If you know me personally, this is probably not a new piece of writing to you. I posted this first to my fetlife profile rather than here, about a year ago, but I re-read it myself recently and thought that perhaps it should be cross-posted here as well.
It is short, and while I intended it to be akin to free-verse poetry, it’s really just a short monologue… but I kind of like it.
I hope you do too.
Kneel for me.
Meet my gaze and hold it. Do not look away.
I know it is not easy. Nothing worthwhile is.
Cry for me. Not because you are sad, not because you have lost, not because you are missing someone dear, but because I am asking you to.
Open your heart for me. Pour the blood of your emotion on the floor at my feet and let me sink into its depth.
Sing your song of sorrow until it fills my soul and covers the rough parts, smooths out the edges, fills the gaps of my emotional canvas.
Cry for me. Not because you need to, but because I need for you to.
Lift your heart and mind and soul to the sky and let my love surround you. This is a place of safety and security, you are in my Protection and nothing in the world can harm you right now.
Rage for me. Not because you need to purge the poisonous vapors of mistrust and envy from your mind, but because I feed on your ire.
Scream for me. Not because your voice needs to escape your throat. Not because you have broken through the wall of your pain and anger and the primal need for screaming catharsis is pulling apart the walls of your soul, but because I want you to.
And then do all of these things again for the reasons I told you not to before.
I will hold your heart close and keep it safe while you channel the dark things away and I will eat them for you.
And then, when you are ready, I will return your heart to you, clean, shiny, and new.
And any time you need to, I will be here, and you can…
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been host to a friend who I met through this site. She lives quite far away, but we’ve been in contact off and on through email and other online means for well over a year at this point. I never thought we would actually meet in person, but she decided that she wanted to take a trip to San Francisco and experience what it is like to live the D/s lifestyle for a short period under my thumb.
This is the account of some of what transpired in those ten days.
I don’t think the experience was what either of us had anticipated, but it was certainly valuable for many reasons and I am thankful for the opportunities that it afforded me to grow as well.
Let us call my friend (and I do hope that she is still a friend after all of this) Nicole. That is not her name, but my name isn’t really Rant either, so this should not be terribly surprising to any of you.
Nicole had no experience with D/s before meeting me – but she had had some experience with kink and there were several things that she wanted to try while with me. We got to many, but not all of them. There were also several aspects of what I consider to be important to D/s that she had no experience with and found surprising. Those are the sorts of things that I am going to focus on for this entry.
Foremost, and although I have tried to cover this in the past, was the assumption on her part that D/s requires sex. This is most assuredly not the case. I know of several D/s relationships where sex does not play into things at all, and while I would not call that sort of complete lack of sexual focus normal, there is also nothing abnormal about a relationship with deep D/s elements that contains no sex at all.
We did have sex while she was here, but I’m certain that it was not entirely what she was expecting, because sex is not the focus of D/s for me.
D/s is about power exchange. It is about the transfer of personal power from one individual to another. It is about choices and decisions and actions and who controls them. Sometimes these choices and actions and decisions have to do with things of a sexual nature, but quite often they are much more mundane.
Nicole is from Europe and many of our conflicts probably would have been a bit smoother or not have occurred at all were it not for cultural differences as well as the very new nature of things D/s for her when she found herself in my space and under my control.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that she felt that I was simultaneously not controlling enough in some areas and far too controlling in others.
Everyone does D/s a little differently and places emphasis on different parts of the equation. I was brought up under a different paradigm than is the current norm, and the key facets of D/s for me are Respect, Devotion, and Service.
Respect is the cornerstone of D/s in my world. It is something that I expect to be in place always and transgressions are dealt with swiftly and decisively. I am not physically violent without a tremendous amount of forecasting, but I can and often do change my body language and verbal tone to be quite severe when I feel like I am personally being disrespected, or my submissive trainee is being disrespectful to my property or friends. Showing me proper Respect is Rule Zero. It is something that I expect to not have to talk about, and if I do, there is a high likelihood that I will be lecturing you, not just mentioning it out of hand.
Devotion is where I get my kicks. It is my single biggest fetish. It is the reason why I do D/s. I may have a big ego, but I like being worshiped just a little bit – and for more than my body or skills. I like being thought of as competent and trustworthy, and being Devoted to me is the best way to show me that.
And last, but not least, is Service. I expect a certain amount of Service to be rendered unto me. This does not always have to take the typical forms, and sexual service is only one manner of service, and not nearly the most important to me. I can be rather particular in the ways that I expect Service to be rendered, and that can also be an area of conflict from time to time.
Pain management is a constant struggle for me, and even in a short term visit like the one that Nicole and I planned and executed I can be sidelined by my physical pain issues. There was one evening in particular while she was here with me where the pain was extreme enough that even conversation was difficult for me. That isn’t necessarily normal, but it’s not abnormal either. I would say that I have at least one day a month where things are that bad.
Nicole is a lovely woman, but I think I disappointed her a bit when I showed her some of the non-sexual aspects of D/s and placed those of higher importance than the sexual ones.
She asked me to be true to my older self and not to soften the edges on my High Protocol nature, so I didn’t.
It caused conflict.
Conflict in any relationship is normal, but most people are so enamored of each other and deep into the throes of NRE that they don’t register conflict right away – and Nicole and I had our first conflict within 24 hours of her arrival. It was jarring for us both, but more so for her, I think.
I also practice ethical non-monogamy, which made for more conflict, as I had to manage the feelings of my current submissive partner as well as Nicole’s own feelings while hosting Nicole for her visit. The three-way conflict was very minimal, but present.
All told, Nicole was able to check off some of her bucket-list items while she was here and I learned a few important things about myself:
Most surprising to me: Sex is nowhere near as important to me as it once was – even just a year or two ago.
D/s is much more in line with my lifestyle and the way I want to live my life than I’ve admitted in the past. It has always informed my choices, but now it is much more of a lifestyle choice that I cannot turn away from.
In particular, Discipline is very important to me where it has not always been.
I’m a very physical person – and while this manifests itself sexually, it also manifests itself in other areas, Discipline being chief among them.
