On (Not?) Being a Sub

I'm not at all sure about labelling myself 'a sub'. Calling myself a masochist seems straightforward, because I enjoy being hurt, but submissive? I dunno.

There's the old question of 'who's really in charge?'. And I think I may well be 'a reaction top' in the sense that I like to provoke and control the man who's supposedly dominating me, by torturing him with his own desire to hurt/fuck me.

Of course it's narcissistic: I'm very turned on by seeing someone else's unwilling desire for me, a desire they don't want to feel. And exploiting that desire to get them to do things they are intellectually or morally uncomfortable with. Like making me bleed, or cheating on their partners (I'm trying to be honest here, not to justify any of this).

Because then they're angry with me. They want me - but they also want to punish me for making them want me. And that's when they push me down or grab me by the hair and fuck me harder, too hard. And I have a sort of sense of triumph.

I'm not sure that submission is an accurate description of this. I like to be hurt and dominated, but I don't see myself as submitting to that domination. What I want is to be forcibly overpowered, not to consent to it.

Ever since I was a child, I've liked arm-wrestling men: women too, but especially men. I've almost always lost, but I never, ever, let them win, and (in any context) I'm furious if I feel like someone's doing that to me. Where's the satisfaction in winning if it isn't real?

I like the idea of real wrestling, tumbling and struggling, heavy breathing: halfway between fighting and fucking. And ultimately being restrained, a hand over my mouth, being held down by one or more blokes as they use me. The idea that there is, in the end, nothing I can do about it - and I know because I tried.

Yahoo 1: Icing on the Vanilla Cake

[17:45] you've got an interesting twist on sub dom
[17:45] you're very into causing reactions
[17:45] yeah
[17:46] bloody laughter woman was talking about being a reaction top
[17:47] I think i'm more into being made to react, as i'm a bit reserved normally
[17:47] a reaction top, hmm interesting
[17:47] (or unable to react)
[17:47] yeah i definitely want to MAKE them do stuff to me . to provoke
[17:47] funny what you said in that comment about scars
[17:48] when we were staying at D's last weekend, when we were very drunk, B got all upset and emotional about my scars
[17:48] "oh it's so sad you did that to yourself" that kind of crap
[17:49] and i was thinking, imagine getting him to the point where he'd do that to me.. it would go so much against everything he thinks about himself
[17:49] god, that's hot, you bitch
[17:49] ha ha
[17:49] yeah i think so
[17:49] it's also horribly against "safe sane consensual"
[17:49] but that's where it gets interesting
[17:49] otherwise it's just icing on the vanilla cake

Green = Fluence
Purple = Me

The Chamber of Horrors

Growing up in London, there were certain places we went to regularly - London Zoo, the National Gallery, the Science Museum, etc. One of my favourites was Madame Tussauds. From an adult perspective, it's a cheesy, overpriced, overcrowded tourist trap, and when I was 16 and obnoxious I used to take great pleasure in strolling down Baker Street past the queues of American and Japanese tourists and blowing cigarette smoke in their faces. But as a little kid, I loved it purely because of the Chamber of Horrors.

I remember the almost unbearable excitement of approaching and entering the dark, ghoulishly lit underground room, which rang with distant screams and the rattle of chains. And within were a series of figures that left me breathless and thrilled. I can't find many pictures online (and probably the waxworks from the eighties are long gone) but I can still recollect them in detail. Some of the highlights were:

The man being garrotted. This one is the most vivid in my mind. I can visualise all the details: his hands helplessly clawing at the solid metal band; the expression of agony on his face, gritted teeth, eyes squeezed shut, tendons standing out; the impassive face of the man standing behind him, studiously tightening it around his neck.

Death masks. Possibly of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, etc. But the historical aspect wasn't important to me at the age of 6 (funnily enough). It was their green, dead faces, the bloodied mouths, and their streaming hair.



Bride in the bath. I think she was a victim of George Joseph Smith. It was her agonised face and naked body that enthralled me.

