You never know what it’s going to be that will trip that “trigger.” Even in “vanilla” sex, there are certain motions, activities or thoughts that turn a person on, get them going, get them off. It might the way he pulls your nipples, or a certain image that pops into your head right at the end, or thrusting deep and long, or maybe a certain toy. Sometimes it’s the way a person puts their hands on your hips, or the slide of her mouth along your neck, a hand in your hair… I had a lover that liked to have his nipples twisted, really hard, right as he was reaching his climax. It was that that would tip him over every time. For me, it’s often just an image, or at times a word (for awhile just the word “fuck” would do it for me.) And to get me started? Rope does it every time. The slide of it gliding against my skin, the feel of his hands placing me just so…

For my ex, it was knots. Yep, you read that right—knots, not rope—that did it for him. As I mentioned earlier, I had given him a list of websites when we first started on this journey. He looked at them, read a lot of information, and was pretty dubious about a lot of stuff he read.

“I don’t want to hit you,” he said, “or hurt you.” He didn’t like the “trappings” of BDSM, the leather and chains, gags, whips, cuffs and attitude. He didn’t want to boss me around or tell me what to wear, he didn’t want to control me or to treat me like a whore or a child, he wasn’t really interested in spanking, beating, slapping or dominating me physically, and those were the things that BDSM represented to him, and the things he saw people doing to each other. He didn’t see how any of those things could be considered erotic.

Then he looked at the rope bondage website I had listed, and everything changed. It wasn’t so much the rope itself, though, or the bondage, it was the knots. Their intricacy and beauty. I swear I saw the “click” in his eyes as he turned to face me from the computer screen on the afternoon he found the site.

“Come here,” he said, and took my arm to lead me into the spare bedroom. He was a fly fisherman, and all his ties and implements were there. Including a length of nylon rope. Pulling me around in front of him, he placed my wrists together and, with infinite care and precision, tied them together with one of the ties he had just been looking at on the computer screen. He held my hands there, bound, between his own for a long moment, staring down at them, and then, slowly, he raised them above my head and held them there with one hand. The other he ran slowly over my body, touching me as if he had never done so before.

I’d never had rope on me before, but I was wet from the moment I’d felt its silken slide on my skin, from the moment he’d taken my wrists between his and held me there, from the moment I’d felt control slip from me to him. And I saw the bulge in his jeans, heard his sharp, quickened breathing, saw the heat in his gaze as he looked at me. And when he pushed me back against the table, spread my legs with his hand and shoved his fingers, roughly, into me, something he had always done in a gentle, almost tentative way before, I knew a corner had been turned. He had found his “trigger.”

He kissed me, roughly, bending me back and finger-fucking me until I was moaning and twisting beneath his hands as he held my wrists above my head and held me captive. A moment later he was pushing me down to the floor, and, using another length of rope, tied my hands off to the leg of the table. Then he ripped his jeans down, and without even undressing fully, threw himself on me, pushing into my wet, open body and fucking me with a fierceness he never had before. I came, explosively, almost at the same moment as he did, both of us panting, thrusting, crazy with lust and heat and excitement.
Later, when we could breathe again, he looked over at me where I lay next to him on the floor, my hands still secured above my head.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “This could work.”

And that was the beginning.

You can find part 1 of this series here.

I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly tell my conservative, straight-laced husband that I had discovered kink. That I had not only discovered a whole new world, but I had landed on its rocky shores and was in the process of exploring it. At least I had a guide, in the person of my Dom. He wouldn’t even have that. And I certainly wouldn’t be able to guide him. In the midst of sub frenzy, I was looking for someone to guide me, to lead me–how could he ever be that person?

How does a Top with no experience become a Top? What resources were there for someone that wants to learn to Dominate another human being? I didn’t have a clue. More than that, I didn’t have a clue if he’d even want to. But I had a challenge of my own: how to tell my husband that his wife liked kinky sex.

I imagined sitting down at the kitchen table with him. Maybe we’d be having a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. I’d just open my mouth and–

What? I could barely even think about saying those words to him, much less speaking them. You gotta understand what I was like back then. What we were like. We didn’t talk about sex, it just wasn’t done, not in explicit terms. I was so afraid of making him feel…inadequate. Less-than. I truly adored him, and, although I didn’t recognize it for what it was back then, responded to him with a quiet kind of submission, always allowing him to take the lead, in and out of the bedroom. I had begun to realize by that point, of course, that this was because of what I am–a submissive–and that my reactions are a natural part of the way I tend to respond to more dominant personalities. But at that moment, thinking about telling him something that could make him hate me, fill him with disgust for me, change our very lives in an unalterable way, well, I was frankly terrified. Because here is the truth of it: once having opened that Pandora’s Box, there is no unopening it.

