Mistress Matisse Is Just Plain Wrong
Posted by Gabe | Filed under Mono/Poly Resources, Random Ramblings, Relationships
For the last day and a half I’ve been trying to figure out how to address this adequately, and coming up short, so I’ll just say it like this..
Mistress Matisse fucked this up royally.
A recent Stranger column by Mistress Matisse attempted to tackle the phenomenon of mono folks dating poly folks in order to change them, to rescue them from their wayward ways and live the romantic story of loving someone so hard that they became who they “should” be. I’ve seen of this kind of thing happen. It’s disrespectful at best and damaging to a person’s psyche at worst. It’s something that needs to be addressed.
Unfortunately Matisse did so terribly, and in the process insulted a lot of people.
She starts off describing monogamous “cowboys” who date poly folks to “persuade them to sever existing relationships and embrace monogamy,” but then paints every mono person who dates a poly person as one of those people.
Instead of speaking of cowboys and cowgirls, her language drifts into “monogamist” and “someone who is clearly monogamous” while still attributing the cowboy behavior to them.
She says
Viewed through a monogamist’s gaze, dropping your lasso on a wandering heart is the stuff of songs, literature, and drama.
Not “through a cowboy/girl’s gaze,” which would make sense. She’s now expanded the manipulative behavior to all mono folks. So us poly folks are the fodder for the romantic fantasies of those monos, eh? The reason one of them would be attracted to one of us is because they can save us and teach us the truth about love.
She just defined monogamous ideals across the board as the fairy tale manipulative machinations of a Harlequin romance novel. If you only want to have one relationship at a time, this must be your drive.
She goes on to say:
Why the hell would a poly person get romantically involved with someone who is clearly monogamous in the first place? The honest answer is something like: hormones, misguided optimism and willful self-delusion, more hormones, and a little emotional masochism
And the only reason one of us would want to date one of them is that we’re horny and deluding ourselves. Right. It couldn’t possibly be valuing that person, up to and including the way that they love.
Where Matisse goes wrong in painting mono/poly pairings as cowperson/cow is in the expectation that a person of one relational orientation requires the same of their partner. Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes that’s not. In my case, obviously, it’s not. Some folks, in order to be fulfilled, need their partner’s to have the same sort of numerical setup that they have. But how I work and what I need from my partner are two different issues.
Think of it like this. I’m starting a band, and I LOVE Black Sabbath. I bring Sabbath’s influence to my writing and playing. My bandmates find their inspiration in other places, like Black Flag, Bop and Jesus Freaks like Larry Norman. But we’re willing to work together, we’re compatible as writers and musicians, and we find unique, beautiful ways to blend our influences.
My buddy, another Sabbath freak, is trying to start up a band too. He found a couple of guys to play with who really believe that Led Zeppelin started heavy metal. My buddy decides to go ahead and start a band with them, even though he can’t stand Zeppelin. He figures if he just plays them enough Sabbath, and explains why its so wonderful, he can change their minds.
Which one of these is going to make it past 3 practices?
Now, is it the love of Black Sabbath that dooms bands? No. It’s requiring of others what they’re not willing to give, and not being up front about that.
In the same way, monogamy isn’t the problem in the mono-poly relationships. Those can be done really well. The problem is approaching ANY relationship as a means of changing someone to fit one person’s ideals.
It’s obvious Matisse doesn’t think so. After moving away from the cowperson language, as quoted above, she then goes on to say:
I can promise you, if you’re poly and you’re involved with someone who’s not, once the hot sex cools off and reality sets in, every single problem that occurs in the relationship will somehow devolve to: You’re fucking other people.
Suddenly Matisse knows everything there is to know about the workings of every mixed-orientation relationship. She’s just guaranteed us all that every mono person in a relationship with a poly person requires that their partner love and fuck only them. There’s no room for differentiating between two related but different needs. Matisse knows better than Elizabeth does that Elizabeth HATES me fucking other people.
And that is complete and utter bullshit.
I’ve respected Matisse’s advice in the past. I enjoy the podcast she does with Monk. I read her blog. That’s why I’m so waylaid by her sudden lack of nuance. The abruptness of her shift from talking about disrespectful behavior to asserting that behavior exists where it does not makes me angry.
Had she stayed talking about cowfolk, she could have had some useful insights, maybe even helped a few people. That without even seeing it she equated all mono-poly relationships with manipulation and abuse is impossible to overlook and difficult to forgive.
The problem with terrible behavior is the terrible behavior, not the other attributes that the person exhibiting it has.
