Orgasm control through trial, error, and data

My partner, one of them, tracks his orgasms.  Actually he tracks edges, orgasms, and a couple other things.  He does this for a number or reasons, perhaps the most obvious that comes to mind is that I asked him to.

I first asked him to do this back in October, and he started tracking in November of last year.  I should say, he started tracking for me in Nov, he’s tracked for his own interest on and off for much longer.  Then we fell off the bandwagon for a couple of months while a lot of his orgasms and edges were in physical proximity to me and it turns out I am actually really bad at tracking things.  Then, last month, fueled by my new obsession with the quantified self movement, I asked him to start tracking again.

Why track orgasms?

Well, “you can’t change what you don’t track” is a truism usually thrown around in Business 101, but as we both get off on orgasm control, I’m just gonna roll with it here too.  Really understanding how his sexual response cycle works over time, looking at various factors that might impact it, and getting a feel for his “normal” lets me fuck shit up with greater precision.

Lets say I was gonna make a rule about how often he’s allowed to have an orgasm.  Let’s say I was gonna say once a week…Well, I know at least one person for whom that would be extremely challenging, that person would not be my partner.  By watching his orgasm patterns over time I have a much more intuitive understanding of the easy -> moderate -> challenging ask scale.  Oh but wait…

Observer effect

As soon as I asked him to start writing down, in a place I could easily access, all of his orgasms and edges he started having more orgasms (and fewer edges) than I expect.  Weird right?  Actually it correlates with something he’s told me before about orgasm control fantasies being soooo hot that those are the ones that actually lead to orgasms not edges for him.  Awesome, so with that in mind, and with this shiny graph I’m making that is going to tell me how long this initial peak lasts, I can make a few guesses.  I can guess at what a reasonable ask is for him based on how acclimated to play he is right now.  A reasonable ask isn’t just not too hard, it’s also not too easy.  Lets say, and this is just a guess, that he has a lot of orgasms when he firsts starts recording and then it peters off in a week or two.  I can then expect that when I first ask him to do something in this realm, like not to have orgasms, it’ll be really hard balanced with new and interesting, but as he settles into it, he can refocus on other things*.  This isn’t shocking news.  In fact I think I wrote about this wearing off of urgency before, but is it helpful for me to remember when designing asks?  Yes.  And it’s also something that can enter the “I know this is hard and I expected this to be hard for you but what you’re doing is making me happy” conversation.

There’s another thing that is really important here, and that is that the observer effect is really real.  Writing down his orgasms changes his sexual drive based on the data I have at hand.  And it’s not a problem.  I thought it was, but it’s not.  The thing that matters here is that it is consistent.  As long as he always records his orgasms and edges there will be a consistent level of this kind of noise, which means I can actually introduce variables and see how they impact his sexual response patterns later compared to this recorded baseline.  More importantly, this is why I want him to record this for me regardless of if we are actively playing or not.  Data that is complete over a longish time period means I will actually start seeing natural peaks and valleys.  If he only recorded when we were playing we’d always have this “oh orgasm control is hot” shock every couple of months as we restart recording at the same time that we’re looking at hot orgasm control porn together.

So what am I hoping to learn?

First off, the tracking part actually really turns me on, so to some degree, I’m justifying, retroactively, data collection I want to do for it’s own sake. #overlyhonestresearchmethods

That said, there’s also a few things I want to know more about. I want to know, for example, what happens just before he gets really horny so I could replicate it. I want to know how long he typically stays horny so that if he doesn’t want to have sex, I can make a guess at natural valley or external stress. And I want to know what the optimal conditions for him to be horny look like because a huge part of the active appeal  of orgasm control for me is seeing him horny and listening to him beg – so how do I maximize that?

Of course pretty graphs aren’t enough

Tracking my partner’s orgasms is hot because it’s a shared project. The patterns become meaningful because we can talk about them and because he gives me enough information to put the dots together. I have shared orgasm control fantasies with this person for years, and we’d been actively playing with this together for at least a year before doing this sort of data tracking made sense.

