Enigma

Winston Churchill once said that Russia was "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.  That would be me.  My sexual identity collides on a regular basis with my understanding of my own life and the world around me, and I end up a pure mess.

The sexual identity part ought to be simple enough, especially in this age of "Fifty Shades of Gray."  I am a sexual masochist and submissive... but only under very specific circumstances.  It is true that I eroticize pain, and that clearly puts me in the masochistic category, but it is a little more complicated than that.  For me, pain is just pain -- and pain served up all by itself, cold, with nothing driving it; nothing to justify it...  well, that just hurts and it pisses me off.  I am turned on by pain when it represents control.  I will submit, and submit at stunningly intense levels if it "pleases" a partner who is in control.  I will fantasize all sorts of spectacular miseries at the hand of an imagined dominant

partner who demands it, and holds me in place with his will.  It is the control that takes me there, and then it is the pain that tells me that I have relinquished the control, and then it is that sense of voluntary surrender that pushes my buttons.  Complicated.

For a few years, I was there.  I was able and willing to play at that level, and I'd found a partner who wanted that as well.  Sort of.  Actually, I think he mostly wanted the sadomasochistic element.  The responsibility of control was too much.  When the control crumbled around us, then the whole dynamic shifted, leaving us where we are today.

Now, I engage with him in sadomasochistic play, but I hold all the control.  I can stop the action at any point if it isn't going along just swimmingly.  He is quite considerate of my moods.  We're polite like that.  So, I am left to decide, at every step, at every stroke, if I am willing to go on.  Now I find myself trying to please myself instead of him.  And that is a challenge.  Because the beginning of a spanking often just hurts.  The endorphin cocktail that makes it all flip into something hot and sexy isn't there in the beginning.  In the beginning there is just endurance ... and the exercise of power.  In the beginning, I have to make the calculation:  "is this going to turn into something good, or is it just going to hurt for no reason at all?"  Because, it won't make any difference to him, and my own menopausal sexual response is pretty unreliable.  On any given day, the odds are far greater that I will not get off, than they are that I will.  It takes work, and luck, and some mystical mix of factors that I can't even identify to get me there.  No one is more surprised than I am when I achieve sexual release during sex these days.

Given all of that, I can talk myself out of it, before anything much happens.  If he starts in, and it seems tougher than I expect, I can  (and sometimes do) bail out before we have really started.  And then, of course, I wonder if I made the right call.  For me.  For him.  For us.  And there is the rub, ultimately... it is all in my hands; all in my power to control it.  I have the control.  And with the control in my hands, the key that unlocks the door to my sexual response is very, very unlikely to swing open.  So, I am left disappointed and empty and bereft.  I can't figure out how to untangle that tangle.  Seriously.

Maybe the only hope is that I will eventually get old enough to just not give a fuck.  Would that be better, I wonder?  Is it even possible to live long enough to just not care...  about sex and intimacy and that connection that only comes when two people cross over the barrier of skin and really touch one another?  I cannot imagine there will ever be a day when I don't long for that.  Ever.