Inclusivity

People are as great as you allow them to become. 

There’s a Kevin Smith quote someone made an amazing comic out of that always stuck with me. It had the narrow scope of referring exclusively to artists, but I personally believe it applies to every person we encounter:

“Remember: it costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever.”

We’ve all dealt with people who were only in it for themselves. Sometimes it comes from using others as tools to serve one’s own ambitions, sometimes it’s bullying that was learned as a source of power in childhood, sometimes it’s insecurity that necessitates an “Us vs. Them” mentality to abate feelings of loneliness. Regardless of what flavor it comes in, it does nothing but cultivate misanthropic sentiments and erode one’s confidence and ability to trust.

There will always be valid reasons to keep specific people at arm’s length, particularly those engaged in such self-serving behaviors, but when we are unmindful of how low this threshold becomes we deny people the opportunity to become amazing. The person who’s a little “off” and socially awkward doesn’t get a chance to hone their social skills because people don’t invite them places. The person who was a jerk occasionally because they lost their job and lover in tandem doesn’t get to build a support network to help them out of their rut. The person recovering from addiction returns to old vices after being met with glaring disapproval for their past. Everyone will, at some point in their life, need help from those around them, and it’s our responsibility to be mindful of this fact. This may be as direct as needing a couch to crash on during a tumultuous living situation, or as indirect as just having people who will – to be frank – put up with their shit so they don’t feel worthless when they’re in a rut.

As the holiday season speeds up, I worry a lot about people in these sorts of situations. I have been there – and likely will be again – and no one deserves to be alone for the holidays, any of them. Suicide rates skyrocket to levels our culture should be ashamed of every year, and something as simple as inviting someone to a holiday dinner can make them feel welcome and wanted enough to feel better about themselves.

I understand the importance of family being somewhat exclusive as it relates to trust, but as you plan your holiday gatherings this year (and beyond) give someone a shot at feeling that warmth that comes from that sense of togetherness. Make them feel acknowledged, and appreciated, and welcome, and watch them grow in ways you’d never expect the following year. It’s a few nights a year that you might be risking a little awkwardness, but it’s the best investment you’ll make all year.

Forced Pup Play

I've known pups for years, and never quite got anything about pup headspace. I always thought the gear was either adorable or, in some cases, fucking hot, but the idea of actually role playing as a pup never resounded with me.

That is, until someone sent me this story. It pretty much takes a bunch of elements from fantasies I've had like my "Control is Best When Stolen" story, and applies those elements to pup play. Needless to say, mixing force into the equation piqued my interest. Hopefully this'll cast some new light on how a pup dynamic could potentially develop.before readily dismissing it as I had previously done.

"Student Living," by ManaPuppy

I whimpered, my sobs muffled by the penis gag locked into my mouth. So close. I had been so fucking close.

I had been so sure he’d been sleeping, he was grunting and all I heard from his room was deep, steady breath. He had come home exhausted after track practice, his shirt soaked through from the sweat off his chest, hair matted against his head. He had left me leashed to the coffee table with some water, naked, locked in fist-mitts and chastity. Waiting. When he came through from the outside he greeted me just as he’d done the past three days, “Hello Milo.” He said, smiling. Fuck, I hate that smile. I had spent the entire 2 hours he’d been gone seething, just as I had the past 3 days. I didn’t know who this fucker thought he was, but I knew I sure as hell wasn’t going to make it easy for him. “My. Name. Is. Alex.” I growled at him. He grunted. With a soft ‘whoomfph’ his track bag dropped on the floor, and there he was, in flight: six feet of blonde-haired jock, lunging toward me. Excellent. Come at me, bitch. I lunged at him in the next instant, bound fists extended, hoping to take him down. He jerked to the side, rolling, I carried on through the air…until I hit the end of the leash. The chain of the leash jangled, snapping against the table. The table was bolted to the ground, so there was nowhere for the force to go, my body carried forward, jerked back by the collar Tyler had locked around my neck. My ass spun away from my head, legs jerking toward Tyler’s bedroom, my fists flying up to my neck as the collar pulled tight, my body rebounding against the floor. I sputtered. Breathed. Barely had time to recover before Tyler grabbed the chain, dragging me, collar, corpse and all, across the floor. One strong arm looped under my abdomen, drawing me, kneeling, parallel with his side. “I’ve told you before, puppy. Your name is Milo now.” Tyler’s other hand — I assume it was his hand — slammed full force into my right ass-cheek. I screamed. Tyler tightened his grip with the arm holding me on my knees. “That was a human sound, Milo. Try again.” He drew his arm again, and once again slammed his hand across my ass, fire spreading from his hands. “FUCK!!” I screamed, tears welling. “NO!” Tyler roared, spanking me again. “NO HUMAN NOISES!” I started to cry, my breathing coming in ragged gasps. Tyler was relentless, and emotionless. I didn’t struggle — couldn’t. The hand that held me, had my chain as well, I couldn’t move my head, let alone excape his grasp.

