sexual preference

My spouse and I were on a long car drive, playing driving games.  Suddenly I remembered a years-forgotten game I made up when I was young.  You have to rank five things.  I asked my spouse to rank these five things by sexual preference.

• smacking my ass by hand
• smacking my ass by flogger
• consent-non-consent
• making me cry / whimper / emote
• making me beg for it

We had been playing the ranking game for a ten minutes or so, and when it was his turn to rank five things, my spouse had trouble holding the items in his head as he drove.  That makes total sense–he has a language-related learning disability.  I’m glad he tried.

When I presented these options and asked him to rank them by sexual preference, he called time out.  This one felt too important.  He said he wanted to talk about it when he wasn’t distracted.  Sex is central to our relationship and our happiness.

list making

Makes me think of list making as a way of talking about sex, early in a relationship or at any time.  We can make lists of things we know we want to do together, things we’ve never tried and would like try, things that are off limits.

Then if we’re fortunate enough to be together still a few years later, we can do it again, since we’ve become new people.

sexual preference

As for me, I would rank those five activities like this.

1. consent-non-consent
2. making me cry / whimper / emote
3. smacking my ass by hand
4. smacking my ass by flogger
5. making me beg for it

I love when he makes me beg for it, so it’s strange that’s at the end of the list.  But I love the other things more.

Ranking is hard.  I love consent-non-consent, but it’s not often that I have the energy to get in a safe place mentally, prepared for it, then have ample time afterward to recover with generous aftercare.  It’s a weird place to go, that c-ptsd reenactment terror-then-healing place.

game

Part of the challenge of the game is making one ranking list when life’s complicated.  In some ways, flogger is better than hand, because my spouse can use the flogger longer.  But the actual physical sensation of hand is amazing.

Like language is slippery and approximate, ranking is multi.

In some relationships, the people can have sex but not talk about it.  I’m happy to have cultivated relationships where sex is a favorite topic.  I like talking about it almost as much as I like doing it, which I’m sure you could tell.