Love, beatings, bondage

I just stepped out of my post kink convention shower. My breasts are speckled with crimson marks, like a rorschach or Jakcson Pollack painting. I can feel the sting of cane welts on my backside. I wiped the condensation off the mirror, and stared at my own tired face. I am present. I am at peace.

I’m home after a long weekend at Kinky Kollege. I’m an exhausted and happy camper. I expected this past weekend to be fun. I did not expect it to be cathartic. Even though I didn’t set foot in a single spirituality workshop or class, I found my own spiritual cleansing of sorts.

Looking back, I can’t say that I’m completely surprised. I’m a very touch oriented person, and for the last few months, touch and connection have been less than easy to come by. Last week was my first scene after my injury (which happened in July). I did the scene for the sensation, not the connection.

This weekend, however, I felt like I got to connect with all sorts of wonderful human types. I got to get hurt by some awesome people. I even got a chance to hurt some pretty people. There were friends, old and new, there were snuggles from pretty girls.

The first mental image of the weekend that comes to mind: I’m hanging in a suspension on Saturday night. The leg loops are digging in to some existing welts on my inner thighs, and I release. I can feel heat emanating from my palms and solar plexus. I can just hang and be. There was that stride I thought I’d lost after spending months recuperating and navigating a brand new city. The validation alone was almost intoxicating.

It was amusing to see people react as I hobbled around the event in my walking boot and crutch. So many people felt sorry for me and how much it must suck to be injured for an event. What most people didn’t realize was a) I was more mobile than I’d been in months, and b) there was no feeling of sadness or suckitude. On my end, I experienced only joy. I must have walked around the entire event smiling from ear to ear, and glowing from head to toe.

Now that I’m home, and ready to reenter my daily grind, I feel grateful. Grateful for so many amazing friends I have in my life, for the people who let me hurt them, for my own ability to find internal balance and peace in a low lit, crowded dungeon.

Ok. Now I think I’m starting to ramble. Enough incoherent frubbles from this sleepy Sascha.

Namaste.

PSA for Fetlife Schmucks

Just like everyone and their kinky, whip toting grandma, I have profiles on Fetlife and OkCupid. Like many women with profiles on such sites, I find that there’s an unfortunately high dumbass to interesting ratio in the cold (from perfect strangers) messages that I receive.

Case in point. Someone messaged me on OkCupid a while back, writing:

you’re adorable actually for being 27…thought you were underage at first. Looking very innocent/shy though…I think im going to be too outgoing, sarcastic, and just plain naughty for such a fragile girl like you to handle, dont you think?

What the hell am I supposed to make of a message like that? I deleted it, and went on with my life.

Today, the same someone (I assume) sent me the exact same message on Fetlife, only this time with the subject line “daddies home .”

It took a while for my inner grammar nazi to get over his misspelling of “Daddy’s” and his seeming allergy to capital letters and punctuation.

In his profile, he listed “just in the bedroom” under activity, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. There are a lot of unwritten rules in BDSM cultures, and he may not know about scene etiquette. Maybe he’s new or just doesn’t know how to engage women in the scene or… at all.

I thought back to all of the emails that I, as well as many of my friends, have received over the years from internet dipshits who expected me to fall at their feet because I’m female or submissive or young or who knows what. If someone gently pointed out his errors, maybe it would be a public service. So I sat down and started writing an email about what NOT to do when making first contact with someone (well, someone like me at least) on Fetlife.

An hour later, the email had morphed into a diatribe. I realized this half way through writing it, but I sent it anyway. For one shining moment, I joined the ranks of didactic Fetlife assholes everywhere. For what it’s worth, I tried to keep the tone as helpful and non-confrontational as I could.

Here’s what I wrote:

* * *

From what little you wrote in your profile, you seem like a decent enough guy. Unfortunately, from the point of view of a mostly submissive woman, your message raises all sorts of warning flags.

I honestly don’t think that’s what you were going for, so I’d like to explain why you came across the way you did. This way, you will know how you can present yourself so that women will want to play/sleep with you, the community will have a slightly lower creep factor, and everybody wins.

I’m sorry this message is so long. Bear with me. You might want to thank me later, or you might think I’m a heinous bitch. Who knows?

