Hello party people. It’s been awhile since I actually ranted about something, so here’s a tirade for you to ponder on your Earth Day.
There is a phrase that has become so ubiquitous in the BDSM culture that it is literally written on t-shirts and mugs that you can buy from dropshippers worldwide – but it is just plain wrong and it sticks in my craw every time I read it or hear someone say it.
The phrase?
“My submission is a gift…”
This is usually followed by other such sundry tripe as, “… and any man who can’t understand that doesn’t deserve it,” or “… and if it is not respected, I will take it back.”
This is wrong.
It’s a terrible metaphor and we really need to stop using it. Submission is merely half of a power exchange negotiation. It represents something different for every power dynamic, and every couple or group. Submission, like almost everything else that we deal with in this thing that we do represents a spectrum of possibilities.
Submission is not a gift. A gift is something that you give to someone with no expectations. If you are submitting to someone with no expectations, you are doing it very, very wrong.
A gift is something that you give to someone knowing that you will never get it back. A gift is something that you give to someone because you are following a social convention, or because they are someone you care about and gifts are one of their love languages, or because you, yourself, enjoy giving things to people.
Only the worst gifts come with strings attached, and while every gift given creates some sort of socially bonded obligation on the part of the recipient – it is always acceptable at some level for the recipient of a gift to do absolutely nothing with it, or even to re-gift it to someone else. If someone were to offer me their submission and I did nothing with it – I would be doing us both a massive disservice, and if someone were to submit to me, only to have me pass that bond onto someone else, that would be a serious violation of trust (unless this is something that you negotiated prior.)
To make matters even worse, the vast majority of the people that I see using this phrase seem to think that they are somehow maintaining some level of control by trying to use this metaphor, which is completely untrue. Everything gets wrapped up in these bullshit harlequin romance novel terms and ceases to have any real meaning anymore. These sorts of modes of thinking force us to treat submission like it is a binary condition – either you are submissive or Dominant and that’s that.
It is certainly possible for a particular power dynamic to be so black and white, but that has to be negotiated to be that way. It is also just as possible for a power dynamic to be more fluid, for areas of submission to be valid under only certain conditions, or only up to certain levels of comfort, respectful of hard and soft limits.
In fact, in my not-so-very-humble opinion, binary D/s is boring and uninspired. Even if someone wants to consider themselves my property, I am not going to treat them like a slave under most conditions of normal everyday life. Not only is it exhausting, but it’s not fun.
So, if my submission is not a gift, then what is it?
It’s a negotiation. How many times do I have to say that here? In the BDSM world, everything is a negotiation.
Let me say that just one more time.
In the BDSM world, everything is a negotiation.
There is power to be shared on both sides of a power exchange negotiation, and if you have not negotiated away a particular power of yours, it remains yours.
I seriously urge anyone who is entering into a D/s relationship to think long and hard about what they want to give up and what they expect to receive as part of that power dynamic and to not only have an earnest discussion about what those things all mean for you personally, but to even write them down and codify them in a contract. This will help to prevent misunderstandings and many of the not-so-fun aspects of D/s relationship dynamics can be avoided.
Lately writing has been hard… in fact, accomplishing much of anything at all has been a great deal more difficult lately than it would normally be thanks to the status of the world around us, and I know that I am not alone in feeling this way.
But I also know that I want to share more than I have been able to, so I’m going to do something a little different for me. I’m going to record an old post in audio and let you hear what I sound like.
Here is me reading my own piece, Kneel for me. I’ve reproduced the text below as well, so that you can follow along as I read if you like.
I hope you enjoy.
— Rant
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…
I started this blog with very little intention of continuing it for very long back in April of 2014.
At the end of every April, I get a yearly summary of my blog activity for the previous year.
It is always a little interesting to see how things change over time.
In my first few months, I got a couple of dozen hits a day if I was lucky, but I was cranking out original content. (All of the content on this blog is my original work, by the way…) I was posting at least once a week, and most of my content was either rants about my personal experiences and how I felt like things were better in the “good ol’ days,” (even though most of those days were strikingly less good for me in reality) or educational pieces attempting to fill the knowledge gap that interest without reasonably accessible educational materials was causing. However, the small bit of recognition that I received was enough to spur me on and do more with the blog and my community.
