Unsure if flake or just weird.

Some 19 year old messaged me on FetLife saying he’d like to “worship my feet online” and that this would entail him buying me things. He also commented on my note re: trading nail polish gift certificates for foot pics, saying “I’d do this!” but when I checked the email address the certificates go to, there was nothing new in there.

I wrote the guy back asking what online foot worship means to him, exactly, and reiterated that I’m more than willing to take foot pics in exchange for nail polish.

He was all “I’d love that!” but that was hours ago and still no new gift certificate. I don’t understand what he’s waiting for. Like, kid, if you wanna buy me nail polish, fucking do it, you’ve already read the note with the detailed instructions in it.

I feel like he’s waiting for some sort of prompt but I suck at etiquette so all I can think of to say to him is the previous sentence, which seems lacking in finesse. Maybe I’ll be like “Okay, well if you have a problem with the certificate-sending process let me know and I’ll try to help. :)”

Probably he’s just dangling the prospect of consumer goods in front of me just to keep me in the conversation so he can talk at me about his fantasies, though. My friend The Vixen basically got that all the time when she was a pro domme – guys who would call ostensibly to set up an appointment, ask her all about exactly what she offered and talk all about exactly what they wanted…and then not make an appointment. I mean she had a particular guy who would do this about once a week.

In other news, since I dumped him The Bunny seems to be RSVPing to even more kink events than before (like he’s literally planning on going to stuff every two or three days for the next few weeks), and he’s recently posted several semi-nude pics of himself that showcase marks other women have recently put on him (this from a boy who never showed more than an ankle or arm or a distant silhouette in any of his profile pics). The increased event attendance may simply be because he has more time on his hands with me gone, but the pictures feel like a taunt and they piss me off. Like okay dude, I know you’re open to every woman on Earth topping you except me. It’s why I dumped you. You can quit rubbing it in any time now.

Another example of attitude making all the difference.

I have a guy on FL I’ve been talking to. He contacted me because of my whole nail-polish-gift-certificate-in-exchange-for-foot-pics thing I do. He sent me a whopping $50 gift certificate to spend on whatever colours I wanted, and although he also chatted with me and stuff, he never acted like I owed him time/attention/conversation in return for the money he spent. If I drop out of touch for a bit, he doesn’t whine and sulk about it – he’ll just wait a while and then send me a casual message continuing our conversation like he didn’t even notice I was gone. Our conversations involve small talk and him subtly letting me know what he has to offer me – he knows I’m into the idea of takedown play and would like to teach me some tricks (he’s a martial arts enthusiast); he’s offered to rub my feet; he said if I want, I can teach him to apply nail polish – and that he’ll bring nail polish to learn with so he’s not wasting mine during the learning process when he’s maybe a bit more sloppy. My brain is all the fuck over the place lately due to depression issues and general life stuff so I haven’t gotten around to meeting him yet, but I’d like to.

OMG I just checked out his profile for the first time in a while, and he’s gone from just a pic of him from far away (which at least let me know he was thin-ish and not monstrously deformed in any way, even if I couldn’t tell if I’d find him hot per se) to having a pic of his head and shirtless torso (with his eyes blacked out) and SWEET MOTHER OF GOD HE’S A BRICK HOUSE. Want.

Anyway.

The other day, a guy contacted me on FL saying “Hey miss love the feet. Being that we live in the same city what would one have to do to worship them if possible.” He has no photos or info on his profile, btw. I told him I’d let him know if I’ll be at a munch or event and if he wants he can come chat with me there. I’m not sure I’ll actually follow through on this, though.

I mean here’s the thing. The second guy was polite enough – I’m not offended or anything – it’s just that he gives me no real reason to want to meet up with him. His profile is blank, so I can’t establish whether he’s cute or interesting. His feed is just a whole bunch of him commenting on pics of women’s feet, and between that and the impersonal message he sent me it seems like he’s one of these very very focused fetishists who forgets that feet even have people attached. Arguably “what do I have to do” implies “I will pay you money,” but then again maybe not; maybe if I’m all “Sure, gimme $100 and we can hang for an hour” he’d be appalled. But if he is assuming that there’s no way for me to be interested in him unless he pays, that actually kinda rubs me the wrong way. Like has it ever occurred to him that if he talked to women like human beings instead of being all “FEET PLZ?” right out of the starting gate, he might get willing takers for free?

