connection like this is rare, and I am definitely doing what I can to nurture and protect it.

I can't wait for school to be over

I'm just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel: my extremely busy spring semester at school has one week left, and I only have 1 more novel to read, 2 small reaction papers to write, 2 more critiques to finish, and 1 longer essay to finish. I know that sounds like a lot, but it is dramatically less than I've had all semester. I've scaled a mountain of work, and now I feel like I'm beginning to hit the down-slope.

Which means: I can have more time to play with my very favorite boy, and I can see kinkster friends again, and I can have something resembling a life for three short months.

In terms of creative work, this has been an interesting semester. It is the first time my sexual identity has really started to bleed over into my creative work, in some interesting ways. My misadventures of January seem to have inspired an interesting project, inspired somewhat by the surrealist (and masochistic) work of Bruno Schulz. However, instead of Schulz writing about Dominant women, a Dominant woman (moi) is writing about masochistic/submissive men. Schulz's muse (whom he often named 'Undula') now has her chance to speak. She's not exactly waxing poetical about submissive men. Instead, I'm writing about their elusiveness -- their emotional advance-and-retreat, the way they long for a stronger, more powerful woman but at the same time, they secretly loathe her.

I was on the receiving end of this in January: a masochist who wants to be dressed/made into a woman but also hates women (and hates himself). I realized after our brief, disastrous affair was over that his fetish was actually part-hate, part-love, and that perhaps this is what many fetishes do -- they combine dread and longing in a powerful, volatile way. People cannot resist what they desire, but they must rebel against it, undermine it, and even destroy it. What is upsetting and frustrating about this is the involvement of another person -- in this case, me -- who genuinely seeks connection and a relationship, not the satisfaction of mere fetish. I certainly have my fetishes, the symbols or objects that arouse me, and I certainly won't deny that there's a mixture of desire and dread in it for me, as well. But ultimately, I don't forget I'm exploring that with another person, a person whose humanity I still cherish and value. I happen to know the difference between a fetish and a man; sadly I ran across a man who conflated the fetish and the woman, and then couldn't deal with the woman in the end.

I also re-learned a lesson New York city teaches me over and over: look at what someone does, not what they say. People are so self-deluded they'll tell themselves (and, by extension, you) anything in order to squeeze themselves into a new, convenient, desired identity. But the trail is there, the crumbs have been dropped, if only you'll be smart enough to pick them up and follow them back to the truth.

What's lovely about my little pet is that he is exactly who he says he is. He doesn't have some secret other life that he's keeping from me, he comes to me exactly as he is, and we explore and experience that together. I have let him know how much I appreciate that -- in fact, I think my recent little misadventure had one and only one purpose: to prepare me for my pet, to make me ready to appreciate just how fantastic he is.

And perhaps the other, less direct purpose is this creative work -- it all came together in such an interesting way. First, the bad experience in January. Then, I read Bruno Schulz in February and started taking notes and writing bits of text. I also created a pastiche work based on Venus in Furs, Schulz's art, and some sketches by Max Ernst. Still working on all this -- and can't wait for the summer to have time to finish it -- and meanwhile, I'm doing a paper on the feminist writing of Christa Wolf.

Away sick, coming back around

I've been sick for the last two weeks -- basically, since the week after my pet's birthday, when I got the flu. At one point, I was running a high fever for several days, with shooting pain in my neck and back. I finally had enough energy to go to the ER. I wanted a test to make sure I didn't have viral meningitis and just had the flu -- which is what they confirmed. I was really relieved. I don't get sick very often, but every few years, I get a bad case of the flu and it takes 2-3 weeks to get over it. I even had a flu shot this year, but so much for that!

I'm still got a bit of a cough, but no other symptoms. I missed the Club Fem play party this month (where I was supposed to give a presentation, no less) and spent a lot of my time in bed. I had to keep my work absences down to a minimum, so I was coming straight home after work and school and getting into bed with a dose of Tylenol PM. Not very fun.