I really enjoy public play. This has not always been the case. I’ve taken part in various forms of it over the past couple of decades, but I have historically had a strong preference for private play. I no longer feel that way. They are balanced for me now.
I still don’t enjoy meting out punishment. I do it, because Discipline is important to me, but I can spank pretty hard – especially when using a paddle – and I surprised myself with the ferocity of my flogger strikes this time as well.
I know that Nicole learned a great deal about herself too while she was here – but those thoughts are for her and I would do her a disservice to relay them here without her implicit approval.
I doubt very much that she and I will meet again in person – the distance and cost are just too high to make that tenable – this was more of a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing, and while I know that things did not go exactly the way that she had planned, I do hope that she feels the experience was worth it.
I certainly do.
If ever I found myself with a similar situation in the offering, I would change a few things, but keep most things the same – so I suppose that is as good a measure of the success of things as any other. I learned and grew and I’m certain that she did too.
I am changing and I continue to change those around me, but I remain Rant.
This is the third part in a three part series. When I am training a new submissive, I rely on three of the five senses to keep her where I want her. My pieces on Touch and Voice were just previous to this and you may or may not wish to read those before continuing with this.
Glance: a much more subtle approach to the same.
Let me explain a bit about what I mean when I refer to ‘glance’ in this piece. I really mean any indicator that I give to a submissive that I want her to do something (or not do something) that depends entirely on her seeing me make some sort of visible gesture which is not accompanied by a vocal command or a tactile manipulation. More often than not, this takes the form of me glancing at her, catching her eye, and then moving my glance towards the position that I wish her to take or the action that I wish her to perform.
This is both the most difficult form of control to get to from a consistency standpoint, and also one of the more dramatic ways to show off the time spent in training and working together.
Apart from control, which is difficult, the stare can be used to great effect in lots of different ways. It can be both calming when offered with compassion, or it can ignite the fires of desire if it is made with confidence and intention.
The actual actions involved here are not terribly complex. In fact, with the right personalities involved, causing action with mere glances is not terribly difficult – it just requires a little bit of mind-reading.
“Saywhatnow?” you ask – I can tell.
Yes – I am atheist and a technologist and a while there are many other ‘-isms to which I subscribe, I do not believe that actual mind reading is possible. However, with the right person or the right training or both, you can achieve something that is very close. The key is to know the person that you are trying to control with your glance. You can attempt to employ the same techniques against the unknown and they may or may not work – a certain amount of the emotional context with which you will attempt these things is universal – however they will be completely ineffective on the unwilling. In fact, if you attempt to stare down an unwilling person, you’re more likely to annoy them than anything else.
The idea here is that you need to meet the gaze of your target and do your best to project the thought that you want to convey, and then follow it with some sort of physical cue to reinforce the thought and spur the other party to act. A stare with no follow up action (which might simply be to briefly look away or smile) will just be interpreted as a stare and is likely to just make people think that you are creepy.
The simplest command that can be issued with the eyes only is the, “come here” or “come hither” stare. This is more often attributed to women rather than men, and that has a lot to do with the way our society is structured, but I don’t want to be pulled into another feminist rant, so I’ll leave that lay for now.
The “come hither” stare is exactly what it has been made out to be in popular culture – movies, television shows, and most especially, books.
Because of this pervasive commonality, a woman can get the attention of nearly any man by simply staring at him, demurely looking away, and then bringing her stare back to the same place. Most men are going to be almost helpless in their reaction – society has baked this one in for us – at least in the Western world. They will find themselves compelled to move towards the woman and interact with her. Depending on the social graces that particular man is endowed with, this may or may not be a good thing.
Again, thanks to the commonality of the above, the reverse is also generally well understood – the ‘go away’ look that can stop a man in his tracks and get him to rethink his move.
Confident women will often employ both of these together to pick a man out from across the room, hold his attention, and then get him to buy her a drink and try to chat her up. She’ll pick out the one guy she wants to talk to, give him the ‘come here’ stare, but end up attracting him and both of the guys next to him, necessitating the ‘go away’ stare to the two undesirable candidates.
Most of the glance-based commands that I will give are trained, but they build on the above interactions as a foundation. The above are things that nearly everyone can understand, and because of that fact, they allow for extension in some ways that are not obvious and many of those things really do feel a bit like mind reading.
The ‘come here’ look has to be modified a bit for my purposes because I’m a man. I do not think that I am a good enough actor to pull off the demure look-away, but I can do the next best thing… I will lock stares from across the room, hold it for just a bit longer than seems reasonable, and then smile. Usually that is enough to prompt her to do the demure look-away all on her own. In the span of mere seconds, without a word, we’ve already begun negotiations.
When I’m working with a submissive who is actually submitting to my Will, I will often employ this to begin – the stare and smile, though sometimes the smile can be a bit more mischievous when given in this context. I will then follow with a gesture that implies what I desire.
If I look at you, keep my eyes on you, but begin to lower my head – while keeping my my eyes on you – and then nod at the floor in front of me, I expect you to come and stand in front of me.
If, once you do that, I further nod my head towards the floor at my feet, I expect you kneel for me.
If I glance to my side, I expect you to move to that side of me and lean on me if I’m standing, sit next to me if I’m sitting, or follow me on that side if I’m walking. If once you reach my side I then nod towards the floor, I will expect you to kneel for me there. If I nod towards a chair or couch, I expect you to sit there. If I am sitting and I pat my knee, I expect you to sit on it.
See? Simple – easy – mostly intuitive.
With some training, it’s easy to cue almost any action with nothing more than a glance.
Even taking things further.. If you are my submissive, I may draw you to me with my eyes, put you on your knees in front of me, and then with a more insistent nod, indicate that I want you to remove my belt, unzip my pants, and start sucking on my cock.
It is quite satisfying to be able to get into someone’s head so much that I can get her to give me a blowjob without ever saying a word, I must admit.
This is the second part in a three part series. When I am training a new submissive, I rely on three of the five senses to keep her where I want her. My first piece on Touch was just previous to this and you may or may not wish to read that before continuing with this.
Voice: a (slightly) more subtle approach to the same.
