Tag Archives: psychology

Orienteering

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“It’s not like I’m sexually submissive or anything,” said West Kensington to Vauxhall Park over the brim of her teacup. “It’s not even like I’m really, like, bi-curious. I mean, I can see why women are attractive, but…” Somehow running out of words, her sentence remained derailed, and she turned to look out of the cafe window, avoiding her companion’s gaze.

“But what?” Vauxhall Park looked faintly amused.

There are parts of Central London that could seem, at a glance, almost rural. Bits of greenish gold like tarnished copper, patches of trees between small, leaf-strewn suburbs. You can feel it though. You know it’s still London. The city has a vibration, almost inaudible, but there all the same. Even as you sit, there in that cafe, over the sound of polite chatter, china and cutlery, the sound of two women drunking tea, talking about sex, you can nearly hear it if you just listen: the amorphous sludge of low-register noise, its pitch too deep to get an aural grip on. It’s a rumble that you feel in your stomach, the soundless sound of a hundred trains disgorging commuters into burrows deep under your feet, a swarm of traffic helicopters flying too low overhead, a million thoughts beamed across invisible strings of radio, phone and wi-fi, tangling around your skull and tightening.

A chairleg screeched as someone shuffled and turned the page of the free newspaper he’d spread across his table.

“There was this evening a while ago,” began West Kensington. “Shit, I don’t know why I’m even telling you this. Let’s just forget it.”

Vauxhall Park was patient. “There was this evening a while ago…?”

“Yeah.” West Kensington took another sip of tea. “Well, bear in mind that I’d had a drink. And he’d been out. I knew he was on his way back. And so I got in the shower. And as the water was running down over my face I decided I was going to be you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. It was like I’d shapeshifted or something. In my head, I mean. It’s the strangest feeling. And it turned me on. Being you. The idea of him coming home and finding me, being you, there in the shower.”

Vauxhall Park said nothing, but smiled.

“And so when he came in,” continued West Kensington, emboldened, looking down into her tea. “I was out of the shower by then. He was late, so I’d done my make-up like you do yours. That thing with the eyes? And I’d looked through the drawer and picked out what I thought you’d wear.”

“What did I choose?” laughed Vauxhall Park quietly.

West Kensington took a large sip of tea, still looking down. “Just this black slinky thing. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, my hair was wet, and he came in and said something, I don’t remember what, but I just kind of attacked him. Well, not attacked. Pounced maybe. Like how I imagine you’d do it.”

“I’m more of a pouncer then, am I?” She adopted an infuriating smirk.

“Fuck, this is so embarrassing.” West Kensington shook her head and blinked twice, putting the cup down slightly too hard in its saucer.

“I’m sorry, go on.”

West Kensington paused. “Well, he looked kind of shocked at first. I’d got him pushed up against the wall and I was saying all these things in his ear, in this really deep, whispery voice, the sorts of things I thought you’d say. Talking dirty. You know?”

A complacent nod from Vauxhall Park.

“He was surprised, but we’ve always played a bit rough. Nothing extreme before. Just a playfight every now and then. Fluffy handcuffs. Normal stuff. But when I was being you, it was crazy. We were throwing each other about all over the place. Kicking, scratching, all sorts.”

Vauxhall Park was laughing now, leaning back against her chair until West Kensington beckoned her back in with mock urgency, giggling, shushing.

“And he overpowered me. Obviously. I mean, he’s stronger and I’ve always kind of let him win with stuff like that. You know? But I kept on struggling. He had to pin me down, and even then I put up a good fight, just like I figured you would. I got so fucking wet.” West Kensington’s voice was a conspiratorial whisper now. “And he fucked me hard. I made him. He smacked me while he was doing it, and fucked me so hard it hurt. I closed my eyes and I was you. It was you he was fucking right then. And I loved it. I loved being you, being fucked like that.”

