Men and women both enjoy looking at magazines filled with photographs of scantily-clad women in sexually suggestive poses. Men want to fuck the models in the photographs; women want to be the models in the photographs.
Discuss.
So we’re partying at Shelly’s new pad in Gainesville, and the conversation turned (as it always does) to sex.
I’ve had a vasectomy; best $150 I’ve ever spent. Prior to that, I always relied on mechanical or hormonal birth control, and with condoms now at a buck apiece (or more!), goddamn if that doesn’t get expensive after a while. And you know, people just don’t think about the amount of money they spend every year to get off.
So, I’m curious…
News item of the day: Woman blames security flaw in Mozilla web browser for destroying her relationship.
From the article:
“This privacy flaw has caused my fiancĂ© and I to break-up after having dated for five years… Firefox should be respecting every single area of privacy per user on one system. It’s not doing that,” the woman writes.
Now this here, folks, is an outstanding example of how people absolutely hate to take responsibility for their own feelings, responses, and emotional reactions.
The bug in Mozilla did not cause the breakup. Insecurity caused the breakup, together with poor communication skills on the parts of both people involved.
The woman says she and her ex were together for five years. Well, if they were dating for five years, what in the name of all that is holy were they talking about–the weather? Whose turn it was to wash the car? Clearly, neither of them was talking about the parameters and assumptions of their relationship, else she would have known that he was visiting online dating sites, and he would have known that she was not OK with that.
She learned something she did not know, because they were not talking. What she learned triggered insecurity on her part, which she did not deal with gracefully because she does not take responsibility for her own emotional responses. She did not talk about her feelings and the fact that his behavior violated her boundaries and expectations, because they both lacked decent communication skills. And somehow, all of this is…
…Mozilla’s fault?
Amazing.
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?
Beneath the cut is an image created as part of a French AIDS awareness poster series, which has been making the rounds of the Internet lately. It’s work-safe, at least in the sense that there’s nothing particularly indecent about it (it was designed for public display, after all), but…
May be triggering, especially if you have a spider phobia. You’ve been warned.
I used to believe that nothing could quash my sex drive. Being too tired? Hell, Shelly takes advantage of me in my sleep. Being sick in bed with mono? Slows me down a bit, that’s about it.
But it appears there’s one thing, at least, that’s all but guaranteed to quash my sex drive: the pain of a broken tooth.
Last week, before it started hurting too badly, S and I had a date, and I discovered to my surprise and delight that she still has her genuine Catholic schoolgirl uniform from the days when she was a genuine Catholic schoolgirl, and so we played a variant of Naughty Schoolgirl and Stern Headmaster that might be called “The Naughty Schoolgirl Confesses Her Sins,” and much fun was had by all…
…but since then, nothing. Ow ow ow.
I got a referral to The Best Oral Surgeon in the World (seriously, this guy is really, really cool), and the tooth is now fixed and has almost completely stopped hurting. It was a messy procedure; I won’t disturb you with the details because they would…err, disturb you, but I now have stitches in my mouth and a new appreciation for the capabilities of a handheld drill and a good old-fashioned lever. At any rate, I’m almost back to normal, for some value of “normal.” Which means that Shelly and I may be able to try out the carrot-shaped vibrator feorlen gave me last week; it has digital controls and lights up at the end. 🙂
Being in pain, or jittery and hazy from pain meds, or both, doesn’t appear to affect my ability to play World of Warcraft, however–something I’ve been doing a great deal of over the past few days. I’ve virtually stopped playing my warrior since he’s reached Level 60 (the highest level the game currently permits), and have been playing my warlock instead; he just reached Level 59, and I may get him to 60 tonight if I play.
The warlock is the only high-level spellcaster I have. Spellcasters in World of Warcraft use mana as energy to fuel their spells; a character has a certain amount of mana, which goes down as he casts spells and then goes back up again over time. As a character rises in level, he gets greater amounts of mana, but he also begins using a wider variety of more powerful spells, which consume mana more quickly, so the amount of mana scales pretty closely with the mana requirements of his new spells.
However, I’ve noticed that at very high levels, the rate at which mana regenerates does not scale with the amount of mana a character has; above level 45 or so, it starts taking a very long time for mana to come back after a fight. (There are potions and drinks things you can buy that speed the rate of mana recovery, but they’re expensive and take up space in your inventory.) What that means is that by the time a spellcaster reaches level 55 or so, he’s spending a considerable amount of time–sometimes several minutes–after combats, waiting for his mana to regenerate.
