Unlimited Responsibility and the Discourse of Mastery

I have been reading Derrida and others on the dangers of a “Discourse of Mastery”. The (vom Ereignis) in the subtitle of Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, pointing to the author as “enowned”, is of course a subtle indication that it contains a discourse of Mastery, and in fact Mastery comes up quite often within the text. As has been pointed out by Derrida, a discourse of Mastery implies “unlimited responsibility”, and while I do not think this is defensible in a horizontal manner (my responsibility for my cat doesn't imply responsibility for all cats) it seems to me appropriate that it imply an unlimited responsibility to the cat I in fact own (assuming I owned a cat, which I don't).

What does this do for human ownership? It means I have unlimited responsibility for the people who are consensually enslaved to me, through their enowning (enabling to own). Working this out in practice is always a situational, ethical problem, but it's one a Master cannot shirk or shy away from.

Meanderings

Today was a frustrating day dealing with bureaucracy. Fortunately I was kept buoyed up by mitda's current euthymia (general mood of well being) and the road trip we had to take to file some paperwork was much easier with her company.

I have decided to put more effort into the Masters' Workhaus group (see sidebar on left for info) and also on a local group called Explorations, where a group of local M/s practitioners get together with specific exercises in mind. The next planned event is a protocol dinner with post dinner erotic entertainment by the slaves. While emmie plans to dance for the group mitda is looking at an erotic reading.

I was sad to find out that the person who penned Married Man's Fucktoy has deleted her blog without explanation, obviously anything personal could happen that would lead to such an action, but it would have been nice to know the reason, and nicer for it to not have happened.

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.

A Slave's Situation

I've had various thoughts today surrounding absolute enslavement as a limit-situation, something I've blogged on previously, and the idea of situation in general and how it relates to consensual slavery. Situation in general is my term for the human condition, a condition of possibilities proffered and decisions required. Even the most brutal poverty, for example, remains a situation, no matter how limted the possibilities or how painful the decisions. Whereas total destitution, were it possible (without termination of life) would no longer be a situation. In total or absolute destitution there are no longer any options and no decisions to be made, and this non-situation is essentially inhuman.

So an absolute enslavement viewed as an actuality, rather than a vector of possibility, would by the same token be inhuman. Not simply in some sense of inhumane, which would be to reposit a priori human rights and the rest of the metaphysical baggage, but inhuman in the sense that the human condition always contains possibilities and always requires decision.

So what then could absolute enslavement mean or look like? It means that the options put before the slave are those of his/her Master's choosing, and the decisions made are made, to the highest degree attainable, as the decisions that his/her Master would take. This in its turn is made available to the slave through the shared world, or meaning-context, that the Master gives the slave. It looks almost like a normal relationship to the outside world, because the slave is seemingly free to make decisions and choose from given possibilities just as any other human being is. That the slave will in all probability choose the Master's will is inherent, but not necessarily apparent.

A limit-situation is defined as a situation in which the absolute, in some way, irrupts into the world of finite beings, mortals, humans. Being mortal itself is the fundamental limit situation, because death is a limit that we can never outstrip or breach, and that we are always in some way, dimly, aware of. Absolute enslavement is a more specific and determined limit-situation where the limit is, quite literally, that of being human and in a situation at all. As an absolute enslavement relationship progresses along a vector that approaches the limit, the slave's meaning-context becomes more and more aligned with that of the Master until the it approaches a probability of one that the slave will, in any specific situation, act as his/her Master would have them act. As a vector it never quite reaches a probability of one, because in remaining a human situation the slave never has 100% of the information required to be perfectly aligned, and thus is never perfectly sure that the Master's wishes are in fact being carried out until after the decision is made and enacted. And in never reaching it the slave's humanity is never lessened, nor his/her ethical responsibilities removed. The ethic involved here, a slave ethic, is the inherent rightness for the slave of doing what his/her Master would will, and it remains an ethical problem and not a moral imperative because what the Master wills cannot be predetermined in an always changing and new situation.

Solstice Time Again

“ During Babylonian and Persian solstice celebrations masters and slaves exchanged places. In each household, one slave was picked to be the master. In the palace, a mock king ruled in place of the true king.”

Tonight is Winter Solstice, and House Daedalus will be celebrating Persian style, with mitda reigning as Master for 12 hours from sundown to sunup. Wish me luck – I'll need it : ).

Crrrriiiitttic !

During a conversation Saturday night a Master friend of mine brought up the “Master's inner critic”, in the sense of the following situation. When living 24/7 in an absolute enslavement relationship it can be easy for the Master to get lazy at times. Suddenly there's a “wait a minute, s/he didn't do ... while s/he was doing ... - ah well, let it go this time, the game's on ...”, and this happens a few times in a day, maybe multiply that by a few days, and you've suddenly let a few dozen “ little things” slide.

Then suddenly you decide you have to correct him/her and set things straight. But the “inner critic” is saying “oh yea, come down on him/her NOW after you were too lazy to do it the other three dozen times”, and it becomes a difficult thing to do. And if it keeps on going the AE dynamic is lost completely, the slave no longer expects correction, and the Master loses the ability to do it and just lets the relationship lapse.

