Male Chastity – In real life

My little rant about the childish wankers who screw up adult forums initiated several responses, including one from my friend Aarkey who elaborates on why adults need time away from children chastity practitioners need someplace to discuss whys and hows, and perhaps more importantly, what one goes through. Aarkey brings up several issues in his post to which, in turn, I feel compelled to add my own thoughts.

The first thing that I want to address – which I touched on in my rant – pertains to the practicality of living in a chastity device.

The fantasy stories of “she forced me into a belt and I couldn’t get out no matter what, and she kept me locked for weeks…” well that’s pure fantasy stuff. The reality is getting the fit right and learning to live with it (and keep things moisturized and clean in there) are a different reality.

Anybody can do it for a few days or a week, mainly because you’ve got the arousal to keep you going. Even if you’re not getting an orgasm – or even sex – for a few days, most men can deal with the little inconveniences because they’re focused on the mind-blowing orgasm that they’re expecting on Saturday night.

When you don’t know when you’ll be allowed out of the device, or even if you’ll be allowed an orgasm when you are, you no longer have something to look forward to “at the end of the week;” that arousal is no longer enough to keep you going, or to distract you from the little inconveniences and annoyances of wearing a device that squashes your wabbly bits into a small, confined space. Ever have a cast on an arm or ankle? Remember how annoying it was, how you couldn’t scratch when it got itchy, how you had to remember to wear accommodating clothes? That’s the same concept here: once you get over the “Oooh, I’m in a device!” rush of arousal, you have to figure out how to live with it, all day, every day.

You will learn that you have to wear certain clothes, because the device will hang and make your testicles sore, or that you need looser clothes to keep the bulkiness from bothering you. Urinating stops becoming second nature as you need to think ahead to find toilet stalls so you can sit. Expect to have a few accidents when you accidentally spray your pants, the toilet, or innocent bystanders until you figure it out.

Do you work out at a gym? You may need to wear a jockstrap to keep it supported. Do you shower at the gym? Hope they don’t have open stalls, or you’ll be displaying your $200 worth of plastic to all and sundry. Even a dip in the pool becomes a potentially embarrassing situation unless you can find swim trunks that don’t show off the off bulge as the wet fabric clings to your body.

You learn that edges that feel smooth to your fingers will feel rough or pinchy on your testicle skin. Rings that feel comfortingly snug one day will be unbearably tight the next. . . or overly loose. You’ll need to learn how to keep it clean, which lubricants are better – you know you need lube, right? – and which not to use. And sometimes you’ll forget to lube, which means that a walk around the mall will be full of surreptitious jiggles and proddings until you can duck into a loo to make a more suitable adjustment.

The CB-2/3/6000 line are great products, but one really needs to be a bit handy in order to make some basic modifications to facilitate more serious use. It’s a bit like owning a computer in the 1980s and 90s – you needed to be a bit of a gearhead to get the best usage from them.

In real life, it takes weeks or months to experiment with getting the right fit and getting your body to adapt. In the chastity fiction, nobody ever mentions the care, cleaning, and hygiene involved.

Aarkey differentiates between people who are just using a device for a short term play, and those who wear one 24/7 for longer periods. Despite the fact that Mrs. Edge and I do play at this for weeks or months at a time, I hesitate to use the word “lifestyle” because, frankly, the term is so over-wrought that I want to plotz whenever somebody mentions it. He introduces the term “sincere play” for those who have a more committed approach, and later, with regard to the wankers who flood discussion forums with fantasy material, goes on to mention:

The thing is, wearing a chastity belt day and night is usually a very tough experience – both physically and emotionally. It is a massive roller coaster, and going beyond a couple hours or days of playing into the deeper levels of a D/s dynamic is pretty intense stuff. So please, I implore you – respect the real players enough to let them have their say. Don’t drown the truth in your fantasy.

I could not agree more. Again, once you get past the “Woot! This is so hot!” phase, few sexual kinks will affect your psyche so much as the fundamental loss of control of your most personal pleasure. Having your lover look into your eyes and click the lock shut gives you a rush of emotions. Yeah, sure, it’s a little, teeny lock that you can remove with a small bolt cutter, and the devices are just plastic and can be cut (carefully!) with a hacksaw, but still, while the device it on, for the first time in your life you can not touch your penis. You can’t stroke it, you can’t feel your underwear, you can’t rub it while taking a leak, and you can’t idly stroke it while lying in bed. Never mind masturbating, you can’t even feel it.

You no longer have control over something that you’ve been playing with for years.

And while I’m on the subject, let me address the “subbier than thou” types who loftily sneer “A real sub doesn’t need a device, he should just not touch it when his Mistress tells him so.”

Get over yourselves, okay?

I never hear anybody say “He’s not a good slave because you have to tie him to the St. Andrew’s Cross when you flog him,” or “If she were a good subbie, her master wouldn’t need restraints when he taps her with the TENS.”

