Remittance Girl's Blog, page 18

Sound and Fury

That first three months had been months of silence. Not a lack of noise. The noise was ceaseless. Voices in a language she didn’t know, with its astonishing range of tonality. The dips and rises and cutting off of breath that indicated, not emotion, but meaning itself. Then there were the mechanical sounds. It was as if every moving part had to have its say. The air conditioner groaned and rattled, the fan squeaked its revolutions like a small tortured animal that suffers but never dies. The pipes that hissed and clanged with trapped air, the water pumps that thrummed and throbbed, the incessant drips of taps whose washers had turned brittle and crumbled. Outside her window, in the narrow alley below, the motorcycles growled and gunned and backfired and beeped for no reason other than to indicate its thereness. The inane and tinny tunes every four-wheeled vehicle played while reversing. Grating, biting, synthetic renditions of Jingle Bells or The Lambada or Je T’aime. Songs unmoored from their original context and appropriated to serve as traffic safety measures.

In that dark and stifling room, Christina lay naked and sweating on her rented bed, a grotesque thing painted pink and black with a clock the size of a large pizza set into the headboard, ticking away hours of insomnia.

She imagined a corpulent man behind a metal military surplus desk in a flyblown office in Hanoi choosing regulation melodies for the purpose. Brown water stains on the foam ceiling tiles, curling linoleum on the floor, ashtray overflowing and stained teacups evaporating their contents in the heat. Across the room, a harried, nervous woman summoned post-haste from the music conservatory, seated at a cheap Chinese keyboard offering musical suggestions.

“What about that one?” she asks, after having plinked out the opening verse to Saturday Night Fever.

“No, that’s too peaceful. Try again,” he replies, lighting another cigarette, closing his eyes and tilting his head heavenwards. “Can’t we find something more irritating?”

She thinks for a moment, pushes the sweat-damp fringe of her dark hair aside and breaks into the chorus of Barbie Girl.

“That’ll do,” he says, and leans forward to add the title to his list of regulation vehicle reversal melodies.

Censorship & Concrete Remedies: Who do you link to?

It occurred to me that as I waxed philosophical in my last post on censorship and the vagaries of being a writer of erotic fiction, I did not suggest any remedies. It’s all very well to bitch and philosophize, but offering solutions is far more constructive.

While we’re all tearing our hair out about Kobo, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Amazon, etc. and their various purges of what they consider beneath them to sell, there’s no point gnashing our teeth over this. Yes, it’s unfair. Yes, they’re consummate hypocrites for removing certain titles while continuing to reap profits from titles like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ (which to my mind is not only poorly written, of little artistic merit but justifies sexual abuse through romance). Their refusal to sell what we write does not impinge on our rights to write it or distribute it through other channels. So…

There are a number of indie eBook retailers out there who, within the boundaries of the law, staunchly defend a ‘no censorship’ policy. Smashwords do this. Mark Coker (who I have taken to task on one occasion) has fought quietly but effectively and passionately to do this.

So put your ire where your mouth is and find those indie retailers and bloody link to them FIRST. 

This means you need to publish through them. And yes, it endangers your KDP Select status if you opted for it. Personally, I have never gone for that on ideological grounds. Although I have always given my fiction away for free on this blog for short periods of time, I think having something retailed as ‘free’ is one of those marketing ploys I find debasing trickery. Yes, your Amazon rating shoots up for about five minutes, but it’s a number based on air. If readers like my writing and want it in a neat, permanent little package, they can pay the price of a cup of coffee to read it. If they won’t, that’s their loss, in my view.

The majority of erotica writers are like anyone else who has been brainwashed into believing that the marketplace is ideologically neutral. They have been trained to marketize themselves and to see their work as manufactured product. There’s really nothing to be done about that. Looking through some of the tweets and comments I received in my last post, I realize that some people are either unable to or unwilling to acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between cultural works and a plastic lighter made in Taiwan.

However, if you find yourself up in arms now about your work being purged, then you have just encountered the truth of it: the marketplace DOES have an ideological slant and it’s not one that favours you or your freedom to write whatever kinky shit you want.  This IS an ideological issue and you, whether you like it or not, have just felt the sting of it.

