The rules.
1. If you say “Honey, I need a spanking,” you can not then say “Ow!” when you’re being spanked.
2. If you say “Ow!” when you’re being spanked, you can not expect the person giving you the spankings to take you seriously if you’re laughing when you say it.
You know who you are…
So last weekend (not the one just past; the one before that) was Necronomicon, an annual roughly-around-Halloween science fiction convention in Tampa. It’s always a good time; and this year was no exception. Easily worth the drive down from Gainesville to attend.
I’m still sorting through pictures (nearly 700 of them), most of which are definitely not work-safe, or indeed safe to share around small animals or those with delicate sensibilities. Those will remain locked on my computer, away from the women and children (sorry, folks).
A small number of interesting pictures that are (reasonably) safe to share, though:
First up, my sweetie joreth in Con gear with the addition of a karada made of chain. True story: we bought the chain (25 feet of it) at Home Depot just before arriving at the convention. I pulled it out of the bag in the parking lot so I could find the center point; as I was doing this, a random guy walked past and said “Oh, bondage party, huh?” No way to answer a question like that except truthfully, so I said “yep.”
Tying a karada with chain rather than rope is remarkably different. The chain does not slide, so you can’t adjust the tension as you go; you have to get it right the first time. It took a surprising amount of work, and helpers, to get this to work. I loved the results, though.
At the pre-con orgy, I had the opportunity to linger over her with the floggers. It’s been much too long since I’ve been able to give her a proper beating, so we took advantage of the opportunity to spend an hour or so of quality time together, in a room full of people fucking, which is always a good backdrop to this sort of thing.
The rope here is a basic karada with the addition of a frog tie. Kept her backside nicely…accessible.
Someone got this pic–don’t know who, but I like it.
The second night of the con, I snapped a self-portrait reflected in the hotel window. Long exposure, no flash, and I really like the gritty, almost surreal way it turned out.
In unrelated matters: I now have a firm date for the move to Atlanta; I’ll be there a week from Wednesday. I had planned to go spend some time with smoocherie today, but I need to meet up with the principals of my client’s company (the one that’s hiring me), and they were supposed to meet with me here in Gainesville this afternoon and give me a check. They were delayed, and I likely won’t see them ’til tomorrow, so I didn’t get the chance to see smoocherie after all. Work is interfering with my romantic life, and that’s not okay with me!
Also, Shelly came home from seeing her other sweetie with a hickey on her neck, and that is absolutely delightful. There is very little in the world more totally hawt than when she comes home marked. 🙂
…in just a few easy steps.
Things you will need:
One half-naked chick
Liquid latex
Foam brushes
One drop cloth
One Unitard
Saran wrap
Silicone-based sex lube (ID Millennium works well)
The first thing you’ll want to do spread out the drop cloth. In fact, it’s remarkable how many things one can do on a Saturday afternoon that start with "The first thing you’ll want to do spread out the drop cloth"…but I digress.
One of the many people at smoocherie‘s party, james_the_evil1 brought rope. This should come as a surprise to nobody, really. S volunteered to be tied up, so I tried an experiment with incorporating her hair into the tie.
This is a two-layer harness, which looks deceptively simple from the front:
From the back, it’s a bit more complicated, though. I think it worked well; I like the asymmetry. Continue reading
One of my particular turnons is relatively uncommon (at least in my expererience), and that is humiliation play–D/s scenarios that involve some degree of eroticised shame or embarrassment or humiliation. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about that over the past week or so, and I think my approach to humiliation play, and the reasons it appeals to me, are unusual even for those people who like it.
The appeal of humiliation is very difficult to explain to people who don’t understand it. It seems to be one of those things that either you get it or you don’t, and if you don’t, it’s just degrading and objectifying and awful. Certainly I’ve known plenty of people who have a strong squick response to humiliation. Many of my partners have (and do) enjoy humiliation play, though, and I’ve been talking to people around me who have an attraction for humiliation play to try to get an idea about what makes it tick. (Why? Because I like understanding myself and those around me; I like understanding how people experience the world. The unexamined life is not worth living, as Snoop Dogg used to say.)
And in talking with my friends and partners about the appeal of humiliation play, I get the sense that the appeal for me is very different than the appeal for many other people.
For some people, humiliation and shame provoke a very visceral response; under the right circumstances and with the right people, there is an immediate sexual arousal attached to it. Shelly hypothesizes that it’s possible this is just good old-fashioned Pavlovian conditioning at work; we grow up in a society with a strong, almost Puritanical streak that teaches that sexuality is something shameful, and a lot of people go through periods of intense shame during puberty…especially if they grow up in repressive or sex-negative environments (Catholic schools, I’m looking at you here). It starts off with feelings of arousal and sexuality provoking reponses of shame and guilt, and those two emotional experiences become linked, so eventually feelings of shame become coupled with feelings of arousal.
This seems plausible to me, and does seem to match with the experiences of some of my past partners as well.