It turns out, Elizabeth doesn’t need to love Black Sabbath the way I do. She’s just got to love that I love them. She does, and we make beautiful music together.
Collars and Identity
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under Age Play, Kink, News, Relationships, Spirit Work
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
(Paul in his letter to the Galatians, 5:13-14)
I was given my first collar in 2006, by a church in Texas. It signified a bond between us as members of the body of Christ, and their acknowledgment and support of a unique vocational call for me. I had been a hospital chaplain for a few years already, and continued that work in their name for a few more years. As with any symbol that’s been around that long, that collar means a lot of different things to different people. To me, it came to mark me as someone in a liminal space. There is a strong differentiation in mainstream Christianity between clergy and laity, that I have never fully accepted. I wore the collar as a sign of servanthood: the education of a leader without the authority over others, the grassroots positioning of a layperson with the devotion that I hoped to find in my fellow congregants. Continuing a long theme in my life, I was “both/and”, combining categories often kept separate. I still have the right to wear that collar… though on the rare occasions that I am fulfilling the duties of that role I tend to wear other signifiers, like the collar-like stole.
I didn’t anticipate ever receiving another collar, until Gabe gave me one on Sunday, July 18th. This collar is specifically a signifier of a relationship between Gabe and one of my age play personas. So, he has a slutty twelve-year old sub! This collar is first a signifier that Lucy is Daddy’s, as Daddy is Lucy’s. Lucy has what are perhaps the most impressionable elements of my personality. She has a purity of desire that other parts of me can access through her, but don’t embody themselves. When she feels, she feels with her whole self. She is completely centered, or completely swept away; entirely in her strength, or entirely vulnerable… sometimes all at the same time. There’s no prevarication, no adult-like tempering of feeling or holding back, no going half-assed. The collar has that purity of devotion to Daddy, and more, without being less full of devotion. The collar reverberates through the rest of me as well, as it does through Gabe. The love he wove into it, and the love I give it as I wear it casts its own spell, and carries its own larger meaning… through us and around us. Symbols are powerful, and carry their own reality… especially when they have their own color, and texture, and weight on a body.
With most labels in my life, it’s been easy for me to realize that they apply both to my whole self and to only a part of myself. I am fully bisexual, but that label best describes one specific thread of me. I am fully female, though there are individual parts of me for which that label doesn’t make sense. When my vocation was minister, all of me was a minister, though being a minister was not all that I was. For some reason, this dance of the parts and the whole gets frequently gummed up in BDSM. There’s a lot of essentialist categorization floating around in the air. For some folks, if you submit or dominate, one of those is all that you are and you are always that. Obviously, there are those who think otherwise. And I believe there are those who want to think otherwise but get a little of this communal gunk rubbed off on their brain. It’s difficult to avoid entirely. I think this essentialism is a key dynamic in the “there’s no such thing as a switch” meme. It’s an inability to hold the paradox of the whole and the parts of an identity. Hard as it is to believe, it’s a reality that eludes a Venn diagram. When I am one of my ageplay personas, I am fully them, and they are a deep and authentic part of me. But they are not all of me. When I am subbing to Gabe, I am subbing with my whole self, though my whole self is not submissive. It’s the same paradox of being a partner, a friend, a massage therapist, a daughter, an office manager, a Christian, an anarchist and more, all at the same time.
This reminds me of one of Gabe’s favorite statements, from Walt Whitman: Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.
Living With Someone/Living Poly
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under Relationships
Moving in with someone else and beginning an intimate relationship with them has brought to light just how much potential for anxiety I have just below the surface. When I lived by myself I had a tremendous amount of authorship of my daily life, down to the smallest details. I knew what areas to avoid, what triggers to stay away from, and I could do so while still having a full and ever-growing life. This gave the illusion that I had overcome all that anxiety and didn’t have to handle it anymore.
There is a theory, however, that’s always felt instinctively true to me, that your fight or flight panic switch gets calibrated at a young age. If you grow up in an atmosphere that is primarily calm and peaceful, that primal switch needs a firm grip on it to set it off. If you grow up around highstrung people, in threatening or unstable surroundings, that switch is feather light and gets tripped easily. I think the latter is likely true for me. That doesn’t mean that I can’t practice peacefulness, and find ways to keep the air around that switch very, very still. I can, and at some points in my life I have. It just means I get to work a little harder at it than others might have to.