Although, in fact, none of that is quite as creepy as this picture of Tussaud's storeroom which I just found online:


Other similarly gruesome attractions that I loved as a child included the Torture Museum in Carcassonne. Among its fascinating exhibits was a chair which had hundreds of sharp metal spikes sticking inwards:



I also have strong memories of a Chinese torture instrument made up of interconnecting metal bars that locked your wrists and ankles together and kept you in an agonising, hunched position. And medieval engravings of a woman being pulled to pieces by four horses (quartered, I suppose), and of a man hung upside down naked, legs apart, being sawn in half.

Another favourite haunt was Mountfitchet Castle, a reconstructed Norman castle/village which we often visited in the school holidays. Gory highlights here included a man on a surgeon's table, his mouth wide open in agony, his torso split open with blood pouring out, and decapitated heads stuck on spikes over the entrance, complete with bloodied neck stumps.

I have photographs of all of these somewhere, and will come back and add them when I have time to dig them out. In the meantime I just wanted to post some happy reminiscences of my bloodthirsty, torturephilic childhood.

My Weekend

R and I drive a long way to visit D. It's been nearly a year since we saw him. B is coming too, from a different city. I don't allow myself to believe that he'll turn up: I don't want to be disappointed. But there he is, looking strangely smart and unlikely in his work clothes.

When B and I first reunite on Friday we are polite and keep our distance, physically and emotionally. He kisses me chastely on the cheek. He buys disgusting shots in the pub and we walk back with our arms around each other. I hold his hand where it rests on my shoulder. We keep it light and friendly. We drink bottles of beer and we all make each other laugh a lot.

On Friday night we sleep close to each other, him on the sofa while R and I are sleeping together on the floor. When I open my eyes he is looking right at me. He looks away quickly. Much much later, close to dawn on Sunday morning, when we are sitting outside curled up together with our fifteenth cups of gin and tonic, he tells me that he was watching me sleep.

"You look strange when you sleep."
"Ugly?"
"No, you look pretty. But you frown. You don't look like you're ... in repose. You look more relaxed when you're awake."
"You were looking right at me when I woke up."
"I had a massive erection," he says. "I was wondering if there was any polite way of asking you to help me with it."

But at the time, on Saturday morning, I have no idea if he still wants me at all. He likes my hair a lot: "bewitching Oriental waves" he said once. He touches it as often as he can. On Saturday morning the excuse is that he wants to feel whether it's going dread-y. He puts his hand underneath my hair, on my neck, and tangles his fingers in it. Twists them around. For a long time. And this in front of D, our mutual friend.

"Thanks for that," I say, keeping it light. B is too sleepy (or pretending to be) to restrain himself.

Later, in the pub, I argue with him about the distinction between andros and anthropos. I borrow R's pen and scribble Greek words messily on the back of a receipt. I am fired up and at that articulate stage of drunkenness. Impulsively B kisses my cheek, fast and hard, in front of D and R. The kiss is chaste enough but I wonder if it seems strange to the others.

By the time we are in the almost empty club, he is kissing my face, my hands, my neck: anywhere but the mouth. Every moment the two of us are alone (the smoking ban helps this - it's obligatory to divide the group every few minutes to go off, in pairs, for a fag) he is talking to me, holding me, looking at me in a way that makes me melt. He puts his arms around me and pulls me close to him. Tangles his hands up in my hair and says my name, over and over. Buries his face where my neck meets my shoulder.

I dance to punk remixes and try unsuccessfully to get off with a girl in the club. She's flirting but ultimately says no. I am very frustrated and drunk and horny. The four of us stumble home at 3.30am. B and I walk behind the others with our arms round each other. Back at D's flat, we stand outside smoking. I ask B if he wants to feel something. He says yes. I take his hand and guide it inside my jeans, inside my knickers, til his fingers brush against my deep, damp, desiring cunt. "Fuck, you're so wet," he says.

