Not always in the stacks. Here’s a screenshot from Project Muse.
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I’ve been told that this attitude is very ‘subby’, but I’m okay with that. I have a huge amount of trouble being selfish.
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Well, I think mania might be Robin Williams going sixty jokes a minute. Robin Williams went on to kill himself, of course.
Honestly watching comedians, sometimes even though they are funny I can just see the pain they are in.
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Yes, this is most certainly a thing. 
I’m pretty ‘meh’ about my own orgasms … or at least the ones most commonly associated with people that have my plumbing. (I’m genderqueer, but my sex is male.) However giving an orgasm? Well now you’ve hit my hot button. I’d much rather give orgasms to my partners than receive one myself. This has actually raised some interesting and twisty conversations with partners – they might want to give me what I want too, but social programming leaves the idea in their heads that what I want should be an orgasm. Luckily I’m usually able to convince them otherwise.
Well, it’s not like I don’t like them, it’s more than they’re not really a priority for me. I also think of my asexual partner; she’s certainly enjoyed orgasms in her life, but they just aren’t something she seeks out. (She and I do have a sex life, of sorts, but it’s fairly limited, and is not the reason we’re together.)
I’m with you there, then again that’s part of polyamory to me. If a partner needs something in their life that they can’t get from me, they have other options. I’m not into needle play (I’m diabetic, so I already have enough needles in my life, thank you), but if a partner wanted to try it … well, I’ll be happy to watch (or not) while they poke (or get poked by) someone else.
I don’t really see that much difference in the two, or rather I see kink as an umbrella term for a large range of activities, whereas fetish is a specific turn on within that range. (So at a kink event you might see someone enjoying fire play, someone else being suspended upside down, and some littles over in the corner coloring. Each of these three might be considered an example of a fetish, but they all could be described as kink.)
Actually that brings up something I wanted to mention. The public idea of kink is a bit slippery. Way upthread someone mentioned kink being at least portrayed as mostly bdsm, but that’s really just some aspect (admittedly, a fairly common aspect) of kink. In short, I strongly disagree that it has to be something unusual to be kink. I think it just has to really turn you on – which certainly can be something unusual, but might be something as ordinary as plain old oral sex.
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Open question to all: how does this translate when being the dom in BDSM play?
It’s good stuff. I think you’ll like it. I humbly suggest you might particularly enjoy Use of Weapons.
Perhaps it’s simply that communicating between fairly different world views requires establishing some common ground that can seem daunting when most of us are commenting while we do other things and can’t be sure we’re up for deep philosophical discussions. I meant no insult.
Fair enough.
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This is something I see far more often than I expected as a grownup. I’m in a happy polyamorous relationship (going on 10+ years) in which we share many kinks, but our actual sex lives are limited with each other due to a lot of things. But that’s not why we’re together. Quite frankly, of the longterm married adult couples I know, gay or straight or poly, I know very few with the sort of active sex life I imagined people had as married couples.
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Taking a dom role isn’t about necessarily all about receiving. A dom, sub or switch can all potentially give or receive orgasms and other pleasures.
I would say BDSM is merely the most widely known aspect of kink, mainly because it’s the one that typically gets (mis)represented most often in pop culture.
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I had the impression that the dom’s pleasure in part came from seeing the sub’s pleasure, no?
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In general drawing any absolutes is tricky here, because BDSM is a flexible range with several dimensions to it. This is why frustration and dangerous situations tend to arise when people fail to openly communicate to each other their desires, limits and motivations. Like a lot intimacy, doing it successfully requires being open and honest with yourself. If there is one defining characteristic of taking a dominant role, it’s about taking the lead, but even that falls on a range from mild leading to serving as someone’s master. That’s another thing that is pretty much never depicted in pop culture. Service is a two-way street, even in BDSM play.
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I meant to ask you about this as well. For those in the scene: how or in what ways do you feel that BDSM been misrepresented or misperceived? What do you feel have been the consequences of these distortions?
