Subspace and consent

I've been browsing Fetlife today, and come up with some amusing threads. The one that is most interesting at the moment concerns subspace and consent.

Basically, the OP disagrees with the whole, "I was in subspace so I can't be held responsible for my actions and anything bad that happened is ALL YOUR FAULT."

So rather than dive into the transient and argumentative world of the forums, I'm going to articulate my thoughts here, relatively permanently stored, and let you argue with them if you want :)

Caveat the first- I refuse to define subspace for anyone other than myself.

Caveat the second- for me, when I bottom, I go into an altered state of consciousness.

Now, that altered state of consciousness, for me, is a lot like being drunk. I enter it mostly knowingly (every once in a while that 3rd drink hits harder than expected, or that really good term of, ahem- endearment- whispered just right in your ear sends you sliding under), I get really, really suggestible, and I am willing to do things I don't usually find enjoyable otherwise.

However, please note the distinctions:

I enter it knowingly, and therefore have the responsibility beforehand to choose a partner who knows what will happen and whom I can trust to be responsible for my welfare while I'm temporarily less capable of doing so.

Note my wording, by the way- less capable, not incapable.

I become suggestible, which does not mean "completely open to any influence," for those who are too lazy to look it up. The judge will not let you off for drunk driving just because someone else allowed you to have your keys, and I won't excuse you from being irresponsible simply because someone else was present and suggested it.

I am willing to do things I'd otherwise not. That doesn't mean I'll have sex with a complete stranger, let someone cut off parts of my body, or otherwise do something really stupid. It means that I will enjoy rougher sex than usual, accept a harder beating than usual, etc. It doesn't mean I'll let something completely out of character happen- it means that I'm willing to push my usual interests a little farther.

So, let's recap, shall we?

For me, subspace means that the person I already know and trust can suggest to me that we push my current interests a little farther.

It does not mean that anyone can convince me to do something I would then later classify as assault of any kind.

....don't get me wrong, Lucivar once debated digging my eye out with a knife and I'd probably have let him in the headspace I was in, but I also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he did he'd find a way to fix it.

And THAT, my friends, is the key difference.

Overdue update

Hmmm so much for that 'writing here more' project.

Short version of the last few months:

Jack and I have broken up. We are still best friends, but it was past time.

Airen and I have also broken up. We're also still friends, although we're taking the time to let a little distance heal things.

Boywonder and I are still together. Our dynamic is evolving, but mostly we're vanilla partners who switch a lot in play. (Although come to think of it, I owe him a good beating for his birthday earlier this week...)

Yeah. And now to my next post for the rant I came here to write about subspace and consent.

Late night HNT

Post-pedicure HNT

A new-old change in direction

This blog used to be the place where I wrote about everything kink-related. My experiences in the community, my lovers, my thoughts on relationships- everything.

But somewhere along the way it turned into my sex blog. Where I write my fantasies, my sexiest thoughts and kinkiest desires, but nothing else.

That is not what I choose for this space to be anymore.

So.

Here's where I am right now.

I live in a beautiful little 1940's house with 2 of my partners, Jack and Airen. My house was built as officer housing for a nearby Army base, and while the neighborhood is now quite diverse, I prefer it that way. My home is filled with antiques I've inherited, but I hope it doesn't feel too much like a house filled with antiques to visitors. I love my furniture, my china and silver, but in the end it is 'wood and metal, wrought in pleasing form,' to paraphrase Jacqueline Carey, and what it means to me is replaceable.

Jack and I have been together for 5 years now, and Airen and I are approaching one this April. Jack has his own bedroom, his own little cave to retreat to, and Airen and I share the master bedroom. This is not a comment on any hierarchy, but merely on my darling Jack's antisocialness.

I was asked to join the Board of Directors for the local TNG group which was the first to welcome me home to my kink community.

I was awarded the title of Ms Southeast Olympus Leather 2011, and in August I'll compete for International Ms Olympus.

This is my graduating semester of undergrad, with my BA in Psychology. (I dropped my Sociology double-major down to a minor in the interests of graduating and getting on the job market).

I broke my collarbone in January, and have been in a sling since then, and will be in one until June.

