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On the bounce

It’s kind of surprising to me how quickly and ferociously my sex drive has come back. Like I said yesterday, it started to peek its little head out of the box I was keeping it in (all blinky and tentative like a baby bear leaving the den for the first time in the Spring) on about Saturday and then seemed to exponentially grow until Sunday when I was sporadically super horny on the flight back (what percentage of guys going into those little bathrooms on planes do you think are jacking off?). Monday it was on point to the extent that I could just find the will power to get a device on. Last night was a bit of a challenge falling asleep since laying on my stomach pushed the Looker 02 into me in a delicious and distracting way and laying on my back inevitably led to my fingers poking through the bars of the device’s cage and feeling the hard shaft of the insert buried inside me. Today, I’m walking around with a ball of vibrating horniness in my chest and sneaking time with Tumblr whenever possible to stare slack-mouthed and in kind of a daze. But the thing is, nothing else has changed. It’s like all I had to do was give myself permission to feel sexual again. 

During the time I was in my funk (which, based on the dates of my posting here was more like a month and a half at least), Belle did let me come several times. Maybe three or four times. But I was all kinds of messed up. The one morning we had sex on the trip, after I got her off, I was desperately hoping she’d not let me come. I fucked her for about a minute or so (usually about as long as I can last anymore) before slowing down to keep it from happening and then she told me I could. I started back up again but quickly lost my erection. It’s been like that lately. Like the penis and the brain aren’t working in tandem in any way. She let me masturbate to completion, but even then I felt weird about it. Almost guilty. Or maybe not guilty. More like disappointed. But how would she know? It’s not like there’s instructions printed on the side of my box and I am the rules say I’m not to tell her what I want with regard to orgasm. It’s supposed to be entirely up to her. 

It’s a telling indication of my rapid change of heart that a week ago my relationship with my own orgasm left me feeling blue but today writing those last few sentences strains the cage I’m wearing. Playing with the things we do in our dynamic — the way we force the higher brain to disconnect, override, and otherwise fiddle with urges and processes that are instinctual and natural — is not to be done lightly. But now that we have, I will never be the same again. Our dynamic isn’t an overlay on top of my sexuality anymore. It’s replaced my sexuality. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing and not one whose significance I think I really understood until recently. 

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B.Y.O.D.

D/s is weird. Weird in that from the outside and to the uninitiated, it looks like the D side of the slash is in control but from the inside it’s clear that’s not true. It’s the lower-case consonant that sets the parameters of the dynamic (limits, boundaries, etc.) and, therefore, the rules the D has to follow. So no, the D’s power is not limitless. They call the shots and the sub wants them to, but the shots they call are enumerated by the sub. But it’s not always the case that the sub’s Dominant is all that interested in calling shots regardless of which are available to them.  

Some of us came to understanding our submissive nature later in life after pairing up with an unsuspecting partner. That can be catastrophic if the partner is not in any way cool with their other half’s inclinations to submission and unable to indulge them. Of course, that’s not me. I have a great spouse who’s willing to make all kinds of accommodations, but she’s not sexually dominant. She’s not naturally motivated by or wired for it. Seems to me guys in my boat (S.S. Subby McSubface) have two options. They can hope and wish and push for their wives to be active dominents or they can accept their wives’ more passive dominance. I think of it as the Mistress vs. the Goddess

Before I go any further, the usual caveats about this being from my point of view and not in all ways encompassing of the infinite diversity of human sexuality apply, etc blah blah.

The basic difference between the Mistress and Goddess, in my mind, it that Mistresses demand submission and Goddesses accept (and perhaps even expect) it. Some women (and men, but that’s not what I’m talking about) get off on playing within those boundaries established by the sub and pushing buttons and seeing how far they can go. Call them sadists or whatever, but they’re wired to find pleasure in how the sub responds to them. But my thinking is most women aren’t wired like that and while they may come to appreciate the benefits of having a submissive husband, they just aren’t going to ever be the kind of parter who will be forceful in asserting their dominent position. In those cases (more or less the case I’m in), the sub needs to find a way to project their submission onto their partner in kind of the same way religious devotees worship a theoretical deity. They need to construct in their minds a suitable target for their submission taking advantage of the topography of their surroundings. I know I’ve done this with Belle. At least she’s a tangible person who can interact with me and not some invisible sky friend throwing lightning bolts down from the sky or killing my crops with drought. 