So I’m living a life now where the details of what I may be doing in any particular hour are shaped by a large number of factors, many of which are out of my control. That’s not a bad thing by any means. It just means I don’t have access to a major coping mechanism that I once used, and I get to develop new ones. They’re coming along slowly. One of the the first ones I got fluent in was leaning on Gabe. It was such a bizarre, wild, new, fundamentally thrilling thing to have somebody else I could rely on to take care of things, or to take care of me. I’ve not had that before — not from parents, not from any other lover. It was deeply healing to experience that. But it’s occurred to me the last month or so that I’m doing it too much. We are committed to communicating with each other, a lot, and so it’s easy to go to him first off about any worries I have. But he really doesn’t need to pour that much energy into reassuring me about everything, and I don’t need to be hit so hard if worries hit while I’m away from him. So, I’m not running directly to him with anxieties, and realizing I still have quite a toolbox of skills available to handle these things myself. I’m still getting my footing, but I didn’t realize how much I already knew.
-=-=-=-
Another recent learning is this: being with a poly partner means being, by definition, behind on the news on certain subjects. Gabe’s relationship with Kristi has… gotten larger. A few weeks ago there was a palpable new commitment or investment in it for them. It’s very hard for anybody to find language for it. They are not headed toward any particular goal, and there’s not a lot of modeling for romances that are not inevitably heading toward marriage. So they’re feeling it out as they go. Changes grow in them, and they communicate with me as well as they are able, through words and other kinds of language.
It was disconcerting at first for me to feel this particular change. I didn’t know what it was. I don’t get direct data; I discover what’s bubbling through them secondhand. Then there were my anxieties about going somewhere we hadn’t gone before. The other times he’s had someone important to him, the bond didn’t grow this deeply, I don’t think. I always had the feeling that they were many steps away from the biggest kinds of commitments, like moving in together or weaving daily life together at that level. With Kristi, our daily lives are entwined. We see each other in some form or another at least 4 times a week, usually more. So the next potential step I should prepare myself for is….? Who knows. They don’t. The most disturbing part of this big shift for me was that I suddenly felt disconnected from my capacity to enjoy them together, and get all frubbly. Something was in the way.
Now, I very much enjoy the way our daily lives weave together these days, you understand. That’s not the issue. The issue this time was more “NEW-OH-MY-GOD-THIS-IS-NEW-WHAT-THE-HELL’S-GOING-ON-AAAAAA-WE’RE-ALL-GONNA-DIE”. Something like that. Nice, rational, reasoned concerns. One of the benefits of my metamour being all kickass and awesome and human and a friend of mine is that I can’t even try to paint her as either evol or perfect. I get an immediate, really good look at just how rational my current fears are. And these were not. At all.
So I hung on and prayed and waited. At some point I realized, again, how much he loves me. I started noticing it again, in his touch and his eyes all day. I realized again that I’m perfectly capable of addressing any needs of mine that come up and getting them met. I realized they all were getting met, and that the danger on my radar was some sort of ancient shadow not at all related to the present. I realized how much I was anticipating, and not living in the present.
And then I got to watch Gabe make something with his own hands for Kristi. And to be able to observe that… was something sacred that still brings tears to my eyes. The stuff that pours out of them is awesome and beautiful. So then all the frubble started flooding in again, pouring through whatever was in the way.
So, I’m in a bizarre state of being raw from the recently flushed fear, and high from the incoming rush of frubbles. It’s odd, but pretty good. I really do love my life.
Getting Good at Oral Sex
Posted by Gabe | Filed under Relationships, Sex Education
I joined reddit.com a few weeks ago, and I have to say I’m really enjoying it. I find that the discussion that happens in the comments on reddit tends to be intelligent, informed and nuanced, especially as compared with other discussion forums on the web. That I can easily bounce between /r/OpenChristian and /r/BDSMcommunity and feel at home in both is pretty impressive.
When I saw someone posting on /r/sex about his worries about his smaller-than-average penis, I was hopeful that the comments would be helpful and reassuring. Reddit, as has been the case so far, didn’t let me down. There are quite a few comments from women (who the poster specifically request give input) stating that penis size is not the measure of a lover, and that they’ve had mindblowing sex with men with smaller-than-average penises. All guys have some worry about the appeal of their cock, specifically around size, and these are just the kinds of comments I’d be hoping for from a general audience.
But, and you knew there was a “but” coming, one thing kinda threw me off. In the top comment as of the time of this writing someone says, “Become GREAT at giving oral, read up on it, same for fingering and everything else.” The sentiment was repeated by quite a few other women. The general thought here is that penetrative sex isn’t the be all, end all of a satisfying sexual experience, and I fully agree with this. Good sex includes all kinds of activities and everyone should embrace them.
