Don’t make me spank you.
My short stint in the BDSM community was strange but educational.
I was curious to see what the community was like and I was hoping to find someone who I could relate to, as I was something of a masochist. I enjoyed some force in sex, but I suppose I liked it animalistic and instinctual. I didn’t want to be a sub or slave.
I joined a group and discovered that they really didn’t have a distinction for masochists except for a derisive one. All masochists were just hedonist pleasure-seekers who didn’t want to follow orders.
Dominance and submission were the only real distinctions in the group. At the munches, you had to choose a color of star to wear on your name tag (blue for dom, red for sub, silver for switch I think it went). When I told them I was a masochist, they just handed me a red star.
I listened a lot. I heard some dominant men expressing that women were naturally inferior and that, deep down, all women wanted to be lorded over. Women just wanted their daddies to tell them how to be good. I couldn’t help but laugh inside.
I got involved with a guy through the group. He was very pushy after a while. He wanted to be dominant. I didn’t trust him. There was no way I was going to let him tie me up. He just didn’t understand that trust must be built and earned. He’s out there somewhere now, no doubt looking for some woman to feed his need for power.
Many of the people I met through the group were seriously messed up people. They needed to put more money into therapy and less into sex toys. They handled relationships terribly and acted like five year olds. Most of them were white, overweight, middle-class folks, too.
Some of them were delightful, however. Some of them didn’t have a twinkle in their eye like I was fresh meat. I got a full body flogging there that I remember fondly. I met a wonderful woman friend there who is fun to talk with.
I’ve been to the Lair De Sade for their educational stuff once or twice, since my aforementioned woman friend needed help with selling things. There’s something so… I don’t know, fake, about the place. It’s like Hollywood glitz. It was all trend and no meat. But I haven’t been there often, so I may be wrong. Kane and Careena were nice people, though.
Slaves bother me. Anyone who gives up their freedom completely bothers me. There is something inherently distasteful to me about the master/slave relationship. I felt like a minority in my view. I wonder if anyone else shares it?
But fetish and BDSM sexuality strike people’s curiosity, so it’s good to have experienced folks around to answer questions. 
Just FEveryonesI -
The Topping Book and The Bottoming Book are coming out this year in new editions.
K.R. sounds like you met an awful lot of *CHDWahs in your experience, real friggin’ jerks. I’m fortunate that my mentors, both submissive women and both platonic in their relationship to me, taught me better. Submission is not a sign of weakness or inferiority, far from it. It is a wonderful gift to be cherished and respected.
Don’t draw too many conclusions about white, overweight, middle class folks though.
*Clueless, Hetero, Dom Wannabees
Dang, no “domscript” UBB tag.
This may be the most stupid question of all but I honestly can’t figure it out so I will ask it anyway. Is there any actual sex involved with these rituals? Do the encounters end with any real sexual release or do they just end some other way?
It’s certainly not the most stupid question, since the answer is : it depends. Some people enjoy the experience in itself and aren’t necessarily seeking after sexual release (at least not every time). Also, one of the partner can get it while the other won’t (and I would suspect that in this case, it’s significantly more frequently the sub than the Dom who will get it, contrarily to what a lot of people could think…But it’s a wild guess since I really don’t know much people who are into BDSM).
However, in most cases, especially when the partner are commited to each other (as opposed to some random encounter), sexual release would be the norm, IMO (with the same disclaimer than above : I don’t know enough people in BDSM to give a statistically sound answer).
By the way, I would argue about the word “rituals”. Though BDSM can often be somewhat ritualistic, and despite the fact that a lot of people in this lifestyle seem to enjoy the ritualistic part, it’s not necessarily true for everybody. Rituals can feel very “artificial” to some people. Personnally, I’m driven by my feelings and my partner’s feelings (the feeling I have about her feelings…). When it becomes too ritualistic and not spontaneous enough, it seems like a “let’s pretend” game to me, and I quickly lose interest in whatever we’re doing. I’d prefer a regular intercourse rather than a “faked” BDSM game anyday.
A question for Hastur, Kricket and other BDSMers: how do you feel about Gor?
For me, it’s running at around a 1:3 ratio of no-sex to sex. Some people may want sex included, some (more, in my experience and, of course, the experience of others may vary - mine’s been mostly in short-term relationships, so that may be a factor) don’t.
Gor is a little too ritualised for me. I can do it as play, but as a full time thing? Nah. I mean, it’s a fun fantasy or role-play and all, but I don’t think I’d be any good as a 24/7 kajira.
