Metrics

I’m well past the stage of keeping track of how long Belle’s had me locked up or when my last orgasm was or anything like that. I used to, excessively. I knew what my record was and was always advocating for beating it or whatever, but ultimately I figured out (as I hope any guy will who wants to be in my kind of spot) that if you’re going to let someone else control you, they have to be the ones to make those decisions without your input or concern. This ends up being quite a bit hotter, to be honest.

I say that to preface the next bit. I’m keeping track of when I’m locked up and in what purely for the statistical data. I’ve often said things about how often I think I’m wearing a device or how many times I come in a year, but I don’t really know. I lose track. So I’m using a little time tracking app on my phone to quantify these things. I hope to create a log that covers the whole year. I started tracking at the end of December when we got back from Hawaii. For instance, I know I’ve been in the Steelheart 313 hours this month. That’s out of about 345 elapsed hours in 2016 as of the moment I’m writing this. That’s about 91% of the time. I’ve had one orgasm this year back on the 3rd. 

The nerd in me thinks it would be very interesting to have this quantified data about myself. I’m all about quantified data. I love that my watch quantifies a bunch of stuff and if I can’t run with some kind of tracking device that adds my mileage and performance stats to what’s come before I nearly feel like it doesn’t count. There are people who get this (like me) or people who don’t (like Belle, actually). In a perfect world, this record would reflect the way Belle managed my erections and orgasms when left to her own devices. I don’t lobby, I don’t comment, I don’t say what my desire is regarding orgasm one way or the other. The only input I have in her decisions is how I act and that’s not entirely under my control. 

Of course, there’s this thing called the Hawthorne Effect in which the act of observing a human behavior affects how the behavior occurs. It’s possible now that I’ve said I’m doing this that Belle will somehow change what she otherwise would have done, but if that happens I don’t think it’ll be by much. I wouldn’t want to keep this a secret for a whole year. That seems wrong. 

Over on the Tumblr, it was pointed out by someone that my previous post about scales and ranges and the different vectors that make up human sexuality was flawed because I used the Kinsey Scale to demonstrate innate gender preference as opposed to reported experiences which is what it was designed to describe. This is true and I knew when I wrote it I wasn’t being perfectly true to the scale’s intent. In my defense, it seems to me that how I used it is in keeping with how most people think about it nowadays. It’s become a shorthand for what we desire. Or even how we identify. In any event, what I’m really interested in when discussing human sexuality is the differences between innate desires versus expressed desires versus actual experience and then all that versus how we identify. I’m super interested in how we are as opposed to how we say we are or how we allow ourselves to think about our desires. 

Belle is off on one of her overseas trips which means the Steelheart (barring some kind of emergency) will be on for 100% of the time over the next two weeks. I hate it when she leaves. Bah. I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately and usually when she’s not around to regulate my cycle I tend to get worse sleep. Hopefully that’s not what happens. We’ll see.