Domspace part 2

emmie and I engaged in some SM sex last night after the Subway experience, and it led to the Domspace feeling of control, and also led to some other fantastically wonderful feelings.  I love the state of mind it engenders and even love the drop into exhaustion afterwards, as it's a satisfied, contented exhaustion far different from the depressive exhaustion sometimes suffered under subdrop.

This morning, very early, mitda and I decided to engage in needle play, I pierced her back and ass, which I then fucked, and then scratched lines down her back and across her ass, just deep enough for blood to well up in the scratch.  mitda went directly to subspace, do not pass go, do not collect your wits.  I was in a wonderful space myself that was hard to let go of for the rest of the morning, although the exhausted contentment that followed made it impossible to do anything but work from home.  Which turned out to be ok given it was the Friday of a long weekend and I had just turned in an important project on time.

Being Noticed

mitda, Jubal and the kid were out yesterday evening, which presented us with a quandary - do we take the risk of eating an emmie-meal or do we fast-food it for the evening.  We decided on the latter, not that I think emmie is totally incapable in the kitchen, however if it doesn't come in a microwaveable package it does cause her undue stress and worry ; ).

So off we went to Subway.  For those not part of North American fast-food culture Subway is a shop that makes long, very good sandwiches.  Not that this is a plug, they certainly charge enough for them.  But the thing is, we live in a very small Texas town, albeit not far from probably the most open minded city in the State. 

Arriving at Subway I pulled into the last reasonably close parking spot, nearly decapitating someone about to leave their car in the process.  He managed to close his door quickly and avoid it, along with his leg, being taken off.  As a result he, emmie and I were on the sidewalk going towards the shop at the same time.  I noticed that this fellow was giving emmie and I an unusually wide berth, without exactly perceiving why, and wondered if I really freaked him out by my driving.  emmie opened the door and proceeded to hold it open for him but he waved us both in ahead of him, as I passed him to go in he said "after all she's wearing the pretty turian".  

Suddenly it clicked, he knew exactly what her collar signified and was simply giving respect to two members of the "lifestyle" as it were.  I said to him "You'd be surprised how many people don't know what it means", and he responded that he knew full well, and in fact remembered us from a  play party we had attended some time before, one where emmie was tongue-tied trying to introduce herself and made more of an impression with her embarrassed silence (very becoming on a beautiful slave) than anything anyone else actually said did.

The incident left me with a weird feeling.  The fellow had been discreet enough, there was noone else really in the store, certainly not within earshot, and I had continued the conversation after he  mentioned her turian, so I had no issue with him talking about it.  It was just a surprise to find someone recognizing the collar in such a vanilla, everyday situation.  And I realized that in a sense this was exactly what we were about.  emmie was happy that she had been on good behaviour, but she usually is.  It's one thing to aim for 24/7 M/s, it's another to realize that in the midst of  a very vanilla neighbourhood we are actually living it.

Dom-space

When we play, sometimes I'm able to find the rhythm and the right kind of empathy to playmy girls perfectly. It results in a heady feeling of control that I term Dom-space, as opposed to the floaty endorphin fueled Sub-space a submissive can go into.

I don't know quite how else to describe it than as the feeling that the slave has become an extension of you, it can come during play, it can come during sex, especially certain kinds of sex. It can come while seeing one's slave(s) go about their business. It's part of the reward of being a Master, the less intellectual and more visceral part. It's a wonderful feeling ...

The beauty of my slaves

Today I've been struck, numerous times, as if I wasn't already overwhelmed, by the beauty of my slaves emmie and mitda. mitda is a word girl, a Joycean full of wonder at the joys of language and full of wonder at the world they give meaning to. emmie is as meaningful in her silences, her hesitations, her stark pronouncements as Beckett. They go together as complementary colours in the beautiful tapestry that they have made my life. I love them both and love them always.

Aftercare ...

Sometimes it's not clear to the Dominant what aftercare is needed in a situation. On Friday mitda wasn't able to do a certain something that we often do - limits change due to physical realities and what a masochist can take one day she may not be able to the next. I understand this, and I understood it at the time. After trying to push her to see if the limit was real, I backed off, lay down and told her to put her head on my shoulder, thinking she would interpret this as "it's ok baby, we won't do that tonight, we'll do other things ...". Needless to say she didn't, she interpreted it as "I'm tired, let's beg off for the rest of the night.".

So the care I thought I was giving her didn't go over. And she needed care. This type of miscommunication is one of the most painful to me as a Dominant. And I'm using the word "Dominant" advisedly here, because when I make this kind of mistake I don't deserve the title "Master".

mitda and I will of course work it out. Other happenstances made the situation worse, things I couldn't and can't do anything about. But the mistake was still mine. She is sleeping now as I write this, softly snoring quite beautifully. And I know from this that things will always be ok between us, no matter what words or actions pass from our lips and hands.

Successful playtime

During the evening mitda and I ate and played. This time I took her close to her limits, scaring her in the process, which I believe was what she needed after a fair period of very little S & M. We eventually collapsed exhausted, much to emmie's disappointment when she arrived at midnight to find us both flat out asleep.

