We pay attention, and we talk a lot. We identify issues and do the work we think is best to solve them. And really, I think that’s it.

There is an idea that having a healthy relationship depends, in some way, upon finding the “right person,” but I’m not sure that’s true. I have had many healthy relationships in the past, and have many at the moment. I have even had relationships end in healthy ways. In every case, they were the right person for me at that time, for whatever it was we were doing.

And then, every relationship I’ve ever been in that was hurtful or unhealthy had issues stemming from problems in communication. Perhaps that’s why I’m so obsessed. And, perhaps that’s why I’m so neurotic, and why the self-awareness tag in this blog keeps growing.

And as for whether Maymay is the “right” person for me, right now, he is. And he continues to be, in a way I’ve never seen before. We are suited to each other in the long term, which is why we’re pushing four years together and we’re still talking, every single day.

One of our recent challenges has been working from home together. The biggest hurdle at the moment is that our sleep schedules are absolutely fucked. It has been rare for me in the past few weeks to hit my pillow before 4am. Maymay does the same. That means we miss a lot of mornings. 

I sleep less than he does. And I wake up more quickly. Truth be told, had my lifestyle not unfolded in such a way that being a night owl is intrinsic to my interests and company, I would be a morning person. I like mornings. I wake up quickly. I write better in the morning. (But I write sexier in the night. Go figure.)

It’s hard for me to work and spend the day with May at the same time. And I have been feeling on the antsy side. There are many reasons we might spend time together or apart. But with living together, working together, being attached to each other, it gets a little much. 

We have been scheduling time apart from one another our entire relationship. That that works well. It means that we’re assured of our own spaces. We have been doing that, of late. It works well. It keeps me balanced. It makes me hungry for him when I come back home.

He is still asleep as I write this. I am going to the beach today. (Even though it looks like it might rain.) I am tempted not to wake him up before I go; he looks so lovely in his sleep. The thing is, it’s good to go my own way for a while. But in truth, I miss him. I miss him even when he’s right next to me. I miss his skin on mine.

“I masturbated to you too,” I said. “After that first party when we played together, and I was so envious of the boy you were playing with. I went home and thought about you.” He became small and gleeful when I said this.

Then, he said something that surprised me.

“It is safe to assume that every man who asks to play with you either has masturbated to you in the past, or will maturbate to you in the future, regardless of whether or not you play with him.”

And when I turned to him and raised my eyebrows, he added, “It’s not just you, by the way.”

I thought that was strange for about three seconds, and then I began to run my masturbatory fantasies over in my head.

“Oh yea,” I said. “I do that too.”

But I do have quite a thing for have my feet touched, massaged, or kissed. They’re a sensitive part of my body, and when May kisses the tops of my toes it gives me shivers that makes my hips roll and my neck tingle. 

And it is a lovely image to see my boy crouch and fold his body on the tail end of our bed, or kneel in a ball on the floor. There is power there, in the way that action frames us. I usually don’t last long, though, pulling him up and away so I can get my hands on his skin. He kisses my feet, it turns me on, I am ridiculously impatient and I always steal him away and upward. I have never mastered the odd art of sitting regally while my toes are touched, that image that floats around in our kinky minds of a reclining queen who barely registers the man at her feet.

One of our first contributors sent us a range of very eclectic, very sexy photos, many of which were immediately re-blogged. Among them, ze sent a photograph of a bound, erect penis: essentially, a cock shot. Exactly as ze described it in hir email, the bondage is beautifully done. The man’s penis strains, his stomach muscles are tensed, his skin flushed with trapped blood. It is, undoubtedly, a beautiful cock in bondage.

When May and I sat down and opened the email to look through the images, the cock caught our attention.

“Should we post that?” I asked.

May shrugged. “My instinct is yes.”

“Hmm,” I said. “My instinct is no.”

We have yet to resolve this between the two of us, so I thought I’d throw it open to a bit of discussion here, and find out what you, the audience of the blog, think.

Can a cock shot be submissive?

I can explain, to some degree, why my initial instinct was to say no. The reasoning is threefold.

