Hacking

The other day, I was IMing with Dev (formerly of Devastating Yet Inconsequential) and the notion of chastity and orgasm control being a kind of life hack came up. According to the Wikipedia, a life hack is “any productivity trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method to increase productivity and efficiency.” Seems to me that denial and chastity definitely do not increase the “productivity” of a very specific thing, but work with me here.

Cast your minds back to the beginning of our journey into the life of male orgasm control. We, Belle and I, had been through a hard time in our relationship resulting from the fact that we had pretty much stopped having sex. I went outside our marriage to find the kind of intimacy I wasn’t getting at home. I suppose it would be an easy thing to then draw a line and say I cheated, therefore I ended up in a chastity device and, as punishment, rarely get to have any orgasms. But that’s all wrong and kind of backwards.

Our problem wasn’t that I cheated (though, yeah, that was a problem all right), it was that we weren’t connected to one another sexually. I loved Belle. Never stopped loving her. Never wanted to leave her. I’ve never wanted to be anywhere but with her from the moment I realized I loved her. But we were not intimate with one another anymore, emotionally or physically. We were roommates running a live-in day care center. As I suggested yesterday, kink of any kind, when successfully executed, is the result of and the catalyst for emotional and physical intimacy. It’s only done well after a lot of communication and honesty with one another. The fact that we have kink in our relationship now is because we were open, communicated, and all that. The kink helps keep us that way, but kink is definitely the egg in this model, not the chicken.

The hack part, for me, is the denial aspect. Remember, my problem was that Belle and I had disconnected sexually. I relied on myself for pretty much all my sexual satisfaction and I resented it. She didn’t seem to care. I craved intimacy with another person, not just my hand or a sex toy. By slaving my orgasm to Belle (using the non-D/s definition of “slave” — a component controlled by another machine or component), we have essentially produced a situation where we cannot ever find ourselves in a disconnected place again. This isn’t about quantity of sex, mind you. We don’t have sex as often as I’d like. We have sex as often as she likes. But it forces the issue of emotional and physical intimacy. She controls when I come. She controls pretty much all my sexual activity. One of my primary sexual releases is her orgasm. We can’t move too far outside of one another’s orbits before the issue becomes evident and then it can only be corrected together, not by me slinking off to the bathroom after she falls asleep to jack off in the sink. I used to worry that we’d slip back to the old way. The disconnected way. In exchange for her controlling my orgasms and access to sex, I got security.

Sexually, we are one. That’s deeply intimate. It’s hard to get more intimate than that.

Another part of the hack is how it fucks with my hormones. I’m about to be 46 and, in the greater scheme, that’s not that old, but biologically, shit’s not as easy as it once was. Even if I wasn’t being denied orgasm, it would take me a lot longer to bounce back from one than it used to. When I was 17, I could fuck four or five times in a day and come each time. (I recall one day in particular when I did something like that and the last orgasm, which was maybe the sixth or so, was dry and hurt like a motherfucker…but I digress.) By not coming and leaving all those hormones in me, I feel as close to 17 as I’m likely to get again. Yes, the trade-off is huge. I rarely get to feel the awesome five to ten seconds of real, uninterrupted, unqualified orgasmic rush. But in exchange, I feel like a total raging sex god. Sometimes. At least when we get to fuck (and there’s been an awful lot of that this past week since the kids have been away).

I’m not saying we’ve discovered the key to marital bliss. We’ve discovered a key to marital bliss. And we’re hardly the first to use some flavor of male orgasm continence. I don’t know how what we do would work for a guy who didn’t want to be dominated or wasn’t all that into the bondage aspect of chastity or was just too wrapped up in his own masculine bullshit to even consider limiting how often he came. But it is a hack of the male sexual circuitry and it does work. At least for us.