However I did wake back up around 3 am. emmie and I played, in a very different way to mitda and I, as is our wont, and she seemed much happier after that. We continued until nearly 7 am with something of a break in the middle, and then it was pretty much time for breakfast.

All in all I feel that much closer to the two of them than I felt yesterday. We play hard, and we play rough, and it isn't for everyone. But it works for us.

Playtime after a long week

Tonight we have decided to indulge in playtime in a hotel after what has proven to be a long week at work. mitda and I are going to play first, while emmie goes to a dinner with friends, and then emmie is going to join us at midnight and all three of us will play for the rest of the night. It gives us time away from the kids and the household in general, time to indulge in the loud types of play that we can't do at home at the moment, and time to indulge in the type of TPE I feel is possible between the three of us but difficult to engage in consistently with others around.

This doesn't mean I don't believe our normal relationship is a TPE one. It's just that, with the three of us and nobody else, we are able to be further along the vector, the "as-if" of total power exchange that much closer to its totality.

Poetry Thursday (after mitda's post)

Then spoke the thunder
D A
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
D A
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
D A
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

... From The Waste Land, T.S.Eliot

Some of the niceties ...

Some of the niceties of being dominant in a TPE situation are, well, obvious. If I need anything, I can just ask and it will be procured. If things need to be done around the house, I can assign it to one of my slaves and it will get done at the time I propose. Things like this make my life very much easier than it would be otherwise.

Other things are not so obvious, but after a while one gets used to them. Having slaves wait on one, in a literal sense, waiting for one's instructions, commands, compliments or complaints gives one a great sense of personal existence. Not only do I depend upon myself, others depend upon me. And this is extremely gratifying.

And, of course, it all adds up to a lot of responsibility.

If someone is waiting on one, in that sense, then one has a responsibility to see that they get what they need. Not what they want, necessarily, or even what they think they need, but what they actually need, and one has the responsibility of figuring out what that is, before one can provide it.

But this is the nicest nicety of all, at the end of the day. Figuring out what someone needs and providing it is the most satisfying thing to a dominant. To a slave, being told what the master needs and providing it is the greatest satisfaction, to the master, figuring out what the slave needs without being told is the greatest thing.

New work situation

Today I have to guide someone into upgrading a very complex enterprise class software system. The fortunate thing is that the upgrade is being done in the test environment, not production, given that it's the first time I've done it on this software. The unfortunate thing is that by repute the woman I have to work with at the client is utterly incapable of doing anything except following instructions. A colleague of mine has to work with her this morning to troubleshoot a new development server that she installed, and didn't manage to get working, and his initial response to my question about what he was doing with her was "committing suicide".

Guiding people can be both simple and complex. There is a psychology involved in getting someone to do what you want, exactly, precisely, without any open domination such as I have with mitda and emmie. In this case I still need to dominate, but as an "expert" and not a master. I like the following quote on the difference between an expert and a master, though you'll have to extrapolate its meaning since it specifically is talking about the two in terms of art.

"Expertise and Mastery: an expert, like an Aristotelian phronimos, does the right thing at the right time and in the right way (and will be immediately recognized by his or her community as having done so); but a true master inaugurates a new discursive practice, often transforming the old standards of success in the process and so requiring more time to be recognized."

Obviously installing somebody else's software is not "inaugurating a new discursive practice" in any sense. It's as an expert, then, that I need to make myself known and try to garner respect for my instructions by having my domain knowledge validated in practice.

Mastery has to be validated in practice as well. emmie and mitda have been wonderful enough to give me their trust and respect quite freely, but having it and keeping it involves earning it all the more. In this comes the notion of responsibility, which I am currently studying and investigating as a result. As an expert at work, my responsibilities are limited - to this project, these products, etc. - while as a Master to emmie and mitda there are no limits to my responsibilities. Expressing this leads to a limitation in itself of language, and as Wittgenstein suggested, running up against the limits of language is ethics.

It occurs to me ...

mitda, emmie and I have a tendency to use our writing to work things out, with ourselves, sometimes with each other. It occurs to me that as a result the relationship comes across as far more difficult than in fact it is. I've never been as comfortable in a relationship as I am with mitda, emmie and Jubal. Despite the complexities of polyamory and M/s we all enjoy each other and are relatively comfortable with the places we're in. I wouldn't trade this relationship for any other I could imagine.

All along the vector ...

M/s relationships, to me, are a vector that tends towards the true hard limits, those of mortality, finitude, etc. that truly limit the human, and thus both slave and Master alike. Within this limit-situation, then, the relationship can be construed as absolute if it is as far towards those limits as possible given the overall situation of the moment. These situations ebb and flow, they're not linear and not in one direction, a devoted slave becomes a tyrant if there is sudden danger to her child, naturally, and this is not something to descry or regret in TPE relationships, it's part of their fabric and texture and part of the fascination.

Expectation vs Submission

I came to a realization overnight.  I've been resenting my slaves' expectations of me.  It's easy to conflate want, desire and expectation, so I will try to differentiate them, and explicate why it bothers me and triggers resentment.