Firstly, because I do have a personal wariness around cocks that should be acknowledged. I am not a big fan of the penis, in general. I find the entire contraption a little off-putting, and wont to spit acrid goo at me. And where erotica is concerned, they’re just not to my taste. I have thousands of images in my porn collection, and not a cock shot to be found.

Secondly, because I do see a tricky distinction here between masochism and submission. I have often identified scenes that focused intensely upon the weapons and gear of kink as sadomasochistic, but not as D/s. This is another instance of the nuances between top/bottom and dom/sub, many of which are fluidly defined from person to person. A person in pain is not submissive. A person in bondage is not necessarily submissive either. But how to convey that distinction, merely a matter of attitude, in a photo?

Following from that point, the third: I’ve realized that I make a connection between character and submission. That is, for me to feel that a photo portrays an instance of beautiful submission, it must first convey a person who will enact that submission. An amputated body part is not, to me, enough.

In my gut, this is a matter of emotional connection. I have no emotional connection to this particular body part. As such, while I find the photo evocative and masochistic, nothing about it says submission to me. The cock has no eyes to cry with, no lip to quiver, no knees to kneel upon, no body to hunch, to protect, to evoke my dominant instincts. I do not care about it, beautifully bound though it is.

But perhaps this is an unfair bias I’m inflicting upon the Male Submission Art audience, to shy away from cock shots and their ilk. In all honesty, I don’t know. I know my personal tastes run deep, and are often counter-culture. We don’t have enough suggestions yet to get a truly fair sampling of what people are interested in.

So tell me. Can a cock shot be submissive? What do you think?

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In many ways, laying my cards on the table is necessary for me. It’s one way I manage my decisions about other people, and I need the little bit of protection bluntness provides in my relationships. It’s my way of saying, “If you’re going to hurt me, I want to know in advance. In fact, right-the-fuck now, if you please.” But of course I don’t say that specifically. I say other things instead. It’s very late. I’m not sure this post is making sense.

That protection is important because, you see, when I think something’s right I go for it. I almost always make decisions fast, reassess, and think my way back to my first conclusion. When my instinct and my reasoning says that the relationship is good, I am a no-holds-barred, hell-or-high-water, second-date-with-a-Uhaul person. I mentioned in my previous entry that I moved in with May three weeks after we started dating, which was five weeks after we met. To most people, that’s insane. Insanity didn’t occur to me at the time; I just moved in, and three years later, here we are.

And it worked because we knew where we stood, even when where we stood was shaky ground. So in some ways, being as rude, straight-forward, blunt, direct as I am is not just a personality quirk. It’s how I keep my decisions conscious, and how I make connections, and how I learn, and demonstrate, trust.

I used to not really like them. I mean, I didn’t really mind the appendage, as a general rule, but neither am I one of those women intimately caught up in the mysteries of peni. Trying to work my way around being a sex-positive woman with little interest in penetration meant that I did spend a fair share of my time dodging their involvement in my sex life. And gentlemen, love you though I do, I happen to find most of you far more attractive in jeans than naked. What can I say? I’m a costumer. I like strategic clothing.

But May’s penis is swaying my opinion, and has been for some time. For one thing, it smells good. I have met some confronting smells, and some neutral ones, genitals that simply did not smell at all. I happen to think women smell nicer than men. So to find out this late in the game that the penis can smell genuinely good? That is unexpected, and gleeful.

I’m not a dirty girl. I know, I know. But I’m not. I’d rather be clean, I’d rather smell nice. I’d rather not roll around in pools of my own sweat and bodily fluid, although I will, in the heat of certain moments. And thus the real crux of my wariness. Eventually penises, big, small, rosy, smelly, clean, dirty, shaved, unshaved, eventually in our encounter they will spurt bodily fluid at me. That can be a literally amazing moment. It can be splendid, it can be tumultuous ecstatic free-fall.

But once the aftershocks wear off, I can’t help but think that semen just…smells awful. I hustle May to the shower, I laugh as he wipes the goo from his own eyes. And once he’s clean again, I let his back next to my skin.