Ironically that very thing happened to me seemingly directly afterwards. Having been faced with two slaves suffering from the muted grays, browns and blacks of the depressive end of the bipolar spectrum, and having been home to take care of some things that I wouldn't normally have time for, I found that all of a sudden E. was making dinner every night (or scrounging McD's or KFC for the family), the bedroom, master bathroom, kitchen and closets all looked like thermonuclear test sites and at 7:30am the only person even close to being awake and prepared to leave the house was myself, so I was taking the kidlet to school while E. got ready for work, and my two slaves snored peacefully in bed.

Time to bring out the heavy guns! Yep, I sent an EMAIL, lol. Detailing what wasn't done and that it had to be done from now on.

Or else!!!!

Or else what?

The inner critic was hounding me on that one but I went ahead anyway. Tonight the kitchen, bedroom, master bathroom and closet have all been cleaned and nitpicked over, we had a wonderful birthday dessertfest with mitda's mother, and while these sorts of things are not a cure for bipolar depression we've discussed emmie's situation in particular and come up with what I think is a workable plan to help her learn some new coping skills, as well as get her medications sorted out in a short amount of time, all without taking her near a hospital.

Critic, be damned.

The Pierced Slave ...

mitda added to her voluminous collection of piercings today with 3 labirets in her left inner ear lobe.  This picture shows the last piercing needle while still in her ear.  Thanks to emmie for some great pics, can't wait until you get the digital SLR and start having some control over the lighting and filters :).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Taking Breaks?

mitda asked if I had taken a break from mastering them this weekend.  I hadn't, in fact, done so.  I simply had been in an easygoing mood and willing to indulge them a little.  I also had been very tired and somewhat afraid of falling asleep and sleeping through for a long period, something problematic if I do things like padlocking their wrists together for bed.

The last few days I've also been in something of a revaluating mode, perhaps triggered by mitda's request for assistance at rating her mentorship needs, as to what both she and emmie each need from me.  emmie is most in need of some direction and impetus to start looking at different topics that interest her and finding something that might hold her interest enough to make it a field of study.  mitda needs to get back to her writing but I expect that will happen soon, especially given she goes to a sci-fi writing conference in 2 weeks.  The GWNN bash was fun in its way, but right now I wonder if, especially for mitda, she's obsessing too much on the best way to be the best slave possible.  Of course it's important to me, but an obsessing slave is not going to be the best slave possible.

Slave Mentoring

Something that mitda and emelina have brought to my attention over the last couple of days, after discussing it with a slave in our acquaintance who is well versed in the etiquettes and protocols, as well as well known in the scene, is the existence of slave mentoring programs.  While I have been aware of offhand Master mentoring programs this is the first time I have heard of organized slave mentoring programs offered by other slaves.

Essentially the new(er) slave chooses from a list of mentors that have different specialties to their service regimen, and spends time online or in person (depending on location) to enhance his/her skills in these areas.  These areas might include household duties to sexual duties.  Masters are definitely not welcome for the mentoring itself, but mitda had me review the mentors available in order to recommend one to her.  

It's an interesting, and I think worthwhile idea.  Since the slave who organizes this locally has a Master who is also well known in the scene, and known to me, I may pursue any Master mentoring they may have set up as well.  Of course Masters tend to want to do things their own way - it's part of the dominance thing - but pointers can always be useful ; ).

Mitdasein

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

Sexy Night

Tonight our quad just fell into a sexy feeling together and everything just flowed, so to speak ; ).  mitda, bound and locked to the bed at her wrists, was being softly played with by E while I started to smack her a little.  emmie  started to kiss me a little and I flattened mitda on the bed and began to sodomize her.  As we started to fuck E took emmie and put her on her knees, and slowly, gently slid himself into her ass.  This has been an issue due to E's unusually large size but tonight she was relaxed, pliant and ready, and as he slid further into her she squeezed and fucked on his cock with her ass, as I'd taught her.   Once he was fully penetrated and she was comfortable he started to fuck her in and out, slowly at first but building until he was fucking her into oblivion.  I continued to fuck mitda on her stomach, then turned her over and took her with her legs pointed at the sky, so she could watch E and emelina.

After everyone had finished we slept, but for some reason I woke up shortly after midnight and, thinking it was early morning, woke mitda from her mat at the foot of our bed, unlocked her and told her to make coffee.   Our activity woke up emelina and eventually even E, who usually sleeps like the dead.  mitda began by going down on me while emmie and I made out.   Then mitda asked if I would go down on her and I said yes, and told her to put her knees around my head and lower herself to my mouth.  Emmie took the opportunity to continue what mitda had been doing for me, and seeing E awake, mitda started to suck his cock while I licked her, something she doesn't usually like as she likes to concentrate on sucking properly and being licked prevents that. 

Somewhere in the middle of all this, still fully believing it was nearly dawn, I asked mitda for my adderall script, to take my morning dose and get ready for the day.  After we finished and I finally noticed that it was 1:40a it hit me that I wasn't sleeping the rest of the night.  I lay down for a while and drifted to neu! on the winamp.  Then I woke up and mitda gave me a coffee, we went for cigs and then decided to go to the office to make her come a few times.  Shortly after we started emmie knocked on the door and joined us, and emmie and I fisted mitda in both holes until she was in full on subspace and coming over and over.  As a denouement to this section emmie got on her knees, mitda beside her lying on her back, and I fisted both of them together until they came together on command.

We have plans for an early morning threesome after mitda has a llittle nap.  I will post if we do anything interesting.  Sexual domination is incredibly fulfilling and often the place where D/s starts.  It reinforces the slaves' position as owned and enhances the dom's sense of control and responsibility.

Mitdasein