* I mentioned one not unexpected thing I learned (confirmed?) through this exercise – initiating anything in this realm comes with an initial interest spike.  But here are some other things I’m starting to pull apart:

• He expresses sexuality on multiple channels (I could look at the log or I can take a look at a semi-private porn stash he curates, or I can look at themes in our communication via IM or email)
• Asking him specifically to have orgasms or edges is a much bigger challenge than asking him not too, or rather, it’s a much bigger ask and big asks require more hospitable contexts
• Because I really like the fact that he is tracking stuff *for me* I generally want to acknowledge log entries as “you did the thing I asked for correctly, good boy” (which sounds more like “saw the entry, thanks.”) I am trying not to comment on every entry for various reasons involving popular theories in behavioral science.
• Slightly surprising is that while not actively traveling or managing travel logistics seems to be important for moments when he’s horny, work doesn’t seem to get in the way as I’d previously thought.

So that’s that.  I’m keeping the graphs private, but I’m having fun digging in

Hello new year!

Well hello there 2013.  We’re 7 days into the new year and I still don’t have a resolution except my usual “be less responsible.”  (I was a 16 year old with a retirement savings account, I can stand to rein it in a bit.)  Thus far I spent a good chunk of the year being home sick and generally relaxing.  Today was going to be a productive evening…

But then I found Rachel Kramer Bussel‘s Suite Encounters on my bookshelf and then…I was thinking about the travel I’d done in 2012 and re-reading some of my favorite hotel-themed stories.  I actually got this book initially because I was traveling so damn much it seemed like a good fit for my lifestyle choice of airports and hotels, but was really surprised at just how much I liked it.  I guess I don’t expect to find stories of female dominance in books not specifically marketed as such, but Suite Encountered included a handful of stories featuring great take-charge ladies in a really casual, matter-of-fact sexy way.  It’s really nice to come across things as explicitly role queer are Night School in a piece of mainstream(ish) pornography, and the “I know what I want” frankness of the ladies in Selfish and Special Request is also a welcome change.  If you’ve got some business travel coming up, check this out!  (It’s available on Kindle if you’re shy…)

So yeah, I was gonna be productive, maybe actually catch up on some blogs, or figure out what I want to do this year, but maybe I’ll just curl up with a good book…

Fantasy

My fantasy life of COURSE wanted you to push back and say “I said ‘No!’.” I have no idea how my reality would’ve dealt in that instance.

This is from a private conversation about my orgasm control/ crashing post, specifically about where reality interrupted the scene in the last of the three orgasms I describe.

It’s interesting because so little of what I read about orgasm control and chastity play isn’t fantasy.  It’s also interesting because unchecked fantasy is usually where I end up feeling bullied…let me back up, I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about moments when I feel like a guy is trying to bully me into topping him.  This is actually a behavior that is no different than a guy trying to bully a girl into sex of the vanilla persuasion, except the ask is slightly different.  I’ve been trying to find a framework to talk about male privilege and how men are sometimes taught by society that sex is something that’s owed to them without reinforcing this stereotype of sexually submissive men as demanding, whiny, or undesirable.

Put simply, I adore sexually submissive men, and I don’t tolerate demanding or prescriptive sexual behavior.  The ‘and’ is highlighted in that last sentence because I kept writing it with a ‘but’ and feeling like I was making a statement about submissive men being demanding, then I thought to put an ‘and’ in instead and suddenly realized these are divorced traits.  (Language is cool like that.)

I’m not being bullied into topping someone because submissive men bully their partners into sex, I am being bullied because I’m talking to an asshole who doesn’t have a firm grasp on ongoing and enthusiastic consent.  The fact that this particular asshole happens to be submissive is selection bias, which is to say, I am specifically looking for sexually submissive men therefore I’m already in that pool.  So, anyway, this brings me back to that odd paradigm where because I am female and because the way our society has historically handled sex and gender is busted, I not infrequently have to deal with men who think they have a god given right to my time and attention and would like to exercise that god given right by telling me about their fantasies and/or trying to push me into playing along.

I banned one acquaintance on a chat client after a drunken incident wherein he kept asking me for permission to have an orgasm and I kept explaining that we didn’t have that kind of relationship so, frankly, I didn’t care if he had an orgasm or not.  And I’ve received everything from insults to ballads from men I’ve informed, in nicer language usually, that I didn’t know them from Adam and didn’t want to talk to them thank you very much.  Usually, these bullying episodes are unchecked fantasy…I very much doubt my acquaintance wanted me – flesh, blood, and personhood me – to control his orgasm so much as he wanted some woman somewhere to take control and tell him he was or was not allowed to come.  Had reality actually been consulted he would be as aware as I was that we did not have that relationship; needless to say, reality was MIA.