Since I started off talking about senses, I suppose it makes more sense to say that I really mean ‘sound’ when I say ‘voice’ here – but since I don’t use a training whistle, clicker, or anything like that, sound almost always means my voice. There are some Dominants who do use clickers or whistles or the like, so some of those same concepts probably apply here, but since that is outside of the scope of my experience, this is the only mention I will make of them.
I have three distinct voices that I use with submissives and trainees:
Normal voice: This is just the voice that I use under normal circumstances – both vanilla and kinky. I’m told that I have a very soothing voice and that it carries, so I rarely have reason to modify this in normal circumstances. In normal voice, it is important to pay attention to what I am saying as well as how I am saying it. This is the voice that I will use to tell you that you are a good girl, but also the voice that I will use when I lean in close beside you and tell you that I’m going to use you until I’m exhausted. It carries the most variability of intonation and generally the most information, but there is subtlety here that can sometimes be missed, so it is not ideal for situations where more control is required.
Command voice: This is the voice that I use when I want you to do what I am telling you. It does not mean that I’m angry with you, but that is how it is most often interpreted at first… I drop my voice by about an octave and a half, so not only is the tone different, but the pitch is as well. It’s an obvious difference and it follows a convention held by much of society – even in different cultures, I’ve found. I’ve been told by vanilla friends that this is my ‘serious’ voice or even my “don’t fuck with me” voice. The timbre won’t change, but I often vary the volume with which I speak in this voice. It carries very far and I don’t always want to broadcast my intentions. In this voice it is much more important to pay attention to the content of what I am telling you rather than look for subtlety of meaning.
Crisis voice: This is the voice that I use when I need to be paid attention to right now – usually for reasons of safety. The tone is similar to my command voice, but it’s about half an octave higher, so it’s similar in pitch to my normal voice, just a bit deeper and definitely much, much louder, just under a yell. This is the voice that I will use when you are near to harming yourself, or someone or something else is about to impede upon your physical space, things like that. This is my, “watch out!” voice. If I want, I can put a lot of power behind this. In this voice, there is never any implied subtlety at all – the only important thing is the information that I need you understand and likely act upon right now.
Of course, I can also whisper and use other vocal intonations, but generally those are embellishments on one of the above – things that I can use to subtly change the meaning of the words that I am using, or to impart a particular idea. I can whisper in Command voice, for example, and sometimes I’m just an asshole and I’ll lower my vocal volume of my Normal voice in an effort to cause someone (not always my sub/trainee) to move closer to me or to pay closer attention to what I’m saying.
Even without me explaining these things, trainees under my care usually come to understand them pretty quickly. I use facial expression, body language, and sometimes just plain brute force to reinforce the things that I say with my voice and establish a pattern pretty quickly. It’s difficult to train anyone to do anything without explaining what it is that you want done, and voice is generally the way that I accomplish that – at least in person – and while long distance D/s is something that I have some experience with and am learning much more about as I do it every day, the spoken word has power even in situations like this. Written text in an email or text message can be extremely descriptive and more detailed than most people can maintain patience for in person, in voice, but the voice, facial expressions, and body language that you can experience in person is a lot more powerful – even more powerful in person than over media like Skype.
More often than not, the things that I will do with my voice are explained by the content of what I am saying when I say it. For instance, if I say, “bunny, go sit on that chair and hold it for me,” what I mean is literally that I want her to go sit in the chair I indicated and wait for me – it’s not rocket science. However, sometimes I will use commands that are not obvious, but that actually require training.
I stole this wholesale from Stranger in a Strange Land – one of my favorite books of all time – but on occasion I’ll just blurt out, “Front!” and I expect my submissive to immediately walk to me, stand in front of me, facing me, place her hands on her lower abdomen with the palms facing her, one over the other, look me in eye briefly and say, “yes, Sir?” and then lower her eyes. This is not exactly what happens in the book. In the book, the character who says this is not a Dom – at least not in the overt sense, and not in the typical sense either. He has three women who serve as his assistants, keeping his books, taking dictation, cooking his meals, etc. – all of the things that one would normally expect of a service submissive, but not any of the physical or sexual aspects of that service. It’s entirely possible that this novel helped to contribute to my ideals of what a submissive should be like – for me – but I first read it at such a young age and it provided the backdrop to a different phase of my life. The character in the book, Jubal Harshaw, expects one of his three assistants – on a rotating schedule – to run to him with a notebook and a pen and ready to take notes or instructions when he calls Front. My requirements are somewhat different and tuned to my own needs, but the call is still similar.
When I say, “present” I expect my submissive to stand in front of me, legs shoulder width apart, hands with fingers interlaced together behind her head, elbows up, head up straight, and chest out. As with any other command, I expect some sort of verbal acknowledgement as well – a, “yes, Sir” is sufficient.
When I say, “kneel” I expect my submissive to present herself before me as above, and then to drop the her knees in front of me, put her legs and knees together, sit on her feet, put her hands behind her back, palms out, and then after meeting my eyes and acknowledging my command, look at her own navel. For competition, I’ll have her make a diamond figure with her hands, thumbs out and touching, forefingers touching, and to do all of that silently, but in more common usage, I’m not normally going to walk around behind her to inspect that anyway.
When I say, “expose” I expect my submissive to be in the kneeling position above or work her way into it through the “present” and “kneel” poses, but to spread her legs out so that her calves are at shoulder-width and straight back behind her, toes pointed back away from her, and then to lock her fingers together and put them behind her head as with the “present” position above. I expect her to hold her head high and meet my gaze or that of anyone else who happens to be watching nearby. For competition, this is modified again so that the knees are further apart and the calves need not be so far apart behind her – toes still pointed but without overlapping the feet.
When I say, “move to position,” I expect my submissive to be in kneeling position or to move to it by moving through ‘present’ and ‘kneel’ and then to change the placement of her hands so that her hands are open, palms covering the front of her knees. Unless she has very long arms, this will result in her leaning slightly forward. I want her to crane her neck a bit to look up at me, acknowledge my command with a “yes, Sir” or similar, and then to drop her eyes and stare at her own navel, awaiting further command. I used to call this “position one” but found that numbering positions was a bit more difficult to remember than naming them, so this is merely ‘position’ now.
