Money off shipping for "The Chastity Belt"

Remember Casandra from my college chastity novel, "The Chastity Belt"?

I always rather imagined her as a young Julie Andrews. Some of the screencaps from the film Darling Lili capture that strangely stiff eroticism I had in mind. Also, that odd robust vulnerability.

Which reminds me, if you fancy a hard copy, then now's a good time to treat yourself. Enter "FREEMAILUK305", and you'll get £2.99 off the shipping cost.

Amazing nudes...

There's this photographer called Mearle, and he has a blog full of amazing nudes...

A slave's life...

The Steam Room

Original picture lifted from http://filmnoirphotos.blogspot.com/

Through the eye of the chastity belt

It's interesting. Almost any erotic image can be reimagined with a different dynamic, simply by picturing oneself in the picture but in a chastity belt.

For example:Very much an Orientalist picture: it's the Exotic East, an African slave pampers a languid harem inmate.

Now imagine that this is seen from your point of view, and that you're waiting patiently to serve your mistress, a chastity belt welded around your loins.

And perhaps once mistress is done, you and the handmaid share a cell. You can't see it, but she's also locked into a chastity belt. However, she can get off, if only you tease her nipples for long enough.

Secret Lover

Pre Raphaelite Chastity Caption

(updated)

Erotic Caption...

Another image lifted from Britni...

(Double click for full size.)

Roman Slavery

Rather too many uncage penises in this sequence for me, but imagine being the chaste male slave of this lady....

The Joy of Part-time Slavery: #1 Your femdom fantasy isn't the real you

OK, well, probably not the Real You.

(I've introspected and researched enough to get the answers I need. Now I'm going to finish up by setting them out here, partly to see if they make sense, and partly because I wish somebody had told me this stuff when I was younger. I'm going to talk about the sub side of femdom only, since that is what I've experienced, and I'm not going to cite sources, though go ahead and comment if you want me to link to books etc.

So, here we go....)

I think most of us fantasise about femdom long before we ever seek it out, and these fantasies have roots in the time our sexuality emerged, when they simultaneously disturbed and enticed us: disturbed because we often imagined being on the receiving end of evil; enticed, so it turns out, in part because they disturbed us. It also helped that they were easy and, yes, safe.

Guess what? The primitive part of our brain can't tell the difference between real and pretend. When we see a horror film, we really do experience fear. We keep going back because, since we consciously know we're safe, we can enjoy the mental arousal triggered by the rush of fight/fly brain chemicals.

In the same way, sexual fantasies that disturb, scare or shock us also arouse us mentally. Some people get hooked just on this: transgression. It's why Internet porn addicts download more and more extreme material. They've no real interest in sex with deceased donkeys for its own sake, but the buzz gets them off, this time. (Next time, the sheep will have to watch...)

Most of us, though, just find that dark fantasies have the edge over romantic or cosy ones. Being tortured by the class bitch is so much more interesting to imagine than necking with a girl we like--

--it's also easier to imagine. Apart from a lucky - or tragic - few, most teenage boys have to wait a horrible long time before they have the experience with which to build a vanilla fantasy. Girls are just unknown territory. How would a seduction go? What would it feel like to touch her? What would she say? What would she be like naked?

In femdom fantasies, the girl often remains fully clothed. The action stays in the easy-to-imagine realm of torture and restraint - it's on TV daily, and you just have to watch Batman or the Addams Family to pick up a few props. Better yet, the intimacy is mostly that of the lash - and we've all felt pain.

It's also a safe fantasy... no, really... it's an escape from that unbearable emotional longing for love, and it doesn't set you up for a fall. Realistically, the class bitch isn't going to tie you to the school railings and torture you with crocodile clips (sorry!), but if you allow yourself to imagine that the unattainable girl in the next desk might actually kiss you... well, then you'll start obsessing about how to make it happen, and bitter experience suggests you'll only get hurt. And, if you do succeed - what if you upset her or come in your pants!?! RUN!!!