What bugged me is the idea that by reading up on oral sex someone can become good at it. I know I’m going against an entire industry of publishing here (including that cultural juggernaut, Cosmo), but I really believe that you can’t learn to have good sex by stacking up a library of techniques you can draw from. Writing the alphabet on her clit with your tongue may give some interesting and pleasurable sensations, but that’s not where good oral sex comes from.
Good sex, oral or otherwise, is communication.
Being a good lover, and indeed, eating pussy well, doesn’t come from combining techniques in a way that will get other people off. Each vulva is unique. Each clit is unique. And, despite all the marketing telling us otherwise, each woman is unique. If you want to be a masterful cunnilingist, then the skill you need to learn is listening.
I don’t mean sit down first and have a discussion about what actions will help your partner come. I mean that before your tongue even touches her you need to be aware of her fully. You need to hear the words she says, the way she breathes, the sounds she makes, the way she moves. And with each touch you need to be aware of how she responds. Does she like hard pressure. Does too much suction cause her to pull back. Does feeling your teeth cause her to gasp? Is it a good gasp or a bad one?
Good cunnilingus isn’t a system. It’s a conversation.
And when you know how she responds to different things, and she knows how she responds to you doing different things, then the conversation begins in earnest.
In preparing for writing this, I wanted an impartial opinion on my own skills, so I asked my friend, theshadowsrose, if to the best of her recollection I was good at oral sex. Without knowing what I was planning to write, or the idea I was going to explore she said “[Y]es. You were responsive to what my body said I liked and were willing to be adaptable to its preferences.”
The thing is, that’s not how you become good at oral sex. That’s how you become a good lover. That’s how you become a good partner. That’s how you become a good friend. That’s how you become good at relating to other people.
Don’t read a book on good sex. Read (and be read by) your partners. They are the ultimate text on themselves.
New Blog from Deborah Anapol
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under News, Relationships, Theory Fuck
There is a new blog about polyamory starting up, from a high profile author. Debora Anapol is credited with writing one of the two earliest books on modern poly, Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits. She is now a new regular blogger on Psychology Today’s website. She also has a new book coming out, mentioned in the blog.
I considered reading her previous book, opened it up to a random page and found that single page dripping with anti-mono bias. She is very New Agey, and polyamory is literally her definition of being enlightened. Soon the whole human race will be enlightened enough to be poly just like her; won’t that be great? So I set the book back down.
I can’t say I’m impressed with her first column either; while she gives polite lip service to intentional mono living, her philosophy is still “polyamory is enlightenment” with a thin veneer over it. Let’s take a look at the following, with an eye toward what her words reveal about her systematic counseling assumptions (this is in the context of defining precisely what polyamory is):
To me polyamory is a philosophy of loving that asks us to surrender to love. Polyamory leads us to ask, “What is the most loving and authentic way I can be present with these people and with myself at this time?”
While there’s nothing inherently untrue about these sentences, they (along with several badly worded references to mono throughout her first column) reveal to me an ignorance that Anapol is still apparently carrying around. Saying “polyamory is one way of living out a philosophy of loving…” will fundamentally change her starting point in relating to non-poly people. But that, I strongly suspect, would be a fundamental shift away from a major bias she has. Without that phrase, the author is making invisible anyone who does not identify as poly and has done the work to commit themselves to the transformative power of love. Since she’s writing this blog to a mainstream audience who will represent many relational orientations and be overwhelmingly mono, this will be a liability to her communicating effectively.
And while the second sentence is certainly true for many people, it’s also unnecessarily narrow. There are all kinds of life experiences that get people asking that question, and a poly nature is not required to do that work. The sentence structure still reveals that Anapol is not expanding past her own specific truths to find out how non-poly people love… that’s a shitty place to start a philosophy that’s supposed to apply to everyone, and it’s a dangerous blindness for a woman who markets herself as a relationship coach.
Still, a blog devoted to polyamory on a mainstream health website is pretty cool. I suppose.
Here’s the link: New Blog: Love Without Limits
Daddying
Posted by Gabe | Filed under Adventures IRL, Age Play, Harlotry, Kink, Relationships
It’s taken me a couple of months to write this. Talking about age play and how it works for me makes me feel quite vulnerable, and knowing it’s a kink that bothers some folks makes it even more difficult at times. Luckily Elizabeth had another moment of brilliance and wrote some amazing things that helped shake the words loose for me. If you’ve not yet read Elizabeth on Age Play then please go do so. No really, I’ll wait.
Got that done? Well, here’s what she helped me to figure out about what it means to be a daddy and to be her Daddy.
While not our primary dynamic, being Elizabeth’s Daddy and her being my babygirl are important parts of our relationship. Explaining those roles, though, and how they fit into the rest of our relationship feels very elusive. It’s just… who we are. And who we are together.
