Power Exchange: Fantasy and Reality

There’s no doubt about it, sex is a highly loaded topic. It has gigantic political and social loading. Kinks like enforced chastity push a lot of buttons. In my opinion, enforced chastity is not about sex at all. It’s about power. Now if you think that sex is politically and socially loaded, consider power. In the 70’s the mantra was sexual equality. Go back to the 50’s and it was “father knows best.” Socially acceptable power exchange is variable depending on where you are and who you talk with. Even in the heyday of women’s lib, the idea of female domination would raise eyebrows and incur political wrath.

Political correctness supplies a lot of fuel to sexual fantasy. In a world where men are expected to head the household, rich fantasies of male submission abound. Don’t believe that? Google “male submission”, “male slave”, and similar terms. There are endless fantasies guys have written. Chastity fantasies form a classic male fantasy genre. The Internet has made it very easy to read and write sexual fantasies. All this juicy reading got me thinking about enforced chastity. It simmered in my subconscious for fifteen years. During those years I reviewed chastity devices online. It was fun but too uncomfortable for me.

I was a hotbed of contradictions. I was a lifestyle dominant — I “owned” a BDSM slave for a decade. At the same time I imagined surrendering power to a strong woman who spanked me, tied me up,  and kept me in enforced chastity. I came to think of this contrast as my personal Yin and Yang. The longer I lived in the lion-as-dominant world, the stronger the submissive fantasies became. I had an advantage over most guys: I was actually living with a power exchange where I was dominant. That reality kept my fantasies from getting too extreme to ever work in real life. My fantasies were possible. I knew what could and couldn’t work. That was a big advantage.

About ten years ago my master/slave relationship ended. I met Mrs. Lion and we fell in love. She was as vanilla as they come. She never considered any of the stuff that I had been living for decades. Very fortunately, she is extremely intelligent and open minded. Within a few months of meeting, we were experimenting with spanking and other BDSM activities. Over time these activities tapered off. The reasons are buried in this blog if you are interested in digging them out. But the outcome was that we had a nearly sexless marriage. Fortunately, we are best friends and love each other more than anything, so sexual issues didn’t drive us apart. During those years, fantasy and masturbation were my sexual mainstays.

Over those years, my fantasies were very well developed so when I asked Mrs. Lion to take charge, I had a vivid movie playing in my head. Of course, the reality was nothing like my fantasies. For one thing, in my fantasy I earned my orgasms by giving Mrs. Lion many before being entitled to one. It turned out that Mrs. Lion doesn’t want orgasms right now and the she had little interest in my fantasy exchange. Most enforced chastity fantasies are filled with rules and rituals. Most keyholders are uninterested in reading the fantasy script. They want to manage things their way.

And herein lies the key to all this: A power exchange is surrender of power to someone else. Offering to surrender and then presenting the top with a list of exactly how things should work isn’t a power exchange at all. The “submissive” is in charge and expects his keyholder to follow his carefully crafted script. This doesn’t mean that keyholders don’t want suggestions. Most women take on the role to make their partners happy. They are interested in what their expectations might be. In the beginning they may even follow the script. But sooner or later they will either quit because acting out someone else’s fantasy 24/7 is just too much, or they will truly take charge and then things will happen their way. In the beginning, Mrs. Lion followed my suggestions. It didn’t take long for her to decide that she would be calling the shots. She still likes me to make suggestions, but I don’t expect them to be followed. That’s what power exchange is all about.