“Good.” Vauxhall park seemed surprisingly nonplussed by the revelation.

“I don’t think you’d have given in like that though. You’d have fought. You’d have been the one fucking him, not the one getting fucked.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“So what does it mean? Why does it turn me on, the idea of a strong woman being overpowered? The idea of you being hurt. Well, me, being you, being hurt? Do I secretly want to harm you or something? Does it make me a bad person? What the hell is that?”

Vauxhall Park was smiling, brows relaxed. “Post-feminism?”

“Seriously though, it freaked me out. We’ve done it a couple of times since then. The same. I haven’t told him what’s in my head when we fuck like that. He’s never asked. It’s just so good.”

The city purred quietly below the linoleum, as if perched upon the belly of a sleeping beast. Just out of earshot, something was roaring. The heating vent perhaps, the wings of a million pigeons, or the brakes of a bus at traffic lights. Not so much a noise, but rather a sensation in the metal fillings that hold your back teeth together. A deep reverberation like inside of a churchbell several minutes after it’s tolled.

“If it’s good, then what’s the problem?”

“There are times with you,” said West Kensington, the other woman’s hand closing around her own, “when I’m scared I’ll forget which one of us I am.”

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Boys on Film?

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There was a thread on IC today where someone asked why, after decades of Feminism, depictions of bondage in the mainstream market and elsewhere are still predominantly of women. Many people came up with excellent arguments as to whether this is the case, and if so, why it is. It got me thinking.

Amongst other things, Mistress Tytania wrote:

Most porn is run and managed by men. Most women in porn haven’t much say in the end product, of what kind of eroticism is represented and sold to the horny masses. While I’m all for porn as an important part of human expression, I have serious problems about the bullying often behind the sex industry, and the way it tends to prey on the vulnerable into its ranks. Many, many women in porn would much rather do anything else (if it paid so well), and when asked, have a lot of hang ups about sexual shame.

I agree wholeheartedly, though the internet is changing the industry. Over the past few years, I’ve met an increasing number of women who produce and sell quality porn online, especially within the Femdom genre, in a way that values and empowers the models involved. In the past, exploitation of women in porn was rife, and in far too many cases it still is, but I think that things in the industry are changing for the better.

The internet has proved that porn’s end-user demographic is no longer a heterosexual male who likes to see brainless big-titted bimbos, but something far more diverse and complex. Mainstream producers no longer have the monopoly, and so we now have the choice to purchase fair-trade wank fodder.

The majority of porn produced by either gender does feature women, in both dominant and submissive situations, but – and this is by no means an objective viewpoint, just my own opinion – they are much nicer to look at. Whether all bound up, or doing the binding, women are aesthetically pleasing. Men can be beautiful too, of course, but the market is driven by consumer demand, and more people who buy porn seem to like looking at ladies than looking at gents, and so there are more images out there of women, just as there always has been.

The thing is, the men are out there to see in all their glory too. The internet has given us the choice to see images that would have been too “niche” for financially viable publishing twenty years ago, and so ultimately there’s more variety now than there has ever been. Cyberspace is still young but, both for better and for worse, it’s changed the face of porn more in the past decade than anything else since the invention of the printing press. I suppose we should just wait and see what happens next.

The Atheist’s Martyr

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The copper kettle cried gently from on high.

In its previous incarnation, it was merely decorative, something that hung from a bar ceiling to give the illusion of rustic authenticity to a purpose-built chain pub. Tonight though, here in the garden, the boiling water that dripped from its spout whenever she moved was filled from the electric kettle in the kitchen (I’m too practical for sentimental rituals). She made a gasping noise, almost inaudible, at the drip’s impact on the back of her neck.

“Please,” she said.

