BDSM as M/s Praxis

“Any form of skillful coping in which you can become an expert, in which you get into a kind of flow in which you don't have to think at all, your mind is out of it and the skills in your body are doing it, we've done all of that and we've done it taking a risk too, that when you do that: you end up lost or you may end up saying things you regret having said, and if you aren't ready to take that risk you'll never become an expert in that. So, I could predict that you have taken the risk and done it and felt bad about it, and you've done it and felt good about it, and when you've got that, you've got a kind of mastery. “ - Hubert Dreyfus.

Merleau-Ponty had an important insight. When we look at certain types of expertise (and I'm betraying less philosophical interests of mine, lol) such as the expertise of an athlete, we see embodied expertise, the expertise that is not simply “unthinking” in its operation but is required to be unthinking, such that the athlete wouldn't be able to do what he/she in fact does if he/she had to think about it while doing it. In this context we have to look at such things as “muscle memory” etc. where the brain simply doesn't contain the whole representation of what is going on. Merleau-Ponty recognized, in his idea of intercorporeality, that our usual and normal interactions with the World were bodily in nature, that we don't in fact keep a mental representation of the World, the World is immediate to us through our bodying forth into it. The skill of an athlete is an extension of our normal bodying forth, not an unusual or fundamentally different manner of relating to the World, or meaning-context, in which we exist.

The “play” aspect of bdsm is related to this, as part of the praxis of M/s relationships. Most M/s relationships do in fact incorporate aspects of bdsm play, and this is not an accidental relation. Dominating someone is not, fundamentally, simply a mental thing, and as a result purely psychological or psychosocial theories of M/s fall down when it comes to praxis. The physical aspects, bodily aspects of domination and submission come to the fore in bdsm “play”, and the scare quotes are there because in an M/s context “play” is in fact very serious and very much a part of the real dynamic between the people involved. That bdsm involves skilled play, mastery of technique in a more limited sense of the word mastery than I usually use it, is part of the way that M/s is embodied and brought to a fullness beyond its psychological expression.

When mitda and I first became involved it was in both a romantic (in the old fashioned sense) and practical manner. We were not an M/s couple in any sense, in fact neither of us understood the M/s dynamic as a real possibility. But the combination of a psychological bond together with a penchant for bdsm play resulted in a very tight relationship with one another, and an unplanned but powerful tendency towards M/s within the relationship. After getting together in a physical sense, living together as a couple, and engaging in such play our relationship dynamic inevitably tended not just to M/s, but M/s in its absolute form. Without having any conceptual transparency, we lived together, played together, and developed a total power transfer dynamic. As we became more aware of the tendencies that were expressing themselves within the dynamic and attempted to achieve some sort of conceptual transparency for what we were in fact doing, ideas such as TPE/IE suddenly made sense to two people who had run across and essentially written off such ideas. One of the things this made me aware of as a person who writes on the subject, is that while I can provide a framework for thinking about such relationships, I can't justify its existence or prove anything of what I am saying, and viewing it as a framework for my reality is something that could be accepted or rejected by the reader, but probably not really understood by the reader unless they themselves had experienced a similar dynamic. And this dynamic cannot be experienced purely mentally, it requires a bodily expression, it requires the bdsm practice aspect that from a conceptual point of view seems extrinsic.

In the relationship that developed with emmie that this praxis was intrinsic came more to the fore, in that she was not, is not a masochist in the conventional sense. She doesn't engage in bdsm praxis for the sake of the physical pleasure that a conventional masochist derives from it. She engages in it, and it has felt and become necessary to both of us to engage in such practices, from a purely dominance/submission aspect. As a result it is impossible to make the error of viewing the bodily aspect as essentially separate and different from the psychological. Her enjoyment of s & m play is purely the enjoyment a submissive derives from being submissive, palpably, physically. It is the bodying forth of her submission and the bodying forth of my mastery. Our play doesn't, as a result, have the comfortable and easy feel that mitda and I attain, where mastery and submission is bodied forth in concert with deep mutual pleasure and satisfaction. Instead it results in a tension of necessity, an expression of dominance and submission with our bodies that we cannot choose to forego simply because it isn't a fundamentally pleasurable activity.

