My brain keeps trying to go to practical matters or little disappointments like the way the bruises become few and far between over the course of a relationship, and how real life interferes.  And each time I bring it back to the sweet moments, lingering kisses, the way the word “ma’am” always makes me melt, as does “please.”  I’m thinking of the parallels as I train my brain into hopefulness without expectations and slip into daydream.

Anatomy of a scene

Pre-scene
-Communication
-Expectations
-Landing

Early scene
-Pacing and warm-up
-Rules and protocols
-build persona if desired

Mid-scene
-Build intensity
-Validate experience
-Don’t ask tough questions

End of scene
-Big request or cool-down
-Praise
-Positive touch

Aftercare
-Attention to headspace
-Headspace appropriate interaction
-Praise
-Positive touch
-Physical care

Pre-scene
Questions to ask:
When do you have to be home?
You know puppies aren’t allowed on the couch?
Have you had dinner?
Tell me a fantasy.

-Communication
This is the time to decide what you would like to do, share any relevant news, and make each other aware of outside constraints.  I also like to use this time for casual chatter because that helps me connect with my partner and buffer from the outside world.

-Expectations
This is actually post-negotiation for me…negotiation creates the opportunity for everything on this list to happen.  Expectations in this context are specifically about making sure my bottom has all the information he needs to succeed.  What to call me, if puppies are allowed on the couch, what to do if he needs a break, etc.

Think of social situations where you get details in advance to help make things smooth, for example you might get a description of appropriate dress with a wedding invitation, which helps you avoid awkward situations.

-Landing
This sets the tone, and I prefer a soft landing.  Ideally I start my scenes calmly without confusion.  I don’t like having to look for space at clubs or work too hard to get myself and my partner out of other conversations because this creates a hard and confusing landing.  Landing is about having the tools you want where you expect them, having your partner confident that they can succeed, trusting your own skill, and not having to trip over anything.  Sometimes, however, hard landings are hot.  In interrogation scenes for example I’ll start the scene without warning, when my partner is walking up to the space we plan to play in, or just about to go grab something from the other room.

Think of landing like a landing page; what do you want people to see/feel/experience in the first 15 seconds?  This sets the tone for the next hour.

Early scene
Questions to ask:
Does this feel good?
Are you going to be a good boy/girl/kitty?
Do you remember your safeword?

-Pacing and warm-up
At this point I don’t expect my partner to be in “sub-space” and I believe it takes about 20 minutes for endorphins to take pain processing to it’s top capacity so I start slow unless there is strategic advantage to taking a deep dive early on (SA Landing).  This also sets the pace for the rest of the scene and a good time to drop some cues as to what to expect (what kinds of toys, how much chatter, etc.)

-Rules and protocols
If you have rules or protocols, they should have been outlined in the expectations step, but early in the scene is typically when I act on them.  This may be having my partner kneel, or it may be “gearing up” as it were.  This would be around the time when I pull out any chastity devices for example or quiz my partner on relevant behaviors.

-Build persona if desired
If you’re doing any sort of role playing this is also the time where you’re going to be most in character.  Later you’ll either be into it and not have to focus or that will drop away in the scene, but early on is the time to focus on language,  protocol, set up, lighting, etc.

Mid-scene
Questions to ask:
Pick a number from 5-10.
Pick one thing that scares you and one treat.
Still with me?  Ready for more?
Note the statements and yes/no questions!

-Build intensity
Pretty self-explanatory but this is usually when I have the highest levels of sustained pain or discomfort come in.  Usually I also see a drop off in chatter from my bottom here, so I look for cues especially in new partners in so far as hand movement, eye contact, and facial expression go.  Depending on that I’ll look for responsiveness (squeeze their fingers and see how long it takes them to register and mimic the gesture for example).  This is also where I do the most checking-in to gauge pain tolerance and desirability.   Typically I do this by allowing my bottom to pick the number of strokes from a range (newer partners) or asking “what’s your safeword” (most established partners whom I want to push harder).

-Validate experience
Personally, if I’m hurting you I’m not going to tell you this doesn’t hurt.  That said, there is a lot of power in denying experiences (just think about the last time your were in hospital and someone told you the you weren’t having the symptoms you experienced) It serves to make you feel unheard, lost, confused, and poorly cared for.  In the right context, awesome, but not usually the way I play.  So I like to let my partner know I know this hurts if that’s the case, and acknowledge however they’re expressing submission.

-Don’t ask tough questions
Don’t renegotiate here.  I’ve learned the hard way that it is damn hard to get a complete sentence out of a bottom in the middle of a scene.  This is not the time to ask about the future (When do you have to be home to your wife?) or about what they want in open terms.  I will sometimes ask “which of these two things do you want to be hurt with.” Or give a guided choice such as laying out a number of toys and having someone pick the one they are scared of, or a treat, or one they’ve never used before and are curious about, but limit possible answers and make it easy to get the right answer.