My other thought is that maybe he looks like The Elephant Man and knows it and that’s why he’s offering to pay (if that’s what this is). And, y’know, I’m not against letting some dude I find hideous slobber all over my feet if the price is right. Although the laws around sex work have recently changed here and it’s unclear whether I’m even technically allowed to name a price. Plus for me to be at ease meeting up with a stranger I tend to need a little chitchat that makes me feel like I’m being acknowledged as a human. He’s kinda treating me like a foot-dispensing robot, which hints at a lack of empathy that doesn’t make me especially wanna be alone with him.

Oh, and before anyone says it, yes, I’d still meet guy #1 even if he hadn’t given me that gift certificate. But damn, it set my heart all aflutter that he sent it to me and instead of telling me exactly what to get (which, to be clear, would be perfectly fine – I have a list of nail polishes I like, and encourage “customers” to let me know if there’s one they’d like to see me in), he said that he just wanted to brighten my day and make me happy and that I should get whatever I wanted. So this is not about the money per se, it’s about him putting my pleasure first instead of being all about “I want I want I want” like guy #2. And quite frankly the gift did brighten my day, and now I associate this guy with the happy feelings I got from receiving my highly anticipated new shinies in the mail.

I’m…just gonna go back and look at the new pic of guy #1 some more. :D

Breaking up while poly. Also, a visit from Mine.

I’m glad I let The Bunny go. For a while there I was valiantly trying to wait until this latest anxiety episode was over, but I didn’t and now I realize that it’s not that my anxiety was making the relationship look problematic, it’s that the relationship problems were feeding my anxiety. I was freaking right the fuck out and on the verge of crying all day and then as soon as I messaged The Bunny and ended it, my freaky-outy feelings pretty much evaporated.

This is the first time I’ve broken up with someone while also in another relationship (I broke up with Minx while The Pedant and I were sporadically seeing each other for makeouts, but that’s not quite the same thing). It’s been…interesting. I’ve been identifying as poly for a few years now but I still keep finding heteronormative residue in my head – little scraps of the idea that we’re all supposed to only have one relationship at a time.

Like, I found myself expecting that breaking up with The Bunny would impact my feelings for Mine (I’m not sure in what way, exactly) and I was surprised when everything with Mine was still the same. Which is silly. I don’t love my friends any more or less after dumping a partner, so why would I love another partner any more or less?

I also struggled with how much to lean on Mine in my time of grief. On one hand, it’s not a secret that I was dating The Bunny, and Mine cares about me and would surely want to help me through this rough emotional patch. On the other hand, it feels a wee bit weird or wrong to discuss that particular sadness with him. Monogamous baggage, again: I have it in my head that it’s mean to angst about one boy to another one, because that means I’m setting up some kind of competition or mining for jealousy because with partners, like with Highlander, There Can Be Only One.

I keep having to remind myself to think of my relationships as being on parallel tracks (alongside the tracks for each of my friends and my career and my hobbies), not fighting for a monopoly on one single track. I find that this helps.

I’ll admit that I dumped The Bunny when I did partly because I knew Mine was coming over for Valentine’s Day and thought it would be really comforting to have such immediate proof that I’m loved and desirable. So…basically I used my pre-existing relationship as a rebound thing for my other, dead relationship. Which makes me wonder…rebound relationships usually spring, I think, from a combo of a freshly-broken-up person needing validation of their continued desirability and of there being a fairly steep curve of personal growth after a breakup that makes them outgrow the new partner quickly. So…will dumping The Bunny make me outgrow Mine? I wouldn’t be so worried if he were more established in my life but he’s only been around a few months (and we’ve logged much less together-time than is customary for me by this point in our relationship, due to our work schedules and living in different cities).