When I say, “hands and knees” I expect my submissive to drop to her knees, lean forward, keep her legs at hip-width directly beneath her, calves straight back, and toes pointed back behind her. I expect her to place her hands flat on the surface in front of her, whether that is the floor, bed, couch, whatever. I expect her to hold her fingers together with the exception of her thumbs, which I want out at a 90 degree angle. Her fingers should point directly in front of her and her thumbs should point at each other. I expect her to look up, craning her neck if needed, acknowledge my command, and then drop her head so that her chin rests on her chest and she’s looking back between her own legs.
In private, these are often all that I will say – there is no need to further qualify who I am talking to or about, but in public spaces or even in private places where there are other people about, I will usually modify the above to include a name, but sometimes I expect to be understood anyway.
As an example: in a public dungeon, I might say, “bunny, kneel” and I’ll expect bunny to come over and kneel in front of me, but “Front!” is a special command and I always expect my submissive or submissives – if I’m carrying more than one – to respond, lining up side-by-side in front of me if needed.
There are other commands that I sometimes use as well, as well as some other positions that are specifically for competition, and these are probably what earned me the reputation of being a ‘High Protocol’ Dom, but I’m not convinced that is factual. I have also become even more lax with protocol as I’ve aged. I’m a lot more tolerant of ambiguity than I once was, and I’ve worked with submissives in the recent past without using any of these commands – positions are not as important to me as they once were, and in most situations I will just explicitly say what I want, making a need to memorize commands like the above unnecessary.
There is definitely something to be said for having someone instantly react to simple or single word commands though. It is certainly one of my favorite things, especially when chained together with other more explicit commands.
For instance, ‘kneel’ is often followed by something quite like, “Look at me. Now reach up and undo my belt…” which, as you can probably imagine, is not where things are meant to end, but often an over-eager submissive in this position will take it as license to do more. Without an additional command, I would expect her to acknowledge my command with a “yes, Sir,” do as I’ve said – undoing my belt – but to then return her hands behind her back and await further instruction.
Sometimes I will chain these with other indicators as well. For instance, “hands and knees – on the bed,” is often a command I might give, in Command voice, to let her know that things are serious and that she needs to respond with vigor. It lets her know that I want her in the ‘hands and knees’ position, but that I want her on the bed, not necessarily where she is now, which is likely to be standing on the floor.
It is really not possible to over-communicate, so I’ll often add modifiers like these even when they’re not necessary. I am not the kind of Dominant to often try to trap my submissive with a command that she cannot easily fulfill – I like to enable success – but I have done so in the past and will likely do so again from time to time in the future. It is a playful way to push her into a place where she knows that punishment is likely to come, but there is a big difference between playful punishment and correction. Perhaps that should be the topic of a new post sometime soon, but I still have one more to go in this series before it’s complete.
Next week I will talk about the final means of control – glances. This is the ultimate level of control in a D/s setting in my opinion. I like my submissives to learn to anticipate and provide for my needs, but that is not the same thing as control. I also like my submissives to be autonomous and have their own opinions and ideas, so I have no desire to completely stifle that, but the ability to produce an action or change a behavior with nothing more than a pointed look is the pinnacle of D/s communication and control – in my not-so-very-humble opinion.
I hope this was informative, helpful, and perhaps even a bit titillating. Come back next week for the final piece in this trilogy and then I’ll give you a story of my own experiences in learning these things at the hand of my brutal and affectionate – if not compassionate – Domme Simone when I was but a young pup myself.
This is going to be the first part in a three part series. When I am training a new submissive, I rely on three of the five senses to keep her where I want her. The other two senses are certainly involved in everything that we do, but using taste or scent as a means of control is difficult. Scent is much easier to employ than taste, but most of the time the things that evoked by scent are visceral, immediate, and tend to trigger or reinforce memory. I can use scent to help me get a submissive into subspace, but it’s rarely something that I can use to instruct.
Touch: the fast path to victory.
The easiest and most direct way to control my submissive is through touch. It really requires no finesse at all, it only requires intent and confidence… well, and some physicality.
It also requires virtually no training. While every person is different, and people act and react during sexual situations or even the non-sexual elements of a scene with different responses, there are some commonalities that I’ve been able to identify and exploit over the years. While none of these techniques are universal, most of them can be employed to good measure on almost anyone – of either sex, from what I’m led to believe.
Just like with any method of employing force, there are varying ways to use touch to your advantage. By far the easiest route is simply to employ brute force.
I’m not a small man. I’m six feet tall and currently weigh in at a slightly overweight but extremely solid 16 stone. This means that I get to throw my size around quite a bit. There are very few women that I have met who are anywhere near my size and I have not yet taken a male submissive to this point in my life. I doubt that I ever will, but if I do, it’s likely going to require me to learn many, many new things.
Beginning in junior high school I started wrestling competitively, both in school sports and freestyle events. In the late 1990’s I was training to be a Pankration fighter. I was hopeful of snagging a slot on the Olympic team since they were bringing the sport back to the modern Olympics for the first time in Athens – minus the glass shards and all… While I didn’t get selected, and I had a very abbreviated and not terribly successful run as an MMA fighter, I did learn an awful lot of useful things and I would still venture to say that it makes me a dangerous man.
Apart from bragging a little bit, the purpose of the above statement was to reinforce the fact that I have much experience as as grappler, I have learned basic pressure points, and I know the value of a rapid and not necessarily high-powered strike. These are definitely things that I employ in scene, but also just when I am having sex.
So – while using physical force is certainly the easiest way to get someone to do what you want them to do, it is definitely not the safest. Please use caution whenever you play. Know your strength, know your partner’s signals, have a defined safe word and safe gesture and use them.
While there are gestures that I may perform as part of a command and sometimes those gestures involve touch, when I speak of three different levels of command, and how touch represents the first of these and has the lowest barrier to entry, it is not that sort of touch for which I am speaking.
It is a much less subtle and more brutal touch that I am talking about here…
Grab her by the throat, step into and behind her to put your calf behind her knee, lift and push and then catch her with your other arm as she’s about to fall. If you plan this right, she’ll be on her back, preferably on a bed or something else similarly well suited to fucking, with you hovering over her and your hand on her throat. If you can’t seal the deal at this point, there is no hope for you anywhere.
