16. Nostalgia

It’s Leather Pride Weekend in NYC right now, and damn, the nostalgia is just non-stop. My first Folsom Street East I had just started going out to public events beyond the boundaries of the tight-knit group of friends I was accustomed to. I remember I wore a green dress and a short leather vest, and I felt about seven feet tall. I watched the drag shows with a glee bordering on fascination, and had my boots shined, those pretty leather boots that were lost a few months later, somewhere in an apartment in Brooklyn.

I miss New York. Tonight I tied May’s hands above his head and ran my finger up and down his body, and then up and down his cock. I did it over and over, for almost two hours, and I watched him twist and pull his arms to his face to bite at the tender skin. As I did, I pressed into him. I swung my leg up along his shoulder and put my foot in his palm, and he wove his fingers in and out of my toes as he gasped. And I thought how glad I am to have him with me.

12. Later

Late that same night I held May’s wrists down and wrapped my legs around his waist. I hovered over his face and watched him. He rippled his body in an S-shape between my thighs.

“When are you going to fuck me?” he said in a tiny, tiny voice.

Now, I thought. I didn’t say it out loud. Instead I hooked a finger behind the steel ring around his neck and dragged him to his feet and through the bedroom door. I stripped his clothes off and left them in a trail of little satin puddles. I pulled tan leather straps and silicone from our new teak toy chest. When I bought the chest it came with a little card, detailing the history of the ships the teak was salvaged from.

I pressed him into the bed with one hand on the dip of his spine. He arched his back in the air with his ass pointing straight up, and I laughed and had to push him back down to get him in a position I could actually penetrate from.

He made the most amazing noises. He started by moaning vowels out low in his throat, like music. When I thrust faster he gave low boar-grunts that ended in little mouse-squeaks, and when I finally stopped and lay across his back he sighed so deep I could feel it curl his toes.

11. Precious

Saturday night I pulled May up from the beige carpeted floor of our living room and onto our rough blue couch. He was wearing thin satin panties. A garter, a slippery nightgown. Pretty things. Pretty boy.

I held my lips over the skin of his throat and growled, feeling my lips peel back from my teeth. I climbed on top of him and ran my fingers through the air around his skin. He writhed upward, trying to make contact somewhere. Anywhere. I hid my laughter in his curls. He moaned. The bright pink tip of his cock slipped out the waist of the satin, and waved back and forth in the air.

After a little while I caught him up in a little ball, his legs folded close to his chest and my arms around his entire body. He tucked his chin down to his collar bone and looked up at me. Red eyelashes. He has red eyelashes. His mouth was trembling open, his eyes enormous.

“I love that look,” I murmured to him, just to watch him being sweet and coy. He flutters those eyelashes sometimes, when he’s pretty, when I compliment him. It goes right through my chest like a dart when he does that. I pressed my lips to his cheekbone, right at the corner of his eye. I smiled in his ear.

“You are so beautiful, precious, precious boy.”

8. Hellfire at Maxxx Black

Hmm. Missed a day. Beer and spanking will do that to a person.

A few Mondays ago I was invited to an evening at a prominent sex-toy retail store in Newtown, Sydney’s newest young queer neighborhood. While there I heard one of the organizers of Hellfire speak. To give context, Hellfire appears to be the most visible fetish party in Sydney; everyone I meet asks me if I’ve been yet, and what I think. I usually respond that I haven’t been, because I can’t afford the door fee right now (I’m trying to stick to a $20/day budget) and were I to go it would probably have to be without my partner, because Hellfire sounds like a dance club and Maymay is not a dancer. Also, Hellfire has a dress code, and while some nights I can roll up in black without a second thought, dress codes are simply not our style.

With this in mind, after she finished speaking I raised my hand to ask a question. “You said that you have a dress code to encourage people to dress sexily, and therefore feel freer in a sexual environment. My question is,” and here I tapped my fingers on my kneecap, “what if the kind of dress I think is sexy is not the kind of dress that will pass through your dress code?”

A year ago I would have felt a little guilty for hitting her with that in such a confrontational tone. Now I’m far more invested in the answer. She talked around the question a little, and then graciously suggested that if I have a particular fetish I want to indulge, that I should email her before the next event and she would arrange something at the door. I thanked her, and I may do that. But I have my doubts; I still don’t think they’d let me in.

4. A Picture Worth 200 Words?

A sketch I gave to May as a present.