End of scene
Questions to ask:
You’re doing great, will you take 10 more for me?”
How are you feeling?

-Big request or cool-down
This is a good time to start wrapping up, landing softer blows and transitioning to more gentle petting.  This is also the point where I will sometimes put in a “big ask” something I am pretty confident my partner can handle, but they may be nervous about.  Three more cane strokes for example, or one more needle, etc.  Pace what you’re doing to your partners capabilities though, and let them succeed.  If they agree to 10 more strokes and you realize that’s too much, land softer blows.  Realize that getting through what you’re asking your partner can be really really important for them at this point, especially if you have an established play dynamic, so make it possible for them to succeed and work through the challenge with them.  I’m usually honest about what’s coming with a big ask, but this is another space where you can capitalize on fear and helplessness if you so desire.  Saying 3 and landing 5 blows may be fun or funny at the beginning of a scene, but at this stage of the scene it can very challenging.  Another stylistic difference I’m interested in is I tend to use the big ask as just that, an ask; “will you take more for me?” or “This is going to hurt a lot, are you ready to do that for me?”  I’ve seen other people do the same thing in a more forceful “I’m not done with you yet!” kind of way, which is totally hot and works for a lot of people.  I think I personally get off on my partner willingly taking pain to please me, though, so I ask.

-Praise
Your partner has been through a lot, tell them you appreciate it.  I like to pick specific things/moments to praise because that feels more genuine, but typically if your partner is in a floaty submissive head space they want to know they did a good job for you, plus lavish praise pairs well with big asks.

-Positive touch
A lot of the ways you touched your partner for the last little while has been purposefully painful, this is a nice time to bring them down with soft gentle touch.

Aftercare
Questions to ask:
Not many other than “would you like some watter?” offer lots of praise instead.

-Attention to headspace
I like to keep a close eye on this one.  Most rewarding for me is partners who let themselves stay in a floaty headspace for a while after the scene, but some people need to come right out of it to feel safe.

-Headspace appropriate interaction
Depending on where my partner is the interaction changes.  Some people recoup by kneeling at my feet while I play with their hair, others want me to get them a snack and see them as equals right away.  I try to make the transition gentle so I tend to defer to where my partner seems to be leading especially with new interactions.  Don’t ask questions your partner can’t answer yet.  Another thing I learned the hard way is making care appropriate to their space: with a partner who comes up quickly I can ask them what they’d like, if I can get them a snack or what not.  With a partner who stays in headspace I usually put them somewhere safe and warm and quiet let them know they can stay there and then bring them a snack or whatever seems appropriate.

-Praise
Praise in this context is a lot like above but also somewhat varied with headspace.  Some people come down hard when they play and don’t want to hear about how they were a “good boy” even if that was ok 10 minutes ago.  Where as praise in scene is often about how good my partner makes me feel or how good they are doing for me, praise post play can be more neutral.  “That was hot.” vs “You’re doing a very good job for me.”

-Positive touch
As above, soft, gentle touch on neutral body parts to help your partner reconnect with the world around them.

-Physical care
This is a great time for food, watter, band aids, etc.

NOTE: You’ve probably gathered that this is from a top’s perspective.  I would love to see this breakdown from the other side…

Somehow, despite all this upheaval, our sexuality communities are trapped inside aristocratic institutions that more often act with an interest in risk-avoidance instead of value-creation.

This from a post about Kink for All, a sexuality conference that started in NY and is going to Denver in February.  I’m going to Denver to check it out.  Secretly I am going to see if I could pull it off at home.  Maymay highlights a point that is not lost on the wider BDSM community – why aren’t young people engaged in the community?  Who are these people who buy the toys but never go to the events?  Why don’t they come share this awesome spirit of community, learning, and exploration?  How do we hook them?  Or more frighteningly, what do they know that we don’t?

My question is this: how do we bring the hacker ethos and the free information ethos (as in beer, and speech, and puppies) to sexuality communities?  And more over, should we?

To the latter question, I say yes.  Because the forces that gave us the public library and the bill of rights are awesome and way way cooler, in my opinion, than the forces that gave us swinger clubs with high membership dues and low representation of bisexual or submissive men.  Because hacker culture is nimble and adaptable, because it restructures quickly around the current needs and because it has room for both the engineer hero and the awesome power of transient community building, and that is a power I want to capture and bring into my sexuality community.  So yes, I want a sexuality community that takes your radical self-resilience and raises you shared resources.

