Somewhere between "oops" and "ooh noooooo"

So, it's Christmas. Good ol' December 25th. I'm not a fan, but a lot of people are, so let's not dwell on that.

What today's date also means is that I'm basically a hair's breadth away from being 31 years old. I've changed a lot over the past few years (a lot of it for the better, I'd say), and one thing I thought I had gotten over was my ability to completely and utterly embarrass myself to the point of not being able to replay the situation over and over in my head until I collapse. It's useless in terms of damage control and it isn't particularly kind to my mental state, but I had managed to lose that part of myself a while ago.

At least, I thought I had.

Last week, late in the evening, Mike's exwife stopped by to grab something their son had left at our place. Our place, the tiny mess. Our place, where you enter in the living room and can see my command center of a computer in its entirety, the monitors readable at a step or  two from the door.

On the main screen was Facebook, and in the corner was a conversation with my friend Rex. In that conversation was the phrase "whenever Mike starts talking to new people on OkCupid."

Fuck.

So the exwife came into the apartment, took a few steps toward the table/desk we spend most of our time at, and, I fear, read the conversation. The one that points toward a non-standard relationship. The type of relationship she has hinted at being unacceptable and worth hauling his ass into court over in the hopes of taking his parental rights away.

Nope, that panicky embarrassment is still there, front and center.

Fuck.

I tried to figure out if coming out to people about my sexuality and facing rejection was worse than accidentally coming out as poly/open to a potentially hostile woman whose existence in our lives is dictated by the existence of the stepson I adore beyond reason. Maybe it's the fact that I'm now half a lifetime away from the days I admitted I "like girls," but this actually feels more painful. The harassment back then was awful, but this? This potentially carries more weight.

Mike's response to the situation was, initially "fuck her" (not literally) and that, if it came up, we would deal with it. He didn't blame me or say I fucked up (that's all me), and his feeling was, if she says anything, he has no problem pointing out that she shouldn't have been reading my screen, regardless of it being out in plain view.

Meanwhile, I'm just hoping it doesn't come up. I spend enough time feeling alienated in terms of being able to talk to people about how our relationship works that I don't need someone to know who will ultimately have a problem with it -- more than the average person does to begin with, I guess.

What's fun is that I'm totally in favor of people just being out and open about their sexuality and their relationships. But because I'm still not comfortable with the perception of certain flavors of relationships, it keeps me from actually engaging the part of myself that is polyamorous and bisexual. I'll admit to being a total wimp and taking the easy way out and hiding in the appearance of heteronormativity, sticking to admitting ladycrushes to my husband and a few friends and playing loops of sexy-girl-time in my head when the situation warrants it.

Standard stuff, I guess, for most married people. It just makes me feel like a fraud.

Ultimately, the panic has lessened enough that I can function again, but I'm still afraid. Thankfully we will be out of this apartment soon and you can be damn sure I will be hiding my computer screen better in the next place.

Asexuality, for those even more removed

So here I am, tacking my two cents onto Mike's previous post. I'll be honest and say I didn't read the page he linked -- I deactivated my Fetlife account a while ago because I couldn't for the life of me feel like I fit in -- but I was thinking about how hard it is to explain to other people about how asexuality works and why I'm okay because married to someone who falls in that spectrum.

Let me lay out the scene for you:

I'll admit that, at times, I complain about it. I'll be at work and one of my raunchier coworkers (I love you guys) will make some sort of reference to some winked and nodded implied sex act, leaving me to comment that I didn't know what that was like anymore. Do I do that all the time? No. But I'm bad at pretending things are any different than they are (I used all that up back when I still lived at home with my mother) plus I am entirely too open about certain things at the best of times. The people I say things like that to are often aghast or offended, or like to think terribly of Mike because of some societal belief that all men are led solely by their gonads, therefore, clearly he must be defective.

One of them actually told me, "maybe if you lost some weight and put some effort into how you look, he'd want to fuck you more." It's weird to say, but she wasn't actually trying to be a bitch. She just not only doesn't understand asexuality but she doesn't understand that I'm not the type to dress a certain way or wear makeup not because I'm lazy -- I actually just don't think there's anything wrong with the way I was put together. I don't believe in God, but my reaction to people doing things to change how they look is often along the lines of, "So you're saying that God made a mistake and you have to fix it?"

Anyway.

If someone had told me ten years ago that I would meet someone who I would want to spend the rest of my life with and we wouldn't be particularly sexually active and I'd be okay with it, I'd consider it another reason to never venture out in the real world because people who think they have psychic powers are creepy and often wrong. But here I am, and here is how things have shaken out.

