Thursday 22 October 2009

Words that speak for us

In searching thro my favourite quotes to find the one I wanted for the sidebar I came across the other Anais Nin quotes that have been important to me for some time now.

The first that I came across some five or six years ago when I was starting out on this path to what I then assumed would be a D/s relationship is this one...

“I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don't mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don't mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.”

... and I remember being thrilled by its aptness and clearly recall the relief that someone out there could put it all into words for me. She was able to do what at the time I could not, and stand four-square to the world and say unequivocally and explicitly, 'This is what I want and you have no right to question it or me!'

As a 40 year old woman who was working through some pretty shaking revelations about my own real nature and needs, it was wonderful to read an unquestionably intelligent, capable woman say that to want to submit was okay, and more than that, to demonstrate clearly that it didn't rob her of herself or her capabilities to do so... it fulfilled her. And boy, did I need that back then.

Later reading turned up other Anais gems that I have come to love and value. The one I've chosen for the site is the one that feels right to me now and which I've adopted as my own since our M/s relationship became established.

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”

That's because I think it speaks of the courage that it takes to submit, the self-knowledge necessary to give yourself to another, and keeps in the forefront the consensual nature of the M/s bond and the strength it requires of both parties: you cannot give away power you do not have and you cannot take on control of another's being if you're not already confidently in control of your own.

As a submissive, you must choose carefully, you need a man who is strong, who understands and is utterly unafraid of female strength, and, above all, who won't back down thinking you too fragile or delicate at the critical moments. And just as we work against societal conditioning and pressures to free our submissive natures, dominant males must have overcome the taboos against controlling and even hurting the women in their care.

For me it's a perfect encapsulation of the whole.

The final one I have for you though I kept coming back to without totally understanding why.

"Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child-bearing and man-bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment the man rests inside of her."

It speaks to me of the crux of female, and sexual power questions in general: the essence of the fundamental differences between male and female. I love the warmth and the sweet pain, the longing, oozing out.

There are some things here that are almost too personal to address, (she too had no children, apparently by choice) and I can't quite put it all into words anyway but if I touch on it even obliquely perhaps others will get it without me having to. Either way there's plenty more to deal with here.

I can't fully agree with Nin about the absence of loneliness for men; I believe their sense of it is different and there is something incredibly tender and intimate about sharing that truth of male and female with someone who you can trust with it. And perhaps this is at some level what we are doing?

Someone once said of their M/s relationship that to her it meant that she was 'no longer alone in her own head' and I think that's what we get from this thing that we do. There are no more dark or shady corners in which to hide. My Master no longer allows me those female secrets, all the little things which you used to hide or quietly deal with alone; he digs them out, makes me reveal them and claims them, so claiming the deepest, hidden parts of me and making me ever more truly his.

And that sense carries through to all the higher level, more prosaic, worries and fears, and finally you realise that you really are free of them, there's nothing more to be afraid of; no more having to cope alone, to wonder or to worry about because you are not alone. Everything, every silly fear or fancy that flits through your brain can be dealt with and he will accept them all without laughing at them (well, not in a bad way at least) and this unconditional acceptance and even the fact that he cares enough, means that you're no longer alone in the world either.

I think, I hope, that for him too, there is consolation at a human level in this depth of intimacy and trust. I believe that the dominant too is exposed and vulnerable in an intense M/s or D/s partnership or interaction (as long as he's deeply in enough to have moved beyond some stereotyped leather-clad coldness I suppose). Authentic dominance embraces the fear too just as submission must... but the magic lies in doing it together no matter the disparities in power and control inherent in the exchange.

Wednesday 21 October 2009

Another Beginning...

How long have I spent lurking, reading other people's blogs, and thinking I should be doing this, writing it all down so that I can share and record, remember and perhaps speak to others following the same path? Well, let me tell you... it's been too damn long! But the pathetic procrastination is over and my rabbitings, ramblings and occasional ravings are about to be inflicted on the wonderful world of the web.

What I'm seeking is simple - an outlet, a voice, a place to share and to ponder, and, I'll come clean and warn you now, probably now and then, an unapologetically personal soap-box on which to have my say on subjects, debates and events that make me go WTF!

So what will you find here? Essentially, the story of one woman's journey... into submission and consensual slavery; from what society expected of me and I obligingly gave it despite the fact it made me miserable and actually disempowered me and prevented me from learning about myself; from a somewhat fearful, forced freedom to consensual captivity at the hands of a strong, stable, intuitive, and lovingly sadistic dominant man which has opened the doors that really matter - to mind and body, soul and sexuality, to life.

But I hope it will turn out to be more than a journal because if that's all it is I will probably get bored before you do. There are too many good subjects out there to chew on so the focus will, I expect, shift without warning from the personal and life with my Master, who is afterall the centre of my world, to politics, feminism, books, sex and sexuality, religion, society and science, and back again. We shall see... it is after all a journey rather than a destination.