My little pet boy was wonderful, however. He's taken care of me every weekend that I've been sick. We live about an hour away from each other, so I have to take the train out to him, but once I get there, he's been fantastic. Very sweet and patient with me, even as I'm coughing all night and feeling low-energy. We haven't played as much as I would have liked, but I haven't been completely dead from the waist down. I managed to feel a little more frisky this weekend -- I think his presence probably had something to do with that.

I still feel, though, like I'm waking up from a coma or something. Still trying to get my energy level back up to what it was. I hope by the end of this week I'll be completely back to normal.

Happy Birthday, little pet

Today is my little pet's birthday, so I'm going out to his house to make him dinner. Yes, Lola does occasionally cook. When I lived overseas, I cooked a lot more often because I had more time and I enjoyed making Western food. I generally think of cooking as something men should be doing (for me), but I will sometimes cook for someone, if he particularly deserves it.

After the cooking, there will be a lot of playing. We just recently set up a harness under his bed so I can tie him to it, and my pet took to bondage like a duck to water. His eyes light up when I tie him down.

I've been incredibly busy lately, finishing up work for school and getting a huge project done at work. I hope to write more next week, but for now, this is as much of an update as I have time for.

But to my favorite, well-cherished and spoiled little pet: happy birthday. All your sweetness, patience and obedience has made me very fond of you. You're a unique and fantastic boy.

Fantasy v. reality

Everyone comes to this lifestyle by a different path. Mine has not always been linear, but there has always been a forward momentum to it -- I have never really had any significant periods of time where I retreated back into vanilla for too long. If I dated vanilla, it was out of sadness or disappointment in the submissive men I had been dating previously. It wasn't because I wanted to date vanilla.

So, I was looking at the Elise Sutton website today and thinking about fantasy versus reality. I would say 90% of the submissive men I've dated up until this point in my life had a problem reconciling fantasy and reality. To wit: they were always disappointed by reality because they expected it to be too much like fantasy, even if they didn't want to admit that's what they were doing. I've been involved with some very intelligent, self-aware men, who should definitely know better, and yet they couldn't get past their online-inspired fantasies of female domination.

And what's interesting is how Dominant women -- like Elise Sutton and even yours truly, really -- both contribute to that problem even as we try to solve it. We're online, writing about ourselves, seeking partners, providing a construct of our identities made in our words that submissive men take literally. However, what else am I supposed to do? I'm a writer, after all, and I can't exactly walk down to the BDSM bar down the street and meet a nice guy. (Thanks Rudy Giuliani, for making the law tough on kinky folk.) So, I go online, although drastically less than ever before.

But I really do think the problem would exist even if the Internet didn't exist. The Internet is not the cause of our problems, it merely amplifies them. It reflects us back to ourselves as we sometimes are, unflattering though that might be, and if we find we don't like what we're seeing, perhaps we should start with that.

For me, that was a realization that I won't trust men who approach me solely on the internet. You need to experience me in person, you need to know me as an every-day entity, not just some idea in your head of a red-headed Southern vixen with a whip in her hand. I mean, I am that person, but not the way you define it. Its the way I define it, and if you can't live with that, I don't really want you in my world.

I also want to know that a man has a healthy relationship between what he thinks about when he's not with me, and how he feels about what we are doing. I approach sex very much as a process to build intimacy, not an end in its own right. If it isn't perfect every single time, I don't freak out, and my boy can't freak out either. He needs to realize I can't be 100% on all the time, sometimes I'm tired and I just want a foot rub and a hot shower, and that to me is sexual intimacy for the night. But people who spend the majority of their time online, in fantasy mode, are really not able to see that.

Fantasy is there to inspire you, to give you ideas, to make life worth living -- but that's just it. You've got to live life, not live it in your head. If you spend all your time thinking about serving a woman, and no time actually serving the women around you, you are no closer than you were when you fired up your computer and went online to stare at femdom porn. And I, for one, can't use you.