I understand that it's hard to wrap one's mind around. It's why I don't bring it up much with other people, but I also don't go out of my way to hide it. I'm of the belief that, in a world where people are often so self-motivated and always on the prowl for anything that furthers their agenda, when two people (or three, or four...) can get together and work together for mutual satisfaction and enjoyment, it's the most beautiful thing those people can do together. It can relax tensed muscles, it can help ease headaches and body pain, it can create life and deepen existing bonds between partners. But I can also understand that some people just aren't into it and have other ways of dealing with headaches. Over time, I've learned to find other ways to enjoy Mike's company. As anyone in a relationship knows, it's almost impossible to find someone who feels the same way as you do about everything across the boards. So if you won't break up with someone because maybe they like tomato soup and you prefer New England clam chowder, can't sex be handled similarly if everything else is going well?

What it comes down to for me is that life's too hard to throw away a good thing over a lack of mind-blowing mutual orgasms, even if some of my friends think it's ridiculous. I just do my part to convince them otherwise by speaking well of my relationship and not only bringing Mike up in conversation when he's driving me crazy. And ultimately, they're not the ones putting in the work every day in this marriage so I appreciate their concern, but that's as far as I'll take it.

While True, It's Not the Whole Story

Hello Dan; I am a mid-40s male in the midwest. I have just been told by my 12-year-old daughter her mom has told her that the reason that her mom and I divorced is that I cheated on her. While that is true it does not tell the whole story...

That was the first couple of sentences of a caller's message on the Savage Lovecast this week. It's from episode 420; check it out here (I recommend the podcast in general, not just the ones I comment on). It's not the first time I've heard it... And it struck very close to home. This is a person who was with his wife for a number of years; a marriage that turned into a sexless, possibly emotionally abusive relationship. There was cheating, a divorce, and then he married the person he cheated with; and his ex, the mother of his daughter, has explicitly fingered that and him to be the reason their marriage fell apart.

This struck me for two reasons - first, because of how much it reminded me of our own marriage; and second, because of how close-to-home it strikes me relative to my ex's threats around my son. And the guy's problem, while I sympathize and identify with it, isn't the most important part of the podcast, not the part most worth listening to; Dan's response is.

I don't think I've talked about it directly before, but my marriage ended in an incredibly ugly way. There were accusations of cheating, actual cheating, yelling, arguments, suicide attempts, a mental hospital, a coming out as bisexual (which to this day I still don't know whether it was honest) followed - two years later - by a coming out as lesbian, and an enormous amount of pain. I'll never know with certainty how much of our marriage was her lying to herself and how much was her lying to me; I do have a pretty good idea how much of it was her using me to get what she wanted at my expense even after she no longer loved me or wanted to be with me. And yet with all this, with all this history, she still felt virtuous in threatening to take my kinks to a judge and trying to have my son taken away - because in her mind, I was a monster, and therefore it was natural to assume everyone else would agree. And the really damning part? Most of them would.

You asked me, how do you convince her you're not a monster? You don't be a monster.

It's hard enough presenting my lifestyle to adults. It's hard enough trying to make them understand there's nothing wrong with me because of my interest in pain, or blood, or bondage, or domination and submission. It's hard enough trying to make them understand there's nothing wrong with me because of the fact I don't use monogamy as a natural rest state and am honest enough to sometimes say that out loud.

What most people seem to forget is that in these cases, most of the time, we're not the bad guys; all too often we're the victims. It's easy to condemn us because we're different; it's easy to condemn us because our minds don't run in quite the same circles as everyone else. It's worse because we're open about it sometimes, even proud of it... It's worse when we aren't ashamed, because we're accused of flaunting it or "spreading our disease".

The best defense you have against this is education. When your children are 8, or 12? No, this isn't a conversation you should be having, at least in the specific sense; they shouldn't know all about your sex life. But when they're 16, 18, 20? When your parents are the ones? Your siblings? Yes - they should know. They should know the truth about the kinks, about the interests, about the fact that there's nothing wrong with being poly or dominant or masochistic or anything else. This won't be any easier with kink than it is with homosexuality; some people are just bigoted and no amount of logic or truth will sway that. And sometimes, they should know that the ones their bigotry and ignorance are hurting are their family.

I'm terrified of talking to my parents about it, because they are bigoted and set in their ways; I'm not scared of telling my sister or my cousins any more, because they're much more supportive of the.. Different and minorities (...and, well, because we already told my one cousin we're poly anyway). And I'm scared of telling my son, but I actually don't think it'll go badly. I don't particularly care if he grows up being straight or gay or bi or pansexual; vanilla or kinky or whatever. He has a shot at being brought up without the kindof of narrow-minded bigotry that poisons too much of our culture and leads to me being labelled a monster.

The real monster in this situation is ignorance... And it's not something you'll ever escape. It's something you simply have to pick your battles and stand you ground and be proud of who you are.

Now you see it...