And! When I was monogamous I was a huuuuge believer in taking alone-time after a relationship in order to get over the previous person before moving on to the next…but that’s when I thought there was just one “relationship track” in my head. Now that I can conceive of multiple tracks, does that mean I can get over The Bunny and go on dates with new people without my Bunny angst fucking it up? I think maybe that is possible – though perhaps too difficult for me to want to do it. Even with the advent of seeing Mine just a day or two after dumping The Bunny, I had a tight leash on myself to make sure I was behaving “normally” – as in, not getting obsessively ranty about The Bunny to him, and not being overly clingy in an attempt to use MIne as a human Band-Aid for my emotional hurt.

My plan, actually, was to forcibly put The Bunny right out of my head and focus entirely on Mine for the duration of this visit. It seemed only fair for this particular get-together, since it was pre-planned and meant to be romantic.

But the first night of his two-night visit Mine asked me how I was doing with the whole Bunny thing, and I realized that he was asking out of a desire to help me through it. So I allowed myself to open up about it a little bit, and I think his being there for me strengthened our intimacy.

Mine likes helping people talk things through, by the way. He took some kind of course in it and volunteers for a support group for people suffering from mental illness. He has that quality of being able to get me to open up without seeming intrusive or judgey. It’s wonderful!

After that one ten-minutes-or-less venting session I made sure to drop the subject and focus on Mine, though. :) We had amazing sexytimes and snugglesleeps and while I was at work the next day he did my dishes. I got to come home to him and have more snuggles and then he took me out to dinner and a movie.

And here’s a fascinating thing…he knows I sometimes like boys who crossdress, and without me pushing at all…he’s kind of into it. I mean he told me recently out of nowhere that he’s been daydreaming about wearing leggings for me.

This is slightly problematic because, while I used to love the contrast of a manly body with feminine clothes, at this point in my life I really prefer girl clothes on a thin, androgynous, hairless dude-body, and Mine’s body is none of those things. I think leggings in particular wouldn’t do Mine any favours, aesthetically speaking; I think he’d just look flat-assed and love-handle-y.

But his legs are thin and muscular and gorgeous, so I bought him some red thigh-high socks and presented him with them (“I bought you a present! …Well, actually, it’s more of a present for me. But you’re the vehicle for it…”)

Now, I really did think his idea about leggings was purely him trying to indulge my kinks. But when he opened up the socks he said “I’m starting to really like the idea of being pretty for you…I actually started getting hard the moment I realized what you’d gotten me.” And ohhhhh that took my breath away and made me tingle in all the places.

I encouraged him to try the socks on and when he took his pants off he was indeed hard. And because I kink on guys taking the stereotypical “female” role, the sight of Mine in thigh-high socks made me want to peg him while his femininely-sheathed legs were wrapped around my waist. And right at that moment Mine said “It doesn’t have to be tonight, but could you bend me over and fuck my ass while I’m wearing these?” I shared my missionary-position-pegging thought and he said that would work, too, basically he just wanted to be penetrated while wearing those socks. I think he’s really getting into the idea of being objectified. Rawr. :D

I did not end up pegging Mine that night. Pegging requires a lot of energy and I’ve been sore and exhausted from work lately. But I dragged him into the bedroom and made him edge a buncha times (and then finally come) while I worked my steel butt plug in and out of him. And then I decided to try to get myself off via HItachi even though my sex drive was feeling kinda wonky. It was slow going at first but then I got Mine to add some finger penetration and apparently that was the missing link because POW. Or actually POWWWWWWWWwwwwwwPOW. :D

But yeah. Mine never used to really think about crossdressing one way or the other, and also by the way used to have sounding as a hard limit, and now – inspired by my interest – he’s curious about both. Most times when I’ve played with a sub, I ran into the issue of him not liking many of the same things I liked and/or not wanting me to go as hard as I would have preferred and/or being really up-and-down with whether he felt like engaging in BDSM at all on any given day. Mine is consistently down for play, has a huge pain tolerance, is up for trying most things, and apparently expands what he’s willing to try as we delve further into things. It’s amazing.

