Tuesday 4 March 2014

Learning The Ropes, Pt #1




Exploring your kinky side (or in my case, your kinky, sicko whole) as a dom or domme*, I’m now convinced more than ever, can have a wide variety of psychological and practical benefits. It can vastly improve your confidence and decision-making faculties. It can encourage an erotic playfulness that extends beyond the bedroom. It urges you towards creativity. It helps to teach you how to tie a decent knot with speed and self-assurance, which will undoubtedly impress all of your friends if you’re unlucky enough to ever go camping.


The difficulty is getting there in the first place.




Because a novice dom, if you stop to think about it, is very nearly a contradiction in terms. A dom is in charge. A dom knows what he or she is doing. There’s a reason that the two most popular (if in the latter case, famously dubious) BDSM stories of recent years, Secretary and Fifty Shades of Grey, are written as sexual awakening stories (bildongsromans?) for their heroines and their heroines alone. Christian Grey and James Spader’s character - also, confusingly, called Mr Grey - are both psychologically broken, sure, but they’re sexually complete, because their narrative function is to guide their subs into the kinky underworld without breaking a step or hesitating.


In fact, the most prominent uncertain dom I can think of is Wanda in Leopold Masoch’s Venus In Furs, who - like her male slave Severin - is new to this whole BDSM scene. And so she finds herself alternately throwing herself into the role - literally keeping her sub as an unpaid, ignored gardener for months at a time - and rebelling against it, unable to come to terms with her own ability to be so cruel and emotionally unavailable to somebody she genuinely loves.


“Wanda was already somewhat out of humour. Suddenly she said to me,“Severin, the seriousness with which you play your part is charming, and the restrictions which we have placed upon each other are really annoying me. I can’t stand it any longer, I do love you, I must kiss you. Let’s go into one of the houses.”


In this particular scene, Severin - both suffering horribly under her cruelties and compulsively, pleasurably unwilling to escape them - immediately reminds her of her place as his master, (“My lady…” I interposed)...and she slips quite happily back into character.


But even Wanda, while she may waver psychologically, never fucks up in the moment; she never fails to properly secure Severin to his punishment cross or mis-times her attempts to slap him. Which is a good thing, after all, since it’s supposed to be a sexy fantasy.




Real erotic encounters are rarely a sexy fantasy. Mistakes happen, things go wrong. But for most people, the process doesn’t also require you to correctly tie a bunch of rope around your partner’s naked body without doing any of the following: 1) tying it too softly, so that they find themselves coming loose ten minutes in, 2) failing to tie a knot correctly, panicking, and then looping the rope around again and again until they end up with a massive ball of twisted cord bouncing around beneath their wrists, 3) leaving the end of the rope dangling down so that it slaps you in the testicles later on, 4) accidentally cutting off their circulation until their skin turns purple.


Then there are the handcuff keys that can be lost. The hot wax which turns out to be uselessly tepid (I could always test it myself beforehand, but that might just damage the whole ‘sadist’ image for everyone involved). The horrible moment when moments after a firm and unyielding command to your sub, you freeze up because you've just realised it came out of your mouth as, “I want you to beel down and, um, no, wait, I mean kneel, uh - what was I going to tell you to do again?”


There are a great many more opportunities for fucking up, is what I’m saying.

As I was repeatedly to learn.

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* I think I’m just going to use ‘dom’ from now on, if that’s OK. We don’t really need to distinguish between the sexes on this (whereas if you’re writing a personal ad, I imagine ‘looking for a dom’ and ‘looking for a domme’ are quite important to get right) and ‘dom’ itself isn’t actually a masculine contraction.

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