Charlie J Forrest

Disclaimer

I am not in any way qualified or insured to provide instruction on how to perform bondage, the following article is for illustrative and debate purposes only anyone choosing to participate in activities involving the activities shown do so entirely at their own risk.

Right, let’s have some fun.

I had a couple of Twitter conversations recently about unusual or improvised bondage (see my post on suits for what immediately came to mind). This also led tangentially to the old stories of Japanese police being trained to restrain someone using their belt, and onto general belt based bondage. I thought it might be interesting to offer my thoughts and knowledge, limited though it currently is. If you know anyone or any source of more information on this I would be delighted to hear as I think this is an underserviced aspect of shibari that has a lot to recommend it.

Differences to rope bondage:

Compared to traditional rope bondage there are a couple of (mostly) obvious differences when working with belts.

Belts are wider: I talk more about this below but this offers advantages (more comfortable, better support, less likely to hinder circulation) and disadvantages (knots and, well, other things).

Belts are shorter: I’m using a belt that’s about 250cm long. I think the longest ones readily available only reach to about 3 meters, and a lot of that gets used up in knots really quickly. More importantly, with normal rope you can easily add length by simply adding another length onto your current one. This is nowhere near as easy with belts. Plus, if you want to go down the traditional route, there’s a fundamental limit of two belts (yours and the one of the person you’re restraining). This means that a lot of the nicer looking forms (full body harnesses etc) are probably out of reach… and now I’m thinking about that scene from the Fifth Element…

Materials:

For the purposes of this article I’m using a spare white martial arts belt that came with a dogi.

Source: The internet (seriously, everywhere!)

Belt. Other brands of martial arts equipment are available.

It’s a not too-wide (1-2 inches) multi-stitched cotton belt. About as bog standard as they get. This one is about 250cm long (the label gives the size of the gi, not the belt).

I also make use of my wrist and a suitcase, but they’re less important.

Basic Knot:

The most important thing with any form of tying is obviously the knots. Belts offer a couple of interesting differences to rope. Firstly, as a belt is much broader there will be considerably more friction for even a very basic half hitch.

Basic half-hitch. Note the direction of the lapping end of the belt.

The other thing to note about knotting with belts is the direction of the lapping parts. Try not to have them completely change direction as this will tend to pull the entire knot loose. In the photo above note how the lapping piece is forming a sort of spiral, roughly mirroring the direction of the piece it laps. As a general rule of thumb a knot should, ideally, lie flat. This generally ensures your getting the most friction to hold it, plus it looks nicer.

Of course, once you have the basic knot, you can always tuck in the end to tidy the look and add a bit more friction for security. In this photo the knot is on the inside of the wrist (because tying yourself up can be difficult), but putting it on the outside makes it much harder to escape from.

Advanced Techniques

Is it an exaggeration to call the rest of these techniques advanced… yes.

Changing Direction:

This is an interesting problem I’m grappling with of how to secure a loop around someone and change the direction to work on something else. If we have two ends of belt like so…

We can’t just hook them around each other as with normal rope as this will cause the belts to stand proud.

Proud belts, probably not good.

This looks messy and, in all likelihood, won’t be very comfortable to wear.

One possible alternative is to make the direction change using a half-hitch Like so.

Belt end from right half-hitches to pass downwards.

But this only really works for one end. You can try to do the same with the other end but you end up with the following.

Both ends half-hitched to change direction.

I don’t like the look of the resulting asymmetry and, more importantly, it pulls unevenly on the (in this photo horizontal) belt it’s branching from.

I’m still very much puzzling over this one and would love to hear people’s thoughts on it.

Hooking:

If one were, theoretically looking to hook strands around a vertical belt, as in a normal rope harness, this can be done relatively easily by just ensuring that one goes over, one goes under.

hooking for karada or similar.

This one has a tendency to roll the central vertical belt, but at least remains contained by the two looping around it.

More elaborate/fuller techniques are probably going to have to wait till I have a model to work with, but hopefully this should be enough for some folks to start playing with.

Please let me know what you find does and doesn’t work and if you know of any resources out there (as there almost certainly are) that provide more/better information I’d love to learn from them.

Sexual awakenings can be a touchy subject. Mainly because it rarely falls in line with comfortable legal milestones like 16 or 18. Leading to situations where some websites have to explicitly tell people not to talk about it for their own legal protection.

Well I’m not writing this on there, and what’s the point of adhering to Bacchus’ first law if not for things like this, so here we go, anyone who doesn’t want to hear about a small fat boy with a stiffy, stop reading now.