You CAN do something about it. By all means keep your titles on the platforms that will sell you, but consider that every time you point a buyer towards Amazon or Kobo, you are supporting an organization that doesn’t share your ethos, and will delete your work without a second thought should you cause them any financial, legal or marketing discomfort.

When you blog, tweet, FB or otherwise promote your book, DON’T post a sales link to Amazon, B & N, Kobo, etc., first. Provide a link to one of the eBook retailers who defend your right to write what you write first. Because the social propensity for stigmatization, righteous indignation, and general hysteria over the ‘morality’ of certain types of textual fiction is not going away anytime soon.

And you are going to need friends.

Censorship: On the Bright Side

It is easy to get tremendously worked up over the recent and ongoing changes taking place at the various e-book retailers. Many self-published erotica works are being cleared off the virtual shelves of stores like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc. For more on this read Nate Hoffeider’s article: “Self-Published Erotica is Being Singled Out for Sweeping Deletions from Major EBookstores.”

I’m not a supporter of censorship of any sort – economic, ideological or social. I’m just a realist. The Western world (which is the only one who even debates the issue of the evils of censorship) has seen a historical ebb and flow to the value in which they’ve held freedom of speech and other attendant, related freedoms.

My guess is that this latest moves by eBookstores is purely pragmatic, not moral. That the books they are removing do not earn them enough profit to be worth the legal risks they perceive to be taking in stocking them. And being businesses, their decisions are informed more by their accountants and legal teams than any content editorial decision-making entity. And (yes, you can jump on me for this in the comments) the vast majority of what they are deleting is material that most of the content-based decision-makers are not willing to defend for its artistic merit.

Self-publishing has brought us extraordinary voices we would not have otherwise heard. Voices so new and fresh that the traditional and even larger indie publishers (few of whom have shown a shred of willingness to participate in literary innovation for years) could not spot the value in them. But it has also brought us a mountain of crap – derivative, badly-written, sometimes blatantly plagiarized, un-proofed garbage with no redeeming qualities at all.

Moreover, my guess is that these retailers possess no one who has even a basic grasp of the nuances of what might or might not breach the laws regarding obscenity in any given country. And the reality is: they don’t have to. Ebook Retailers have no altruistic obligation to the cultural landscape of our society. They have made no pledges to stand shoulder to shoulder with the literary innovators of our age. They’re textual Walmarts. That’s all they are. And so there is no compelling reason for them to defend anyone’s right to sell some self-pubbed ebook that interrupts the smooth running of their businesses.

The minute we started calling music, literature, film, etc. ‘cultural product’ is the moment we started treating it like a material thing that might be bought or sold on the basis of superficial standards of profitability. And ‘product’ sellers started selling it. The minute we started demanding that the books we bought should ‘do what they say on the package’, or slot neatly into genre parameters, or come up to our specific expectations (not as readers, or explorers in the world of fiction but as ‘consumers’) was the moment we said goodbye to an enduring, nuanced and untransactional relationship with literature.

This issue is not going to go away or get better anytime soon. We have become so consumer-oriented, so intensely market-driven, that it will probably take generations before enough people notice how achingly vacuous our society has grown and do anything about it. And when that does happen, it won’t be a happy time either. Because unless there is a groundswell of common sense and critical thinking (when was the last time that happened?), the loudest voices are going to be the ones who think the only place depth is to be found is in some hyper-religious version of morality.

So, for now, I expect that transgressive literature will be driven underground, into the shady byways of indie ebook retailers. These problematic books may not gross enough profit for the major eBook retailers, but it’s probably enough for someone smaller.

And so we go back to purchasing our questionable reading material in the electronic version of brown paper packages. Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. I’m not opposed to forcing consumers of transgressive literature to admit that what they’re buying is, indeed, transgressive. In fact, I think there’s a certain fetishistic pleasure to be had in having to do it.

Moreover, no one is stopping writers of transgressive material from distributing it off their own websites, or in subscription form. And if you really believe in the material you write, as I do, then the loss of what is, for most of us, a laughable sum of money that won’t even cover the cost of my cat food… is no loss at all.

Write because you love writing. Write because you have to. Write to be read. Write to speak to the uncomfortable realities of our desires, to the erotic truths that a terminally hypocritical society will not acknowledge.