D and R fall asleep. B and I stay up, refilling our g&ts and smoking whole packets of Marlboro. We sit against the wall, limbs tangled up together, trying to talk it all out. We make each other laugh and tell each other that it's like communicating with yourself, almost - our connection is so transparent and uncensored.

He tells me that he had to leave the room earlier to masturbate because of what I was saying. "I came almost instantly," he says.

I ask him why he hardly ever makes eye contact with me.

"Because then I'd have to kiss you," he says.

I kiss him a few times. He switches rapidly, repeatedly, between resistance and desire. He talks about the stars we can see. I think this is cheesy.

He tells me he was worried I was falling in love with him. That he loves his girlfriend and that he has had enough of turmoil and passion and it always ends badly. That yes, he and I have something unique, but so do he and his girlfriend. And so do me and R. He has difficulty reconciling his different selves.

Eventually we go inside. The sky is already light around the edges. In the hallway we kiss again, briefly. I try to tempt him further but he refuses.

Inside, R is asleep on the floor. B sits on the sofa and pulls me down next to him. He holds me more tightly and for longer than I can remember being held. Eventually his breathing deepens and I realise he's asleep, head on my breast, arms locked around me. I disentangle myself and change into sleeping clothes. I take his shoes off with a maternal ache inside. Then a struggle to wake him up and convince him to take his jeans and jumper off and to get into his sleeping bag. I am ready to go to sleep on the floor but, barely conscious, he puts his arms around me and pulls me into him. We lie pressed close together, my legs sandwiched between his, my head on his shoulder. I can feel his cock throbbing against my leg. Barely awake myself, I let my hand stray there and (finally!) hold it through his boxers. He moans quietly. His hand finds its way to my breast and he strokes my nipple, slides the bar back and forth, circles it with his thumb. All the while I have his cock in my hand, I'm holding him gently but firmly. Lying like this, we drift off into sleep.

I wake up some time later. It's light and R is still asleep on the floor only a few feet away. Reality knocks, distantly. This is dangerous. I readjust my clothes and try to get up, but deep in inebriated sleep, B tightens his arms around me. Eventually I extricate myself and fall asleep where I should be, next to R.

In the morning R is horny and I am still drunk and still hot. To ward off the hangover I swig gin and tonic and suck his cock inside the sleeping bag. B is asleep - I think. But I like the possibility of him seeing us, hearing us. I know he thinks about me doing it to him; he's told me. R fucks me with his fingers and I let myself moan and wriggle, just a little. It's inconclusive though, and we both fall back asleep.

We spend Sunday trying to ease our way back into reality. D and R don't drink. B and I keep knocking back the gin, the vodka, the beer, and holding each other whenever we get the chance. He says he doesn't remember much of what happened after we went to bed. I half-believe him.

We decide we are very grown up and have dealt with this in a mature way and we're not going to agonise over it any more. I half-believe this.

We part ways on Sunday evening with a quick hard kiss on the mouth and then he's gone, and R and I are driving home through end-of-weekend motorway rain, listening to The Streets and bracing for the rude shock of real life.

Car Crashes and Comas

When I was little, around the ages of 7-10, I was slightly obsessed with car crashes, injury, comas, and paralysis. As far as I can remember, this fascination started when I watched a crap TV movie in which a young girl was hit by a car and left paralysed. It must be twenty years since I saw it (blimey) but I can still remember the scene in which she was hit. She's crossing the road, carelessly, looking back at her friend, and then WHAM. I remember seeing her body flung up in the air and bouncing hard off the car bonnet.

It wasn't just the climactic impact that enthralled me. It was also the fact that afterwards she was so badly damaged, physically and mentally. She spent the rest of the film learning to walk and talk and eat again. It's hard to be sure, but I think part of the fascination was that a single moment of carelessness could have such immense consequences. What could be destroyed in an instant.