Of course – you don’t do ANY of that shit if she isn’t expecting you to move on her. She doesn’t have to know exactly what you have planned, but she does have to know that you’re going to basically attack her. However, I guarantee you that the results will be better if she doesn’t know exactly what you have planned.
But it’s not just sex that I’m talking about here… you can use touch – firm or light – as a method of control in almost any D/s situation.
If I want my submissive to kneel for me, and she fails to do so the first time I tell her to, maybe because she didn’t understand that yes, I did in fact expect you to kneel right in the middle of the aisle at Target, or maybe she’s just being bratty, but no matter what her reasons for failing to kneel, I can usually get her to do so without saying another word. She has to have heard my first command or she’ll just be confused by my actions, but usually if she doesn’t respond to my command, “kneel for me, bunny,” I can put my hands on her shoulders and apply a little bit of pressure and she’ll do what I want. If that fails and the setting allows for it, I can move behind her and gently apply pressure to the backs of her calves, right below the knee, with my boot.
This will almost certainly get the point across.
If that still does not produce the desired result, I can grab her hair and increase the pressure that I apply with my boot. It will cause her to be off balance and bend at the knees as she begins to drop. I can then use my hand in her hair to guide her slowly to where I want her to be.
And if that still fails to produce the behavior I want, I can move to the front of her, put my right hand on the front of her throat, my left hand on the back of her neck, and stare her in the eyes as I close off her carotids with my thumb and forefinger, which will eventually cause her to become lightheaded or even pass out. Then I can do whatever I like to her.
This maneuver requires a great deal of trust and training, however, and I would not recommend it to someone who has not seen it demonstrated in person and has had many chances to practice.
But using touch as control does not require overpowering either…
Occasionally my submissive can be a bit bratty. When that happens and I’m not feeling like dealing with it, a quick light slap across the face will almost always get my point across. If I’m a bit more tolerant of the brattiness, I’ll slap her ass instead, but that has a tendency to encourage more brattiness – a reaction that appears to be almost universal among bratty subs, but one that I still don’t completely understand.
So – if you want the brattiness to continue or even intensify – smile and smack her ass. You don’t have to say a thing. If you want the brattiness to cease, slap her across the face – lightly. Too much will encourage a fight or flight response and you’ll have a fight on your hands.
Part of this has to come from experience, unfortunately, and every person is different. I’m sure that I’ll hear from someone who is going to tell me that slapping her face will increase her brattiness as well as from someone who will tell me that a smack to the ass will pull her out of her bratty tirade.
Touch is most effective in combination with voice and glance as well, but it is the crudest and most easily employed without predefined rules in place. Like anything in this world though, it will require some practice to get right.
Next week I’ll talk about command voice and how to intone things for maximal effect – employed with some pushing and prodding taken from this post as well, but this post threatens to get too long if I keep talking.
I’m currently working on a triptych of posts – dealing with the various forms and methods of control that I employ as a Dominant, and I hope that it will be worth waiting for, as it is taking me some time to write to my standards, but in the meantime I have something else to say.
This is the core of my own personal belief system and a telling window into my own soul, if such things exist.
I don’t experience emotions in the same way that people who are born with them do. I don’t mean to imply that I was born without the ability to emote at all – of course not – I would have been institutionalized long before now if that were the case, but I was born neurologically different. I had Asperger’s syndrome, or something very much like it. Throughout my childhood, I was always the odd one out. While my ‘friends’ would play around me, I was often content to sit by myself, still playing, but the only interactions that interested me were the ones in my own head, or the things in front of me which I could control. I put together a lot of models and puzzles as a child…
I say I had Aspergers, because I no longer believe that I meet the diagnostic criteria for that particular syndrome, and the only reason I can imagine for that is that I rebuilt myself and made it less of a part of me.
Much later in life, when I felt that the Roman Catholic Church that I was raised to revere had failed me, I sought answers in other places. I found some, and I missed others, but I learned in the process.
When it became apparent to me that my life would remain one as a social outcast if I did not conform, I made a choice. I would not only conform, but I would exceed the norm. This has often been the choice I would make when I had the time, energy, and resources to do so. As a young man, I had those things in spades.
I watched people interact. I emulated their behaviors. I taught myself to be human. And somewhere along the way, I broke myself, several times. I was not prepared to deal with the weight of the emotions that crushed me when I took them upon myself. I was not prepared to deal with the staggering uncertainty that comes in the wake of allowing that information to percolate up from within me. I was not even aware that I possessed such things – I could see them in other people, and I could behave as they do, but it wasn’t until I rebuilt myself around that model that I became a real boy and could hurt so deeply – and I do hurt deeply – all the fucking time. Not in the sense that I am in constant pain – for while that may be true, it is of a physical nature and I hold my soul separate from that infection.. I am happy and hurting at the same time.
I came to learn that emotions are beautiful things. Each one has its place and time. Each is important information that one ignores at great personal risk. Happiness and love are certainly my favorites and I am blessed to have much of both lately, but pain and sorrow are also useful things.
I found the practice of Zen along the way, and I have employed it to deflect, avoid, and trap emotions from time to time. Zen became my method of self-defense against the mental assailants that I could not overpower and so it became my Aikido of the soul… But the greatest gift that Zen gave me was the realization that I don’t matter.
My readers will dispute that fact, and while I concede the point that my continued existence provides financial, emotional, and spiritual support to a lot of people – more than I ever realized – it is also true that none of you matter.
Please do not be offended by this. The universe is a very large place and we are but motes floating in the stream of time. None of us matter.
This is an empowering concept. It allows me to carry the understanding that the universe is so much greater than I am, and that there is so much in life that is unfathomable to a mere man like me. I do not need to understand it all and I am unable to do so.
It is my atheist way of understanding the Will of God.
Future generations of humans will be impacted by the things I do, but the net affect will be small. I can control things to an extent.. I can try to be good, and I can try to make sure that the microscopic things that are a part of my world take the best turns that they can, but my missteps will not derail the universe. Nothing is so horrible that it can never be forgotten.
