Monthly Archives: April 2017

dominance, question, rant

Stealthing – just what the fuck is this nonsense?

I remember first reading about this on fetlife about a month ago and thinking – that can’t possibly be real, can it?

Just now, I saw an article about it on NBC’s website.

Seriously, what the holy fuck is this nonsense?

Stealthing, in case you haven’t heard about it yet, refers to the act of removing a condom from your dick before you have sex with someone who agreed to have sex with you – with the expectation that you’d be wearing one.

Not only is this completely asinine from a health perspective, deeply disrespectful, and an act of destructive violence against your partner, but since most of the victims of this tend to be women, it is yet another layer of misogynistic bullshit that is being built up by this disgusting culture of selfishness and brutality that is percolating up from the dark hearts of people who look like me and who have had it far too easy for far too long.

I don’t cuss a great deal in my normal life, and I do so even less in print, but seriously, people, what the holy flying fuck is this nonsense?

We finally have a culture – after the oppressive AIDS-scare years of my youth and the puritanical family-first bullshit that followed – we finally now have a culture where sex is beginning to become less a thing of shame and more a thing of connection and joy – like it always should have been – and you assholes are ruining it for everyone.

Cut it the fuck out.

Sex without a condom feels better, sure, but it’s a lot riskier than sex without one for men and it’s orders of magnitude riskier for women – whether they are using a secondary form of birth control or not.

Unwanted pregnancy is probably one of the most horrible things that can happen to a woman.  There are no good choices to get yourself out of that situation, and as a man – you can, and most do, simply walk away and forget about it.  Nevermind the lives that you are ruining – and it won’t just be the mother’s life that you ruin.  Her friends will share her pain, and if she decides to abort, she will have to live with that decision for the rest of her life – and while I have known a few women to get the procedure, I have never known anyone who felt like it was a good thing to have experienced.

The reasons that I have seen some of these pigs give for why they do this are just plain ignorant if not downright chilling.

“It feels better without one.”  Well, yeah, of course it does, but that is the most profoundly selfish thing that I have heard in a long time.

“It’s degrading for the woman, and I like to degrade her – she even likes being degraded.”  Okay.. I’m not really sure how you’re managing to get her to feel degraded for your poor choices and untrustworthiness, but even if that were a valid reason (hint: it’s not) – THAT is not the way to bring degradation into your sex life.  That’s a good way to cause serious harm to you both – and to the other people in your lives.

“It’s not illegal – she already consented to sex.”  Yes, she consented to sex, and yes, it may not yet be illegal, but it only takes one judge to decide that it is and it will be covered under other forms of sexual assault and then you’re going to end up in the national sex offender database… but even if that were not the case, what an idiotic reason to do something?!?  The law is there to protect people from others who would take advantage of them or would act recklessly with the lives and property of others.  There are lots of things that are not illegal but that are still pretty stupid, but this has got to be near the top of that list.  I do things that are both illegal and legal all of the time, but I draw the line at doing things which are immoral – and this is most definitely immoral.

Consent is one of the pillars of our community, but it’s also a foundation for trust, and trust is a required element of any relationship, kinky or not – long term, short term, even just a one-night-stand.

So, just cut this shit out.  It doesn’t make you a big man – it makes you a coward.  Shit.. even the term that people who are perpetrating this bullshit use to refer to it – ‘stealthing’ – is a cowardly term.  It already implies that you are being deceitful.

Don’t be a deceitful coward.  If you are fluid locked with your partner and using another method of birth control and talk about it together – then by all means, don’t use condoms.  But everyone else – you really should be, for your own sake, not just hers.

Don’t be a fucking moron.  Keep the condom on.

I should not have to be telling you this.

  • Rant
control, life, love

Pain and when the fight is over

2 Comments

In October of 2011, I was in a terrible car accident that almost killed me.  I was at a dead stop on the highway and a driver in a work van was not paying attention and struck me at full speed – probably close to 75 miles per hour.

I was physically broken by that accident.  Emergency responders had to cut the door off of my car to get me out.  I was concussed, suffered a minor skull fracture, a fractured clavicle, three fractured ribs, an avulsion fracture of my cervical spine, and countless soft tissue injuries, the scar tissue from which still causes me pain today, almost every day.

I can still count the number of pain-free days that I have had since October 2011 on two hands.

But I don’t have to be pain free to function, and I’ve developed a staggering tolerance for pain.

Recently I was in a conflict where I broke my jaw (hence the photo in my entry from earlier this month) and I walked around with a broken jaw for more than a week before I realized that it was broken.  Sure, it hurt, but nothing more than I go through almost every day.

Physical pain and I have been traveling companions for a long time now.

I am only now beginning to realize that emotional pain and I have been traveling companions for most of my life.