One of my coworkers and friends - let's call her Ace - was told last night by her girlfriend - let's call her Gwen - of three years that she wanted to break up because they were "sexually incompatible". Ace was not... Traditionally upset; but it's the first time I'd ever say that she looked shaky. It was strange to me because this was a couple who started dating very close to the time Ash and I did - if I remember right their first sortof-date was two days after ours - and they'd been talking about forever at one point. More than one point.

Granted I know the situation purely from Ace's point of view, but from her side it was almost a total surprise. They agree they're extremely compatible in almost every way. The only place Ace - or, according to her, Gwen - thinks they aren't compatible is in their sex drive; that is, Gwen would love to have sex every day, while Ace has a much lower interest. They'd been having some trouble a few weeks back due to an argument around being open or closed; or, more specifically, Gwen wanted to be open and announced she was going to be - with or without Ace... Leaving Ace defensive and confused and upset. They talked through it and agreed to work on it and ways they could satisfy both of them... But the fact that they aren't compatible sexually is the reason Gwen gave, and because she thought they were working on that, it took Ace totally by surprise.

So... There's a lot of aspects to this situation here, and I don't want to dig into all of them here; some of the details really aren't mine to share... But what it did make me think about was how little Ace trusts Gwen right now. A month ago, that would have been entirely untrue; but their interactions have just sortof led Ace to the point where she doesn't know what to believe. Several weeks ago she felt like she was being given an ultimatum; then she felt like she was being cheated on; then she felt like Gwen was looking for an excuse to get Ace to break up with her. Several weeks later, I'm forced to wonder if that thought back then was the right one - that Gwen was looking to find a way to force Ace to be the bad gal instead of her, and eventually just gave up and pulled the trigger when it turned out Ace was too much in love to actually do so.

Unfortunately, we'll probably never be 100% sure how much of this is truth and how much of it is lies and how much is just something we don't know about. It's worse for Ace, obviously, being the one in the situation; but I'm close enough to her to worry and sympathize and agonize of it as well.

By the time I separated from my ex-wife, any semblance of trust we had once had was totally shattered. She had managed to convince herself of several key things about me that weren't true (mostly, that I was cheating on her); and in return she lied to be me about being gay, cheated on me for more than half our marriage, and left me with years of doubt replacing what had previously just been trust and love. It's fascinating to me, looking back over it, how trust - or the lack thereof - changes your perceptions of past acts, both by you and towards (against?) you.

Unsurprisingly, I have a lot of regrets relating to my marriage; mostly around the possibility of having been naive. I don't know yet whether Ace will regret her relationship with Gwen, or at least aspects of it. Probably the better question is "how much", not "if", because it's human nature to regret things that could have been better - even if we don't know so until after the fact.

In some ways this has very much shaped my attitude towards new kinky (well, more to the point, new Dom/sub) relationships. It's much easier to ignore the risk and ignore the possibility of things going wrong and turning against you; but it's much safer not to trust. Unfortunately, any type of relationship - kinky relationships far more than most - desperately need trust to be functional and healthy.

The most basic building block of that trust is always going to be communication; I've hit on it before, and I'll continue to harp on it probably for the entire life of this blog. A more basic thing, though - and the moral of today's post - is to remember that you aren't the only person in your relationships. Whatever the power dynamic, however many corners there are in your love polygon, no matter what you do in the privacy of your home... Everyone else in the relationship is just as much a human as you are. Everyone else is just as much prone to being scared, or being angry, or feeling cheated, or feeling sad... Or not wanting to be the bad guy. Always remember that - think about what you're about to do from the other side. Once someone loses their trust in you, it's too late to get it back.

Some men are born kinky...

"Some men are born kinky, some men achieve kinkiness, and some men have kinkyness thrust upon them." - Dan Savage, paraphrasing William Shakespeare.

I've spent a lot of time over the last few months thinking about kink and various related topics. I can only assume this isn't a particular surprise to anyone reading here, which is probably for the best, but it got me wondering about other peoples' various first experiences and memories with kink. Did I ever mention my first memory? It was a movie I found in my parents' VHS collection a long time ago, called "What the Swedish Butler Saw". My memories of it are pretty vague - it was, after all, 25 years ago at this point - but there was a scene involving a woman being chained to the wall by manacles. Shortly after that, there was a movie on TV (some random 80s teenage angst movie I have very vague memories of) where one of the scenes involved a bet where the loser had to clean the winner's bedroom naked.

So nothing incredibly sketchy or exciting, really; just things that stuck in my head quite some time ago and always makes me smile slightly to think back to. The beginnings of my own kink, at least as I've consciously identified it. So I continued the train of thought and asked a number of people - friends, acquaintances, people on Fetlife, etcetera - for their earliest kinky memory, and I thought it would be worth sharing some of them with you. I think the only one that made me blush was the one ex-girlfriend who said that I was her earliest kinky memory. I'm not sure whether to be proud or not?

