Charlie J Forrest

Well, yesterday didn’t entirely happen. I’ll elaborate a little and say that it was a bit of an interesting day made the more ‘interesting’ by Royal Mail’s descent into outright taunting. I’m not even kidding, going to the collection office and literally being shown my parcel on the other side of the glass and told that I can’t have it.

There. Are. No. Words…

Not that this really excuses my tardiness in putting something forward for Wicked Wednesday. I really like the prompt this week and, whilst I’m working on a sequel to the chastity-play story from last time, I wanted to do a bit of non-fiction blogging on the subject of trust.

I’m a kinky switch. Meaning (to anyone who’s only just stumbled on this blog… hi mum, it’s not what it looks like…) that I enjoy both dominant and submissive roles when it comes to play. This is something that a lot not kinky (and indeed kinky) people sometimes have a rough time getting their heads around. At best there’s a shrug of the shoulders and an “I don’t get it.”/”It’s not for me.” At worst it’s taken to mean that I’m secretly (shock horror) vanilla, or somehow haven’t made my mind up yet.

It’d be easy to go off on whole blog-posts on either side about how much fan is to be had from either perspective and how even the contrast itself can be an awesomely entertaining head-fuck. But I think the easier thing to do is focus on what stays the same.

Trust.

Trust is always there, it is the lifeblood of not just any kinky relationship, but any healthy relationship full stop. I see kink play as a way of revelling in trust, of celebrating that you have connected with another person to the extent that you can trust them with your emotional and physical safety. And by contrast, it’s also a reflection that the other person trusts you. Put simply, a lot of what goes with kink play for me isn’t necessarily the play itself, it’s what it represents. What is often referred to as power play or power exchange I tend to think of as trust play.

“OK,” you may say, “That’s all well and good, but can’t you have that trust without all the rope and spanking and other accoutrements?” To which I guess the answer is yes, that is possible, I suppose. But I guess it’s a bit like saying that I can get to Edinburgh by coach just as well as I can by bi-plane… but one of them is a lot more fun, and means you get to wear goggles.

Trust: n, antonym: Royal mail.

I’ve talked in the past about how I don’t get fetish wear. I somehow can’t quite grasp the appeal of something that’s designed to both cling to every inch of your flesh and make you sweaty.

As anyone who’s met me will know I’m on the more generous side of the spectrum and the words ‘tight‘ and ‘sweaty‘ are about as far away from how I want to feel when wearing something as it’s possible to get. The only worse adjectives in my book would be either ‘stabby‘ or ‘made of bees‘.

Except something new has cropped up on my radar that  is making me alternately very happy and slightly awkward. Kilts.

I’ll prefix the following discussion with a quick acknowledgement that the whole ‘clan tartan’ business is basically nonsense. It was an imaginative invention of the Victorians who, having got this idea into their heads, supposedly sent requests to the various clan leaders for samples of their tartans so that they could all be recorded in a book somewhere. I imagine a lot fo the conversations with the clan heads went something like this:

“Excuse me sir.”

“Yes, what is it now?”

“We’ve had a request from London sir, they asked us for some tartan.”

“What? oh for pity’s sake, if they want some they can bloody buy it.”

“Uh, no sir, they say they want your tartan.”

“My tartan?” says the clan chief, glancing nervously down at his kilt. “As in, right now?”

“I don’t believe it has to be yours specifically sir, but rather a sample of yours.”

“O…K…– Oi, Geoffrey?”

“Yes my lord?”

“Do we have any tartan kicking around?”

“I’ll need to check sir, but if not I can get some from the market?”

“Oh aye, that’ll be fine. Go get some and give it to this chap, says the Queen wants some.”

“At once my lord.”

“Hey, maybe if I send her some o’ mine she’ll send me a pair of her undercrackers?”

Anyone wanting a more accurate and slightly less racist interpretation might do well to google the “Cockburn Collection”, not least because it has an amusing name. I’ll only add that, however dubious the notion of clan tartans was to begin with, there is nowadays no legal protection for such things and basically everyone is entitled to wear whatever tartan they like.