I say all this because recently our D/s dynamic kind of sputtered out. Sometime around the beginning of March I started to feel it slip away to such an extent that I found no pleasure in wearing a device (though I did for a little while only because it was expected). Then, she let me out just before leaving for a trip and forgot to tell me to go back in and I didn’t remind her or put it back on by myself. When she got back, I said I didn’t want to wear it and she didn’t push it. This kind of thing has happened before for short periods, but the big difference is, other than when she initiated, I also pretty much lost all interest in sex, too. I tried to look at porn but I just couldn’t. Like, it wasn’t just uninteresting to me, it kind of annoyed and even disgusted me. I never touched the penis and never even thought about it. Not sure I even had an erection outside of the nocturnal kind and/or when Belle wanted me to. 

So, what the fuck, right? In unpacking this with the therapist Obi Wan, I came to understand that I was kind of like a religious person whose faith had been shaken. Not because of anything overt that Belle had done, but because of life. She’s been very busy at work and traveling and, I’d say, in a grumpier mood than usual. Any one of these things or even the combination of them over a short period I could deal with, but this was sustained for weeks and longer. Long hours at work followed by more work when she got home followed being absent and then perhaps flavored with my own issues led to a general collapse of the dynamic’s infrastructure. Even in the best of times, I need it to be bigger and more elaborate than she needs it to be so I’m by necessity “holding up” more than one half of it. When the footings on her side got a little crumbly, I couldn’t do it anymore and it fell down. 

But my submission and our rules are too ingrained to disappear completely. Instead of unilaterally disengaging and doing my own thing sexually, which is what happened years ago and led to all kinds of issues in our marriage, I simply shut down. If I can’t get a hard on looking at porn I can’t jack off and come without permission and that means I never have to deal with the reality of what that would have meant. My sex isn’t just mine anymore and acting like it was would have been too much to deal with so I just packed it all up in a box and put it on a shelf. But my sexuality is a big part of who I am so this left me dispondant. 

I never really said only of this to Belle. I didn’t want to be perceived as being unsupportive of her and what she needed to do with her job. So I just let it all happen. In general, Obi Wan thinks I don’t do enough to ensure my needs are being taken care of in the relationship. He thinks I tend to avoid conflict with Belle. He’s probably right. Of course, “ensure my needs are being taken care of” is an interesting concept for a sub, but it makes sense when the D/s dynamic as seen as an overlay to the foundational relationship. My needs are, to a certain extent, for my needs not to be taken care of, but only in the dynamic. Down in the foundational relationship, I was feeling neglected and maybe a bit taken for granted.

Again, Belle didn’t do this on purpose. She wasn’t being a terrible spouse. But I didn’t say what I was thinking because I was afraid it would cause her to think I was not being supportive to her needs and I didn’t want to get into a fight about it. 

Last week, we were away on a family vacation. Except for one night, it was close quarters for ten days. I hoped and expected that the trip would be when I turned a corner on all this. Not sure if it’s because of my expectations, but by the end of the trip I found myself a lot more interested in the penis that I had been for nearly a month. To the enxtent that yesterday I put the Looker 02 on. Porn was all of a sudden super hot and had I not locked it up I would have been pulling on it. This is not to say I or we are out of the woods or there won’t be some backsliding. Belle’s still busy. No reason to think that will change. Maybe this is just a little bit of sunlight breaking though some clouds or maybe a high pressure system is settling in. No idea. 

Obi Wan thinks Belle and I should see a therapist together. He even gave me some names of kink-aware people he knows (he doesn’t really do couples). I don’t know if we’ll take it that far or if we’ll figure it out but ourselves. Time will tell. 