One of the things that makes the relationship I describe in all my orgasm control posts possible, is my partner’s extremely firm grasp on a) reality and b) consent.  His near-religious adherence to consent culture, and the fact that he is so very careful with my boundaries is the cost of entry to the sex I (and I hope, we) want to have.  In taking a step back and being enthusiastically available to me, but not actively pursuing me he gives me space to step forward and engage rather than spend my time fighting my spidey sense.  Fantasies are hot, incredibly so, and we share them regularly, but knowing our reality means actually getting to do this in reality!

I don’t know if I would have said “no” in my fantasy.  More likely than not, I wouldn’t fantasize about quite this situation – I don’t fantasize about partners being pushy and me having to overpower them and enforce my will like some sort of uncaring ice-queen.  That isn’t hot to me.  Hot to me is a partner who wants to be good and who wouldn’t dream of using an excuse to “get out of” something we both want.  I fantasize about a partner begging me to not let him come, asking to be locked up, or asking me to hurt him; not one I have to “punish” or lock up for “his own good.”

But since I’ve been wanting to post a porn short for ages…I fantasize about having him locked up and tied down, face down on the bed with a few pillows under his hips so he could almost rub against them while I fuck his ass except of course it’s futile and about amusing myself watching him get into a state of dripping, begging, frenzy while I get off before making him get dressed and go out to some sort of social dinner knowing all the while that he won’t be able to focus on anything outside his body and my nails grazing his thigh under the table.

Orgasm Control Through Trial and Error: in light of bad advice

So as I’m making my way across the blogosphere looking for resources aimed specifically for dominant women who want to do this with their partner I am coming up with more and more laughable advice.  I figured I’d deconstruct some of it here while I wait and see if anyone will kindly point me toward better advice…

First some gems I’m steeling from an advice board maymay quotes here…

It [chastity device] doesn’t come off except for showering and she stands there and watches me so I can’t jack off (Every guy is going to jack off at work if you take it off for them to go there). 
Ah yes, because supervising shower times is exactly what I’d like to do with my free time.  It’s right up there with supervising the daily scrubbing of the bathroom floor with a toothbrush.  Actually, I have both supervised a partner’s shower so as to ensure he wouldn’t masturbate (and cause what’s more awesome than a hot, naked, wet boy with a bee in his bonnet?) and another partner scrubbing my bathroom floor with his toothbrush while wearing a rubber hood.  Both of these activities are fun *as special occasion indulgences* however, if the tasks I assign (including “don’t have an orgasm”) add daily chores to my day they will become really old really fast.

If I had a nocturnal or other unauthorized ejaculation, my cock and balls are punished pretty intenseley. (sic)
Here again, perhaps it works for the couple in question but it will not work for me.  I believe strongly in encourage desirable behavior and ignore undesirable behavior.  Humans are large mammals so it stands to reason that large mammal training would work.  In any case, CBT (cock and ball torture, not cognitive behavioral therapy) is hot.  It’s a treat, not a punishment.  Oh, and see also Ms Rika’s take on treats and rewards when thinking about reinforcement of behavior.

And of course, orgasm control urban legend…When we started our journey with the male chastity we read about the man who was kept in chastity 24/7, 365 days by his wife. She allowed him to come only once a year, on his birthday. She believed that only women deserved such as pleasure as orgasm is. I have to admit that I have been wondering for years if it could be true or it was just a slave’s fantasy.

I suspect there are plenty of people who have gone a year without orgasm, maybe religious people, or people who have gone through sexual trauma, even perfectly simple people who just aren’t that into sex.  However, I feel like we have all heard about the guy who could only come on his birthday, or his anniversary, or maybe it was Christmas…I gotta ask, after 364 days, do you even think about orgasms anymore?  Do you go 364 straight days without needing to go through a metal detector?  Does something like this not sound problematic in physical terms or in its impact on brain chemistry?

Orgasm control through trial and error

*I will not lose the key

*I will not lose the key

*I will not lose the key

*I will not lose the key

*I will not lose the key

*I will not lose the key

*I will not lose the key

Even though I’ve paid more in lock out fees than rent some months, I will not lose the key.

Even after having dropped keys in that space between the two doors of an elevator, I will not lose this key into random crevices of buildings.

Even though I had to learn how to break into my Thai house with a borrowed wire coat hanger, my Mission St apartment through the roof access and my Folsom St apartment by climbing through the bedroom window from the balcony, I will not lose the key.