For other people, it seems to be the powerlessness and the sense of helplessness or objectification associated with many types of humiliation play that really do it. I can understand this; on some visceral, irrational level, which has nothing I can see to do with anything in my past or any of my experiences, powerlessness (and, conversely, control) crank my motor. It’s not associated with any kind of trauma while I was growing up; it has nothing to do with any past event, or with trying to work through problems in childhood; for whatever reason, a strong psychological control dynamic just gets me off. It’s a purely irrational thing that in some ways is like what I imagine having a foot fetish or a crossdressing fetish to be like; something that makes no sense to a person who doesn’t have it, something that has no logical reason; simply a quirk in the wiring or whatever that makes this particular stimulus really, really arousing.
I think there’s likely an element of this in people who like, for example, Daddy/daughter relationships, or who like resistance play or sexual objectification in any other form–just a good old-fashioned sexual fetish, not particularly associated with anything outside itself.
And I have talked to a few people for whom various types of BDSM, including humiliation play, is a direct response to some specific form of trauma. I’ve known people who explore BDSM as a way to get through or to gain power over some event or some part of their lives that was harmful or damaging–and I think thewre are both healthy and unhealthy ways that people do this. (There’s a term that’s used in the psychiatric community–I learned it in one of my cognitive psych classes back in the day, but don’t remember it now–for the act of processing damaging or traumatic experiences in ways that actually deepen and reinforce the trauma, with the belief that they are working through it when in fact they’re making it worse.) I think BDSM can be a positive and healthy way to explore, deal with, and ultimately regain control over some traumatic experience, though I also think that a person who’s not careful may in fact end up just hurting himself more.
But none of these things is really the reason I like humiliation play.
Now, there is an element of that irrational, almost fetishistic arousal for me, make no mistake. From either the giving or the receiving end, humiliation play really gets me off.
But that’s not why I do it. Humiliation play gets me off, but it isn’t a fetish; I can get off in many other ways, and humiliation play is emotionally risky, at least for me. If it were simply a matter of having an orgasm and being done with it, I don’t think I’d do it.
For me, the real appeal of humiliation play is as a vehicle for emotional intimacy.
When I am engaging in some kind of erotic scenario built around humiliation or shame, from either side but most especially from the receiving side, it exposes me emotionally to my partner in a way that nothing else I have experienced does. it strips away any emotional defense mechanisms I may have and lowers all of my emotional boundaries. The person you see when you see me i that context is me, undefended, completely exposed. As a tool for emotional intimacy, it can’t be beat; there’s no bullshit, no filtering any of my responses; what you see is what I am, completely unfiltered.
For that reason, I can’t do humiliation play with a casual partner, or with a person I’m not in an intimate, stable, long-term relationship with. I use it precisely because the emotional vulnerability creates a vehicle for intimacy; for me, it’s that, not the orgasm, that really matters. The fact that it gets me off is what makes me able to do it in the first place, because no doubt about it, that kind of vulnerability and emotional exposure is pretty scary shit–if it weren’t for the fact that I eroticise humiliation, I’d never have started down that path in the first place. But from the people I’ve known and spoken to, using humiliation play for the primary purpose of exploring emotional intimacy seems very unusual. It seems those people I’ve known who enjoy it have some other primary motivation–which might be something as simple as “it gets my rocks off”–and anything else it does is something of a side effect.
Thoughts? Opinions?
Halloween weekend: Necronomicon!
Necronomicon is the closest local equivalent of the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. The nice thing about Necro is that the pilgrimage comes to me, rather than the other way around. It’s an annual convention of science-fiction geekdom of high order.
Sadly, I have relatively few pictures to share of this year’s Necro, as an unfortunate accident on my part deleted many pictures from my camera. All was not lost, though, and I do hae much delight to show you.
smoocherie stayed with us for the weekend, which was delightful; we’ve seen more of her these past three weeks than in the six months prior. Shelly got a new, silver corset for this year’s festivities, and it is the hottest. Thing. EVAR.
The convention was, as it always is, the usual assortment of geeks, freeks, and general hottnests. This year’s festivities featured not one but two strip parties; Strip “Are You a Werewolf?” and Strip “Apples to Apples.” Physicist Sir Arthur Eddington once observed, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” It is not, however, so strange that datan0de can not make any part of it into a game in which the players disrobe.
Of bondage, drama, and nudity
Friday night: Strip “Are You a Werewolf?” This is a social game, played with a deck of cards which randomly assigns a role–werewolf, villager, or seer, to the players. A game is played in cycles; each night, the werewolves, whose identity is unknown to the other players, silently and secretly choose a player to devour. That player is then removed from the game, and the seer silently chooses a player and has a vision that identifies that player as villager or werewolf. The villagers, incensed at the heinous crime, vote among themselves as to which of their number they believe to be the werewolf, who is then lynched. The cycle continues until the werewolves devour the villagers or the villagers correctly identify and lynch the werewolves.
Traditionally, the way we play is that each member of the losing side–werewolf or villager–loses an article of clothing.