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Riding the thermals

I like porn as much as the next guy. I probably look at it more than the next guy my age since I’m unable to get myself to the place where it loses its appeal temporarily. Orgasmically speaking, I’m like a bird catching thermals. Spiral spiral spiral UP…spiral spiral spiral UP…always on the move, never resting.

I pay a lot of attention to the stuff that gets me off turns me on. Different things at different times. Sure, there’s the gender thing. Some days women are more appealing than men. But also scenarios. Women dominating men. Women being serviced. Men dominantating men/being serviced. Some days it’s just boobs that really get me going. Some days it’s just penises. Or men fucking women. I mean, this is all pretty basic, but what I’m saying is since I never “complete” a session with porn and only stop looking at it when I run out of time, I can pick up on how the texture of what I react to changes. It’s interesting. Well, to me anyway.

Some days, like yesterday, it’s men having orgasms that gets me. Specifically, close ups of men jacking off and then spewing their loads, thick and ropy, right into the camera and/or all over themselves. And when I say “gets me” I mean “leaves me staring slack-jawed.” The way a reformed smoker probably watches someone in a bar light up. Mesmerizing.

And I could feel it. The way it was to come whenever I wanted. Whenever I had the barest inclination to do so. How a guy can almost pull one out anywhere there’s a bit of privacy. At work. At the gym. In an airplane. That sensation of gripping a hard cock and how it felt in my hand and how as I got closer to coming I’d get up on my toes (if I was standing), eyes half closed, and then that breathless, weightless moment right after the point of no return and before the ejaculate slams past the prosate. Gasping. Moaning. Warmth.

Usually, I don’t miss it. Or I enjoy missing it. But sometimes, rarely, I miss it. I want it. I need it. It leaves a hole in me.

But it’s been so long since I can do it whenever I want that I find what I think it feels like and what it actually does doesn’t match. I imagine the penis feeling more substantial in my hand (to match the porn, I guess). Thicker. Longer strokes. And I can’t jack it or come without a sincere wave of guilt. And even if I could, it doesn’t last. I can’t savor it. Like the cigarette, once lit, is totally consumed in the first drag.

So I watch the men with their nice dicks do their thing and shoot their loads like a former fat kid pressing his face against the donut case glass. Wanting. Salivating. Jealous. But that’s all. Nothing more. Because there’s nothing more for me to do. If I ever had that kind of access to my own body again — to my own pleasure — it would mean I’d have lost so much that it would probably leave me sad.

But, you know. I’d still do it.

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Evolution

Once upon a time, Belle would leave me locked in the Steelheart until Friday night. Then she’d let me out before she went to sleep so the penis would be right there for her the next morning. I’d stay out until Sunday night (or even Monday if I didn’t mention anything and she forgot). We’d have sex a few times over the weekend and I’d get to fuck her each time and she might even let me play with myself Friday night. Then she started leaving me in until Saturday morning, letting me out right before she wanted the penis. We’d still have sex and I’d get my pussy time, but no more jacking off. More recently, she’s been leaving me locked up until Sunday morning and wanting me back in that day. She doesn’t forget anymore. I get out Sunday morning (Saturday’s are just about her now), I’m back in by Sunday midday. I’d only get inside her once. 

Except today. Today, I didn’t get out at all. This is the start of my fourth week being locked up. 

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An interesting conversation

“Describe to me what sub space is to you. What does it feel like?”

That’s what Obi Wan, my therapist/counsellor/whatever, said to me yesterday during our session. As I’ve said in the past, I like Obi Wan because he’s sex-positive and comes pre-loaded with a broad understanding of BDSM. We were having a related conversation about subbing and being in a Dom-sub dynamic and then this question came out. It was unexpected and I was at a loss for words.

“Oh come on, you’re a blogger,” he chided. How can I not have words?

Remember that scene from Sex, Lies and Videotape where Andie McDowell’s character is asked something and she just smiles coquettishly and blushes? Funny, I can’t remember what made her do that, but I felt my face warm up trying to find the words to answer his question and that’s the first thing I thought of.

