I’m normalizing talking about sex and desire, because I want to have these kinds of conversations be commonplace in my life and in my relationships.
So I’m going to tell you the story of how I got over one of my deepest fears. It feels appropriate for Halloween.
And what better story to tell than the story of the worst scenario I could ever imagine for a situation coming to fruition?
I don’t know how to talk about this, so I think, I’m just going to do this:
Dear you,
You know who you are. Do you remember that night I demanded you to make good on your promise to worship my manhood? The night I made you crawl to me. Tease me and kiss me. Sit your lips on mine, so you could watch the throb of my desire?
The night that I demanded you put your face in the pillow, hips in the air, and let me have my way with the two-stemmed, wet flower, blossoming before me in the night?
I have never been so naked. You ass was in the air, but mine was on the line. Trusting you, was a beautiful thrill.
And scary as hell.
Love,
Me
Before that moment, all dom-sub play in my life was a matter of my own safety. Being dominant was an act of distancing myself from my own desire to engage with the body seeking to be pleasured by me. A trick to pick their locks while leaving mine untouched.
Now that I’ve delved into the Tao of sex I know that this is actually a tried and true solution for successfully satisfying sex partners. That I just was intuitively doing what people who care about the pleasure of their partners have done for literal millennia… but for me, it came from a fear of inadequacy, rather than a place of prowess… and that’s important for this story.
I didn’t have to be vulnerable when I did this, I was in charge. I was telling them that they could not have what they wanted until they showed me that they would submit to their own desires. And to do this they had to play.
And they had to play by my rules.
It was a game. Like Simon says. And I just wanted everyone to win.
I didn’t have to be vulnerable. I knew my sexuality was vibrant and eclectic. I wasn’t ashamed of myself, but I felt like my kinks were beyond the scope of “normal.” I know most people actually have a kink and less than 20-10% of us are truly vanilla... but while I’d told her a lot-... most of my partners discovered little things about me in their vulnerable moments: like squirting and then discovering that I thought it was hot. Or that queening is my happy place; my lips are a throne. Queefing makes me giggle, but I think it’s super hot if it doesn’t take her out of it. But I’d been kink shamed before when I admitted these things ahead of time, like my being enthralled by all the possibilities of pleasuring my partner was a bad thing. It somehow managed to hurt me, perhaps because the shaming of female bodies limited how much I was allowed to adore them. And I hated it. It felt so much safer to let them blunder into erotic serendipity when they were expecting sexual embarrassment. My desires were never in question and I trusted myself to remind them that they were goddesses. Anything connected to their pleasure was welcome. Invited. Implored even.
I simply denied full access to the pleasure that came from me until they were willing to demand what they wanted.
It was a sneaky way of architecting the perfect moment for me. Not simply consent-.. but enthusiastic, vocal cries and demands of the exact pleasure my partner needed in that moment. I wanted to tease my partner until they did what I was absolutely mortified of:
Surrender to and voice their desires. Open up enthusiastically about what they wanted. Blossom because those fantasies were on the precipice of becoming reality. And clearly, in my mind, they were safe, because I wanted to give it to them ONLY if they could surrender to the desire fully. And I was there for their pleasure, wherever it came from.
Up until this moment, I hadn’t realized it… but I was looking for a partner who wasn’t simply satisfied to let me be dominant. A partner that didn’t just want to get lost in the pleasure I prided myself on providing… it was great for the ego, but I wanted someone who was willing to and wanted to be this person for me. Someone who was just so excited by the idea of my pleasure, and fully accepting of what they might find in me. Someone that wanted to be the safe space I believed myself to be for these partners… I wanted to open my heart and melt for them.
But none of them were mind readers… how could they know this playful torture was actually a plea to be invited to unleash myself?
An invitation to play at the edge of pain and pleasure, hoping they would be happy to contain their desire for me enough to deny me. To give me an excuse to lose control and beg. To feel safe begging. That they were excited for what they might bring out of me. That they could handle all of the desire and pleasure I wanted to finally let out… I wanted to trust someone enough to let them take me to the heights of pleasure. I was worried it might not happen. But I was more worried that I would be shamed if they didn’t know about my baggage before it did. And so instead of telling them about my baggage, I hoped showing them my dedication to their pleasure would save me from having to have that talk. Maybe they’d just understand. And maybe I would get to give them something I hadn’t really let anyone share with me on a consistent basis.
