Trigger warning. Spellcheck tells me that the words “trouser snake” may be offensive to my readers. Consider yourself warned. Rather thoughtfully, spellcheck has not proffered any alternatives.
My date said, “I kind of see you as being maternal. I pick up a lot of mommy energy from you.”
“What?!” I said, not what I wanted to hear. I mean, who wants to date their mommy? Okay, hypocrisy alert. Who wants to date their baby? Cut me some slack please on the fantasy channel.
“I mean, you cook, you like to care for people, you like to take care of me,” she said, her eyes sparkling away. I was melting.
“But I’ve always thought of myself as a baby,” I protested very softly. She paid no heed.
“That’s the energy you put out. Caring,” she said. I sighed.
“Maybe it’s the oestrogen.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, “from what I know, you were always like that.”
“But that’s how I express love. Caring for people, giving to them, taking care of them, fussing over them, making sure they’re okay, especially fed. Well fed.”
“Exactly.”
“But I really am a baby,” I protested.
“A very good baby too,” she smiled, “one who has achieved a lot in their life. Written books, had jobs, gone to work, done difficult things. A very competent baby.” I couldn’t help but smile.
“It’s hard for me to imagine myself as a mommy.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
I go to bed at 20:00 on most nights. This is a holdout from my days of active service to a catfish, but my two subsequent dommes, one remote/video and the other in person decided to keep it in place. “No, I think I rather like it,” one said, “I think you should be going to bed now.”
But it was already 23:00 and this woman was setting a new trend with me. At least when she comes over. The last time I nearly fell asleep on the couch next to her. Talk about submissive fantasy material. I was flirting like crazy only the flirts became yawns became drifting in and out, and it felt like drifting in and out of her spell. We have yet to stop enchanting each other before 2 am on the occasions where she has “walked me home”.
This time we were discussing the submissive partner, and she was wondering why all the men who are attracted to her are just like me, not willing to make a move, fundamentally submissive. I tried to explain my stance in political existential terms.
“It’s about respect and shame. I was never like other men. Now I have removed all doubt. Not asking first, even thinking it, was problematic.”
“Just like this guy I am seeing now,” she said. [By the way, this is going poly. And what did another woman say to me? ‘Poly doesn’t work’. Tell that to the judge]. “He said the same thing. You see, there are others like you.”
“No. I am unique,” I insisted. She laughed. “Maybe you put out really dominant energy,” I noted truthfully.
“It would explain a lot,” she said.
“That’s what attracts us. We’re like moths. Drawn to you.”
“I’m going to do an experiment on you,” she said, pulling out a large rubber ear with words written all over it. She shook it at me and laughed nervously. But no, I take her seriously. She’s the reflexologist, and yes, whether she knows it or not, she already dominates me.
In fact, as I sit here writing, I still wear her experiment. After getting me to talk at length in monologue about something which was really important to me—and guess, my dear reader what that was—she found just the spot to apply it. What she had been doing was watching how my ear moved as I spoke, looking at the way different areas responded to my words and feelings. The ear, like the feet and hands, is filled with nerve endings, and are core to reflexology. Where the doctor goes is driven in part by the underlying issue.
She said, “I want a man to jump my bones. I don’t want him to ask. I want him to be an animal.”
And I said, “I can be an animal, I just need to be told.” It was a fun conversation! Verbal tango. In my life, there were only two times that I was not pounced on by the woman I was with. The first was a beautiful relationship that geography interfered with, but which was more than I could appreciate at the time. She was a wonderfully loving and complex woman who was truly out of my league both sexually and spiritually, only I didn’t fully know it at the time. But on some level I did, for when she took me to the plane to say goodbye (you remember those days), I suddenly wept like a baby. And boy did I weep. I cried all the way from New York to Paris. All the damn way. And then I got food poisoning.
The second time was with my wife, and we know where that got me. Fundamental incompatibility. My lawyer says, “please don’t marry the same again. That’s what all my clients do.”
But I am also thinking that being trans, having oestrogen coursing through me, doesn’t absolve me from seeking consent. In fact, my gender shouldn’t have anything to do with it. And for those (mainly women) people who want to have someone jump their bones, courting enthusiastic consent involves being up front. I don’t want to lose great friendships over misunderstandings. Sometimes a deep attraction can actually enhance a friendship rather than sow confusion.