Xmas and Migraines

I took emmie to a wine cheese and widgets party Saturday afternoon, where the point was to objectify (or de-subjectify as I prefer) one's slave by not addressing them and simply using them as whatever tool one needed at the moment. It was interesting to see her reaction and the reaction of the other slaves at the event, and also to have some conversation with other Masters. More events are planned that will be different than the more common bdsm style get togethers, the first being a protocol dinner with entertainment by the slaves in the group. While mitda wasn't quite recovered enough to attend the event she did make it to the xmas party that followed (at a different ranch) and we had quite a lot of good conversation and good times. I played emmie for only the second time publicly, (the first was a very private sort of publicness at a small party) and she did very well, given that I played her rather hard, if only for a short time. She did well with being publicly nude during the playtime as well.

There are a few more xmas events in our community but this party was the big one as far as I was concerned, with a huge white elephant gift exchange (which our family did rather well at) and various other holiday attributes :).

I am definitely planning on switching jobs in the near future. One company has interviewed me but there is some distance between their offer salary wise and my expectations. Two more opportunities came up today (I am taking the day off due to a migraine and the resulting dozyness from migraine meds).

Discipline and Punishment

In one of my earliest posts to this blog I talked about the conundrum of how to punish a masochist.  As it happens this worked itself out over the period during which I didn't post much to the blog, and I never got around to explicating any of it.

There's a "mode" one has to get into in order to punish, it's a mode
that involves "knowing" that you know better than the person you're
punishing, people find that easier with children, obviously, than with
adults   If you look at Tanos' site, the focus on "Internal
Enslavement" seems to focus on the slave's mindset, which is of course
important.  When mitda or emmie are being punished they are in a
different headspace than when they're being played.  But my
introduction of the term "Absolute" or "Total" Subjugation is important
because it deals with the mindset and headspace of the Master.  (Tanos does include this of course, it's only the term that seems to focus on the slave's doing, not the site or his thoughts on the matter)  In
order for the slave to get into her mindset, the Master has to be in
his, and it's a difficult thing at first to accomplish.  If you look at
my earliest blog entries there was the conundrum of how to punish a
masochist, and it took time to solve, but it has to do with getting
into a certain zone and making that felt to the slave.



First, as I said, you have to "know" that you're right, or that you
know better, than the slave.  This is difficult to do with someone that
you love and respect as an adult on the same level as your own.  You
have to know you know better because, simply, you are the Master in the
situation and it is your world and your set of meanings that are the
crucial ones.  The slave, in her enslavement, has given up the set of
meanings she had, what she accepted previously as her truth, and
accepted your reality as hers.  As a result, although she might be as
intelligent and capable as you are, she doesn't know the terrain as
well as you do, and within the dynamic in any disagreement she is
always in the wrong, because you are the arbiter of what is right and
wrong to begin with.  She needs this grounding by you as much as you
need to ground things in this way.  

Second, you need to get this world, this set of meanings, across to her
and put her in the situation where she knows that no matter what she
believed prior to her enslavement, she is now completely in the wrong
and needs to be punished to set her straight and remind her of where
her ground and truth are.  Partly I talk to emmie and mitda constantly
about the way I view things and the way things are for me, and must be
for them.  But truth lies in manifestation, and having things manifest
to the slave in the way they manifest to you is the key.  Human beings
share a world and share the way things manifest to a greater or lesser
degree depending on how close they are - and this phenomenon is what
people mean when they refer to "relating" to someone.  Physical contact
I've found is a key - standing at a distance and touching the slave
only when you hit them doesn't bring them into your space, you need to
break the slave's personal space by being as close to them as possible,
touching them with your free hand, and letting them feel the punishment
implement prior to and between hits, so that they know it's an
extension of your hand and your will.

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.

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.

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.

TPE, Poly and other Alt. Marriages, less coercive or more?

If the outcome of coercive power is the reduction of the human to human resources, and the reduction of the tradition to resource
allocations, we can begin to take a closer look at the various options open in the field of relationships. Quickly we can note the alignment of marriage with tax structures, religious power centres and family-values style politicking. 

