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Stranger in a Strange Land

Sometimes I feel like I ran away to Ohio to join the sex circus.

There was a birthday dinner I went to this winter for a friend of mine. I met up with a bunch of people at this great sushi restaurant on the East Side. There was my friend, her boyfriend, and her husband (the 3 of them at the time mostly vanilla/a tad kink curious but poly), a lesbian couple who were also friends of ours (poly and quite kinky), Skypook, me, and a married couple and the husband’s brother, who I was meeting for the first time (it became evident over the course of the dinner that they were vanilla and monogamous). That particular evening, I was extremely punchy, silly, and chatty. I don’t know quite what it was. We were in a private room, enjoying some great sushi, and I just kept saying kinky and risque things with wild abandon. The conversation kept naturally trending towards those kinds of topics, and rather than mince words, I went for it. My kinky friends giggled and encouraged me, and the 3 new vanilla acquaintances seemed to respond to my words with a bit of curiosity, if anything. They were nice, geeky, seemed like pretty cool folks actually. At one point, Skyspook and I were discussing doing a scene for my birthday at our local dungeon – that he could give me 31 strokes with the dressage whip (as that’s the age I will be turning).

The vanilla lady laughed and said she could see herself enjoying giving such a beating, that it seemed fun. But getting…? Hmm…

At moments like that, the relative exoticness of my proclivities spring into focus, that my masochism isn’t “normal” per se – even though it’s natural to me, my baseline. Conversely, I don’t have a scrap of sadism in me. I am a terrible Top. I can be taught the techniques (indeed a favorite memory of mine involves Skyspook and me with a beautiful naked friend of ours stretched over our laps, and a lovely switch friend of ours patiently instructing me how to correctly spank her), but I very much dislike administering pain, even to a willing target.

Recently, my friend Flicker lent me Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s books The Topping Book and The Bottoming Book, and in particular, I was curious to read The Topping Book as I’ve been struggling lately to understand why anyone would enjoy being a Top, a sadist, a Dom, a Master as I’m so diametrically opposite of those things, though I have my feisty, energy switchy moments, and Skyspook and I enjoy wrestling, brat scenes, resistance play, etc. I was having such a difficult time understanding the other side of things, the other roles, that it was threatening to rob me of my enjoyment through feeling guilty about Skyspook’s contribution, unable to understand what he possibly could be getting out of his side of the equation.

It’s easy to forget that the vanilla world more easily understands the allure of the Top, the Dom, the sadist than the raw physical thrill of masochism or bottoming for sensation, the calm freefall of submission, or the rewards of enslavement/servitude.

It’s easy to forget how differently I see and feel things now.

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