Obi Wan has never said so, but I’m pretty sure he’s dominant. Our relationship is odd in that he knows everything about my sex life and predilections and relationships but all I know about him is he’s married to a woman. But in talking about it, he just comes off as dominant. Maybe he’s switch, but that’s not the vibe I pick up predominantly. There was something about being asked that particular question by a presumed dominant who’s also a sort of authority figure that made me squirm and lose my ability to create a coherent sentence. Then, as I struggled, he just sat there. Waiting through the silence.

To be clear, I didn’t feel threatened. I didn’t feel as though I were being taken advantage of. It wasn’t anything like that. This wasn’t a bad thing.

Once I found my ability to talk again, I felt myself in that doped up warm n’ fuzzy subby hazy zone. Having to describe it to him in that way triggered a mild sub space incursion. It was odd. Last time something similar happened was when I was visiting the Boston area and had lunch with Geek Domme. She didn’t put me on the spot as directly, but there were a couple of times during the meal when I had a hard time looking her in the eye. Same thing with Obi Wan. I spent a lot of time looking at the various bric-à-brac strewn around his office as I tried to form some coherent sentence structure.

Paraphrasing what I said, sub space or being submissive feels…warm. Comforting. As my sense of control slips under theirs, it’s like all the sharp edges of our interaction get knocked off. A glow appears in my chest and my limbs feel light. Somehow. Or something. If there’s some physical act involved, like putting on a chastity device or a collar or being told to strip, it happens that much faster. It’s a feeling of being somewhere I belong. Need to be. It’s hot, yes, but there’s something tangibly different between that and the basic urge to fuck. It’s much more nuanced. There’s much more texture and topography. I want to demonstrate my willingness to submit. To feel their satisfaction at it. For them to use me for their pleasure. However that happens. To feel them taking their pleasure from me.

He was paying close attention.

Then I said more about being restrained. How sometimes a non-restraint restraint – one which isn’t totally secure and involves some cooperation from me (“hold your hands above your head and keep them there” or “don’t let go of this”) – is hotter than something I can’t resist because it by itself is a form of demonstrating submission. I don’t move because they told me not to and while I might want to if I’m uncomfortable or whatever, I don’t and they know why. I talked about pain and how when it’s really humming it stops being pain and becomes something else altogether. Same circuits, different energy. And about how that can feel like floating in a bottomless pool of intense sensation. One I can’t necessarily get out of by myself.

Then he kind of sat up a bit and pulled on his pants and repositioned himself. Unmistakably the sign of a guy needing to make room in his pants. I was feeling it, too, but the steel made repositioning impossible and unnecessary.

So that was…interesting. The conversation quickly moved away from that place. I felt the mild sub buzz wear off after a few moments. The mood shifted and it was like the lights came back up.

In fact, we ended the session early. We were out of things to talk about ten minutes before the appointed time. He suggested I didn’t need to come to him anymore and he’s probably right, but I’m going to keep my appointment for two weeks from now on the books and think I’ll probably make a few more at that interval. I feel good. The reasons I went to him in the first place seem to have resolved themselves, but there’s something about ending I don’t feel comfortable with just yet.

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Work those glutes

Belle’s been gone for about ten days now on her trip and doesn’t get back until day after tomorrow. Usually, when she’s gone, I get kinda rabidly horny and, perhaps not coincidentally, sleep gets harder to find. But, except for just one night about a week ago, I’ve been sleeping well on this trip. And, until the past few days, I haven’t been all that horny.

But WOW all of a sudden. I guess it may have started on Friday. I had a massage scheduled and, as usual, I was locked up. I busted out my emergency key and got all the way undressed for the rubbing and laid face-down on the warm table. The masseuse I see is incredible. About the best I’ve ever had. Chief among his attributes, besides his strong hands, is how he happily works my glutes. Once the shoulders and back are done, he lifts the heavy sheet up exposing one whole leg to the waist and tucks it under. Then he goes to town. Oh, mama, does he.

