You and i

Or, the online version of "Are you my dommy?"

There is a weird phenomenon of online kinksters that I simply do not get.

Yes, my darlings, it's 'You' and 'i'.

I'm referring to submissives -- usually male -- begin begin emailing or messaging me and refer to me as 'You' (and themselves as 'i') right off the bat.

I do most of my play in person, so perhaps I've missed something here. This may well be the norm in online communications -- although so far, my experience doesn't back that up. Most charitably, I'm sure they mean well. Perhaps this is intended to be a sign of respect, or of status.

To me, it's neither -- and it irritates the hell out of me, for a few reasons.

First, and most critically, jumping into You/i in email communications puts me in a D/s dynamic that we have not negotiated, without my consent. I can't begin to see where this qualifies as sane, or consensual.

Second, I feel like I've wandered into a one-size-fits-all BDSM script every time this happens. The men who do this rarely have an idea of who I am or how I play. If they are looking for Ye Olde Standard Domme, I can't begin to tell them how disappointed they're going to be. Yes, I have the boots and the rope. Yes, I can be a mean bitch. And -- domme? With an '-me' at the end? Have you met me?! I am a gender bending feminist, who tops for her own reasons. I am not a 24 hour BDSM fantasy line.

Thirdly, if you do this in a public forum, you have potentially outed me without my consent.

Last, but not least -- I'm sorry, but you earn the right to call me by honorifics. If you are lucky, I will play with you as a friend and a equal, something I love to do. If you are extremely lucky, you will be allowed to enter into a D/s relationship with me, in which you earn the right to call me Ma'am, or Sir, or Mistress, or whatever the fuck I choose -- when I choose it.

I would be extremely interested to hear from others who do more of this online thing whether I'm just being cranky on this.

(PS: I should say, for the record, that calling oneself 'i', or anything else one wants, is always fine. It is always someone's right to call themselves whatever they want, and to ask for their preferred form of address. If anything, that's the heart of what I'm trying to say.)

Building Trust

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I cannot trust your yesses, unless I can equally trust your nos.

There's something to be said for the bottom pushing hir own boundaries, at least a bit. Just like in any endeavor -- yoga, weight training, learning an instrument or craft -- growth typically happens right outside the comfort zone. And so of course there's a value in playing up to one's boundaries, and renegotiating those consistently upward.

That said, there is never a value in going too far beyond those boundaries, or too quickly. To follow the analogy, one could hurt themselves -- physically or intellectually -- in a way that impedes further progress.

As a top, I have certain responsibilities. As I see them, those include:

- working to connect with and understand my own desires

- articulating those desires clearly, and non-coercively

- creating an environment of trust

- pushing my bottoms to their limits as appropriate, while keeping play sustainable and fun

- listening for, and honoring, boundaries

Bottoms also have certain responsibilities. The biggest can be summed up in a single sentence: know your boundaries, and articulate them as needed. (Put another way, we're back to the pithy Miriam quote: you cannot exchange power you don't have.)

The single most corrosive thing I have ever seen happen in the scene is for a bottom to go along with something they don't really want. The motivations can be multifold: to be a 'good' bottom, to please the top, to save face at a party, ambivalence, bad communication skills, immaturity, whatever. It doesn't matter. As a rule, I've seen this lead to bad scenes, and ultimately to bad relationships.

The other side to this, of course, is listening not just for consent but, to use a phrase bandied about lately, 'enthusiastic' consent.

The folks I know who have managed long term kinky relationships find ways to constantly negotiate their boundaries and desires. A failure to do this, early and often, will destroy trust, and relationships with it.

All this to say: finding someone who can say yes and no equally clearly, and both with an open heart? Priceless. There's a list coming soon in which I plan to articulate the ideal bottom. This has got to be number one on the list.

Kinky interwebz, and kinks . . .

Well, I was going to take a nice long nap this afternoon. Instead, I spent a good part of the afternoon setting up a FetLife profile. There is nothing like confronting a long list of fetishes to get you honest with yourself.

Many entries rattling around ye olde brain, no time to write them. Soon, my pretties!

Do It Like Ya Mean It

So, new lesson learned: set up the harness like you're going to use it.

This may be my Steven Covey moment. Covey is the self-help guru with "habits for effective people." One of those being: begin with the end in mind.

I was doing some really gorgeous floor work the other day. And constructed a very beautiful harness. Which was lovely and pleasant until I decided I wanted to do a partial suspension -- and that my harness was not up to the task.