Slaves should want.  They should desire.  They can express these things without it being an issue, in fact it's an extremely pleasurable thing to hear one's slaves' wants and desires.  Where it becomes an issue is when wants automatically turn into expectations.  It is appropriate and reasonable for a Master to expect things from a slave.  Putting an expectation on somebody holds them to it because it creates in them a desire not to disappoint.  And this desire not to disappoint is extremely important in the submissive's psyche.  But when the tables are reversed, and the Master becomes expected not to disappoint, the power is suddenly in the hands of the slave, the wrong hands. 

Of course this is an issue to the Master.  Loving his slaves, he doesn't want to disappoint, yet he doesn't want to submit to their expectations either, resulting in a catch 22 situation.,  But it's as problematic for the slave, because she fundamentally wants the Master to want, and inside she knows if he does it under expectation it's not 100% his want and desire.  As a result, the satisfaction of the expectation doesn't actually satisfy, and leads to more expectations.  The final situation created is one of the slave topping from the bottom, and being unhappy because at root she doesn't want that.  At root she needs to submit to the Master, but she can only doing that by wanting, desiring everything, and expecting nothing.  In this way everything she gets is a gift of her Master, and only in receiving gifts from her Master is she really satisfied.   Of course an action is required from her Master as well, and in some ways this may be the a priori, that the Master refrain from the desire not to disappoint, because disappointment is the necessary impetus to change that trains the slave.

Thinking Cap On

Recent posts by mitda and emmie have had me thinking about jumping-ahead, or projecting-open, not in the general sense but particularly in their lives.  How does one jump ahead in order to give someone their concern?  In a sense I do so, have done so, and without it I wouldn't be their Master.  But it's an effort that has to be renewed every day, every hour, and preoccupations get in the way.

Luckily I don't think the new job will be altogether that stressful.  The code that needs to be tested, and the new code that needs to be written, are not particularly complex.  Which should give me a bit more time and energy to focus on the girls than I have had recently.  Well, specifically I have had time but stress from the other place has overburdened things and the energy and focus hasn't been there. 

Replaced Vista with Linux Fedora

I made the mistake of thinking the new core2duo laptop I just bought could run Vista ok. Nope. Although it is the default OS preinstalled on the Thinkpad it runs like absolute crap. So I ditched it and went with the beta of Fedora 8, which supports most of the laptop's hardware by default, and only requires patching for the wireless and sound capabilities.

So far, so good. Everthing is now working, except sound. For which I might have to recompile the kernel, but maybe not. We'll see after the current patch list is installed. At any rate the machine now feels like a fast laptop. Vista made the core2duo feel like an old 386 running NT 3.1.

Narcissism, entitlement, rights, mastery and slavery

"and the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder came up. These include "has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations"".

This quote is from a well thought out post by Tanos on Entitlement, posted in his weblog and linked from the ownership wiki on The Slave Register.

It got me thinking, first, in terms of the relationship between entitlement and rights.  If the sense of entitlement exists where rights are specifically not claimed, and even when all rights have been expressly given up, on what does it base itself?  And in a situation where rights themselves have been seen as baseless, exactly what is it that a slave has "given up"?  And what is the fundamental difference between Master and slave if we cannot lean on the notion of rights to distinguish them?

In the notion of slavery that comes down to us from Greek society, we distinguish "citizens" from "slaves".  A citizen has rights conferred on him by the city-state, while a slave does not.  The citizen also has duties to the state, while a slave has duties only to his/her owner.  Obviously in dealing with Total Power Exchange and Internal Enslavement this definition will not suffice, because in terms of current society both Master and slave officially have rights conferred by the state, and have duties to the state, since the state does not see a difference between them.  This lack of societal backing leads some to question the possibility of the Master/slave relationship in modern society, but I believe this idea comes from a misunderstanding of the nature of the Master/slave relationship in the ownership subculture.

If entitlement is appropriate to a Master, while not to a slave,  the specific meaning of entitlement cannot come down to a matter of right.   Positing that "human rights" involves a false equation of "human" with "citizen", we are going to do without that particular crutch of thought, useful as it has been in terms of developing better treatment of human beings.  The lack of progress beyond a certain level of potential egalitarianism in society, and our seeming inability to actualize it, perhaps comes from the lack of a basis for human rights in a real ontology of the human.

If as a Master I am entitled, to what am I entitled?  As a Master I fundamentally find my meaning in my concerns, cares and loves.  And it is my will that puts these first, orders them, and determines how best to promote their well being.  My slaves are fundamentally important to this, as they embody my concerns and cares, and receive my love.   Of course my slaves have concerns and cares as well, and certainly love.  Without these they wouldn't be human slaves.  But the fundamental difference is that my slaves have given up a correlation between their developed personalities and these things.  Instead they are concerned with the Master's concerns, care about those things the Master cares for, and love in concert with the Master. 

As Master I feel entitled because my will is in line with my most basic meaning, as slave they do not have a personal sense of entitlement, because their meaning has been merged with mine, any remaining sense of entitlement or right comes from doing my will.  As a result slaves still feel entitlement, they still feel the urge to do what is right and what they are needed and required to do, but this right of the slave is in reality their expression of the Master's entitlement, of doing what is right for their Master, of accomplishing the expression of his concern, his cares, and his love.

