February 2015 (Page 5)

I’m a house lion right now. I’m between jobs. Naturally, that’s pretty stressful. It’s something I have handled before and I am sure that somewhere out there I will find something gainful to do. In the meantime I will begin some serious writing. I’ve had the makings of a novel swirling around in my head for a while. This is a good chance to see if I can take it anywhere.

Mrs. Lion has been terrific about enforced chastity. She has been doing some serious thinking about how she wants to proceed. Her post yesterday talked about her thoughts on rewards and punishments. Until very recently, neither has been part of our lives. I think the reason for this isn’t simple, but understandable. As I wrote yesterday in my post, a lot of Mrs. Lion’s difficulty with a more authoritarian role is that she has a lifetime of self training to expect little or nothing. So, she is extremely unlikely to handle setting and enforcing rules and orders for me. It just doesn’t fit her model. Her new context, rewarding and punishing me because it is something I want, seems to resonate better.

That brings me to the main point I want to make: enforced chastity isn’t a lifestyle. It is a power exchange activity that really applies to my ability to use my penis for more than peeing. It’s that simple. I regularly hear from readers that they just couldn’t do what we do because they don’t have the time to dedicate to this sexual practice. How much time does it really take? No one has ever asked me that question. Let me answer my own question.

Actual activities relating to enforced chastity take very little time from our days. In my case, I suppose it takes a bit longer to pee, but not more than a minute. Mrs. Lion devotes about thirty minutes every other day to teasing me. Those physical activities are no more than other couples spend doing sexual things. We are affectionate as usual, hold hands, talk, laugh, etc. That has nothing to do with enforced chastity.

So, time is never a barrier to enforced chastity. Drop that excuse right away! I think we both spend extra time thinking about my chastity and surrounding control issues. I think we both enjoy having those thoughts and in reality, they don’t really take time away from other thoughts we might have instead.

The bottom line is that the vast majority of enforced chastity activities take place in our heads, far above our waists. I think about Mrs. Lion all the time and it is usually not in the context of our chastity activities. I just love her and want to make her happy.

Even the kinks are mostly above the waist too. We have both been writing about my interest in discipline. My thoughts have been around ways Mrs. Lion could show her control and authority. Being the sort of lion I am, those thoughts gravitate toward sore bottoms, etc. Mrs. Lion reminded me that I could be rewarded for being a good lion too. I am really enjoying her rewards. I like working for them. My lion brain is finally understanding that authority is as equally expressed by reward as it is by punishment. I astound myself that I never considered that before. A reward could even be a spanking. I know that because I asked for that as part of my last reward. Cool, huh?

One other revelation I had yesterday is that there is a very subtle interaction that has blocked the authority scenario. I’ll give you the example that turned the lights on for me. Mrs. Lion asked me to pick up a prescription for her when I went to town. I did got to town, even to the market where the pharmacy is located. I shopped for dinner and completely forgot to get her medicine. After I got home, Mrs. Lion sent me an email asking me if I got her medicine. I wrote back that I completely forgot. She replied that it was ok, we could get it tomorrow.

See what’s going on? In a vanilla relationship where all is equal, I would be immediately forgiven my forgetfulness. But in a relationship where rewards and punishments are meted out by my keyholder, forgetting something should require a punishment. After all, I get extra play sessions for cooking and doing other things that deserve rewards, why shouldn’t I also earn punishments too.

I think that what’s happening now is good for both of us. Just as enforced chastity has awakened sex and intimacy, authority may help Mrs. Lion begin to feel more entitled and make me more attentive. Note to those who think all this is a time robber: we are not spending much time at all with both the power exchange or the enforced chastity. All this stuff is going in way above our waists in our heads.

I was going to end there, but I have to comment a bit on the “FLM” (Female Led Marriage) folks. FLM or FLR (Female Led Relationship) are both little subcultures that essentially practice what Mrs. Lion and I are testing out. In the FLM world, authority is very strong and well defined. I have nothing against that, but it isn’t us. As I see it, we are testing a power exchange that gives Mrs. Lion concrete ways to affect me sexually, and in other areas where she wishes. I am not being a lifestyle submissive. I just accept that she has considerable power that I feel sexually and sometimes painfully.

This is all very new. I suspect it won’t be easy for either of us. I can also hear Mrs. Lion in my head saying,

“You need to be careful with what you ask for. This is going to hurt you much more than it will hurt me.”

Oh  yeah. Not just a sore bottom either. The lion is losing some of his autonomy too. It’s a little scary for me. I need some extra hugs, Mrs. Lion.

Lion now has a brand new Good Lion coupon for his collection. He’s been making dinner a lot and I thought he deserved a reward for it. It’s good for an extra play session of his choosing. No orgasm, but he loves the attention and he gets to choose what kind of attention he gets. That’s handy when he feels I’ve neglected a certain type of play.

He’s still got four days left to wait and he’s very horny. The past few waits he hasn’t been grumpy at the six day mark. We’ll see if he is this time around. I’ve also been behaving myself and not giving him bonus orgasms. I’m not sure if that affects his grumpiness or not. I mean, is he grumpier when he thinks I might give him a bonus orgasm and I just don’t? Is he more resigned to the idea that I won’t give him a bonus so he doesn’t get grumpy? The grumpiness was not a problem that I was trying to solve. At some point he told me it might be better if I didn’t give him so many bonuses.

The other night I was trying to give him a ruined orgasm. Today I’m wondering what would happen if I gave him a ruined orgasm every time I played with him during a given wait. Would it make him hornier because he almost got there but not quite? Or would it let off some of the pent up steam? I think it might be worth trying just to see. I have to keep experimenting so Lion never gets bored.