The first inkling I got that I was ‘kinky’ was when, as a child, I read a history book about criminal punishment, torture and execution. The book was titled “Guilty” I’ve had a poke around on Amazon but, despite having a vivid recollection of the title and cover, can’t seem to find it. I read it, many times over, lying on my bed with a stiffy poking uncomfortably into my belly. I don’t think I could have told you then, and I’m even less sure I could tell you now, whether the excitement of reading this book was from a sense of “ooh, that looks like fun to do to someone else!” or from a sense of “wouldn’t it be terrible to have that done to me!” All I knew was that I liked it, and liked it more than maybe anyone else realised (I swear the school librarian eventually gave up on getting that particular title back).

This was in the pre-wanking days, that period of my development where I understood that sometimes my penis got hard, and this was by and large, a pleasant sensation. The notion of this going any further than that didn’t arise until I was well into my teenage years. However, looking back, that was probably the earliest thing I could point to where that mix of dread and fear and excitement first reared its head.

You might be able to tell from the header image… and background image… and those photos I put on Fet-Life, that I like wearing a suit. I’ve never really bothered to articulate why I do, until very recently.

Exhibit Unadorned recently posted an interesting piece giving his take on the matter (I look and feel fucking sexy in a suit so nerr nerr… I may be paraphrasing but, go read his article yourself, in fact you should be reading  his blog in general, he uses much better words than me). I agree with most of what he says and, if something works for you, even if it’s a too-tight Chuck Norris vest and a pair of blue speedos, then work it baby!

What spawned EU’s, and indeed, this, article is a pair of tweets from the ever-cheery Dom Signs (btw the scars are healing nicely).

“Men that wear suits are so very seldom at the top of the food chain… it is the people who dress like they have only £10 in their pockets…to me a suit is a sign of submission to the corporate world”

Wait but… hold on a second.

First up let me point out that Signs quite rightly prefaces his latter comment with “to me…” so let me offer a counterpoint by explaining what a suit is to me, and why I like wearing one. This isn’t an advocation for everyone else to wear one (frankly it’s too much competition, I like standing an outside chance of being best dressed pervert in a room), but rather an attempt to articulate some of the less obvious aspects of wearing a suit.

I’m not the top of the food chain, nor do I want to be. I’m not an apex predator, I’m a scavenger, an outsider. The hyena slinking into view as the lions collapse into a flatulent heap, the feral cat that’ll rip Mr Nibs’ ear off if he shoves his way into my territory. Or at least I like to think I am. In reality I’m probably a gazelle going through an existential crisis.

Anyway. To me a suit isn’t s declaration of being the most powerful person, a suit is camouflage. I used to wear a suit for work and, when attending events in the evening, it was always easier to just go as-is. A suit is a garment that attracts pretty little attention anywhere it goes. It’s unlikely to be frowned upon and, in some circumstances, will back up your desperate pleas that you’re an honest good person really and this is all just a terrible coincidence… but I digress.

What a suit also is, is menacing. not in a “I’m the most important person rah rah rah” way, but something subtler, more insidious.

A suit comes with two things, a belt and a tie. It only takes a small additional notch at the wrong end of the belt and suddenly you have there, on your person, all day every day, everything you need to knock together an improvised gag, wrist restraint, hog tie etc. Most people don’t usually think about that, but once the seed of that idea is planted… it can be a lot of fun.

The other thing is this: Think about the most stressful experiences in your life. I bet a good portion of those will be, on some level, meetings with people. Bank Managers, prospective employers, lawyers, plain-clothes police officers, all of whom wear suits. A suit isn’t a display of alpha male dominance, but it does trade of a certain amount of alienation and fear.

For a lot of people the greatest fear they’ve felt in their life has been someone in a suit.

There’s an old saying, no honour among thieves. You’d be mistaken, if you look at some of the rhetoric in the literary community for thinking that this statement applies equally well to erotica. No honour (by which they mean, art, craft, quality control etc) amongst smut peddlers. It seems to me to be an extension of the needless snobbery between ‘literary’ fiction and ‘genre’ fiction.

It’s an attitude that bugs the crap out of me. The number of supposedly liberal open-minded friends I have who, upon hearing I write erotic fiction, assume that I’m the writing equivalent of a battery hen and ask me if I find it soul-destroying.

Soul destroying?

Seriously?

Are you fucking mad?