While it was ultimately my pleasure to untie and retie a gorgeous woman, it was a learning moment for me. Thinking a few steps ahead is very important. Especially if you want to look all masterful and stuff. And particularly if you may have a baby eel on your hands . . .

Lesson learned.

Back in the Saddle

As of today, I declare myself officially back in the saddle.

Not that I was completely out of it. In the last year, I've attended several SIGs, one rope conference, and was even the rope bottom at a kink event's rather public demo.

What I've been missing is regular practice, the kind that transforms dilettantes like me into true masters.

New Year's Resolution: to learn the classical katas so that I can practice better rope jazz. For this moment, planning and plotting for the afternoon SIG.

Not sure if anyone reads this thing any more, but it's good to be back.

Annie B: Not a novice any more

I went to a caning workshop at my friendly neighborhood play space this evening, and I realized, with some startlement, about halfway through the lecture portion of the presentation that I already knew almost everything that the presenter was talking about. It was lovely to see her enthusiasm for her topic, and some of the toys she passed around were exciting or wicked or both (a cane made out of a real rose stem, thorns and all? Ow!). But I didn't need to keep the handout, because it didn't tell me much that I didn't already know, other than that one can make canes out of a great many natural materials, such as apple tree shoots or forsythia branches. Or bull horn, which is what I think she said the big scary solid thing was. Or a foot-long, inch-wide cylinder of solid rubber, if you can even call that a cane and not just an implement of ow.

My very first toy that got any consistent use was a cane, or at least a stick that I called a cane for lack of a less generic description. One of the very first demos I ever saw at a kinky con was a caning demo that left bleeding welts on the thighs and ass of the very happy demo bottom. I think I've gone to at least one caning demo at every kinky con I've attended since. At this point I can rattle off a great deal of theory about cane care, and about playing safely with said toys, and how the rules can be gently bent if you both know exactly what you're doing. And so, on the one hand, I agreed with the smartass top who joked that you can cane any part of the body, because in theory you can indeed do so, if you put no force behind the strike and don't use an innately painful object as your cane (cf. the thorny rose stem). On the other hand, I wanted to grab him by his ill-fitting (and ugly, IMbiasedO) fetish wear and smack him upside the head for hijacking the presentation for even a short discussion of why it is, no seriously it is, you smartass, a bad idea to cane someone's hands using force. (I happened to be sitting right behind the smartass top in question, and I was momentarily tempted to smack him on the head or neck with the little cane that I was holding and see what he thought of his own statement. Of course, I did not. But I was tempted.)

All that being said, I know I have a great deal more in the way of technique to learn. But I'm not new to this any more, and I've reached a point where I'm refining certain skills, rather than newly acquiring them. And that, somehow, still surprises me. I feel about the same as I did when I went to my second year of Witchcamp, or my second year of home-grown co-created rituals. "I'm still relatively new to this -- but I'm not a 'baby witch' any more."

I think it's all too easy to lose sight of the vast middle ground between "novice" and "expert." There's a long way between me and the famous names in either witchery or kink, but if I had been doing what those folks have been doing for as long as they've been doing it, and had been doing it as well as they have been, I'd be pretty damn good at what I was doing, too. And, at this point I'm still under 30. I hope to have a very long time in which to become that good.

And yet, despite the experience I do have, I sometimes compare myself with the leading lights of the witchy or kinky worlds and think, "Gosh, I'm nowhere close to being that good. Therefore, I must not be good at this at all." This is clearly false; I wouldn't even need to ask my dear partner for confirmation of that any more. But it's as if that middle ground temporarily vanishes, and since I'm not an expert, therefore I must be a novice.

And so I leave you with this piece of unsolicited advice, dear reader: Do what I say, not what I do. Embrace the middle ground, for it is truly a vast place, and there is much good company therein.

Bonus paragraph: I would love to make a direct connection between the above statement and the Iron Pentacle, because I feel like these things go together in some obvious way. However, it's late, so I will leave that as an exercise for anyone who feels like taking it on.

Introduction: Annie Blackbird

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
--Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

---

Hello, readers of Arachne's Web. Annie Blackbird here. Miriam asked me a while back if I would like to make the occasional guest post to this blog, and I said yes before I had really thought about it. Then I thought about it, and thus ensued the few months' delay between the time of her asking and the time of this writing.

You see, I'm not a rope person. I appreciate the aesthetics of rope bondage, as well as its functionality when it's intended to be functional, but for me, the return isn't often worth the effort. I don't have much experience at all with rope of any kind, and right now it simply takes me too damn long to rig everything the way I want it. By the time I've finished, I've usually lost the momentum of the scene, which is entirely counterproductive, at least to my way of thinking. And therefore, at least for the time being, I don't think of myself as a rope person.