I recently started a new relationship, which I have absolutely no idea how to label, except that it's so much like what I had with Lucivar that it terrifies me.

So yeah. Busy, much?

I'm currently in Ft Lauderdale, FL at Beyond Leather, and badly need to wrap up this rambling entry on nothing terribly important so that I can go downstairs and actually be sociable and not make my producer and judges regret giving me this title.

Writer's Block

I want to write about you, but the words aren't there.

I want to write about the shape of your eyes when you smile at me, open and not-quite-innocent. The taste of salt on your skin, suddenly spiced with the coppery hint of fear when my teeth begin to meet. The sharp intake of your breath when my lips graze your neck. The way your lips part in a combination of fear and desire when the predator watches through my eyes.

I want to write about it.

I want to tell everyone about the arch of your throat when you offer it to my teeth, the sharp hiss of your breath and the low growling moan when I bite down. I want to tell them about the way your body presses into me, and the sharp sounds you make when I roll your nipple between tongue and teeth. I want to tell them about the sweet, meaty scent of your belly and the way you moan when I run my hands over your trembling body.

I want to write about you, but the words just aren't there.

Pleasant thoughts HNT

Coffee-laced kisses

Your last few kisses tasted like coffee and the lingering hint of cigarettes.

I'm wearing your shirt that I slept in, the scent of your body soaking into my skin again after reluctantly washing it off when we showered together.

Your body is pressed against mine, warm on the cold morning, and all that I want to do is drag you back into my warm house and crawl back under the covers to finish what we started last night.

All day, I could smell you on my skin and taste you on my lips.

Hot water and sisterhood

Sitting yesterday afternoon in the Korean sauna I go to, I was struck by a realization.

Let me first give you a picture of the space: walking into the bathing area in the women's locker room, the lights dim and you enter a space that is exclusively feminine, a space no man may enter.

To one side are showers, where women of varying ages and bodies scrub down before entering the hot, tepid, and cold pools, the dry and wet saunas, the UV-ray area, or paying for a massage or body scrub. Women sit beside each other, laughing and talking and scrubbing one anothers' backs and washing one anothers' hair.

I am soaking in the hot pool, letting my injured shoulder float languidly and take the pressure off of my healing clavicle and it's intrusive, supportive titanium pin. Gigi floats beside me, her beautiful red hair plastered close to her classical face by the heat, and we simply lie together for a while, not this moment in direction contact but connected by a sense of feminine community.

Around us, throughout the bathing area, are women. Aged women with baby-fine skin and long, low breasts showing the marks of childrearing. Thin women with tight stomachs and pert,small breasts. Heavy women with rounded bellies and deep, wide thighs. Women with long, glossy black hair and golden skin. Women with waist-length locks and rounded buttocks. Deep brown skin, golden skin, pale skin. Hair in every shade from red to brown to black to blonde, a rainbow of tattoos and piercings sitting alongside conservative Asian women. It is a rainbow of women in every shade and every style, in a community which is connected without needing words.

Even children are here, running freely under the indulgent eyes of their mothers and grandmothers and aunts, and every other woman in the room. Here, they learn community, learn the diversity of their gender and the beauty of every body. Here they laugh and bathe and soak and learn that their bodies are safe spaces, homes for their souls and places in which they live.

It is also a curiously asexual space. No, asexual is wrong. A as a prefix means "without", and this space is not without sex. It is non-sexual. Sex simply has no place here. It is... irrelevant, for lack of a better word. Even I, one of the most sexual creatures I know, look at the bodies around me- a smorgasboard in another place or time- and see only sisters, not lovers.

It is a curiously comforting sensation, to bathe in a potent brew of hot water and community.

Caveat: I am aware that the Asian spas (at least those I've visited) are transphobic places, and I understand that my use of them is an exercise of cisgendered privilege. I'm sorry, my trans friends.

Bewbies HNT

Rapine Dreams

I dream of rape sometimes.

I dream of forcing you to your knees, tears in your pretty eyes from the twisted grip of my hand in your hair.

I dream of the fear that twists your features when you look up at me, realizing what is going to happen. Realizing that I will bend you over, force you open to me, and hurt you.