As a writer of erotic fiction, that’s my job. All that business stuff… is just a distraction.

The By-blow of Good Intention

Now she wants to get in.

The woman who keeps fucking up my dreams. Cloth coat buttoned up to her aging chin and a thick scree of make-up forever threatening to slide off her face and reveal… what?

She’s half-zombie, half-vampire, an undead machine of unthinking consumption. Even as I lock her out: imaginary bolts slotted into metal sheaths, the clunk of sturdy door chains slid into their bespoke receptacles, I feel for her. She terrifies me and I pity her as well. Like a terminally sick cat, crawling with fleas and lice and mange, who mindlessly pushes itself into my arms, seeking one last drop of comfort and affection before dying and taking the whole of the world down with it.

It is hunger that has made her this. Black-hole hunger that cannot be sated in a million years. My mussulfrau is a cored-out thing, a walking, reeking hollow, an abscess of need what will inevitably convert anything she devours into infection, destined only to eat away at the edges, to make a larger hole. The cunt of a mouth that births nothing: that takes until the sun goes out.

How can I love her? How can I let her in when I know what she is, how she was born, and what she has grown into after so many years in the dark park outside my gates? She is the girl on the bed grown old in the room with the fleur-de-lis wallpaper. After I turned off the light and shut the door tight and moved on to a life of milder, mediocre things. Of just-enoughs and not-too-muches, of sensible means. A Goldilocks life of luke-warmness.

If, in my dreams, I keep losing track of rooms, or find them incrementally possessed by ghosts I never quite catch in the act of taking possession, then what of it? It’s still my house, and my door, and my locks. And she of the terrible hunger is out there and I’m in here in my warm, shrinking world.

 

 

The Honourable Mishap

Here comes a candle to light you to bed.

Here comes a chopper to chop of your head.

“Oranges and Lemons”

Traditional English Nursery Rhyme

There was before and there was after.

I remember the chill silk of the quilt beneath my naked skin, crisply urging me to arch my back. My small, perfect breasts, tipped with nipples as dark and tight as walnut whips, offered up to him and, beyond him, the molded Georgian ceiling. I flung my arms above my head and smiled, snaking my spine from side to side, feeling my bare ass slither against the bedclothes.

“I want to do it,” I said. “Now.”

It might have sounded spontaneous but it was nothing of the sort. I’d fearlessly made my way up to the family planning clinic and demanded the pill months before. I had decided I would lose my virginity perfectly: not drunk, not pressured, not carelessly like so many of my contemporaries. This was the way I wanted to divest myself of my virtue and this was the man – yes, man – with whom I’d do it.

Kevin looked down at me, hands fisted in the front pockets of his jeans. The long, lank flop of blond hair forever threatening to obscure his right eye did so. But I knew he was looking at me anyway. He couldn’t not look at me.

“Come on,” I whined, in what I thought must be a sexy sort of petulance. “You know you want to. You’re hard.”

His shoulders and the fists in his pockets tightened, obscuring the erection I assumed was there, was sure was there.

God knows, it had always been there before. To my mind, which hadn’t had many close encounters with penises prior to his, it had seemed a constant presence. And if perhaps I was still a little wary of it, I had overcome my initial horror of the thing many months before.  In the front seat of his car, parked in the rain, drops pattering rhythmically on the roof and turning the glare of streetlamps to bright smears in the dark. In the circular booth of the restaurant he used to take me to, open past midnight on Saturdays, were he’d buy me burgers and we’d talk until two and grope each other beneath the table cloth. Against me, against my own tightly jeaned crotch, humid with its own machinations.

This was the man, I decided. Not a sniggering adolescent, but a man. Not a neophyte. Not a virgin. Kevin, I was certain, was as knowledgeable about sex as it was possible for anyone to be. I’d picked him for that very reason.  He knew about Baudelaire and atomic fission and the Stalinist purges. He knew, I was pretty sure, about everything. And if at first he hadn’t known I was sixteen, I did not keep that awkward secret from him long. He’d gotten over the shock of it, I was certain, ages ago. Thirty-one, I thought, was the perfect age to be if you were going to be nominated for the privilege of deflowering me.

