questionmarks

I'm doing some reading about comparative religious studies, and I came across this striking passage from a medieval Christian treatise: "I leap at Him swiftly as a greyhound at a hart [i.e., an adult male deer]... I suck the blood from his feet... I embrace and I kiss, as if I was mad. I roll and suck I do not know how long. And when I am sated, I want yet more. Then I feel that blood in my imagination as it were bodily warm on my lips and the flesh on his feet... so soft and so sweet to kiss." Mad for the blood of Jesus's crucifixion wounds! Fascinating stuff. (In one of my all-time best and sexiest dreams I sucked the blood from a wound on a beautiful woman's forearm.) Anyway, now I can't help, when I read stuff like this, but think of the Fortress, and suddenly feel in my imagination the Fortress ladies' adorable toes as if they were bodily warm on my lips... The next time I'm in NYC I hope you'll let me worship your feet, O Mistresses!

Awesome response, thank you! I think you're totally right. Since I went too far in the extreme of what I'm calling self-suspicion, it's important for me to explore the other side and to learn, as I put it, to trust myself---BUT I have to take care to stay open to the possibility that, at any given moment, there may be deeper meanings to uncover, unconscious motivations, etc. The comment I made about my "teachers" perhaps gives a sense of the sort of trauma/deprivation I experienced in childhood. There are surely still wounds yet to be healed! I've had much better teachers since way back when, thankfully, and I think I can add the Fortress to that list now. I mentioned in another thread that I'm not particularly drawn to degradation, but submission. I never felt so free to submit as I did with Mistress Koi, because it never felt safe to in other contexts at other times. I'll of course have to come in for some more experiential research but my strong suspicion is that this urge to submit is part-personality and part-personal history/trauma. Discerning between these two aspects will be helpful, though I suspect that the distinction will by necessity be somewhat arbitrary, and that they cannot be fully separated. It will be fun working through it all! Sadly I'm way on the west coast. I dont think I'll get to stop by until... January. Bah. Your presence on the forum has made me really excited to meet you. I've also told Mistress Kang that I will let her "break me in," as she put it, and I, of course, want to see Mistress Koi again, so now I'm thrilled and overwhelmed at the thought of having a session with all three of you!

What's our punishment if we're wrong??

Great questions, Mistress Fei! Sorry for the super long reply, I can't help myself I would guess that for Freud the fetish is already (and only?) an expression of unconscious motivations (mother-love and -fear, etc), and, if so, I'm not sure I buy that story. I suspect I may take some issue with his conception of neurosis, too. That said, I can't argue that repressing desire is often harmful, especially if one is repressing it out of a sense of shame or the like. I watched online bdsm videos (especially POV videos) for years before coming to the Fortress a few weeks ago, but I can't quite say when I first noticed my urges. (Actually, I wasn't totally sure that, as Mistress Koi put it, I "have a sub side" or am "what we call masochistic" until feeling the way I did, bound, looking up into her beautiful eyes as she wrapped her hands around my throat!) I was basically taught about sex by pop culture, porn, and my confused adolescent body. These were not great teachers, and I did not develop a very clear language for my sexuality. For a long time I felt broken. I attached a psychoanalytic (though probably not entirely Freudian) meaning to my sexuality. In short, I thought the desire (say, to be slapped by a beautiful dominant woman) MEANT something, and that some unconscious motivation lurked underneath it and needed to be resolved. It felt like a secret that had to be divulged. (To a certain extent, I assumed the more mainstream of my desires were hints of health and integration and the fears or less mainstream desires were evidence of dissociation or shame, etc.) I considered going to a dungeon every so often, but usually, after clicking around, everything I found online felt unsafe, plus I felt conflicted and confused, anyway. I wasn't trying to find a dungeon when I found the FF website (the look on Mistress Koi's face when I told her that I "stumbled upon it" was amazing, but it's true!). Being confronted with the possibility of living my fantasies has always been thrilling and scary. I kept clicking around the site and reading, expecting to feel that icky, unsafe feeling, but it never came. (It's a great site, and a super well-run business, I'm really impressed and grateful!) I was in Japan at the time, and I wasn't sure when I'd next be in NYC, but over the next few days I kept coming back to the site and imagining. I'd started cultivating a sense of privacy. This is part of a big effortful shift in my thinking over the last few years, but long story short, most relevant for this post: rather than treat my desire as a secret pointing to some dark, hidden undercurrent of brokenness, I started teaching myself to just take it for what it is. (And, thus, to experience it as MINE. Sharing it - with Mistress Koi, with my girlfriend, with a friend, whomever - is a choice, not a requirement.) Sometimes that psychoanalytic impulse is correct, and/or at the very least useful. But sometimes the need to look under the surface just creates the fear that there is something lurking under the surface. I was more afraid of what my desires MEANT than I was of the desires themselves. So all that (plus the tingly feeling I got when looking at Mistress Koi's page over and over!) meant that when I got back to the States, I booked a trip to New York and to the Fortress. My open exploration - or, at least, my session with Mistress Koi and my plan to return to the Fortress ASAP - has been really helpful for me. There's lots to share, but I've gone on long enough, so I'll keep it as short as I can. As far as I'm concerned I took the step to "open exploration" at the perfect time. Any earlier, and I would have interpreted my experience - positive, negative, mixed, whatever - in terms of the same suspicious structure (what secret hidden in my psyche does this point to??). Instead, it bolstered my growing capacity for just having things as they are. I enjoyed almost every second of my session with Mistress Koi, from the second she walked in to the moment we hugged, and over the next several days I watched with a mix of joy and sadness as the bite marks and scratch marks and whiplashes faded. It's not an exaggeration to say that, even after just the one session, I trust myself more, and suspect myself less. Lots of other unexpected minor benefits, too, but that's enough! I really hope you found all that interesting and helpful! Thanks for the great questions, Mistress Fei. I'm really looking forward to meeting you some time, and to you playing with me

This makes me so damn excited for my next visit to the Fortress, Mistress Kang. It was a funny thrill to see the man in the cage in person as I walked down the dark hall to the steel room - so funny and scary at the same time! I can't believe how long I'll have to wait to know what it's like to be that little man, bound however you like, obedient to you, your plaything You said you'd like to break me in, newbie that I am, and I'm (sort of, I think) ready! These next months are going to be so long.

I love this. A few times, after slapping me, Mistress Koi would tell me, "Good boy," and I didn't always know what exactly I had done well, only that I needed to keep doing it.

Ooh I'm bummed I didn't read this before my session with you, Mistress Koi! I've started working out a bit more since my first session. I want to be ready for stricter bondage next time and I hope it will please the FF ladies. (So in my case, Mistress Fei, I'm aiming to be stronger in my body and mind, and in my will ... to submit!)