I want that fear, the spark of hope when my hand gentles in your hair, the terrified resignation when it tightens again and you know that my mind will not change.

I want the hardness of your cock contrasting with the tightness around your eyes, the hopeful reluctance as your legs spread wide for me, and the grunt of fear and pain and long wished-for fulfillment as I slide inside of your warm, tight body.

Sleeping in HNT

An evening's thought

I want the boys who are wounded.

I want the boys who are wounded, but not so that I can heal them.
I want the boys who are wounded, so that I can lick the bloody tears
from their skin.

*squeeeeeeeeeeal*

Well, there's a very busy few months coming up for me.

This was my last free weekend until I graduate in May with my BA in Psychology, and this week, spring break for me, will be spent busily writing term papers so I don't have to write them in my complete if spare time.

Upcoming are:

March 5: Passing the Torch: An Intergenerational Dialogue in Dallas, NC

March 25-27: Atlanta Poly Weekend in Atlanta, GA

April 1-3: Atlanta Leather Pride in Atlanta, GA

and quite a few others, but those are the soonest.

I'm extremely excited about Atlanta Poly weekend, where I'm teaching "Poly and D/s," "Interpersonal Communication," and "Real Life Polyamory".

What's even more exciting?

One of my favorite writers and activists, maymay of Male Submission Art, and Maybe Maimed, will also be there. Not only is he teaching a cool class on censorship, but he's looking forward to my class on Poly and D/s!

...........a writer I really admire is excited about one of my classes?!??!?!

*squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal*

Loss

We're in the car, and driving home.

My home,not yours anymore and that is its own special kind of pain.

You're talking about the woman you loved, the woman you still crave despite the pain she caused you and the scars you still stroke on nights when the loneliness is too much.

I am sympathizing with you because I have my own scars, my own secret could-have-beens in the middle of the night.

"...it's the most intense things I've ever felt," you tell me, and I shudder in response.

"I've felt it three times," I tell you. "Once for Wolf," whose strong-safe arms are no longer- can never again be- in my life. "And two other times."

I know the intensity you mean. The obsession- and yes, it is obsession. Your brain releases the same chemicals during the early stages of a relationship that are released during an obsessive episode for an OCD person. The craving for them, for their bodies, the meeting with their minds, the brush of their soul against yours.

The fierce craving for their touch, the need to touch them, to mark them and show the world that they belong to you, that they love you and they are yours and you are theirs and yes!

"You're lucky to have felt it so many times," he tells me.

I glance at him, pretty and dark and hurting. I know what he means- that I am lucky that having felt it more than once, I know I can feel it again. Know that the loss of it once is not the loss of it forever. But the words won't come past the lump in my throat.

"You get past it," I tell him. "You go to bed hurting and you wake up hurting and you go through the motions hurting- eating and drinking and working and playing- and you know it won't ever go all the way away but you hold on to the little things, the little pleasures."

"It's different for you," he says. "You have someone."

"It's not like that," I respond. "It doesn't make the pain less. But you cling to the little things. The taste of tea in the morning, the rush of caffeine in your body. The taste of chocolate on your lips. The accomplishment of learning a new skill. It doesn't take away the pain, but it makes it bearable.

"And when you think you can't stand it anymore, when you think you're going to call them in the middle of the night, you remind yourself why they're not there anymore. Why they're gone, whether they chose it or you did. In the middle of the night, you hold on to anger or hurt or fear or whatever it takes to remind you because sometimes they're the only things that are stronger than the craving for them."

After all, foolish boi, how do you think I keep from calling you?

Collaring

I had a ritual planned.

Elaborate, beautiful, formality suiting the depth of my feelings for you.

Candles, ritual words, my hands on your body gentle and harsh and cruel and tender.

But when you came home, like a child unable to hide the sweets from herself, I sent you to find it. When you returned, stainless steel links in hand and looking a little dazed, I could only grin in delight.

I had meant to be stern, formal, but found myself instead laughing like a child.

The links shining in your hand, bright rings of stainless steel twisting, designed especially for you and woven in an intricate and beautiful pattern by my sister.

Mine.

Love and joy reflected in your eyes like candle flames.

Mine.

