Breathing exercises, songs or chants, visualizations, and stimulations – stroking, beating, cutting, piercing – are all rituals we engage in to open ourselves to our own and each other’s gorgeous flowing life force, to connect to ourselves and to each other in a particularly profound way.
Magic-making
The roles we play, the costumes we wear, our collars and cuffs, the candles we light, how we turn bedrooms into dungeons by hanging up some chains, all this is setting up ritual as well. We are making a space and time in our lives that is set aside to be different. Dungeon or temple, this is sacred space, and we do well to come into it with good intentions.
We may play a character different from our everyday selves, or express a minority part of ourselves who doesn’t get to be up front very often – we will discuss this at much greater length in the “Mind Journeys” chapter. We may be polarizing our roles, top or bottom, becoming intensely more dominant or more submissive; and in harmony or maybe in friction, perhaps pushing against each other, we push each other higher, further out.
Foreplay, bondage, rope, all the ways we set up scenes, these are our pathways as well. And while ecstasy can be reached along an infinity of paths, including the short steep ones, we’ve found that the most certain paths are the slow and gradual ones. We like short fast intense thrash-and-scream scenes sometimes too. But we suggest that once in a while at least, you might be pleasantly surprised if you enter into setting up a scene with the idea in mind of taking a long time warming up, setting up, breathing together, sharing massage, slow dancing, chanting or undulating. If you invest some time at the beginning, there will almost certainly be more rewards at the end.
You are, after all, not really in a hurry. You do intend to enjoy this for a while. If you start a scene or a ritual slowly, and take plenty of time at each step, you will move more smoothly into the flow, travel further, and perhaps surprise yourself. Try something, oh, doesn’t work, okay, let’s try something else, and how about we rub a little skin in between to quiet down again: when you make friends with time, you can also afford to make mistakes.
What about orgasm?
Out in vanilla-land, orgasms are considered a pretty straightforward phenomenon. There’s one kind: you have it from genital stimulation; it goes on for a few seconds or maybe a minute if you’re lucky; some women can have a few of them; most men only get one at a time.
That wasn’t our experience even before we started working on this book. We were pretty sure we’d had the kind that everybody else described, the nice clear-cut binary now-I’ve-had-an-orgasm kind – but we’d also had ones that felt like we were skimming along the surface of orgasm without really dipping beneath it, and ones that felt like a huge wave that consumed our whole bodies without ever really especially involving our cunts, and a lot of different things that felt sort of like orgasms and sort of not. In fact, it seemed that there were almost as many kinds of orgasmic experiences as there were kinds of sexual experiences. Janet writes about this:
When I first learned to come, I learned to squinch up my genitals, my face, my legs, pulling everything inward toward the center of myself, tightening every sphincter I have in my body plus a few that probably exist only in the noncorporeal plane. With exactly the right kind of stimulation to my erogenous zones, the proper tape running in my head, and a goodly dose of luck, all that tension struck a spark that flared up into — voilà — an orgasm!
Much much later, I learned to ejaculate — and all those skills were exactly wrong. I had to push where I used to pull, and open up what I used to close, and let go of what I used to hoard so jealously. And it was still an orgasm, but it was different — a pushy-outy orgasm instead of a pully-inny orgasm. I started wanting both kinds, not always both on the same day, but at least some of each some of the time.
And all along, I’d been having these other experiences during peak BDSM play — convulsions that felt like being grabbed in Something’s teeth and whipped back and forth like a rag doll, huge waves that started at the site of the sensation and slammed outward toward my fingers and toes, whole-body quakes ranging from subtle tremors to somewhere off the Richter scale (I never fell off the table, but almost). During these, I wasn’t pulling in or pushing out — I was beyond volition, helpless in the power of whatever it was that was shaking me.