During this year’s werewolf party, someone brought out a large coil of rope and casually mentioned that it was ideal for tying people up with, and someone else–a friend of phyrra and nihilus–eagerly volunteered to be the subject. “Well, hey,” someone else–I didn’t quite catch who–said, “Franklin here does rope bondage, and the next thing you know…
“I’ll try to do this without groping you,” sez I. “Groping’s cool, grope away,” sez she. I managed not to grope her–probably a good thing, since her partner appeared about midway through, within seconds of this picture being taken, and there was some drama. I didn’t witness the drama, and I’m told it was resolved amicably the following day, which is always good.
Got a nasty rope burn on my thumb, though.
Of elevators, Apples to Apples, and taking over the world
Saturday we made our appearance at the convention quite late, a fact I blame on smoocherie. I wanted to go to bed early, see, but she insisted on being interesting at me.
We arrived eventually, and ate ice cream. Ran into an old partner of mine, M:
Also spent some time with my archnemesis, and saw his hero, Gir:
My partner S‘s other partner Sterling entered, and won, the masquerade contest. I’m told this is a character from the TV show Angel; never seen it.
Necro was held in a new hotel this year. Traditionally, in every hotel which plays host to the convention, at least one of the elevators will fail every year…and this year continued the tradition. Fortunately, the new hotel is equipped with hydraulic elevators, which don’t fall when they’re overloaded.
The elevators were mirrored, as all swanky elevators in all upscale hotels are.
Later that evening: strip Apples to Apples.
Sunday: Groping and Relationship Negotiations
istislah showed up on Sunday, so sadly missed much of the activities. She did, however, bring a rather copious supply of M&Ms.
Now, negotiation is an important part of any relationship, particularly a polyamorous relationship or a BDSM relationship. smoocherie and I are, for example, currently negotiating the beginning of a relationship right now. However, even the fearsome negotiation skills of all of us combined–smoocherie, Shelly, Sterling, and I–failed before the complexity of the negotiations over istislah‘s M&Ms. In fact, I was just today informed that istislah has made a unilateral and entirely non-negotiated decision regarding the disposition of the remaining M&Ms, something which might warrant a Kierista-style gestalt on the subject.
She also took advantage of the opportunity to grope smoocherie, something that may or may not have been negotiated but definitely needed no intervention:
I had more pictures, which have been sent to digital oblivion–among them being pics during Werewolf and many pics of S and the members of the Smoosh. smoocherie snapped this pic of me, which is horribly backlit but shows off my fun “Hellraiser” jacket:
I know a lot of you guys out there have additional pics, which I need to get copies of…datan0de? zensidhe? nekkidsteve? (I got the pics you sent of the impromptu bondage session.) Anybody else?
…I give you a random collection of pictures to look at.
First, Molly, the new kitty, sleeping on the couch…
And also, S, in Ybor City, handcuffed to a wall…
So, Shelly’s back in town! She left Thursday to go spend some time with merovingian, and came back Sunday. I got quite a lot done while she was gone, and also had the opportunity to spend some time with s and her boyfriend.
S and her boyfriend and I spent part of the weekend building a new St. Andrew’s cross, to replace the one we left in Boston. This one is painted metallic silver; the effect is, I think, kind of interesting…
This morning, Shelly got a copy of the new video game World of Warcraft, and she’s already an addict. She’s been glued to the computer since she got back from class this morning,a nd probably will be until she goes to class this evening, I imagine.
At some point this evening, s and I are probably going to be going on a…well, I don’t know quite what to call it. We’ll be spending some alone time together exploring the possibility of a romantic relationship–can you call that a “date”? “Date” doesn’t quite seem like the right word. A spending-time-together thing to see if we want to start a relationship. Thing.
Thursday: Thanksgiving with the Haus Boheme crowd, which should be fun.
Friday: Tampa Fetish Party with friends, possibly including s and her boyfriend. I made this for Shelly, which she’ll probably wear:
It’s entirely made from zip ties and 7/8″ rubber O-rings; takes about fifteen minutes to make. I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out.
Saturday: Dinner with my parents.
Sunday: PolyTampa.
In other news, I’ve been approached by a couple of different publishers who’re interested in the book on polyamory I’ve been working on. One of them wants to see an outline and some writing samples; the other wants an outline and three chapters. So now I actually have to get off my ass and start writing again; I’ve been neglecting the project ever since Boston. Yikes! Now that the idea is beginning to turn into reality, it’s beginning to turn into work as well.
From a recent shoot with phyrra (both digital and film; these are the digital images):
+2 more Bondage, not safe for work
…I’ll post those later today.
Instead, i want to complain about silicone.
The distribution of stress inside silicone rubber is fractal in nature. What that means is that silicone rubber tends to fail in unpredictable ways when it’s stressed. It never cleaves cleanly in the way that most solids do. It will rip or tear, always roughly and sometimes not at the point of greatest stress.
What that means is that carving, boring, and drilling a silicone dildo is exceptionally difficult and frustrating. It’s virtually impossible to get a clean hole through a silicone dildo, and the silicone can rip even when being sliced by a razor knife. It also deforms under stress, of course, so the cuts and holes assume an irregular shape when the stress is relieved.
Frustratin’.
