House Tearmainn

Here it is, a post 4 years in the making. No, make that 35 years. I have a feeling that everything I’ve seen, done, and become in my life will inform this post in some way. I admit that the idea of committing this to written form is terrifying. Not because people may think I’m wrong or foolish, but because I know that as much as anything that I have done in the past 4 years this will become a part of the identity I am building in pais.

My views and definitions of what makes a slave are constantly evolving, and I know that isn’t about to stop. However I was rightfully and dutifully called out today on dodging this question for a long time now, and so I will give it my best shot. I hope that this will be the first of many such posts so that I can go back and see how the changes evolve.

So what is a slave? We are all at least a little conversant with the traditional definition of slavery. I like Wikipedia’s take on it:

Slavery is a form of forced labor in which people are considered to be, or treated as, the property of others. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages)

I’m a bit less thrilled with their definition of sexual slavery:

Sexual slavery is the organized coercion of unwilling people into different sexual practices. Sexual slavery may include single-owner sexual slavery, ritual slavery sometimes associated with traditional religious practices, slavery for primarily non-sexual purposes where sex is common, or forced prostitution.

I don’t believe that it need be organized to be sexual slavery, but I digress. The key component of traditional slavery is that it involves the coercion of unwilling people. These slaves at no time consented to this.

Naturally when pais asks me what a slave is she is not referring to traditional/historical slavery. I believe that what she’s really asking is some combination of “What do you expect from me?”, “How do you perceive the my role in our relationship?”, and “As Your slave, what should my identity be?”. I suppose to answer that I must first decide in what ways she is a slave.

I did not purchase, inherit, or in any legal way come into possession of her. She chose to become mine after getting to know me and deciding that granting authority to me was a safe and reasonable thing to do. So, easily enough we have eliminated the possibility that she is a traditional/historical slave. In all other ways, however, she does meet that definition.

So, we have narrowed down the scope of the question to consensual slavery. It seems to me that the definition of consensual slavery must match that of traditional slavery- she can be forced to work, coerced when necessary, and could potentially be held against her will. All of these things she agreed to, and some she had to be absolutely assured of before she would consent to be collared. Still, those are only things that can happen to a slave. What of the slaves themselves? The definition rightly leaves out any concept of what a “good” slave is, as such a value judgment is solely the province of their owner.

Hm. I’m wandering again, which undoubtedly means I’m still avoiding the question. Luckily we’re almost to the meat of the issue. What do I think of when I imagine a “good” consensual slave, and how does that play in to what pais means when she asks what a slave is?

For me a consensual slave is an objectified servant. The extent of objectification can vary widely, but I think the objectification is the essential difference between slave and servant. I also think that the concept of this objectification is what causes people, at a gut level, to reject the terms “master” and “slave” as descriptive of their relationships. I’ve recently struggled with this myself as pais is more than a consensual slave to me, I am in love with her. As such I identify her as a pet as well as a slave and have recently taken to calling her a “pup slave”. This has been invaluable to me in keeping the roles clear and maintaining that level of objectification.

I suppose the next logical question is what is the different between a “pup slave” and a “consensual slave”? Well, for me a pup slave is a consensual slave. Just one whose identity is a pet instead of inanimate chattel (by most definitions pets are chattel, so I suppose this is really a sub-set). Pets tend to get more affection, tenderness, and love than household or personal objects, and that is just how I like it. As to how this ties into what pais is really asking, I suppose it breaks down like this:

“What do you expect from me?”

I expect service, loyalty, obedience, affection, flexibility, and the kind of worship a pup gives their owner.

“How do you perceive the my role in our relationship?”
“As Your slave, what should my identity be?”

I see you as a treasured, beloved, useful working animal. Often times I still see a lot more than that, but I think that is the ideal, primary role. Of course I need more than that right now, and your ability to fulfill all of the roles I need is not only critical to us being able to live together right now, but also a very necessary part of our path toward a deeper M/s dynamic.

Of course this has all gotten very specific to my relationship with pais. I feel another post brewing about how I feel about non-pais slaves. A long time from now I may even feel qualified to speak to slavery in general, who knows?

It’s not unusual for me to be completely swamped in one area of my life at a time, two is a bit less likely, but recently I’ve been going full-bore on four different fronts. The effect isn’t much of a surprise… I’m not doing particularly well at any of them. Still, I wanted to take a few minutes before we run off to MsC to post an update for the couple of you who kindly check in here now and again.