Of course the upshot of this is responsibility, which is what a Master takes on in willing his concerns, cares and loves.  For a Master there is no set limit on this responsibility.  For a slave,  responsibility is there to align their will with their Masters, once that is accomplished (and the accomplishing is a constant effort) their responsibilities are simply an expression of the unlimited responsibility of their Master.

New week, new job.

I started with the new company today, writing management apps for a big telco. Interestingly I'm designing new apps and upgrading old ones, but not writing the new ones, the client, said big telco, wants me to design the adapters but they will write them themselves. Yippeee! No bloody boring coding. And once I'm done this project they want to move me into modelling, providing things work out.

The girls really helped get me together for my first day. So when I got here things went pretty smoothly. It will be interesting to see how this one goes compared to other jobs in a similar field that I've held, I'm hoping this will be one of the good ones.

The Abyssal

The cause of the irrupting of the Abyss is our urge to closure. Responsibility is in this sense an experience, something to be undergone, suffered, endured. And in the undergoing the something, in this case responsibility, itself comes to pass. There is no closure to experience, and this lack is itself the limit of experience. There is therefore only grasping of the experience in the as-if of the limit situation. Responsibility is responsibility only in the as-if of seeing no limits to responsibility, hence the arising of the Abyssal. But the Abyssal doesn't exist in-itself or as something apart from the experience that gives rise to it. The Abyssal's arising becomes the negative confirmation of that experience at the limit of lack of limits.

Collaring

I thought I would post some thoughts on the subject, since although the girls have been collared for some time, mitda for a fair length of time, last weekend we did a collaring ceremony for them together, and as a result it is closer to top of mind than it has been for a while.

Firstly, I love that they are collared.  Their beauty seems that much more radiant wearing their collars, and now that they can both wear their collars 24/7 they are a constant reminder to me of my luck and joy at mastering them.  They are also a constant reminder of my responsibilities in mastering them, and the standard which I have to try to live to.  I am currently studying the concept of unlimited responsibility, something that I think is particularly apropos and necessary in a TPE relationship.

Not that things are always perfect at House Daedalus.  The fact that the collars are identical reminds me of the occasional rivalry between slaves, the envy or jealousy that can poison any poly household.  And treating two very different people differently, as they require, but still equally, as they desire, is a difficult balancing act at times, and one  I don't always succeed at.

mitda and I, as a former vanilla married couple, had the easiest transition to a TPE lifestyle.  emmie and I have a few more hurdles to climb.  We are in a poly married situation as far as our vanilla sex lives go, but it is new and like any newlyweds we are still learning each other's tastes, wants and predilections.  And we have our pre-existing, comfortable relationships with our legal spouses to fall back on when things become tense for any reason.  That my spouse is also her sister slave makes her feel insecure.   That her spouse is a "top" sexually, and beginning to dominate in a bedroom bdsm sense, is an additional element and tension for me.  Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't trade any aspect of my family for any other in the world, but it's only by being honest about the tensions that they will be resolved, as I always trust that they will.  The love I have for emmie, Jubal and mitda, and the love between all of us, makes all the tensions worth it, all the difficulties a temporary thing, and my overall life satisfying and full of joy.

World as Abyss

What happens when World as the totality of meanings exhausts itself without finally providing the context for all our varied subtexts?  World as Abyss.

Does this mean, finally, that all subtexts are relative, and relative to something unknowable?  It seems to.  Does that relativize everything?  No.

Our responsibilities remain what they were.  Even in the situation where we don't, finally, know that we can be right.

Total Power Exchange and Limit Situations -2

“As soon as human beings attempt to
attain certainty about the totality of the world and life, they find
themselves faced with ultimate forms of incompatibility.”

“ It is from our experience of such
antinomy that there arises within us a vital will to unity.”

“Antinomies destroy and bifurcate,
and our experience of them amounts to standing within limit
situations.”

Incompatibilities, or contradictions,
permeate reality. In TPE we absolutize the master / slave
relationship, which keeps the dialectic and both antinomies alive in
a unique manner, affecting our experience of reality in a number of
fundamental ways. I will attempt to point towards them in the next
little section of blogworld. In this particular post in the series I
have a subintention as well, which is to provide an answer to the
objection raised in an earlier post towards use of the term "Total Power Exchange" or alternatively "Absolute Power Exchange".

Self certainty, from the perspective of
philosophical history and epistemology in particular, has a very
privileged place. It is from self certainty that Descartes arrives
at the absolute positing of the subject of the assertion, and the
subsequent subject object split has haunted epistemology since. If
the subject experiences only a representation of the posited
thing-in-itself, the thing-in-itself is never actually known. This
relativizing conception, generally known as subjectivism, has been
fought more or less successfully since in a number of philosophical
ideas. One of these is Hegel's conception of absolute knowledge, or
Spirit. For Hegel we are able to arrive, here at the end of History,
at absolute knowledge, because knowledge is able to know its own
knowing, and this double relation totalizes it, not quantitively, but
qualitatively. The sublation from self certain self consciousness
to absolute knowledge accomplished in the Phenomenology of Spirit
requires that Hegel explicate, and we experience, the unfolding of
the Master/slave dialectic. Hegel has been turned on his head a few
times since the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and for
good reason. But there remains something crucial in its exposition
that returns again in existential analysis.