Identifying the energies that we’ve come to know as her two little personalities came early in our relationship, and we’ve spent the last 2+ years naming them (Grace and Lucy), fleshing them out and getting to know them. I’ve learned how to be Daddy to each of them, how to spot them, what they need and want from me, and what I need and want from them. It’s been intense and beautiful and amazing. Despite her having multiple littles, I’m the same Daddy to them both. Obviously we interact in different ways, but the energy comes from the same place in me, whichever I’m tending to.
So why age play? The simple answer is that it turns me on. Being her Daddy makes me hard. That’s the biggest drive behind it. There’s an area of my and of her sexuality that is best reached through embodying these parts of ourselves with each other. Age play was a fetish of mine before I ever got the chance to act on it, though. Before it became this deep part of my relationship with my partner it was an unfulfilled fetish. I devoured Daddy/Girl erotica and I fantasized about roleplaying the scenarios. I understand that for many people age play isn’t necessarily sexual, but that’s not how it works for me. Even cuddling one of my little girls and watching a silly movie turns me on. Why? Who knows. It makes about as much sense as finding stockings with seams to be hot, only it’s stronger because it’s the intimate interaction of people.
So what does it mean to be Daddy? As uncomfortable as it may be to say so, I learned how to be Daddy to a large degree from my own father. To be Daddy is to be gentle and loving, offering guidance but only being stern when it’s needed. Daddy is playful and loves cuddling, and is protective of the fragile parts of his girls while letting them experience bumps and bruises when they can handle it. All of this is then filtered through my life with Elizabeth and my sexuality and it’s become this integral part of my sexuality.
Being Daddy to these two delightful girls isn’t something I undertook to re-write earlier experiences in a therapeutic way, but I’ve also seen ways that it’s helped me. I have a strong caretaker streak, and learning how to take care of Lucy and Grace as their Daddy has helped me learn how to do that in a healthy way. I’ve been able to strengthen boundaries and learn when it’s good for me to take care of someone and when I have to say no. I have a long history of unhealthy caregiving, and so this is a special gift that I wasn’t expecting when I first asked her what being a little girl felt like.
And I’ve seen my Daddy persona become more integrated with the rest of me. At times it becomes hard to define, because Daddy is Gabe, at least in relation to Elizabeth. That doesn’t mean that she’s constantly in little space, or that I treat her like a child, but I’m more aware of my affection toward her, and my protective streak. We could be doing something simple around the house, and I’ll tell her to stop if she’s about to do something that will hurt her. She may not be embodying Lucy or Grace at that moment, but Elizabeth is just as much my babygirl, and I will protect her.
Beyond our relationship I’ve begun to identify to some degree as a daddy-type dom. Daddy, as a name and a title, is part of my identity that is, at least right now, linked to my relationship with Elizabeth. The name and title “Daddy” doesn’t get used with anyone else but Elizabeth, but I can see similar tendencies in the way I top someone, or even in how I interact with someone with little girl energy. I’ve even had a play partner refer to me as “Daddy Gabe,” and that made sense to me, and was quite hot. Being a daddy-type is more of a descriptor of how I interact with some people. I’ve been wondering about why I gravitate to that word to describe myself and my style. Obviously it’s a very subjective word. In his Toybag Guide to Ageplay, Lee Harrington discusses universal, cultural and personal archetypes, and I think the differences in being Elizabeth’s Daddy and being a daddy type have some relation to those varying types of archetypes. With Elizabeth I fall somewhere between the personal and cultural, whereas with what I’m describing with a lower-case “d” daddy is somewhere between the universal and cultural. Sort of. As I said, pinning all of this down is rather elusive.
So then what do I mean when I say “daddy-type dom”? I can’t point to specific things I do or expect that make an interaction fall into that category, as it’s more about the way I feel toward the person. It’s a mix of tenderness, adoration, protectiveness, playfulness, control and certainly a few other things I’m not thinking of at the moment. It’s neither tied to nor divorced from SM, though daddying tends to focus a somewhat more on somewhat more conventional pleasures. The D/S element is strong, as my daddy side does put effort into remaining in control. But that control is often more focused on guidance than on punishment, and on the little one following willingly more than on her being pushed too hard. Even the SM elements that have been incorporated have been focused on nurturing, guidance or sheer hedonism more than punishment.
