Domination & Submission: The BDSM Relationship Handbook (12 page)

There are a
lot
of questions about Primals
which defy any attempt to make generalizations or come to any useful
conclusions.  Those questions must be answered by each Primal
individually, and I would venture to guess that no two answers would be alike. 
Questions like these, perhaps:

·
        
Are you, as a result of your
instinctive
way of evaluating the world, inherently
amoral?

·
        
If there were
no limits
to
what you could do, how far would you go to alter your physical appearance to
resemble your inner animal?

·
        
Do you, as a Primal, prefer other
Primals or non-Primals as your potential mates, and why?

·
        
Is the
credibility
or
authenticity of another Primal ever in question to you, and if so, why?

Perhaps my readers can, post-publication, provide
some inspired answers to these and the countless other unspoken questions that
naturally come to mind when pondering the many mysteries of
humanimal
relationships. 

In the meantime, let’s shift our focus to
another
practical aspect of interacting with a Primal.  Before entering into
an actual
relationship
with a Primal, you might get the idea that you
want to
play with one.
  In
this
lifestyle, that usually
means a
scene.
  A scene with a
Primal...
  Now,
there’s
a scary thought.

A primal scene is not something you see every
day.  That has a lot to do with the fact that there’s very little that a
primal does that is
preplanned
.  A scene,
almost by definition,
is something that is planned
ahead of time
.  There
will
, of
course, occasionally be those times when Primals have made plans to do a scene
completely unrelated to their
primalism
and serendipity nudges them
off-script
. 
When it
does
happen, it is rarely predictable, and may even be as
alarming to spectators as it is fascinating to them.  By the way, the
phrase
“primal scene”
can mean very different things to different
people.  Among psychologists, it is a term which refers to witnessing or
imagining
your parents having sex
; something you just might want to keep
in mind if you ever decide to discuss this topic with your
shrink
. 

Typically, in the BDSM world, a Primal scene simply
happens
without a lot of forethought.  What may start as a bit of cautious
sniffing and circling can quickly escalate to a scenario where instinct
supersedes reason and judgment, and life leaps from mundane to
extraordinarily
interesting
in about 2.6 seconds flat. 

Mellissa W., a twenty-six-year-old woman from
Kansas, considered herself a traditional submissive before she became involved
with a Dominant who seemed to play a lot rougher than she had been accustomed
to with her previous lovers.  That,
in itself
wasn’t too
unusual.  What
surprised
her was her immediate and instinctive
reaction to it; a reaction that opened up a part of herself that she had never
suspected was there. 

“We had always been playful and even a
little rough at times, but I always figured it was just fun and games. 
One night I was walking past him and Derek surprised me by grabbing my boob,
and I don’t know why, but I snatched his hand and bit into the meaty part at
the base of his thumb really, really hard.  He screamed bloody murder,
grabbed me and picked me up, and literally threw me like a sack of potatoes
across the room onto the bed.  As soon as I realized I wasn’t going to
die, I was just completely filled with this primal all-consuming rage.  I
just sprang off the bed like some kind of wild animal, throwing my entire
weight on him and knocking him to the floor, while hitting and biting and scratching. 

We fought and wrestled and rolled around
on the floor snarling at each other like pit bulls until we were completely
spent.  Even then, he somehow managed to pin me down until I stopped
struggling.  Then we just looked at each other silently for a minute, and
suddenly we couldn’t stop laughing.  Then we had what I can only describe
as the most incredible sex, ever.  We should have done this a long, long
time ago.”

Sometimes, a person may be fully aware of their
primal nature, yet still be unsure about how it can be expressed as part of a
public scene.  After all, it is something that is often misunderstood,
even within the BDSM lifestyle, and can sometimes lead to potentially
embarrassing or even dangerous situations. 

Kevin P., a thirty-year-old living in Florida,
described to me the first time he’d allowed his primal side to come out at a
public gathering:

“I was at one of our group’s monthly
play parties, held at the spacious home of one of our group members, watching a
couple of friends do a knife play scene.  Across from me, I noticed Nora,
one of the newer members of the group staring directly at me.  Once I
noticed her, I just couldn’t take my eyes off of her.  We had chatted
briefly at the last get-together, but it was just your typical
small-talk.  This was something completely different.  We probably
said more in those few minutes of silently staring at each other than any
conversation, no matter how deep, ever could.

I walked around the group of people
gathered to watch another couple doing a scene.  Her gaze never left me as
I slowly circled around the group and around her as well.  I stopped
between the kitchen and the living room.  Then it was her turn to circle
me, I guess.  She started to move past me, and as she did, she put her
face right up to my shirt and sniffed me, then moved on past me a few steps and
stopped, as if she were daring me to follow her.  I moved past her towards
the door that led outside to the patio, and opened it.  She stepped thru,
and I followed out onto the patio, where a few people were enjoying their
cigarettes.

There, in the back yard, we both started
silently circling each other, the way boxers or MMA fighters do in the ring,
completely oblivious to the other people on the patio watching us.  Our
circling got tighter, and turned into touches, pokes, and her raking her
fingernails across my bare skin.  I finally pulled her close to kiss her,
but when I did, she turned away from my kiss and sank her teeth so hard into my
jawline that it broke the skin!  I was surprised, bleeding and angry, and
without even thinking, I just slapped her hard across the face.  She drew
back for a split second, and then clocked me hard right on the nose with her
fist.  I staggered and almost went down, but figured I’d take her down
with me, so I tackled her to the grass, where we wrestled and I bled all over
her until the other people on the patio pried us apart and positioned
themselves between us. 