1. When breaking the ice with a potential play partner, don’t go with the “I may be too big and bad for you, little girl” approach. The smileys tell me you’re joking, but I don’t what you’re playing at.

How am I supposed to respond? Do you want me to show you what a shy and fragile thing I am? Do you want me to step up and challenge you? Are you looking for me to brat?

If we’d met in person and I knew your intentions and voice patterns, that would be a different story. This is why it’s a bad idea to make assumptions about me and my play style based on my age and picture.

Better to engage me as a person first, and then find out if you can engage me as a toy. Otherwise, I’m going to write you off.

2. Introducing yourself as Daddy is a REALLY BAD idea. I get that you were trying to be funny, but even with the smiley, it’s just bad form.

Titles represent power exchange. Once you use them, you’ve already started to play. So if you take on the role of Daddy without asking for my consent, you might be trampling on my boundaries.

Why would I want to play with someone like that?*

3. This is a personal pet peeve. Using proper spelling, punctuation, and capitalization is in your better interest. This goes double when messaging people like me, who state IN THEIR PROFILE that they’re hot for articulate people. Otherwise, it’s likely that your email will be seen as an annoyance and deleted.

4. Read someone’s profile before deciding to message them. And reference her profile (not just age and picture) in your message. It’ll look like you care.

If you actually read through all this (can’t say I blame you if you didn’t), I hope you found it useful.

Best,
Sascha

* * *

UPDATE:
I just got a response.
ll pass on reading that essay…thanks though for the effort.

Oh well. You can lead a horse to water, I guess.

*This part was redacted. A lot.

Forgiveness

This post has nothing to do with kink. Unless Judaism and pontification happen to be your kinks. Just FYI.

It’s Yom Kippur today, the Jewish day of atonement. I just came back from morning services and my stomach is already growling.

I don’t know what my beliefs are in God. I certainly don’t believe that whatever higher power that exists is tallying all of my good and bad deeds and writing them down in a ledger. Surely such a higher power would have better things to do with its time.

Yet, Yom Kippur is an important holiday for me. It’s a time I use for self reflection, where I hold myself up to my own mirrors. Now, some biblical scholars will say that there is God in all of us, so I guess I am subjecting myself to God’s judgement in some way.

In services today, there was a portion of the text that really struck me. I read it just about every year, but this was the year it held meaning for me.

I hereby forgive all who have hurt me, all who have wronged me, whether deliberately or inadvertently, whether by word or by deed. May no one be punished on my account.

As I forgive and pardon those who have wronged me, may those whom I have harmed forgive or pardon me, whether I acted deliberately or inadvertently, whether by word or by deed.

As I read this text along with the congregation, I had to ask myself am I ready to forgive? How do I forgive? What does forgiveness look like?

This year has been a very rough year for me both physically and emotionally. Being injured for the better part of the summer and on crutches for two and a half months has exacerbated much. It’s given me all sorts of extra time to sit and contemplate the rest of the things swirling in and out of my universe.

There were people in my life who acted in ways that left me feeling emotionally bruised. Granted, during this same time, countless blessings have entered into my life. And mane of my ordeals this spring and summer. have helped me to find a new career path in a brand new city. But recently I realized that I was not at piece with what had happened.

I have no desire to contact this person. I can justify this by saying that the conversation would just rehash old wounds and only succeed in causing the both of us more pain. The truth is I’m not ready to let this person back in because as much as I’ve moved on and grown, part of me is still holding on to that emotional pain.

So how do I say that benediction with sincerity? I bear no ill will towards this person, nor do I think that this is a bad or ill intentioned person. However, thinking such things about a person is not the same as forgiving that person. What does it say about me that I’m still hanging on to that pain, as if getting rid of it would somehow negate the validity of my past emotions?

I wish I had an easy answer to these questions. I have little doubt that this day of contemplation and atonement will end in more questions then answers. On the plus side, it will also end with good friends and pizza, but that’s another conversation entirely.

What I think I’m learning today is that true forgiveness takes a lot of courage. For the sake of my own mirrors, I want to find the strength in myself to be able to make peace with that hurt and anger and truly let it go.
Maybe I just need time. Maybe I just need pizza. Regardless of what I may need, forgiveness is the center of my meditations today; forgiveness of myself as much as the forgiveness of others.