I started to be able to feel them approaching, and to make preparations to welcome them. Sometimes I’d find myself bouncing or dancing, building rhythm, letting the inside of my head turn snowy white. Sometimes I’d feel myself inflating, my fingers and toes extending and quivering, my skin thin and tense as the skin of a balloon, impossibly full and getting fuller, waiting for the explosion. Sometimes I’d have visions, flames leaping, fireworks bursting, and I’d open up to their heat and feel it light the fuse that runs right up my center. I’d let go of my face and feel it contort, let go of my voice and hear myself making sounds I never dreamed I knew how to make.
Now, I go to classes and workshops about sex, I read books about sex. And they talk about learning how not to squinch the way I used to, how to rreeeeelllaaaaaxxx. Well, OK. I think not-squinching is maybe a good thing, although an orgasm that you get by squinching is certainly better than no orgasm at all. But really, I think that the whole discussion of how to have orgasms is sort of beside the point.
I don’t want to have orgasms, I want orgasms to have me. When an orgasm has me, I don’t get to decide whether to squinch or relax, whether it’s pully-inny or pushy-outy; it makes that decision for me. It makes all decisions for me.
But it won’t take me unless I ask it to. So I dance, I inflate, I burn, I scream. My friends come and help. We do anything we can to get that bitch my brain to let go of me for just a little while, and then the orgasm, the energy, the universe comes and takes me, takes me, takes me.
A lot of what we’ve done in classic SM, though, is still aimed at the traditional genital orgasm. And in an SM scene, all too often, when one or both partners have an orgasm it means the scene is over. Orgasm works great for closure: everybody feels good, gets a release, and returns more or less naturally to a more ordinary state of consciousness. The transition is built into the physiology.
Yet so often, after playing with intense sensation or energy or roleplay or even sexual stimulation in the lengthy explorative manner that we think is typical of ecstatic SM, when the top goes for the genitals, or the vibrator, or whatever might take either or both of us over the edge to orgasm, we might feel a faint disappointment. We know we will be moved out of the transcendent state we are now inhabiting. It’s almost over. The end is near. We have to come down. Dossie remembers:
I had a tantra date with a woman who was concerned that it wouldn’t be possible for us to get close to each other without going for the genital, which was out of bounds for her. We had made an agreement about boundaries, that whatever we did in our energized state, it wasn’t going to be genital sex. We went into altered space with massage, with some top/bottom energy, with holding and breathing and raising kundalini. And kundalini went up and up, way out the top, till we were breathing and laughing and shouting and sighing and breathing some more, playing with the third eye as if there were an electric conduit between hers and mine. Whenever either one of us moved a hand over the other’s body, even at the back of the head (especially at the back of the head), the response was orgasmic: flowing and laughing and shuddering and gasping for breath and totally ecstatic. Going out, but never getting off.
We played in that space for more than an hour, all delicious and delirious, me sitting on her lap with my legs wrapped around her, total body contact, coming out of one paroxysm to catch our breath, only to dive back into the flow and rush onward to the next. We were ecstatic.
Ending wasn’t easy. We had mentioned finishing a couple of times, only to find another fabulous way to rise up again to play with the life force. Finally, with the wisdom of SM, I said “I don’t think this is going to come to an end. We’re in the Forever Pla
ce. I think we’re going to have to decide when to stop and actually work at it.”
After a few more rounds of ecstasy, we went to work on it. We kept getting caught up in the rush of it all — we would calm our breathing, only to touch another fabulously alive bit of flesh and start yelling again, then come down again. Finally we managed to move our bodies a little bit apart — I slid down so I was lying on her, my face on her chest. Our chakras no longer lined up right against each other, so the energy quieted more readily. We cuddled there for a while, trancing in little seismic aftershocks, until we were able to bear the notion of moving yet a little further apart.
Eventually we stood up — vertigo! Hugging and kissing, still connected in the energy, but somewhat less intensely. Getting clothes back on was funny — I was clumsy, couldn’t figure out a bra, finally gave up and didn’t wear it — I kept thinking, “Our left brains will cut back in eventually, right?” She thought we should go outside and get something to eat, so we went to a cafe (I drove: we were at my house, and I could drive the back roads on automatic). We radiated all over the restaurant. Food got us further and more firmly planted in our bodies, and also gave us a chance to talk about our experience.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I like orgasms just fine. But sometimes, as I found that day, I can go out a little further if I don’t finish us off.