“I need better access to your ear,” she said, tucking a warm blanket underneath her lotus-position as she sat on the couch. I sat next to her. “Lower,” she said. I went to the floor. “Perfect,” she intoned, picking up a metal tool about the size of a pencil. She showed me the various instruments, which included magnets, an electro-shock device, and these little sticky things with metal-magnetic nubs inside them.
She watched me talk, and then once she had seen what she needed to see, she came in close, and started poking my ear with the metal instrument. Some places felt fine, and others really hurt. She was unblocking me. The topic? Freeing my feminine sexuality…allowing me to step into my lioness.
Oh, weep for Mr. and Mrs. Bryan!
Ogden nash
He was eaten by a lion;
Following which, the lion’s lioness
Up and swallowed Bryan’s Bryaness.
After she had finished hurting me, she taped a tiny magnet in my ear. “Push on it,” she said. I did. “Ow,” I said.
“Good,” she said, “I want you to do it often.”
“When do I take it off.”
“You don’t. It will fall off when it’s supposed to.”
Do you know what happens to me when I push it? Instant sub space. I’ll have to ask her if that’s what she meant to do.
After our little torture session we talked about BDSM, me as a /s, her as a D/, a gay couple who are friends of hers where he is a professional Dom who likes to heal people, “just like you,” she said. She wants me to meet him to learn the dommly arts.
“But I don’t like men,” I said, “and I could never dominate a woman.”
“We’re just going for a walk,” she said, “it needn’t be existential.”
“Okay.”
Who says my life isn’t wildly and unexpectedly beautiful. But am I getting any closer to my New Year’s goal of canoodling my way through 2023? I don’t think so, and in that regard, I haven’t changed a bit since I was a teenaged boy, awkward and shy. That means that my love of innocence hasn’t gone away…my own that is…and might explain why my experience with that primal domme was actually rather fun, even if I’m not willing to admit it.
Separately, I got on the phone this morning with a young trans woman who I am helping with her career. In truth, I am simply opening a door, and what happens on the other side is up to her. But I learned this morning that she was struggling to even get to the door, let alone walk through it and shine. Lot’s of excuses.
She wants something from me. She has from the start. To be my girlfriend. Or whatever. But needy is a turnoff. I have written about her before. Perhaps only obliquely. The victim narrative. The danger of the victim narrative is that it become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I don’t know what she was looking for. What she got was tough love. “I’ll cancel the meeting,” I said.
“Would that be all right?” Wheedle and whine.
“I’m sure it will be fine. She’s very busy.”
“Maybe we can push it back a few days.”
“Maybe. I have no idea.”
“What do you think?”
“Generally, I think it’s good to keep commitments.” I was going to give her anything.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Listen, I’m busy too. I have someone else here now, we’re working, so I could use the time.”
“It sounds like it isn’t convenient for both of us.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that if you decide to cancel, we’ll get on with things, and I have no idea whether and when the door will be open again.”
After a wishy-washy conversation of 10 minutes, we concluded to do nothing, only I was going to cancel. Then she called back two minutes later and said she would come. Good choice. I’ll believe it when I see it.
But it got me thinking on the same lines for the same time in 3 days. We make our own luck, our own fortune, we make our own lives. Yes, privilege exists, it is real, but within the context of where we begin, we always have choices, and it is how we make those choices that dictates how we live.
This is not the first time that we have had this kind of interaction. She is submissive. She also knows I am. She also triggers the mommy energy in me, and so I do help her. But I don’t want anything from her. How could I? And I wonder a bit if this is what my ex-Domme felt like towards me. I see that I can help her, I seem to want to help her, I am helping her, at least insofar as she is reaching for help, but being wanted by someone who is needy, is desperately uninteresting. I feel like a cat in more ways than one.
What do I wish for her? Strength. Success. Self-control. Discipline. She needs to grasp the nettle of her own life. I can’t do that for her, nor can anyone else. Until she does, she will remain a victim, feeling sorry for herself, not achieving anything close to her potential. But I make the investment because I think she can do it, that she can learn to own herself and her life. And should she succeed, then if she wants to be with me I will know she comes from a place of power, of her own power, not one of need, dependence, and submission.
I don’t think I can become a dominatrix. Men gross me out. Sorry boys. But I can’t separate my years of self-punishment and my having had to inhabit a male body from my feelings. I would never feel right dispensing dominant energy towards a woman. Naked cuddling is more my thing. Anyway, once I up-cycle my trouser snake we can just concentrate and touch and tongues. There’s a lot to play with there.
Beyond Non-Binary 
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