I have recently found myself in two mentoring relationships in my local BDSM community. Of the two, one took a little more mental convincing on my part.
Honey J is a lover I have been playing with for about two months and who has been mentioned in this blog once or twice. I am mentoring her in being submissive — she’s naturally masochistic and over time I am helping her find her niche within the many different paradigms of dominance and submission. It feels very natural, nor is it the first time I have helped someone newer to kink learn more about their subby side. The two of us just click, and I’ve spent little time questioning it.
It was another thing when my friend Noelle asked me to mentor her in being a Dominant. She has a lot of other teachers in the kink community and has been quite rapid to pick up the more physical aspects of BDSM — she’s already growing proficient with a flogger and when we played with rope together the other day she’s easily the equal or better of this still-learning rope novice.
What Noelle wants from me is my skill at the psychological side — at pushing the buttons and switches in a submissive or bottom’s head that makes them melt and give in to the dominant. The attitudes and behaviors which project Dominance and help open up others to submission. On one level I know I’m good at this. I’m confident about the skills I’ve learned. But teaching them feels almost presumptuous. Mentoring on the surface feels like saying I’m an expert. And I look around me at the amazing, sexy, skilled Doms and Dommes who have been doing this for a decade, or two or three decades longer than me. I look at even someone like Boss Bondage, who is not much older than me but seems much more qualified to teach. I consider myself decidedly an intermediate kinkster.
And yet I also know that taking on a student is one of the best ways to learn. We spent a few nights talking for hours and both gained insights — following one of our late night hangouts, Noelle fully unlocked her inner Dominance for the first time, in a lengthy and powerful scene she described to me soon after. And I’ve found myself thinking in deeper ways about what I do too — in order to teach, one has to first translate what may have become almost unconscious into words.
So after reflection I realized becoming Noelle’s mentor was probably the best way for us both to grow as dominants. It helps that she shares a certain amount of chemistry with my pet, and I forsee us co-topping her in the future (for purely instructional purposes, of course). I’ve been giving her reading assignments (so far The Sexually Dominant Woman and Sex For One) and getting her to journal about her experiences. She’s already inspired insights in me into what I like about sex and some other aspects of why it is we do what we do. She’s also taught me some rope tricks, too.
I plan to blog more about some of those insights in the near future.