So you can even take your time and the orgasm doesn’t end, it just flows through you and keeps on flowing for as long as you can stand it; and sometimes it never ends, you just have to give up.
Time is your friend even when it becomes time to go fast and furious. Try staying with that longer than you usually would. Try elongating the gasping and heaving, the storms. Keep going when you think you can’t thrust one more time, and then go on some more. Slow down, catch your breath, speed up again... wear yourself out, then take yourself back to the breath, relax, and jack yourself up again. Each time you go further. And the endless beauty of ecstasy is that, miraculously and tantalizingly, there is always further to go.
Here is a scene that Dossie played with a friend of hers:
Ropes and Points
Rope. A meditation on rope. I’m wearing fishnet, black of course: stockings and long sleeves and seriously inadequate panties, all made of skinny woven cord. The rope is industrial cotton, unbleached, softened with many washings, tumbled smooth in the dryer for hours. It is straightforward, radiates a practical elegance. She pulls a whole lot of it out of her bag.
She has worn a dress shirt for this date, with a black satin vest that outlines a lean elegance, very hot to watch her moving around, gleam of cufflinks, studs. The tie makes her look Victorian, strict, unbending.
She starts by weaving a corset around my waist, an intimate endeavor. Her arms reach around me again and again, wrapping and looping, tightening — and tightening again. While my legs and arms are still free, I am cornered, constricted at the core: organs pushed out of the way, breathing circumscribed to her limits. My reality defined by her, not me.
When the corset is tight and my breath high and nervous, she pins me down with her body and closes her mouth over mine, breathing into my lungs, sucking the breath out of me. When I figure out how to follow her lead, she pinches my nose shut, her fingers across my face, and I almost panic, dependent on her for my breath. Her eyes stare into mine, pupils like black knives. It takes all my attention to keep the air moving between us, all of my will to allow this dreadful intrusion into the pulse of my life. With tremendous effort, I give in.
Satisfied, she lifts her head, and I gasp in the cool air while her fingers explore my throat, isolate the pulse in the jugular. She watches my blood moving from the brain. She plays with the puluse for a while. She wants my blood.
My eyes cloud a bit and I feel slightly faint before she releases my circulation, turns the business of staying alive back over to me. “Keep breathing,” she says. I feel relieved, now I know what she wants.
More rope. From the corset through my crotch, knots carefully placed to press here and there, the incidental stimulus of rope drawn across my clit before it is cinched down. Rope inside my labia, pulling them apart, cinched down wide open. She regards her handiwork while I feel the unaccustomed coolness of air between my lips, those lips, my cunt in a cage, clit exposed.
I can feel her breath on me, warm and purposeful, an exquisite sensitivity. She draws the tiny patch of fishnet back over my clit, protecting it from too much too soon, and laughs at me as I shudder.
More rope. Windings around my calves, my thighs, caught behind the knees, legs bent, fixed open, in the proper position for getting fucked.
More rope. Wrists are connected to ankles, then strapped to my knees — if I struggle, I will pull my knees further apart.
And I will struggle.
She will ensure that.
She stands by the bed, looks me over and nods in confirmation: everything is as it should be. She undoes her tie, places it on the dresser, unhooks the collar stud on her shirt, and then removes her cufflinks. Gold gleams in the candle as she places it neatly on the dresser. Thoughtfully, getting each fold just even, just right, she rolls up her sleeves.
She pulls a blindfold over my eyes, carefully rearranging my hair. I fall into soft fur, soft darkness — without my sight, my only focus is the sensation she offers me.