Getting back to my original topic of The Bunny…I realize now that my angsting over him must have been using up a pretty big chunk of my mental resources because now that the relationship is done, I suddenly find myself in the mood to make art for the first time in ages and generally feeling calmer and happier. Although I’m still quite positive that my meds have stopped working and I’m gonna try to get that back in order ASAP.

BAM.

Yeah, fuck it. I know I’m anxious and underslept and PMSing but underneath it all, I know The Bunny and I do have issues.

And the more I thought about him texting me that he was going to the sex club, the more pissed off I got – like why the fuck would he tell me that, knowing I was starved for both sex and kink from him? I don’t expect him to be celibate, or to meter out sex and play exactly equally to everyone in his life, but don’t rub my face in the fact that you’re gonna go out and pursue random play.

Plus there’s some “men in suits and slutty naked chicks” play party he RSVP’d to twelve days ago.  So much for him just not having any drive and it’s nothing personal.

Plus he made some minor crack today via text – something that basically smugly acknowledged that he knows I think he’s hot – and my brain just kinda collapsed. Like Jesus Christ why not just outright go “Ha ha, you want me and I don’t want you!” and stick out your tongue at me?

Anyway. The feels were too much and I couldn’t wait the handful of days it would take to see The Bunny in person. I just sent him a FL message spelling out that I’ve tried to be patient but a) these issues have been going on for a long-ass time and b) it seems pretty obvious it’s not actually a general sex drive thing and really he’s just not attracted to me. I said that things don’t seem likely to ever get better so I gotta bail on the relationship but maybe, hopefully, after I take some space to regroup we can go basically back to what we have now (snuggling and watching cartoons, mostly) except without me wanting more.

He replied almost immediately, saying he understands and will give me the space I need. He didn’t put up any fight whatsoever. And jeez, I had a feeling my breaking up with him would be a relief for him but it’s a bit of a kick in the teeth to actually be right.

Well, whatever. If he’d promised to do better in future (like he’s assured me before) I might have been tempted to cave and keep dating him and then I’d be trapped in limbo still. This is easier in the long run.

Still. I don’t get it. Other times that we talked about the impotence thing, he could’ve just said “Yeah, sorry, not feelin’ it anymore” but instead he always made a big thing of wanting to get to the bottom of the problem and fix it. And he’s been the one initiating almost all our get-togethers for ages now. And he’s continued doing all the same sweet things for me that he always has, aside from anything sexual. I feel misled. And confused.

But I also feel kind of relieved.

Fuck.

My anxiety seems like it’s probably back. I don’t know if it’s because I’m underslept today or PMSing or if my meds are starting to be ineffective (as has happened with every antidepressant I’ve ever taken) or what.

There’s a grain of truth to my twirling thoughts. The Bunny hasn’t initiated sex or kink in ages (and I’ve given up asking for these things) and the last bunch of times we did sporadically have sex, it felt disconnected and/or his erection failed. I asked about the state of our sex life a while back and he said he’d just temporarily lost his mojo (citing his usual generic-but-maybe-true excuse of job stress).

Yesterday he texted me mentioning that he was gonna go check out a theme night at the local sex club. This triggered a feeling much like the time I asked my husband (who hadn’t fucked me in almost a year, claiming a low sex drive) how often he masturbated and he said “a few times a week.” Like, you know I’m starving for sexual attention and you’re spending your drive elsewhere?!?!?

I reined in my paranoia and told myself that maybe The Bunny’s sex drive has been low – with everyone, not just me* – and now it’s coming back. I texted him “So does this mean your sexual mojo has returned?”

He replied something like “Let’s see if you remember how to hit me the next time you’re over. [devil face emoticon].” So that’s good; he was going to the sex club hoping for action but also offered a little something to me. Although the possible issue now is that him repeatedly rejecting me before has made me kinda lose my sexual and D/s mojo with him.

Mine, for instance, will tell me ahead of time when he has some sort of limitation. i.e., “I just had dental surgery to remove an abscess from my jaw so please don’t slap the right side of my face for like two months.” If he doesn’t give me a heads up that something is amiss, I can pretty much go ahead and rough him up however I want. And when I ask him to do something, he’ll reliably do it unless there are extenuating circumstances, which he explains to me (like the time I asked him to wear his butt plug the next time he went out, and he said “that will be lunch with my mother. I love the idea of secretly wearing the plug but could I please do it some other time?”