The soft grunt as you knelt before me, my hand warm on your throat.

Mine.

The clasp closing, silver-bright steel against your golden skin.

Mine.

Your hands on my skin, slowly removing my clothing piece by piece, the disrobing its own pleasure.

Mine.

Your skin against my skin, your body inside of mine, my hand wrapped around your collar.

Mine.

After, we simply held one another, skin to skin, heart to heart, breath to breath.

Mine.

Always.

Craving you

I thought I was past this craving. Thought I was past the point when your voice could wrap my gut in a knot and start a low fire of need in my groin. Thought I was past the point when the thought of you could squeeze my heart with a tight-knuckled fist and focus every instinct in my body on you like a hunting dog on point: Mine.

Your slut voice is back, that high, piping boy’s voice that makes me think about pressing a knife to your balls and keeping it that pretty soprano forever. Every word is calculated to reach deep into my body and call the predator from me, the rapist, to draw him out and into my eyes and my hands. I know you’re manipulating me, but is it really manipulation when I’m cooperating fully? When my words and your voice weave together in a cooperative manipulative descending spiral of predatory and helpless lust?

This is almost not rape, not when your pouty lips are half open in undisguised need and your every glance over your shoulder is an invitation. You know that I want you, and you want the brutality of my hands and the cruelty of my teeth on your skin, and you are drawing the quiescent predator back into me, back up through my hands and my eyes and my teeth and down into my cock until I use it like a weapon to pound into your body. She’s been so quiet, the predator inside of me, this past year; barely sniffing the air since your departure but now she has the scent of her favorite prey and I don’t know if I can keep us sane, keep us from crossing the line and ripping you open like the meat that the predator sees. There is too much fury and pain mixed with the desire and it is so blended now with the love that even that may not stop us from opening you.

It doesn’t matter now, though. I don’t really believe that I’ll ever have you back for keeps, never feel your body wrapped around mine a clinging liana vine boi, so I will have to take this opportunity that may be the last and means the consequences don’t matter… so I set my teeth in your throat and bite untilI taste blood.

Fetish

I spoke with a friend today,and we spoke about our loves, our needs, our fetishes.

I described a scene to him:

Your eyes, wide and begging and fearful and glazed with arousal.

Your lips, pink and round in an 'O' of wanting.

Your face drawn in fear and desire, your high cheekbones stark as bright spots of fear-color draw my avaricious eyes.

Your throat, bared to the blade and your body lifting convex from the bed and against my hands and my knife. Pressing yourself into the possibility of death with a mixture of sex and suicide.

Submissives speak of the confidence they have in their master, the gut knowledge that he'll never harm them.

You don't have that. You know I will harm you if the psychopath in the back of my brain slips her leash, for even a moment. You know that I want to let her, know that we can smell the blood beneath your skin and crave the taste of it on our lips and the stickiness on our hands that hold the blade.

But you arch into me, and into the blade, anyway.

That.

That suicidal desire.

That overarching need that doesn't care if it ends in death.

That is my fetish.

To be continued

He looked at me with his eyes wide, his lips making that cute little 'O' of surprise.

'But I thought you were still mad at me and didn't want sex?'

I smiled, or at least I bared my teeth. Sometimes, he can't tell the difference.

'I've changed my mind... sort of.'

That was when the first nervousness entered his eyes. The first vague concern, not quite real fear yet. 'So...'

'Shut up, bitch,' I cut him off.

He started a little and fell silent, his eyes getting wider. I'm usually extremely lenient, to the point of spoiling him. This tone, this attitude, was new.

'Get on your goddamned knees, boy,' I told him, and smiled inside as he scrambled to obey, wondering exactly what he'd gotten himself into.

I unzipped my jeans, freeing my cock- 8" of beautiful opalescent silicone- and smiled when he licked his lips.

I love owning whores.

'Suck me, slut.'

I didn't need to say anything else, he was already leaning forward, licking his lips and wrapping his hot little mouth around me. God he's pretty like this! His full lips wrapped around my cock, his whole body arching into every pull of his mouth and throat.

I stroke his head lightly, drawing his attention with the unexpectedly gentle touch. 'Make sure you get it good and wet, baby, because it's the only lube you're getting tonight.'