But I’d already opened it, hadn’t I? The first time I had called my Dom “Sir,” the lid was off the box.
The bald truth was that I was more terrified of living a lie. I loved this man, I loved our life, I loved that he had been able to give to me this “normal” life, a life of stability and ordinariness, that I had so craved when I had met him. But once I’d seen what lived inside Pandora’s Box, once I’d let it out, I didn’t want to put it back in. I didn’t want to kill it, to hide it, to deny it. To use my previous metaphor, I wanted to explore this strange new country from shore to shore. And I wanted him to explore it with me.

So I wrote a story.

A sexy, erotic story about a man and woman that engage in some hot, kinky sex on a boardwalk on a beach. Not somewhere that he could ever place as “real.” The woman wasn’t me. But her desires–and her fears of the consequences of those desires–were very real.

And I left it on the keyboard of his computer. And then–I waited.

I waited for two days. The story disappeared. He didn’t mention it. We did all our normal things. I saw…consideration…in his eyes. Found him watching me, knew he was thinking, wondering about it, about me.

I am not good at waiting. I may have said that a time or two. Those were the longest two days of my life. Would he ask me for a divorce? Would he ignore it altogether? Would he come up behind me in the kitchen, grab me by the hair, push me down to my knees and tell me to “suck my cock, bitch?” (Well a girl can dream, can’t she?) I didn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. By the time the evening of the third night had come, I was a hot mess.

And determined to speak up. To ask.

“Give him time,” my (now ex) Dominant counseled. (When I told him that yes, I would talk to my husband, he told me that it was time to release me, and that from that point we would be friends, but not lovers, not BDSM partners. “That’s for your husband now,” he said. “Give your submission to him.”)
I didn’t have to bring the subject up though. As we headed down the hallway after putting our children to bed, he said, “Get me a glass of wine, and let’s go sit out on the deck. You’ll probably need one too. I think we have some things to talk about.”

And so it began. The journey. He didn’t ask for a divorce. He was puzzled, but curious too. He’d never heard of it other than the extremes of what the media portrays, and couldn’t imagine ever hitting or willingly hurting me, or any woman. Or why that would be something I might want. Or that he might want.

I’ll be honest–I never told him about my infidelity. I told him I had learned about it from online and in books and that was it so far. I gave him copies of “Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns and ” SM 101.” I gave him a list of websites, one of which turned out to hold the key to what would be his first, tentative forays into BDSM: a bondage website. I gave him stories I had written, and told him there were local groups that met monthly where we could meet and talk to real people that did this.

He is the kind of person that needs to take time to deliberate a thing. And deliberate he did. For a month. He didn’t want to go out in the “real world” and meet people yet, but he gave me permission to go to a couple meetings and a play party/social, just to check out the scene. And that is where I met some of the people that would eventually mentor and teach both he and I about the “Lifestyle.” And who would become people I am proud to consider some of my best friends, to this day.

From that beginning we ended up enjoying five incredible years practicing BDSM together. It wasn’t always easy, but it was worth every moment, even the ones where we stumbled and fumbled and made mistakes. We learned about so much more than just sexual gratification; we learned about ourselves and each other that made our relationship–not just the sex–better.

My ex-husband and I were the most normal, vanilla couple you could ever meet. Married 10+ years, three kids, two cars, house in the suburbs, sex on Saturday nights. We didn’t fight, or drink, or do drugs. No wild parties, no clanking skeletons in our closets.

It was boring.

Okay, so I’d asked for it. My life prior to meeting and marrying my ex had been…NOT boring. In some not-always-good ways. When offered the “normal,” quiet life of a suburban housewife and mother, I jumped at the chance. Normalcy? Seriously? Sure, I’ll take stab at it. And it worked for a while. In fact, even now, I appear as normal as the next person. It’s just when you get to know me that you learn there’s another side to me. That’s just the point though—there is this other side to me. There’s the side that likes to play kinky games, to get tied up and spanked, that has two primary relationships and a host of secondary ones with men and women, that writes a BDSM sex blog and a blog about the joys and challenges of living polyamorously. It was that side that was dying inside me all that time I was trying to be “normal.” It was that side that drove me to explore what else life had to offer, and what I might be missing out on. I knew there was something missing—that there was more—I just didn’t know what that more was.