Just in the past two years, I’ve been working hard to peel back the layers of my mind and access the deep hurt that has been buried there.  I have developed emotional scars as well, and where I have learned to tune out the physical pain and walk on in the past 5 years since my car accident, I had also developed ways to tune out the emotional pain, I just didn’t realize it.

This is where things start to cycle back on themselves, and I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s helping me to function again, so I’m just going to live with it for now and examine the consequences later.

I can’t take my anxiety medication right now because of my closed jaw.  The capsules cannot be broken and there is no liquid variant available, so my psychiatrist gave me a different liquid medication instead.  It doesn’t really work for me, so I’ve just stopped taking the meds altogether.

This is dangerous, I know.

This is probably not the right way to go about things, I know.

But those wonderful drugs that opened my viewpoint to allow me to experience more of the emotional spectrum and to be more emotionally available to my partner.. they appear to be a crutch, and it’s possible that my already developed and natural coping mechanisms – while not ideal, perhaps – may actually be more effective in letting me live a somewhat normal life than the drugs have been.

I took them, and I went to counseling, all in an effort to save my relationship and fight for the one that I love.  But my counselor betrayed me and my girlfriend left me and now I’m physically broken again, emotionally vulnerable, and heartbroken in a way that I have never been before.  I rarely leave the house, and there are days when I do not speak to anyone.  Not one word.

But you know what – despite that.. despite the depressing canvas that I’m creating upon, despite the lack of medications, the lack of contact, the isolation from my family, the lack of any available friends, the severing of the best and worst relationship that I have ever had… despite all of this – I’m getting better.

I’m hardening again, and that may ultimately not be a good thing, but the funny thing is that I’m finding that the further I hold the world at bay, the easier it is to deal with.

I’ve cocooned the pain away, and it becomes easier and easier to deal with every day.

I was fighting hard for something that was probably hurting me more than helping.

The fight is over for now, and I have to find a new way to move forward in the world.  Oddly enough, pushing away the pain has led me to be more present and patient.  Or maybe it’s the lack of drugs that has restored my patient nature… either way, the fight is over, and I’m finding new ways to deal with the pain.

I am strong like the Oak.  Pretending to be a willow does not suit me.

 

  • Rant
bdsm, dominance, rant

The Breaking of Samantha

In the vanilla world there is this developing mythology.. and the concerning thing is that I’m seeing it spilling over into the BDSM world too now, and that is that submissives and other s-types “need to be broken.”

People are not horses, and even those that feel that they are horses probably feel that horses – for whom the term was coined – don’t really need to be ‘broken’.

It’s a pervasive myth though, and I think I know why…

It encourages violence against women and other disenfranchised and dis-empowered peoples.

Oh, shit, I can feel the Domme-rage from here…

Maybe that’s also why it’s such a pervasive myth.

Let’s just be factual here – on a pure numbers basis, there are more female and LGBT people who identify as submissive than as Dominant.  That’s not saying that there aren’t women Dommes or LGBT Dominants, just that they tend to be under-represented when held against the background of cisgendered males in that role.

But just as bad, maybe worse even, is the whole mythology taking the place of that from the quasi-feminist perspective – that “my submission is a gift that should be cherished.”

Bullshit – and anyone who would submit or accept submission under such terms doesn’t really understand what the fuck is going on.

One of the oldest sex clubs in San Francisco is called The Power Exchange, and that terminology is used for a reason.

D/s is not about power transfer, it’s about power exchange.

But hell, even I forget that sometimes.

I don’t know anyone named Samantha – and I’m not trying to break anyone.   submission is something that is given, but it is also something that is taken… it is a shared power that when added together sums to more than the parts.

The spiritual side of D/s gets lost in the haze too often.  The sex appeal is turning it into a game and the ritual is getting lost.

But the spiritual side – that’s where the really terrifying stuff lives.

And the really, awe-inspiringly awesome things are there too.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve personally been able to confront it.

Don’t lose time to the bullshit posturing and misogynistic terminology.  You don’t have to break anyone – it’s a bad word, find something else.  Bond is a good one that comes to mind.

And from the other side – realize that sometimes a voice in support, even if it’s coming from someone who doesn’t look like you – might actually be a voice of support.

This was a rant.

Changing the lexicon – one jaw at a time…

  • Rant
control, life, limerence, love

sometimes life just kicks you in the teeth

3 Comments

I try to represent myself here as the best possible version of me there is. If I ever fail to do so, it is because I either intentionally want to project vulnerability (which does not make it false) or because I made a genuine mistake.

This time, I think it’s just because I’m a little broken – emotionally, physically, mentally… broken.

I like to think of myself as somewhat enlightened – no Bodhisattva or anything, but I like to think that I generally have my shit together, or at least that there is a path that I can follow which will end in me getting my shit together sometime soon.

But sometimes life just has to kick you in the teeth and let you know who is Boss.