My job is voracious, and I could easily let it eat my life whole. So far I have resisted that, but we are getting right into launch season and we have some HUGE projects wrapping up. Since I’ve been here less than a year I’m not essential staff of any of these things, though I bet next year will be a different animal.

The kids are growing and changing and prepping for another school year. It’s hard to believe the littlest is starting grade school. School was hard on us last year, and I’m mentally steeling myself for an epic battle to really engage the eldest in her school efforts this year.

Things with pais have been fluctuating pretty wildly recently. We acknowledged a while back that the NRE (new relationship energy) had wound down after an amazingly long run and that we have fallen into a few different levels of rut and bad behavior.  More than ever we need this year’s MsC to have time to reconnect and really dive into the lifestyle in ways that life just isn’t permitting at home.

The fourth front is a project I’ve been working on since we returned from last MsC, and that I promised myself I would have done for this year. It’s a M/s community web site called M/s Sanctuary, and I think I have managed to drag it’s lifeless corpse over the finish line. I’ve enjoyed working on it, but my obsessive focus on projects has certainly added to the stress around the house.

My intention was to unleash this beast of a site on an unsuspecting (and likely ambivalent) MsC this year, but I’m having some second thoughts on it. In order to get it out the door, I had to chop off several features that I felt were important to the overall mission of the site. I’ve also invited a number of people to come check it out and I think the reception has been lukewarm at best. Though I know these things take some time to warm up and a few of the right people can really engage folks. Right now I’m just not sure that things are quite ready for a critical mass of people to join in.

Nevertheless, I’ve got a flyer on CD that I’ll be taking with me, so if it seems like there’s interest I can have a few run off and see where things go. Either way, we desperately need this vacation and I can’t wait to get it started!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I’ve actually been writing drafts and letting them linger half-finished due to time or focus issues. Looking over the half-written posts it seems like most of them pertain to either communication or managing others’ perceptions of my lifestyle. Given that those seem to be the big topics among M/s folks that’s hardly surprising, I guess.

What is a little surprising is how honest and open those posts are. I suspect that might be another reason why I’m not finishing them… the only thing worse than baring your soul to the Internet and getting mocked or bashed is baring your soul to the Internet and getting silence. Still, I think I’ll re-double my efforts and put them out there.

On that note I’d like to put down some recently hard earned thoughts on transparency. I’ve had a lot of back-and-forth with pais about transparency and how/when to communicate what she’s feeling. We each have issues around this topic that certainly exascerbate the proble. She has extreme guilt over any kind of negative feeling and that means it takes her a long time to get up the steam to communicate it to me. I almost always immediately notice that there is something up with her and have a nearly pathological need to find out what’s up.

It’s been a long-running issue, stretching back to before I collared her. I’ve tried a few different things including:

• Letting her sort out as much as possible on her own, and only bring to me the things she feels she needs to. The failure here being that she feels like she should never need to bring anything to me, which eventually leads to meltdown on her part or a freakout on mine when I can see that she’s struggling and not bringing it to me.
• Ordering her to bring any issues to me immediately, no matter how small. This worked in that I knew what was up, but failed in that, well, there are a lot of things that can be brought up. I just don’t have time to handle those conversations, and she felt like crap for having to bring tiny things to me that she was completely capable of handling on her own.
• Having a time set aside to discuss any issues from the day. This worked pretty well for her, since she could filter out any small things and only bring me the important ones. Unfortunately, it also meant that if there were no important ones the small things seemed bigger. The timing was also bad, at the end of the day when we’re both tired is bad, and the worst issues tend to happen in the evenings when the kids are around anyway.
• I used to have her journal for me. This particular method of communication went through several revisions and finally ended up pretty balanced. She could write as she needed to, delete small things or things she had dealt with, take the time to express herself well and politely, and append notes when she sent it to me explaining her current state.  This was the most successful, I think, but does consume a fair amount of her time which is extremely valuable to me. This fell by the wayside as she ramped up with work (or was it finals?) and time became compressed.

I know that along the way each of those took on different forms and shapes as I changed things that were obviously not working so it feels to both of us like this topic has been beaten to death. As of last night we’re back to journaling, and I think that will work out well if I a) can wait long enough to hear what’s up to actually get to post, and b) can give her enough time to do it effectively.