I’ve never shied away from sex as a subject. My first (thank Christ unpublished) novel featured a lot of sex. Not just for titillation but as a key element of both the plot and the main character’s development. I’ve written erotic pieces for people who are close to me and, when I decided to start writing and publishing erotic fiction it was with no doubts, fears or regrets. If you enjoy writing, why on earth wouldn’t you write at least some erotica?

I’m firmly of the opinion that art should reflect life, and I do see writing as art. Dan Brown and Jackie Collins as much as Poe and Dickens. I don’t care about literary reputation, I care about people enjoying something, running their eyes across the words and feeling something.

So why, then, do so many writers choose to cultivate this gigantic blind spot around something that sits so close to the heart of the human condition?

Maybe having too much focus on erotica is a bad thing, but I think there are very few people who ever go that far. Most writers, myself included, don’t just write erotica, but I bet you that you can spot the mainstream authors who don’t. The sudden shift as characters enter the bedroom from an engaging, convincing authorial voice into either prudish euphemisms or what sounds like the script of the world’s worst porn film. Quite frankly I’ve had enough of both.

Read erotica; write erotica; it’s good for you!

Yes I’ve titled a post after a Judas Priest song, what of it. It was either that or some reference to ‘remote control’ and, well, that leads me off down a very different kink path.

Anyway, to crowbar myself back on topic. There were many varied and interesting things that went on at Eroticon 2014. One of which was that I was handed a flyer, this one in fact by a chap from Alternate Press about their ‘esensual‘ books:

It makes some pretty ballsy claims, ‘hands free’ orgasms, ‘intense multiple orgasms’ and bondage and sex that ‘feel real’.

It was accompanied by a link to a downloadable sample and, being an open-minded chap, I gave it a try.

The results were… interesting. I’d describe it as half and half relaxation tape and erotic audio. It opens with some nice gentle talk and relaxation techniques (breathing, counting etc), then slowly adds in descriptions of the narrator… doing things (in the sample it’s a massage followed by oral sex, but I understand that the company’s plan is to release a range of different scenarios… so will this include chimney sweep play, I can but hope.)

The language and tone of voice get more explicit towards the end of the piece and the steady shift in tone following the initial relaxation phase is certainly interesting. I would say ‘effective’ but I want to draw a distinction between what the flyer suggests and what I experienced. I gave it a few tries but no ‘hands free orgasms’. Close, but no cigar.

Does this mean my brain’s not wired the right way? Possibly. Certainly anything that uses words like ‘hypnosis’ or ‘suggestion’ tend to only work for some. (and there are whole theses to be written on the importance of expectation management for such things, but we’ll leave that hornets’ nest be for now).

What I will say is that this piece is very promising when compared with most audio erotica available. Actually I’d go so far as to say that heavily descriptive second person audio erotica is something that is pretty woefully underrepresented in the marketplace and something I would happily listen to more of.

Which just makes it a little disappointing that the titles avaialbel on their website seem to be hiding what’s actually in each piece behind two lengthy paragraphs that are still trying to sell me the idea of directed erotic visualisation… this is the equivalent of Amazon’s kindle store prefacing every blurb with a bit of text explaining how awesome owning an e-reader is.

As with so many things there’s something really quite good in here trying to get out, something I actually enjoyed and might even pay money for, but feels like it’s getting drowned out by the walls of text telling me how amazing it is.

I want to talk about penis.

Not mine, (nobody wants to do that). I want to talk about the word penis. More precisely, I want to write the word penis, I want to write it a lot, but I can’t.

OK, yes I can write it… penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis.

What I can’t do, or rather what I struggle to do, is to include it in sex scenes. It just doesn’t seem to fit (no pun intended). It’s like vagina, it’s a little too real, a little too medical, a little bit too much like an alien crash landed on earth and thought that writing erotica would be the best way to fund his Uranium mining operation to refuel his ship.

So what? There are plenty of other good, and not so good, words for it. dick, cock (my favourite) schlong, manhood, rod , shaft, chopper, willy, winkle, whopper, length, fullness, hardness, loch ness (monster).

The thing that annoys me is that I know it can be done. How do I know this, because one of the most respected literary erotica writers of all time Anais Nin uses it all the bloody time and when she does it, it’s fantastic. When she does it it isn’t a clunky mechanical or medical term, it’s simply minimalist, to the point, unembarrassed.

Reading one of her stories makes me want to crawl into my cave and get back to work on crystalising reactor control rods… I mean, have another cup of tea.

