With LeatherSIR defined as a “players” title, one of the questions that bothered me some earlier in the title year was whether my kinks and play activities measure up, whether they are “enough” for the title and to carry me through to an International win.
The title of this post came from a discussion about some local play parties where some people who are on the invite list never come to the party. When asked why, their response was that they aren’t “scary” enough to come to those parties. While we knew they wouldn’t be on the invite list if they weren’t sufficiently advanced players to be appropriate, it raised a couple interesting thoughts about our own perceptions of both our kinks and our perceived skills with those kinks.
There is always someone who plays with stuff that is too “edge” for you, and there is always someone who plays harder or “better” at the same things you do. If you limit what you allow yourself to do because you think other people will judge you and consider you to be inferior — because what you do isn’t as extreme as what they do — then you will never get the chance to play at all. This is a really hard hump for people to climb over.
(This wasn’t about my fisting parties, but as I think of it, there are guys who have been on the invite list for a while who always say to keep them on the list but never actually make it to a party. I’ll bet some are simply intimidated by the thought of a group party where there are guys who are “better” than they are — deeper, wider, just more experienced — so they don’t come and don’t get to play with a variety of great guys in a great, supportive environment.)
In the 90s and early 00s, when I was simply trying to figure out what I liked, I sampled a lot of kinks, and bought a lot of equipment (including contest auction baskets; you don’t think I bought multiple huge nasty paddles, do you?). I’ve got probably a dozen floggers, a couple spreader and bondage bars, a wide selection of cuffs, sounds, an electric butt plug, pounds and pounds of dildos, a humbler, collars, whips, a myriad of paddles and rods… you name it, I likely have it, including some rather interesting, quirky items. A lot of it, though, I never use. In fact, some of it has never been used at all, by me or on me.
A large piece of this lack of use, of course, is finding the right partner for certain equipment. You don’t spring a paddle with sharp-edged grooves cut into it on just anyone, after all.
More than that, though, as I have matured, I have also narrowed my focus. Before, I was into (nearly) everything, or said I was because I didn’t know any better, but now I have found a few things that I really do like/am good at, a few things I like enough/am good enough at, a whole bunch of things that only lightly interest me, and a few things which definitely don’t interest me.
The peculiar side-effect of that is that stuff that I do enough to know I really like and get good at also starts to seem mainstream. One friend a few years ago said “What I do is normal. What he does is edgeplay.” Another, at a recent fisting workshop, whispered “Is fisting really considered edgy? It’s always seemed normal to me.”
Which cycles back to the original question: Am I “scary” enough? For my title year, rather than trying to be into everything (a Sir of all trades), I decided to focus on two things: fisting and foodplay (and to a lesser extent, flogging — FFF!). The first being something to center around, the second something to explore. Most especially, this helps me have a kink center to bring things back to for my interview questions, my speech, and even to touch on in my stage fantasy.
Is fisting “scary” enough? The lack of need for fancy equipment and the basic truth that it’s just a (huge!) step up from fucking make fisting seem simple to some people. I often forget about my own journey, which took a couple years to complete the first leg of the “journey” (taking a fist), and then many more to repeat it at will. I see that I am still building my skills, as both top and bottom, with no end in sight — I can see the vast distances I have traveled and that the road goes ever on, and that is a good thing! While I do it often, fisting is a huge mystery to many guys, and to many others, it is an occasional event at best (so many never get truly good at it, having to always relearn atrophied skills). So yes, fisting is “scary” enough.
How about foodplay? This is a huge blank space on the map for most people, marked by “Here there be (hungry) dragons”. Most guys don’t even have a solid concept of what could be involved with foodplay, beyond two obvious images: a cucumber or other vegetable as a dildo, and licking whipped cream or honey off someone’s chest. (Or maybe that scene from 9-1/2 Weeks. And for some people, much of foodplay actively turns them off.) Like with fisting, foodplay really needs no elaborate equipment; just go to the kitchen and use what you find. Super-cheap kinky play, that confuses people. (How can Mr. S make money from this? Is it valid if they can’t?) Just from the curiosity factor — break out a Klondike bar for your scene and people will pay attention — yes, foodplay is “scary” enough.
Does flogging qualify? Almost no one would question this one, although when marked up against guys who use singletails, it starts to seem like the baby brother of “real” whipping. But that depends on what your goals are and how you implement things. I sometimes do just standard flogging, but I like to get up close and use my hands to beat on a guy (usually in concert with pop music rhythms, to abuse the brain as well as the body). I like to scratch (if I have any fingernails after trimming them for fisting), I like to bite, I like to spit. Even if I don’t raise welts and break the skin, I leave my mark.
In the end, this all second guessing the competition judges, and there are a bunch of them. Do they feel that fisting is “out there” enough, or has it become too mainstream? Do they think just flogging is passé, that whipping is where it’s at? Do they think foodplay is just dumb, not even worth considering in comparison to e-stim and suspension bondage and fireplay? Or maybe, hopefully, they don’t really care what you do — “Your kink is your kink” — so long as you do something!
Updated on August 1, 2012:
Touch-up edits and added links.
