Charlie J Forrest

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!