Femdom fantasies are also safe because they resolve all the mixed messages we get about women and heterosexuality:

• "Raw female sexuality is the ultimate beauty, but women's experience of sex is tangled with emotions."
• "The only appropriate sexual partner is a strong woman, but strong women don't just give into a man's lust."
• "Desire is good, but selfish gratification is bad."
• "Women can and should demand satisfaction, but a woman who does things for you may be doing it because she feels she has to. (Shame on you)."
• "Women should be assertive, but a man should dread being a bully above all else."
• "The female orgasm is all powerful, but you can never tell whether she's faking it for your sake."

How much safer to imagine the girl in control, making you manfully earn her favours through pain and humiliation!

So, as soon as the arrow of our hormones points at the fairer sex, we start wrapping them in protective femdom fantasies, and then we masturbate, and the brief satisfaction triggers a chemical longing for more of the same. Eventually, we train our brains to skip a link, and the evil of femdom becomes erotic...

...and it feels good. (I wouldn't change it for the world.)

Looking back, your inner slave (I'll use this as shorthand from now on) is not the Real You. It's just a refuge you built in order to cope with being a horny, inexperienced, stressed-out teenager. You probably also vanished into first person shooters for hours on end, but you didn't rush off to join the Marines, did you?

The truth is, for most of us the vanilla world has much more to offer than that of consensual full-time slavery. The parts of our brain that are not wallowing in a musky dungeon are wired for building, creating, and companioning... for earning a very broad satisfaction with our lives, for carving a place in this generation and contributing one way or another to the next. (This is a good thing, because full-time femdom women are probably thin on the ground; but I'll come to that in another post.)

However, your Inner Slave is still real and part of you - try and see how long you can ignore it for - so what do you do about it?

To be continued...

Evening in Aqua Sulis

The cymbals clash. Electric stringed instruments I still don’t recognize twang, drums rumble, setting up a vibration in my chastity belt.

The Roman girls throw overhead claps and dance. Long gowns flounce around many-hued legs, some long, some short and curvy, all smooth as marble.

It's like being at a toga party, but the gowns are richer and wilder – shimmering silks and printed cottons - and the girls actually do all chatter in Latin as they crowd around the bar where male slaves scurry to fill their drinking cups.

If you watch carefully, you'll catch a flash of steel beneath the men's short-hemmed tunics. Welded on steel neuters their groins, just as it does mine.

This is Aqua Sulis.

It should be the English town of Bath, but in this alternate Earth, both the Roman Empire and real chattel slavery flourish. The spa town is dedicated to Minerva, the virgin goddess, so that long ago it was decreed no penis should blight its streets.

When it became illegal to castrate a slave – in these days of universal Pax Romana, such men are no longer prisoners of war, but self-bonded for a fixed term of years – the city authorities instead "gelded" their much-needed male workers with steel cages.

Cunning tavern keepers quickly learned they could earn extra money by renting out chaste young men to visiting ladies who were less than chaste.

Then, a decade ago, the railroad connected Londinium with Aqua Sulis, and the Virgin Goddess's city became the fleshpot for debauched young women freed of parental control thanks to the Empire's belated industrial revolution.

Now, divorcees come in carriage-loads to wash away the stain of the one arranged marriage owed to their parents. More accurately, they have the marriage licked away by the tongues of slaves, willing or unwilling – they need not care which. And, if their failed alliance has left them loaded with anger, where better to shed it, but on the back and buttocks of an amusingly helpless male, who no doubt would be just the same as the despised ex-husband... were he not writhing under the lash.

Angry women, though, are the minority. For most, the attraction is more innocent. This is the place where families send their wayward daughters to take the waters so they can also take their pleasure and still return virtue technically intact, and the place where single girls and women come - in all sense of the word- because they can.