In the second year, things really started to sizzle. I was getting hundreds of hits per day most days and thousands of hits per day on the busiest days. I slowed down on content generation, but I was still getting a great deal of attention and I was getting emails from readers almost every day and responding to those took up a good deal of my free time and introduced me to some really interesting people from all over the world – several of whom remain my friends today.
In the third year, I slowed down on content creation even more, and the readership started to dwindle away. My most frequently read post was An Imaginary Conversation With a New submissive and I was still getting emails from readers almost every day with comments or questions, but readership was starting to diminish as I started producing less new content and started revealing more about me personally as opposed to fielding questions about BDSM or writing informative pieces based on common questions that I often hear.
Now, coming out of my fourth year, and with even more sporadic writing, my readership has dropped back down to first-year levels. I’m getting dozens of hits per day, up to a few hundred on the busiest of days, but nowhere near where I was at the height of things. Yet… I kind of like it that way.
I still get emails and comments asking me questions, and I still try to answer all of these within a day or two at most, but it’s a much more sustainable pace for a part-time single parent and full-time tech startup employee and I don’t have to feel like I’m letting people down by not answering them in an expedient manner. This has helped to reduce my stress level somewhat, especially since sometimes the questions that I get asked are intensely personal, time sensitive, and important.
‘An Imaginary Conversation…’ is no longer my most-read piece, being replaced by Finding subspace – which is, interestingly enough, one of the very first posts I wrote (as opposed to ‘An Imaginary Conversation…’ which was written almost at the height of my popularity.)
Most of my hits in the first year came from links from other people’s blogs – or from ‘likes’ on facebook (which continues to amuse me, since I’m not on facebook), or through some unclassified means of finding me, but now the majority of my hits come from google and bing.
And perhaps most amusingly – I think that most of the hits that I’m getting from google and bing for that particular page are not people who are coming here looking for information on BDSM themes, but math students looking for easy answers to their homework questions about linear algebra.
I have a degree in mathematics – and I can almost certainly answer your linear subspace questions as well – but I’ve only ever once actually been asked such a thing.
I suspect the person who did ask me this question was seriously confused, but I’m really much more amused by the imagined reactions that I suspect of people when they come to a site like this looking for answers to their math homework.
Today is May Day, and the start of Year Five.
I’m really curious what this year will bring… hopefully it will involve drastically fewer broken bones, but I suspect that it will still involve a broken heart – perhaps more often than once, as that seems to be the one thing that I am wholesale incapable of escaping.
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.
It’s a new year. I didn’t manage to post anything in January, and if I’m not quick, I’ll miss February too, so I guess I better post something.
It has been an interesting time, hasn’t it?
My personal politics are probably not a surprise to any of my readers, but this is not a political site, and I won’t harp on political issues here, but I am still a feminist and I still hold to my own core values, and when those are being threatened, I speak up.
I did not march in the women’s march in January, but I’d proudly wear a pussy hat any day.
The title of this post is “Everything is new again” and that is true.
We are in a new year, we have a new administration, I have a new job, and I’m about to begin re-engaging with the community in a way that I haven’t for years.
But in many ways, we’re taking a step back.
Scratch that, we’re taking several steps back.
People are people, and each and every one is different. You can’t put people into buckets – they don’t fit and they don’t like it.
I’ve seen the posts by people saying that they’re leaving the country, and while I can understand the sentiment, I think that is slightly cowardly… if you can afford to leave the country, you are not likely to be woefully impacted by the present administration – in fact, if you are someone who can afford to leave the country, you’ll probably benefit from staying right here.
I’ve seen the posts by people saying that they’re going to stand up and stay home and fight. That is what I plan to do.. but remember people, this is a marathon, not a sprint.
I’ve donated money to the Red Cross in the past, and while I still believe that they are a worthy charity to donate to, I think I am going to be a bit more focused with my money and time this year – and next year, and the next year, and the year after that.
And here’s to hoping that it won’t be (as) necessary after that.
I am a Dom. Sometimes I don’t act very Dom-like though, and for the past several months, I’ve been out of control and very rarely Dominant.
The essence of Dominance is Control – control of yourself, control of your environment, control of the scene, control of your submissive. That is the order and hierarchy that the world should adhere to from the perspective of the Dom in me. Rant’s rules, distilled to the control elements…
But lately, I have NOT been the one in control – the demons in my mind have been controlling me and therefore everything else in that chain – including my saint of a poor submissive girlfriend. The fact that she stayed with me through all of this is something for which I shall always be grateful and never fully understand.