Today, in Japan, is ‘White day’, a (fairly recent) tradition in which men reciprocate to the gifts they received on valentine’s day with gifts of white chocolate (or is it the other way around, I forget). It’s a painfully unnecessary holiday that smacks of a society where individual expression is so daunting that even tokens of affection must be regimented… but that’s material for another post.

In this country some bright spark has decided to dub the 14th of March as “Steak and a blowjob day” the idea being for women to reciprocate all the hard work that men have to do on valentine’s day with a steak, and a blowjob.

That sentence makes me want to spit blood. Firstly valentines day is (to my mind) pretty reciprocal anyway, and even if it isn’t, what on earth makes you think that making a restaurant reservation and picking a card/ordering something from interflora is such a terrible burden that it needs special recompense? How jaded and cynical must your relationship be if you’ll only do these things in tit-for-tat fashion?

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against steaks and oral sex. I deeply love both (although dental issues makes one of these more of a sometimes thing for me) in fact I’d say that they are two of the high points of existence!

Which is why ‘Steak and a Blowjob’ day really pisses me off. It perpetuates the idea that these things are somehow undesirable, that the only circumstances in which someone will do them is because they’re being shamed/forced into it.

Three words.

Fuck That Shit!

I want to have steak and oral sex all the fucking time… I can’t because of, well, finances/dental issues/life in general. I know there are those who don’t. That’s fine, vegetarianism is something even I dabbled with, but I’m not going to try to make it into something negative and ‘dirty’ that’s snorted about like a nine-year old school boy.

God forbid people might have the sex they want, when they want, with who they want, and because they want to, and yes sometimes that may include putting someone else’s genitals in your face because you think it’s hot as hell to do so.

</rant>

P.S. If you’ve read this far please support Coffee Cake and Kisses, it means a lot to so many people!

Not quite sure how this works but I’ve posted a ‘storify’ summary of Eroticon here.

(makes ‘which way to the beach’ pose)

This weeks prompt was “Hidden”, this story is based on that, and a prompt from Exhibit Unadorned, who is a lovely chap and made Eroticon that bit more friendly and welcoming… I’m also assured I can sleep in his bath any time I’m financially pushed to attend an event… which is nice.

Anyway, without further ado I present Emotional Baggage.

John

The tyres smack into the tarmac once, twice, three times, then stick, squealing in protest as the plane lurches, tugging everyone forward in their seats. I release a breath I didn’t realise I’d been holding. For good or bad, the worst part is over now.

As we shuffle into the terminal building I’m sure that every official is watching me, they know, with their beams and lasers and x-rays and smelling dogs, they know what I’ve done. Why don’t they move? Why don’t they arrest me?

I join the rest of the passengers at the torturously looped conveyor, doing my best to still my juddering heart. The bags start to appear.

That must be it, they’re waiting for me to collect the case, then they’ll have me. I hang back in the crowd as the first bags appear through the flaps, people shuffle their way forward, grasping handles and hauling them rudely back through the throng.

The case is maybe the third or fourth to appear. I don’t go for it. There are too many people and I can’t be certain I’m not being watched. As the handle glides past I realise how stupid I’m being, that the crowd is the perfect cover, might be my only chance. I clench my sweating palms as I wait for the case to make its way back around. Sooner than seems possible it’s approaching me again. I don’t hesitate this time, shouldering my way between the Canadian couple in front of me I grab, brace and haul all in the space of a second. It lifts easily in my hands, the adrenaline lending me strength I didn’t know I had. The wheels ‘clack’ onto the ground and I’m gone. It’s all I can do to act like a simple stressed business man, not quite running but power walking the rest of the way out of the airport.

I ask the taxi driver to help me lift the case into the cab. He does so, muttering under his breath about weaklings, then we’re off again. I stroke my hand over the reinforced surface of the case, mumbling meaningless reassurances to it and myself.

We reach the hotel, I check into our double room. The receptionist looks at me strangely when I say that my wife will be joining me, but not to hold her key at reception. I wheel the case to the lift, out of the lift, over the threshold and finally into the room. I position it in the middle of what floor space there is, taking a moment to catch my breath. Then I rap on the top, the little sequence we agreed, two, one, three.

