REDIRECTED TO MAYBEMAIMED.COM: Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

I was going to say a lot more, but a picture is worth a thousand words. This year's march was much like the one from 2005, above, except this time I was in chains and jeans instead of ropes and khakis. Happy Pride. :)

Oh hey, guess what? A friend of mine pointed me to some more photos of myself and Eileen from around the web that she found. Here's another, of the parade a few days ago, taken when Eileen and I were taking a short break from all the whip cracking for a sip of water and diet coke:



And hey, yet more pictures are cropping up. Here's another of my back this year:



Okay, I know I keep updating this entry with more links to photos, but that's 'cuz they keep appearing. Here is a gallery with a number of additional photos of me and Eileen. Enjoy. :)

Playing with other people in a sexual way has been a new experience. I'm a gigantic slut in my fantasies, but in reality I've only ever been with about as many people as I can count on one hand. For some reason, while I feel perfectly okay doing "crazy kinky shit" with people I've just met, like letting them beat me with whips, letting them tie me up in very strenuos positions with rope, shackles, handcuffs, and whatever else is lieing about, and more things, I feel far more self-conscious and uncomfortable with the thought of kissing, groping, or fucking people that I don't know very well.

When Eileen and I were talking about our positive weekend experiences with others, one thing that has stuck in my head that she's mentioned is that she said she felt good about the experiences in part because she, "felt like [she] was giving [our friends] a new toy -- you." This struck a chord because that was so much the feeling I got that I was glad she felt it too. In fact, our friends felt similarly!

To make the feeling even more blunt, a week before we had purchased a little gold dog tag at Petco (ahh, one of the many pervertible stores in the city) and placed it on my collar. The collar reads, appropriately enough, "Property of Eileen" and makes a lovely little jingling noise when I shake my head. This thing feeds directly into my human pet fantasies and I've been crushing hard on it ever since we got it. (Note to kinksters on a budget: for God's sake, go visit Petco! Not to mention the fact that this tag really enhances puppy play scenarios!)

I liked feeling as though I were being given to our friends for the night. Eileen went so far as to give them the option of letting me orgasm (or not) once and once only that night. The combination of these things had put me deep into a headspace of feeling owned. The funny thing about it all was that this feeling was around even while spending the night and, wonderfully, it didn't impede or hamper the activities at all. I was still EIleen's, but I was there with our friends. I think this worked so well, at least in part, because they not only understood, but enjoyed the dynamic as well.

This experience makes me want to dig deeper into exploring feelings of ownership and, beyond that, of being shared.

Leather Pride Night and Folsom Street East this year were both really fun events. However, for the first time ever, my experience of the events was extremely different from Eileen's, whose arm I am usually hanging off of for the majority of these sorts of things. This time, instead, she spent a good deal of time with an ex who came in from out of town and I had the pleasure of spending a good deal of time with other friends.

And you know what? We both really enjoyed ourselves during our time apart and—more to the point—enjoyed coming back home to sleep and cuddle together on our own bed.

The other night when Eileen's old (and new?) flame was leaving, he said, "I thought you'd be all mean," which surprised me some. Later, she expained to me, "It's understandable; one reason he was coming in to the city was to hook up with your girlfriend after all." That makes sense, but being mean was never on my radar.

It made me feel good to hear about the good times they shared, and it made me happy to be asked about the details of my night with our friends. I think I can finally be optimistic about our relationship's poly standing again. That's a really good thing.

I have been completely remiss in blogging these past few weeks. For this I would apologize, save for the fact that I've been doing a whole other kind of writing.

It's taken a little longer than I would have liked and the result is anything but finished, but I've finally completed making Orgasm Logger public. At the moment, the only really interesting thing that it does is provides the means to easily keep an orgasm counter on your blog as long as you can enter a single line of straight HTML in your blog service of choice. But, come on, how cool is that?

It seems that Blogger blogs have no problem with this (obviously, since mine is one), and neither do personally-hosted tools where you can edit the blog template, such as WordPress, MovableType, and so on. WordPress.com users, however, seem to not be able edit their template code and the posts themselves are stripped of the required HTML to make this work. As of right now, I don't know of a workaround, but if you do, please let me know.

The really ugly, completely limited interface is actually somewhat decieving. I spent a lot of time under the hood of the site, so to speak, making sure the schema for the database is as sound as I could make it. I hope to be able to expose a number of other capabilities soon as well as add some bells and whistles when the opportunity presents itself.

In the mean time, it's a good place to store some basic information regarding orgasms (and other sexual experiences). I like doing this because I find that keeping accurate records of my own body can become invaluable information later on. If you use the site, I hope you enjoy it. If you find problems, please let me know!

With recent explorations into the realm of friends-who-also-have-sex realm, something that has come to my mind recently is what kind of distinctions I can draw between fetish, kink, and sex. There are actually so many things that make up what we usually call in one pathetically limiting word "sexuality" that this is actually a very difficult thing to piece apart. So much of fetish is sex after all, kink is fetish in a way, and sex can certainly be kinky. But again, not always. Where's the line?

In my experience, this line varies so wildly that I'm not surprised it's so difficult for people to draw distinctions between them. What are the distinctions though?

Contrary to what many people believe, my experience has been that fetish, BDSM (kink), and sex are each distinct realms, separate from one another. This is true in both a cultural sense—because the fetish scene doesn't actually always mingle with the sex-positive scene doesn't always run in the same circles as the BDSM crowd doesn't always rub shoulders with the swingers, and so on and so forth—and a personal sense, because these three distinct parts of my sexuality developed in wholly distinct periods of my life.

While you will never get any argument from me that there are large sections of the three that overlap with each other, I maintain that these three things are different enough from each other to warrant observation and thought as distinct entities. I have been also been making bigger strides in cross-polinating with other groups, and the variations in etiquette and general tone is surprising (and refreshing!) to even me. (This is supposed to be impressive because I'm one of the younger, "Yes, I've seen it all types." And I have actually seen quite a bit.)

Ultimately, the point is not that one's sexuality must be thought of in terms of distinct components, but that it is very helpful in getting what you want when you know that what you want is a mix of different things you can put together in any damn way you please. This freedom to pick and chose what you like is absolutely essential to making a sexual experience rewarding, and it's bafflingly undercommunicated for some strange reason.

The public BDSM (heterosexual) scene, for instance, seems to have some kind of taboo against sex. Sex is so frequently the after-thought in BDSM meetings, that recently TES-TiNG did a whole meeting asking the question, Where'd our sex go? In fact, the blurb for that meeting is so appropriate to this post, I'm going to quote it:

A little confused about where the 'sex' went in 'kinky sex'? Want to get it back in there? Heard rumors that people used to play and have sex -- in public! Wonder why the "Scene" isn't quite like that anymore? (Was it ever?) Confused about how sex & BDSM could be separated in the first place? Concerned with safeguarding the spaces we still have?

Surprising, right? Well, the taboo's not against sex, of course, but it certainly drives the point home. Indeed, when I first began to get into the scene, I divorced sex so completely from BDSM that it actually surprised me when Eileen started playing with me sexually a couple years ago. Now, with (somewhat) non-kinky explorations of sex (which is almost a first for me), I wonder if there's not new and ever more interesting possibilities to play with by mixing and matching elements of fetish, kink, and sex to my liking. Will I create something entirely new? Will that even matter? I'm just going to have a lot more fun!