A billion years from now, our descendants will appear nothing like us – they may not even be organic creatures, but they will carry forward in their own microscopic and easily forgotten way… until the universe itself cools and falls apart.
This is not fatalism – it is hope.
My past mistakes have already been forgotten by most. The horrible things that haunt my dreams will be completely forgotten when I am gone, to trouble my descendants no more. The horrible things that were done to me are already being erased by the love and compassion that surrounds me. I have forgiven, and I will forget – or I will die and whatever dreams may come from that will not be plagued by the evils of my past, but will be enlightened by the hope of my present and future selves.
I am still physically broken, and I cannot focus the power of my mind to solving hard problems yet, but I am mending and my soul is mending as well.
This was pretty self serving today, but I will follow up soon with things both erotic and instructional. Thank you for your patience as I heal.
Sleeping with a broken jaw is turning out to be difficult – or perhaps more accurately – turning while sleeping with a broken jaw is difficult… I keep turning over onto the side with the break while I’m sleeping and waking myself up. It is just ever-so-slightly maddening.
But it does give me lots of time to think.
I have a new submissive trainee. She is wonderful.
I want her to burn for me, and I told her that I would leave her be until today while she saves herself for me, but after today, all bets were off.
I planned to share this story with her, but I know she’ll see if it is here, and I thought perhaps the rest of my readers might benefit as well.
Plus – who doesn’t like a little voyeurism into the life of their favorite online Dom?
While slightly embellished, this is a story based on reality and the names of the parties involved have been changed to mask the identity of the guilty, but if you happen to be reading this and know who you are – I’ll gladly remove the story at your request.
I have a fetish that I have never fully satisfied. I’ve had a pretty varied sex life to date, and I’ve actively sought out every fetish that I have been able to identify so far, including this one, but I haven’t quite managed to hit the right combination of factors yet… the short version is that I have a desire to have sex with a fully unconscious woman. Consensual, of course – pre-negotiated, adhering to limit terms even while unconscious, etc. But, as you can imagine, this is a tricky thing to negotiate. It requires a seriously intense amount of trust.
My new trainee is willing to satisfy this for me, at least in theory, and for that I owe her much, including this story.
As I said, this is a fetish that I have not yet been able to fulfill, but I do have something of a confession to make. While it is true that I have not fulfilled the entire fantasy of mine, I have, sort-of, possibly, had sexual intercourse with an unconscious woman before, but she didn’t start out that way, and I didn’t drug her or anything nefarious like that.. in fact, I’m pretty sure that the experience was pretty profound for her, but I’ll relate it now in full.
I would like to preface this story with the fact that this happened several years ago, and at the time I was a very different creature, emotionally, than I am today. I was a more callous, hurt, and dangerous person, but I don’t want to sugar-coat my past.
This all happened several years ago. I was freshly broken up again, which seems to be a recurring theme in my life, but that’s not the point.
During the course of my relationship, which was mostly polyamorous, my girlfriend told me that I could have sex with anyone I wanted to with the exception of three people, two of which were her friends and the other .. is not important.
One of these friends and I had some serious sexual tension from the time we first met. Within moments of meeting, we were locked in a kiss and my girlfriend had to separate us and ask us not to pursue each other because it was going to induce Ratatosk-sized brain squirrels for her if we were to continue, so – since we both loved her – we stopped and let it drop from that point forward.
Let’s fast forward a bit to where I was broken up with. This friend was one of the few who remained friendly with me in the aftermath. I know that her motives were not entirely selfless, but then again, neither were mine. The sexual tension had never completely dissipated.
In my sorrow at being emotionally wrecked yet again, I was out drinking at a strip club and I received a text from this woman – let’s call her Ruby.
Ruby texted me, letting me know that her date turned out to be a dud and that she was home alone, waiting for her girlfriend to get back from the kink event that she was volunteering at..
Home alone safely now. Date was a total bust. The guy was at least four inches shorter than he claimed and he was about as Dominant as the gum under my shoe. Now I’m just sitting around and waiting for Ariel to get done at the Citadel. What are you up to?
Interesting, I thought to myself. It was about 10:00pm and the event that was going on was going to go until 1:00am at the earliest.
She was sitting at home, looking at three hours of doldrums ahead after having had her fires stoked for a bit by a guy who turned out to be a total schlep. I was already horny, a little bit drunk, and not looking forward to the prospect of bringing home another stripper for meaningless and somewhat risky sex.
Besides, Ruby was hot and I wanted her more than any of the girls who were hanging off of me because I’m respectful, good looking, and came with lots of cash… How can I work this to my advantage?
I’m just sitting here watching London climb the pole topless and waiting for her to finish her stage show so that I can try to talk her into blowing me in the back room.
Leave out lots of information… make the pieces that you do reveal tantalizing… tilt the direction towards the thing you want… it’s okay, she wants it too…
Oh really? Who is London? Where are you?
Bingo. Gotcha.
Absolutely. She’s a rather attractive young girl who would really like my money. I’m at the Hanky Panky, drinking way too much and trying to forget why it’s a bad idea to offer London money to suck my cock.
Damn, I’m horrible… I might as well be hanging out a sign saying, “I want sex and my inhibitions are down.” The real question is whether or not she’s really been hooked and will let me reel her in now, or if I’ll have spooked her. Even with the pre-existing tension, trying to reel her in with only a couple of text messages is pretty bold.
You mean that horrible dive bar/strip bar in Redwood City?
That’s the one.
Yuck. Isn’t that place gross?
Now I know that I have her. She’s making disparaging remarks towards the competition and seeking to elevate her place in my eyes.
Meh. It’s not so bad… once you’re six or seven drinks in, anyway.. and London is very cute. Much too young for me, but that never seems to be much of a problem.
Now I’ve reinforced my claim that I’m dis-inhibited (nevermind the fact that this is true, at the time, I was rather full of myself) and I’ve let her know that her competition actually has my attention, I should become irresistible…
You really should stop robbing the cradle, Rant. I would think that you’d have learned to appreciate the experience that comes with a few more years by now.
* evil grin *
You’re not suggesting that you would be a more suitable tribute than young London here now, are you? Besides which, you’re still several years younger than me.