Sex Toys and Cast Itch

About a month ago, I slipped on a wet grassy hill and broke my leg. When I say broke my leg, I mean seriously fucked it up. And just when I’d finally healed from that torn fucking calf muscle. Apparently, I don’t go half assed when it comes to hurting myself in the non sexy kind of way.

Three hospitals, two surgeries, and a whole bunch of metal plates and screws later, and my poor foot is now healing inside a fiberglass cast. This is a vast improvement from the external fixator I had on for the week before my second surgery. That thing looked like a crazy steampunk torture device sticking out of my leg. I guess that’s hot if you’re into the cyborg look, but I digress.

The agonizing pain/ doped up on painkillers stage has subsided, and the “oh my god, this cast fucking itches!” stage has now begun.

According to my doctor, it’s a really bad idea to shove things down your cast. He gave me this spray stuff that comes with a straw a-la WD40, which is supposed to alleviate the itch, but it doesn’t do shit. The straw doesn’t work as a scratching device either.

Finally, in a moment of not so quiet desperation, I came up with the only solution that seems to work: a Hitachi.

I’m not kidding. I stick it on my cast, and vibrate the spot that itches, and the itch goes away. This amuses me more than it probably should. I guess this is yet another reason why Hitachis are truly miraculous devices.

Beltane Part 2: Catharsis

It was Friday afternoon at Beltane. I was sitting on the cabin porch with my gimp leg propped up on my crutches. My cabin mates were sitting and standing around, waiting for lunch to be served. Laughing, joking, recounting each others’ exploits thus far. And I started to cry.

Silently at first, choking on the sobs so that somebody or nobody would notice. No one did. More joking. More laughter. All the while, tears and sobs shook my body.

Eventually, someone caught me in her peripheral vision.
“Hey. Are you ok?”
My eyes, by this point, were red and swollen. I don’t remember my exact answer. I think I let out a sob. At some point, words started pouring out between the sobs. I remember fragments of what I said.

Disconnected. Don’t know why I’m crying. Frustrated. I know I’m being dramatic. Feeling rejected and helpless. Why couldn’t I connect.

Fortunately, Sarah was around to help me ground and regroup. Earlier that day, I went to her catharsis play class. I had told her that I wanted to do a cathartic scene, and she suggested a few people for me to talk to.

After patiently listening to my outpouring, she took action, and asked the others if they could eat with me so I felt a little more included. Part of me reverted to my preteen self, sitting alone in the school cafeteria. And the cool kids were only sitting with me at lunch because the teacher made them. Then I got mad at myself for thinking along those lines, and even more tears poured down my cheeks.

It’s ok. You’re safe here. Just let it out.

More people joined me. I felt silly, being surrounded by chatty happy people while sobbing into my sandwich, but she guided me through.

Imagine a giant root stemming from your heart and running deep into the ground. Take all that hurt, and send it deep into the ground.

I let it all snake through me from the top of my head, through my feet, and deep into the earth.

She looked me dead in the eye. “You realize that this is the catharsis you were looking for, right?”

The last dry heave dislodged itself from my throat. After that moment, my weekend took on a very different shape.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

About the Dominant Savant

This past weekend, I had the immense pleasure of meeting Mollena, among many other awesome type people.
She and I were on the same Bolt Bus from DC, which gave me the unique opportunity to pick through her big, sexy brain outside of con space. (I’ve now added her to my list of intellectual crushes) Anyway, she wrote a fascinating post and related conversation thread about the phenomenon of dominant savants.

She writes:

Someone who is a stellar whipmaster, bondage aficionado, piercer, what have you, may be able to act as your guide throughout an incredibly earth-shattering experience, but you would be absolutely making a dangerous assumption if you automatically piggyback a deep spirituality to their expertise. It MAY be there. It MAY not. It may be there for one partner and not for another. This doesn’t intrinsically make them a shitty player, it means you have to know what is happening for them.

I don’t have much to say in objection to what she wrote, but it did dislodge some of the flotsam that has been banging about my brain. I’m posting a more polished version of what I left on her thread.

