Tho actually, a little explanation of why I'm working on this might be worth it, since I won't know where to start babbling otherwise. (Mmm... must remember to get Vitamin E supplements. Damn skeeters.) First of all - people keep asking me. Questions like, "What do you enjoy about...?" and "How does ... feel?" and the like aren't things that I can answer straightaway - it takes digging down into the back of my mind and letting my waves take it below conscious level and pop up again with answers. I've also been having an absolute ball spooking people on the NE:tR public channels with offhanded comments....

Anyway, what hit me last night was a start to a mental analysis of what I think of BDSM - not only in my own life, but sort of as a general thing. I've been poking at it in bits and pieces since then, and this is what I'm coming up with.

First off - there are people who like pain. I'm not one of them (and on a certain level, they spook me a bit). (As I muttered last night while arguing with my gods-be-feathered cramps, "Dear gods, just because I'm a masochist doesn't mean I like pain!") I can deal with pain moderately well - I have fairly high tolerances, due to the amusing combination of cramps, migraines, and utter obliviousness ("Hello, I'm bleeding. I wonder how that happened?").

What - in certain situations - gets a reaction out of me is what I termed the other day "the capriciousness of sensation." Each individual touch or contact starts out as a shock of anticipated touch - whatever that touch may turn out to be - and, as such, the reaction to it is intense. the fact that I don't know what it'll turn into, necessarily, adds to that - a piling on of uncertainties into a tottering mass of imaginations. Pain becomes irrelevant, because it's liable to go away any moment, and it doesn't get much of reaction out of me most of the time anyway ("I wonder where that bruise came from? Isn't it a strange shade of green?").

Sensation is utterly expected - and unpredictable. Each contact is a long-anticipated surprise. To sub - for me - is, in many ways, to revel in being the exact focus of attention. Even if, for example, I am left - supposedly ignored - I am aware of my partner's awareness of me... and to be desired, recognized, wanted, is one of the most deleriously erotic concepts I am capable of recognizing just at the moment.

Flipsiding that a bit to when I dom, now. I tend not to, mostly (reasons I'll poke at later). When I do, however, my use of sensation rarely involves pain of a /physical/ type. I'm quite capable of less direct tortures - sensation upon sensation until just stopping, and waiting, and watching.... People fascinate me anyway - when I go dom, my partner acquires the specimen-under-glass quality that most of the universe has for me anyway. I make studies of reactions - touch here, scratch there, bite there - see what each will do, reveling in the possession of such a fine specimen of...whatever. (One of the verses of "Nine Passions" has this.)

The other form my mind fits when I go dominant is ... predatory, is the best word for it. The game of the hunt is the appropriate delight and, like all big cats, sheer arrogance rules. The attitude comes down to - "You are mine - even if you don't realize it yet." That form is, to say the least, far more self-serving, more fire than earth, prone to fits of sudden emotion, swinging one way or the other.

I don't know why I tend to go to that side - perhaps it's a function of being female, perhaps it's my overdeveloped pain empathy ("Whose headache is this?"), but my fits of being dom tend to be almost gentle. (Then again, while it /is/ possible, it's more technically difficult for a woman to commit rape.) The point is the power trip, in that case, but then again, that's part of the point for the entire process.

I think that part of the thrill for people who go sadist in dominance situations is the ability to do anything - including inflict pain. Perhaps I get that thrill as well, but I almost never cause pain (intentionally) - getting the cheap moral shot of never bothering to touch that realm, perhaps (cynical answer); more honestly, I don't think it occurs to me. :}

(In other, more flippant news, my latest rubberband ball is up to 2 5/8"....)

Trust, though, is probably the focus of the entire thing for me. Sex is - just to start out with - for me an act of absolute trust, just because of my history, my loss of barriers, and, hell, my natural inclinations. (There's a theory I'll pursue sometime....)

Extremes are weird for me. I don't entirely believe in absolutes. They don't /fit/. Black and white are very odd. (Much of my writing comes from a grey oberver looking at black and white societies - or, more often, a pink, chartreuse, pale blue observer, marvelling at the limits of monochrome. Contrariwise, my best drawings /are/ black and whites, like the portrait of Hellcat.) (Another thing to ponder sometime. Quitting my job makes me philosophical.)

Sub lets me play with the notion of absolute trust, and further lets me place that trust in a place where it's obvious to my partner. It's meta-action, like my frequently written meta-poetry; the act is a conscious reflection on itself. More complicated philosophy to pursue later - I'm almost out of hours in the office and I don't feel like getting lost in the usual webwork of tangents.

I'm a control freak. Known fact. I'm incredibly paranoid-controlled of my surroundings because I don't trust ninety-nine point eight bar nine percent of the universe /not/ to attack me in some way - often subtle, emotional, and/or imaginary. The incredible liberty of being able - willing, and even wishing - to give up all control over my current situation, to relax into the perfect trust in someone else, to cease having to worry, to defend, to... etc., all this is incredible to me.

One of the reasons I'm reluctant to dom is that I know I'm control freakish. Frekishly freakish, in fact. I play mind games all the time, I do subtle manipulations, I say things with hidden meanings to get reactions, and get upset when people don't pick up on them. Going dom means that that tendency to tie people in knots is loose, and in my own opinion that is bad for me. I'm too good at getting what I want as it is.

Other people need the dom for similar reasons to the ones I need the sub - a place, as it's been put, where, "Only my opinion matters." I'm too good at making my opinion the one that matters, in everyday life; give me a two-hour argument with a Christian fundamentalist. He won't hear anything I have to say about religion, philosophy, or ethics. /However/ - everyone listening to the conversation will come away with the sense that the guy I'm talking to is completely cracked. (I've done this more times than I can count.)

Needing to have a place where taking control is safe can be as important as needing to have a place where giving it up is safe. I - under most other circumstances - am not safe unless I have a certain level of control. If I cannot establish my safety with quiet means, I will, occasionally, do it with violence. (Once someone tried to contradict me with hearsay evidence on a topic of corporate litigatory law - on which I had just completed a course of study. I grabbed him by the shirtfront, pulled up a bit, and shouted in his face something along the lines of, "Don't you /dare/ tell me that I don't know what I'm doing!")

There is a strange and twisted culture (going into the usual sociological coda to my thought train) in the US these days. I should really write more about it. Howerever, the gendertyping is, were it not so damaging, almost hilarious. Both men and women are 'supposed' to be able to take control and act - but if men do it, they're oppressors, and if women do it, they're ballbreakers; contrariwise, both men and women are 'supposed' to develop a sentimental, emotional side - which, if a man has, he's weak, and if a woman has, she's a throwback to the squished antifeminists of the fifties.

Which amuses and disturbs me - granted that a few months ago, I was mentally (and on poly-list) trying to resolve the mental hiccup I had suddenly realized was inculturated in me. Granted that I /don't/ want an outside-the-home working space (a bit of my mind debates a Juris Doctor, but the problem with law school is afterwards you really have to become a lawyer to pay it off, and I don' wanna!...), and that, in fact, outside work would interfere with what I want/need to do - (write, raise children, write, grow herbs, play with kittens, write, write...) - I got mentally stuck. I want to stay at home - which definitively puts me outside the 'modern woman' stereotype, where busines suits (eghk) rule; but I made a choice in career and desire, and don't feel like being a stereotypical housewife (I can cook and sew, but the cleaning is beyond me...), which sets me outside the fifties throwback horde. :)

I realized that I was inculturated enough that this was a problem for me, and worked hard at fixing it. Now I just worry about feeling like a freeloader (and being one, too...).

Anyway, that's gone off-tangent, and anyway, it's 5:28.

Love.