That’s when I discovered BDSM. That’s when I discovered what a truly kinky woman I am, and that I needed a kinky partner to share that with. I discovered that I am a bottom in the BDSM hierarchy, and I needed a Top to make my sexuality complete.

We had been married about 10 years when I discovered kink. Or discovered kink the way I know it now. My first experience with kinky sex of any sort was the way that many young women of my generation discovered it: through the infamous “bodice ripper,” better-known as the steamy romance novel. And I’m telling you, if you don’t think those books have kinky sex in them, you haven’t read the right ones. A lot of critics decried the “rape-turned-pleasure” scenario, or scenes of women being kidnapped, tied up and raped, only to end up in love with their captor, but I ate that shit up. As did a whole lot of young girls, I imagine. I never bought the argument that this kind of imagery in romance novels influenced girls to expect and/or enjoy rough sex, either. Reading gay novels doesn’t turn you gay. You either gravitate toward that kind of sex—domination and submission—or you don’t, and it does nothing for you. But that’s a whole other discussion. My point here is that while I had read and been turned on by those kinds of stories early-on, I never knew that real people actually did those things—and enjoyed them—until I discovered discussion lists on the internet, way back in the early days of AOL. But once I did, I couldn’t let go of it.

Sex with my ex had been okay up to that point. Nothing spectacular, and sometimes downright dismal, but I had been led to expect that once you were married, hot, steamy sex that made your toes curl was not realistic. There were so many other benefits to being married, right? Even wanting hot sex was a little…suspect. Kind of wrong. But hell, he seemed to be having a fine ole time. He had orgasms, he seemed to be having fun and be interested in the whole thing. It was me that had a problem. Sex was kind of…boring.

Except (after I discovered BDSM online) in my head. Oh my god, sex got hot then. And, given the right headspace, I could use those fantasies to fuel sex with my ex! Soon I was having almost as much fun as he was—except I was having it with partners that spanked, tied and dominated me. In my head. (Of course, maybe he was too.)

There came a day, though, when living it in my head wasn’t enough. I had met someone online that wanted me to meet in real life. I loved my husband and we had a good marriage—except this one thing. I debated for weeks. Should I try and tell him what was turning me on? (Because even he had realized by this time that I was a lot more interested in sex than I had been, and a lot more enthusiastic. I’d let him assume it was that thing about women in their 30′s coming into their own sexually.) I tried to think of a way to tell my conservative, traditional, missionary-position husband that I wanted to experiment with kinky sex, that I fantasized about being spanked, tied up & dominated in the bedroom, but I wasn’t even sure I actually wanted those things in real life.

I decided to meet the Top that I had been talking to. I’d love to say that he was upstanding and honorable, and didn’t fool around with me since I was married, but that isn’t true. And I’d love to be able to chalk up my 6-month affair with him to innocence and him taking advantage of a new, dewy-eyed, submissive unable to think for herself in the thrall of D/s. But that’s not true either. He didn’t subvert me; he didn’t lead me anywhere I didn’t want to go. I chose the path I took with open eyes. I wanted to know about myself in this, to discover it for myself, before I broached the subject to my ex. But I fully intended to talk to him about it, if it was, indeed, something that I wanted to do in real life. If it was something more than just kinky fantasies in my head.

And what I discovered was that yes, I wanted to do this in real life. In fact, I discovered that kinky is what I am, that submission is a deep need in me, and that if I didn’t have it as part of my sexuality, I would no longer be fulfilled. It was an exhilarating—and frightening—discovery. Because, in spite of the fact that I’d been having an affair, I loved my husband deeply and was very, very happily married to him. I didn’t want to have an affair. I wanted to do all those lovely, nasty, perverted things with him.
I got lucky in my choice of Dominants, because he understood this, and he supported it. In fact, he insisted on it. He knew how unhappy not telling my husband made me, and one day, he told me that it was time for me to find a way to talk to him.
(To be continued…)

“I’m Jade, and I have body image issues.”