Finally, his rage seemed sated. Tyler rubbed his hand gently, almost lovingly across my abused ass, and unwound his other arm from my body. I collapsed, shaking to the ground, tears still streaming down my face. The whole thing had probably only taken a couple of minutes, but I have no tolerance for pain — never have. I’m pretty, not sexy. Cute, not masculine. Now somebody was taking advantage of that. And I, ashamed as I was, was losing the strength to fight. Fuck. How the fuck am I going to get out of here? I couldn’t think. Couldn’t form words. All I could do was whimper, my mouth closed, a long, sustained tone that spoke to hurt, and abuse and sadness. Trembling, I looked down, turned away, completely still, barely aware that I was making any sound at all.

Tyler knelt down then. He reached forward with both hands, and took my face in them, he turned his face up, toward me. My tear-splotched cheeks, red and angry from yelling looked up into his chiseled features. “…good dog. Good Milo.” He said, his words quiet, a breath. “That’s right. Dogs don’t speak. They do whine, though. Good boy.” Keeping one hand on my cheek, he raised the other to my hair, petting me gently. His fingers tangled in my curly hair, almost absently. He maintained eye contact. …I didn’t do anything. Slowly, the hand that had been on my face worked its way downward, playing over my chest, and coming to rest on the metal cage that enclosed my cock. He thumbed the cage, then reached under, his fingers stroking my balls. I jerked away, squeaking in fear. He gripped my balls, chuckling. “Sorry we had to get you fixed, Milo.” He teased. “I didn’t feel like cleaning up after you if you hump things. …besides.” He added, his eye glinting. “If you’re a very -very- good boy, maybe I’ll let you cum.” He released my balls, standing. “M’taking a nap.” He slumped off to the back of the hallway, where I knew his room was.

I waited. I didn’t move. I swear, I barely fucking breathed. At first it was the shock. Tyler punished me every time I defied him, but usually it was bondage or making me go without food, or making me eat something disgusting. That was the first time he had ever hit me. Then I noticed that he’d forgotten his track bag. And I knew what I was going to do. As soon as I was sure he was asleep, I started. Carefully, slowly, I took the chain of the leash in my mouth, lifting it off the ground so it wouldn’t jangle. Then I moved across the floor, as softly as I could, crawling toward the navy hold-all. Lowering my head to the ground I released the chain, and then started working on the zipper. It felt like an eternity: every inch was hard-won, trying to make sure the bag didn’t make that sound that zippers make. …as soon as I got the hold-all open, I knew this was going to work. …I was going home. There, on top of his street clothes, was Tyler’s wallet, and inside, his keys. Fuck, I didn’t care that I was naked or had a collar locked on me. All I had to do was get out of this room, and anybody, any sane fucking person would help me. Once I’d found the key to the fist-mitts, I managed to work the key into the lock of my right hand with my teeth. As soon as it was off I unclipped the leash, sprang to the door, used the deadbolt key Tyler kept on the same ring to open the internal lock, and wrenched on the door.

"AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!" …somebody was screaming. That was the next thing I noticed, before I even knew it was me. Then, black.

The world swam together. I was still in the living room, and my head was fucking killing me. …this is where you joined us. I was later able to figure out what had happened. Tyler had pulled me away from the door by my hair, and slammed me to the ground. My head had rebounded and I had fallen unconscious.

Tyler was sitting behind me, petting me like an angry, obsessive child might pet a cat: too hard, too deep, as if he was trying to exfoliate my skin as he rubbed my arm. “….I thought we were doing so well.” He said, his voice smooth and deep. Slow. Deliberate. “It was my fault. I need to be more careful. I can’t have you running off, you could get hurt.”

I was still trying to figure out where in the living room we were. I realised, eventually, that we were by the sofa, I was on the ground, he was sitting up on the sofa. “Still,” he continued, “you do need to be punished for trying to escape. I had been letting you be my human pet up until now, I took away your hands, true, but I didn’t take away anything else. Clearly you can’t be trusted with any of your appendages, so.” He patted my arms. …that’s when I realised what he had done. He had cling-filmed my forearms to my biceps and my calves to my thighs so that I couldn’t possibly use my hands or stand. He had also locked the aforementioned penis gag in my mouth. I squirmed, panicking. My knees had kneepads taped onto them, as did my elbows, so I could balance myself, if precariously. I tried to walk back toward the door, fell. Felt nauseous. He shook his head.

"It doesn’t have to be this way, Milo. Just until you’re trained. Then you can earn back some of your body. In the meantime, we’ll keep you like this for a few hours at a time so you can walk around the house. I can’t keep you like this all the time, though, it’s too stressful on your body. So, the rest of the time, you can be tied to the bed in the spare room so you can stretch out your limbs in between sessions. Okay, boy?"

I grunted, whimpering. ‘Please’ was what I was trying to say. What I had been saying, every day since I had come here. All that came out was a wet slurping whine. I kept trying to get up onto all fours. Kept falling over. I desperately wanted out. I felt that even if I could just get to the front door, it might make a difference. Silently, Tyler unzipped himself, pulled his cock out and started stroking. Watching me struggle.

I felt sick. …still, I kept trying. I knew I would get out. I KNEW it.

Deconstructing Coping Mechanisms

While I love a guy who is actively masochistic and directly gets off on pain, as most people know I much prefer pushing someone well past their threshold of enjoyment. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the intensity of what is being administered, but rather how it is impacting the boy involved. I want a boy to know I'm in his head, and that it's not only his body I'm in control of. It may sound melodramatic, but it really amounts to a battle of wills.

If you've ever stubbed your toe so bad you yelled or cursed, it should be easy to understand that this is your body/mind's attempt to process the pain. Naturally, people have different coping mechanisms and they can vary even for an individual through different levels of pain or discomfort. Sometimes this might be as significant as their demeanor completely changing, or as subtle as clenching their jaw. If you're not very observant on an intuitive level, well-paced repetition is the best way to glean new information - too frequent of repetition can end up with lingering responses compounding instead of giving information on a singular stimulus.

Once you've got a feel for how a boy is responding to a number of different stimuli, you want to deliberately elicit those reactions. What ends up happening is the more you force someone to use these coping mechanisms, the more they become dependent on them. Essentially, it almost works like addiction: the more you make a someone rely on a coping mechanism, the more dependent on it they become. The result is it takes an increasingly small amount of effort to evoke a response. This doesn't necessarily have to be done by intensifying the specific action, it's just as useful to simply reduce the cooldown before you start up again. The latter is a much safer alternative given that, for someone with a high pain tolerance to begin with, you run the risk of escalating to the point of causing harm.