Basically, the assumption between me and Mine is that he is submissive to me. Anything else is a deviation from the norm and needs to be mentioned.

That’s the crucial difference between Mine and The Bunny; with The Bunny there is no default, he just does what he feels like. It doesn’t occur to him to give a heads up when he’s not up for BDSM play because he never got in the habit of thinking that was our thing, I guess. And I thought he was a sub to me, or at least a bottom, and would go to do something dominant/toppy and he’d just…slap me down out of nowhere. It just doesn’t feel like I have any authority over him whatsoever. At most, I’m a service top to him. And I don’t even mind being a service top to someone sometimes, but I guess with him I’d expected more, and there’s all this hurtful baggage there, and…yeah.

Earlier in our relationship, he’d ask me to spend the night and we’d both come like five times while I was there. On one notable occasion we took a post-coital shower together and he got horny again already and jerked off onto my hip under the hot running water. He used to offer to carry things for me, and kneel at events to take off my boots for me or massage my feet. Now he rarely asks me to sleep over (and only does because I pointed out he’d stopped, I think), rarely can get an erection with me, goes all passive and closes his eyes any time we’re trying to get sexual, hasn’t orgasmed in my presence in I-don’t-know-how-long, and when we were at an event a while back and I asked him to help me put my boots on he appeared to hear me but didn’t do it.

Things really seem like they’ve gone sideways, and I don’t know why and I have a feeling when I finally break down and confront The Bunny** he won’t know, either.

But still. My musings on this subject have a histrionic edge to them that feels really damn familiar, and today I felt compelled to stalk his FetLife profile for the first time in weeks or months (to establish that, yup, he’s been RSVPing to all kinds of kink events; it does seem that he’s into kink but just not with me. Again.) So this is indeed seeming like chemical-based anxiety rearing its ugly head.

So now I’m afraid to talk to The Bunny about any of this because I’m not sure how rational I am or how calmly I’m capable of approaching things. Which sucks because it does need talking about (even when my anxiety issues were in remission I knew there were things we needed to discuss).

Further complication: his birthday is coming up and I may not have a chance to see him in the meantime. And I’m a believer that birthdays should be happy times if at all possible. So I may have to bottle this up for god knows how long.

By the way, he came over the other night after I had a super busy week at work. He brought homemade soup, a pair of my lamps that he’d rewired, and toys for the cats. We watched NetFlix on my couch and he gave me massages and pettings. He also got naked (which he normally never does – sometimes he’ll peel off some layers, but if he doesn’t want sex the boxers stay on as a literal and symbolic barrier to me getting any cock). And at times he started slapping his half-hard cock against my thigh – usually a hint that he’s looking for action – but when I kissed and groped him it sorta never went anywhere, and his caresses of my body blatantly detoured around my pubic region. The second time he cock-slapped me, I started semi-seriously jerking him off, and after a minute or two he politely disengaged and said he had to go home. WHAT IS THIS I CAN’T EVEN. I didn’t point out his mixed messages because I didn’t wanna scare him off from ever being naked with me again – I love nakedsnuggles in their own right and don’t need them to lead to orgasms. His usual leaving-the-boxers-on thing frustrates the shit out of me, actually, and I’d be glad to see it go even if we still weren’t having any sex. I just wish I knew what he wanted. I feel like I’m too flinchy about initiating anything now, and he’s always been kind of passive about it, so we’re doomed to get stuck in a stalemate.

And my paranoid anxietybrain is trying to tell me that the gifts and the hours of naked snugglepets aren’t proof that he’s into me, they’re overcompensation for him not being into me anymore. Although at the end of the night he said he hoped we could hang out later this week, so if he’s trying to pull a fade he’s fucking it up pretty badly.

I don’t usually break up with someone until I pretty much hate them, I guess because I know my anxiety might lead me to rash decisions so I want to make sure things are reeeeeally not going well before I drop the hammer. But I’m having one of my periodic urges to let him go. I’m not sure how to do it, though. How do you break up with someone you love and are attracted to and still have fun with but there’s just no spark anymore? How can anyone ever leave that security?