If you want the rainbow

So, I've started loaning my coworker my DVDs of the British TV series, "The Office." I couldn't believe she hadn't seen it and it makes our working life difficult, because I can't do my impeccable David Brent impression for her. ("If you want the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain -- do you know which philosopher said that? Dolly Parton! And people say she's just a big pair of tits!") But we are redressing the imbalance, and I can call her extension up sometimes and mutter "yer a cock, yer a cock!" and now she understands.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with kink, but it does explain why, after I've done something particularly good, I sometimes crack, "And people think I'm just a big pair of tits!"

I think I got on this topic because it did rain particularly hard this morning. I'm really just free-associating here. I don't think I can keep a blog unless it blends my offbeat personality with my sexual orientation, so there will just have to be moments of levity, folks.

Tonight we have a little informal graduate student contest: we all meet at a bar after class and everyone contributes a 300-word story on a particular topic. This week's theme is "wolf boys" -- left deliberately vague so you can interpret it as you will. I'm planning to write 300 words of plushie porn. The cheaper the shots you take, the more likely you are to get the votes that make your story the best of the night. Explicit sexual content, slapstick humor, bad puns, smack-talking: these are the ingredients of a winning story. Perhaps I'll post the results of my efforts here.

In other news, it looks like I'll be doing a sissy training demo for ClubFem in April. I'm excited about that, because it gives me an opportunity to talk about why I love sissy-training as well as allowing me to create an environment where I have a room full of sissy boys doing my bidding. My goal is to make it pleasurable, even for the women who aren't into sissies necessarily -- they'll enjoy the service they're getting even if they aren't turned on by boys in frilly clothes. Not every boy can give you what you need, but in the world we're trying to build, the boys should be at least useful on a basic level to every woman in the room. So, the whole thing will take place in the midst of a Victorian tea. Little sissy maids will walk around and provide food, drink and attention. I have about a month to pull it all together, so I'm sure I'll be writing out my ideas here.

Anticipation

I had a critique last night, for a piece of creative writing I've been working on. The work is relatively fresh and challenging for me -- I've essentially been using the energy from a recent incident in my life to fuel a story which is ostensibly about something else. And in struggling to talk about these things, a lot of unexpected twists emerged. My instructor last night pointed out a lot of the potentials of this work I hadn't quite seen yet.

The story explores what it means to have a fetish, whether it is possible to love someone as a result of pursuing that fetish, what it means to lose that love, how people manipulate their own memories and experiences in order to persuade other people, and it mixes in race and gender in ways I didn't anticipate when I started. I also flirt, very openly, with the fact that this story -- or some parts of it -- may be my own experiences. The instructor warned me about the ramifications of that, even as he suggested that it was intriguing. I learned the most from him about what was working in the story by what he warned me about -- the warnings were a sign to me that I was onto something potentially dangerous, which is what I want.

Afterwards, I went out with two of my favorite classmates and we had a long, interesting conversation. Both of them are gay men, and they got me talking about sadism. We got into the specifics of what I enjoy about inflicting pain. It was strange to describe it in such detail -- the tingle in your hand when it slaps skin, the eroticism of someone gasping in pain, the desperate, lost, dependent quality of a man who both longs for and fears you putting nipple clamps on him (or taking them off), the sight of him bent over for you, the knowledge that you could do it harder and he would take it happily, the freedom of being cruel when cruelty is so forbidden to women socially. In some ways, I can't even put words to the way I'm feeling when I'm being sadistic -- it is probably one of the moments in my life when I am the most wordless. I act, I don't speak very much.

I came home to find a sweet little note from my pet telling me that he missed me. Those small little gestures of longing and vulnerability are exciting -- knowing that he can't wait to serve me again adds a little spring to my step that I wouldn't otherwise have. Feeling that hunger to use him again soon, and knowing that I will see him in a few days. The anticipation is an important part of the fun.