It never occurred to me that it might be a burden. I was beautiful. Perhaps not pretty in a cover-girl way, but exotic. Dark eyed and dark haired with obscenely plump, wide lips and a body made to take curves at speed. Small and lithe and perfectly proportioned. There had been a lot of volunteers to relieve me of virtue. The brazen, the sly, the bold and the manipulative. The drunk, the fumblers, the monstrously presumptive, the sweet even. But they were all boys. Not men.

Kevin leaned back against the fleur-de-lis patterned wall paper I’d chosen for my bedroom and let his weight carry him down to a crouch. I propped myself up on my elbows, and the room felt colder than it had before.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just can’t.”

I stared at him. A ball of something black and tarry formed in my chest and inched its way up my throat. “Yes you can.”

He propped his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands. “No, I can’t.”

“Why?” It was a broken-backed breath of a question. It was all I could manage.

He sighed, took his hands away from his face and looked at me with his sky-blue eyes. “You’re just too young.”

“I’m what?”

“You need to find someone your own age. I can’t do this. It’s just wrong.”

“No it’s not.” Only then did it occur to me that I wasn’t just cold – I was freezing. I tore blindly at the quilt beneath me and pulled it over my torso. “It’s me.”

“It’s not you.”

“Oh, what a fucking lie! I know what that means. ‘It’s not you. It’s not you.’ What a fucking cliche! ‘It’s not you’.” I was crying then, spitting the words at the ceiling until I rolled over to face the wall and curled into a ball.

His weight jostled the bed as he sat on the edge of it. He put a cool, long-fingered hand on my forehead. “It’s not you. I just… I can’t. I can’t be… that dishonorable.”

“Don’t touch me. Don’t you fucking touch me. Don’t you ever touch me ever again,” I whispered into the dark because my eyes were shut tight, tight against the flood of tears stinging to get free. “Go away. Go.”

“Sweetheart,” he said gently.

“Get the fuck out of here. I hate you.”

He tried again, but all the other words I had were stacked up behind the thick black ball in my throat and couldn’t get past it. The bed moved again as he stood.

In the dark cocoon of my hurt, I had no skin. The bones of my knees were pressed tight to my ribs. No skin and no organs. Flayed and gutted. The fearless girl who had stretched herself so confidently and invitingly across that bed was dead.

I grew to adulthood wearing her frightened, insecure, rotting remains.

Veiled Girl With Lute – Last Chance to Read and Listen

My very long short story “Veiled Girl With Lute” has been accepted for publication and so I’ll be taking both the text and podcasted versions down over the weekend.

If you’d like to take the opportunity to read the whole series before it disappears from view, then start at Veiled Girl With Lute, Part 1.

If you’d like to listen to the podcasted version of the story, masterfully read by Bravemouth101, you can either play or download the individual MP3s at my Libsyn podcast area or from my iTunes page.

I’m going to be taking the files down on Sunday evening, so you’ve got the weekend.

Just to underscore the point, this story is NOT an erotic romance. It contains disturbing subject matter and it might be said to ‘eroticize’ torture. So… you’re a grown-up. Consume responsibly.

 

The Privilege of Choice

I received a lot of gratifying comments on my last post, but it reminded me that I perhaps had an obligation to balance it. The wired world has become a mosaic of communities who share common interests. There are groups for every interest under the sun and it becomes easy, if you spend too long in the company of like-minded individuals to become oblivious to the experiences of others. From time to time they collide and flame wars ensue, but it is always worth keeping in mind that the online world is, by its very nature, a privileged one. A large proportion of the world doesn’t have regular internet access at all, doesn’t speak English, or has a lot of its internet access blocked by governments, like China, who prefer to maintain an internal virtual playground rather than a global one.

More specifically, I wanted to address the issue of people who associate, either online or in real life, or both with BDSM and their surrounding issues. It is the happy couple who  find their sexual tastes intersect. People who lived steeped in the language and the subculture of BDSM often forget that they are, in fact, a subculture. It is a non-normative form of sexuality. And I feel that, in attempting to validate our own desires, we forget that.

