As I’m slowly reintroducing myself to kink society I’m finding I sometimes have an odd desire: to actually switch. And, just as oddly, to try puppy play as a puppy.
I recognize that on the face of it what I just said makes no sense. Literally millions of people want those things; there’s nothing odd about them. The oddness is that I want them. I, whose entire sexual fantasy life is predicated on 24/7 TPE.
I don’t enjoy imagination and games in my relationships; I want things to be real. Slavery, servitude, status inequality; it’s always been a turn-off to me to have to suspend disbelief for a scene, whether that means equality outside the bedroom or pretending my partner is a puppy. The very fact that whatever I do, I do sincerely, has always given it meaning; it makes it true. A boy in a pup hood, mitted on the floor, wagging has always seemed a bit like I’m indulging him, but take the hood and mitts off and call him a slave and now he is just in his place: he’s where he belongs if he’s honest about who he is and what he needs–and about where he needs to belong.
I’ve always considered it to be because of my need for definition, understanding, honesty, and reality about who and what I am that switching is anathema to me. Sure, I’ve been flexible enough to say I feel a need to be submissive and a need to be dominant; so my place is above other submissives and below other doms. But those are always fuzzy categories: which submissives am I above? Which doms am I below? I never really answered those questions, just assumed my place was above total subs, below total doms, and peer to people who wanted both. That’s not very precise or well-justified, but it was close enough that I only occasionally ran in to issues with it. In any case, it’s certainly always precluded what I consider the idea of switching: actually changing roles, whether in the same or different context. I wasn’t not a dom when being submissive to other doms; I was still above the subs I played with. I wasn’t not a sub when domming other submissives; I just did so out of an agreed-upon definition of my superiority to other subs. There was no scene, no roleplay; my role in life and with my partners didn’t change with contexts. Certainly, the idea of one day domming a boy, telling him he’s inferior to me while making him lick my feet, and the next day being caged by him, waiting on him and doing his laundry has always been completely alien to me. Or even doing that with two different boys, one a sub and one a dom, but doing each just for fun, because both turn us both on, with no additional meaning about who we are; that, too, had no place in my life. In the past, if I’ve needed to address someone as Sir, it’s been because we agreed his relative status was higher than mine and he deserved it, as people; there’s never been a component of when or if, or that things were limited to certain contexts. I guess to me that’s what switching represents–regardless of whether roles reverse or simply become equal.
Perhaps because of seeing different content creators with different content, perhaps because of my hiatus, perhaps because of my changing relationships with my partners, perhaps because of my growing awareness of my own needs–or, perhaps, just experience and the passage of time–I’m wondering about that. Some of the switches I’m following on twitter have intrigued me; it’s odd. And at the same time, and in a related way, scenes of pup play have also started to appeal to me in certain ways.
There’s nothing inherently humiliating about being a puppy or adopting the mindset of a dog; and yet everything I’m now finding attractive about pup play is predicated on the exposure and helplessness aspects, on begging, being displayed, being inferior. Of being mitted, not allowed to speak, helpless. Of being expected to whine and beg and shake with horniness. Of being allowed to beg for anything I want (albeit nonverbally) because there’s no expectation I should know better, as a boy or slave should. Of being allowed to pull away from and try to get out of things I don’t want–again, of not needing to behave with the self-discipline and control of a slave, fully knowledgeable that he has to obey, and instead to be able to be willful and try to get out of things–and, unless the dom is willing, to instead be made to do the thing or be disciplined for it. To let the dom re-train my brain to with the discipline to obey commands I dislike rather than just doing so out of my own discipline and belief in my place as his inferior.
I’ve already veered back in to slavery, here, though; the appeal of pup play as I’m beginning to see it isn’t so much about servitude as it is about exposure, humiliation and control. It’s about being naked, on all fours, caged, straining, and unable to do anything about it beneath a man or men–and perhaps alongside other pups similarly limited. It’s about being helpless and allowed to beg. Or at least I think it is; it’s such a new curiousity it’s hard to say. But something about that kind of abject exposure, usage, and being enjoyed despite–or even for–begging for things a dom doesn’t want–and providing him pleasure in getting to decide, genuinely without fear of my desires not being met, whether to give it–something about that seems to correlate with pup play better than just enslavement. I’m not sure how; I can’t quite articulate it.
And that, I think, is the weirdest thing of all. I don’t know what I want, or even how to articulate what I might want. And I don’t think that’s ever–in the twenty-plus-years I can remember out of my thirty-year life–happened to me before, not in a way meaningful enough for me to remember.
Painting with Knifestrikes 