And, honestly, I’m helpless. There’s just no way I’m going to be able to lay there impassively as he rubs my ass and runs his stong hand along the crease of my ass cheek and down my inner thigh (and I may have gotten him to do that a bit more by complaining of a sore hamstring). He must get within a half inch of my balls when he does that. Whimper, for fuck’s sake. So he does each leg in turn then asks me to flip over. Then asks me to flip over. I let myself enjoy the first side and my mind wanders and things do what they’re supposed to do but when he switches to the other side I have to start thinking about taxes or something. I mean, I know that errant boners are a professional inevitability for someone in his field and I’m not going to lose any sleep showing a bit of chub through the sheet as he’s sitting up by my head to work my shoulders and neck, but I don’t want to be pitching a fucking tent. Friday, I was somewhere in between. The hard-on wouldn’t have been elevated above my stomach had it been exposed, but it was definitely…there. And then he does this thing right at the end where he pushes down on my hips and rubs the top of my thighs through the sheet and he get’s really close to the package. If I were a normal boy, I’d probably wank one out in the bathroom before heading over there but I’m not so I don’t.

But I was good. I put the Steelheart back on as I dressed, but the shadowy nature of the room and the slight rush I was under trying to beat the erection that was rapidly developing had me put it on wrong in a way I don’t think I’ve ever done before. Usually, the PA fixing goes through the PA ring but I missed that somehow so the PA wasn’t secure. I had no idea until Sunday night when I realized the discomfort I was feeling in there was due to the PA fixing pushing the PA ring in ways it’s not supposed to. I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to take the Steelheart off since Belle wanted me locked but it was heading in a direction where things were going to be hurt if I didn’t address it. In fact, there were already sore spots developing that I know from experience need to be allowed to breath more than they get to in the solid tube. The solution was pretty obvious.

Since I still had the key (no numbered tag being provided before Belle left and me being unable to find one), I simply switched to the Looker 02. So that’s where I am today. A day or so should be enough to be able to get back into the Steelheart and, since that’s Belle’s favorite and the one she left me in, I’ll swap back into that tomorrow morning.

So I felt the horniness growing over the weekend. Sunday I woke up and groped and clawed at the Steelheart in that way. This morning I was able to have some quality alone time with just me and a few carefully chosen inanimate objects and was left sweaty and panting and significantly distracted. Cruising the Nifty Archives and finding a story that hits all kinds of my buttons hard didn’t help. Or maybe it did. Depends on your perspective, I guess.

Being the exceptionally well-trained and obedient rabbit that I am, I never entertained any ideas of using the key and letting myself out. Even though I could warp my almost-injury into a valid excuse. Because if I had, I know I’d eventually have my hand wrapped around the hard penis and then I’d feel worse than rabidly horny. I’d feel guilt. Guilt isn’t sexy. Not in the slightest.

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Power behind the chair

Been watching old West Wing episodes. From S05E11, the First Lady and Leo are in the Oval Office chatting when the President walks in dressed in tails and holding several ties out in his hands.

President Bartlett: I can’t dress for this thing without you. Which one screams, “Dominance!”

First Lady: Do I get to wear it afterwards?

Bartlett: No comment.

Nice.   

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Metrics

I’m well past the stage of keeping track of how long Belle’s had me locked up or when my last orgasm was or anything like that. I used to, excessively. I knew what my record was and was always advocating for beating it or whatever, but ultimately I figured out (as I hope any guy will who wants to be in my kind of spot) that if you’re going to let someone else control you, they have to be the ones to make those decisions without your input or concern. This ends up being quite a bit hotter, to be honest.

I say that to preface the next bit. I’m keeping track of when I’m locked up and in what purely for the statistical data. I’ve often said things about how often I think I’m wearing a device or how many times I come in a year, but I don’t really know. I lose track. So I’m using a little time tracking app on my phone to quantify these things. I hope to create a log that covers the whole year. I started tracking at the end of December when we got back from Hawaii. For instance, I know I’ve been in the Steelheart 313 hours this month. That’s out of about 345 elapsed hours in 2016 as of the moment I’m writing this. That’s about 91% of the time. I’ve had one orgasm this year back on the 3rd. 