Three years is not several.
I have to admit, at this point, I’m pretty excited. I’ve wanted to nail Ruby for well over a year at this point and I’ve been denying every impulse.
I can’t drive at this point, but if you’d like to come get me, I might be persuaded to leave now.
I’ll be there in ten.
Holy shit! Did that just happen?!
At this point, I have to actually get rid of London, because she really is sitting on the stool next to me with her hand in between my legs and asking me if I’d like to go back and have that ‘private dance’ with her now.
I politely tell her that I’m not feeling well and that I need to close out and leave, but I give her a $20 for sitting with me for the couple of minutes that I was arranging for what would turn out to be rather extraordinary.
I closed out my tab at the bar and walked outside, to wait for Ruby to show up to pick me up. One of the other dancers was outside and took the opportunity to chat me up and handed me a slip of paper. It happened to have a name, phone number, and email address on it. I figured I’d keep it for later, so I put it into my pocket, but I ended up losing it – sorry, Cheyenne…
Moments later, Ruby pulled up to the street next to where I was standing and rolled down the window of the passenger side door, on the curb next to me. She leaned over to look at me through the open window, “Hello, Sir. I’m ready to take you home now.”
“Thank you, Ruby,” I said as I opened the door and sat beside her in the passenger side.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” she said as we pulled away.
“It almost certainly is not,” I replied. “But I’m not altogether certain that I care.”
“I agree,” she said, and then not another word all the way back to her place, which was not far.
“I suppose I should have asked if you wanted me to take you home, shouldn’t I?” she asked demurely once we’d pulled into her parking spot.
“Don’t be foolish,” I said, “this has been over a year in the making. Show me upstairs.” I already knew the way to her apartment, having been there several times in the past, but I wanted her to lead me.
She led the way to her apartment and I followed.
Once inside the door, I closed it behind me and then turned around to find her only inches away from me, looking up at me, directly into my eyes.
“You don’t smell good, Sir,” she said, without the slightest hint of guile.
“Does that matter?” I asked, knowing that I was in the throes of grief and had not been taking care of myself for several days, not to mention the fact that I had recently been drinking heavily and even smoking a bit – which I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I occasionally do when I’ve been drinking.
“No. I suppose not,” she said, in the most demure voice I’d ever heard. “I want you,” she said afterwards, while looking me directly in the eyes with the most innocent eyes she could manage.
“I am here, Ruby.” I said, with all the gravitas I could summon, and shockingly, it worked! She dropped to her knees in front of me, wrapped her arms around the back of my thighs and looked up into my eyes.
“May I suck your cock, Sir? I’ve been waiting ever so long to do so.”
“You may, Ruby.”
She undid my belt, slowly, with purpose. Then she undid the button at the top of my jeans, then the next one down in the fly, then the next, and finally the last one.
As she started to pull on my pants to bring them around my ankles, I held onto my belt, pulling it free as my pants fell.
Then she brought her hands to the front of my boxer briefs and stroked the bottom of my cock, from balls to head, through the fabric of my boxer briefs.
She looked up again into my eyes, pleading for me to give her permission to pull my boxer briefs down, even though the permission was already implicit in my affirmation that she could suck my cock.
I put my hand under her chin as she lifted her head, and tilted it back.
With the other hand, which was holding my belt now, I quickly looped it around her neck and pulled it taught, dragging her upright on her knees.
Then I pushed my boxer briefs down and pulled my rigid cock free, letting go with my hand to allow the belt to settle around her neck and come to rest between her breasts, still covered by her clothing.
I grabbed the back of her neck with my free hand and guided her mouth around my cock.
I thrust slowly in and and out a few times, deeper than was comfortable for her, but not enough to cause serious discomfort.
Then I grabbed the belt again, and pulled her off of my cock, and up to her feet.
I stepped out of my pants and my boxer briefs and I walked her back, forcing her to back up several steps until she was abutted against her ottoman.
Then I let go of the belt and I leveled my sharpest gaze directly at her soul and I said in my Command Voice, “Remove your clothing and lie on this ottoman on your back. I want to eat your pussy until you scream.”
Before thoughts were registering in her mind, I think, she had removed her top and was halfway through removing her bra.
“Wait – can I put a towel down? This is new furniture….”
“Yes, of course, but if you make me wait any longer I’m going to hurt you.”
“Yes Sir!” and with that she quickly removed her remaining clothes, ran to put a towel on the ottoman, and laid down upon it, on her back, spread legs in front of me.
Cunnilingus is my favorite sex act… it allows me an awful lot of control over my partner’s orgasm, and I really like that kind of control.
I dropped to my knees and closed in on her gorgeous pussy.
I thrust my tongue deep within her and then drew it up through her inner labia to her clitoris, and as I did so, she let out an audible moan.
I focused my attention on my tongue and her clitoris for some time after that, bringing her to a state of near frenzy and backing off to deny her orgasm several times.
Eventually her frustration was staring to climb and she called out in an exasperated tone, “Sir! Are you ever going to let me cum?!”
“Why should I?” I asked in the calmest, clearest tone that I could.
“I thought you said that you weren’t a Sadist?!!?”
“I said I’m not a physical Sadist.”
“This feels pretty fucking physical to me!”
“You’re right, Ruby,” I said and then immediately put my right forefinger and middle finger into my mouth to wet them, and then thrust them with nothing held back deep into her pussy.
She exploded with her first orgasm, shaking and moaning.
I began to feather my fingers inside of her, hitting her g-spot as I put my face back between her legs and started circling her clitoris with my tongue again.
“Ugnghshg!” – She can be pretty eloquent when she’s cumming.
“ARGH!” she screamed out as every muscle in her abdomen contracted at once and she came extremely strongly, pushing my fingers out of her with the force.
“That was almost a word,” I said, sarcastically.
“ARGH!” she replied, so I stuck a finger into her asshole.
“UGHAASHUEDUDSAVJ!” she squirted all over me and pushed my fingers out of her vagina again, but the one in her asshole remained, so I curled it on her.
“HOLY FUCKNUTS!” she screamed, which I took as an invitation, so I put my fingers back inside her and attacked her clitoris with my tongue again.