Now that you've got a guy flinching in anticipation and reacting when you barely touch him, you have a lot more flexibility with how far you can choose to take a guy. To quantify it, eventually you could get a guy to react as severely at a 3/10 intensity level as he used to at 7/10. What this means is that you have a lot more room to take a guy's brain further before you cap out at what is physically safe. Suddenly a guy doesn't freak out at 9/10 intensity and then you have no place else to go, leaving you incapable of correcting the behavior. This is where training opportunities begin.

The goal with any training should be to make as staunch of a difference as possible between desirable behavior and unwanted behavior. Use this newfound, elevated dependence on coping mechanisms to coax out whatever reaction you're trying to quell, and increase the intensity drastically as soon as it presents. Since by this point a guy's head will be pretty fuzzy, he may need a verbal reminder of why the intensity is ramping up; his brain can be so overwhelmed it's letting his body operate unintentionally.

At this point it's really as methodical as lather, rinse, repeat; the more frequent the reaction you're trying to stop arises, the greater the gap in intensity should become. If you can isolate enough individual behaviors this way, you're very apt to have a boy that just whimpers pathetically and becomes putty in your hands - not to mention one whose brain is frantically trying to predict what comes next.

"This Isn't About You"

Believe it or not, almost two months later I'm still decompressing some of the things that happened at IML. It was a very densely packed weekend, and it seems like the surge of experiences still hasn't slowed down due to pride month and birthday-related plans.

The most significant thing was actually a random occurrence at Pride North involving a girl who I initially thought was just a drunk mess, but seems to have tied everything together. She came up and started talking to me and my friends, almost with tears in her eyes, and was telling us that despite the fact she was walking around with a gay pride flag that she wasn't gay, that she just wanted to show support. I try not to be judgmental, but it was a little off-putting until she explained why she was feeling so intensely.

It was a little difficult to hear due to the noise, but from what I gather apparently a lot of people had been complaining about how stupid they thought pride was and that they refused to participate for that reason. Appalled, she had told a few of them "This isn't about *you.*" Her voice started wavering as she was recounting this to us, and she went on to explain that people had suffered and died for our right to do this and that even if you don't like it you owe that fact respect.

What made this significant for me wasn't just witnessing such a genuine expression, it was how widely this principle could and should be applied. There's a lot of negativity directed towards different events or different groups or different circles for various reasons, and it needs to stop. There are way too many people hurting because they feel afraid to be who they are, and anyone attempting to create something where people can stop feeling afraid and unwelcome deserves support, not scrutiny.

This isn't just about being gay, this isn't just about sex, this isn't just about kink; it's about creating a culture where people can be themselves to the fullest extent and we can't do that by failing to support each other. Even if you don't like something or someone, consider whether it is actively helping more people feel okay about themselves before you jump to expressing negativity towards it. This kind of kindness can spread, and is spreading; we all just need to put more conscious effort towards it.

To sum it up, I'll borrow a quote from Sense8:

“For a long time, I was afraid to be who I am because I was taught by my parents that there’s something wrong with someone like me. Something offensive, something you would avoid, maybe even pity. Something that you could never love. I was afraid of this parade because I wanted so badly to be a part of it. So today, I’m marching for that part of me that was once too afraid to march. And for all the people who can’t march… the people living lives like I did. Today, I march to remember that I’m not just a me. I’m also a we. And we march with pride.” - Nomi

There are countless people just like you, and for every moment spent mocking an expression of unity another person slips back into being afraid to be who they are. Consider that before you breathe more negativity into the world.

Extreme Reactions

I've watched a good bit of porn in my day, and my favorite videos always involve really strong reactions. A lot of sadists can get off on something simply knowing how it feels to the sub, but for me I want to see someone forcibly losing control of himself. Doesn't matter if it's him whimpering in frustration over being edged, screaming in agony, laughing hysterically from tickling .. as long as I know he can't stop his reaction any more than a puppet can stop its mouth moving, I'll be hard as a fucking rock.