I’ve been meaning to get back into the habit of posting here again lately, but have been waiting to have something to say. Today’s the day, it seems, though my feelings on the topic are conflicted.

I had an experience recently which is not uncommon. I was in a room with a group of M/s and D/s folks, enjoying a conversation regarding the role of fear in the lifestyle. One person in the group, a dominant, drove the conversation. Dominated it, if you will, by speaking up often, loudly, and consistently changing the topic back to the things he was more comfortable talking about. The bulk of the group seemed happy with that direction so I let it ride, but the methods employed put me off.

This is pretty stereotypical dominant behavior, and I’d classify it as more clueless than assholular, but it’s one of the reasons I’m loathe to call myself a dom. I don’t feel the need to dominate strangers, co-workers, friends, or groups. I’m perfectly happy to lead, but I’m not overly interested in leading a group if I feel someone is more qualified to do so. Obviously I have a need to be in charge in my “romantic” relationships as well.

The rest I see as, frankly, impolite. At the end of the evening I was left with a nagging feeling that somehow I was less of a dom for being like that. After further consideration, I think that I was less of a dominant for not calling the behavior out for the slight rudeness that I feel it was.

What I’m taking away from this is that dominance, like most any trait, can take a variety of forms. I’ll just keep trying to engender what I see as the positive aspects and move on, I think.

I made a priority shift the other day that I haven’t posted about, which is sort of ironic since what I de-prioritized is posting. I still expect to get to it several days a week, but I made a deal with myself that if the “popcorn” tag outgrew everything else it would be time to drop the daily posting requirement. So be it! Better to post something useful infrequently than crap daily. Frankly the number of people who seem to care just doesn’t warrant the amount of sleep deprevation that it was causing me.

Perhaps when things settle down in 14 years or so I’ll have more time for it. I doubt it, though.

Last night Sunday night was a long, but good, night. No post because I needed all available time with pais. It was definitely the right choice.

There is a lot in flux… we are both likely to be starting new jobs within the next week, and the hours on hers are going to significantly impact our one on one time. I am lucky enough to have choices of where to go, but any of them are likely to be more hours than I have been doing at my current job.

Plus the brief period of having violet in the household has brought a lot to light in terms of what our needs are and if/how they can be met in a household context. For all of the thought I have given this, we have still only been together 2 years and change. There is still so much to learn that I sometimes despair of ever being able to live up to my own standards.

Still, here we are. Yes, there is a lot to learn, and to do, before my full vision of the Household can be realized. Yes I am very limited in the things that I can offer to help people. That’s ok. The important thing is that we make progress, do good, and live with joy.

So where does that leave us? Well, as a household of two we’re doing fine. I’ll keep poking around, as I do. Maybe something will pop up that fits life right now, maybe not. Either way, I’ve got a path to walk and while the last couple of days has been well spent licking my wounds, it’s time to get moving again.

… and I’m twice as tired as I was yesterday. Funny, that. Let’s see if the trend continues.

Still mulling over the events of the past few weeks. Got in late, not really up to writing anything. Got a bit to say on intensity, though, when I get around to it. Hope everyone is sleeping more than I have been.

I’m sorry to say so
but, sadly, it’s true
that Bang-ups
and Hang-ups
can happen to you

- Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

girl violet has left us and will be missed. I think it was the best choice for her. They aren’t kidding when they say that LDR’s are hard, and doubly so when I have so many other responsibilities (including a couple to myself that had been completely neglected for a while). She was with us only a short time, 10 days, but I learned a lot from the experience and I hope that she was able to take something away from it as well.

A large part of what I learned is that I’m not a super hero. Sure, with pais around I can feel like one. One of the best things about this relationship is that I feel like I can do anything with that kind of support. I need to remember that feeling that way doesn’t make it true. I can’t fly under my own power. I can’t play the cello. I can’t overcome the time and distance issues well enough for that kind relationship to work for violet right now, no matter how much we both want it. 

No regrets, just lessons.

Another day of “living M/s instead of writing it”. I was amazed to find this morning how functional I was given the sleep I’ve had the past few days. It seems to have caught up with me. I will take comfort in knowing that I have written quite a lot of meaningful D/s in other formats.

Given that I’ve written and deleted at least 5 paragraphs here and just forgot how to spell “sideways”, that’s all you’re bound to get.