Charlie J Forrest

I’ve been thinking about limits lately, and how big a window they provide for understanding ourselves. In particular I’ve been thinking about fears and what makes one ok to explore and one untouchable.

This is the first of two posts exploring my personal fears and where they come from.

I’m going to talk about falling.

I would stress the distinction between a fear of heights and vertigo. Yes I’m scared of heights, bloody terrified of them. But along with that also comes dizziness, loss of bearings, and that tiny niggling urge to leap when confronted with severe drops. Even when sitting in the balcony of a theatre I sometimes find it hard to concentrate because of the awareness of the huge looming space in front of me, sucking me in.

I hate it.

If I had to pick the one thing I have always had nightmares about, it’s falling. Usually preceded by desperately clinging to something above me, a ledge, or some unhelpfully obtuse bit of architecture. Finally letting go and plummeting into oblivion.

I love it.

At school I took rock climbing, on seaside holidays I would gleefully peer over the edges of cliffs. I’ve scrambled up I’ll advised bits of mountain on my own miles from help or mobile phone reception and fucking loved every moment of it. The two things highest on my bucket list are bungee jumping and solo parachuting.

I can’t help watching things like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, Sean Bean in Goldeneye or Jack Nicholson in Batman with a mixture of horror and excitement.

Falling is at once the most terrifying and fascinating thing, and I wish I could explain why, but I can’t. It’s primal, it’s apriori and I fucking love it.

The door of the flat closes with a muffled thud. There are incoherent noises, giggle sand groans, then the bedroom door opens and they stumble in, bow tie draped over his shoulder, her dress rippled up high on her buttocks by his groping hand. She pulls her face away from his with a wet sucking sound. She’s panting arms half heartedly grabbing at his head, shoulders, arms. Another step and they topple out of sight into the mountainous landscape of unmade bed linen.

Shapes writhe and undulate, appearing and disappearing like rocks with the tide. Clothes are cast like dark smokey clouds into the sky, only to fall back beyond the impossibly close horizon.

Between two peaks the lightly furred rolling hills quicken their pace, rising briefly only to come crashing down with force to make the white mountains shiver. The winds roar a cacophony of agony through the cotton valleys until, finally, it fades into the distance with one last wolf howl.

The wind is gone, the ground no longer trembles and the peachy hills lie still. The last ripples of excitement wash over me, as I wait, knowing what is to come. The shapes finally stir, pulling themselves from the make-believe landscape and tottering dazed and happy about the room. He comes to me, wrapping fingers around my cool dry surface, lifting me up into his embrace. His soiled spent manhood slips past my brim without touching it and I open myself to him, enveloping him in cool wetness, taking his sweat and spunk into me, he stirs me a little, pulling back his foreskin with his free hand to grant me every last lingering taste of him.

When he pulls out he leaves his traces permeating every millilitre of me, wearing the little foamy scum on my surface like a medal. A good job well done, his dirty little glass.

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)