I know, I know, nothing new there for the majority of women, large, small, or in-between, in this country. Perhaps the world over—I don’t know, because I’ve only ever lived in this country. It seems like there is a whole generation of us that grew up with body-hatred, feeling imperfect and not-beautiful, no matter what we looked like. Too thin, too fat, to busty, too flat, too tall, too short, wide hips, no hips, too much ass, not enough. A never-ending litany of what is wrong with us physically, reinforced by images on television, in movies and in print that we could never hope to live up to; growing up understanding that how we look is the most important thing about us. And that it was never good enough.

I was a gregarious child that grew into a painfully shy teenager. I woke up one morning at 14 to find that I had lost all my baby fat, but not grown any breasts, and that was to be my body for the rest of my life: small, varying from painfully thin to a little chubby, flat-chested. In high school parlance, this translated to “invisible,” which both caused me pain and suited me just fine, in the quixotic “if I can’t have it then I don’t want it” mentality I used to armor myself with. Being “shy” was my protection.

I remember one particularly amusing exchange I had with my mother, whose Marilyn Monroe-esque breasts I used to view with awe. “Why don’t I have breasts like you, mom?” I asked her once, before I had decided not to care anymore. She’d laughed a secret laugh. “You will,” she said. “When you turn 30.” I never forgot that conversation, and anxiously awaited my 30th birthday. Which came and went. Finally, when I turned 31, I asked her about it. “It didn’t happen!” I said. “They didn’t grow.” She was first shocked that I had taken what she’d said to heart, that I’d believed her, then that I’d remembered it all this time, and finally, she couldn’t stop laughing. “Jade,” she’d said, wiping her eyes, “I bought my breasts when I turned 30. I got a boob job. None of us Frame women grow our own.”

Looking at pictures of that time, I can see I wasn’t unattractive. In fact, I may even have been pretty, though I couldn’t see it in myself. All I saw was an invisible girl, and when the first boy seemed to “see” me I was so flattered and grateful I slept with him. That would be the pattern of my young adulthood: all you had to do was make me visible to have sex with me. It wasn’t as sad as it sounds, I liked sex, and I think even then I was acting on my submissive tendencies and getting pleasure from pleasing the few boys and men I was with (I was still invisible to the majority.)

When my first husband—then boyfriend—called me “beautiful,” as in “Hey, Beautiful,” I married him. I didn’t believe him, but I believed, in that moment, he thought I was. Even if it was just to get in my pants. Later, when I strove so hard to fit into the life I had chosen with my second husband, I settled into ordinariness and invisibility with a kind of relief: I was just a wife and mother, it didn’t matter what I looked like. But I would secretly look at “pretty” women, at women with curves and “sex appeal” and wish, however fleetingly, that just once, I could be that girl, the one everyone noticed, maybe even the “hot” one. Secretly, I hated my ordinariness, my non-descript body, my baby belly and tiny breasts.

Then I discovered BDSM. And I discovered that my body, with its ability to do all these things we do, to transform pleasure into pain, to wear 5 inch heels gracefully, to bend and twist and tolerate being bound, to find pleasure in all this, was an asset. I was looked at appreciatively, and, suddenly, I wasn’t invisible. I was fulfilling the thing that I had been socialized to believe was the most important in being female—being attractive to men—and I reveled in it.

As a student of gender studies, I am well aware of how fucked-up this is. I bought into the brainwashing, and I liked it. I wasn’t any different than I had been, I was still the same woman I had been, a woman with many positive traits that had nothing at all to do with my looks. And yet it was only when I finally had approval of my looks that I felt validated. I knew these other positive things about myself, and never had self-esteem issues in that way. But I had never before felt…beautiful. Attractive. I never loved my body before then. Suddenly I saw myself in a whole new light. I started dressing for the parties and for my ex, and liking the way I looked for the first time. I was…sexy. Hot, even. The first time I saw a picture of myself in a corset and stockings my jaw dropped open in shock. That was me? The mousy invisible girl?

Another thing was that I saw women of all shapes, sizes and ages doing these things we do, feeling sexy and hot and desired, being admired and desired. It didn’t matter that we didn’t all look like Playboy models, that we weren’t perfect. There, in that space, we were beautiful. It was empowering in an entirely different way, a way that thumbed its nose at the things we’d been brainwashed to believe about beauty and attractiveness, and I loved it. Here, even an ordinary girl like me, a girl with the “wrong” shape, could be beautiful.