But let’s back up a bit…
I live in the United States. California, to be exact, and the San Francisco Bay Area – which is more tolerant than other places in this country, but we still lag behind in a few areas and one of those is that there is still a stigma attached to mental disorder. People still seem to think that if you are diagnosed as bipolar or depressed or with general anxiety disorder that there is something fundamentally wrong with you and, perhaps more insidiously, that there is something dangerous about you.
To a certain extent these fears have a basis in reality… as I have personally come to learn in the past several months. But more importantly, these sorts of preconceived notions can affect how one perceives such things, even when one has personal experience.
I have battled depression, and recently, anxiety as well.
I knew the demons of depression, and that was part of the problem with this most recent bout of anxiety. Anxiety and depression look and feel very different, and yet they can cause a lot of the same sorts of symptoms and problems.
When I was controlled by depression, I wanted to kill myself. I was overwhelmed with the world and I just couldn’t see any way past the horrible realization that everyone I loved would be better off without me dragging them down. I was despondent and in pain and sometimes even just breathing seemed to be too much effort. I wanted out and I could see no other way.
Fortunately for me, I was strong enough to recognize that suicide is ultimately an extremely selfish act, and I chose not to be so selfish and got help. I pulled out of my depression and I thought that I was cured.
I’ve always been neurologically atypical, but it never even occurred to me that I was suffering from anxiety. I was stressed out and I couldn’t sleep and I was irritable and short to anger and couldn’t concentrate and had all of the other hallmarks of severe general anxiety disorder, but I was sure that I was “just a little stressed” or that once the current crisis abated that things would get back to normal in short order.
But that was masking the problem. The current crisis always gave way to the next. And that’s just how life is. Life is not easy, and if you let every issue balloon out to the point of crisis, you will be fire-fighting all of the time. There is no shortage of crises to be found anywhere nowadays.
I started fighting with my girlfriend – daily. We fought about everything and nothing at all. We spiraled into the same patterns, over and over again.
But never did it even occur to me that I was the problem.
Even that statement isn’t really fair – the problem wasn’t me, the problem was that I was unable to cope with the level of anxiety that I had in my life. Once again, I was overwhelmed, but this time instead of forcing that inward and causing myself to be depressed, I pushed it out into the world around me, and I lashed out at the people I loved. I shut out all emotions and I pushed everything and everyone away.
My girlfriend tried to get me to get help. And I even went along with it, but I didn’t try very hard. I saw a doctor and I told him what was going on in the broadest of terms and when he told me that I just needed to deal with it, I took that in stride and just figured that I was facing daily stress like we all do and that better time management or organization would help me.
But no amount of organization or time management can fix a broken mind.
As the anxiety got worse, my symptoms did as well.
I got delusional.
I stopped sleeping almost entirely.
I lost the ability to concentrate, even for minutes at a time. If not for the reputation that I have developed at work, I would have been fired several times over for being behind in my duties or just plain failing to get things done, and the more I failed to get done, or the more behind I would get, the more anxious I would become.
I felt like I was failing at everything.
I can recall many conversations with my therapist or my girlfriend where I said, “I’m failing at everything,” but it was never enough to clue me into the real problem.
My friends and even my family would tell me that I needed to get help, but I was sure that I knew better.
“I know what depression feels like, and this is not that.” – I would tell them. And I was right, but I was completely missing the point, it wasn’t depression that was sidelining me, it was something else entirely.
Of course, it took things getting really horrible before I actually took the steps that ameliorated the problem. My body started objecting in the most amazing ways…
My blood pressure went off the charts… I’d started dropping a lot of weight. I was sweating like crazy – so much that even the skin on my palms was beginning to peel… but even that was not enough. I didn’t go back to a psychiatrist until I had a panic attack.
I was driving on surface streets and had a panic attack and failed to move when the light changed. People in cars around me honked and leaned out their windows to yell at me and flip me off and I still couldn’t move.
Eventually I was able to begin breathing again and moved my car. I got home and resolved right away that I needed chemical help for my anxiety.
I found a new doctor (who is pretty amazing, actually) and started a new treatment program and now, three weeks in, I am in control of myself once again.
The difference is as stark as day and night.
Just a few weeks ago, I doubt very much that I could have managed even to sit still long enough to read a blog post of this length, much less actually write it.