Guiding is a good word for the D/S element of ageplay for me. It requires meeting the person with whom I’m interacting where they are, without expectations of how their own energy will manifest or take them. It is accepting that energy and directing it in ways that best serve us both. Where and how I direct changes depending on who I’m playing with (or which alter ego I’m playing with), the moods we’re both in and any goals we may have. Elizabeth recently described that kind of guidance as “a love that doesn’t fully shield from bumps and bruises, but very specifically works at a person’s growing edges, the edges of our ability and draws us out further and helps us grow.” And I think that nails it.
An important element in accessing my daddy side is my trust in the other person’s maturity and ability to care for themselves. Being a daddy in an age play context is far removed from being a parent. I don’t want someone completely dependent on me. I don’t want someone who can’t take care of themselves. The littles that play best with this daddy are the ones who are, when they want or need to be, self-sufficient. If someone can balance their childlike delight or teenage awkwardness with their ability to be a grownup when they have to, then we are more likely to find common ground on which we can come together. If I can have that trust they they can and do care for themselves, then I feel more free to care for them myself.
With only two years of daddying behind me, I have a lot more to learn about what that means and how to do best function in that role. How will it change and expand over time or with different people? How integrated is the sweet, gentle daddy with the sadistic fuck who loves his little girls’ tears? There’s a lot to learn, and I look forward to it all. I love this part of my relationship with Elizabeth and this part of myself. And I’m so thankful to her for helping me grow and develop this way and to get to know this new part of me.
Elizabeth on Age Play
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under Age Play, Harlotry, Kink, Relationships
Gabe and I do age play, and have done so since we began dating. Despite our prolific writings on our sex life, we haven’t written on this subject yet. Part of my hesitation is that it’s a sacred and vulnerable thing for us, and is difficult to put into words. Part of it is certainly that this subject has a high squick factor for a lot of people, and is sometimes misunderstood as a dangerous “slippery slope”, and personally I haven’t yet wanted to deal with the potential responses. But I have eventually wanted to find a way to share.
So, here goes. I have two personas that I will occasionally inhabit (one at a time): Grace is 5 years old, and Lucy is 12. I have been surprised to see how nuanced both of them have become as personalities. Gabe has one persona: Daddy, that plays with each of us separately. Grace is very playful, and very much about joy. She likes soft blankets and making forts with them. She likes making up stories, and making animal sounds. Gabe can tell from my giggle when I’ve fallen into Gracie headspace. Being Grace is a delight, in so many ways. She is an altered state of effortless eagerness and pleasure. Lucy is 12. She is both a child and a grown-up. She’s trying everything on, and everything is new… and she is beginning to shape her opinions of it all. She enjoys romantic gestures and romantic movies. Valentine’s Day and Mardi Gras are two of her favorite holidays. She likes both pajamas and sexy lingerie, and has been known to really like wearing make-up. Gabe can often tell from my word choice that I’ve gone into Lucyspace, without any other cues.
Part of the challenge of finding words is a fear of spoiling what is preverbal about our age play. They are each a near-complete shift of consciousness for me. There is an immediacy that is unique to our interactions as Daddy and Babygirl (a nickname for all of me) that bypasses the usual analytical and heady elements of our relationship. The sensations I receive as Gracie are very different than the sensations I receive as Lucy, and the sensations I receive as my overarching identity Elizabeth. Since I’m not sure that I can describe the difference, or want to right now, I’ll leave it at that.
Some element of both Grace and Lucy is what I call “redemptive lying” — together Gabe and I create an alternate universe where I am having a much more pleasant 5 year-old and 12-year old experience than I actually did. Lucy especially has been a great gift to me in that regard. When I was actually 12, I was already the primary caretaker for my mother, who is deeply mentally ill and yet passes for functional. I secretly had a terrifying home life at the time, and everything related to being a teen has had a thick veil of dread around it that I have slowly fought to tear away piece by piece. With Lucy, I can effortlessly be a different me, and experience the both/and teen years in a place of being loved into great personal strength, and being cared for when overwhelmed. I don’t have to start in Elizabeth’s constant starting place for adult relationships, and work my way out of that hole. I can be Lucy, be lighter and freer. My previous trauma is not the reason for her existence; she was born out of something more life-affirming than that. But it is a healing that Lucy gifts me with. Grace is a similar outlet, a way to step outside my usual heavy use of analysis and careful attention to boundaries and others’ needs. None of those things are bad; in fact I adore them all. But occasionally stepping outside them leads me to experiences I wouldn’t otherwise have. It makes me feel more whole as a person, and gives me insights I can bring back into my Elizabeth self.