In an earlier post I talked about the
limit situation and TPE as an example of such a situation. It was
posited there that in a limit situation such as TPE “ ... human
life knows itself drawn by a motive (idea), which extends it beyond
the forms, both subjective and objective, in which it customarily
exists." This is a bold statement. Within a recognized limit
situation such as TPE the human being is drawn beyond the forms of
subjective and objective reality. This totalizing move (totalizing
because it allows us to go beyond the relativizing subjectivism of
Descartes to a reconstitution of the world as a whole), obviates the
subject-object split, not merely within a theory, but practically as
well. Which brings us to another aspect of the limit situation.
Within it, the distinction between theory and practice, thought and
action, disappears as well. This is the second totalizing, or
absolutizing, move of the limit situation.

These things together produce the
situation where the human being can be aware of the totality of
world. World sounds a bit mysterious here, but a simple explanation
would be that World represents the sum total of meanings at our
disposal. We talk of worlds in this sense all the time, in fact,
when we use terms like “sports world” or “fashion world” - by
this denotation it describes a total of meanings that in turn
determine specific meanings, such that something like “walk”
means a positive thing in the “ baseball” world and a rather
negative one in the “business” world. We also call this context.
And the “text” in context is always intimately associated with
language as meaning. Jaspers notes a “splitting asunder” in the
limit situation as “the primary phenomenon of psychical life”.
But that splitting asunder also brings to light an unnoticed, a
priori unity, that must have always already existed before the limit
situation caused the splitting apart. Specifically with regard to
TPE this splitting asunder, that creates the Master/slave dichotomy,
points to the unity in which they exist a priori. And this pointing
at a unity, a totality, an absolute, which cannot be directly
experienced by finite, mortal man, is held fast in the TPE limit
situation, because it does not admit of a resolution.

For these reasons I believe we are
justified in the use of the term “Total Power Exchange” (or
“Absolute Power Exchange” when we are asked to describe what it
is that we do. We do not need to replace this term with the new
“Internal Enslavement”, because while IE is in itself a useful
term, and implies things of matter to the practice of TPE, by itself
IE implies that subjectivism and relativism that we seek to overcome;
implies that the slave enslaves himself, internally, in a
representing activity, rather than being enslaved in a dialectical
process whereby he first and finally becomes himself, as slave, and
the Master first becomes Master.

Nature vs Nurture (sic)

Jubal just had to raise the spectre of the nature vs nurture argument viz BDSM in his post.  Now you should know Jubal and I have very different intellectual backgrounds and very different ideas about most things.  Luckily it creates a healthy, fun argumentative situation and not a nasty type of thing.

In this particular case Jubal states very definitively that all BDSM is a learned thing.  I'm assuming that by "all BDSM" Jubal intends to include M/s and D/s as well as the more playful types of BDSM that interest him more at the moment.  Now I don't fall, this time, on the complete opposite side of his argument.  With just basic knowledge of information theory it seems unlikely that the number of bits required to produce the quantity of memes in a developed human brain could be found in the human genome pool.  At the same time evolutionary psychology has a foothold in demonstrability in the identical twins raised apart studies, which show striking and sometimes unbelievable correlations between the developed behavioural patterns of people with shared genes and different development histories.

Of course neither IT or EP are really close to my own background and methodology for analysing a question, but in order to satisfy Jubal that I am paying some attention to Science and not all my attention to Philosophy I mention them, and what I feel they do bring to the argument.

So what does phenomenology have to say about the situation?  Since here we are discussing psychology in a broad sense, without agreeing with the DSM-IV that these things are deviant in the sense of being a psychiatric issue, I will bring in the most phenomenological of the psychological schools, Daseinsanalysis.

 Daseinsanalysis prescribes a phenomenological approach of paying attention to the things themselves, and not immediately subsuming the concrete phenomena under a already available set of abstractions, such as specific development theories (Freud) or specific meaning theories (Jung).

The phenomenon of personal domination, in my history, is one where it was something I simply did.  It was only later that I realized how much I exerted control in my early relationships, without being overt or, really, honest about it, even with myself.  Partly due to my ex's being a dominatrix, but mostly due to mitda's need for submission and the immediate way I responded to it, I became open to the idea of being dominant in a thoughtful, proactive sense.  And this has continued since, as we've developed from playing at BDSM to entering a TPE triad, myself, mitda and emmie.  So the practice of domination is something I have definitely learned, but it seems to have been learned from a strong pre-existing tendency. 

This feeling I have seen talked about on the BDSM boards when the question comes up by dominants and submissives alike, who can trace their immediate responsiveness to BDSM situations, whether real or portrayed, as far back into their childhood as they can remember.  And while I am sure there are people into BDSM that can trace their interest back to specific events, such as childhood abuse or trauma, when asked on the boards it doesn't seem to have that strong a correlation for most of the participants.

I am asking mitda and emmie to put in their opinions as to how they experience and first experienced the submissive traits they have developed.  How much came in the development and how much (if any) do you feel was a priori present?  My own feeling about M/s, at least, as a subset of BDSM, is that it is learned, but learned out of strong pre-existing traits.  That I happen to share my dominant traits with my mother (who I am similar to in many ways) shows a possibility of a genetic connection also, but since my parents raised me, it being developmentally acquired from her is not out of the question.