The nerd in me thinks it would be very interesting to have this quantified data about myself. I’m all about quantified data. I love that my watch quantifies a bunch of stuff and if I can’t run with some kind of tracking device that adds my mileage and performance stats to what’s come before I nearly feel like it doesn’t count. There are people who get this (like me) or people who don’t (like Belle, actually). In a perfect world, this record would reflect the way Belle managed my erections and orgasms when left to her own devices. I don’t lobby, I don’t comment, I don’t say what my desire is regarding orgasm one way or the other. The only input I have in her decisions is how I act and that’s not entirely under my control. 

Of course, there’s this thing called the Hawthorne Effect in which the act of observing a human behavior affects how the behavior occurs. It’s possible now that I’ve said I’m doing this that Belle will somehow change what she otherwise would have done, but if that happens I don’t think it’ll be by much. I wouldn’t want to keep this a secret for a whole year. That seems wrong. 

Over on the Tumblr, it was pointed out by someone that my previous post about scales and ranges and the different vectors that make up human sexuality was flawed because I used the Kinsey Scale to demonstrate innate gender preference as opposed to reported experiences which is what it was designed to describe. This is true and I knew when I wrote it I wasn’t being perfectly true to the scale’s intent. In my defense, it seems to me that how I used it is in keeping with how most people think about it nowadays. It’s become a shorthand for what we desire. Or even how we identify. In any event, what I’m really interested in when discussing human sexuality is the differences between innate desires versus expressed desires versus actual experience and then all that versus how we identify. I’m super interested in how we are as opposed to how we say we are or how we allow ourselves to think about our desires. 

Belle is off on one of her overseas trips which means the Steelheart (barring some kind of emergency) will be on for 100% of the time over the next two weeks. I hate it when she leaves. Bah. I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately and usually when she’s not around to regulate my cycle I tend to get worse sleep. Hopefully that’s not what happens. We’ll see.

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Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do

Most every morning, the first thing I do when I wake up that time – the time I know I’m going to get up and not just roll over again – is grab my phone. On it, there’s usually a dozen or so notifications of things that happened when I was asleep, 97% of which are nothing of consequence. This morning, there was only one.

4:27 AM CNN Breaking News: David Bowie has died at age 69.

FUCK.

There are different levels of emotion one feels when a famous person dies starting with indifference. Like, oh that person is dead. Next thought. Then you get to the, Oh, that’s sad. Next thought. Skip a few levels and you end up with the ones you cry over.

The last famous dead person I cried over was Steve Jobs. Just a bit because it had been coming and we all knew. Those are the situations where you get to mourn in slow motion for a long time. Steel yourself. In the case of Steve, that was months if not years. But Bowie just happened. Like that bolt painted on his face on the cover of Aladdin Sane.

So I said to myself, FUCK, and opened the apps and read the news. I wasn’t ready for it to hit me like it did. In fact, it wasn’t until I got into the bathroom to get ready for work an hour or so later and started playing my Bowie playlist that it became real and I felt the emotion and that made me cry. Honestly, I think of people who cry when famous people die as marginally unstable. They don’t know them. Sure, it’s fine to feel a sad, but to cry. That’s for people you really know. But that’s not what happened this morning. I was crying for Bowie. Then I’d stop and the song would change I’d do it all over again. Streaming tears. What the fuck?

David Bowie was the featured artist on the soundtrack that was the John Hughes movie of my young adult life. The first time I have any memory of hearing one of his songs was relatively late considering he started releasing albums in the 60’s. I was at a friend’s house who was one of the first I knew who had cable and MTV and it was just on and playing in the corner as a bunch of us hung out. This was also the first time I ever saw MTV and the video playing was “China Girl.” And man, that voice. I recall just staring transfixed. Then I bought Let’s Dance then I ended up hanging out with people who had the whole back-catalog and then he was always just  there.