SO, anyway, apparently kilts can be seen as a form of fetish-wear. This is good for me because I own a kilt (two in fact) and also look bloody good in them (I have even been compared to the tremendous sex symbol Archie from Ballamory).

I live in a pink castle too.

There are many pluses to it. It’s distinctive (particularly the one I wear, which comes from one fo the more eye-watering traditions) it looks good, and is supremely comfortable.

However, there are two things that bother me. First up is a creeping sensation that it doesn’t ‘work’, that somehow wearing it at kink events devalues it. I mean, can I wear the same outfit to a kink club and to my best friend’s wedding?

The other thing that bothers me a little is this feeling that I’m not Scottish enough. Despite being born in Fife and having Scottish heritage, the simple fact of spending most of my formative years in Derbyshire means that my accent is more Mellors than McKenzie. It’s not a big issue on the face of things, and it’s not like anyone’s going to call me out on it.

I mean hey, it’s not made of bees, and is still more culturally appropriate than wearing a kimono right?

One of the interesting effects of having grown up in the age that I have and reading some of the finest smut that Nexus et al had to offer is that my experience of corporal punishment has been an entirely adult experience.

This leads to the slightly peculiar position where, rather than having had some kind of early sexual awakening during a decidedly non-sexual situation, I’ve only really been exposed to spankings, canings and other such delights as an explicitly kinky and sexy phenomenon.

This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong or unusual in spanking enthusiasts who did have youthful experiences of such things, save that, unlike them, I had a period of time where my fondness for spanking was entirely theoretical. How can I put it, I had no idea whether I really liked it, or whether I was merely the victim of some bloody fantastic writing.

And in the world of corporal punishment there’s one thing that seems to stand above all others as an icon, a rallying point of the kink. I refer of course to the over-the-knee spanking.

I love it, I love so much about it that it can be hard to express it in sensible terms, but broadly it comes into two categories.

1) Practicalities.

The over-the knee position it at once intensely intimate and powerfully objectifying. You can feel the weight of the subject pressing against you, their buttocks neatly presented for attention. Yet at the same time their face is forced away from you. Still close enough to hear every noise, but unable to look at you without craning the neck. This is powerful stuff but is generally sugar-coating to the real benefits. First is that it’s a relatively awkward position, not massively uncomfortable, but one in which control can be maintained with little more than a firm elbow in the small fo the back. But the key element that really marks this position out on a pragmatic level is the sheer immediacy of it; the ability to feel the effect every blow has on your partner.

This is a big plus because it offers a tremendous amount of easy control over the pain inflicted. Whereas things like stress positions and torture ties are great fun, there is also great skill involved, whereas over the knee it’s somehow simpler and more focused. you are never in any doubt whether the discomfort is intentional or not, because it is, every. single. strike.

2) Psychology.

There’s ultimately no denying the cultural baggage that comes with corporal punishment. Even the name ushers in images of stern authority figures and misdeeds ripe for chastisement. It’s more than mere pain play, by taking someone over your knee it hints, however obtusely, of centuries of merciless correction; of stern and determined use of force; and of the kind of forgiveness that only comes from suffering.

It’s powerful stuff, but oh so much fun.

[N.B. I have absolutely no qualification and little knowledge of psychology, Psychiatry and neuroscience and advise anyone interested in these to seek out reliable sources of information including qualified professionals.]

Over at The Kinky Brits we’re contemplating putting together a ‘Kinky Brits guide to spanking’ (or similar, the title, along with everything else is rather up in the air at the moment). Amongst the different areas to cover is a proposed chapter on “how to meet kinky people” and as designated singleton it’s fallen on me to look at penning the bulk of that chapter.

I’ll wait a moment for the laughter to settle down.

You see, I try to avoid falling into the trap of giving advice either to people who are already happier than I am, or that I am wholly unable to stick to myself. Put simply I don’t think I’m the right person to ask.