Both Grace and Lucy are stories we tell with one another that bring out a different experience of joy and pleasure. They’re two whole new palettes of colors to paint with in creating our sex lives together. Some will say that their age play is not always or not even primarily sexual. I have occasionally been Grace or Lucy without sexual play (if you’ve seen me coloring at events recently, I’m often in one little space or another). But for the most part it’s a very sexual connection, specifically with Gabe. Yes, Daddy and Gracie have sex, and Lucy and Daddy have sex. It is very much about the sex for Gabe and I, where we can touch those parts of me that interact with those parts of him, and bond them in a sexual way. It is NOT in any way about violating real-life childhood sexualities. It is about exploring something very much in the context of adult sexuality. I can relate one part of this dynamic to the way memory is created — my memories of being a child now are heavily shaped by my adult experiences. In the same way, my alternate experience of being 5 and 12 can only be understood through my adult self, and my adult sexuality. They are facets of me and my full adult self, my connection to my life force and to Gabe, and so they are naturally erotic in nature. They are stories I am writing, and I make them sexual. Gabe does not play the role of a biological father, but of a caregiver to me as I surrender certain specific parts of myself and take up other parts. I can’t speak to others’ experiences, but incest has little to no draw for me. Age play is a far different kink.
Grace and Lucy have not yet played much with others, at least not to the knowledge of others around. I’m very protective of them. I suspect it will eventually happen, but can’t really speak to the future. They both live very much in the present moment — another gift they give me.
(For a brief but thorough introduction to age play, I suggest Lee Harrington’s book The Toybag Guide To Age Play. It is a very quick and informational read.)
Mono/Poly – Questions To Ask
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under Mono/Poly Resources, Relationships
Are you mono, and considering dating a poly person? Here are some questions to ask yourself:
How often have you sought out therapy in your life? How much work do you consider to be a typical amount for maintaining a relationship? Communication and steady work are essential to maintaining any healthy relationship, and bad poly relationships are more noticeable than bad mono relationships.
What demonstrates love and commitment to you? Physically write it out. Make a list. Be specific. Regular physical affection? Words of love? Acts of service? (You may want to explore the 5 Love Languages as one tool for unpacking your style and needs). Continue to explore further. What daily interaction is important? What kind of participation in your emotional and/or spiritual life do you need? What kind of sex life do you want? Finally, how important is sexual exclusivity to you? Is it necessary, preferable, or not necessary? If everything else you need is present, including a fulfilling sex life, would your partner’s sex life with another person affect your sense of being loved?
Do you expect a partner to complete you, and fulfill all your needs? Or do you expect to have a fulfilling life and nourishing relationships outside your bond with your partner? If you find the former to be true, a structure where your partner has full romances outside your bond is a recipe for disaster, despite any fond feelings you may have.
Do you believe that (somebody else) being polyamorous is possible? Healthy? Ethical? Mature? Do you expect a poly partner to stop being poly at any point?
Now, about the person you’re considering a relationship with:
Are they supportive of your mono nature? Or will they be threatened by being your only partner?
Can they trust you to honor their poly nature?
Can they trust you to name your needs?
Are they willing to be supportive in your process of getting to know how poly works, and take the time you need? Are you ready to start that process?
Has your partner’s past behavior or current language emphasized “equality” among partners, like equal feelings between various individuals, or equal number of partners on either side? Or is there room for more diversity of shape? A mono/poly shape is going to be “lopsided”, not “equal”, and a certain level of comfort with that will be required of all parties for success.
How skilled is this person at providing reassurance when you need it?
How many other partners does this person have? How much time can they commit to your relationship? How much time do you need?
(This post is part of the mono/poly resource list, which can be found through the link at the top of the page.)
Mono/Poly Resources – Coming Soon
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under News, Relationships
Since starting this journey with Gabe, I have had constant dissatisfaction with the mono/poly resources out there. I’ve yet to find a single one that fits my needs. There are many resources that have been useful to me on a variety of other topics, like jealousy or time management. But there are only a handful of resources aimed at mono folk in poly relationships, and to a one, they have all been foreign enough to my experience that they might as well have been written in a different language.
First, I have not been committed to someone for years before learning they are poly and not mono. I chose to enter knowingly into this bond with my poly honey. This means that many important support groups out there talking about rebuilding trust and dealing with deep grief responses and shattered hopes bear no resemblance to my needs. I am glad they are there for others, but they’re not for me.
Secondly, we did not enter into this with any deep revulsions of each others’ orientation, nor any notions of changing each other. This appears to describe the audience for the other half of mono/poly resources I come across. If those resources are useful to you I’m glad. But for myself, a basic focus on all the potential faults of a relationship, and beginning from an assumption of distrust and lack of faith is counterproductive to the work I want to do next on my journey.