Strange world of work part 2

This won't be the long, analytical kind of post the last one on the topic was.  It's just the note to self to remind me later why I dumped the contract, something I don't generally like doing.

An impassable personality clash is normally something that would put my back up.  Especially when, as in this case, I'm justified in my stance on the project.  Simply put, multithreaded and batch shouldn't be in the same sentence in programming circles.  Banks don't do it, and there's good reason for it, if you happen to be interested in accuracy of data.

But this time I've just walked away.  Granted I have another project elsewhere to walk away to, which makes it much easier. 

on perversion re: mitda re: jubal

mitda, commenting on jubal's next-to-inaugural blog post, makes a few comments that make her worldview precariously relativistic.  Here is an adjustment I would make to correct her, since her ideas are my responsibility : ).

"we live in our own worlds- and for the 4 of us, and the kinky people
with whom we associate, those worlds sometimes overlap, creating our
own society with its own norms."

Worlds are shared phenomena, Being-in-the-World is a simple, single structure, not a relation between independent phenomena the way it appears in English.  Even between radically different cultures there is a shared set of meanings that constitute a common world, and allow other structures of human being such as discourse and understanding to occur coterminous.  It's not so much that worlds sometimes overlap.  Rather the result of World+understanding (among other existentials), things that always already have occurred in human being, and are therefore a priori to willed cognition, are unique, and huge contributors to what is variously, and loosely, called character, personality or self consciousness.

To quote Medard  Boss, a Swiss psychiatrist who was very involved with Heidegger's ideas of human being, "We are not individuals locked up inside our bodies; We live rather in a
shared world, and we illuminate each other.  Human existence is
shared
existence."

Total Power Exchange and the Limit Situation - 1

An oddity, but one that often surfaces when pro and con arguments are vetted out, is that they take the same form, and essentially become two moments of one argument. This is the root of the form of thought known as dialectic, particularly the way that Hegel uses the term.

This turns out to be the case in the pro and con TPE argument, so let's take it apart a little. I will provide one of the original formulations of the argument for TPE and talk a little about the argument con, just to set the stage.
"When you "submit" to or "dominate" someone in a situation where safe words are used and when limitations are negotiated, you are not actually submitting or dominating at all - you are playing at it." - Jon Jacobs

The con argument also talks about limits. (In TPE) "The relationship is subject to the physical and the emotional limitations of the participants and therefore cannot genuinely be total or absolute." - From TPE, Wikipedia.

Odd isn't it that the arguments are so similar. What is it about TPE that immediately points towards limits as the crux of its own possibility? Karl Jaspers, in "The Psychology of Worldviews", a book unfortunately difficult to obtain, originated the idea of the "limit-situation", a peculiar existential condition where something unconditioned obtrudes and causes the self to come before itself in a unique way.

"...Jaspers claims that the self-disclosure of the possibilities of human existence depends on the capacity of the individual human life to open itself to the experience of the unconditioned (das Unbedingte). When it experiences the unconditioned, human life’s knows itself drawn by a motive (idea), which extends it beyond the forms, both subjective and objective, in which it customarily exists."

On a personal level, then, the limit situation unique discloses our possibilities, which gives us a better ground for actualizing them. On a philosophical level, if the limit is something unconditioned, and the unconditioned results in transcendence beyond the human's customary existence, being in a limit situation is an especially valuable situation for understanding what that customary existence is grounded upon, as well as experiencing a transcendence from it. And in fact the two things are the same, the subject-object split turns out to be based on an originary transcendence. What does transcendence mean here then? "Beyond" the customary, beyond the subject-object split, is in any case not a very well defined location, as far as we can immediately see. Before we can understand transcendence though, we need a horizon against which to view this new location, which does not admit of either subjectivity or objectivity.

So in order to develop a sense of what this horizon might be I'm going to look closer at the limit situation in general, and the limit situation I believe the TPE relationship to be in particular. In any limit situation Jaspers says that "existence directs itself from its own origin against and beyond its experience of normal subjective and objective reality". Direction then is important, and direction seems promising for understanding something like horizon. But what specifically happens in TPE? In the TPE situation there is an unconditioned demand, that the slave surrender all will, all freedoms, to the Master. Does this surrender equal surrendering all possibilities for the slave? By no means, but the slave's possibilities now all involve those inherent in enslavement, a situation where rather than being an "existence for itself", self consciousness becomes an "existence for another". Of course this act simultaneously creates the Master, who for his part was merely an undeveloped self consciousness as well. This part is well documented by Hegel in his lord/bondsman dialectic, so I will not further pursue it here, though a link might be useful to those not familiar with the argument.

So in the master/slave relationship there involves a complex dialectical process at work, at least according to Hegel. In TPE we attempt to make the enslavement total, or absolute. What does this do to the resolution?

Obviously the easy happy resolution of Hegel's "cooperation" isn't what we have here. We have in lieu of that a permanent tension, a permanent dialectic without resolution, unless you consider the passing of the participants a kind of resolution. It isn't a resolution as far as my thinking goes because the participants are precisely no longer there, but mortality is its own limit situation.