There was something else that happened, though, something more important than just figuring out that I was an attractive woman. Suddenly I liked and appreciated my body for what it could do, as much as for how it looked, and started paying attention to it. Not to mold it and shape it to be more beautiful, but to do things with it, to use my body and muscles as they were intended to be used. That was the year I started hiking and backpacking, and reveled in the feel of my muscles moving beneath my skin, moving me around so efficiently and effectively. I could do things with my body—it was good for something other than just being looked at.

It seems ironic to me that it was being “seen,” being made visible in the eyes of men, that gave me a love for my body, for reasons other than being attractive to men, but that is the truth of it, however twisted. And now, I accept both sides. I still struggle with my looks, with my imperfections and with (~gasp~) the ever-present specter of age, but when I am feeling low, I dress up in something sexy and look at the way my men’s eyes light up, or I look at pictures that one of my lovers has taken of me that I like, or I take my body out for a run and feel it move, and appreciate the gifts that I have.

Making good choices in who we partner with is so important. Poly or mono, we’ve all done it: fallen for the wrong person. We have all, at one time or another, fallen in love with a person that we knew, going in, was not going to fit into our lives, or was not going to be available for the depth or type of relationship we are seeking. In the poly world especially, this can be very detrimental—your relationship choices affect not only you, but potentially every other member of your poly group/network/relationship/web.

I was reading on FetLife the other day in one of the polyamory groups and ran across a post by a woman that said she was looking for a certain kind of relationship dynamic. She was very clear and specific about what her needs are, what kind of relationship dynamic she is seeking, and why, and this, to me, seemed to be a perfectly legitimate way to go about “searching” for the one or ones who might fulfill those needs.

There were several good responses, and then came the reply that seems to be (aside from “communication, communication, communication”) the standard poly mantra: “Look for the right person or people, not the right situation.” This is conventional wisdom in the poly community for the most part—you should not be searching for a person to fill a “role” in your head, like trying to fit a piece into a “you” shaped puzzle, but should be getting to know people that interest you and that are interested in you; the role itself will develop organically.

While I agree that we should not attempt to fit people into preconceived roles, and in fact tend to fall into the “organic” model of relationship-building myself, I do think there is a strong case for being specific about what our needs are in a relationship, and for making choices about who we date based on those needs. This is especially true in poly relationships, where what we do has the potential to affect so many more people than just you and the other person, but it holds true in mono relationships as well.

Take, for instance, in the mono dating world, the thirty-two year old woman who is ready to settle down, find a lifetime mate, maybe start a family, but keeps dating twenty-five year old men. Or in the poly world, the woman that keeps dating couples, saying she wants to be a casual playmate, when what she really craves is one person to be “hers.” Neither of these women, unless they get very lucky accidentally, are going to have their relationship needs met, in the long-run. And they will both probably blame the other person for not being what they want, rather than looking at their own complicity in the situation. Neither of these women was honest with themselves, and probably not with their potential partners, about what they really needed in a relationship. And unless they are, they will probably continue to fall in love with people that fall short of the expectations and needs—and they won’t even know why.

Another issue I have with this is that the other person or people involved are also being misled. By not being specific about what she wants and honest about what she is looking for in a relationship, the woman in these examples is not allowing her potential others to choose to be in relationship with her based on what they want in a relationship, either, or on what they believe she wants. They base their expectations on false information, and so none of them are ever going to have their needs met.

So to me the woman that advertises that she is seeking a certain type of relationship is much more likely to find what she needs, as opposed to one who hopes to “accidentally” find the mate or mates that are also interested in forming the type of relationship she desires. Yes, it’s a bit more clinical, perhaps, and yes, there is the possibility that she will miss out someone that doesn’t fit into the role but who may be willing to explore it, but, at least in my experience, this method will give one a much greater chance for finding a relationship that is successful in the long run and meets everyone’s needs.

I am always amazed and delighted how often the blogosphere echoes things that I am thinking about or discussing with my Others, or events that are happening in my life. The other night, after visiting my local piercer, was one such time. I had come home, tired and a little tender and just wanting to veg out and catch up on blogs. Lo and behold, there was the post about play piercing by Red. All in all it was an excellent piece, and makes me look forward to my own play piercing experience that I will (hopefully) be experiencing in January some time. But what made me really sit up and pay attention (even as sitting up made me wince) was the similarity in emotional reaction to play piercing that she spoke of to my own experience with permanent piercing earlier that evening. That afternoon, after months (maybe years) of thinking about it, I had finally gotten my labia pierced, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the results. Not just the look of the piercings, but with the physical experience itself.