There is no One True Way® to practice D/s (yes, that includes those of you living on Planet Gor). For some people, it’s not about the device, it’s about the control - who gives it and who has it, and believe me, it’s not all just the man’s fantasy. Mrs. Edge probably kinks a little harder for the device than I do; to her, the device does more than just represent her control, it embodies it. She doesn’t need to negotiate with me (after the initial agreement), nor does she concern herself with my self control, or lack thereof. She likes, no, she wants that security. And when I’m under her control, she doesn’t deny herself; I wear a strap-on because she prefers intercourse, and she loves the feel of the cage bumping against her. Even better, when that cage is filled and the device is stretched out from my body, she knows that I’m aroused, hot, wanting. . . and most importantly, frustrated.

Some of us just happen to kink on the physical restraint. It’s okay. Really.

And I want to touch a bit on the emotional roller coaster that orgasm denial can become. When Mrs. Edge looks into my eyes and clicks the lock shut, it’s an incredible sexual rush – for the both of us. By turning over the control of my orgasms, indeed, of my cock itself, I’m assured that she is paying attention to it, and more importantly, to me. I like attention from Mrs. Edge, especially the nice, sexual kind. The feelings of arousal will build for several days afterward, and by the end of a week I’m beside myself with all that good, wholesome horniness that’s just flooding over. Then, it gradually subsides to a low-level arousal until about the third week when I somehow sublimate my sexual desires into a need for raw sensuality. I can’t orgasm, but I still seek the touching, the closeness; and paradoxically, her sexual satisfaction becomes almost a substitute for my own. I say “paradoxically” because despite my own cock being locked up, I actively work to seduce her, even though I know I’ll be using our strap-on, my “other cock.” I want to see her, taste her, feel her body quivering, feel her nails digging into my back and my ass, her legs squeezing around my own; I need to have that, in order to have satiety by association, as it were.

But in real life, we have jobs, children, household chores, jobs, family events, community service, jobs, and the other stresses typical to any other couple. While I need more closeness and intimacy in order to assuage my orgasmic continence, she’s doing just fine. And when those life situations keep us from being intimate, I sometimes find myself becoming withdrawn and (perhaps overly-) sensitive.

From what I’ve read / seen / experienced, far more often then not the issue is that the dominant simply enjoys keeping the sub in chastity without dramatically paying more attention to the aspect of control, simply accepting it as it is. So there becomes an almost greater feeling of neglect by the sub, since they are being dominated so personally and so intimately, but the actual interaction of it is really very minimal. It almost becomes an absent domination, and can feel very empty and very lonely. Which makes it a much rockier experience than most subs expect.

And here is the point that you miss by believing the “tease and denial” wank fodder: The denial only remains fun because of the tease. Constant denial without any intimacy simply feels like neglect. This point completely escaped Mrs. Edge and I in our early days, and we experienced some bad times because of it. As it happens, Mrs. Edge has had some issues with intimacy which we really didn’t understand until a particularly bad point in our marriage. When we experimented with some long term “sincere play,” I learned from experience that hanging $200 worth of plastic on my tonker did nothing whatsoever to improve our relationship. Oh, things were a lot of fun at first, but because we had not addressed the underlying issues of intimacy and trust, things eventually went back to being bad. In fact, for a while things might even have been worse, because after over 8 months of orgasm denial, I was feeling more neglected than ever. And while we eventually were able to pick it back up again, it required some serious discussions about the nature of our relationship over a long period of time.

Even now that we are aware of the pitfalls, things still sometimes can feel “off” between us. For example, it has happened that we’ll spend a few days groping each other, feeling frisky and intimate. And one of us will have a heavy work week, at the end of which the other comes down with a flu, and by the time that’s over, then there is some family or community event that one or both of us are working on, after which the other one gets sick. Next thing you know, we haven’t been intimate in three weeks. These are issues that all couples contend with. Now, I know that she’s not intentionally neglecting me, but during that time I’m also working to suppress my own sexual urges so as not to feel more frustrated than I already would be. The inability to masturbate in order to simply relieve some internal pressure is no longer an option, and I sometimes find that I’m drifting into feeling a bit sorry for myself, if not downright neglected.

The point here is that, just as in any relationship, it takes a lot of work to communicate your needs and desires, and to control your own impulses so that you don’t blow something out of proportion. Unlike in the wanker fiction, in real life some things can be more difficult because the whole concept of chastity and orgasm control creates a situation in which the control is more passive and often times unseen. From Mrs. Edge’s perspective, her own life hasn’t changed at all, so it would be easy for her to forget that mine has changed in a fundamental way. And I have to be careful about reminding her, so as not to sound like I’m whining; but I do have to remind her of how I’m feeling, or else she might not realize. Sometimes all it takes is just acknowledging that there’s no time right now. . . which sounds exactly like the same issue that non-chastity couples have.

Going back over this, all the chastity stuff almost appears to be more trouble than it’s worth, doesn’t it? It’s not, really, certainly no more than any other interest or hobby or fetish can be. I really just wanted to elaborate on why discussion boards can be helpful for people starting out, or who are interested in taking their part-time play to a deeper level, and to point out that actually practicing this sincerely is nothing at all like the fiction one reads.

And on a personal level, while chastity and orgasm control might not have been my top pick for a kink, in our relationship it was one that we could agree on; Mrs. Edge – despite what you read on this blog – still considers herself to be rather “vanilla.” That is one of the reasons that I work at understanding this subject – the better to have a common kink that is enjoyable to the both of us. You know, just like in real life.