There, in the back yard, we both started silently circling each other, the way boxers or MMA fighters do in the ring, completely oblivious to the other people on the patio watching us. Our circling got tighter, and turned into touches, pokes, and her raking her fingernails across my bare skin. I finally pulled her close to kiss her, but when I did, she turned away from my kiss and sank her teeth so hard into my jawline that it broke the skin! I was surprised, bleeding and angry, and without even thinking, I just slapped her hard across the face. She drew back for a split second, and then clocked me hard right on the nose with her fist. I staggered and almost went down, but figured I’d take her down with me, so I tackled her to the grass, where we wrestled and I bled all over her until the other people on the patio pried us apart and positioned themselves between us.
I stood there, bleeding from my jaw and my nose while she, covered in my blood, paced like an angry feral cat that had been swung around by its tail. Someone mentioned calling the police, and we both instantly and simultaneously said, “No!” She assured them further, saying, “It wasn’t a fight... it was...” She paused, and I jumped in to finish her sentence. “Foreplay,” I said. They laughed. We laughed. And then we went to my place for sex.”
It isn’t always simply the unpredictability of a primal scene that can sometimes make it problematic. When I asked my friend ShadowCat, a twenty-two-year-old Primal switch who leans heavily dominant, whether she usually sought out other Primals as potential partners, she surprised me with an unexpected response. She said that she typically did not prefer other Primals, and explained why:
“Being with other Primals can actually be kind of dangerous for someone like me. I’m a woman, a Primal, and I’m usually a Dominant. But Primals don’t care about what you usually are; they make up their own minds about your position in the pecking order. Many just automatically assume that if you’re a woman, that there must be a submissive buried deep down inside there, somewhere. They figure all they have to do is beat me into submission to bring it out. Don’t get me wrong - I like my sex rough, but I don’t want to end up in the hospital, either. Some of these guys just can’t get it into their heads that I’m very dominant. Their instincts keep telling them that if they just try a little harder, take the violence up just one more notch, that I’ll submit. But I don’t and, sometimes, they just don’t know when to quit. That usually doesn’t end well.”
Primal scenes and other intimate primal encounters always have the potential to be simultaneously exciting and terrifying; erotic and dangerous. A Primal’s instincts can typically do a wonderful job of telling him who to play with and how to play, but may not always be adequate at telling them how far is too far, and when to stop.
Even Primals playing with other Primals would be well-advised to keep that in mind.
Primal Instincts
In the final analysis, primalism is simply a matter of surrendering matters of attraction, love, sex and kink to our most basic instincts. William Bernbach, a prolific advertising executive who had an exceptionally keen insight into how people think and relate once said, “Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action... If you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.”
Trusting and following your primal instincts can not only help you to connect, touch and be touched at your very core, but it can sometimes actually help you to make better decisions. Good instincts can very often convey hidden truths and guide your actions long before your intellect figures things out rationally.
Perhaps an exploration of your own primal side is something you should consider.
“For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.”
Mark Twain
My Two Cents on Primals
There really wasn’t a word for what Nicole was, at the time. She was, in my mind, quite simply a difficult submissive. On the one hand, she had a truly beautiful spirit and an intense, focused loyalty – not only to me, but to the other members of my house – that was simply amazing. On the other hand, she would often do odd and inexplicable things that would perplex or infuriate me. I didn’t know it then, but Nicole was a Primal.
When she first walked into my life, I was sitting at my desk, working in the front office of a technology business that I’d founded some years previously. The door chimed, and I looked up from my work to see a petite young woman with straight blonde hair to the small of her back and penetrating blue eyes that were focused intently on mine. She seated herself in the chair in front of my desk and we chatted amiably about the services my business had to offer. As we spoke, I noticed an unusual tattoo which covered her entire forearm from wrist to elbow. The tat consisted of orange and black tiger stripes that encompassed her arm like a sleeve. I noticed also that her aggressive, penetrating eyes never – ever – strayed from their laser-like focus on mine. We quickly arrived at a business agreement, and when it came time to finalize the paperwork, she leaned over the desk to sign the contract and did something very odd, something which I found simultaneously fascinating and arousing. She sniffed me.
A few days later, I received a phone call from my mysterious new client; she was having a little problem with our software. Would I be available to discuss it with her? Incredibly, I heard myself responding, “Sure! Actually, I was just about to break for lunch. It’s such a gorgeous day out, I was thinking of having a sandwich in the park. Would you care to join me?” She gave me her address, and told me she could be ready in ten minutes. As I hung up the phone, I thought to myself, what the hell just happened?
I never did go back to the office that day. At the park, we sat on the grass and studiously ignored both our sandwiches and our purported reason for being there. As she grew more comfortable in my presence, she became progressively more playful as well, climbing the trees and cavorting on the playground equipment. It was something I might have expected from an adolescent, but she was in her twenties. I found myself incredibly, irresistibly fascinated, amused, and yes... smitten.