In sexualized and charged spaces, we tend to bring filtered versions of ourselves. This is not a bad thing, mind you, nor is it something that always happens consciously. So someone can present a facade of togetherness and control in one environment better than he or (insert pronoun here) can in the mundane world. Similarly, there are others who, like you said, thrive in a BSDM environment, but are utter crap at relationships, nurturing spiritual connections, etc.

If the only interaction you have with people is in kink contexts, then it’s hard to see the other facets of their personalities. And if that’s the only venue in which you interact with people, that’s fine, so long as you know what you’re getting and what you’re not.

I use myself as an example because it’s my blog, dammit. There are a few people I can think of off the top of my head with whom I’ve had really intense, beautiful, and cathartic scenes… For a while, I’d trumpet these scenes to others “Oh So-and-so! Yeah. He’s awesome. We’ve played. Maybe I can introduce you!”

And then the realization two-by-four clocked me on the head. I don’t really know these people. I don’t know what they’re like at home, or what their mental map looks like outside the fleeting context of our scene. I still enjoy playing with these people, but I no longer assume that a hot scene will immediately grant me a certain level of personal access.

This idea of dealing with someone in one capacity without letting it bleed into another can be tricky. But again, it’s about knowing thyself as much as it is about knowing thy partner.

I can bottom to most people, no problem. I can do silly, I can do pain slut, I can do happy rope space without requiring deep spiritual connections with my partner. If they happen, great! If not, meh.

A lot of the play I like to do as a submissive, however, requires me to strip myself physically and emotionally bare. To trust my partner to take me to those dark places and bring me back in one piece. Deep mind fucks, hard core humiliation play, anything where I let someone stomp around in my brain require intimacy and deep, meaningful connection.

For me, the purpose of such scenes is to strengthen or establish intimacy. I give so much of myself. How can I go to those places without letting myself get close to the person I’m playing with? It’s like putting an ice cube in my mouth and telling me not to let it melt. However, since I know this about myself, I’m very careful about whom I explore that kind of play with.

I have had the misfortune of going that deep with someone who could not maintain that intimacy. The realization that we were speaking different languages and that his idea of intimacy did not coincide with mine was devastating. I felt like a teddy bear whose stuffing had been pulled out. I needed to curl back up and put those pieces of me back together. In retrospect, there was no way I could have known without going those places, and I don’t regret a single second of the relationship. But it goes to show that emotional anguish is kind of a recreational hazard.

I still seek out those connections knowing full well that I may get hurt again, but to paraphrase Osho, you cannot love or enter into reality if you are not courageous.

Interlude: Pervertables and Boobies!

Before I get to the second part of my Beltane story, I feel compelled to share my recent pervertable find with the world wide internets! For someone who’s been around kinky people, I have a very small… ok… practically non existent toybag. Part of the reason why my toybag is so small is that many toys are ’spensive. But sometimes, like today, I stumble upon kinkster gold.

I was in a hardware/cooking supply/stationary/everything store in manhattan, when I stumbled upon these:

They cost less than two bucks a piece, and were advertised as “mini tongs.” That’s not what I thought when I saw them. I started clamping them in my hands, thinking of their potential for nefarious uses. My gears started turning. How could I test these out without doing something that could get me arrested for indecent exposure.

I settled for pinching them on my hand and arm, just to see if they’d grip. The workers looked at me kinda funny, but I’m sure they’ve seen worse. When I got home, I concluded, after some non-scientific experimentation, that “mini tongs” is clearly code for “things what make people’s nipples all ouchy.”

Case in point:

And depending on how you put them on, they can by really gentle or really nasty.

In my book, I call this a win. An epic win. Yay cheap pervertables!

Beltane Part 1: Ordeal

I remember thinking to myself, as I drove down to the event with two wonderful and amazing women, that I wanted to experience ordeal and catharsis. Remind me to be more specific next time.

Ordeal Path

Religion and spirituality have been on my mind lately. I’ve had many enlightening conversations with people about their spirituality, from my uber-Orthodox Jewish cousin, to neo-pagans, to hard core atheists. Each conversation has helped me to shift my perspectives ever so slightly on my own relationship to spirituality.

Given my interest in spirituality and BDSM, I found myself drawn to the idea of the ordeal path. Lee Harrington, in his class on Sacred Kink, describes the ordeal path as

using purposeful and intentional pain (mental, physical, spiritual, psychological), suffering, challenge or endurance to push the brain and body past its perceived limits and open up to a world beyond those limits.