This post has become long and rather than lose the thread I will end for now and bring up the next element in the argument in a further post.

Lazy Sunday

Today the family hasn't been up to much at all, me especially.  The girls and I went for coffee and laptopping for a little while, and then mitda did the market run while we were out, but emmie and I pretty much sat and vegetated.  Well I did some writing about TPE which will likely find its way onto this blog later in the week.  But nothing really useful.  emmie's and mitda's posts today made me feel very good ...

This is a needed change after yesterday, which was wonderful in many ways but extremely tiring to me at least.  We prepared for and performed the collaring ceremony for both girls, with E assisting me in actually locking the new collars in place.  It was fun and we all felt a little special I think, hopefully not in a short bus sense.  Afterwards we went to the local play party and after a rather interminable "discussion period" and an equally lengthy set of personal introductions finally resulted in us watching some interesting rope work and having some reasonable conversation with others into related kinks.

So today, as I said, is relaxation time. 

Collaring

After many fits and starts with various collars, severe allergic reactions, and more than a couple of other issues, we decided that a collaring ceremony for both mitda and emmie, with new collars that do not have allergen issues and can be locked and worn 24/7, was the solution.  And something we wanted to do on its own merit, of course.  So, the two collars having arrived, today is to be that day. 

For the occasion I took up the pen (well, the thinkpad) and wrote out what they are, in fact, agreeing to.  It's fairly comprehensive as you may imagine.  I'm not going to post it here as it is also a little private, and somehow it doesn't seem to suit a public forum.  Even one for a very small public such as this one.

In general, then, the vows made by the girls have them commit to spending their lives living, experiencing and deepening their own enslavement.  And in return they will be taken care of in every possible way, directed in every possible way, and loved in every possible way.  No power exchange can be total or absolute due to the limits and constraints imposed by society, personality and simply the human body.  But it can be considered to be in the realm of such, by virtue of existing in and sustaining a limit situation. 

I plan to explore this application of the concept  of the limit situation in a future post.  But it was necessary to introduce it here to counter the most obvious objections to the vows we are each taking, and by extension the journey we have already begun together, that we are reaffirming in a permanent fashion.

The translators of a favourite book of mine coined one of my favourite
terms in order to literally translate the title in German, which
contains the German neologism "ereignis".  In English it is rendered as
enowning, where the "en" prefix denotes an intensification of the root
word.  mitda and emmie are not merely owned the way non-human property
can be merely owned, they are enowned, in a way that is unique and
proper to who they are, each in their own way.

Sleepy Afternoon

I decided to work from home this afternoon, partly because I have very little to do right now. However mitda and emmie were sleepy from the exertions of taking emmie to her first appointment with her new therapist. The therapist apparently has experience with clients in alternative lifestyles, so she shouldn't have to deal with being called a sexual deviant on top of having bipolar and generalized anxiety . In any event it seems she wasn't given that epithet on this occasion, and they had a get-to-know-you type of session where the therapist asked about and wrote down the family configuration.

Their sleepiness, alas, was contagious and I found myself napping at 3pm. Now I feel less tired and more relaxed, but a bit headachy unfortunately.

I looked over my post from last night and wondered what on earth possessed me to write so much about the topic. Finally decided it had to do with having come from an emotionally abusive vanilla background, and having seen the difference in a number of friends' relationships, where spousal abuse was common, unpredictable and extremely hurtful. One point I should have made but didn't, I think, is the number of abusers I have seen who were self-thwarted Dominants, prevented from exercising their personality traits in other ways due to morality, or a too hasty acceptance of societal norms. Put these people into a vanilla relationship, add a lot of frustration, and in the worst cases a good deal of alcohol, and what could have been a healthy domination streak turns into a nasty abusive one. My mother is that all over, though she controls the alcohol, as was the first girl I had a long relationship with, although not with me. We kept in touch, still do, and in later relationships she followed a ruinous course, eventually being charged with spousal abuse. Ironically her bail was set dependent upon her being my "court charge" for a period. If only the Judge had known MY predilections : ).

Well, for tomorrow, on to brighter and happier subjects. We have a play party to go to tomorrow night where mitda and I may play publicly for the first time ever. In any case some people we know and get along with well will be there, so it should be quite fun.

What a strange world of work

I work in an odd situation, for most people, in that I don't stay very long with companies. I don't work permanently, I work contracts. This is partly due to my nature - but mostly due to the nature of my job. Since I work as a software architect/developer, I'm in need of new projects on a consistent basis, but most companies don't start new projects all the time in IT, so they don't keep architects and developers on-staff, they hire contractors. Of course most of you probably know someone in IT, so you know this. But this is not the oddest thing by any means at the moment.

I am working a contract right now with a large, rather well known computer hardware OEM and services company, in their services division. They do, unlike many of my former clients, write software on an ongoing basis, but they hired me contract to write a market trial, which is close to starting.

Now emmie and mitda are not the most subtle slaves in the bdsm world, they both wear collars in virtually all situations, mitda wears cuffs most of the time, and they make no bones about the fact that they are my wife and girlfriend, which is noticeable even to those who don't know what collars and cuffs indicate. They have been around my work enough times that the people on my project, other than the ones who are absolutely clueless, know what the situation is at my household.