As for the how?  I don’t know yet, but I think maymay is onto something.  I think it starts with breaking formation – I want to take alt sex out of dungeons and hackers out of their prototypical basement caves.  Maymay structured Kink for All around observer-participants, open access to the mic, and free access to the conference.  I think there is one more thing to add, and it’s hard because we don’t want to say it, but I think it’s something my non-sex cultures have that my sex culture lacks:

People will say what you do not agree with and you have to be ok with that.  People will use methods you’re unsure about to meet goals you care about and you need to let your emotional reaction go.  The world will not coddle you, not everyone knows your triggers, people do not enjoy walking on eggshells; that’s ok.  Be excellent to each other, expect difference, take what you can and leave the rest.  Nuance isn’t always paradox and it if it looks like hypocrisy check again, it may well be, but it may also be a different way of looking at things.  Define your win condition, be excellent to each other.

I need something from you:

• I need you to come sit with me, and talk with me and tell me what sexuality community looks like for you.
• I need you to listen, not to me, but to someone who is different from you…take the other to lunch
• I need you to stop waiting for permission and do the thing you want to see done.  Ideally, if we can, I want to do it with you because there is power in shared resources.
• I need a space in which to bring 50-75 amazing people together sometime in May or maybe June to talk about sex and hackers and internet privacy
• I need to find people who care about this, who are willing to sit in a room together and start the discussion
• I need you to start breaking formation, to call people out when their language belittles submissive men, trans people, sexual women, etc
• In short, I need you to wake up, show up, and make some noise.

Hey kinky nerds wanna talk about creating more inclusive opportunities for dominant women and submissive men? Like coffee? Free Sunday?

More importantly, do you want to hang out in a neutral space (read not a play space or kink space), chat, and meet other people who are geeking out on the frequently less than ideal structures of the BDSM scene?  Do you have a blog post you’ve been meaning to finish up and need a co-working buddy?  Just feel like you can’t keep up with all the awesome people you meet through activism, blogging, and general rabble-rousing and wish there were office hours for the sex-blogging crowd?

Are you in the Bay Area?  Do you have some free time this Sunday or next? Do you feel like it’s time for a kinky, geeky, politically minded laptop party with beer and/or coffee?

Do you think I’m batshit insane but you’re in the Bay Area free this Sunday or next and willing to humor me?  That’s cool too, please let me know!

EDIT:

Sex Blogger Office Hours are on for Sunday Jan. 29th, 2pm-5pm at Sight Glass (7th at Folsom)!

To my dismay I got to the airport early, but was choking back tears by the time I got to the ticket counter.  The ticket agent asked if I was ok, but printed my boarding pass anyway.  She spoke slowly, gently explaining my gate number, “29, behind me and to the right.”  By the time I got to security, I was losing it.  Not about anything in particular yet, just a general sort of falling apart.  And then I got to the gentleman who had positioned himself in the now defunct metal detector.  As he directed me to the full body scan, I panicked…I forgot the special thing I was supposed to say, the one he’s not supposed to question, the one that leads him to echo back “opt out, female assist” as though it was some kind of religious call and response.  So I looked confused briefly, offering finally “I’d like to decline, what do I have to say?”  “Say whatever you want.” He directed me to an area on the side and proceeded to other people.  As I watch my fellow Americans step through, feet apart, hands over their heads, one by one; as I waited for someone to call a female assist, I lost it.  It was not the TSA’s fault, and this is not a process I have ever found upsetting before, but after some pretty hard conversations about my country, and after a pretty hard week overall, I couldn’t do it.  I bit my tongue as I considered stepping through the scan, wondered why no one had called for the pat-down lady, and consoled myself with the idea of missing my flight.  I felt alone.  I wanted to recite the constitution, or ask the guy if he felt safe around those machines, but didn’t.  And then another man came – calm, collected, cocky even.  He stood next to me with the words “no need to cry, this is your right.”  And all of a sudden it wasn’t just me, I wasn’t just a trouble maker, I was an American doing the all-American thing of standing up for my rights.  I wasn’t in trouble anymore, just like that I was an annoyed customer again.  And the man next to me proclaiming “I ain’t going near that thing.” As though it was a dirty cafeteria restroom.  And suddenly the security guy stepped back calling out “Opt out, female assist, male assist, 5 and 6.” Clearly, loudly, calmly.