And anyway maybe if I can get my brain on track I won’t feel like bailing anymore.

*I purposely have not asked how things are going with his other partner. I learned my lesson from the “Hey, Husband, how often do you jerk off?” debacle.

**I was hoping the sexual issues would clear up if I just gave him a little time and space. Certainly it wouldn’t give him erections if I was all “So, sex now? No? Why not? What’s wrong with you?” every time we got together.

More porn thoughts

My brain is still all buzzing with foot-porn ideas. I have a talent for understanding, to some extent, the tension behind a fetish even if I don’t have the fetish myself. I’m able to film a clip, watch it, think “this part really works but this part does not” and re-film it so it’s much more effective (well, I guess I don’t know this for sure; I haven’t focus-grouped anything yet. But I’m feeling confident).

The ever-delightful leighalanna has mentioned before that sex work clients usually have a taste for tacky, unsophisticated lingerie; I’ve decided that this advice, for me, probably translates to “don’t bother doing any really fancy pedicures. Just use bright-coloured polish. Probably especially in ‘girlie’ shades like pink or lavender.” Ms. Alanna has also noted that fetishists, by their very nature, have big-time tunnel vision – they can’t get enough of their specific thing and are totally fine with lots and lots of repetition*. I was worried that I would quickly exhaust all my foot-porn options and not know what else to do, but to a certain extent I can probably do almost-identical videos of me rubbing my feet together and flexing them and stuff and as long as I vary the background and/or nail polish and/or the things I’m saying, it’ll be fine.

I also remembered that with full-body porn, shit’s usually pretty much the same. Every chick has two tits and a vulva and an ass and generally does the same limited range of things with them, but straight dudes never get tired of watching. Even a lot of lingerie has a certain sameness to it – a bra and a pair of panties in different colours and materials and maybe slightly different cuts. Our male-gazey media has trained me to accept that an infinite repetition of boobs and crotch encased in different fabrics is still sexy, and I came to accept this without questioning it, but I haven’t been indoctrinated to believe that feet are sexy so I’ve been slow on the uptake there.

But yeah. I’m gonna use the same principles for my foot stuff. “Lingerie” of different kinds – toe rings, anklets, flip-flops…perhaps some one-off items I sew myself that hide, accentuate, and reveal various parts of my feet the way women’s sexytime clothes alternately hide, accentuate, and reveal different parts of the body.

Plus of course there’s the audio part of things. I kick ass at dirty talk. Plus I actually am dominant and love having attention paid to my feet – no strained, obvious acting here. This may help differentiate my clips from some of the other foot-porn out there.

We’ll see. I haven’t uploaded anything yet – gotta figure out some technological shit first. But I have high hopes.

*Derp. I knew that – I would happily watch pretty, slender, androgynous boys parade around in eyeliner and stripey thigh-high socks all damn day, provided the boys and/or socks changed from time to time.

Happy things.

I have discovered that The Dreaded Hug has a polar opposite – I guess I’ll call it The Unhug of Gratitude.

This is when one of my art instructor boss-people is so thrilled with my work that they’re practically doing a pee-dance and there’s a palpable sense that they want to hug me but won’t because they know it wouldn’t really be appropriate.

I love everything about this phenomenon – the fact that the person is so happy with me, the fact that they continue to maintain professional boundaries – all of it. And to be honest, I would hug people at that juncture if they initiated it. It never feels like it’s coming from a pervy place with them; it’s always a “you were so great and I loved drawing you and OMG THANK YOU for calling when you thought you might be late because some models don’t do that and then I get stressed out” place. But they don’t initiate and I’m not gonna be the one to venture in that direction, so things never go further than them jittering all over the place and giving me multiple compliments and me being all “That’s so lovely to hear, you’re so sweet, it’s been a pleasure.”

One of the people with whom I had Unhug of Gratitude moments ultimately chose to express his gratitude via a $5 tip instead. That’s even better. :D