My next task will be to come up with some useful punishments for him. Maybe I need to give him an assignment and if he doesn’t complete it he gets punished. That would be very easy for him to “forget” just so he does get punished. That sort of willful disobedience would get a bigger punishment. And, well you can see where that’s going. If he wants the punishment to begin with then “forgetting” would be the way to go. It’s not normally in his nature to game the system, but in the back of his mind he might think about it. I wouldn’t want to encourage that. I’ve always been of the mindset of rewarding good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior. Not that I’m always great at the rewards, but I don’t want to make people feel worse.

On the other hand, I’ve never encountered anyone who actually wants to get punished. Except Lion. After all these years I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with that. It’s definitely been a challenge. I’ll get it, Lion. I just need to keep trying.

Tuesday night I cashed in my “Good Lion” reward: non-orgasmic play of my choice. I asked to be spanked and teased. I got a good, long spanking that was wonderful and left me with a red bottom. The teasing was equally spectacular. It’s very rewarding to be a good lion.

I don’t get many of those coupons and only one naughty lion one as well. I’ve been thinking about why there aren’t more. I think that the reason is both simple and difficult: Mrs. Lion tends not to have expectations. She has told me many times that over her life she trained herself not to expect things. She said she did this to avoid disappointment. If you don’t expect something, you won’t feel badly if you don’t get it.

I can’t argue with that logic, but I think it does remove some of the fun life can hold. Me? Well, I am always full of expectations. I just can’t help myself. Over the years I have learned to accept with some grace when I don’t get what I expect. But, I have to admit that I have a long way to go in that department.

Here we go again. Mrs. Lion and I are opposites in the expectation department. Both positions create problems. In my case, it hurts a lot when I find out that Mrs. Lion had wanted something but never let me know she did. Every time I discover that I feel like a shit. Why didn’t I realize she wanted it so badly? She never intends for me to feel guilty. She does a wonderful job trying to make it clear it “doesn’t matter”.

My expectations hurt Mrs. Lion when she feels she can’t meet them. She tries hard to make my every dream come true. Of course she can’t do everything, but I can see it bothers her that she believes I am sad because she couldn’t do something I want.

We both overcompensate. I look for the tiniest clues that Mrs. Lion would like something. When I think I find something, I pounce on it with all four paws. I think that when I do this, she can feel guilty. Mrs. Lion reacts to my expectations in two ways. Sometimes she kills herself trying to be that magic genie. If she feels I didn’t get exactly what I want, she feels terrible. Other times, she simply withdraws. I don’t know why she does one or the other.

These behaviors challenge our enforced chastity. In the first place, Mrs. Lion is working very hard to make my wish come true. Over the last year we have documented the good and the bad and used this blog to help work out compromises. I love the results. We have made our marriage stronger and happier in the sex department. We both feel so good about that we are planning to continue my lockup indefinitely.

The one area of my expectations for enforced chastity that has been very difficult to try is around good lion / bad lion. Part of the problem is that we truly love each other just the way we are. I don’t have any behaviors, other than interrupting, that Mrs. Lion has cited as needing correction. I think the biggest part of the reason we can’t seem to work this area out is that old expectation issue.

Look at it this way: I have discipline expectations (typical of me) that are based on the quality of things I do for Mrs. Lion. Mrs. Lion doesn’t have expectations, so she needs to invent reasons to monitor my “behavior”. Same issue that we always have. I feel guilty that I am not doing enough. Mrs. Lion sees this as a failure on her part so she schedules her own orgasms to give me the chance to have the fun of giving them to her; not because she wants them. She makes up rules and then tries her best to enforce them. She has trouble doing that because they are artificial and are purely to satisfy my expectation.

Enforced Chastity solved one problem very nicely. It gave us a framework around which we have built increasing physical intimacy. It works for both of us, albeit in very different ways. But it works and we both think it makes us happier. It works so well for me, that I could go on with just this and be very happy.

There are some procedural issues with enforced chastity that hit every couple at some point: rationalizing the wait times. What does the keyholder use to determine them? However, that isn’t the real question at all. I think the real one is, Why does the keyholder decide how long to make him wait?

More than just holding a key
Holding the key to my ability to get sexual satisfaction implies that our relationship is unequal in some respects. My keyholder has considerable power over me. She controls my favorite toy. Knowingly or not, accepting the key was also accepting control over me.

The problem is that it wasn’t clear that this control extended beyond sexual release. In the most basic sense, having the key means making my releases  more or less frequent; controlling how long I have to wait. This is where non-sexual control creeps in. Should my orgasms become a form of currency that my keyholder uses to “train” me? I like that idea because it makes my waits something that I can understand. I like to understand things. If they are essentially random, the enforced chastity still works.

All this is a fairly new challenge for us. As we have grown accustomed to me being caged and Mrs. Lion teasing and eventually giving me orgasms, the more subtle issues are easier to see. Mrs. Lion has arbitrarily set a series of orgasm dates for me. None of the waits are terribly long. That is her wish. I have to say that this will work and work well for us. Nothing needs to change. She is doing exactly the right thing.

I have to consider my expectations. After all, just because I want her to be in charge, at least of some areas of my life, doesn’t mean she wants to do it. Nor does it mean she can realistically do it. We need to consider what each of us wants, and yes Mrs. Lion, expects. If these wants and expectations will benefit from more keyholder control, then we should go after them just the way we did with sex. If they don’t, then we should consider how we can make them happen.

We have learned one very important lesson from enforced chastity: If we work together and communicate constantly, we can solve any problem. Let’s start sharing expectations and work on making them come true.