There were lots of other examples:

We were shown a public information film at school about a boy who was skateboarding and was knocked over by a car. I still remember the final image with the blood trickling out of his nose, and the solemn pronouncement that he had 'a fractured skull'. I think it was the first time I ever heard the phrase.

In real life, around the same time, I knew a girl who was in a serious car accident and was paralysed. We weren't close friends - I think our mothers vaguely knew each other. I have a vivid memory of an article about her in the local newspaper which included a photo of her with her legs in some sort of metal contraption. I was painfully interested by this picture.

The enforced passivity of the coma also intrigued me: for example, the film Reversal of Fortune, about Klaus and Sunny von Bulow, and the Sweet Valley High book Dangerous Love, in which there was a motorbike crash which left Elizabeth comatose. I had a thing about unconscious people being physically moved around. I used to play a game with my sisters where we would take it in turns to 'play dead' and be moved around by the others.

I even remember telling a babysitter, who was probably only about 16 herself, that I was really interested in people being paralysed, and her having no idea what to say back to me. Which isn't that surprising really.

Does this belong in a blog about sexuality and BDSM? Instinctively I think it does. My fascination, which coincided with the very beginnings of puberty, had an edge which I would describe as sexual. (I told some of this to a friend in the pub last night, and she suggested that it might have something to do with your body changing, beyond your control.)

The vividness of the images, how clearly I can still recall these verbal and visual scenes twenty years later, means it must have been very very intense at the time. Perhaps it could even be described as a fetish. But I had more or less completely forgotten about it until something sparked my memory recently, and it all came flooding back.

I have no idea what conclusions I can draw from any of this, except: it's amazing what you can forget; I was evidently quite strange, even at the age of 7; and it's not very surprising that I found Crash ridiculously erotic.

Watching Men Come

In feminist writings, I've often encountered the argument that the emphasis on cumshots in porn is purely for male gratification: that it provides confirmation of his potency and his orgasm and disregards the woman's pleasure.

I can understand this view to a certain extent. Generally speaking, it's not that exciting to have someone ejaculate on you. [Notwithstanding my occasional bukkake-style fantasies, which are about degradation and exposure and excess and mass loss of control, and may or may not get a separate post at some point.]

And yes, the emphasis on the male orgasm as the endpoint of sex can definitely be detrimental in real life, even if it does provide an easy narrative closure. But I think these critiques perhaps miss the fact that for some women - for me at least - seeing a bloke come is very very erotic.

Admittedly, a lot depends on the specific way it's represented. I'm not aroused by watching a woman's face or breasts as she waits to be splattered on: in particular, the emphasis on women looking apprehensive or resigned or disgusted is unappealing, and probably somewhat misogynistic. And porn which fetishises the spunk itself doesn't do it for me either. Bubbles? No no no.

But watching a man masturbate - the gradual build-up, the rapid, instinctive, almost unconscious movements of his hand as he gets close, the twitches in his belly and thighs and balls, the sudden pulse through his body in the millisecond before he comes, the moment where his consciousness is annihilated - is incredibly erotic.

Hardcore pornography breaks down the boundaries between fiction and reality, performance and life, and this is perhaps most evident in orgasm. It must be difficult for a man to come on command in what is most likely an unsexy and uncomfortable environment. So to see him overcome that, to get to the point where the context doesn't matter any more, and he's just intent on reaching orgasm ... appeals to me very much, for some wrong reason.

I actively like the disjunction between the industrial conveyor-belt nature of porn and the immediacy, the realness, the physical ooomph of watching a man ejaculate. I like seeing him have to make a conscious mental effort to block out the surroundings. I like the flicker of relief in his face when he realises that, despite the situation, he is going to come.

Yeah, that's not right, is it?

Blood, Biting and Badness

It's a cliche that sex is better when it's wrong. But I understand it. Because, if you shouldn't do something, but you still end up doing it, you must really really want to.