In this walled city, a Roman Citizen of the gentler sex can drink wine until the world spins, and weave a giggling path by gaslight back to her inn, with no thought of danger from stray males. Better yet, if she has a denarius or two, she can satisfy her every desire, with no risk of disease or pregnancy.

If this is not what nature intended for women, then it is surely what they deserve.

The music stops and this week's mistress sways towards me, red hair wild from the dancing, every swing of her hip a dripping with new sensuality. Without a word, she strides past and I follow her out into the warm summer night.

She turns off into an alley, then presses into wall and simply sheds her gown. Pale skin flashes in the moonlight. The darkness mutes her russet curls, but I know what to do. I kneel on the rough cobbles and crane my head back to kiss her vulva.

The music swells from the tavern, and her hands press the back of my head. My tongue parts her pubic hair and I taste salty sex.

Above me, she gasps, and the sound echoes inside my chastity belt, setting my penis throbbing hopelessly against its steel prison.

Whoops - wrong link for free download

Sorry folks, here's the actual link for the free download of my previously properly published chastity novel....

Whips and Stockingtops: Lover's Tiff

The morning after the chaste night before...

The danger of eroticizing other people's hangups is that love may trap you in your own fantasy...
(Picture borrowed from Britni's blog. I'm happy to take this down or link to the original source if anybody can point me to it.)

What the slave saw...

The Paradoxes of Consent resolved?

I've been Googling further (terms like "sex porn addiction dopamine"). I need to read around this, but what I've found so far is interesting:

Wanting and Satisfaction

• Wanting and Satisfaction are different.
  It's entirely possible to want something - or be excited by it - but not enjoy or like it very much. It's why shopaholics buy crap, then come back for more.
  
  
• Satisfaction quenches Wanting, but then sparks it off again.
  We have a good experience, we want it again... so repeated kinky activity or fantasies can intensify the desire for that activity.
  
  
• Random and often low-level satisfaction increases intensity of Wanting.
  This explains gambling addiction, and the draw of unrequited love.
  

Wallowing in the Darkness: The bad stuff is real

• The animal part of the brain experiences things first and does so naively: it can't tell the difference between real and pretend.
  This is why porn arouses us, even though we can't have sex with the girl in the picture, and why irrational phobias still paralyse us.
  It also means that everything that happens in BDSM is "real".
  
  
• For evolutionary reasons, Submission produces satisfaction.
  There's scientific evidence to support this. It makes sense because animals that persistently fought the pack's dominant would have no chance to breed surreptitiously (being dead), and packs where everybody was always challenging the pecking order would die out.
  This has to be the foundation of most masochistic urges.
  
  
• For evolutionary reasons, Fear and Guilt related to sex intensify wanting (i.e. excitement)
  The brave and transgressive breed more! This explains the pull of the dark, and the delicious thrill we feel when contemplating terrible fates for ourselves.

• If you're aroused enough Pain is also pleasure, but the animal brain still reads it as an attack.
  This resolves one of those central contradictions, I think. You can be getting off on a beating, while still resisting it and pleading.
  
  
• Pain is Satisfying, afterwards
  Even when the pain is too intense to be pleasurable, its cessation releases a flood of happy chemicals, so triggering more desire....
  

Though the bad stuff is real, we choose to let ourselves enjoy it

• Our (let's call it) Conscious Self can decide it's safe despite the (very real) bad feelings. These emotions then intensify our excitement, i.e. Wanting
  This is why people ride roller coasters, and consume Horror films, and other things that "scare" them. The fear is real, but they still pay their money and take their seat. It's also why we masochists come back for more, and yet would hate to be beaten up for real.
  Those of us who seek out safe ways of experiencing negative emotions are perverting our survival mechanisms for kicks - it's the equivalent of getting off on the vibrations from the motor that turns the early warning radar.
  So, we are Perverts. (Yippee!)
  
  
• The Conscious Self can become confused or neutralised.
  Standards can slip. People can take greater and greater risks, or lose their moral compass. This explains Porn Addiction, but is of more interest to writers of erotica.
  It also roots our masochism firmly on our psychology.
  