And this, gents, is why you should learn your way around a set of lockpicks.

orgasm control through trial and error part two

I am learning, interestingly though perhaps not surprisingly, that I don’t get off on not-orgasms.  Not-orgasms are a means to an end, but not sexy in and of themselves for me.  I get off on begging and want, and so I can see the benefit of denying orgasms for some period of time to create more want and spur more begging, but see, it’s just a tool.  I also get off on data.  It’s not that I want my partner to not masturbate, it’s that I want to know about each and every time he does.  I can’t tell you why, beyond the fact that it feels like trespassing on someone else’s private moments and that’s hot in an objectification kind of way.

…I’ll be in my bunk.

Yay a brand new year all for me!

Inspired by Peroxide’s New Year’s resolutions I decided to make some of my own, only I hate the negative nature of resolutions so I’m mixing in some good with some needs improvement:

1. Keep loving what I’m doing every freaking day.
2. Put more miles on my carry-on
3. Actually do the math so that I can quantify the above resolution.  You can’t change what you don’t measure.
4. Fuck the carbs, just buy clothes that fits that extra ten pounds I put on since grad school, and love the curves.  Look at sexy curvy ladies as needed.
5. Read/absorb at least one non-fiction per month in printed paper form.
6. Remember to take my glasses off when I read to save my eyes.
7. Let go of the fact that humans like odd numbered lists and be ok ending at 6, or sometimes even 4.

 

Random and cool

So a couple of random things I found this morning that are making the gears turn in my brain turn slowly through their pre-coffee grog…

First off, Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement, which is a great explanation of what’s been floating around my brain recently vis-a-vis how we communicate a message to not the choir. I actually stole this from maymay’s livejournal which I didn’t know existed but turns out to be wealth of nerdy fun. You can find more context for and critique of this diagram there.

I also tracked down this 2009 post by Calico Lane on the Fetish Business of BDSM where Calico says of TNG groups that fail to attract participants “If your demographic isn’t buying, don’t get mad at them — fix your product.” Actually I’ve seen this a lot in feminist circles too – why don’t young women identify with feminism, don’t they know how much we’ve done for them?!  The idea that your constituency should be blindly grateful for your organization’s work and eager to participate in whatever way you dictate is endemic to the non-profit sector.  Volunteer run organizations feed so much into their core volunteer’s sense of identity that they easily shift from goal achievement to organizational maintenance, by which I mean: they lose focus on their constituency’s needs and broader social outfacing goals and  instead focus on keeping the organization alive, whether by securing funding or securing more members, withoutasking if the organization is still serving a valid need outside of itself.

 

Orgasm control widgets…

So I have a blog post in the works about “orgasm control by trial and error” But before I get to that I’ve been thinking about the techy side of orgasm control.  Between Maymay’s 2008 Orgasm Permission Machine ,  AlternativeB’s Chastity android app, and my own fascination with thumbprint and RFID locks for chastity devices, I’m wondering what the best of all worlds would be.

The one thing that is super vital for me that no one has covered to my knowledge is the ability to see how often the device was accessed…how many times did the wearer or bottom spin the wheel/test the lock/solve a puzzle, or otherwise attempt to interact with the device?

I also want remote access and ideally, the ability choose between synchronous and asynchronous interaction. For example, I want the ability to either pre-program a time (Tuesday after  2pm) or condition (after you’ve edged 3 times) or switch to manual control and have the device SMS me when my partner is edging to seek further instructions.

I would like to be able to lock and unlock remotely, but I am given to understand that current technology doesn’t allow that in a lock that would be small enough for a chastity device.

I want an at-a-glance readout of the time since the last time my partner had an orgasm, edged, and asked for an orgasm.  A dashboard widget would rock.

Because I’m a nerd, I want to also have this data in a log format so I can look for trends and see if there are any ideal frequencies I’d prefer to work with.

I want this to work well when my partner and/or are mobile, so it would need access via mobile devices, if there is a component that needs to be worn it should be easy to lock and unlock remotely as well as easy to remove for air travel and border crossings.  A high level of communication and interaction should be built into the use experience (not a lock it and forget it device).  Nothing heavy, or hard to transport should be required for use.

And a personal caveat…while some actual chastity devices are cool, the part I kink on primarily is having my partner ask permission to masturbate or orgasm and knowing that I have ownership over that experience.