We also forget that choice and consent are at the very heart of how BDSM can remain non-normative yet still tolerable within a modern, diverse society. This ‘outness’ is a very modern phenomena. Its increasingly public nature is something I have ambivalent feelings about. I’m quite sure the popularity of books like Fifty Shades of Grey have sent many, especially women, flocking to the darker side of the social net to seek what they think of as a way to spice up their sex lives.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not belittling anyone who is curious and adventurous and looks for broader horizons in the experience of their lives as a whole or their sexuality in particular. But I’d like to point out that demanding that someone participate in that adventure with you is fundamentally unfair. To make someone feel like a prude or selfish or unaccommodating for not wanting to smack your ass or have theirs smacked is just as wrong as treating someone like a freak for wanting it.

Furthermore, many people who have come from cultures where physical abuse, cruelty, corporal punishment or sexual control are mainstream, normative practices may not see the sexual fun side to indulging in power play. Similarly, people who have been caught up in institutions where power hierarchies are dominant structures in their lives may see the voluntary taking on of sexually dominant or submissive roles as something approaching their worst nightmare.

I don’t wish to pathologize perverse sexualities and yet I can’t ignore (through my own anecdotal experiences) that some people seek to ritually play out in adulthood the power dynamics they experienced in childhood. No, I’m not saying everyone in the BDSM community has been abused, or neglected. I’m saying it has been my experience that for some people who have been, the BDSM paradigm can be an alluringly familiar structural orientation. Nor do I think it is bad that they have found it and found comfort in it. I’m not making a judgement. It’s just what it is.

What is worth remembering is that a considerable portion of the world lives under circumstances that, to us, would look like institutionalized BDSM. With one very salient difference: it’s not consensual.  And for people who have experienced that kind of power imbalance, without their consent, BDSM can seem like a disorienting dose of PTSD. To believe that you have grown up and escaped physical abuse, power imparity and lack of sexual choice only to be confronted with it in the guise of liberated sexual fun can make you feel like you’ve walked into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

So -  the point of this post? Just that while we are all busy congratulating ourselves on our openmindedness and adventurism, our liberating demands to have our ‘needs met,’ it is worth recalling that our current circumstances are born of having immense scope in our choices. And that is not everyone’s reality.

Apologies for the Silence – Yangon, Myanmar

I’ve been traveling. After years and years of contemplating whether it was ethical to visit Myanmar (or Burma), and after it became even possible to get a visa arranged to visit the country from Ho Chi Minh City, I decided to go.

Like Vietnam, Burma was also a colony. It was colonized by the English, instead of the French (like Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) and it reflects both its colonial heritage and its struggle to independence. And Yangon, like Ho Chi Minh City, has a love-hate relationship with its history. But unlike Saigon, Yangon – probably through lack of inward investment and globalization – has kept a lot of its colonial architecture. I suspect out of sheer necessity.

Yangon is immensely more spread out. The city blocks are huge. Parts of the city, close to the port, are massively populated and tightly packed. But most of it is made up of massive garden estates with single, enormous houses on them. Many of them turned to educational or administrational purposes. It was only when I took the Yangon Circular train (which surrounds the whole city and takes 3 hours to circumnavigate) that I got to see where most Yangonese live; in little bunched village-like hamlets interspersed with industrial areas.

On similar latitudes, it has pretty much the same weather. Now it’s the rainy season, so there are torrential afternoon showers. The buildings bear the marks of the heat, the humidity and the rain.

Another difference in Yangon is the diversity of cultures and religions. Vietnam is, for the most part a Buddhist country with a small but robust Catholic minority. Myanmar is predominantly Buddhist, but it has sizable Christian, Muslim and Hindu minorities, all of which are represented in their houses of worship. Within a single 300 meter area there is:

The Sule Pagoda

 

Across the street, a large mosque

One block from a Methodist church

and down the street, a Hindu temple

This is reflected in the diversity of faces you see on the street. I found this one of the most pleasing of all aspects of Yangon. Saigon, for all its many charms, in much more homogenous.

Instead of the ubiquitous coffee stalls of Vietnam, the Burmese are tea fanatics. I came to learn that tea houses are somewhat frowned upon as places where lazy men waste their days. But if you tasted the tea, you’d know why they never leave.