There's a lot more to read in a boy than his vocal protests, but there's something special about that particular reaction to me (though I do find a silently clenched jaw sexier than any scream). People naturally speak at pretty consistently the same pitch, so to hear the pitch change and waver and break just happens to be an exceptionally sexy look into where the boy's head is at to me. The way the guy in this video breaks from yelling pretty loudly to a pitiful sob, to screaming in a panicked manner? Yeah, the internet needs more videos of this caliber.

college jock captive part 6 powered by XTube

Post-CLAW Thoughts

Since the first time I attended, CLAW has been my favorite event. People who go to IML seem to have greatly varying interests in going, from circuit queens to "tourist" types to people who just go because of its notoriety to those who go only for the vendor mart. When you're at CLAW, there is an overwhelming sense of community, love, and family, and you see the way the people involved not only want to be there but want to make it better; people willing to trade debauchery for community-building and responsibility - not that there isn't room for a little of both. I missed CLAW last year, and after a reminder of how much I love it I truly hope to not miss another in the foreseeable future.

In addition to the feeling that people are actively invested in bettering their community, you also see that they are interested in bettering themselves. This is apparent by how extensive their education efforts are, and how earnestly people attend these classes instead of treating them like a novelty or a quick demo as they sometimes do at other events. This year I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Master Taíno's class on Power-exchange Relationships. As most of you know, I think a lot about BDSM-related endeavors; I don't just randomly participate in them. While a lot of ideas that were discussed were conclusions I had drawn some time ago, hearing someone else independently draw the same conclusions was not only self-affirming but empowering. When reflecting on these experiences and possible exchanges, I try to think in abstract terms to make it easier to share thoughts with others. Unfortunately this sometimes results in forgetting that I'm a part of the equation. As I watched my friends all mulling over the weekend through various social media portals, I began to realize how all this abstract thinking has challenged my ability to cultivate an identity.

My friends and I joke a lot about how I primarily identify as submissive, and it seems to be a common line of ribbing among "switches" and their friends. While my ambitions certainly fit my identity as submissve my experience, statistically, does not. I've sought a level of play which very, very few people can deliver for nearly a decade, and I'm only just realizing that the need for such an intense level of play is a result of this identity conflict.

The issue seems to be that ego and dominance can become conflated; it's easy to see dominance and ego as nearly the same thing sine they both stem from what appears to be an elevation of self. This form of ego can be taking pride in being right more often, in knowing more, in understanding something better, making more money, etc. What occurred to me while attending this class is that ego more closely resembles being true to yourself, not simply asserting what or who you are. What I am is a person who strongly desires intimate connections of any kind. Unfortunately, for years the ego I feel in being sure of myself had been mixed with the concept of dominance, just by how my culture perceives power and ego. This can make it very difficult to express submission since being unable to assert yourself can feel like giving up who you are due to this conflation.

I've written a lot in the past about controlling unwilling subs, ranging from simply being reluctant to becoming enraged in protest. Depending on the situation, this is most likely due to an imbalance between what the sub wants and how badly the sub wants to relinquish control, which can be related to the above mentioned conflation. After all, if someone thinks giving up their desires means letting go a part of who they are, of course they'll be less likely to do so. For me this relinquishment is the nature of the connection, and I had been too busy focusing on asserting who I am instead of being true to who/what I am. If that seems too subtle, it's the difference between attempting to control a perceived identity as opposed to actually having one. Unintentionally, this has really helped me understand what a lot of bisexual friends must have went through and many others still are.

To make a long story short, I'm slowly realizing I'm capable of deeper submission than I knew I was capable of, and it's primarily due to this weekend. Even better, I've already had a scene since arriving home that confirmed this suspicion. While this was largely intended to help me deconstruct some thoughts, I really hope this ends up helpful to anyone struggling with similar issues .. I don't presume I'm the only one, though it's entirely possible I'm just exceptionally dull in these matters.

Thanks for an unbelievably amazing weekend, everyone.

Best. GIF. Ever.

I've been needing some sub time lately, especially with heavy bondage. Then this gif shows up and about breaks my brain, especially the one placed on his forehead. Really need to break out the spineboard.