As we stood there a woman came by ready to take her turn in the scan, and stopped next to me, it seemed like she was waiting for me to go first.  I told her I had opted out, so she asked, and I told her, and she stood there so the man told her she had to tell the guard if she wanted to opt out…she was doing that as a nice black lady took me through the security procedure, carefully making eye contact and explaining what she was going to do, gently walking me through the process, and just like that it was over.  I put on my shoes, plugged my phone in, and called C sobbing to ask him to come get me in 6 hours from the other side of the country.  I was amazed that they let me through, though later I realized that I am small, and female, and white.  I am well dressed and well groomed and therefore I am allowed to cry in public spaces, and when I do so people will come to help me because they were told that’s what they are meant to do.  I realized that just before I realized that this is privilege and it is a tool and a crutch, and maybe it is one of those things you do to survive when you’ve run out of other options – use the oldest tricks in the book.

My heart sank as I realized I had left my connection to the part of me I had just found on the East Coast, but then I wondered if radicalizing moments were like super hero awakenings, half traumatic and yet utterly mundane.

This past weekend I went to a science fiction convention as well as a sexy party with a very dear playpartner. We survived, mostly, for which I am immensely grateful.   Some of this is personal mismatch and some is clearly having put our relationship into pressure cooker of stress without a contingency plan. We’re thousands of miles from home base, underslept, failing at the 5-2-1 rule, running logistics of two people two events and one car, and coming off a week of trying to balance all the insanity of travel.

So contingency plan? I wish I had clear priorities that were said out loud before we got on an airplane.  Which event is prioritized?  Are we each other’s interrupts or are we self reliant and maximizing exposure to others? How much time is ideal for each event?  What’s too little?  What’s too much?  I think this serves somewhat in the same way as ethics…which is to say, not for when it’s easy, but for when you really really don’t want to, but you can stop and align yourself with what you had talked about and agreed upon.  Honestly, I don’t think I would have had a particular stance on which event should be prioritized if I knew my partner was interested in both, but the lack of clarity made it hard to prioritize.

I wish we had taken care of our bodies.  We hit BOS already exhausted and I think we never caught up.  We tried to do too much, sacrificing sleep too often, running tight schedules and high pressure tradeoffs.  Because our priorities weren’t clear, it wasn’t easy to swap out events.  Because things were packed too tightly, not only did sleep suffer but also patience, the ability to take a hit and still recover for the rest of the day and so on.

I’d say also we had too many firsts all put together. His first time at Arisia, and my first time in the Boston office.  Our first time meeting my parents together.  Our first time traveling together and spending this much time together all at once.  My first topping an orgasm control scene that went on for longer than a day or so of ongoing contact, and his having to guide me through that. The blows came faster than we could dodge them, and each point of stressed added to the last.

And there is the expectation you put on time as well. The special eventness of it makes it that much harder, the work you put into making things nice builds attachment which unfortunately can create opportunities for downfalls. A bad hour at home is an opportunity to take a shower, eat a snack and move on. A bad hour at a special event can throw your whole day.  I think at one point or another we each felt as though we were trying so hard, doing so much work, for something that just wasn’t working.

I am hoping that this is the first pancake, the one you mysteriously burn on both sides while it’s still squishy on the inside.  That once we each sleep, and focus on ourselves for a while we can regroup and try again.  And also, I wish I had a word for “this amazing person who is deeply important to me, whom I love and care for, who pushes my limits in ways that are almost but not quite too much and I am grateful for that, and grateful also for the time and energy we share, but I realize that we can not share this time and energy full time and I am grateful for that too” I want a word that allows for that non-full-timeness without being “less than” and I want to say “not full time now” and be fully comfortable with that, without forgoing the possibility of full time ever.  But mostly, I need it to be not less than. (Fuck society?)

…I’ll be in my bunk.

Second, I have questions, and since every time I talk about chastity, orgasm control, begging and all sorts of torments that involve, well “maybe” a) traffic spikes and b) you all pipe up I figured I’d ask them here…

1) What kind of support system do you have in place around your orgasm control play (or would want to have in place)?  By this I mean, what happens when you’re, say, horny and, for any reason, grumpy about it?  How do you handle feeling disconnected from your partner?  What happens if you think it’s unfair that she gets an orgasm and you don’t?  What is the immediate next step?  What happens after that?

2) Orgasms are nice and all but they also rock the brain chemistry.  One of the reasons I like it when my partner has orgasms is because I like the happy sleepy space that happens when your brain takes all the dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin around and dumps it in your system.  You have, in post-coital bliss, the building blocks of bonding on a neurological level, so I am wondering what happens to your brain, and consequently your relationship, if you are not regularly experiencing a heightened production of these chemicals around your partner.  Does this question make sense?  Why is no one else talking about it?  Lots of people talk about how depression and/or anti-depressants may impede intimacy because of altered production of these “love” hormones, aren’t inability to orgasm due to prozac and inability to orgasm due to CB6000 similar enough problems from your brain’s perspective to be worth some concern?

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.