I’ve also hit something of a brick wall in the book on polyamory I’m writing, and progress has slowed dramatically; I’ll add a few pages over the course of a week, then not work on it at all for three weeks or so. (Yes, this does relate to World of Warcraft; bear with me.)
Since I want to stay in the habit of writing, even if I’m not working directly on the book, I’ve started writing fiction–specifically, erotica. I haven’t ever tried writing fiction before, so it’s been an interesting experience. What I’ve started doing is writing while my character is regenerating mana; I keep the laptop next to the game computer, and switch back and forth, typing on the laptop while my character is regenerating mana, then switching back to the game when he’s ready. It seems to work pretty well; I’ve already got some stuff posted on Literotica.com and have so far accumulated an average reader rating of 4.93 out of 5.00 for quality, not bad for my first piece of fiction evar.
A strange side effect, though, is that I’m beginning to eroticise World of Warcraft, and playing is becoming an arousing experience. The human mind is a weird, weird thing.
And speaking of eroticising unusual activities, I just want to reiterate that having a girlfriend who is aroused by math is the hottest thing evar!
A while ago, I found an online sexual glossary that had a lot of definitions I found problems with (for example, it defined “polyamory” as something like “group sex between multiple people”). I dropped an email to the site owner, taking issue with the definitions in the glossary. He emailed me back immediately, and not only responded very positively, but also sent me a T-shirt.
We’ve emailed a few times since then, and he’s asked me if I’d be willing to write reviews of the various sex toys and stuff his company sells. That should be fun, I think. I’m considering adding a reviews section to the Symtoys site, y’know, because I don’t ever have enough to do.
And speaking of which, I’ve done yet another significant update to my own BDSM dictionary and polyamory glossary because, y’know, what else is there to do after oral surgery?
Tomorrow, hanging out with Shelly and S, and then camping with Shelly and smoocherie and her partner fritzcat66! Then next week, Front 242, and then the following week, Shelly’s other partner merovingian will be in town! *delighted*
And in the final piece of good news, alias_node isn’t going to die. 🙂 It’s not cancer, but rather an incredibly rare (and treatable) bacterial infection called Lemierre’s syndrome. They figured it out in time, and while he’s up for some misery that’s probably going to make a broken tooth look like a casual midafternoon stroll through the Golden City beyond the Elysium Fields, his prognosis is most excellent. Which is most excellent.
Do Gays Cause Hurricanes? by Janis Walworth
Do “Unnatural” Acts Cause Natural Disasters?
Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, recently warned Orlando, Florida, that it was courting natural disaster by allowing gay pride flags to be flown along its streets. “A condition like this will bring about … earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor,” he said, apparently referring to his belief that the presence of openly gay people incurs divine wrath and that God acts through geological and meteorological events to destroy municipalities that permit gay people the same civil liberties as others. (Robertson also warned Orlando about terrorist bombs, suggesting the possibility that God may also employ terrorists.)
Before Pat and his Christian cronies get too carried away promulgating the idea that natural disasters are prompted by people who displease God,they should take a hard look at the data. Take tornadoes. Every state (except Alaska) has them – some only one or two a year, dozens in others. Gay people are in every state (even Alaska). According to Pat’s hypothesis, there should be more gay people in states that have more tornadoes. But are there? Continue reading
Ugol’s Law states that no sexual fetish is unique–that is, if something turns you on, then someone else, somewhere, is turned on by the same thing.
Shelly is currently in school, pursuing a degree in chemical engineering with an eye toward using it to get a doctorate in biomedical nanotechnology. More and more universities are offering graduate-level degrees in nanotechnology, mostly interdisciplinary degrees that bring together people from medical, physics, and chemical engineering backgrounds.
As you might imagine, her coursework involves rather a lot of math. And, as it turns out, Shelly is uncontrollably aroused by math. No, there isn’t a word for it (I looked), but math gets her hot. Really hot.