It’s made with very coarsely cut black tea leaves, steeped for what tastes like hours and served with a dollop of canned milk.

If you are thinking of traveling somewhere new, consider coming to Myanmar. Their tourist industry is nascent, so don’t expect things to go exactly as planned. They have rickety internet and the odd power outage. But countries are not about their buildings or their amenities. What makes for a great place to travel is the people. I was warned by someone that I’d fall in love with Burma and the Burmese, and I have. I haven’t had a single unpleasant or even cold interchange since I’ve been here. People are open, friendly, and almost overwhelmingly eager to engage you, no matter whether they speak your language or not.

A couple of things to keep in mind: never pat anyone on the head in Burma, not even a child – it’s incredibly rude. Also, everyone kicks their sandals off here at the drop of a hat, but never, ever point the soles of your feet at anyone, or at any religious iconography. Like most Buddhist cultures, there is a lot of same-sex physical contact, but don’t touch a person of the opposite sex unless it’s obvious it’s welcomed. It’s not in the least bit a gender-separated society, but it is a polite one.

The Ephemeral Quality of Dominance

This post has been coming for a while, and then a twitter conversation with @DarkGracie sort of kicked me into finally writing it.

If you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you’ll have noticed I seldom use terms like dominant or submissive in my stories. I tend to leave the labeling to my readers. That’s not to say I don’t write about power dynamics in sexuality or eroticize it. I do, constantly. As far as I know, I’ve never written a story that doesn’t feature some element of D/s, but I do try to explore the nuances of it without naming it. Because to name it is to limit it; to define it is to constrain it. My experience is that power is, at its sexiest, quite a complex thing. It never truly runs in one direction unless it’s rape or abuse.

Anyone who plays under the constraints of consent, top or dominant or whatever, still gives power over to the concept of consent. If that consent can be withdrawn, then ultimately power lies in the hands of the person who might refuse it or withdraw it.

The biggest problem with labels is that they allow other things to hide beneath them. There are a considerable number of men who purport to be dominants but are just incredibly immature and so insecure about their sexual skills as a lover, they figure the way to circumvent having to prove themselves is by completely ignoring their partner’s experience, and hiding the tactic under the guise of being in charge. Being a dominant doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility of caring whether a partner gets off. In fact, he or she takes on the entire responsibility of the when, the where, the how and how often.

One of the reasons I don’t identify myself as truly submissive is that I am reluctant to trust or burden anyone with the responsibility for my pleasure.  And a dominant IS ultimately responsible for it. They don’t have to read minds – they can demand communicativeness in order to take that responsibility – but that’s the deal. It’s all in their hands.

I’m not sure if it is true for anyone else, but the dynamics of D/s have more to do with the chemistry I feel on meeting someone and getting to know them, than on any presented ‘orientation.’ There’s a kind of neuro-chemical magic that occurs when I meet someone. They may be a perfect dominant to someone else, but not for me.  I’ve met people identifying as dominants who, once they got to know me even a little, toned it right down. Conversely, I’ve met people who didn’t identify as having any power-dynamic preference at all, who, upon more intimate acquaintance, turned into rather yummy dominants with me.

Beyond the initial presence of mutual sexual attraction, I think the most successful experiences occur when people are open to a certain amount of reorientation and reconsideration of how the lines of power will play themselves out. Unfortunately, this seldom happens with insecure people.  They’ve come armed with an understanding of the way things will be and blindly attempt to force the encounter into the box they’ve constructed before hand. That very rigid and cramped box is usually a consequence of a closed mind. People who bring brittle expectations with them are already fighting to establish control, trying to impose an experiential template they’ve premade long before they knew of your existence. It’s an encounter that’s doomed, if not to failure, then to a lack of depth or genuine engagement. Fantasy projections are seldom as complex or rich as reality.

I’ve had my share of comic meetings. Meetings with ‘dominants’ who were so frightened, so intent to establish their domminess that, for all intents, they were the only person in the room. Insecurity, much like narcissism, precludes the other party being real. On the other hand, I’ve met dominants who, after 30 minutes of conversation, grinned at me and said: “This isn’t going to work, is it?”