I am, however, an experienced witchy-type person, a stealth queer (by which I mean that I am a bisexual woman whose primary partner is a heterosexual man: I'm not visibly queer when we go out for a walk together), and a dyed-in-the-wool kinkster. With regards to the latter, I've been a top all my life; I was a dominant sadist, as per Midori's excellent definitions of both terms, long before I knew what either of those words meant, or even what sex was. These days this part of my life is lots of fun, now that I like who I am: I have a wonderful partner who complements me in all the ways that matter, many supportive friends, a healthy local kink community, a membership to a truly excellent play space, and a lot of fun toys (all of them of inanimate natures, at least thus far) to play with. I even switch with my partner on rare occasions, which is a thing I hadn't ever considered before we got together. Life is very good.

In any case, to return to my point: there's more than one way to be a spider, and more than one way to put spider silk to good use. I'm more of a wolf spider than an orb-weaver type, but I like to think that I'm at least as skilled at weaving the web of closeness and connection between my partner and myself, or between myself and others, or between one community and another, as any other spider out there. Thus, this introduction; thus, this writing. May it help to bring together those things that are meant to come together.

And, canes

The black and blue marks are still working their ways out of my butt and thighs.

Why yes, I do switch, thankyouverymuch. And gods I've missed the dirty end of a cane. Nasty things, those.

Nope, that radio silence has not been do to a lack of play. No, ma'am.

Knives

One of the things I love most about my D/s relationships are the ways they suffuse the rest of my life. When I admire the sparkling floor, or look down at my hennaed feet, I get something more out of them than their inherent pleasure. They also function as forms of connection.

My girl has taken on keeping my knives sharp as a piece of her Work, as of the last time she was here. There was a bit of sneakiness involved, I'll admit. I was planning to get her a set of good knives for her birthday, and wanted her to take on maintaining them as sacred work. And, of course, it gives her something to do while I make dinner.

I still can't get over the pleasure I feel every time I take those knives to garden-fresh produce, and effortlessly slice them through.

And so I find myself looking very carefully at the homework I give her, and give my service submissive. On the one hand, it seems a waste to do something too prosaic. But there's something else, too. Reportedly, someone once criticized Feri witch Cora Anderson for cutting an apple with her athame, and she replied that she wasn't desecrating the knife, she was consecrating the apple. And that's how it feels to choose this work.

Even mopping the floors is sacred Work, if you make it so.

Floors and Foundations

Or, Witch/apprentice as the new D/s paradigm?

So, I've recently returned to a kabbalistic project of mine, poring through medieval and modern texts on kabbalah, cabala and qabala to learn as broad a perspective as I can, using the sephirot as a structure. Having recently returned to this, I'm starting over at the bottom, reviewing and researching the bottom two spheres of Malkuth (Kingdom) and Yesod (Foundation), as well as adding to the pile new books that I hadn't covered in my previous research. So, that was my planned magickal work of the evening during my service session.

Coincidentally or not, I decided that yesterday's session would be about my floors. I hate doing floors. Hate, hate, hate sweeping them. Hate, hate, hate mopping them. I probably would have chosen that service regardless, but the magickal parallelism was too great to ignore.

And so it was that I opened my session again this week by talking about the magickal work I had planned for the night, and how my submissive's work would feed into that. I gave him just a very rough overview of the work, and asked him to pay special attention to the floors in three spots in my house, and then set him to work.

Other magickal stuff uncovered itself, as it will. In order to clean the kitchen floor, he had to move the coins and offerings I had to Legba behind the door. As he was putting things to rights again, I asked where the coins had gone and briefly explained why they'd been there, and why he had to be the one to put them back and how to do so. I explained that he can, in making those offerings, ask for assistance at any crossroads in his life.

Later, when we were having our chat at the end of the session, he mentioned that he is at a lot of metaphoric crossroads right now, and seemed amazed that I had keyed into this for him. "Well, darling, that's what happens when you choose a witch for your dom." We talked a bit about how Legba might be able to help with his choices, and about how to build that relationship. I added extra attention at real and metaphoric crossroads to the between-class homework, and we made plans for our weekend session.

I'm very pleased at the direction this is taking.

Unsurprisingly, I got to my email afterward to find that the Pyrate Lass, who knows next to nothing about the kabbalistic work I'm doing, had sent me a painting she worked on last night. It is completely filled with colors, symbols and objects that I associate with Malkuth and Yesod. Life is very funny that way sometimes.