And she’s started doing her homework on my body, using a fine-point marker pen to work out problems on my back. Which is beyond hot. By the time she’s finished with her homework, she’s usually uncontrollably aroused and very aggressive. I won’t bore you with what happens afterward, except that it involves numerous implements, floggers, and other things which might offend those with delicate sensibilities. In fact, I went in to the office today with a complex problem in analytical geometry written on my back.
So it should come as no surprise, then, that the Intellectual Sexiness Test meme that’s been making the rounds these days says:
…some lighter fare, about kitties and about social dynamics.
First, the kitties. My kitties love John Woo movies!
Every animal that exists is bequeathed by God with a unique gift. Human beings are bequeathed with an amazing hubris that tells us we’re the chosen of God, for example, as a sort of “sorry, my bad” for the whole hairless-ape thing we’ve got going on. Dogs are gifted with boundless, enthusiastic optimism to compensate for the eating-off-the-floor thing.
But cats have the greatest gift of all. Cats are granted a special and limited immunity from the law of gravity.
Three nights ago, S was over late, and the kitties were feeling frisky. In a beautiful and stirring tribute to the Great Director, the two of them faced off against the vast expanse of the living room hallway, then charged each other in a stirring reenactment of that scene in “Mission: Impossible” with the motorcycles. About three feet apart, they both leaped high into the air, and collided with all four paws outstretched several feet off the ground, whereupon they fell heavily to earth in a ball of savage mock fury.
The performance was somewhat marred by the fact that they were both purring madly, but it was amazing nonetheless. I’d give the right arm of a crippled child with leukemia for a photograph, as long as it was a reasonably patient child who wasn’t using the arm for anything and liked cats and John Woo.
In other, and also amusing, news, I recently left a post about transhumanism on one of the Macintosh technical forums I read. I’ve been a member of this particular technical forum for many years, and I’m usually quite prolific. Another member of the forum told me that there was a conversation on transhumanism on a different forum he belonged to, and did I mind if he quoted me? I said no, not at all, and he sent me a URL to that other forum.
I went over, took a peek, and discovered that I have a fan obsessed freak. She used to use the Mac technical forum, disappeared around three years ago…
…apparently because of me. Seems I’d posted a comment in a conversation about using digital cameras with a Mac, and she’d said “Oh, a fellow photographer!” and visited my Web site, and read my polyamory pages, and, well…
“Creep” figured prominently in her comments on the other forum. “Depraved sexual appetities,” too. And other, even less flattering things.
She quit using the Mac technical forum because she couldn’t bear to use a message board I belonged to, and has over the past three years spent a great deal of time and energy talking about me on this other forum. For the sake of curiousity, I did a search on that other forum for my name. Thirty hits, in all, representing messages about me this woman has left.
In the most unkindest cut of all, she said something about how she can’t understand how I get all these women, because she’s seen pictures of me and I’m “sure not easy on the eyes.”
“Depraved sexual appetites,” that’s cool. “Sick pervert?” Hey, it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it. “Dedicating an entire Web site” to my “unnatural perversions and lusts?” Well, hey, it’s something to do on a Saturday afternoon. But “not easy on the eyes?” Man, that just hurts. 🙂
Y’know, the funny thing is, I barely even noticed when she stopped posting on the Mac forums, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually had a conversation with her. The emotional energy she’s invested in me is kind of flattering, in a peculiar way, but damn…
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from someone who’d read my BDSM pages on my Web site. He said he’d been married for twenty years, had always wanted to explore and experiment with BDSM, but had never shared this with his wife or told her about any of his fantasies.
Now, I get a lot of emails like that, and my response is always the same: “Tell her! You can’t expect to get what you want if you never ask for what you want.”
About three days later, I got another email from the same person, who said “I told my wife I wanted to explore BDSM, and she said that she had always wanted to do the same thing, but never told me. In fact, before we met, she was active in the BDSM community.”
Now, I get that response rather often, too–you’d be amazed how many people, after finally working up the courage o share their deep dark secret (whatever it may be) with their partners, hear “Oh, yeah? I’ve always wanted the same thing!”
But still. Twenty years. Twenty years these people were married, and they never told the other person about their fantasies and interests. Twenty years. Twenty… YEARS.
Jesus Christ. Twenty years???!! What the hell have these two been talking about for the last two decades? The weather? The TV show “Friends?” How do you spend two decades in an intimate relationship with someone, and never once talk about what you want your sexual life to look like?