The last time I was taking psychoactive pharmaceuticals, I was worried that I was going to be stuck on them for the rest of my life.
I wasn’t.
I may be on the new meds that I am taking now for years to come, but I don’t care one whit…. I am in control again, and it feels good.
Well, not really. First of all, she’s not a witch and secondly, her health is fine, but I’m leaving my horrible job and my horrible boss and moving on to a different startup that is founded and run by people that I know and respect. It’s a massively good thing and I feel like yelling something upbeat and, “Ding dong the witch is dead!” feels about right.
The past several months have been difficult for me. The only time that I have made for my blog is to answer the direct questions of readers who email me directly. I need to do better than that, and now that I feel like I have a little more mental and emotional capacity, I plan to do just that.
I’m skipping Nanowrimo this year, and because I’m starting a new job and there are other life changes in the works that require my attention, I’m probably not going to really make any major commitments to writing or anything else in the short term, but this is massively good news for me and everyone in my life.
I’m beginning yet another new chapter – and this one feels really good. New places, new expectations, and a chance to start again where I’ve not been ‘outed’ and can be seen for the merit of what I know and do instead of what I do in my private life.
The nature of Dominance is not always an obvious thing – even to me.
Preface: This is a post that I started and didn’t finish from about two months ago. The information is still valid, but the email that I reference is pretty old at this point. Caveat lector.
I recently received an email from a very intelligent reader who did not specify his gender, so I apologize if my use of male pronouns is inappropriate, but I’m going to continue to refer to this reader as ‘him’ for expediency’s sake.
He asks me, “Is this FinDomme for real? I’m really thinking about this and I don’t know how to stop myself. Is this for real? What should I do?”
I’m not really sure how to respond to such a request. I can’t claim that I didn’t know that financial Domination was a kink for some people, but I’m not sure that I can bring myself to endorse it.
I know that “your kink is not my kink but your kink is okay” is a huge part of the open philosophy that I love about the kink community so much, but this may be one case where I have to reserve my views.
I’m not sure that I think that financial Dominance – especially in the form being peddled by the young lady in the link that I won’t echo here – is okay. I don’t judge her. She is extremely honest about what she intends to do. She explicitly states that she wants someone – very clearly intended to be a wealthy older male figure – to give her total financial control of his life, and that once she has this, she intends to completely ruin him. There is a great deal of camouflaged language that follows which seems to indicate that this financial control would also entitle one to sexual favors, but even that is very clearly secondary to the stated and intended purpose of financial ruin and humiliation.
I have been involved at some level in the kink world for almost two decades and learned that there is quite literally a kink for everything and that there is always, always, someone who will subscribe enthusiastically to that kink, and yet, even after all of the things I have experienced or seen, I have a really hard time believing that there is someone out there who wants to be financially ruined like this person is advertising, and like one of my readers is considering.
My problem – and it may just be a personal problem for me – is that I can’t see how this is a good thing for the person being Dominated.
D/s relationships are, by their very nature, stilted. They’re not equitable. They’re not equal partnerships, and they’re not intended to be, but there is still some level of balance.
One can, and probably should, argue that every true TPE relationship is a financial Domination, and that might be true. but there is a huge difference between controlling something and destroying something.
My own personal philosophy, and I know I’m not alone in this, is that I always try to leave every interaction I have with people such that they are in some way better than they were when I first found them. I’m human, and I don’t always succeed in this. I’m sure some of my former friends and exes would probably start fuming if they were to read this, but I actually do try to do the best I can in this regard. I value friendship highly, and I try to always help and support my friends, but D/s takes this even further.
I regret to say that I cannot, with absolute certainty, claim that every submissive that has been under my thumb left our interactions in a better state than she began them, but I do know that I’ve done more good than harm, and I’ve tried to ameliorate any issues of which I am aware and able.
I do have remain friends with some of my exes and some of my former subs, so I know that I’ve managed to keep things positive at least most of the time.
So – with that in mind – I cannot see how this could possibly be a good thing for at least one of the participants in this arrangement.
If you go over things with a fine enough resolution, you can probably find something that is being satisfied by such a relationship, and if you have an itch that needs scratching, you could say that finding someone to scratch it for you is a good thing, but again, I have to think about the relative magnitudes of these things. While my reader may be getting some deep seated psychological need fulfilled – temporarily – by this sort of arrangement, the implied consequences are far from temporary.
Bankruptcy is a horrible thing.