Fact:
Many of my partners have left me feeling really honored by opening up and letting me pleasure them.
Confession:
I have been on a long journey of learning to truly let partners pleasure me. To be vulnerable and open my heart and my body to a complete and honest experience of the pleasure. For a long time I would only do oral and manual stimulation so they would know it wasn’t about me getting off.
So when this happened, it was amazing.
And it was amazing and terrifying to have a person let me boss them around, not knowing if something would be weird or too far. Amazing and terrifying to have them enjoy my “being demanding.”
But then it was just terrifying and it stayed that way.
The story I told myself, that I was this careful, generous lover who was focused on my partner’s pleasure above all else, was finally allowed to dissolve.. I didn’t need to be that person to be worthy of love. I could just be.
But just be what?
What was I if not a truly unselfish male? What if I wasn’t a nice guy who finished last, if you catch my drift. Wink wink nudge nudge and all that?
And then I got nervous because maybe I was this character I played that night. Demanding. Selfish. Entitled to her body.
Maybe I was full of myself, believing she found me sexy… maybe she was just humoring me. I mean, I did tell her to literally come worship my cock. WHO DOES THAT!? I MEAN SHE TOLD ME TO-... BUT WHO DOES THAT!?
Not me! Not the person I’d been for years-.. trying to truly treasure all of my partners fully. Honoring the body they’d brought me and caring for the wounds they’d shared with me…
Who was that asshole?
Who was I?
I’d heard the stories from her and friends and partners about selfish men who just used their bodies. And stories are dangerous because sometimes we write ourselves into the ones we’re scared of… creating what we focus on.
And maybe this is why horror movies are effective.
We can’t help but put ourselves into stories that affect us emotionally.
I didn’t know who I was anymore. I wasn’t amazing at pleasuring her… and I didn’t know what to do with that.
And she was in love with me when I thought I was the nice guy. And I always playfully subverted that with the Dom guy.
I had been working on taking responsibility for my own pleasure and trusting my partners to take responsibility for theirs and this was my first lover after a long drought.
Did she understand that this was my story?
Did she have space for this story?
Could she appreciate all the work it took for me to let go of this story? To be demanding? To surrender to the pleasure she could bring me? I had never established in PRACTICE that I wanted her to be that girl. I said it. But in this moment I realized I hadn’t proved that I wanted it out of her.
The hungry vixen.
My demanding mistress.
I wanted to unlock and embrace her insatiability.
But she unlocked mine.
I surrendered to it. And I let her in. And it was so exciting… but because I let her have this part of me I was so naked.
And then I was afraid.
I wasn’t sure that she would let me in. And I wasn’t sure that she could let me in. That I could find the desire that would make her beg me. That would make her unleash herself. Maybe she never would. And maybe it was my fault for healing from that narrative. Maybe it was because she was so exciting to me that I didn’t have the discipline to wait…
That sounds gross to me. Discipline.
But,
it was amazing.
Finally, someone unlocked my heart and I wanted her to know she could have this part of me, without needing to break down her walls first. I needed her to know she had allowed me to break down mine. I had let go of my story for her, or so I thought.
She asked me to be demanding, and so I was.
So.
What fucks me up about this is the story that follows.
For so, so long I had been trying to convince people to read my mind by following the golden rule… doing to them what I wanted them to be doing to me. I didn’t know that this had become a strategy.
What’s worse is that I didn’t realize it had become an obsession.
I didn’t realize it was an identity I’d attached myself to. This “nice guy” lover, who was a Dom to break down my partner’s walls. To get them to fully let go.
But when I finally let go of it, I floundered spectacularly. Because I gave myself to her in a language I didn’t know how to speak, but thought I had to learn to make her happy.
Instead of withholding pleasure until she demanded it, I demanded it.
And that wasn’t my game.
I let her have me. The tension around my heart that I felt whenever I engaged intimately melted. My walls came down. My skin hummed. Love and trust poured out of me.
And since it worked, I wanted her to do the same.
I wanted her to demand pleasure. Or to let me withhold it until she demanded it. But that’s not how vulnerability works.
You can’t demand it. You have to wait until it’s right.
And so this is the part where it gets sad. That night I finished and my body melted into a hazy blur.