I watch his eyes widen and feel something like contentment as his efforts at swallowing me redouble.

Such a pretty little whore.

Abruptly, I'm done with it, done with being sucked, and all I want is to fuck him- deep and hard and fast until he whimper and squeals and begs because it's too much.... because it will be.

Don't wanna

You told me in an email, "No one has ever been able to break me, and I think you could be the one."

Stupid, arrogant little boy.

Break you? I barely fucking know you.

Breaking you implies I give enough of a shit to put you back together afterwards like a good little massa.

Let's get something straight- I don't.

So I don't give a fuck if I 'break' you.

I just want to fuck you up.

I want to watch you flinch when the cold chains wrap around your wrists... ZOMG chains on wrists you might get bruises and then DIIEEEEEEE.... and then hook 'em to the eyebolts in my ceiling.

USB20 put them in for my birthday last year. They'll be a year old soon.

Maybe I'll give him a birthday present to say thank you.

I digress. Reading his pr0n does that to me.

I want to wrap the chains around your wrist and watch you shiver involuntarily from the cold against your hot skin. Watch your face go tight as you realize I've seen you flinch, watch you buck up and try to pretend you didn't because oh noes I might think you're not a big and tough and scary!

You're not, bitch. Right now you're a hanging chunk of meat.

Go be scary to someone else in your pretty digital uniform and shiny little gun. They're not here, and I am.

I and a length of chain link from Home Depot. It was your idea, and that makes it all your fault.

Tiny little links leave a lovely trail of welts.

Maybe if I were a Good Dominant I'd be able to make pretty patterns with it and take pretty pictures.

But, well, I'm not and I can't and I don't.

Also, I don't take pictures.

So I'll just hit with it instead.

The first blow, winding up my arm and down my hand with the snap of the wrist that makes a lunge whip crack, is across your chest.

Across your chest and trailing across one nipple while you grunt and groan and try to be A Twue and Stoic Mas-o-cast.

Bah. Boring little twat. I want you to make some noise for me.

Another blow, wrapping around your torso now like the flogger falls everyone says Do Not Do but it's soooo pretty wrapping around you and kissing your ribcage while you grunt and strain a little against the chain.

Another one, diagonal now across your back and your making a low keening sound but it's not enough and I want to hear you scream so it's time to switch chains, to grab the heavy links designed to hold rabid pit bulls inside their swept-earth yards even when the census man comes to knock at the door.

This one bruises, this one can break bone if I hit you wrong so I shove you around and let it fly against your back until your spine bows and a strangled scream rips from your throat.

Mmmmm, much better.

I haven't had a boy beg me for mercy in a long time.

I think you're going to.

I think two more blows will do it.

I'm suddenly debating in my head.

Good Dom, Bad Dom.

One good blow over the kidneys won't kill you, but it will have you pissing blood for a few days and blubbering.

Two good blows to the sweet spot where thighs meet ass will have a similar effect but I don't wanna be good, Mommy, I wanna hurt him....

3am

You are making small whimpering noises in your sleep, little puppy-like snuffling sounds as you move across the bed seeking my warmth. The rice paper that covers your bedroom window blocks little light, and even now at 3am I can see your face relaxed and childlike in sleep as you search for me.

I love that you search for me, that you seek in me safety, and warmth, and comfort.

It makes me want to wrap you up tightly in my arms and keep you safe forever, and it makes me want to rip you from sleep with a hand over your mouth and another pinching shut your nose before I ride you into oblivion.

Mornings

It is in the mornings that I wake to find you gone.

It is in the mornings that I reach, warm and fuzzy-minded from sleep, to cuddle you and wake abruptly to the lack.

It is in the mornings, with their 5 hour time difference, too early to call and reassure myself with your voice, that I feel how far away I am.

It is in the mornings, quite and peaceful and utterly lacking in your warmth, when I let myself weep.

Musings

We are studying the Psychology of Terrorism, sitting in a classroom in Dublin and my mind is drifting.

I am thinking of you, as I find myself doing so often.

