Gender and BDSM, D/s, S&M

Sometimes it I just plain can’t remember what I’ve written here. It is complicated by trying to distinguish what I’ve written on my other sites and things I’ve told Alexandra in email (she know everything about me).

So if I repeat myself I hope you’ll forgive me.

I want to make another stab and capturing my subjective experience of gender and BDSM. Not having the energy and inclination to try to deal with this exhaustively (which would surely exhaust you dear reader) this is all fragmentary and provisional. And maybe redundant.

All the earliest fantasies I can remember of wanting to be controlled and tormented starred guys as the ‘dominant.’

I did once try to figure out if I could get my little sister to spank me. Not that I’ve ever thought of incest. It was just a gender agnostic desire to be hurt.

Through years of fantasizing about the most painful and humiliating things being done to me it was always under the subjugation of a man.

Until one day I had a fantasy about a female sadist.

My feelings about gender are too complicated for me to really even begin to try to explain here. I’ll opt for treating myself as an at least partly sexist man.

My feelings about womanhood and femininity (which aren’t necessarily the same thing) are strongly conditioned by my momma. She was a longsuffering woman who never spoke an unkind word. And she lived for too many years under the heel of my selfish father (who if he’d had more self-control might’ve been an ideal Dom).

I have an involuntary desire to protect, assist, comfort a feminine person. I’m guilty of idealizing. I know they aren’t really better. But something in me feels - quite happily - they are special.

Women, without regard to femininity, I’ve never thought of as other than equals. Mass media crap aside I don’t think of them as less rational, more subjective.

I was about seventeen when I stopped opening doors for women. A female friend faulted my gallantry. So I stopped. [(1) Alexandra lets me open doors for her because she knows it makes me happy. (2) In public places I open doors - good southern boy - for everybody.]

What about very feminine women a sharp reader might ask. Hell, I don’t know. There’s such rich spectrum of gender qualities. Really the only thing to do is respond to the individual. In life there’s nothing better than having an inner eye for individuality and attuning yourself to it.

The idea of being hurt by a woman was a bit of a mindfuck. It violated much of my conditioning. But I quickly fell in love with all the cruel female stereotypes. Selfish, petty, ruthless - yeah, they can all be applied to men but for me to translated them into the other gender was pretty strong stuff.

It was in thinking of dominant women my masochism shifted.

With men I mostly thought of physical pain. It was pure S&M. Oh, they owned and used me ruthlessly in my mental dramas.

But with women I came to appreciate the more purely emotional side of things, to really grasp D/s as dominance and submission.

I remember reading a local dominant woman writing about how she bound a guy naked near the door and ordered a pizza. If the door opened a little too widely the delivery guy would see the guy.

There were purely emotional torments, leaving yourself vulnerable in ways that had nothing to do with bodily pain that had never occurred to me before. (Sure a guy could do the same to you. It is just that I’d never thought of it that way before.)

In thinking of being owned by a woman I came to think more of surrender, submission. Ultimately of worship.

In masochism to a degree there’s the pleasure in your physical self: the pleasure of pain.

In thinking of giving myself to a woman I came to better understand the idea of abandoning your own will. Sure I’d done that in my fantasies of men.

But in my images of a controlling woman the self-abnegation, self-denial were really appreciated for the first time.

This is just a story of my inner psychohistory. Applicable only to me. Not to anyone else. We each become who we are by our own paths.

Self-discovery remains one of life’s supreme pleasures.