In writing this, I tried to decide if what I had done, if piercing, in and of itself, was a kink activity. The only answer I can come up with is, in my own situation, “yes and no.” There are plenty of non-kinky people that get pierced, because it looks good, or enhances their sexual pleasure. There are people that don’t like pain, in particular, but enjoy being pierced. There are many others who do enjoy that bite of pain that a needle penetrating flesh brings. And there are still others that enjoy it for entirely other reasons, for the spiritual or mental sensation. And yes, there are some that do it for another person, because that person, a Top or Dominant, told them to do it.

My reasons are all right in the middle.

I already have a vertical clitoral hood piercing, and have had it for years, having gotten it done when I was with my ex. When we split, I took it out, but realized recently that I missed my little jeweled hood ring, and had it reinserted. While I was there, I spoke to the piercer about getting my labia pierced. I had always wanted to get my labia pierced, but my ex didn’t like the look, and frankly I was afraid of the pain. Then, a year ago, I met my Owner, who loves women with piercings. It seemed only a matter of time before I’d begun to think about it seriously again. Of course, it was a matter of a long time—over a year, to be exact. It took me that long to get up the courage.

I did a lot of research in that year. I looked at a lot of pictures, talked to other women who had been multiply pierced, talked to local piercers and read up on healing times, and placement, and what I might expect in the experience and afterward. Finally, when my Owner went out of town over the holidays, I realized it was time. I was going to surprise him with a very special Christmas present when he got back. What I didn’t expect was the intense physical and emotional reaction I had to the experience of the piercing itself.

Nor how beautiful I would find the piercings.

I know that last sounds odd. Why get it done if I didn’t think they’d be beautiful? The reason was simple: my hood ring, to me, is delicate, the very epitome of femininity. I don’t know why I have that feeling about it, but I do. I had initially wanted to get outer labia piercings, as these too, seem feminine and somehow, delicate. But in my reading , and in discussing my lifestyle with my piercer, I realized that the longer healing time, and the placement of the outer labia piercings, especially rings like I wanted, might not be ideal for someone of my activity level (I am a runner.) And so I chose the inner labia, but felt that I was perhaps trading beauty away for the practical. It was an acceptable compromise—I still liked the look of the inner labia piercings in pictures I had seen—just not as much as the outer.

Boy was I surprised when I took the mirror from my piercer’s hand and looked down at what I had done. “They’re beautiful!” I exclaimed. She just laughed. She couldn’t know how surprised I was. But she did look over at my boyfriend, who had accompanied me, after I kept looking at them, and said, “You’ll never get her away from the mirror now.” It was a grand moment.

But back to the piercing itself.

I had recently taken part in a hook pull at Kinky Kollege, a kink convention in Chicago. While not technically a kink activity, the hook pull elicits many of the same ecstatic emotional responses that many masochists and submissives have during pain play. So I was not unfamiliar with the emotions that needles piercing flesh can bring out. At the time of the hook pull though, I chalked up my own deeply emotional, almost spiritual, reaction to some recent upheaval in my life and to sharing the event in a profoundly intimate way with my partner. While I did not enter that same ritual space during my labia piercing, I was surprised to find myself similarly moved by the physical experience of it.

It also turned me on incredibly. But that’s another story, maybe one for my own blog.

What is it about the act of being pierced that I enjoyed? From a purely physical perspective, piercing is a quick high, as Red notes in her piece. Sharp and intense, a pain pop that sends the endorphins rushing into your bloodstream, but then subsides just as quickly. (Much like wax play or singletailing.) But more than that, there is something visceral and deep about the feeling of the needle pushing into and through the flesh. The slide through the barrier of skin and into me. It elicited a euphoria that took me hours to come down from. I remember feeling something similar, although not as intense, when being tattooed.