Well, surprise, noone seems to take much offense. In fact one of the members of my very small team turned out to be a TPE/IE Master with a live in slave. We went together to the recent GWNN conference (group with no name - a local bdsm group).

And this is what this meandering post is finally getting to. My colleague is very much a dom. He is ex military, very much into controlling himself and his surroundings, and confident in his ability to do so. He and I get along extremely well. However there is another member of the team who doesn't share that attribute of easy going self confidence. He tends to be at turns blustery or sulky, or tries to be easygoing with a rather undeveloped sense of humour that can be either quaint or irritating, depending upon one's mood. Because this fellow, although also a contractor, has been with the client for a good long period of time, while my other colleague and I joined for this project only, he is generally the lead on one of the main aspects of the product development.

Suffice it to say I openly have issues with him. And vice versa. But that isn't the story here either. He, let's refer to him as "J", has major issues with my other colleague "B". And vice versa there too. So here we go to a little vignette.

The project has been an extremely rushed affair. This is not that unusual in software development, and is part of the reason we were hired. There simply wasn't the turnaround time to reallocate permanent employees to the project, so contractors were brought in. However as a result normal process methods have been somewhat lax as we rushed past checkpoints and approval items to simply get something done and working. Now B is the requirements engineer for the project, and as we move precariously closer to QA he has become more and more aware that there are major differences between the product we have in hand and any requirements documentation that may have existed for the project. As a result, and mainly with other business-side members in view, he sent out an email, strongly worded as is his style, asking that from this point on any changes be vetted through him. After all this is his job. And he wants to get these changes, however minor, documented so that QA can perform their jobs. If they don't know what the current program is meant to do, it becomes a worthless task to test it. But the wording of the email put our friend J's back out of joint. And in response he went into bluster mode, came over to where B and I sit, and began yelling. It's not a big office and almost right away the entire project team was at B's desk getting involved in the "discussion".

B responded pretty calmly, repeated a couple of times "J., you need to calm down". Eventually this advice did reasonably sink in and the crowd dispersed. However B. wasn't happy with the situation. Once most people had disappeared for the day he took J. aside and to a meeting room. And proceeded to "rip him a new one" as it were for his unprofessionalism and poor behaviour. J. became extremely upset, to the point of tears, and told B. that he had an anger management problem. B. was nonplussed, telling J. that if he couldn't control his a. m. problem at work, he simply shouldn't be working.

Why have I wasted your time with this rather long vignette as part of an even longer post? Because it illustrates well, along with another comment J. had made as one of his rather quaint jokes, shortly after I had met him, something I started to talk about in a post earlier on this blog regarding bdsm and abuse. J. had said to me and others in the group when asked about his weekend "after you marry, one night when you're fast asleep, your wife rips your spine out and you don't make a decision after that".

I'm not implying J. is into spousal abuse. I wouldn't know and wouldn't want to know. But with an anger management problem such as he has it wouldn't be unthinkable. At least many actual wife abusers have anger management problems, that much would be accepted, I think, by most authorities on the subject. Yet it is B., who doesn't comprehend or accept lack of self control even when caused by such a problem, that is into bdsm Mastery, and keeps a live in slave to that end. I have no doubt either that B. can be quite sadistic with his consensual partner. But he is not an anger management class candidate nor is he a danger to his partner, while J., whose comment on his wife spoke (non-bdsm style) submission, that is a real danger when it comes to spousal abuse.

Does this mean that Dominants are never spouse abusers and submissives are? No. Does it mean that most spousal abusers are not vanilla? No. But it does show the difference I had been trying to express between a Dominant and an abuser. Abuse comes from lack of control, over the self, over others. And this lack is what makes abusers pick helpless targets. A Dominant first chooses someone who wants to be dominated, and someone who is worth dominating. If for any reason you find out that your next door neighbour whose kids are on your kids' basketball team and whose wife runs the PTA is secretly into bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sado-masochism, remember that it doesn't mean anyone there is in danger, physically or psychologically. It may be the nervous churchgoer across the street that is hurting his wife and marring his kids, in a way that is permanent and difficult to reverse.

A Firmer Hand

It is easy for a Master to become too at ease and complacent. Today both girls are in chastisement for different reasons. Suffice it to say that if the hand is not firm enough with a slave she will quickly lose her way, get confused, and fail at complying with the most basic tenets of the TPE/IE life she has accepted and submitted to. I become complacent with homelife when I am too strained at work, tired from insomnia and other issues, and generally happy with myself and our family. Even though I remain very happy with the family, I have been forced to realize that things are nowhere near 100% and action was needed.
A slave, unlike anyone else, no longer moves simply within the space they open up as human beings. Rather they share the space their Master opens up, and can only find their way when they are properly directed by the Master, who is familiar with the terrain and can guide their vision. In sharing this space, this "there" that the Master provides for them, they must find their only solace and satisfaction, and must find their will being guided and directed in union with their Master's, so that when they do go astray, upon being reigned in will wish for and delight in the chastisement the Master chooses for them.