At first glance TPE, total power exchange, a.k.a. internal enslavement, is the most forceful of the marriage options open. Polyamory possibly the least forceful. Traditional marriage falls somewhere in between. But glances are dissembling here as in many areas. There are also the areas of gay and transgender marriages.

So how about polyamory? Poised as it is against the traditional marriage and the upholding of "family values", and convoluted as it makes marriage from an ownership and taxation point of view, polyamory is in many ways the most radical option for a newly relationshipped adult. The many flavours of polyamory, whether the poly group is in a V, W, quad or other, leads to a delay between expectations and realizations from the moment the group sets foot in society. There are no easy societal labels within the group - husband, lover, partner etc. all seem equally inappropriate. This facet poly shares with gay and transgender marriage. As a result polyamory as well as gay/transgender marriage finds a common element with the proponents of traditional marriage

But since the seat of coercive power in the home is usually occupied by the heterosexual male, doesn't all this argue the more that TPE is the most outrageously coercive form of relationship dreamt up in the west so far?

The missing element here, is mastery. Were TPE simply a matter of domination, and were the domination available in an exterior form, it would be nothing more than a 24/7 form of the imposed drudgery of Hegel's bondsman. A marxist BDSM'er might argue that since the relationship is at least explicit, there is the possibility of reclamation, which seems impossible for the wage slave in his battle with the amorphous and mostly unempowered bourgeois. More than this, however, is the internal form of the "slavery" envisioned, where the slave gladly enters the relationship and would not leave it for a moment. And the willing acceptance of that gift by the Master, returning a solid sense of responsibility that traditional marriage and traditional divorce simply leave to the courts. Mastery is not coercion, it in fact abhors coercion, and will only admit of its own existence if that mastery is provided to it by those it masters. Coercion looks for the weak and the subduable, Mastery only finds value in the mastery of equals.

Mitdasein

When the Dom doesn't want to dom.

Some days one isn't fit for anything. Today I'm not fit to be a Dom. I have little to say to my slaves and no particular desires or wants for them to serve. I've therefore given them the day off and essentially asked to be left alone.

This is a difficult thing for some slaves, not for others. emelina doesn't seem to particularly mind, while mitda is rather upset by the whole thing. In any event there's not a lot I can do about it at the moment. We will see how I feel tomorrow morning.

It is the 4th of July. Perhaps everyone needs a holiday.

Mitdasein

Dominance and Abuse

Dominants get a lot of flack.  We're accused of being "spousal abusers with an excuse", or "sadists with a philosophy".  The thing is, anger is a huge part of abuse, and lack of control the other major factor.  Sadists get off on pain, domination is a tool.   Dominants get off on control and domination, bondage, discipline and sado-masochism are tools of that control.  Submissives or slaves want, crave, need that control, discipline and domination from their Masters.

Not that this post will convince anyone who doesn't know and understand someone involved in internal enslavement or total domination. 

When it doesn't go right ...

Even in the best BDSM relationships, dominants with the best slaves, submissives happy and adoring of their masters, sometimes things don't go right ...

Today we played and it didn't go right.  Maybe mitda wasn't in the right frame of mind, after all she had her day put out of rhythm by emmie and I being home.  She'll get used to emmie being home but the Master being home on a work day always upsets things.  Anyway we played and neither of us could get properly prepped or into it.  And it didn't work.  She got nowhere near subspace and I got nowhere near domspace.  Yes there is such a thing.

I'm still learning, and so are mitda and emmie.  Perhaps I should have used my hands instead of toys, to gauge her response.  But shoulds aren't the answer.  We all have to continue to learn our places and each other.

A Blah Tuesday

Last week, after many years of avoiding psychiatry, emelina was diagnosed with a number of complaints (no, sexual deviancy wasn't among them).  Aside from the shock of actually dealing with a diagnosis, she has been dealing with the side effects of the medication she was put on and hasn't managed a day of work since, although she has tried going into work twice now. 

Family income isn't really a big issue at the moment.  We can survive off my income and E's income quite nicely.  It would be great if emelina can get disability but nobody's really getting their hopes up on that, we know too much about the SSA and their methods of avoiding awarding disability, especially to psych. patients.