A few weeks ago I curled up in my new leather armchair with a pad of paper, thinking I would work on some illustrations for a project I have on my plate at the moment. Instead, I ended up with this ink sketch. I gave it to May as a present. It is stuck to our wall with Blue-Tack, and I use it to weight my arguments when telling May that he’s pretty. The original is larger, uncropped, and uncolored: I punched in a bit of quick-and-dirty flat color (my old silkscreen style) before posting it here. While admittedly my Photoshop skills are weak, this is a good approximation of our actual skin and hair tones at the moment.

Friday Night And Sweet White Wine

I wouldn’t usually allow myself the indulgence of posting in this blog while completely knackered on wine and Friday night promises. But I am just drunk enough  that I’ll let it slide. Just this once.

Here’s what I wanted to say, the thing I probably wouldn’t say without that sweet white wine:

I also have an oral fixation.

May is siting across from me right now in a leather armchair, with his leg stretched out along the beige carpet, and when I look at him I think, “Fuck dominance, fuck dignity, all I want to do is lick my way up the skin of his legs, his hips, his stomach and neck, and sate myself in the texture of his hair. All I want to do is lay him down on our bed and let my mouth go roaming.” My mouth tingles with the thought, his soft, butter-smooth skin catching on my lips, opening to me, offering to me.

His skin is like vanilla ice cream. I look at him and want to eat him up with relish, like a delicacy. Earlier he brought me my wine in a tall water glass, and I pulled him up against the rough fabric of the couch, scraped my teeth over the fleshy head of his cock and tried like hell to ignore how much I wanted to just bite down.

There is a weird fucked up paradox that places want and need in submissive spaces. The part of me that is a drunken, dominant, desperate connoisseur is here to tell you: that is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I want May so badly it hurts to look at him. My mouth aches for him. My fingers tingle when I think of touching his velvety, amazing skin. 

I want him. Fuck all the shit that says I shouldn’t want, that says I have distance and control. I have no distance. I barely have control. My lips pulse at him, the urgent need to just push him to the floor and devour, to pick him up and curl him in my arms and eat him whole.

Protected: Postmodern Part 2

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Postmodern? Part 1

This weekend May and I went to a play party. It took us three weeks in the country to find a place to play. It does, of course, help to know people.

The party invitation called for “Fetish formal.” Facing our new built-in closet, May wrinkled his nose in frustration. “I hate dress codes,” he repeated, pulling on a transluscent grey tank top that matched his pants. He posed in front of the full length mirror. “Is this okay? It’s not even black.”

“You look great, love,” I said. I enjoyed the way the shirt framed his shoulder muscles.

A party with a fetish formal dress code makes both of us wary. I wondered if there would be play, at what level, if we’d be interested, interesting. What was the age group, what was the space like, what was the ratio? Should we bring our whips, the rope, the knives?

When we met Ms160 and Sol on the corner, we had no large toys with us. I’d stuck my villainelles, tiny hand-made steel points that Switch and Boy so beautifully created, in my purse. We piled into the backseat of their car and drove the few minutes to the party through dark, small streets. We all laughed at Sol’s brilliant parking job in front of a high wooden fence.

Ms 160 led us to a row of nondescript doors. “Damn, I don’t remember which it is.” We stood awkwardly between two buildings, debating the decency or indecency of knocking on some stranger’s door at 10pm in full fetish gear.

Across the street some guys and girls were hanging off a porch, drinking from green bottles. I peered up the stairs behind a screen door that was propped open. A girl, one of their friends I thought, with more green bottles, saw me peeking in. “You’re the next one over,” she smiled, coming down the stairs. “You can knock. They’ve got a doorman.”

“The outfits gave it away, right?” I thanked her.

The doorman, in a tuxedo, ushered us up the stairs into a beautifully done up apartment, decked with candles, pottery, plants, dramatic lighting. I felt distinctly as though I should avoid moving quickly for fear of breaking the place, or burning it down. We dropped our coats, retrieved drinks from the elegantly laid table, and circulated through the building. Ms 160 introduced me and May right and left. Characteristically, names dropped from my head as fast as they entered. I complimented our hostess on her veil, made cleverly of metal wire and rhinestones and glittering like a Mardi Gras mask.

Eventually May, Ms160, Sol and I found ourselves in the dungeon, testing out the frames of the equipment and picking up toys from the rack to slap them against our arms. “They run this as a B&B,” Ms160 said, “So you can rent the whole thing out for a night, close it off and have your own private dungeon.” She pointed out the TV stand with a built in cage. There was another cage under the bed. The floors were hard tile, which I regretted, thinking of the possibility of flinging May against the ground.

At one point my boy ran up to me excitedly. “They have tie points in the shower!