“AGISDGDH! What?! WHo?! How?!?”
I straightened up so that I could look her in the face, because reactions like these really need to be seen to be understood.
I pulled my thumb up to start pushing on her clitoris.. not moving around, just steady and increasing pressure. I was kneeling above her now, so I could see the fact that she was holding her breath. She was starting to turn purple, but I didn’t want to stop what I was doing, so I pulled my finger out of her ass and stuck the tip of my cock in instead.
“AHDFGSHDSAJD!”
I began to push with my hips while I was continuing to kneed at her g-spot with my fingers and push on her clit with my thumb.
By the time I had half of the shaft of my cock in her ass she had squirted again, her eyes rolled back into her head, and her body went completely limp. Her arms flopped back behind her, and the action pulled her tits up and forward and that made me even harder, if you can believe it.
Now balls deep inside her ass with my cock, two fingers into her pussy, and putting increasing pressure on her clit with my thumb, it was clear that she had passed out. She was still breathing though, and making noises that were somewhere between a moan and a ‘coo,’ so I just kept fucking her ass.
A few moments later, I came in her ass, pulled out, pulled her body against mine and held her while she tried to catch her breath.
Eventually she came back around and she looked up at me and smiled and said, “Thank you, Sir,” before dropping her head onto my shoulder and trying to steady her breathing.
I helped her to clean herself up, and clean up the mess we’d left behind. I put on my clothes and then I walked home.
It was a pretty intense night. Some of the details I’ve glossed over and left behind. Some of the details I’ve embellished upon, but the core of the story remains true, and my desire for the real thing is unabated.
I hope you enjoyed my story.
I know that bunny is going to enjoy the reality much, much more.
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.
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 alsowhy 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.
I am in a relationship. It is a complicated relationship, it is definitely not easy, as no relationships are, but this one is worth fighting for, where I have failed to fight for others in the past.
In the past, I’ve always felt justified in blaming the failure of my relationships on external factors or upon the other person, and yet, I’m almost always the one to call an end to things. Not always, but generally, I’ve been the one to give up.
When my first wife, Sabrina, found religion and started to use it as a weapon against me, I could take it no longer and ended the first real relationship of my life – quickly, mercilessly, and without much regret, but regret and pain are not quite the same thing, and that experience surely did hurt.
I went through a series of short term and nontraditional relationships after that, and in most cases, I was the one to give up when things looked the least bit like they were going to crack, but eventually I was tossed out by Simone and experienced my first case of being the dumped party. It hurt; it scarred me, and every relationship that I have had since then has had to bear the baggage that came with this event. Every time a relationship came close to ending, I feared the upending of my entire life – being thrown out onto the street has a way of refocusing you though…
Despite being somewhat jaded at this point, I decided to once again try to settle in and live life according to the societal norms. I found a new wife, Madison, and we had children together, and no matter how bad things got, I fought to stay in that relationship for the sake of my children. That relationship ended for reasons that were not my choosing.
Then I did the series of short term and nontraditional relationships again – with the same sorts of results for the most part.
The truth is that in all of those cases, there was always a fear that the other person would abandon me, and in most cases that is what actually happened.
In some cases, I pushed things to that conclusion. Consciously and unconsciously, I worked against my own relationships to break them, so that I didn’t have to be hurt when the inevitable abandonment would occur. I could spin it around and say that it was my choice to leave, and in most cases, that is how it would appear to anyone who was not deep within my mind.
In some cases, it really was the other person’s fault. Kendra, for example, was simply batshit crazy, and after spending tens of thousands of dollars to try to get her help and get her life back on track, I simply could no longer afford to keep it up and I told her so.
But my current relationship is different, and very much worth saving.
This is the first time that my partner refused to hear me when I said that it was over.
She has been the first person to see through my bullshit and my baggage and my fear and anxiety and dread and to hold on to the part of me that really does not want her to go.
She is my lighthouse.
She is the blue canary in the outlet by the light switch who watches over me.
She is the one who I want by my side for the rest of my life. Whatever form that takes, she is the one that I always want to come home to, the one that I want to always protect, the one that I want to always have my back.
But in order to do that, I have to clear out this garbage from my past.
I am confronting things about myself that I buried long ago and never wanted to revisit, but those are parts of me and if I do not acknowledge them, they crawl out on their own anyway.
This is a long, painful, and extremely difficult thing for me to do.
I have nightmares almost daily. Even when I am awake and focused on something entirely different, sometimes when I close my eyes, the images that I see on the inside of my eyelids are of inexplicable and horrifying things. I often lie awake at night in the dark and I can feel the demons trying to infect me again, but I have strength, because she is there, sleeping by my side.
I am fighting against myself. I am fighting against the walls that I placed in my own psyche for very good reason, but those walls have to come down and the elements behind them have to be dealt with. I need to re-incorporate those things into my being again. Until I do that, I won’t be whole, and she deserves so much more than a partial boyfriend.
I will kick my own ass so that she can have more of me than anyone ever has. She deserves it, and I want to give it to her.
But when I started this post, I was only meaning to speak in part about my girl and how much she means to me and how much I want to fight for her, because while she may be the most important thing in my life to fight for right now there are going to be many, many, many things that I will have to fight for in the years to come.
I had briefly considered pulling the white male card and just coasting through, hoping that nothing bad happens and nothing touches me, and I am just fucking spoiled to have that option in the first place and I’m a bit disappointed in myself for ever even half-seriously considering it.
I had considered leaving the country. The incoming administration has no love for people like me and the things I represent, but that would be cowardly as well.
I am extremely fortunate. I am not powerless in this world. I do not have much power, but whatever I have I am going to dedicate to fighting for the things in which I believe.
I am donating money now. I will donate time when I am able. I am going to speak of things in my bully pulpit here for as long as I can.
People are people, and until and unless we can recognize that, we may deserve the environmental catastrophe that is coming for us…
But we can, and should, fight against all of those things until they overwhelm us.
My ancestors long fought against impossible odds, and they usually lost, but they won enough that I stand here today, and they kept enough of their values and culture that it is immediately recognizable the world over.
I stand on the shoulders of giants and I stare down the petty and selfish.