So not the fun type of day we had on Sunday, although we started off the morning with some good group morning sex.  I decided to work from home after realizing I needed to learn some things about my current project code base and didn't want to do that learning in front of my colleagues.

mitda and emelina should be back shortly from the misadventure at work.  I suppose we'll discuss what can be done to either help her get back to functioning or deal with her being at home with mitda.

Motorcycle and then some

Today I took emelina and mitda for a short run on the motorcycle.  This after showing E how to basically ride.  Of course he picked it up right away.  emelina and mitda have taste in other doms.  Afterwards we ate dinner, and then came the most intense non-disciplinary thrashing session with mitda in a long time.  emelina was watching, and then E came in and joined the audience.  mitda was in subspace heaven.  i played with her sphincter with a toy while whipping her, then had her go down as the whipping continued.  To cap it off we had anal with her legs in the air while E took emelina from behind.   Very hot all round.  Now E and emelina are online with their laptops and relaxing while mitda finishes the dishes.  I love my poly M/s family.

Finally!

After a few years and some objections from my primary my poly family agreed to my desire for another motorcycle.  Yes, I could have simply bought one, but sometimes consensus is preferable to domination, even for a dominant.

The bike is a simple one, a good learner bike, and so it will be good for the other male member of the household, who would like to learn but has never ridden one before.   And it was cheap and will keep me happy for the year and a half or so I need to be able to afford the bike I really want.  Hell, anything is fun to ride and as long as it can do the speed limit on any highway I don't actually *need* more. 

Emelina is looking forward to going for rides with me.  Mitda is more circumspect but she seems to have given in to the fact that she *is* going to get on the back of a motorcycle.

- Mitdasein

"Getting Away with It"

From a vanilla person's standpoint showing mercy in the event of a punishable offence is laudable, "nice", etc.  To a dominant it feels irresponsible, and to a slave it feels uncaring and neglectful.  Because I'm not in a dominant mindset 24/7 (just the reality of any 24/7 relationship - you're not always in the mode) I made the crucial mistake of being merciful on a number of occasions, and wound up with two very upset, unsatisfied slaves feeling completely neglected and uncared for.

Punishment for punishable offences has to be dealt out fairly, coldly (never in anger), and consistently.  It is, really, the only way for the slave to feel that their owner cares and would do anything for them.  "Abuse" in a D/s relationship means neglect.  Trying to get this across in the vanilla world would likely end me up in jail.  But it's the reality of my life path.  "Getting away with it" simply cannot be allowed, because all it means to the slave is neglect..

Domestic Discipline

Atlhough mentioned in the description of the blog, I haven't really talked at all about DD in the blog itself.  This week I came up with a list of household tasks (stolen from a Microsoft Excel template - thank you MS, lol) for the two slaves.  It wound up being fairly easy, my just being able to assign basically what each already does, but formalizing it seems to have made the whole quad happier about the needs around the house.

Not that this comes close to the reality of what domestic discipline should mean.  For my new slave it is an impossible ideal while she works full time.  It is a closer reality for mitda, who has not worked outside the home for some time.  The plan is for emelina to enter retirement from outside work later this year and be a full time service girl for me and the other male household member

A Little Time Alone

Tonight we
are going to do the club scene again.  Last weekend was a qualified
success, with emelina and I going to one type of club and mitda and e
going to another to suit different tastes.  Tonight we attempt again to
find one that we all like.  emelina and mitda are currently out
shopping for last minute necessities for the outing.  e and his
youngest kidlet are at Six Flags hopefully getting rather wet and
having a good time.

Living in a poly household, I don't really spend much time alone.  Oh,
I might be in the office while others are in the bedroom or the garage,
but not actually alone in the house.  It's both a relief and a
frustration. 

Vanilla after kink?

The latest post, entitled "Vanilla" on the blog "Confessions of an English Gentleman" (see roll), by an excellent writer on D/s btw, voiced something I had wondered about for a long time. I have personal reasons for disbelieving that such a transformation is possible, and my only experience with someone attempting it is not changing my mind.