Fortunately for me, I haven’t had to go through it, but I have been destitute at one time, and while I do not necessarily believe that it is required for us to have material possessions to be happy, I do believe that having our primary survival needs met is absolutely critical to our wellbeing, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. In the society that I live in, not having access to any money at all would be a severe impediment to at least two of these needs – food and shelter.
I can see how a relationship where the Dominant partner controls all aspects of the submissive partner’s finances would be appealing. In fact, I’ve been in such relationships myself, on both sides of that particular coin, and I don’t believe that the experience was damaging to any party involved, but this particular situation differs a bit. The FinDomme in question is not offering to take ownership of this person and care for him – as I have done and had done for me in the past – but instead is explicitly stating that she will financially ruin and embarrass this person, leaving them completely on their own with no resources and no recourse.
I cannot recommend such a thing.
D/s is a journey. I believe that more strongly now than ever. It is, however, a journey that one must undertake with much forethought and preparedness. It is not a thing to engage in lightly and there are no shortcuts.
Sure, you can do a short scene or incorporate elements of D/s into your kinky fuckery and leave off with a lot of the more profound considerations, but in so doing you are only scratching the surface of the possible. To get the profound D/s experience that it seems most of my readers are seeking, you have to commit yourself, body and mind, time and energy, and give it real attention.
I suspect that the reader who wrote me is trying to shortcut some of these things – by signing over his assets, he is creating an instant and binding relationship that goes far beyond the ordinary. Most vanilla marriages include at least some aspect of separate finances, or at least some kind of equitable scheme through which both partners are able to make purchases of necessary and everyday items. Under the sort of scheme this young lady is trying to proffer, her finsub would not even have the ability to purchase food or pay rent.
And then again, maybe there is just a kink element to it that I can’t understand…
I’ve been maintaining this blog for a year now. Sometimes it seems much longer, sometimes it seems less, but the reality is that it’s been a year since my first entry (even though I deleted my first entry..) and I’ve been able to manage at least a post or two a month since then. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but it’s been one of the ways that I’ve kept writing, and I think that writing is a very important part of who I have become.
In that first month, I had only a few page visits per day, most of which were probably me.
In the months that followed, my readership has gone up dramatically, which I’m not entirely certain how to process. I’m getting thousands of hits per week now, and hundreds per day at seemingly random intervals. One might think that it’s tied to when I post new entries, but that seems to not be the case all of the time. Yes, I get a bit of a spike each time I post something new – I guess I can thank rss feeds for that – but I get an even bigger spike whenever Autumn posts something new at servingmaster.com, which I still find amusing and heart-warming at the same time. And yet, my best day ever seems to not correspond with either of those events, it was just a random Thursday where my site got several hundred hits for no reason that I can think of, but I’m certainly not upset about it.
One of my friends suggested that I should start putting up ads, but I have no desire whatsoever to do that. I did not begin this as a money-making venture, and I have no need of the couple hundred dollars a month I could make from serving ads here.
Another friend suggested that I should write a book and promote it through the site. That is something that might someday do – I’ve got several unpublished and unfinished books on my hard drive that could use some attention, but even that seems an unlikely goal when I barely manage to write new entries for the blog itself.
However, all of this aside, one thing I can say about the past year is that I’ve enjoyed the experience and that I have no plans of stopping any time soon.
This is a wordpress site (which should be obvious) and wordpress gives me a bunch of interesting statistics about the site, my visitors, etc. It should come as no surprise to anyone that most of my page views in the past year have come from referer links on the servingmaster.com site. However, in the past few months, the number of people coming to my site from Autumn’s has been eclipsed by those coming from google and I seem to also get quite a lot of folks from yahoo.
Even more interesting is the fact that wordpress collates the search terms that lead people to my site.
Back when I first started this site, I did a series of posts that I called ‘unasked questions’ because they were topics related to BDSM that I felt strongly about and that I know many if not most newbies struggle with, but I hadn’t really achieved the sort of penetration that led to people actually asking me questions in email the way that they do now.
It seems that most of the search terms that people use to find my site are about these pages, and oddly, some of them are questions that I have not yet answered, so this year I’m making a pledge to do so.