It was the sound of the water that thrilled me at first: the tiny, hissed breath of steam as the boiling droplet hit the cool of her skin; and then the way it ran slowly down her back like rain on a window, swerving on its course around the bumps of vertebrae, wriggling down against the small, involuntary lurches as she tried not to struggle against the ropes around her wrists. After all, she knew that if she moved, the next drip would fall, smashing agonisingly against the nape of her neck and beginning its journey down her spine, following the track of its recent predecessor.

“Let me touch you,” she sobbed. “I just want to touch you.”

The sky was featureless and black above the garden, suburban horizon smudged with brown from the streetlamps. There was something almost blasphemous about the tableau here: the woman half-kneeling like a graveside statue in the dark, on the patch of rain-nourished lawn between the rose beds, pale and nude, arms cruciform, wrists bound, pulling desperately downward to hold the slack, her bare shins on the wet grass, antique copper kettle suspended above her on the taut rope that ran between outstretched arms and looped up around the metal frame of the fold-up washing line. It reminded me a little of that famous quote by Bertrand Russell about God, daring us to disprove the existence of a Celestial Teapot floating merrily around the sun.

“No,” I said, with a kindly smile.

Predicament bondage excites me. It might be because I grew up watching James Bond, Batman, Penelope Pitstop, and a host of other characters who would not merely be executed outright by the charismatic villain, but instead find themselves tied to a timebomb, or various pieces of sawmill equipment, or a complicated contraption involving laser beams or similar. This is flawed, as the heroes inevitably escape and win whatever battle they’ve waged. Yet I adore the concept of entirely automated torture. Quicksand inspires me – the fact that its victims come to more harm if they try to struggle or swim than if they merely keep still and submit to its unthinking authority.

“Please,” she murmured hopelessly towards the wet ground as I rolled my fingertips around her button-hard nipples.

A tiny shiver in her bowed head sent the kettle rocking gently, just once, and another drop of boiling water fell, forcing a sharp inhalation as it hit. She was the vital part in a machine that was tied in perfect equilibrium. So simple: rope; washing line; copper kettle; boiling water; her, arms splayed and weeping. One tiny drip at a time. Pain with precision. After all, a larger splash would scald her, stripping the skin, and neither of us wanted that. The mechanism allowed only the smallest, most excruciating droplet to fall with every flinch. Perhaps she was frightened, or – ha! – excited even, that someone would see us out here. The panel-fence gave little privacy, if anyone knew to look at this time of night. The rain-jewelled lawn shimmered and blinked in the light breeze. Plip, hiss, gasping breath. All was quiet.

“Keep still,” I whispered calmly, just as I had before. “If you keep still, the drips will stop. It’s very simple really.”

Her head hung low, hair draped like a curtain, obscuring her mascara-slicked face. “I can’t.”

“You should,” I said, one hand down between her bare thighs, finger sliding its gentle orbit round her swollen clit, those hot, wet lips pulsing against my skin.

The woman’s body shuddered again, and she cried out as another burning droplet exploded at the top of her spine. My eyes followed the thin, florid tracks of the previous drips, haphazard red scribbles, parallel lines snaking down the length of her back, diving to join up as a neat little delta at the cleft of her buttocks.

“Please,” she whimpered softly, with as little movement as possible, muscles tense and rigid. “I’m going to cum.”

“I wouldn’t advise it,” I said flatly, fingers working faster now, pushing harder, drenched. “Not unless you can do it whilst keeping completely still.”

“Oh god, please stop,” she gasped, right at the edge of her own control, another boiling droplet falling, landing, darting down the hollow of her spine. “Oh god!”

I felt the tremor like a single ripple in still water at first, there at my fingertip. The full force of the orgasm hit her then, throbbing in waves, torrents, writhing helplessly, clenching, bucking against my hand, drip after burning drip rattling down her back from above as the washing line shook. She opened her mouth in pain and ecstasy, face twisted, lips frozen in a silent cry, my pitiless fingers caressing her on into further depths of oblivion. Her naked body contorted, a martyr to the Celestial Teapot, she hissed the words again:

“Oh. God.”

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