At another, I chatted in the hallway with a young blonde woman, laughing and enjoying a respite from feeling socially awkward. “I’m assigned to the door,” she said, “so I just try and snag people as they go by and get them to entertain me!” May joined us a moment later.

“This place is really nice,” he said, gesturing toward the dungeon. “It’s very schmantz” -our private word for fancy- “and postmodern.”

“You just called the dungeon postmodern,” I glanced at him.

He wriggled a little. “Yes, so?”

I raised an eyebrow. “You just called the dungeon postmodern.” Our new blonde friend dissolved in laugher.

After a little while we grew to miss our singletails. The boys were sent into the night to fetch them. Ms 160 and I climbed the stairs to the upstairs living room, settled on a couch and watched as a woman in a zippered black latex dress was tied to a beautiful wooden x-cross lacquered in red and hung with silk. In the meantime, Ms160 told me the amusing story of the male dom who had started a fashion trend of wearing leather chaps, thus confusing all of the dominant women at the party, who suddenly found themselves surrounded by dominant men with their bums hanging out.

A lovely boy in just such chaps passed by us occasionally, offering tidbits of food on a tray and occasionally stopping to say hello. Watching him leave, I decided I might very well be warming to the aesthetics of ass-less trousers.

Eventually our boys came back. The whips came with them.

Heads up, the second half of this story will be passworded.

Broadcasting Live From Sydney

One thing I’ve never quite mastered is the art of making an entrance. I’m a bit too conscious and a bit too critical; the poise of such drama escapes me.

It’s been surprisingly difficult to find the time, the energy, and the inspiration for a big, juicy comeback entry for you all to chew on. Suck on? Is that too dirty?

First, there’s the culture shock I keep holding my breath for, the shock I never got when I moved to New York City, but which I kept expecting for months after I’d moved in. I keep thinking this time I’ll get it, this time I’ll be shaken by the differences.

Though my friends are resembling little aching gaps in my life which hurt dreadfully at times, thus far, culture shocked I am not.

Then there’s the nitty gritty, the thousand-and-one administrative items of moving to a new country. Every day I cross a few off, and every day more come piling on. Bank accounts, cell phones, Internet access, furniture. Where can I get a good cheeseburger at 4am? Does this city even understand the concept of mozzarella sticks?

Then, there’s the psychic weight of everything I’ve missed here online. Would you like to know how loquacious you are, my sexy friends? In the three weeks that I have been primarily offline, you have managed to push 984 new items through my RSS feeds. 984. For bonus points, I’d like to dare you to guess how many of those items belong to Richard.

The concept of catch-up is at this point laughable.

And finally, there’s all that tricky expectation. There’s the nagging thought in the back of my mind that I should manage a piece both delicious and spectacular, that in the months since I’ve seriously written here I should have garnered something that would make for a good re-entrance. I do have plans, to write about Sydney’s Mardi Gras and queer spaces and the visual representations of gender and power (again.) Also about the last play party in New York, the flesh and the screams and the sock monkey pajamas.

I am dreadfully out of practice. My narrative voice has gone all rusty and tangled, leading me down rapid tangents and far too eager to abandon me.

May and I spent the first week and a half here stressed out of our minds. We barely ate. We couldn’t stop fighting. We were staying in a tiny hostel room with bunk beds, going slowly mad from the nightly separation of skin and flesh. Now we’re in another hostel, another tiny room with bugs on the floor and our things in haphazard piles, but with a double bed that is devious and enchanting. I am having trouble waking up in the mornings, some sort of weird jet-lagged throwback.

I get caught up in the nasal reverberation of Australian voices. The coffee is better, the food is too expensive, the wind is warmer, the ocean is closer. The wireless options are pathetic. The grass is amazing.

Sydney is, as I remembered it, a fabulous city. But it’s also a real city, a home. That means it has quirks, disappointments, secrets, tricks that I have yet to master. There is a part of me that thought this move would be easy. Simple. The physical logistics of the adventure have been slow and frustrating, but they’re manageable. They’re working.

That part of me focused on the physical logistics with such ferocity that the all thoughts of emotional health were smudged out. Truth be told, I am a little lost. Perhaps more than a little. Perhaps my life has been through one too many massive upheavals in the past three months.

But lost or found, shocked or not, consider this my self-conscious, rambling, entirely pointless and decidedly undramatic re-entrance. I am online again.

The Thing About Tiggers

The events of the past six weeks (damn, six weeks already) have put me off the Internet. I have commented scarcely, posted rarely, abandoned my Scrabble games in lonely binary heaps. Curiously, in this age there is actually such a thing as an electronic hermit.

But, all things pass.