David Bowie was the first person upon whom I ever heard the label “bisexual” applied. I knew he was it before I knew I was. Even today, if you told me to say the first thing that came into my head upon hearing “bisexual” I’d probably say Bowie. Then “Dancing in the Streets” came out and there was the guy he was supposedly bisexual with (among others). For a really, really long time the entire universe of out bisexual people I could point to was David Bowie. And in a way, the fact that he just was bisexual without any politics or flag waving or carrying on was quietly and powerfully influential on me. I never realized how much that meant to me until I was standing in the bathroom this morning feeling stupid about the tears running down my face.

Funny thing is, I kinda stopped following Bowie after “Blue Jean” was released. We do that sometimes, I guess. The best music is the music that was made when we were 17. I’ve lost time for music now. All I do now is consume information. I listen to the news and podcasts and hoover up as much info as possible. Who has time to listen to new music when the world is still full of so many interesting things I haven’t learned about yet? But every time I heard he released a new album, including his last just a few days ago, I’d think a happy thought. He was still out there. Still doing his thing. Still reinventing himself.

I’m forty-eight. Not old but not young. Old enough to know better than ever that I’m not going to be around forever. That more of me is in the past than in the future. The death of David Bowie is also the death of a chunk of my youth. This is what getting old is, I think, more than the ache and the lines on your face. When you become aware that the things that mattered to you before you developed a sense of your own mortality are literally dying around you.

God, it fucking sucks he’s dead.

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Kinsey is not enough

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Alfred Kinsey’s scale. You know, the one that supposedly explains the difference between gays and straights by assigning a number between zero and six where zero is totally, 100% straight and six is totally, 100% gay. And I’m thinking, not for the first time, that it’s totally insufficient to describing human sexuality. At least, my sexuality. Probably yours, too.

First off (and forgive me as I’m not a biologist, sexologist, geologist, or really any sort of oligist at all) there’s this concept called normal distribution. The idea in nature that any given set of variables measured over a large population of beings will end up distributed on a scale in a shape resembling a bell. You know, the bell curve. Why do we think that’s not applicable for sexuality? According to popular culture, human sexuality is more the inverse of that. Lots of straight people, a smaller yet significant number of gay people, and then a bunch of confused weirdos in the middle who, if we’re honest, are probably going to end up gay once they get their heads out of their asses. In my experience, both internally and externally, that’s a load of bullocks. Humans have way more variability in what makes their sexy bits throb and plump than that simple binary (especially women). But anyway, that’s not really the point of this. It’s just an observation. 

Seems to me (and I apologize because I may very well have expounded on this at various times and in various ways already), the Kinsey Scale is one axis of minimally three axes that describe our sexuality. Kinsey’s is all about that sexy throbbing and plumping. As in, what gets us going. What do we want to fuck/be fucked by, etc. I think it’s the most lizardy aspect of our sexuality as it’s the most deeply wired and involuntary. There’s little thinking about it. Dicks get hard or they don’t. Pussies get wet or they don’t. We see what we like and our bodies respond. 

I spent years thinking that was it. I also spent years bought off on the idea that if I wanted to have sex with men I was gay, period. Based on some previous comments from readers, there’s a fair chance you think something like that yourself. It’s wrong. Yes, I do like having sex with men. But I also like having sex with women. I might also like having sex with a trans man or woman, but I’ve never had the opportunity. Bottom line, based on old Kinsey’s reckoning, I’m right down the middle. And, because I’m a know-it-all bisexual, I have the feeling you’re probably somewhere on the scale yourself. Not a zero or a six. Maybe a one and a half. Of a four and three quarters. Or even a .25. Doesn’t matter. I believe in absolute zeros and sixes as much as I believe in the Easter Bunny. 

Which is not to say there aren’t straight people and gay people. We round ourselves off. If you’re a 1.5 you likely identify as straight and that’s fine because it’s simple and you’re really only a little more than incidentally bisexual. Likewise, if you’re a 4.75 you might decide to call yourself gay. That’s cool, too. I’m saying there’s a difference between what we are and how we indentify. I also think identification is very much a higher brain activity that’s influenced by all kinds of emotional and cognitive bullshit our sex organs care little about. Who do we feel more comfortable with? What do we feel more comfortable being? If there’s one thing living as an orgasm denied person can teach you it’s that our brains and our genitalia are on entirely different tracks in the old sexuality train yard. 

