No Idea (new video porn from Elizabeth!)
Posted by Gabe | Filed under Harlotry, Sexy Vids/Pics
I was out on a date last week, and Elizabeth decided to find some mischief into which she could get. Grabbing the video camera and an old silicone friend of hers, she set to making us all a movie. I’ve put it up as a torrent on Empornium for you all to download and enjoy. I recommend enjoying it with some lube handy.
Not only is this video immensely hot, it’s also everything that I think the best porn can be. Elizabeth creates a direct connection with her audience, talking directly to us, and presents herself with a depth of intimacy rarely seen in sexually explicit video. She inspires me to be better. She also inspires some amazing orgasms. Watch and see.
Download “No Idea” from Empornium here.
Grab Bag of Porn
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under Adventures IRL, Harlotry, Kink, Sexy Vids/Pics
The last couple of months there have been some things stirring. We’ve got some ideas for upcoming porn… some solo stuff and group stuff, all video-based. Very exciting!
We really look forward to sharing that here. But until then, here’s a few pictures we want to show off. Having so many friends active on Fetlife can be distracting when it comes to posting one-offs, or small sets of pictures. Here’s a collection of some of our very favorites over the last few months.
The Broadest Community Possible
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under Mono/Poly Resources, Spirit Work, Theory Fuck
It occurred to me after writing my last post that I have some intentions and attitudes I could clarify for you. I talk a lot about how the connections between the mono and poly communities are shaping up, particularly around counseling theory and technique. And I have a lot of opinions about it. Here’s a little explanation of where I’m coming from in that opining.
I look at conversation about polyamory and/or monoamory through two lenses. The first is as a counselor. How does what you are saying inform counselors across the board who want to serve various populations? How does your theorizing and defining contribute to the bank of information available to everyone? If you’re narrowly defining the needs you’re meeting, that’s fine with me. Detailed work is as important as broader picture theory, and both can’t be served simultaneously by an individual project. But build your work in a way that it can fit into a larger picture peaceably. Give your colleagues something useful to work with. Don’t allow biases and restrictions to choke your work off from being included in a larger perspective.
That’s where the second lens comes in. I’m a Christian in a multifaith world. There’s a reason why my ministry was in chaplaincy. By experience and inclination I deliberately place myself in a larger picture and demand of myself that I live peaceably in that larger picture. I choose very intentionally to focus on Christianity in my personal faith life. But if I build within myself a Christianity that cannot play well with other faiths, I am limiting myself, choking off the Holy, and fucking over the rest of the world. That’s not cool.
So, I’m going to keep being the one telling relationship authors of all stripes to be less biased and restrictive. Do the work you want to do, in whatever broad or narrow stripe you want, but allow it to inform as many other people as possible. Find your biases and eliminate them. Find the ways you’re choking off conversation and expansion and loosen them. Leave the door open to feeding others besides yourself.
And yes, I’ve got a book I’m working on myself, so there will be at least one done my way. It’s in what you might call pre-production.
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
My Anomalous Faith
Posted by Gabe | Filed under Spirit Work
My faith has come up several times recently in conversation, as out Christians are apparently rather thin on the ground in the kink world. Often I’m met with questions like “How does that work?”
To me, there’s nothing to work out, nothing to reconcile. I don’t believe there is a Christian sexual ethic. I believe there are Christian ethics, based on love of one another, that should be applied to the way we approach sex. In that context the question isn’t about promiscuity or power or good, old fashioned beatings. It’s about me asking “Am I recognizing the divine in this person? How can I best interact with them in love?”
And if I can answer the former with a “Yes,” then sometimes the answer to the latter is, “With a good, old fashioned beating.”
This passage from a recent article, Rethinking the Resurrection sums up well why reconciling my sexuality with my faith is so far from my radar.
As I walked through the week, I realized that Christianity was not based on a system with maxims, but a Person with a story, a story full of drama and humor and uncalled-for love. And this story could be a guide to me and to others, calling us out of our petty existences to love the world, not with our thoughts but with our actions.
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.)
Sexual Bigotry
Posted by blessed_harlot | Filed under Go Read This!
Mollena over at “The Perverted Negress” has written a fantastic article on Vanilla Bigotry, that touched a nerve for both Gabe and I. We’ve each heard kinky friends and acquaintances referring to vanilla folks as backwards, uneducated, and otherwise living incomplete lives. Mollena addresses some of this thinking head on. Here’s an excerpt that hits home for me:
When I’m in a room full of kinky people and someone says “I feel so sorry for the poor vanillas. I just don’t get how they could be so lame!” and goes on to expand on how kinky sex is the best way to have intimate relations, that “they” will “never understand” how much “better” our sex is, and I see the majority of people in the room nodding or clucking their tongues sympathetically, I realize something.
We become that which we reject when we paint people who don’t fuck the same way that we do with a broad brush.
Let me say that I totally get the impulse to engage in such in-group/out-group thinking. The temptation to this behavior often comes from a deep well of pain. Even the healthiest folks in marginalized groups have cultural programming to manage that encourages self-hatred and self-ignorance. Directing that into anger toward the mainstream group – be it kinksters bemoaning the misguided vanillas, poly folks proclaiming themselves the new evolution past outdated monogamy, or gays and lesbians insulting “breeders” – is one way to cope with the pain.
But here’s the thing — that behavior doesn’t heal. It doesn’t heal ourselves and it doesn’t heal communities. It doesn’t create anything new. It keeps resentment alive and keeps wounds open. It gets the speaker in touch with anger that is appropriate to feel, yes… but it encourages that anger to turn rancid and bite back, instead of using it to build a more just community. It’s simply not fair to hold a person’s sexuality against them, whether that sexuality is similar to ours or not.
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.