I’ve recently started reading Axe’s blog, ever since I got a few chances to chat with him in person. Axe is a sweet, smart submissive guy here in New York, who writes primarily about his search for a relationship with a dominant woman. I get the impression that his search has morphed into something of an epic quest at this point, spanning several years and causing him to move from the midwest to New York City.

As is often the case for those of us with experientially based learning styles, for me recognizing a thing is not the same as knowing a thing. As such, I often come to long foregone conclusions in my own way, and in my own time. Getting to know Axe has really driven some issues home for me, issues that Maymay and others have been writing about for ages.

Where the hell are all the dominant women? Where are the women like me?

The supposed scarcity of dominant women is bemoaned, condemned, dismissed and mistrusted. And yet, my experiential evidence within the New York scene confirms this scarcity.

And, a less-recognized issue but one that I find personally just as relevant: Where are the other couples in relationships like mine?

I think I’ve remained so persistently blind to this imbalance because addressing this issue demands that I acknowledge exactly how rare I am. I have no real sense of personal rarity in my life; it consistently surprises me that other people are not like me.

Obviously there are multiple issues at work here, which play against one another. The scarcity of dominant women in the scene says many (predominantly negative) things about how scene space welcomes women, and how the dominant sexual orientation is portrayed and understood. The scarcity of femdom/malesub couples speaks to the scarcity of desirable, sane, smart male submissives, which in turn illuminates how the scene marginalizes that brand of sexuality.

Honestly, folks, there’s too much at work here for a single entry, or even a single blog. Here’s my suggestion: for more insight on how scene space “welcomes” dominant women, I refer you to the brilliant, bitter Bitchy Jones. For more insight on how submissive men are marginalized, see Maymay’s entire blog.

Just right now, just here, I want to talk about what the scarcity of dominant women means to me, as a dominant woman in the public scene.

Axe writes not once but twice that Maymay and I are the only femdom/malesub couple he knows. This confirms my experience; we are the only femdom/malesub couple I know as well. The rare dominant women I do know in passing are usually dating dominant men.

I intend to keep my data on a meatspace level during this entry. Yes, I know other dominant women online who are like me. We make similar choices about our identities and maintain similar relationships. And I have online friendships. But, for me, they’re not the same.

The part of my brain that thinks the world should make sense finds it strange that Axe has not met an appropriate dominant woman. He’s a polite, sane, well spoken submissive man: an attractive rarity. He’s good looking, has great kinks, and a charismatic ‘nilla personality.

But it is ranging on impossible for him to find a partner.

I’ve had three long-term relationships with submissive men, at the age of 24. I’m picky as hell, but I can find partners. On the other side of the coin, I’m the first dominant woman Maymay has dated. Before me, he dated three submissive women.

Believe me, I understand how much the imbalance created by the scarcity of dominant women works in my favor. I see how unfair it is to him when Maymay and I compare our numbers of potential play partners.

I understand how desirable my age, gender and orientation are.

There’s a part of me that deeply distrusts this desirability. After all, it’s not particularly reassuring to know that one is the best choice because one is the only choice.

I suspect we all feel, at times, as though we are unseen. Being a young, sexy, dominant woman gives me privileges in the scene that I don’t earn. I show up, and people give them to me. At the same time, being desired (or respected, in a culture that consistently confuses sexual attraction with respect) because of a particular flux of timing, genetics, and orientation makes me feel like a cardboard cut out.

Of course, from many perspectives I have nothing to complain about. Inherited privilege trumps any kind of card I might play about feeling insecure, or unseen, or unwanted. In a world where rights are gained through suffering, yet again, I have no right.

I wrote after I came back from Floating World that I was wrestling with the difficulties of supporting a fluid culture from a standpoint of relative stasis. This was true then of gender, and it’s true now of power.

I firmly believe that power balances shift, that people are capable of embracing multiple roles and defining themselves as they choose, in as many ways as they choose. In short, I believe in the existence of switches.

Right now, however, I am not a switch. And perhaps because I love fluid people, the overwhelming majority of my friends are switches. Most of remainder of my friends are men who top and women who bottom. Within my circle of friends here in New York, there is not a single dominant woman besides me who does not switch. I know dominant woman as acquaintances, and almost never in couples.

The simple truth of the matter is, I have no friends like me.

Where are the other dominant women? Women my age? Yes, in friendship and the exchange of ideas on related experiences, age does matter.

Women who don’t switch, and are doing their best to incorporate that choice into their lives? In an avidly fluid, changeable culture, and possessing a chameleon-like personality, that choice is sometimes very hard for me to manage.

Women who’re smart, and wise, and local? Where are you? Could we have coffee sometime?