The top search terms that led people to my site:
limmerent submissive
This is kind of interesting. This term has led people to my blog more than any other word or phrase for which people can search. It makes some sense… I mean, I put ‘One Dom’s views on life, love, and limerence’ as the ‘mission statement’ for my blog when I created it, and my third (or fourth, if you happened to be one of the three people that saw my very first entry before I deleted it) blog entry is, itself, a story of my own limerent behavior as a submissive, but look at the word there as I spelled it and then look at the search term.
The search term is a misspelling!
I’ve gone back through my own pages, and I don’t misspell it anywhere that I can see, but somehow, when someone is searching for the misspelled version as above, I must be near the top of the pages that come up – and yet, when I did the search myself, that is not what I found, so this may have to remain a bit of a mystery.
sub drop
This, again, makes sense. I mention subdrop many times in my entries, and there are quite a few other similar searches that also hit on the same idea: ‘subdrop definition,’ ‘can you have subdrop without a scene,’ ‘sub drop missing your dom,’ ‘when does subdrop happen,’ ‘how to tell your dom you have subdrop,’ ‘ways to avoid sub drop bdsm’ – just to quote a few…
I’ve experienced subdrop. I’ve witnessed it many times. I think I address many of these questions already, but just to reiterate: yes, you can have subdrop without a scene; yes, you can feel subdrop just because you miss your Dom; yes, there are steps that you can take in aftercare and communications to try to stave off subdrop, but no, you probably can’t always completely avoid it altogether if it is something that happens to you; and no, not every sub feels subdrop and there is nothing wrong with you if you don’t.
dom rant
This one is kind of self evident, I think. I’m kind of surprised that so many people are searching for me directly by name though. It’s flattering, and also a little bit creepy.
doms training submissive
Now this is also kind of interesting. I have never written an article about training a new submissive. I’ve been asked to a number of times. I’ve started such an article a number of times. I have several unfinished, unpublished entries that tackle this very topic, but I’ve never actually published one. There are several variants on this one too: ‘is part of a doms training a submissive to ignore them,’ can i punish my sub with her hard limits,’ and ‘training a submissive before a scene’ just to name a few.
I’m not an expert in how to train a submissive, but one of the reasons why I’ve had such difficulty in writing the article that would satisfy this question is that I think it really depends on the submissive – and in situations where I am giving someone else advice on the Dom as well. I think that each of these interactions is dependent directly on the people involved and the relationship that you want to have with each other.
If I am able to maintain cold objectivity, this is a much easier process for me, but if I become emotionally entangled, and even more so recently than in the past, the whole notion of submissive training becomes one giant clusterfuck for me.
Who then, am I to advise others on this topic?
I still intend to tackle it at some point, but I need to get my own ducks in a row on this concept before I can have any confidence in advising others.
However, there is one question up there that I absolutely want to tackle right here, and right now.
“Can I punish my sub with her hard limits?”
Absolutely not.
That, my friend, is what we call abuse, and I hope that you get the ostracization you deserve for trying such a thing, if not a full court press on the legal issues you expose yourself to with that.
Hard limits are hard limits for a reason. Respect them or you disrespect the person and yourself and the entire BDSM community.
subspace (or some variant thereof)
I added the ‘or some variant thereof’ bit myself in case that wasn’t apparent. There are probably more distinct questions about subspace than anything else, but because each question is unique, the results don’t as easily correlate in the wordpress search terms page, I think. Some examples: ‘signs of subspace,’ ‘how do I get to subspace,’ ‘subspace bdsm’, ‘subspace mistress,’ ‘can I get to subspace without pain,’ ‘subspace sex,’ ‘how to get someone into subspace,’ ‘finding subspace,’ ‘subspace definition,’ ‘can your dom put you into subspace with a word,’ ‘ways out of subspace,’ ‘‘subspace commander’.
Obviously, that last one there is my favorite.
I talk a bit about subspace, and what it is, and how one might find oneself there, but it’s only really been the focus of one entry, so it’s a bit interesting that it seems to lead people to me so frequently.
Clearly though, it’s a topic of interest to people, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s something that I should probably be spending more time focusing on in my own personal relationship, so I promise to give this topic some more thought and attention in the coming weeks and months.
Is there something that you are interested in reading about that I didn’t discuss here?
Write to me in the comments, or send me an email. I try very hard to make certain to answer every legitimate email that I get, though they can sometimes get lost in the spam filter, so if I don’t respond, please take that into consideration or use the Contact Me page – since most of those seem to get through.
Thank you for your attention over the past year, and I look forward to more to come.