I don’t look at my partner’s poly nature as an unwanted burden, nor am I traumatized by my partner’s desires and wish to change them. This leaves me with no place to find handy lists of insights to ponder, no uniquely affirming writings to review periodically, and no basic introductory texts or quickguides to my kind of mono/poly relating. I am most definitely looking for insights that help me grow past the “ick” – the fears, anxieties, jealousies, and limitations that come with being human and having a past… but that’s only one small part of the journey for me. I want to creatively build my bond with my honey, with the basic understanding that I am constantly learning how to love more fully, live more joyfully, and offer more of myself.
So we’re beginning a compilation of resources here, likely written mostly from my perspective. This may include a list of the benefits for a mono person dating a poly person, writings on the issue of reassurance, and questions to ask yourself if you’re mono and considering dating someone poly. In short, it will be the kinds of resources I see elsewhere, but written in a way that someone like me could find them useful. If you have any questions, thoughts, or things you’d like to see, please contact me at elizabeth@pornocracy.org.
Drop and Such
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under Relationships
Somehow, we got ourselves quite a week last week. Monday night was a party friends of ours threw at a bar they own. Tuesday night was a discussion night with the major local kink group. Wednesday and Thursday Gabe’s girlfriend Red August (who lives an hour away and has been crazy busy this semester with school and work) got to stay with us. Friday was a kinky house party and Saturday was a party at the local dungeon. And yes, we participated in all of that.
As far afield as that kind of schedule is for us, it was surprisingly nourishing for me as it was unfolding. Yes, there was that slightly off-kilter feeling growing from not having an evening at home (and it all reminded me of what an important need the night at home is). But there were also powerful opportunities to connect with community, and deeply enjoyable chances to spend time with Gabe’s girlfriend and the two new people he’s dating now. So, the week spun by with joy. And, Gabe had an intense public scene with me, and a separate public scene with a new date of his, both at the Saturday party. This last is probably the largest single factor affecting our mood right now. If you don’t know, a couple days after doing a big scene, the participants can have a heavy emotional experience referred to as “drop”.
And we’re both crashing, hard.
My drop started last night, and unfortunately I was not in a space to handle our social obligation very well. It was Global Orgasm Day, and Gabe had organized a get-together, which ended up being at somebody else’s house. There are elements of our uniqueness in the community that played into my thwarted expectations for the evening, but I won’t go into all that now. I had a difficult time plugging into the energy of the evening, and when I eventually needed to leave, the circumstances meant that my desire to leave was a domino that knocked over two other people’s desires for the night. Gah. Messy and unpleasant.
Aside from a great big pile of new insights on a dozen different topics, I think the week is also leading to some insight on my part that I’ll have to learn some new social skills around saying no. I won’t second guess any decisions we made this past week. But I’m aware of two things:
1) There are lots of very pleasant activities that can present themselves as options, especially since Gabe seeks them out, that are not the ideal way for me to balance all my needs. Awesomeness of event is not the only criteria to use in deciding whether to do something in a particular moment. (The flip side is, I’m blessed to have so many wonderful ways available to me to enjoy my life).
2) Time management assumptions have to change now. Before, Gabe’s girlfriend actually took priority, though that wasn’t our explicit goal. Her schedule was so tight, that we both wanted to make the most of any time she had available. I rarely said no to being there, or to supporting Gabe in being there. I also took partial responsibility for planning. That all worked fine under those circumstances. I found balance of schedule, and the high level of participation from me was probably the best way for me to really get to learn poly. Now, he has two local people he dates as well. I have to get used to:
a) being a priority for his time (while this makes perfect sense with our commitments being what they are, it has a hierarchical feel to it that we have previously avoided, and which I have discomfort and a lack of experience with), and
b) me disengaging to some extent from planning and being involved with his time with others. I’m not sure I have adequate language for this use of my energy; it’s not necessarily about spending less time with his lovers (though it may manifest that way). It’s more about taking on less responsibility for his calendar. As much as I like all the people he’s dating, I’m nowhere near capable of dating two people, much less four. It’s not up to me to get their needs met. I have to let him figure out certain things. This feels oddly like putting him in an inappropriate position, even when I look and see the appropriateness of it. But I’ve got to find a way to shift from what I’ve been doing, at least a little. It’s one of the more exhausting elements of this past week that I was pouring so much psychic energy into supporting all of them, when it isn’t quite my place. LOL, maybe it would help if I didn’t like them all so much? Hey y’all! Stop being so damned cute and interesting!
All of my insights and the changes I’m aiming for are fine with him, you understand. The only delay is in me learning it.