I’m a ghost, ungrounded and wandering, infecting the lives of the living while trying to find the things that I need.

I used to preach from my armchair philosopher pulpit, telling people that the soul is a quantum waveform and that the only separation between life and unlife is time. That when we die, our waveform gets to spread through the cosmos, unbounded by time, and your consciousness gets to experience the most impactful parts of your life over and over again. It’s a nice story if you don’t think about it too hard – you get to revisit the best parts of your life over and over again. I get to be there at the birth of my daughter, over and over again. But it’s also the perfect argument for leading a good life. If you lead a tumultuous and drama-filled life, and if your most impactful memories are of the terrors that were done to you when you were powerless, or the horrible things that you were coerced to do in another’s name, while you knew that they were wrong all along… when those are your most impactful memories, the story is a little more grim.

I’ve tried to live a good life – I really have.

It hasn’t actually turned out that way.

I have a powerful mind, and when I let it do it’s thing, it feeds me metaphors to describe every situation, analogies to draw everywhere, magickal ways to connect any two things across space and time. When I let some other folks use it to do some things I didn’t really want to do, I hurt people and I’m never, ever, going to live that down. I didn’t kill anyone, but I surely found other methods of hurting people.. the arbitrary line that I drew at the power over life and death was just an homage to something that doesn’t even really exist.

If there is a God, oxytocin might be the best name for it, but whereas I used to think it was sufficient to explain love in a chemical way, it’s only been since I’ve been seriously altering my own internal chemistry in a measured and controllable way (until recently, anyway… pills don’t always go through wires…) that I’ve begun to understand that there are elements of relationships with people that are not simple manipulations and that cannot be explained away by simple chemistry.

Being in love was the hardest thing I have ever done.

I thought it happened several times over the course of my past, but it only really happened once, and then I chipped away at it, pulled the pieces off, tried to take it apart and see how it worked, how the inside pieces fit together and moved it. But I broke it. A long time ago, I broke it, but it just kept limping along, trying to fix itself, and each time I saw that I got scared – nothing had ever tried to put itself back together before – so I just kept breaking it, over and over again. I wasn’t even trying to see how it worked anymore, it just scared the shit out of me, and despite the fact that I felt lonely and scared whenever I was away from it, I felt lonely and scared every time it would be close to getting fixed again too. So I enslaved it.

It’s the only thing I was ever taught to do.

Power is to be captured and manipulated.

People are to be enslaved and abused.

So I just kept trying to find people who wanted to be enslaved and abused.

“There is something wrong with me,” they would say, “and you are strong, I can see it. You have come back from this before.”

And yes, I had, but not in the way that they were thinking.

I’d lend my hand and say, “certainly – come with me, I can show you the way.”

I knew the way – some of the way on my own, and I have a powerful mind that I could use to find paths to set other people upon.

Sometimes I would carry them, sometimes I would lead them, sometimes I would push, but always, I would enslave and control.

And then I found my nachash and everything changed. I could find no way to move her, so I chipped away, pulled at the parts to try to see how she worked inside, and to my complete and utter astonishment, she opened up and freely gave me everything inside and I had no idea what to do – it was too precious, and too frightening, so I captured it as best I could and broke the other parts that would try to slip out.

I broke it. Over and over again, I broke it, just so that I could keep it under control, because I don’t know any other way.

Say what you will about the men and women of my past, and I certainly have a lot of both good and bad things to say about Simone, but she was actually a pretty good teacher.

It’s been too long to remember her words, so I’m paraphrasing, and I may even be remembering things incorrectly because memory is fallible, but I never understood the importance of this lesson until now.

She said to me –

submissives talk all the time about how they have the real power in the D/s dynamic – that’s bullshit – you are the Dom, you have the power, you have all of the power that exists, your power, her power, the power of the people who are watching your scene if there are any such – until the scene is over or until the safeword is called, all of the power is yours to do with whatever you will and that is why a lot of Doms fail – they can’t decide what to do with all of that power or they limit themselves and leave all of those people who lent them all of that power without satisfaction

But you won’t do that, because I’m training you right. I’m bringing you up from the bottom, and while you’ll learn that if you surrender your power, I will use it against you, you will also learn that there are things that I can do with your power that you cannot. You are going to want those things. The only way you can get those things is to give your power to me and trust me that I’ll use it to give you what you want. It’s exciting because there is no guarantee. It’s exciting because if I do something else with your power you might like that too and you’re too afraid to make the choice yourself. You will remember that when someone else gives you her power that you need to honor that trust. She can always take it away because it still really is her power, but if she does, you both lose.

I thought she was talking about D/s dynamics. I thought that woman was a stone and never loved a soul in all her days, but I see now that I was probably wrong there too.

She probably had her one, and she probably broke him too.

She was trying to teach me about love, but it took my nachash to do that, and then I broke it one final time.