I deeply dislike this concept. Because it’s totally unreal, refering to an unexistent culture. I happen to live on earth, and act accordingly. Because it’s role-play. I love real feelings, not “let’s pretend” mindgames. Because it doesn’t seem to me to be related to actual human psychology. Because it’s extremely ritualistic, and as noted above, I’m not really that attracted to formalism. Because it’s IMO degrading for the “slaves”, instead of being strenghtening, as any relationship, BDSM or not, should be. Because it ignores human feelings and desires (being a Dom doesn’t prevent from being caring or affectionnate).
Actually, I didn’t even liked the books. I tried to read a couple of them, but found them boring. Not credible (I mean the character’s psychology…I’ve no problem with the fantasy setting).
That said, apart on some occasions on the internet, I never had any contact with an actual Gorean (I’m not even sure the concept exists outside the US), so I could be somewhat off base. But I don’t really believe one can build a significant relationship with someone else on such a basis. At the very least, I wouldn’t be interested in this kind of relationship…
Perhaps an explanation of Gor is in order for those of us out here who are clueless?
Just did a search on Yahoo! and while I couldn’t find a really comprehensive faq (it wasn’t that compelling a subject to spend too much time hunting) it appears to be a sort of role-playing lifestyle based on some sci-fi books about the planet “Gor” which are largely about a society with a detailed structure of female sex slavery and submission to men. Whatever turns you on I guess. I imagine their conventions are a little more x-rated than Hitchiker’s Guide or Star Trek ones though.
John Norman wrote a schlock series of Edgar Rice Burroughs-esqe adventures about a guy from our world who ends up going to the world of Gor, wherein he boinks a lot of women, many in a master/slave (he’s the master) context. And rape. Lots and lots of rape. But women really like it, so that’s ok.
At thirteen and hormones that could be carbonated by just about anything, they still bored me. Imagine how dull a writer must be if he can bore a thirteen year old boy by talking about sex!
A sample paragraph from Slave-Girl of Gor that I swiped off of Google: (pg 27)
It goes ON and ON like that. Basically it’s 40-year old letch tries to describe (from a woman’s POV) why normal women like to be dominated and enslaved.
Norman somewhere along the line started taking himself seriously and wrote a book called Imaginiative Sex (which was anything but).
The intro to the book is written in a pompous, pseudo-scholarly tone explaining why men (who are genetically hunters) should be
dominant.
Essentially, the first 2/3ds are really, really, really dull (and repetitive) “1-2 page scenes” that men and women are supposed to play out. He explains in detail in the beginning how women like this sort of stuff.
They run the range from (paraphrased) “He is soldier and she is a slave who he’s captured and intends to rape” to “He is a king and she is a slave who he’s captured and intends to rape.” to “He runs a ‘slave farm’ and rapes one of his slaves” to #28. “The ‘I am raped by a monster.’ fantasy”
One part of the final section of the book is a fucking creepy description of how it would feel to really buy a slave (but somehow with out the terror, and the screams, and the blood and the horror that slavery somehow entails*. What to look for. What to expect. What to pay. It may have been fiction. But it didn’t read like it.
Anyway, a bunch of people have decided that the Gor books are Holy Writ and do a master/slave thing based on the books.
Fenris
*Playing Master/Slave is NOT the same thing as Norman playing that the slave trade was a way of enlightening women, so don’t get on my case about that. He describes how to go to an auction block and check the teeth of prospective slaves…and how the slaves like to be enslaved. He bases a whole society on a tidy, happy version of a slave trade. He’s not getting off on a dominance/submission thing, he’s whacking off to slavery as such. Where’s a barf-face when you need one?
From what I have seen, most “Gorean” roleplay happens online (I could be wrong, so don’t get pissy with me). I sat in on a couple of rooms just to see what the hell was going on in there, and because a friend of mine had gotten a little involved in it.
It involved a lot of doe-eyed character description and a lot of ritualized servicing. All women wanted to be slaves, of course, or were slaves at heart. There were rituals for everything, from serving a glass of drink to serving a meal. There were so many things to remember that at some point, a woman in real life would probably throw in the towel and tell the male to get his own godamned drink. Slaves were always to speak in the third person in regards to themselves. There were different poses a slave was supposed to get into at different occasions which, from all descriptions, would cause serious discomfort in real life (and outright lack of bloodflow). Men were objects of fear and authority. They were the ultimate daddy figures, except they owned you.
The roleplay looked to me like master/slave cybersex with some Gorean catch phrases thrown in. Why people would want to do it every day is beyond me, but the Gorean rooms have regulars just like nearly every other type of chat room.
I found a decent site here
Sounds like an excuse for mysogyny cloaked in BDSM to me.
But I have to admit, I don’t know much.
I feel that it is misogynist and repugnant.
But… as long as it is being done in a safe, sane, and consentual manner… well, I still disagree with it, but people make their own choices.
They are not generally ritual[s. They are just a different sexual expression, nothing more nothing less.
Sometimes it ends with sexual release, and sometimes it doesn’t, just like vanilla sex.