Julia

I hear the voices coming closer, the occasional scrape of cloth on cloth as they take away the bags burying me. I have to suppress a giggle and a little squeak of excitement as I’m suddenly pushed this way and that as they wriggle my case free. I know we’re down now, know that I’m safe. Not that I was ever really worried, but the release of feeling the wheels hit the floor is euphoric, I feel invincible, more alive than I’ve felt in years. I wait till the movement stops, then pull open the slider that controls the vents. The temperature rises slightly, my nostrils catching the hint of a smell that isn’t me. Pollen and petrol and rubbery tarmac mingling with the scent of sweat and sex. How many times had I come? too many, no, that could never be. At first it was a vague attempt to calm down, trying to make sure I didn’t use the emergency oxygen, not that I should have needed it but, well, better safe than sorry. When that didn’t work I tried meditating, yeah, the restless fidgety girl who tried to get into yoga for three years is going to find her inner Zen now, like this? Then it became something more, a trembling unstoppable desperation to feel something in the darkness surrounded by white noise and fear.

More movement, gradual this time. This must be the trolley ride to the terminal. I jam my knuckle into my mouth to keep quiet The urge to shout out in delight is tremendous, that permanent itch to bring everything crashing down around me.

It’s the thought of him that stops me. Isn’t that always the way, the thought of what might happen to him keeping me from destroying everything.

More movement. I brace myself with my arms against the wooden sides of the case as I’m flung from upright to sideways to briefly upside down and then, thankfully, back onto my side. There’s very little room to move in here, even for someone as small as me, but even so the impact of the side of the case on the ground is enough for me to know I’ll have bruises when I emerge, bruises to be admired, bruises to be smoothed over with arnica and kisses.

Another bout of jolting and I’m propped up at an angle, there are mechanical squeaks form the conveyor outside. Almost there.

Soon there’s another lifting, another drop and I’m grinning again. In the darkness I look up and to the left, to where he must be, his firm right hand guiding my ‘click-clacking’ wheels across the floor towards customs.

I count the different sounds we pass through, bustling inside, squealing outside, the dull rumble of the taxi, outside, inside, the hiss of carpet against the wheels of the case.

Finally I’m still and, a few minutes later, I hear the clunk of the latches being released. There’s no knock. Maybe in his nervous state he just wants to check on me, maybe he’s just worried, or has forgotten. Light floods the case and I glance blinking up into it. There’s a surprised cry as the shadow overhead takes the form of a face that is not my husband’s. Deep inside there is a tiny bit of me that thinks maybe I should have worn at least some clothes for this trip.

Hi All,

Well, those who pay lots of attention to these things (Hi Mum!) will have spotted a growing discrepancy between the cover art I post here and the cover art and, indeed, titles as they appear on Amazon. There’s a reason for this and, gutted though I am to say it, it all comes down to money.

Put simply, following the big hoo-ha last year about e-book erotica, Amazon is clamping down on anything they deem “shocking” in the title, cover or blurb of an e-book. They’re not really trying to be prudes about what goes on inside the book (Hooray! Cock balls pussy cunt fanny cum spunk!) but they have started putting stealthy ‘filters’ on things that do appear ‘adult’. They’re still available, but if you go onto the main page and type in a search term, anything filtered won’t show up.

In principle this is to protect people who aren’t interested in erotica from having their search results peppered with diaper porn, pony play, or all the other fun things I keep meaning to get around to writing (more on that soon). But it’s not applied uniformly and (again sorry for bringing business into this) there’s a big disparity between how a book performs when it is and isn’t filtered. If they made it standard that anything categorised as ‘erotica’ won;t show up in whole site searches then that’s one thing, but this simply isn;t the case. So, in these circumstances, the only viable option for a poor newbie trying to make it, is to pander to their requirements and put up covers that they don’t deem to be ‘shocking’.

This can make it very difficult when you realise they’ve started putting filters on books that include the word ‘milk’ and ‘lactation’ on the cover… especially if you’ve just released an incredibly hot, exciting and enjoyable romp about said fetish. [Subtle hint: go read it; it’s awesome! It has firemen in it!].

No real reason for this, I just love the picture!

I was faced with the very real problem of how to tell the reader what they’re getting without shooting myself in the foot. I eventually opted for “Cream Tea” for the Amazon title, mainly because tea plays an important part in the plot and, well, between the word ‘cream’ and the picture of an ecstatic woman having thick white liquid poured over her face, I hoped it would get the message across.

But this is getting ridiculous. I have literally no idea how I’ll get my next few titles out without plain omitting what they’ve got in them. So, with that in mind I’m finally getting my behind in gear and looking at other publishing outlets. It’s going to take a while but, all being well, my future releases should also become available on i-tunes, Nook, Kobo and assorted other places and, most importantly, they should be released with their proper titles, so you can know what you’re getting, and get what you’re wanting.