So with all that in mind, what I would like to see is an app that has the following features:

• ability to link two or more users
• ability to set parameters by which the question “may I have an orgasm” is answered via probability, with one of a series of tasks, based on a preset schedule or using a combination of these methods.
• the ability to override the above such that the question “may I have an orgasm” triggers an SMS to a specific other user who may respond directly or choose from preset options.
• an at-a-glance display of the last time permission to orgasm was asked, the last orgasm granted, and the last 3 tasks assigned/completed
• an ability to generate reports such as frequency of requests (by day of the week or time of day even) frequency of orgasms, any tasks assigned but not completed etc. and/or the ability to export data for Excel, SAS, or SPSS.

Nice to have features include:

• some method for recording bottom’s emotional state during ask
• personal requests – bottom must write a personally worded message rather than hit an “orgasm?” button.  Even if the answer is automated requests are sweet and sexy and I for one would collect them to read later.

Possibly useful maybe just confusing:

• error handling for human errors (reporting/logging “unallowed” orgasms)
• orgasm assignment (because the orgasm you have are as important to me as the one’s you don’t have I want to be able to assign you to have an orgasm, either just in general or with certain parameters…) User should be notified via SMS of new assignments.

What do you think?  What am I missing?  What features can’t be done or contradict each other?

class, party, food…must be weekend

This weekend started at Thursday with Geek Girl Dinner, and an Edukink class on kinky relationships.  The Geek Girl Dinner was awesome as always, the Edukink class, well my date and I decided to slip out early.  I went in with three goals: find language to speak to the type of kinky relationship I want, find ways to reinforce a D/s dynamic through the day to day, and learn concrete tools to build a D/s dynamic.  An hour in, I had learned about love-related brain chemicals, and more importantly about limerence (NRE) and that it can in fact only be experienced toward one person at a time and lasts from 2 weeks to 18 month.  The limerence piece is cool because it helps me codify my experience and know what to expect and why I can’t crush on two people at once, but I had still not seen anything related to my goals, and I was dead tired and annoyed by the instructors push for kinky relationships as somehow better/more evolved/more communicative than vanilla relationships.  So we took off for some mellow hanging out, and petting of kittens.

Friday, I got to get femmed up, and Platonic Husband took me out for a fantastic dinner.  I also got to practice some of the rope work I’ve been thinking of getting back into.  Wanna know why the lovely and amazing C is my platonic husband? He wasn’t into that at all…

Saturday was full of thinking about and reading blogs, updating Purple Picket Fence, hoarding things in my more sexy tumblr blog and eating lots and lots of turkey.

Things I’m reading about and thinking about that you can too:

1) I’ve been thinking about Fern’s When Your Submissive Says No since last week.  It reminds me of a realization I had in my last relationship, which is that being someone’s dominant is actually a commitment I make that comes with a lot of subtle expectations; some real and some imagined.  In my first couple “real” relationships I had to shed a layer of what I thought was expected of me (call my partner if I was going to stay out late, put their time first etc.) which a) made me angry and b) wasn’t really expected of me. I expect a learning curve in kinky relationships as well.  The advice of “Make expectations clear” is vitally important regardless of your relationship style.  Just as I try to start my sex with “how do you like to have sex,” I am learning to start my relationships with “what makes you feel valued and cared for.”

But there is another idea that is very important to me…I need my submissive to invite me in, and continually reaffirm their commitment to and interest in our dynamic.  A partner who says not only “yes” but also “thank you” reminds me that I am not just being a jerk, I am giving them something they crave.  When my submissive says no, I feel less disappointed in not getting what I wanted and more concerned that I have, in fact, been a jerk.  And then I feel confused and angry that something was wrong in our dynamic such that they want to break the pattern of it all together and they didn’t tell me until they broke.  And this is why no is the beginning of the conversation and not the end of it.

2) I’ve thus far only skimmed this article on Sex Educators and the Politics of Attractiveness (I use this list to organize what I will read on my commute as often as to comment on what I have read) but it’s an interesting take on the fact that many if not most of the women you see at the forefront of sex education and advocacy are classically attractive.  Why is that?

3) I’m following Thumper’s exploits with some interest, in particular this thought caught me off guard with how utterly simple and mindblowingly hot it is: “If she leaves on the trip without allowing me to come, I will beg to be locked up.“

Ok, I know I’ve read more this week, but I’m coming up empty so here are a couple of pictures to set you on your way to Monday…

Sandals in December, California for the win!

kitten catches a pair of riot cuffs meant for another kind of pet.

Platonic Husband playing along