I stood there, bleeding from my jaw and
my nose while she, covered in my blood, paced like an angry feral cat that had
been swung around by its tail.  Someone mentioned calling the police, and
we both instantly and simultaneously said, “No!”  She assured them
further, saying, “It wasn’t a fight... it was...” She paused, and  I jumped
in to finish her sentence.  “Foreplay,” I said.  They laughed. 
We laughed.  And then we went to my place for sex.”

It isn’t always simply the unpredictability of a
primal scene that can sometimes make it problematic.  When I asked my
friend
ShadowCat
, a twenty-two-year-old Primal switch who leans heavily
dominant, whether she usually sought out other Primals as potential partners,
she surprised me with an unexpected response.  She said that she typically
did
not
prefer other Primals, and explained why:

“Being with other Primals can actually
be kind of dangerous for someone like me.  I’m a woman, a Primal, and I’m
usually a Dominant.  But Primals don’t care about what you usually are;
they make up their own minds about your position in the pecking order. 
Many just automatically assume that if you’re a woman, that there must be a
submissive buried deep down inside there, somewhere.  They figure all they
have to do is beat me into submission to bring it out.  Don’t get me wrong
- I like my sex rough, but I don’t want to end up in the hospital,
either.  Some of these guys just can’t get it into their heads that I’m
very dominant.  Their instincts keep telling them that if they just try a
little harder, take the violence up just one more notch, that I’ll submit. 
But I don’t and, sometimes, they just don’t know when to quit.  That
usually doesn’t end well.”

Primal scenes and other intimate primal encounters
always have the potential to be simultaneously exciting
and
terrifying;
erotic
and
dangerous.  A Primal’s instincts can typically do a
wonderful job of telling him
who
to play with and
how
to play,
but may not always be adequate at telling them
how far is too far, and when
to stop.
 

Even Primals playing with other Primals would be well-advised
to keep that in mind.

In the final analysis, primalism is simply a matter
of surrendering matters of attraction, love, sex and kink to our most basic
instincts.  William Bernbach, a prolific advertising executive who had an
exceptionally keen insight into how people think and relate once said, “Nothing
is so powerful as an insight into human nature...  what compulsions drive
a man, what
instincts
dominate his action...  If you know these
things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.”  

Trusting and following your primal instincts can not
only help you to connect, touch and be touched at your
very core
, but it
can sometimes actually help you to make better decisions. 
Good
instincts
can very often convey hidden truths and guide your actions long
before your
intellect
figures things out rationally. 

Perhaps an exploration of your
own
primal
side is something you should consider. 

“For
all the talk you hear about
knowledge
being such a wonderful thing,
instinct
is worth forty of it for real unerringness.”

Mark
Twain

There really wasn’t a
word
for what Nicole
was, at the time.  She was, in my mind, quite simply a
difficult
submissive. 
On the one hand, she had a truly beautiful spirit and an
intense, focused loyalty – not only to me, but to the other members of my house
– that was simply amazing.  On the other hand, she would often do odd and
inexplicable things that would perplex or infuriate me.   I didn’t
know it
then
, but Nicole was a
Primal.

When she first walked into my life, I was sitting at
my desk, working in the front office of a technology business that I’d founded
some years previously.  The door chimed, and I looked up from my work to
see a petite young woman with straight blonde hair to the small of her back and
penetrating blue eyes that were focused intently on mine.   She
seated herself in the chair in front of my desk and we chatted amiably about
the services my business had to offer.  As we spoke, I noticed an unusual
tattoo which covered her entire forearm from wrist to elbow.  The tat
consisted of orange and black
tiger stripes
that encompassed her arm
like a sleeve.  I noticed also that her aggressive, penetrating eyes never
– ever –
strayed from their laser-like focus on
mine.
  We
quickly arrived at a business agreement, and when it came time to finalize the
paperwork, she leaned over the desk to sign the contract and did something very
odd, something which I found simultaneously fascinating
and
arousing. 
She sniffed me.

A few days later, I received a phone call from my
mysterious new client; she was having a little problem with our software. 
Would I be available to discuss it with her?  Incredibly, I heard myself
responding, “Sure!  Actually, I was just about to break for lunch. 
It’s such a gorgeous day out, I was thinking of having a sandwich in the
park.  Would you care to join me?”  She gave me her address, and told
me she could be ready in ten minutes.  As I hung up the phone, I thought
to myself,
what the hell just happened?

I never
did
go back to the office that
day.  At the park, we sat on the grass and studiously ignored both our
sandwiches
and
our purported reason for being there.  As she grew
more comfortable in my presence, she became progressively more
playful
as
well, climbing the trees and cavorting on the playground equipment.  It
was something I might have expected from an adolescent, but she was in her
twenties.  I found myself incredibly, irresistibly fascinated, amused, and
yes... 
smitten. 

We went back to her house, where we spent the rest
of the day rolling around on the floor and bouncing off the furnishings the way
cats tussle over a ball of yarn.  The sex was an incredible mixture of
passion and violence, a struggle to establish dominance, and an unrestrained
expression of
raw hunger.
 Despite a full day of biting, wrestling,
scratching, hair pulling, spanking, blindfolds and bondage, we somehow managed
to survive it and have a conversation later that evening. 

I asked her how long she’d been in the BDSM
lifestyle. 
“BDSM?”
she responded with a bemused look on her
face.  “I don’t know anything about that.  I only know that I was
yours
from the moment we first met.  I don’t know
how
I knew it, I just
did.
  I could
sense
it, somehow.  I could
smell it.
 
I just trusted my instincts, and they told me to trust you. 
I am
yours.”

“In
that
case,” I smiled, “Let’s start by
having you address me as
Master.”