We went back to her house, where we spent the rest of the day rolling around on the floor and bouncing off the furnishings the way cats tussle over a ball of yarn. The sex was an incredible mixture of passion and violence, a struggle to establish dominance, and an unrestrained expression of raw hunger. Despite a full day of biting, wrestling, scratching, hair pulling, spanking, blindfolds and bondage, we somehow managed to survive it and have a conversation later that evening.
I asked her how long she’d been in the BDSM lifestyle. “BDSM?” she responded with a bemused look on her face. “I don’t know anything about that. I only know that I was yours from the moment we first met. I don’t know how I knew it, I just did. I could sense it, somehow. I could smell it. I just trusted my instincts, and they told me to trust you. I am yours.”
“In that case,” I smiled, “Let’s start by having you address me as Master.”
“On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.”
- - Peter Steiner cartoon
depicting an actual dog at the keyboard.
The New Yorker, July 5, 1993
Chapter 5: Online BDSM Relationships
Many people get their very first taste of Domination/submission and the BDSM lifestyle via the internet. Web sites, chat rooms, fetish portals and virtual worlds have all combined to make the internet a veritable buffet of BDSM and kink in general. In fact, it is so plentiful and omnipresent, one often finds BDSM-related images and references in places it where they shouldn’t be, such as on web sites and in chat rooms that are frequented by under-aged children.
If you happen to be one of those people whose only exposure to the BDSM lifestyle has been through the internet, you may very well find yourself wondering about the differences between the online BDSM lifestyle and the real-world one, and about the validity of your online experiences. Our goal in this chapter will be to t
ry and answer some of those questions for you, and perhaps provide you with a road map that will help you to make the leap from virtual D/s relationships to the real thing, if that is what you seek.
The online BDSM culture is truly a double-edged sword in many respects. On one hand, it allows a person with absolutely no prior experience or knowledge of the lifestyle to dip his or her toe into the waters without fear of ridicule or harm. On the other hand, it allows a person with absolutely no prior experience or knowledge of the lifestyle to misrepresent himself as an expert, without worrying about any potential consequences. The horror stories one hears, again and again, are enough to make some people shun the online BDSM culture entirely. It is disturbingly common to hear tales of middle-aged submissive women who learn that their supposed Masters are actually teenage girls. Not only do men turn out to be women, but women are revealed to be men, and children routinely pose as adults. In short, the one thing that you can trust to be true when it comes to internet BDSM is: Nothing is ever what it seems.
My favorite story about online relationships concerns two overweight, middle-aged, heterosexual men who posed as twenty-something lesbians in order to engage in frequent cybersex with naïve bisexual or lesbian teenaged girls. What happened, instead, was they met and seduced each other, and fell head over heels in love. Imagine their mutual surprise, after months in a loving and ostensibly committed online relationship, when they discovered the awful truth. Apparently, karma is not only a bitch, but she has a wicked sense of humor.
Online BDSM culture and relationships can be illusory, deceptive, and abusive. They can also be entertaining, honest, and fulfilling if you approach them with open eyes, the right attitude, and take proper precautions. We’ll discuss those precautions later in this chapter, after we’ve talked about some of the different venues where you may encounter the online BDSM culture.
Text-Based BDSM Chat
For most of the people who use the internet today, it’s difficult to imagine that there was ever a time when the internet existed without the World Wide Web, robust graphics, or the high speed networks that made them all possible, but there was, and I was caught up in all of it from the very beginning.
My first exposure to the online BDSM culture was in the mid-1980s through an online service called CompuServe, which was the very first major internet service provider. In the beginning, CompuServe charged roughly $5 per hour to connect to their network and overseas, where I was stationed at the time, a person could easily spend $30 per hour in surcharges to connect through CompuServe’s international nodes. Needless to say, at those prices, only the most obsessed and committed computer geeks bothered to do so. Yes, people like me.
The reason for my obsession was something CompuServe called CB Chat. It’s humorous to think of it now, but at the time it was called CB chat because the marketing gurus at CompuServe believed that would be the best way to explain the concept of a chat room to people who had never heard of one before. The idea was to invoke the familiar notion of CB, or citizens band, radio. Yes, we’re talking about the very same CB radio fad made famous by the popular 1975 song “Convoy” by one-hit wonder C.W. McCall, and the 1978 movie by the same name. By the way, if you’re not familiar with the song, do yourself a huge favor and avoid the temptation to look it up on You Tube. It could be days before you get that earworm out of your head.
The chat rooms or channels, as they were sometimes called, were organized by topic or lifestyle, and I naturally gravitated to the BDSM lifestyle channels. There, I learned that the online BDSM culture – even then, in the internet’s infancy - was far different from what I’d experienced in real-life and there were a lot of new rules to learn. A few years later, around 1988, other alternatives to CompuServe chat became available, including America Online (AOL) and a multitude of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks. Today, there are literally thousands of IRC chat networks in existence, with the four largest being EFnet, IRCnet, UnderNet, and DALnet. Many of the customs and online protocols that were developed by the CompuServe fetish community then were adopted by the users of these newer chat platforms, and most are still in practice, even now.