It's come into play a lot recently with B. For him, every aspect of his desire for me is wrong. It makes him feel bad and guilty. And that turns me on. A lot. Not so much the real-life badness when it starts to fuck up our friendship, but the "oh god I shouldn't but I want to so much" badness.

Way way back in 1996 when I first met R, I was really into blood. I used to cut myself, badly enough that I ended up in hospital, but I wasn't angsty about it. I had quite a detached relationship to my own body and could cut or burn it (or have someone else do it) without feeling any particular emotion. I liked the aesthetic.

Sometimes I wrote him letters in blood. I used a ceramic cup which I'd smashed up. I kept the pieces in a plastic carrier bag in my bedside table, and used their sharp edges for both cutting and writing. The variation in the shape of the pieces, and in the viscosity and colour of the blood, created nice calligraphic effects. From his perspective, the strangest thing was that the content of the letters was mundane: just scraps of institutional news and thoughts about what had been on telly. But - incongruously - scrawled in blood.

At times, with R, this cutting spilled over (sorry) into something like sex. The first time I ever went to his house was around my 16th birthday. We stayed up all night talking. Eventually, around dawn, the inevitable sofa snogging session began. There was fumbling and groping and heavy breathing, but it only got properly heated when I persuaded him to bite me. The harder he did it the more turned on we both got. There was something in his savagery which made me lose my mind a little bit. Something about being meat. The smell of blood and sweat. His absorption in his own violence.

Then the fateful moment: he looked up momentarily and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror above the sofa. The sun had risen and he saw his own face, pale, his skin and teeth stained with my blood. I saw the horror in his eyes and felt him growing cold. I took him by the arms, tried to pull him back to me, to relight the fire. But it was too late. He was scared, disgusted, by himself and by me. He stood up and went to make tea instead, refusing to go any further down that road.

Writing this eleven years on, what sticks in my mind is the look on his face when he saw himself. Not because I liked the horror, not because I wanted him to stop, but because... If he looked like that, if he was so horrified by himself, then it meant he hadn't quite known what he was doing. That he had, somehow, lost control. Lost his presence of mind. Was carried away by desire and by the physical. He'd betrayed himself, betrayed his better judgement and his reason, to blindly follow the urges of his body.

I'm not really into blood anymore, but that doesn't matter. Some people have a thing about specific acts, specific objects, but I don't especially. Whether it's biting or choking or groping in an alleyway, it's making someone do something they know they shouldn't. Divided between their own desires. Driving them to the point of savagery and violence. I want to make them break themselves.

MSN 1: Two People Trying to Destroy Each Other

02:40:33 yeah

02:41:05 think it's a possibly misogynistic control thing. Just want to hold you down and keep you down and please myself

02:41:26 shut me up

02:41:31 and use me

02:41:56 yeah, stop you...talking back. Or something. Just take what I want from you.

02:42:32 i have a very distinct memory of my face pushed against brick.. a wall maybe.. damp from the rain

02:42:48 and you pressed hard against my back , with your hands wound in my hair

02:43:20 see...I don't understand why, but you make me feel violent. I've had that with some people but not with everyone. I don't understand the chemistry of it.

02:43:59 i love that. it charges me up so much.

02:44:48 makes me want to struggle just to be restrained harder

02:45:22 * thinking *

02:45:41 * feeling *

02:45:54 * wan --

02:46:35 I want to...I suppose my lying on your back thing, the root is, I want to possess you and make you helpless

02:47:23 its hard to analyse this stuff... when you say "you make me feel violent".. that hits me in the pit of my stomach.. in such a good way

02:48:08 yeah...my curiosity is, I don't feel that way about everyone. I was very violent with H (D's ex), but it's not my norm.

02:48:27 well, a few possibilities

02:48:37 its to do with her and me - the fact we want it

02:48:48 or its to do with the context

02:49:40 I think it's partly being intimidated and bewitched at the same time...makes me want to physically and mentally crush you in revenge

02:50:03 yes. its a lot to do with the fact that i argue with you and challenge you and exhaust you

02:50:20 R and i are like that... not always, but often ..and at first, always

02:51:16 yeah, you're a more dominant personality than me. So there's a massive backlash.