  

Conclusions

The components of our masochism are simple, but interact in complicated ways. Most importantly, they are distinct systems, so cannot cancel each other out: the paradoxes are an illusion and can never be neatly resovled.

• On a primal level, we experience cruelty as real and uncomfortable.
  
• If we think we are safe, the cruelty excites us or satsifies us, either directly or indirectly.
• Some evolutionary wiring underpins our masochism.
• Our personality still determines which taboos we want to break.
  

I think it's now time to revisit Aqua Sulis...

Does neuroscience explain the Paradoxes of Consent

It turns out that the brain has different centers for "wanting" and "liking".

We all know from experience that you can want something, but not like - as in enjoy - it, perhaps a new gadget, or a cheap bar of chocolate. You can also like something, perhaps getting very very drunk, but not really want to do it.

What's new is that this sort of ambivalence isn't you maturing, or failing to mature, or human weakness, or hypocrisy; it's actually just a normal interaction between two chunks of your brain, meaning it's not going to resolve itself very easily.

To me, this has stunning implications for masochism (in its broadest sense, covering all submissive proclivities).

First of all, it validates the idea of an authentic BDSM experience without adding layers of role play. I can genuinely want to be a mistreated slave, but genuinely not enjoy it. If you beat me, you are being genuinely cruel. If you are a sadist, then you can enjoy that experience with no self-deception. (I think it's more complicated than that, but that will require a different post.)

It also explains how this exquisite ambivalence can be so very stable; how we can fear the lash, and crave it, time and time again without learning one of the two logically possible lessons, either: "Shit! That's painful, I won't do that again!" or, "Actually, I rather like doing this."

This study suggests to me that erotic masochism is a lot simpler than it seemed: a masochist really does seek out unpleasant experiences, and the experiences really are unpleasant.

Update: Very illuminating thread here.

A simple inescapable chastity belt...

No material is indestructible, no chastity contract is legally enforceable, so how could we make a chastity belt inescapable?

I have an idea. Can't guarantee it would be legally watertight, but...

Suppose, instead of selling chastity belts, a manufacturer leased them out to the wearer; say USD 400 a year for three years, after which the rent would drop to, say, USD 50.

The cunning part is that the device would have to be returned to base each year for checking and servicing.

If it's damaged in any way, then - as per the original contract - the manufacturer charges the full value of the device to your credit card. This could be a hefty but realistic sum, e.g. USD 2000.

Even you would be happy to take the financial hit, the chances are that your spouse would not: "Your bloody stupid fantasy - you live with it until your keys turn up!"

It could even have a timelock, so that there would be no legal issues around refusing to return somebody's keys....

Typology of Coping Strategies - maybe it's simpler

OK, my last attempt was way too complicated!

I still think coping strategies revolve around D&S (the "evil" power relationship) and S&M (the "evil" acts themselves), but I think they all fall into three categories:

• Cool: Has no qualms about playing at evil from time to time.
  
• Distancer:
  D&S- Uses fantasy or e.g. BDSM culture to provide permission and context.
  S&M - Regards S&M acts as e.g. nurturing, or acts of trust, or quasi initiation.
  
• Identifier:
  D&S- Identifies with his/her role, and adopts a morality to justify it, e.g. female supremacist.
  S&M - Would honestly say, "This is the real me."

This gives us 9 possible combinations, which we could write thus: CC,CD, CI, DC, DD, DI, IC, ID, II.

It's very hard online to tell if somebody's D&S coping strategy is to Distance or to Identify; the long postings about small penises and female supremacy could be one handed typing (distancing), or genuinely held beliefs.

Similarly, the rhetoric accompanying an S&M act may be entirely misleading. The lady with the whip may enjoy teasing her "victim" by talking about giving pain as a form of nurture, or she, or her fantasy persona, may be a distancing. Also, it's hard to know if somebody is cool with acts of sadism and masochism, or actually identifies themselves with them.