I guess my point in doing this is to just drive home the fact... Kink doesn't necessarily com from abuse, or hatred, or fear, or anger. It comes from a lot of places, and can come from those things, but it can also come from the most innocent sources - childhood games and music videos and whatever else. Also, since I never defined "kink" in the question, it's been very interesting to see how people interpreted that when answering! Either way... I hope you enjoy as much as I did.

"A friend in high school.. She liked to talk a lot and I'm good at listening lol we talked about sexual-ness often - her more than me lol"

"The fanfic I read on the internet. Then a boyfriend."

"First time? Hmmm. Maybe having my hands pinned during sex when I was younger? And please don't laugh... Madonna's Erotica album and Sex book."

"TV or books, I'm not sure. Played a "save the princess" game with friends when I was maybe 8? It mostly involved taking turns tying each other up But not very effectively and there was nothing more to it."

"Bondage scenes in comic books shaped my early development. From there, random TV scenes fueled my interest. After that, porn at the newsstands (remember those?) aided and abetted by clerks who didn't care how old I was."

"I tried tying myself up around 8 or so and enjoyed it?"

"Believe it or not and completely on my own thought when I was 7ish I saw a curtain rod chain, When mom and dad were cleaning the house I don't know what the feeling was but I snatched it and then went to my moms jewelry box and "browed" two of her bangles (the kind that click). I put all the pieces together and had my first set of manacles, I've had happy little wrists ever since......ankles....... Neck.......... Well you get the point."

"Saw Siouxsie Sioux on Top Of The Pops. I was 9, and two thoughts went through my head 1) You can't think she's hot, she's a girl and that's wrong and 2) I don't care how much you love that leather and those whips, that's wrong too. I've found myself eventually living a very wrong life..."

"It'd probably be either some of the TV shows and movies that I loved to watch, or experimenting with paper clips to craft the worlds flimsiest handcuffs."

"My first experience even realizing that kink was a thing that existed was when I was just hitting puberty and I was methodically scouring the internet for that "one thing" that was supposed to turn me on, because at the time I believed that must exist (because I didn't have the framework to realize I could honestly be sexually attracted to nothing). As such, my first experiences were strongly negative as much of what I encountered was either deeply sexist in a very violent and regressive way or at least was presenting a very sexist viewpoint as part of a kink I didn't have the sophistication to understand at the time."

"I remember I used to tie up Barbie when I was really young. I think it was with shoe laces."

"I vividly recall my first kinky fantasy ever. I don't know exactly how old I was but it was 4 or younger because we moved when I was 4 and it was before that. It involved being given deliberately unsolvable math problems and punished for getting them wrong. The imaginary people who gave me the math problems were called "the Problem Lady and her Problem Child." I think someone must have called me a problem child while punishing me for doing something bad, and since I'd only heard the word "problem" before in regard to math problems, I was trying to figure out how that made sense. I remember really liking the fantasy though. I wished that the Problem Lady would visit me in real life. I don't recall what the punishments were. They weren't severe, I don't think. The fantasy was more about the Problem Lady as this dominant personality who enjoyed giving people impossible tasks than about the specifics of the punishment."

"Oh gosh... it started maybe around four years old with 'rescue' scenarios, before I had any framework for BDSM and how that would work, and that was the game I'd play out alone, mostly in my head."

"I remember seeing those detective magazines on the rack at the grocery store."

"When I was in kindergarten, I had a friend who came over to my house. My bed was set up so there was about a foot of space between the frame and the wall. I remember putting her in that space and telling her she was a prisoner in my dungeon. At some point, I remember taking her out and spanking her (over her clothes, and not too hard, but all the same)."

"When I was 12 years old, I had a pair of crappy metal handcuffs. I am sure that you all know the type, safety latch, sometime wouldn't even lock. Yeah, those. For whatever reason, I was playing with them during the day, then at night I just thought about wearing them as slept. I don't know why I thought about that, but I did. So that night I cuffed my hands behind my back and curled up sleeping like that until morning when my father woke me up. Either he didn't notice or he didn't say anything, either way, I was hooked. =P"

"When I was 8 years old, I was in a small stall of the bathroom in a Mormon temple in Switzerland masterbating while laying on the floor with my panties tight around my ankles. It's the first time I realized I really liked the feeling of being restrained while masterbating. But, I also found the thought of someone possibly walking in on me quite exciting, especially because we were in a religious temple."

"Mine was tickling when I was a youngin I'd tickle my female cousins and my aunts."

"Mine was a very submissive fantasy, when I was about 5 or 6. I dreamed of a dark and twisted king who would capture me, lock me in his castle, and rape and punish me out of love."

"The corporal punishment scene in Lord of the Flies. I was, maybe 6 years old."