Bottom line, for me, I’m less interested in identification politics as I am in actual in-born stimuli reactions. I don’t think and would never say that a man who identifies as straight is not what he says he is because seeing two dudes go at it makes his dick chub a little. But I think it’s critically important for us to acknowledge that that is a thing that can happen and aforementioned dude should not feel weird or end up bashing some poor gay boy because it threatens his image of himself.

Anyway, that’s the part I most closely associate with Kinsey. Involuntary response, not identity. The second dimension is emotional capacity. There’s probably a scale to that, too, but it’s often rounded off like sexuality. Homoromantic vs. heteroromantic vs. biromantic (not to be confused with New Romantic which is what I styled myself as in 1985). For simplicity’s sake, imagine the same zero to six scale. If on the sexual response scale I land at about a three, on the emotional response scale I’m more like a five. I can almost get to the point where my feelings for someone of my gender could reach critical mass and become romantic, but it’s never quite happened with anyone and I assume never will. I am totally into chicks when it comes to emotional response. For me, guys are for sex. And playing video games. And seeing a ballgame. Maybe both video games and ballgames as long as I get to suck them off after. You get the idea. 

I think this emotional response scale is where we tend to find our sexual identities. A “straight” man who falls at about a two on the Kinsey scale rounds off as straight because he feels deep and satisfying emotional connections to women. A gay man might occasionally think about a particular kind of woman sexually but finds himself fitting into a relationship with a man so he’s “gay.” This is where I think the idea of “sexuality is a choice” comes from. Someone might occasionally get a boner from a person of their gender but they choose to do nothing about it because they love someone of the other gender so therefore anyone who “goes gay” is choosing to do so. Of course, that’s nonsense but since we only think of sexuality as a linear A/B scale it must be true. 

The third axes of our sexuality involves power. As Oscar Wilde said, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” I believe we’re all on a spectrum of being more interested in having power in a sexual dynamic or giving up power in a sexual dynamic. Or sometimes enjoying a bit of both. I think this is drastically under appreciated when we think about sex and relationships probably because being overt about it is kinky and kinky is weird and bad and why can’t we just be happy falling in love forever and fucking like missionaries until we die, right? But the internet is rife with stories of men who have discovered their submissiveness later in life and how that plays havoc with their partners who are either totally out of touch with their own “power response quotient” or are simply incompatible power-wise or too hung up on the weird kinkiness of the whole thing to be able to cope. Also, not withstanding my bell curve rant at the top, there seems to be a lot more submissives of all genders than dominants. So who knows. Personally, on the power spectrum (assuming zero to six again), I’m like a .75 absolute tops. Probably not even that high.

Imagine a world were we were aware of all three of these spectrums and our places on them and were able to communicate openly about it to one another and our prospective partners. I have to think it would lead to so much more satisfaction and intensity of experience. 

The more I think about it, the more I think there may be more spectrums. Is pain one? Either the desire to feel it or the desire to inflict it? Is there something more about gender in there? Not just what we respond to but how we need to express our own? Where does androgyny fit? What about bondage? Is that a thing unto itself or just a manifestation of the power exchange thing? Like I said before, I’m no sexologist. I’m not trained in anything useful, really. This is just a bunch of stuff that’s been bouncing around in my head for a long time. 

At the end of the day, sex and sexuality and human relationships are infinitely more complicated than we tell ourselves they are via popular culture. Once you have a peek into the complex nature of it, you realize there is no “weird” because there is no “normal.” There are just too many possible combinations to think there’s one predominant way of being. There’s the way we all choose to believe is “normal” but hardly any of us are that. We just play at it. We fill the roll chosen for us because we think it’s what’s expected and we typically so badly want to fit in. That’s too bad. And it’s too bad too many of us don’t figure this shit out until we’re middle-aged. But at least we figure it out at all. Well, some of us anyway.