Mitdasein

Looking at others' experiences

I've found a couple of interesting blogs by owners/masters, unfortunately one that I related to very well has ceased posting on the subject and, while other parts of his and his partner's life are also great reading I do miss the comments on the subject of D/s, such as the following.


"The problem that I have been having is that a lot of websites dealing with this are mostly dealing with the feelings of the psychology from a submissive point of view. Why is it, that these feelings can easily be classified for submissives, yet there is no website out there that deals with the Dominant side of things. No set of `tools` that would help a Dominant understand these issues and help them to enhance the relationship. It's almost like Doms are to know-it-all. Aren't we humans after all? Do we not have our own issues and emotional bagage to deal with?

I guess that is one of the major parts I am struggling with, at the moment. Do I want more control .. yes but how do I go about implementing this. A good example is `reactance`. It's a description of how a submissive will fight certain aspects of the control. But it is not said how a Dom deals with the fact that if the submissive tells him where to stick it. A Dom might be able to tell that the sub is reacting against his orders, but what tools does he have at his disposal?

Does he punish her? This could be one way, but would punishment really deal with the underlying issue? I tend to believe this is certainly not the case. One way would be talking, but what if both parties have talked and debated the issue, and no agreement can be reached? Do you just waltz over the issue and pretend to ignore the muttering and the fingered salute that is given behind your back?

I guess my problem is, that I have trouble at the moment to grasp where to go from here. How to implement structures that increase the submissiveness, without it becoming a forced affair. How to keep the relationship alive and blossoming without grinding it slowly to a halt in stricter and stricter rules.

I was just thinking of a quote I have: From the point of view of a typical dominant, most are also primarily looking for a relationship and many are themselves exploring their dominance as they go, unsure of exactly what they want, or how to teach or even ask it of a submissive, to say nothing of how lost they are when the submissive says no. Their focus is more on finding someone who matches and compliments themselves and then exploring with the submissive only what interests them. I am not sure where this comes from or who the orginal source is, but it is true in a way."

I'm not going to bother with the link as the blog owner has specifically said he is no longer interested in discussing his D/s relationship, he is just living it. Another blog that is being kept up has had a couple of good posts but I'm reserving judgment until I read a few more, if I still like it I'll add it to my blogroll.

Mitdasein

M. is back

I haven't asked for details but apparently mitda and her M. have made up. I'm glad and not at the same time, glad for mitda and for M., a little un-glad for myself, as it means mitda is still at the behest of two masters.

Of course I can't complain, since with emelina I now have two permanent live in subs. Emelena is also taking the lead of the 3 of us in really investigating the bdsm lifestyle, something mitda and I have steered around to this point. You can see some results of this on the web page with the bdsm flag now proudly flown and our association to Austin GWNN (group with no name) noted on the sidebar.

One thing with researching bdsm online is the number of people whose posts lead one to believe that either they a) live in a Gorean fantasy world or b) are full of crap about their real life D/s experiences, especially in a permanent live-in situation.

I've read things on reactance where the writer (a slave) says her reactance "increases" when an important freedom is withheld or completely taken away, such as being locked in the cell on days where she is supposed to go to work (!). Either they are in no need of her income and her dom is trying to get her fired, or he is an idiot. And if he doesn't want her to work, then why not simply order her, as her master, to leave her job?

more later
Das

End of the M. ?

When I met my wife and sub, she was involved in a D/s relationship with another woman. Eventually the woman involved "gave" her to me as a collared girl, but retained her position as my wife's mastress.

This created an interesting situation, to be sure, but since the mastress lived over a thousand miles away their relationship was confined to online time and phone conversations, much as ours had been until mitda packed up from L.A. and moved to Toronto to live with me.

Even online relationships suffer from the impingements of reality such as lack of time to spend together, and not feeling at least "as" preferred by one's partner relative to their other committments. And this seems in fact to have happened to my wife and her mastress. Since it is easier to avoid someone online than someone one happens to live with, my wife, after writing a damning email, simply stopped being available by IM or phone to her mastress.

This has put me in a bit of a quandary. In general masters/doms support one another, and a sub, even if no longer collared, just walking away is an odd position for a master to be put in. But I empathize with my wife's reasons as well.

m. mitdasein

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