But then again it simply wouldn’t occur to me to send someone a picture of my penis; so maybe there is some kind of a market out there for men needing basic tips on what to Definitely not do! [N.B. this isn’t the sum total of it but clueless guys is a big portion of the issue]

This line of thought got me onto a realisation that a lot of these issues come down to a sense of entitlement, which is a horrible thing in terms of the way it makes some men behave, and also royally fucks with their prospects whichever way you look at it.

Let me expound.

You are God’s gift to the opposite sex. Either because you are a physical Adonice, are incredibly intelligent, have a wonderful personality, or can do that thing with your tongue. For whatever reason you know full well that any prospective partner would be delighted to have you.

Except they don’t.

I’m not going to go into why, because that’s not what I’m interested in right now. What’s interesting is that at this point there is a huge gulf between what you expect and what you get. Your sense of entitlement hasn’t been validated. this kind of discord can be extremely tough to handle and typically leads to two responses (ego defence mechanisms? Is that what they’re called?).

1) Externalise the rejection.

You were absolutely right to feel entitled and the world at large is at fault for not appreciating you. Unfortunately this doesn’t often help matters and usually leads to being compounded with further rejection leading into what I call the ‘runaway self-denial reaction’ in which, in order to justify the gradually mounting evidence that maybe you aren’t as utterly wonderful as you think you need to construct larger and larger persecutors, ultimately heading towards accusations of “Feminazis” and getting interested in being a Male Rights Advocate.

2) Internalise the rejection.

You were rejected because you weren’t entitled. This is absolutely fine by and of itself (entitlement is a dangerous, pervasive and destructive notion, of which more to come), but a common scenario is to take on the idea of not being entitled, whilst still seeing others as being entitled. This can set up a similarly destructive and unhelpful feedback loop of rejections re-enforcing the feelings of worthlessness. This is the “You’re OK, I’m not OK” scenario described by Thomas A Harris.

The point I’m trying to make is that neither response is healthy and both can lead to very unhelpful paths of thinking. The most helpful thing to do is to attack the root cause of this, the very notion of feeling entitled in the first place. If you let go of expectations, then anything positive that comes your way is a bonus.

Except things are stacked against you on this front. Our society perpetuates the idea of entitlement and ready gratification. Consumerism and objectification are rife and overtly encouraged. This shit needs to stop. It needs to be recognised and fought. Because it fucks up everyone it touches and everyone they meet.

My number 1 dating tip? Start a cultural revolution!

I live a grown-up modern adult life. I cook, I pay rent, I clean my shower, I even buy electricity (which is much less exciting than the “Energon Cubes” of Transformers led me to expect). I am the very model of a constructive pillar of society.

But I don’t feel that way. Most of the time I feel like a bundle of guinea pigs standing on top of each other wearing a trench coat. I was at a party recently and there were other people there, grown-up people having grown-up conversations about work. The kind of conversation where there are smiles and laughter but the words were all about things that aren’t funny or happy; words like “skillset” and “aquisitional”. I sort of stood dumbly on the sidelines offering occasional comments, but basically feeling like a child invited to sit at the grown-ups table.

The thing is, it’s not that I didn’t understand the conversation. Through my own experiences in the world of work I recognised a lot fo what was being discussed and probably could have contributed more. Except I didn’t want to.

I think on some level it’s just that I don’t want to spend my free time, especially my sociable free time, talking about things that alternately bore and depress me. Why talk about internal auditing when there are some really interesting oil paintings over there? Why empathise with someone’s chain of reporting responsibilities when you could be talking about their most recent elements of self-discovery. Why talk about work when you can talk about literally anything else?

But there’s still a part of me that whispers that the reason I don’t want to talk about those things is that I’m not really a grown-up. That if I was really an adult I’d care more about getting a mortgage and a car and the difference between Rugby League and Rugby Union.