I wanted to test my edges. I’m sitting on the verge of some major life changes, and I wanted to prove to myself that I am strong enough to make it through whatever challenges lay ahead of me.

I wasn’t sure what form I wanted it to take. Maybe some bondage blood play would be involved. Lots of screaming. Lots of tears. Sounds kinda hot, right?

Yeah, no. That totally didn’t happen.

Another Fucking Learning Experience

Wednesday night. First day at Beltane. I was sitting in on a fireplay intensive class, let by PyroSadist, when my stomach started to rumble. I hadn’t eaten since the morning, so I jogged down to my cabin for a snack and bathroom break.

For some reason, I remember thinking to myself, “Running downhill wasn’t so bad. I can run uphill, no problem.” I pushed myself to run a little faster. That’s when I felt something in my calf go pop. I tried to put my foot down. The sudden shock of pain made me reconsider.

Pyrosadist’s face froze when he saw me limping through the doors.
“Did you seriously just hurt yourself on the way to the bathroom?”

I nodded.

“How the hell did you manage THAT?”

I shrugged.

More specifically, I had torn a calf muscle on the way to the bathroom, or so I later found out. Went to the hospital. Popped my crutches cherry. Why did no one tell me how evil those things are? I’m convinced that the main purpose of crutches is to make your arms and hands hurt so much, you forget about the pain in your legs.

So what happened to you? I got asked that alot. Apparently crutches are conspicuous.
I tore a calf muscle. I would reply.
Inevitably I’d get the sucks-to-be-you wince. Oh jeez. I’m so sorry. That sounds really serious.
It’s not that serious! I wanted to plead No really! I’ll be fine! I swear!

Getting anywhere beyond a ten foot radius of my cabin required a production. There were maybe one or two carts running through camp. In order to participate in… well… just about anything, I relied on the carts and other people nice enough to drive my sorry gimp ass. To get the cart, I had to find people with walkie talkies to call a cart. It seemed like whenever I needed these people and their magic walkie talkies, they were doing ritual things, on the other side of camp, or off somewhere having sex.

The universe had decided that the entire event was going to be my ordeal. The hell with you, universe! I was there goddamit, and I was going to enjoy myself as much as possible.

Did I succeed in being a 24/7 ball of joy and light? Not by a long shot. But I give myself points for effort.

Like I said, shoulda been more specific. This was not how I wanted to confront my demons, but it ultimately did the trick.

Lessons and Challenges

The nature of the place and the event had me delving deep. Whining and snarking aside, my little brain hamsters and I got to spend some quality time together. Well, I guess they were emotion hamsters. If no such thing exists, I’m inventing them now.

Where was I? Right… I was getting to the introspective part.

Part of me knew that I was injured and it was ok to ask for help. Another part of me hated the prospect of being a burden to others. After all, I’m the one who’s supposed to be the teacher, the mentor, the healer. I’ve built parts of my identity around these pillars. In my enlightened state of gimp, I had no choice but to let those pillars go.

I quickly discovered the drawback of having to rely on people: you’re not always going to get the help you want when you want it. I had to make peace with this reality. As much as I joked throughout the weekend that I needed minions to do my bidding, I knew that minions were not realistic expectations… Well, not at this event anyway. I had to make things ok within myself.

My cabin mates were off having their own journeys, exploring their own horizons, and deepening their own connections. And that was truly beautiful. I’m grateful that my injury did not hinder those journeys. (At least, I hope it didn’t.) But even still, there were moments when I found myself pouting like a petulant child when no one was around to help me.

You’re being stupid. You can’t expect people to be at your beck and call. So what’s with the tears? Stop acting like a child!

If I’m not beating myself up for one thing it’s another. So to silence those angry and destructive voices, I turned it around. Instead of “sorry”, I said “thank you.” I constantly reminded myself of just how much people were going out of their way to help me, get me dinner, drive me to the dungeon. I used the absence of help to make room for gratitude.

I did not let my crappy situation overtake me, though it sure gave me a run for my money a few times. Still, I came out ahead. By the end of the event, I was overflowing with joy.

From the Middle of the Whirlwind

May seems to be my month for travel, challenge, and revelation. Every weekend this month brings with it a new sexuality centered event.