Even with this simpler typology, the potential for confusion and crossed wires is immense.

Strangely, in my erotica fiction, most of my characters are ultimately are II; they identify with both their role, and the S&M acts themselves.

BDSM and the problem of evil: Incompatible coping strategies

To recap, I've observed that BDSMers cope with playing at evil in several ways... (I've revamped these a little)...

They each comprise a pairing of context - how they place BDSM mentally - and a style - either distancing themselves from the evil, or accepting it:

• Fantasy Acceptor: e.g. "Rape me in a car park (since it's only a game)."
• Fantasy Distancers: e.g. "I'm a Celtic slave and she's a Roman Widow (so we know it's only a game)."
• Experiential Acceptors: e.g. "I enjoy doing this. What of it?"
• Experiential Distancer: "This isn't sadistic punishment, it's a ritual of trust etc etc. (Evil? Moi?)"
• BDSM Acceptors: e.g. "Men/Women deserve to rule over women/men. (I'm not kinky, I'm righteous.)"
• BDSM Distancer: e.g. "I'm into BDSM. This is what BDSM folks do. (Our power relations are nothing to do with the real world.)"
  

This has practical implications, since not all coping strategies are easily compatible.

I've found that Experiential Acceptors make for the best play partners, since you get a 100% authentic experience (bounded by time, of course) - they just get on and enjoy being boss.

The snag is that I've tended to preserve my self esteem by being a Fantasy Distancer.
Experiential Acceptors simply aren't interested in pretending to be Amazon Queens, or don't have the acting talent. At length they get pissed off and the sessions ebb away. My solution is to create scenarios as close to our real world as possible - and that seems to work very nicely, thank you.

Of the others, I only have direct, if disastrous, experience of Fantasy Acceptors. These always seemed to offer the possibility of shared fantasy. However, I quickly found that they would go places that icked me out, and in turn they took my squeamishness as a rejection.

What remains are types observed on the Internet.

The "BDSM Acceptor" turns me on. What could be more scary than to be in the power of a female supremacist? However, we'd be totally incompatible. First, I don't agree with any kind of sexism, and don't really respect people who are sexist. Then, there's the problem that she'd be very unkeen on doing anything that fulfilled my S&M fantasies, for the simple reason that I'd be enjoying them. Wires would be fantastically crossed.

I'd have no problem with a "BDSM Distancer", except I'm not really interested in the paraphernalia. Leather and latex don't speak to me of my fantasy worlds, and they reek of pandering to a male-driven aesthetic.

A "Experiential Distancer"... well, I'm afraid I'd find her rather cloying. My fantasy is about descending into the darkness. Trust is involved... nay, required, for that kind of trip. However, it's not about trust. I don't take a whipping to prove my love, or please my mistress, I take it because I'm a slave (and because it shows I'm a slave).

Looking back up at the list, I wonder if the two styles are always incompatible. We've already seen what happens between Fantasy Distancers and Fantasy Acceptors. BDSM Distancers and Acceptors would also be ultimately doomed, because each would always be chafing at the limits and demands of the other - hence some of the arguments we see in BDSM forums. Experiential Acceptors would see Experiential Distancers as cloying, but the Distancers would see the Acceptors as plain sociopathic or self-destructive.

When relationships cross between contexts, then things get more complicated...

I suspect Fantasy people tend to treat BDSM as a sort of fantasy, but would hit a brick wall with an BDSM Acceptor who wanted it for real, 24/7.

Experiential Acceptors would be happy with both kinds of Fantasy people, and BDSM Distancers as long as they didn't make too much of a fuss - which could be a drawback for the other side of the equation.

Experiential Distancers probably usually embrace BDSM culture, and express themselves ostensibly as one of the two BDSM types. However, I bet they're often at cross-purposes with both...

So, I think to build a kinky relationship, you have to know your coping method and that of your partner, or face the unerotic consequences.