You can be incredibly sexually attracted to someone but not feel the power-surge at all. When I was younger, that was okay; I was more amenable to a happy romp in vanilla sex world than I am now. In more recent times, I’ve realized that, if they aren’t ringing dominant bells for me, I end up being on top, even if they don’t realize it. And, to me, that’s not the happiest of situations. It leaves me cold. But I end up switching because, at some visceral level, I figure someone ought to be in control and, if it’s not going to be them, then it’s going to be me.

So, if you are considering the pursuit of an encounter in which you are dominant, I’d like to offer you a few bits of advice, take it or leave it:

Dominant doesn’t mean self-centered or fascist pig. Control is about taking responsibility for everyone’s experience, not just your own.
If you don’t feel the power chips fall in the right place with your clothes on, it isn’t going to happen once you take them off. Not truly. What you may get is a masquerade, but it’s not the real thing.
Dominance isn’t physical; it’s mental. Superficially, it might be nice if you can toss your partner around in a bed, but you shouldn’t have to. If you’re in control, you can move someone with a single finger touch to the hip.
Dominance isn’t necessarily penetrative. You can dominate by envelopment just as surely. I don’t mean this as a concrete (genital) statement; I mean it in the abstract. To put it another way, flanking is just as aggressive a military strategy as spearheading.
Dominance isn’t about props. It’s about language and presence.
For me, dominance is almost exclusively about intelligence and the appetite for power, not sex. Of course, for me, it’s essentially sexual, and I don’t get off on D/s with no sexual aspect. But it is a ‘will to power‘ and not a ‘will to fuck‘. Being uber-horny doesn’t make you uber-dominant. In fact, quite the reverse.  So much so that, if I perceive a man to be too much at the mercy of his sexual appetite, he’s just handed me the reins of power, whether he knows it or not. He’s a ‘bottom’ the minute he’ll compromise to get off.
Finally, and I really hate to have to say this, but apparently it’s not obvious: if all you really want is to get off and not give a shit about your partner’s experience, get a doormat, not a submissive. You aren’t a dominant, you’re just bad in bed.

Luckily, I have a pretty good nose for #7. #6, however, is the bane of my existence. Perhaps because I am so capable of critical thought myself, even under the influence of extreme arousal, I find it impossible to ignore the tremendous power advantage in being able to show restraint or disinterest. The moment I think I can lead you by the dick, my sadistic side comes out to play.

I want to close by underscoring that this isn’t an attempt at a universal definition of dominance. It’s just my take on it.

Postscript:

After some twitter chat, it occurs to me that I should be clear as to what I mean by insecurity. I’m not talking about the universal little insecurities that every human has (my tits are too big, my ass is too flat, my cock is too short, I’m too fat, too skinny, not buff enough, too old crap). Few people are truly unafraid of how they may be judged in intimate situations. But there is a threshold of familiarity at which that stuff disappears or at least fades into the background.

I’m talking about a fundamental level of insecurity that is essentially a form of self-obsession. It refuses intimacy because the fear of negative reaction is so acute, the suffer refuses to truly process any incoming reaction just in case it might be negative.

Every sane dominant has had moments of self-doubt, of ‘Fuck, am I actually in control? Can I control this?’ They may not show it, but they’ve felt it. If they haven’t, they’re sociopaths.

 

Just This And No More

I dreamed. Of him, lying fully suited upon a faded chintz bedspread in a nameless, placeless hotel, and I, curled beside him in a nightdress, my knees tucked up, feet covered by its hem.

“This is the way the world ends.” he said, my hand tucked into his.

The curtains were open to the rising the sun, piercing the window glass like the angry arrows of an archangel.

“This is the way the world ends.” And he was right, of course, because the long conversation of night was about to be torn to shreds, light tattering its dense fabric.

I was sad we weren’t naked. That we hadn’t conversed without armor. Now it was over – this world of night. Dawn would turn us to mute and stately marble carvings like those that lie atop tombs in old cathedrals. Him in his suit and I in my nightdress, clutching onto his hand as if time would part us.

In the dream, I laughed at myself. A moment of lucidity at how I’d turned desire to monument and stone, instead of the lascivious fuckfest I should have dreamed of.

My subconscious is considerate of boundaries.