A pleasant side effect that I have noticed is that the rings themselves elicit pleasure. I had heard of some women enjoying the sensation of having their inner (and outer) labia stretched, or pulled on, during sex, and some said that these sensations were enhanced by the piercings. Still other women reported pleasure as the rings or bars rubbed against the opposite labia. When I was trying to decide whether to get the inner or outer labia pierced, I experimented on myself, and to my surprise, found that I, too, quite enjoyed the pulling and stretching feeling. And after the piercing, I have found to my joy that this has been enhanced as well.

I am still in the initial healing period for my piercings. I am still quite tender, they itch and pinch a bit, and (surprisingly to me) I am very bruised. The no-sex rule is beginning to make me crazy, too. But I am in love with my piercings already, and have a strong suspicion that I will enjoy play piercing just as much. I was also wonderfully surprised at how much my boyfriend loves the look of the piercings.

And I can’t wait til my Owner gets home tomorrow and sees his “present.”

Much has been made on the internets about the CNN.com article that came out recently on non-monogamous relationship models. It’s a good article for the most part, fairly balanced and well-written, with a brief look at poly as one relationship alternative. The central question of the article, “Is Monogamy Realistic?”, can’t truly be answered in 1500 words or less. But the author addresses many of the issues that challenge the viability of monogamy in our modern age, when life expectancy is so much longer than it used to be and it seems so much easier to find people to give in to temptation with. I imagine it was a lot easier to contemplate spending the entirety of your adult life with one person when the length of that life was so much shorter.

“It’s realistic that some people can mate for life in the same sense that some people can play the Beethoven violin concerto or other people can ice-skate beautifully or learn a new language,” psychiatrist Judith Eve Lipton says in the article.
Adds evolutionary biologist David Barash, “It’s within the realm of human potential, but it’s not easy.”
In spite of these challenges, monogamy is the predominant choice for most people, even when statistics say that it is likely to fail (over 50% of marriages end in divorce and some sources estimate that 40% of women and 60% of men will have an extramarital affair at some point during their marriage.) Many people still attempt it, though, because, up until recently, it’s been the only game going. Society still presents the monogamous til-death-do-us-part relationship model as the only acceptable one (with the occasional “mistake-that-ends-in-divorce” exception.) Anything else is suspect at best, vehemently opposed at worst. As children and young adults we are still bombarded with the fairytale romance concept, still conditioned to search for our “one true love” with whom we will (if it’s “true” love) live happily-ever-after. When society promotes this ideal it conveniently ignores that even if you are happily and successfully monogamous, relationships take work to be successful, as well as love. Whether they are monogamous or poly. And so we are given no other viable options, and if we choose to try a new way, we are brought back in line by society’s censure.

I do believe that even if people knew about and embraced poly as just another alternative to traditional marriage, the majority of people would still probably choose monogamy over polyamory. For many people, having one-on-one relationships just works better. And for others, the perceived “security” of monogamy, issues of trust, and human beings’ basic territorial instincts are deeply ingrained enough that poly just isn’t an option. But I also believe that many more people would consider polyamory if it was presented as a viable option: if more people knew about it, if it was just another relationship structure like any other, if society accepted it as an alternative relationship model.

I know I would have.

See, I was a married person that cheated. Whether emotionally, as in my first marriage, or emotionally and physically, as in my second marriage, I could not be faithful to one person. I fell in love and lust with others, and even when I was physically faithful to my spouse, I knew that I was committing emotional infidelity, and that is was just as wrong as the physical kind, when I had made the commitment to be faithful to my partner. How could I simply turn off my feelings, though? How could I stop loving others? I tried. I cut off all contact with anyone I might have more than “friendship” feelings for. Looking back, I see what a bare and lonely landscape that was. I did try, though. I tried to fit into the box that society wanted to put me in, and that, because I had known no other way, I had placed myself.

I wish I had known about polyamory when I first met my exes. We would have been able to choose either to be with each other (or not) based on what we wanted out of relationship, and with an understanding of who we were. I’m not proud of the choices & mistakes I made, but I do know now why I made them. And having discovered polyamory, I realized there is a better way, an honest way, for me to be me: a person that has the capability—and chooses to—love more than one person. I have been happily poly with my live-in partner for six years now, and with my OSO (Other Significant Other) for over a year.

It’s my belief (and hope) that the internet is beginning to get these ideas out in the public realm, and that by doing so more people will know there is another way to do things, and society will begin to accept it. Your choices are not only either to be monogamous and unhappy or a cheater, if your natural inclination is to love more than one. Articles like the one on CNN.com may be a beginning to that.