During the early days of the internet, certain protocols had to be followed in order to make sense of a BDSM culture that could only be expressed in text. There were no websites or social media portals like Facebook or Tumblr. The very notion of being able to have an internet-based voice-chat, a la Skype, was still decades away. Even the ability to attach a photograph to an email in order to send it to a friend was beyond the technical abilities of most people. In other words, if your message couldn’t be expressed in letters, numbers, punctuation or symbols, you were quite simply out of luck.
So, we adapted. We learned to use plain text to provide all of the necessary vital clues to a person’s status, relationship, sexual orientation, and standing in the online BDSM community to anyone who happened to be paying attention and knew what to look for. Dominants capitalized the first letter of their names; submissives used all lower-case letters. Submissives referred to any male Dominant who was not his or her own as Sir. Female Dominants were referred to as Ma’am, Miss, or Mistress. Personal pronouns such as you, him, her, and they were capitalized if you were talking to a Dominant. If we were talking about a Dominant, then we capitalized the Him or Her. If we were unsure, or we were addressing a mixed group, we sometimes used torturous grammatical monstrosities like Y/you, T/them, or even E/everyone. You could always identify the chronically clueless by their admirable but terribly misguided enthusiasm in misapplying this particular protocol, which would sometimes resulted in grammatical abominations like, “H/hello E/everyone, H/how A/are Y/you A/all T/this E/evening?” Nice try, but no cigar.
We couldn’t always figure out a person’s sex without asking, but we could immediately tell who was collared by the addition of bracketed initials at the end of a collared individual’s name. For example, if a submissive named slavekitten was collared to a Dominant named DarkKnight, her username would often look something like this: slavekitten{DK}. If slavekitten were to log on one day without the {DK} attached to her name, you instantly knew what that meant. She had been released from her collar.
Despite the advent of the World Wide Web and the tremendous growth of more technically sophisticated chat platforms the appeal of text-based chat has remained as strong as ever, with over 3,200 IRC chat servers currently hosting hundreds of thousands of chat channels each day. The most popular IRC program is mIRC, which can be downloaded for free from practically any freeware or shareware download site. Some popular BDSM-related websites maintain their own custom web/IRC interfaces, which allow visitors to use their web browsers to access the site’s IRC chat servers. To learn if your favorite BDSM web portal has an IRC chat server, just look for a search box on the site, and search for the term “IRC chat.”
Virtual Worlds BDSM Chat
As computer technology and networking capabilities increased, so did our ability to explore a robust and growing BDSM culture online. The first networked virtual worlds were developed in the 1970s by the Department of Defense and deployed on ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the precursor to what eventually became the modern internet. By 1978, the first non-commercial virtual world to be deployed on the internet was called MUD1, which ironically stood for Multi User Dungeon. The dungeon in this particular instance was more of a Dungeons and Dragons sort of dungeon, than a BDSM one.
By the late 1980s, commercial versions of virtual worlds had begun springing up, most notably Habitat by Lucas Films, and WorldsAway/Dreamscape by CompuServe. These experiments in virtual worlds led the way for the immensely popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) that followed, like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. Today, the most popular virtual world chat platforms are IMVU for Windows, Second Life for Windows, Play Station Home, and The Sims Online.
Virtual world chat programs added an exciting visual dimension to what had previously been limited to lette
rs, numbers and symbols. Suddenly, you no longer had to guess or ask about a person’s sex, you could figure it out simply by looking at that person’s 3D avatar. Of course, nothing prevents a person from misrepresenting his or her sex by choosing an avatar of the opposite sex, but why let a little thing like that dampen our enthusiasm for the magic of 3D virtual worlds? The process of choosing an avatar to represent you in this virtual world also came with an added bonus: the ability to be the person you always wanted to be. In virtual worlds, we are unencumbered by age, obesity, bad teeth, bald spots, muffin tops, spare tires, small boobs or tiny penises. Everyone is perfect, or at least as perfect as they want and can afford to be, which for the most part, is pretty darn perfect.
For some people, this illusion of instant bodily perfection can be pretty heady stuff. Combine that with a large dose of internet anonymity, the allure of consequence-free 3D graphic cyber-sex, and a ready supply of naïve hormonal teenagers, and you end up with a recipe for a potentially problematic detachment from reality that could be downright catastrophic for any relationship, D/s or vanilla. Adding a BDSM relationship dynamic to the mix can be a little like throwing a bucket of gasoline onto an already out-of-control fire.
The sophistication of the 3D graphic cyber-sex available in these online virtual worlds is astounding, however, even at its best it is still only as good as one’s imagination. In that sense, it is really not much different from phone-sex, sexting, or cartoon porn – perhaps better than nothing, but that isn’t exactly high praise. Some virtual worlds impose bewildering rules on what is, and isn’t, allowed sexually. One of the largest online virtual worlds, for example, forbids erect penises and/or any hip to hip contact between avatars. In fact, if you want your avatar to have a penis at all, expect to hand over some real cash for the privilege, since starter avatars come penisless in almost all virtual world chat programs.
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