The magic of the “multiorgasmic man” and all of the Sexual Tao practices I had used to work through my pleasure blocks had worked. I had several amazing peaking orgasms.
Why is this sad you ask?
Well the next day she said, “I love-hated you.” And that didn’t sit quite right with me. It felt like I had done something fun… but wrong. And I tried not to let it bother me, because she was playfully smiling and I figured it was fine. But then I started to remember the stories again… of the partners who she felt used her, and how I promised to be different. And I remembered how I told her about my partners and stories and how maybe I didn’t match the image she had.
And then I tried again the next night.
And I wasn’t a Dom at all. I didn’t boss her around. I didn’t deny her. I didn’t bother with any of that. I decided to just be. And it felt phenomenal again.
Amazing-... and then terrifying.
I was just present with her. Present with her body. I became each breath we took and felt a beautiful and overwhelming energy.
It was the softness of her lips and the magic of her skin. It was the saltiness of her sweat and the sweetness of her wet. It was the music of her breath and the pressure of her being.
It was the savoring of my favorite fruit as child juice running from the fingers and down the neck.
And I felt the energy rolling through me once and she laughed with me as I giggled… “Well,” she said.
“Oh that’s nothing.” I let the energy roll again and again..
And she quieted. And I let it roll again.. and again.
Then she was silent.
And I was finished.
And I asked that question. You know the fucking question.
That question. And the conversation basically went like this:
Her: “Uh, maybe a little one.”
Me: “Oh. I had like 9.”
Her: “I noticed.”
Ooh. A pause.
Me: “Do you want to keep going?”
A soft laugh.
Her: “No that’s alright. I think I need a break.”
She explained again that sometimes she got overstimulated and it was mostly just frustrating to try to force something. I cuddled with her and passed out.
A few days later or so we talked about the experience… and she said the thing. You know the thing.
Actually, you don’t but I liked the symmetry of it.
We talked about that night and she said something that was an absolute gut shot.
“Well it just seemed like it didn’t matter much that I was there.”
You know those stories I was talking about earlier? I had become my worst nightmare. But it was worse, because I had become the story of her last partner, too. I managed to leave her feeling like I was just using her body AND like I was not really present with her and her experience in the moment.
My stomach flipped. I had done so much work to remove my blocks around pleasure. And I let down my walls and softened my heart. And I forgot about discipline and let myself be lost fully to the wonder of her. And literally the worst scenario I ever imagined happened.
And suddenly I felt the shame of every person who has ever come too easily. And I was so ready to hate myself until I realized:
It was the most liberating thing.
I like to laugh about how nothing I’ve ever lived through has been so bad it killed me. But really, with the pressure I put on myself historically to satisfy my partners, you’d think it was a possibility.
But I didn’t die.
I wasn’t perfect. I but was vulnerable. But most importantly, I had grown.
And I got to live a new story.
The story of being vulnerable with someone wholly beautiful and perfectly imperfect. I’m always vulnerable with my thoughts and feelings… but not so much my pleasure or insecurities. I thought I was brave… but honestly, I was just being cavalier, when I wasn’t afraid… and strategic when I was.
This story reminded me again that the villains of my stories are just people doing their best. I’d learned to forgive the things I hated in myself, so I wouldn’t have to hate people who reminded me of them... but I hadn’t learned to be ok with the kinds of failure I’d promised never to partake in.
I don’t have to be such a narcissist. It’s kind of a relief.
This story taught me that being a perfectionist in bed is just as conflicted as being a perfectionist in any other aspect of my life. It’s a form of neurosis for me that isn’t worth what it costs when I fear failure more than I enjoy success.
So, I guess the worst thing case scenario is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.
And… now , because I don’t know how to say it, I guess I have to say this:
Dear you,
You know who you are. I’m sorry. I played a game where I demanded something unequal. I wanted your vulnerability. And while I traded you pleasure, that’s not the same. I asked you for trust and didn’t give much back. And while that’s probably just the way of things these days, as we make up stories about how everything happened and what it all meant… I just want you to know I had the best intentions.
I got a dose of my own medicine. And she is absolutely beautiful.
And so is all of you.
Love,
Me
I’d love to hear about some growing you’ve done. Thanks for reading. Sending you all the love and support as you face your fears.