I am thinking of your body, warm and soft and spread beneath me like a feast for my senses. I am thinking of my hands, running up the length of you, spreading your legs for me. I am thinking of your warm buttocks, rising from your legs as though they were made for my hands to spread apart and toy with while you squirm and moan. I am thinking of the slow curve of your back like flowing honey and the smallness of my hands against the length of it, stroking steadily upwards. I am thinking of the curved bow of your neck, of the swallow of your throat in my hand and the softening of your face as you slip under.

I am thinking about the solid line of your body beneath me, of the soft sounds that you make when I slip inside of you. I am thinking of your hands, grasping at the floor and at my hands as your back arches when I fill you. I am thinking of your open mouth, gasping and moaning as I fuck you.

Yes- this

OMFG This. Ferns has, as always, expressed my emotions better than I ever can:

Little Boy

An apology and a memory

Beloved one,

I woke up yesterday with tears hot on my cheeks, fear clawing at my chest like a beast trying to rip its way out through my ribs.

I knew that you would leave, knew that you would walk away as surely as I knew the taste of bile in the back of my throat.

There was no doubt in my mind that before day's end, I would lost you.

But when I talked to you in the morning, I pasted the smile to my face, letting myself take honest joy in what I knew would be my last conversation with you as Mine. I reveled in your sleepy voice, high and soft and rough with sleep. I bathed in the soft sounds of joy you made when I told you that I loved you, wrapping them like spun glass in the recesses of my mind, a tightly held balm against the pain I knew would come. I listened to your rustling movements in bed, seeing you in my mind's eye sprawled in your soft sheets, and I smiled even as tears burnt the backs of my eyes.

And then I went about my day, I wandered alone in a city 3,000 miles from my home, idly watching the people around me. I noted their movements, smiled reflexively at those who greeted me, and all the time my mind was full of you, full of all that I knew I would lose. Your face, soft and open when I'm inside of you, your smile wise and kinder than you'll admit when I am small and frightened. Your hands small and quick and nervous when you clean. Your tremulous smile when I kiss you as a man, and your slow, wicked grin as you ride me. Your face lighting with passion as we chat for hours about the things we love, your narrowed eyes and manic smile when you hurt me, your shy eyes when you curl up tight against me. A hundred thousand images flashed before my eyes and broke my heart a hundred times over: you folding clothes, obsessively neat. You at work, focused and proud. You curled close to me, watching a movie. You hurting me, mad eyes and tender hands. You spread out before me, a feast for my senses. You shopping, movements graceful and restrained. You at my dining room table, laughing and talking. You grinning sideways, that delicious, wicked expression. You on your couch, primal and barely restrained. Every image a glass shard in my heart, ripping me slowly, inexorably open. Over and over I saw you, everywhere that I looked. Architecure I wanted to point out to you, dresses I wanted to laugh with you over, pretty boys with their hipster hair I wanted to laugh with you about. Sad murals I wanted to share with you, good food, all of it wrapped around my heart like barbed wire and I bled inside.

Finally, with heavy steps I came home to talk to you, dreading every step, afraid of every word I'd have to write. When you greeted me, I was both afraid and joyful. I leapt into the conversation because I knew that if I didn't, I'd never have it. I'd give in to the temptation to conceal it from you, the nagging hopee that maybe I wouldn't lose what has become so precious to me.

Every keystroke punctuated by a tear, by a stabbing sensation in my chest, by the certainty of loss.

...and then you didn't.

Then you were quiet as you conferred, and you simply accepted in me what I cannot accept myself.

And then you told me that you love me, and the tears spilled out, spilled open in me and my heart was still bleeding but it was marked by joy now and the disbelief that this was really happening.

Were you truly still here? Would I still really be able to hold you, be able to taste your lips and hear your precious voice? It was too much, too deep, too sudden,and I couldn't believe it, couldn't process it, could only curl into myself a release the shaking sobs that had hidden inside of me all day.

I still have trouble believing it, still have to reach sometimes for the twine you had me tie around my wrist, my tangible reminder of your love and your presence.

I still keep waiting for you to change your mind, to look at me with horror and disgust, and just as you told me so long ago in the darkened car... you prove me wrong. Every time.

I've never been so grateful to be wrong before.

I love you.