I hear her moving, organizing some things, clicks and rustles, then she moves close again, lying on me between my spread thighs, her hands on my breasts. Her knee, accidentally or deliberately, disturbs the ropes on my cunt. Fear shoots through me, I feel so fragile, so easy to hurt. Her hands on my skin, she carefully turns me on — stroking here, pinching there, bit by bit, all of my skin comes to full alert. She slips some fingers inside my stocking, feeling around to the inside of my thigh to get to more skin, more sensitivity — her other hand holds my face.
From the darkness I imagine her staring at me the way she looks when her lust rises, brown eyes burning in her relentless glare. I feel her digging into me. Letting her touch in beneath my skin, past my bones, into the vital vulnerabilities in my gut. Catching my breath, I lift myself toward her touch.
She laughs. “Right,” she says, “Are you ready to fly?”
Earlier we had met for a hike on the beach, combing the tide for agates and sea-smoothed glass, fossil rocks and petrified whale bones. We had talked about dreams and limits, boundaries and the wild red yonder.
She said she wanted blood. I saw the hunger glowing in her eyes, watched her swallow as she salivated. I felt a flicker of her in my cunt, a release of wetness as secret sap started to flow.
Back home, we covered the bed with an old sheet and set up the needles, alcohol, towels, surgical gloves, preparing a table like a scrub nurse before surgery. Hunting for the right scalpel, I noticed an old toy — a gift from someone — gathering dust on my dresser.
“Look,” I said, “Somebody made these.” A candle in a small thick glass pitcher, purple wax, ripe for melting. She lit the wick, set it aside aside to melt for later. So there would be plenty.
Now, pulsing in the blindfold dark, I listen to the small sounds, the rip of sterile packets opening, the click of metal on the tray, the snap of rubber gloves, while my imagination wanders in the warm grip of the ropes.
She climbs back onto the bed, settles between my legs. She plays a bit with the ropes on my cunt: is she adjusting something, or just trying me make me thrash? I lie entranced, nothing is real except the reality she creates, I am nothing but a creature that responds, canvas to her brush.
She drops her weight on my torso, a pleasant constriction. I can breathe easily until she catches my throat, pressing on the pulse to play with the channel that feeds life into my lungs. Pressing and releasing, compressing and lifting up, she dances over me till I fall into her rhythm. She lifts up, breathing out loud so I can keep following, deep inhale, full breath out. She picks up a pinch of flesh on my chest — one breath, two — “Now!” she says, and a sharp pain pierces my consciou
sness, too bright, lasting a little too long as the needle finds its way in, leisurely, and then carefully out again. My body is still arched, my hands clenched, when I realize that she has finished and it doesn’t hurt any more.
“Relax,” she says, and she breathes on the needle. I breathe out, almost relaxed but her fingers are on the needle, twisting and pulling, stretching my skin — and me.
Something in me always has to fight the needles. She lets me, holds me down till the thrashing subsides.
“Now we need to bury the point.” Her progress through her desire is deliberate, meticulous, painstaking — she has a design in mind, and intends to see it perfectly etched into my skin.
She collects my breath again. I follow the sound, the hiss of the in-breath, the aah of exhalation. Somewhere in here I remember that the blindfold allows her to turn the lights up so she can see, but right then her knee hits my crotch at the same instant that the point pierces my skin and her other hand holds me down at the heart. Again I fight as the point goes in.
“Hold still, little girl, don’t mess up my design.”
Her design. I wonder what she sees? Me blind and bleeding. She amuses herself with my clit, but when I start rocking and reaching, she puts on the brakes.
“Oh, no, I am nowhere near finished. You gonna be a good girl and wait for me?”
Crushed in the silence, I can’t think of what I’m supposed to say. Is there an alternative? She climbs up on me again, carelessly tugging on the ropes, my crotch leaps, she hisses into my ear: “Yes. You say yes now.”
“Yes.” I whisper. “Yes, what?” “Yes I’ll wait.” “Yes, who?” “Yessir.”
She pinches my breast hard and vicious and before I can pull away another needle spikes into me. I bite back a scream.
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