So right now I could sit here and finish off my tax return, or go to a munch and talk about awesome kinky things, with cake, and coffee, and people who won’t look at me like a serial killer when I start talking about rope.

Which do you think I’m going to do?

I’m a little hit and miss on how much of my personal life I put up on here, but there’s something bothering me.

I was at a party recently. More specifically it was a play party. I got chatting to someone and the combination of company, conversation, atmosphere and everything else had put us both in a place where some casual play was definitely on the cards. And by play I mean rope, I mean hey, this is me we’re talking about.

We’d established that we were both switches and after the, “So, do you fancy doing something?” came the next most important line, “What do you fancy doing?”

There was a pause. Only a momentary pause and one that I don’t think the other person picked up on, but in it I could see the same feeling staring back at me. Put very simply, we both kind of wanted to ge tied up.

I’ve talked about my switchiness before and I’ll state for the record that I absolutely bloody love tying people up and that evening I had a truly wonderful time tying people.

But there’s a part of me that’s very aware that I am almost always the one tying. In fact, aside from when I’m modelling for someone being shown some of the basics, I can count the number of times I’ve been tied, the times I’ve been really, playfully, passionately tied, tied the way I love to tie others, on the fingers of one hand.

In part it’s a trust thing. I’m much happier tying someone I’ve only met fairly recently than I am being tied by the same. Bizarrely this doesn’t seem to play out with the people I tie (I’m still kind of astonished that I got multiple volunteers at Smut Manchester willing for me to do restrictive potentially (though I was of course very careful) dangerous and certainly very hot things to them with rope.

I’d love to attribute this to my natural charisma and the sheer bloody confidence that exudes from ever… BWAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA! Sorry, I can’t even type that sentence with a straight face.

I think part of it is that it’s also a numbers game. The simple fact of the matter is that there tends to be more people who want to be tied up than there are people to tie them. This can lead to situations like mine where, despite being very much a switch, one side gets to come out and play more often than another. What’s worse is that, knowing this, makes me feel like, when I ask someone to tie me, I’m doing much more than just expressing a different side of myself, I’m asking them to invest time, and energy and emotion into something where by the nature of it I can’t give that back. I am a greedy emotion-hungry parasite, an attention leech who’s asking you to indulge me rather than anyone else.

And if the numbers are against me when it comes to rope bottoming, that’s nothing compared to the statistical inequality when it comes to the wider BDSM world of submissive men vs dominant women.

So what do I do, sit here and feel miserable? Abandon all hope of being able to explore the full range of my emotional palate? Write angsty self-pitying blog posts?

Or do I say fuck it and brave the meat market of Club Pedestal knowing full well I will rock that place to the ground. For I am no mere worm. I am the maker, the god made flesh, the old man of the desert. Come ride if you dare for I am Shai Hulud!

Hear me roar!

I’m by and large a very honest person. In large part this is due to the early realisation that I am utterly utterly shit at keeping secrets and that even half-truths have a tremendous tendency to eat away at me.

So the prospect of being ‘out’ as kinky to my family is a tricky issue for me. I think Dan Savage summed it up nicely when he said that there are some things your parents have a right not to know. Similar thoughts have been echoed by my parents, although it feels like a combination of morbid fascination with the rational realisation that some things can’t be un-heard.

But what if I were gay?

I’ve been mulling this over for a while now and I’m not sure how fair or unfair it is to compare kink with being gay (or bi, or asexual etc). On the face of it there are a lot of similarities, particularly in public perception (i.e. kink being relatively common but underrepresented and widely misunderstood in the general perception of the public and particularly in the media). Indeed there have been commentators who suggest that kink and kink acceptance is at a similar point to gay rights twenty or thirty years ago.

The simple fact of the matter is that if I were gay I would have absolutely no problem about being out to my friends and family, not least because I  know that I have extremely loving open-minded and supportive parents. Not only that, but I understand and appreciate that one of the most effective things one can do to challenge homophobia and prejudiced perceptions is to be ‘out’.