02:52:11 It makes it D H Lawrence style sex. 'He could only conceive of the sex act as two people trying to destroy each other' -- Earl Russell.

Purple = Me

Black = Him

Train (of) Thoughts

B seduces me with words. There is, as he said, a 'powerful mutual physical attraction', but that isn't what does it. When my mind wanders, when I'm struck by a memory that makes my stomach go suddenly hollow, it's verbal. I remember stuff he's said: jokes, compliments, statements about what he'd like to do to me, how I make him feel, replaying real encounters we've had. We meet up and we start to give in to our desire but then we stop. Responsibility to other people (and, in his case at least, fear about falling too hard for each other) gets in the way. So we go home and go online and 'talk' to each other on MSN for half the night.

Through typed words alone, he reduces me to a quivering breathless mass of sexual desire. There's nothing of the body in it, not even as much as in handwriting or speech. I remember the physical events, they turn me on, but I don't dwell on them in quite the same way. And when I do, it's about what we said and about what I think he was thinking when he touched me like that. The look in his eyes. The conflict in him. His desire fighting against his better judgement. [More on that at a later date.]

And my ultimate desire to really fuck him is at least partly because I want to destroy his ability to think and to articulate. It's ridiculous. It's his verbal dexterity that makes me want him so much, but what I want is the dissolution of that dexterity. What really makes me catch my breath is when his brain melts. When he can no longer manage the quotations, the witty phrases, the polysyllables. When he can do nothing except mumble obscenities or inanities, and grab me and bite me and smack my arse. The sudden plummet from the ultra-intellectual to the visceral. The funny thing is that most blokes are like that most of the time, and it turns me off. What I want is to take the clever articulate ones and turn them into gibbering priapic wrecks.

Is this a statement of principle? A mission? Is it possible to stick to verbal fucking alone? Because when we kiss, when we grope and stumble and stagger together, it's not just biology. It's the end result of the way we talk and write to each other. The verbal tension-building. Is it possible to go so deep into someone's sexual psyche, to know so much, that you can never forget it? That it's always going to get in the way, at least until you've fucked and destroyed the mystique and the tension and the imagining and reduced each other to sweaty, spludgy, rutting animals?

None of which erases the fact that I want to feel him come inside me. I want to hear him come. I want to see his face. I want to know if he groans my name. All those times on MSN I made it happen - I chose my words so carefully that he came over himself, but I didn't get my reward. The sound, the look, the smell, the taste. Yes, I do love talking to him. Yes, he is witty and articulate and ridiculously educated. But I want to drink his come. I want him to come in my mouth. I want him to come over my face and up my cunt and in my hair. I want him to come with his hand tangled in my hair, or over my mouth, gagging me, with his cock inside me.

But why can't that be just anyone? Desire is such a weird, fucked-up thing. Just because he can talk like that - why should that mean I want to feel him orgasm inside me? What the fuck is the connection there? And what I should do about any of it is another matter entirely.

What This Is, and Why

Inspired by the incomparable Bitchy Jones, I've decided to try to write about sex. Well, not sex exactly; I'm not intending to give lots of gory details. More to try to thrash out (ho ho) the stuff that goes on in my head and why some things turn me on so much.

I found myself on a train the other day, coming back from a work-type thing. Beautiful countryside outside, water and bridges and hills. I was very sleepy (it had been an early start) but I knew I should get on with something useful, so I took out my notepad and my biro. The sun was warm on my skin and I couldn't concentrate on work. Instead, I found myself wandering into the dark alleyways of my mind: replaying real events, fantasising about different endings. I scribbled four sides of A4 in an intense 20-minute burst, and presenting a version of that here seems like a good place to start (if I can decipher my own handwriting).