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I know I keep going back to the SF/F (and related) world, but it’s an easy example! I compare it to comic book fandom. Sure, most people outside of comic fandom have heard about Marvel and DC, even if they don’t can’t tell you which company owns which characters. If you go to Comic-Con or see pictures from it, you’ll see a lot of images from those companies, possibly to the point where you could be forgiven for not knowing they’re not the only players in the game. In the same way, there are a lot of other options in kink that BDSM, even if that’s the most visible part for a lot of people.
Frankly I think a lot of kink activities won’t get screen time because they’d be fairly boring to most people … and possibly won’t register as sexual. In some cases, it’s because the activity isn’t really sexual. (Boot blacking, anyone? I doubt that’s going to be used as titillation on CSI anytime soon.)
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Well, for a start, it’s frequently depicted as inherently manipulative and abusive (re: 50 Shades of Gray). Certainly there are creeps in kink scenes like in any, and there’s a real problem with it sheltering them (which probably sounds familiar to people from all kinds of communities), but BDSM is itself emphatically not about abuse, it’s about fulfilling each others sexual desires when those desires fall outside the gamut of what “mainstream” society interprets as healthy. Ironically, our society is often more accepting of dominant sexual fetishes than submissive ones, and subs often face stigma outside the community for their desires, which is why it’s even more important that kink scenes be a safe space, which not all are.
Like any outsider group, society’s reluctance to see kink as a having problems rather than being a problem isolates the communities, and isolated communities facing widespread stigma have a harder time policing predatory behavior because when they go to the media or advocacy groups, they’re told the problem is that they have abberant fetishes, not that the communities where they share those fetishes have creeps in them. In essence, exploitative bullshit like 50 Shades of Gray leads to a lot of victim blaming, which is why a lot of kinksters loathe it and other pop media misrepresentations of what they do.
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:whistling innocently:
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This sort of makes it sound reasonable.
Quite a lot of BDSM is about “ritual.”
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Ah thanks for elaborating.
That happens?
I have to admit it’s never even occurred to me, as such a hook-up seems inherently counter-intuitive, when it comes to achieving sexual satisfaction.
*lolz
Roger that; anything involving biowaste is definitely outside of my personal parameters.
Same here; I seem to have a knack for choosing partners that have similar sexual proclivities to mine.
Your mention of giving pleasure as a fetish piqued my interest because if it is one, then I think the guy I’m dating currently just may be a fellow fetishist.
(Good thing that I’m not self conscious when I’m in ‘that zone’…)
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It does! My first boyfriend was a friend-of-a-friend who became a long-distance relationship. Although we’d known each other in person and our interests synced up beautifully, when we had the chance to spend intimate time together, we realized pretty quickly that we were both very much subs. In the interests of TMI let’s just say that not much happened and the relationship became awkwardly platonic quickly.
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Aw.
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Well, I used it that way because that’s basically the definition. “An unusual sexual preference” is specifically referenced. So I was just going with the flow there. (Me of all people, right?)
That’s a huge plus, the whole ‘I love you being happy’ bit is I think every healthy (of course poly people cover a pretty wide range, but in general I’ve got a positive impression of the crowd and have been in a couple of polyfi/polymutual relationships.
This has led to a couple of hilarious conversations. There’s that moment of realization where everyone’s ‘Wait a sec, you like the same thing from me? Feedback loop!’
I wish the feedback loop quote was mine, but I was slow on the uptake on that one
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And THAT is where the feedback is the most positive. The eyes-rolling-back-teeth-chattering-speaking-in-tongues-completely-incoherent level stuff. There is definitely a huge analog scale there and some people gravitate towards the fun side a lot more easy.
If there’s anything that counters my preferences, it’s excessive self consciousness. My worst two experiences were with models (I don’t know that this is a real trend or I just got unlucky there)
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