But for now I’m remaining as ‘in’ as my bungling will allow (oops, did I really leave that coil of rope out in the living room…). But does this count as respectfully not troubling the old ones with things they don’t need to know, or instead am I pandering to societal pressure to conform. Do I keep these things separate because of respect or cowardice? Love or fear?

Someone drew my attention to this delightful response by Neil Gaiman to the question of how to seduce a writer.

The last line in particular really struck me, not least because there have been multiple instances where I was in that very position of having literally no clue what was going on until suddenly my lips were in contact with another person’s. These encounters have then proceeded along the entire spectrum from being the beginning of a long-term relationship to an awkward drunk moment of trying to remember the guy’s name, then paying silent thanks for the extremely drunk friend who chose that moment to need to be carried home.

The notion of seduction sits a little uncomfortably with me for two reasons. First is the presumption that any form of romantic or sexual approach is inherently unwanted and therefore is a game of basically tricking someone into being with you (Fuck. That. Shit!)

Second is the horrific gender bias that tends to go along with such ideas:

A friend once described being a female and engaging with websites including Fet-Life, OK Cupid and others as being a bit like the seagull scene in Finding Nemo (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then shame on you… but you can watch it here). Basically what I’m saying is that I am extremely unlikely to ever ‘seduce’ someone as I don’t want to be another entitled, squawking voiced, Larus Canus. I know (or at least hope) that that modicum of self-awareness already elevates me above some creatures of the net, but still, it’s not something I’m comfortable doing.

But what about the other side of the equation? …Sorry, I literally spurted cold coffee over my keyboard upon typing that last sentence. But no, seriously, go-on, I promise I’ll stop laughing at some point.

So, how to seduce an erotica writer (extrapolated from a single data point, so your mileage may vary):

• Talk to them.
  Ideally in person (at an event perhaps, there are several scheduled for the coming months including Dirty Sexy Words and Smut Luton to name but two), or failing that via the internet. And I don’t mean Twitter. I mean, ok yes twitter is fine, but if you’re serious about this seduction malarkey, I think it’s appropriate to go full prose and send an e-mail.
• Don’t fanboy/girl.
  Don’t just talk about what they do, or just about erotica, or sex in general. I mean, by all means talk about it, but go deep, mention something specific that really worked for you. Any writer I know would probably be chuffed by the compliment, and gratefully file the factoid away for future use… basically what I’m saying is feedback makes writers better BUT talk about other stuff. As a rule I try to avoid talking too much about the thing I’m doing. So if I’m at a writing event, I’ll usually end up chatting about martial arts or morris dancing, whereas if I’m at a talk about hyper-real religion and self-made belief systems then I’ll usually be that guy who heads off on a tangenital* conversation about spanking and CBT. This also helps with the fact that on some level I still constantly expect to be called out on being a filthy disgusting pervert-weirdo. Don’t get me wrong, being complimented on my writing is fantastic, but it comes hand in hand with a massive fear of having passages I’ve written being read out-loud by a sarcastic barrister while I stand red-faced in the dock…
• Express your interest.
  Don’t be subtle, I really cannot stress that enough. If you’re interested in someone then tell them. Even better, if you’re interested in a particular thing, then say as much. “Hi I’d really like it if you could tie me up in a platonic satisfying curiosity sort of way?” is very different to, “Would you like to come back to mine so I can lock you in a cage and poke you with a cattle-prod?” Both are awesome, but have rather different implications. I’d also say be prepared for a no, or at least to not receive a response right away. This might actually be one of those situations where the instinct to run away and hide mortified in a corner might be worth listening to; Lord knows that’s what I’m thinking during most conversations I have anyway.
• Have a plan.
  Is your bedroom near here? Do you have a suitably sized cage? Are your sure your cattle-prod is fully charged? Knowing this stuff beforehand makes the difference between an awkward “I like you but have no idea how this would work” and “stick a flower in my mouth and call me Ermintrude!”

*pun intended.

And a happy new year.