First, I went to a Beltane celebration.

I just got back from the Sex 2.0 convention, as anyone following my twitter feed can tell. I’m probably going to another sacred sexuality retreat this weekend, and then next week, I fly off to go to Shibaricon.

What’s amazing to me is how radically different each event is. Beltane was all woo woo and spiritual, Sex 2.0 was cerebral. I expect this upcoming thing to be all crunchy and granola, with a side of sex positive hippy (I say this affectionately). And Shibaricon will be filled with awesome kinky rope people… and, with any luck, awesome kinky sex.

So many thoughts are swirling from these last few weeks. I don’t know what to expect from my upcoming adventures, but my last two trips have left me profoundly changed. I feel like I’m coming out of a cocoon, and learning how to use this shiny new set of wings. Bit by bit, the last remnants of winter are falling off my skin. The weight of who and where I was no longer sits on my shoulders.

I can now revel in the newness of my current existence, and these events have helped me find the tools I need to forge this strange and exciting path.

Us verses them?

A few weeks ago, I sat in on a Jay Wiseman class at TES.

He opened the class by saying something to the effect of:

I am a kinskster. I like to tie women up. And that’s ok. The vanilla world, they need to be tolerant of us. After all, haven’t we spent enough time being tolerant of them?

Those last two sentences bothered the hell out of me.

Now, I mean no offense to Jay Wiseman, nor do I want to belittle his accomplishments as an author and community member. And I agree that it’s important to be comfortable in one’s own skin. But the implicit “us verses them” mentality wrapped up in those two little sentences is one of the major issues I have with many people in the scene.

First of all, by taking this stance, a person automatically goes on the defensive. He’s expecting confrontation and controversy… it leaves barely any room for the possibility that people may be accepting of that stance.

I can’t help but be reminded of one of my favorite Little Britain characters, Daffyd Thomas, the only gay in the village. He goes around declaring his otherness and creating his own persecution, even though it seems that the rest of the village is bi-curious at the very least.

As I wrote in a previous post, it’s natural to want to feel different or special. I know that I’ve been guilty of using kink as a way to establish my otherness, to create a separation between me and the “vanilla” world.

Then I realized… You can’t always tell what people do in their bedrooms.
Not everyone advertises their sexuality. Hell, when I was in college, I did things that could be defined as kinky, but it never occurred to me to attach any label or identity to them. Quite frankly, there are times and places where I’m perfectly happy with kink being off the list of appropriate conversation topics. (Around the watercooler at most jobs, family reunions, funerals, children’s parties…) BDSM, when you get down to it, is about sex… And what I do in my bedroom is my own damn business. I realize the irony of this statement coming from a sex blogger. I guess a more appropriate statement in my case is: if you have issues with what I do in my bedroom, don’t have sex with me.

To be honest, I’m a little torn on the debate about bringing kink into the public square. On the one hand, I hope that there will come a time when a person’s sexual proclivities cannot be used as a strike against them in a court of law. Also, people who are kinky should have access to reliable information so that they can practice it as safely as possible. On the other hand, engendering the idea that the rest of the world must tolerate us feels downright counterproductive. It borders dangerously on forcing one’s kink onto others.

I’m well aware that there are plenty of people in the world who are not accepting of things that they don’t understand. I’m also aware of the prejudices and preconceptions that people have when they hear “kinky” or “BDSM.” It has frightening connotations to many. I do hope that organizations such as TES and new initiatives such as Kinkforall can help dispel some of that misinformation.

Kink isn’t for everyone. It’s not without physical and emotional risk, even though there are ways of mitigating those risks. A lot of what we do is hard for people to accept. Upon reading my blog, someone once asked me What compels you to want pain? I know this may sound stupid, but my lord isn’t it painful?

People have visceral reactions to the thought of inflicting or receiving pain. It’s completely understandable why someone would squick at the thought.

I usually wait for people to get to know me as a person before I get into any conversation about BDSM. It is, after all, only one aspect of my life, not my entire being. This way, I change peoples minds through example and not through proselytizing. I find this to be a far more elegant, subtle, and effective approach.

If we’re going to gain any ground in the arenas where it matters, I think that we need to think hard about how we perceive and engage people outside of the kink community.