Let me just make clear that this isn’t a cut and paste what I’ve done over the last year that abound on the internet at this time of year. I mean, ok, it is that, but with reason rather than the arbitrary ticking over of numbers in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

You see, a year ago almost exactly I was keyboard-clattering my way through what was to become my first published story Bound in Plain Sight. Over the last year I’ve been more than happy to see this one is still a consistent seller and in spite of some failings (it was following this story that I switched to first person narration) it’s a story I’m very fond and rather proud of.

So the last year has been pretty succesful given that it’s been my first year of really doing stuff. I mean yes I’ve been writing for longer than I can remember and a good portion of that has been filth, but 2014 marked my first plunge into self-publishing and has seen me go from red-facedly typing short smutty stories to getting stuck into the (long promised and definitely actually happening) novel.

Along with the writing has been Eroticon and the Smut events and, with those, meeting more wonderful friendly, enthusiastic gloriously filthy kinky lovely people than I can shake a stick at (I would suggest looking to my Blogroll but that’s currently hopelessly out of date… so I’ll do something about that soon, honest).

It’s also been a year that has seen earth-shaking changes in my personal life and I have finally taken another plunge to fully embrace my kinky interests, not least of which rope. Yes I know I go on about it a lot, but it’s something that just works for me, something that just clicked from my first clumsy single column tie months ago to my more recent clumsy single column ties… To quote from the Sunscreen Song:

“The race is along and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.”

So, it’s been a year.

I’ve been struggling to find something to write lately. Mainly this is because life has been happening to me at something of a rate of knots. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a dull ‘taking the cat to the vet and re-tiling the bathroom’ way (although I did have to use an outdoor toilet for the first time in years… but that’s a tale for a different time). Oh no, there were sexy and dramatic adventures involved. It’s just I can;t talk about it.

It’s a decision you have to make when writing a sex-themed blog as to how much of yourself you are ready to share and, put simply, my personal life for the most part doesn’t belong here. Hey, this is meant to be a marketing tool for selling more books right? (Have I mentioned lately, I sometimes write stories you know, stories you can buy and read!) There are wonderful courageous funny brilliant people out there who share a lot more than I do and I admire them for doing so. But that’s not me. Don’t get me wrong, what you see here will always and absolutely be a true reflection of me. But not all of me. Sorry internet, but you don’t get that.

But what I can write about is my writing. More specifically I can let you in on the secret of what’s been stopping me publishing stuff for the last six months.

I’m working on a novel.

I shan’t go into detail but for those who’ve read more than a couple of my posts it won’t surprise you to learn that there’s a healthy element of kink and particularly an emphasis on rope bondage in this current WIP. There’s also (partially following some encouragement from a potential publisher) and element of the supernatural.

Now, let me be very clear, I am not talking some god-awful Twilight knock-off. There be no dragons, werewolves or vampires in my story. Instead I’ve been doing one of the best bits of writing, I’ve been doing research (yaay more books!) into the occult and different traditions and generally trying to get more of a handle on (for want of a better term) ‘real magic’.

“You don’t really believe in all this stuff do you?” asked my mum, upon seeing me absorbed in An Introduction to the Golden Dawn Tarot.

The answer isn’t really straightforward. In fact I’d go so far as to say the answer cuts right to the heart of what it means to write. You see I’m well aware that when I read or write, that it’s not actually happening. No matter how many times I re-read the junior novelisation of Jurassic Park, those characters aren’t actually there and the dinosaurs aren’t really real. But (and here’s the important bit) when I’m reading it, they are real. Even when it’s the fifth or sixth time through, they are still absolutely facing that life or death situation, and facing it right now, as I read.

A friend of mine once described conspiracy theories as being an indulgence; something you let yourself believe in for a little while because it’s fun and can be an interesting new perspective on things. I guess that’s how I’d describe my approach to belief, as a luxury, something to be enjoyed in quiet moments, like a cup of tea or a walk in the snow. Something different, a change, a little piece of time where anything’s possible.