Thursday, January 8, 2009

On roleplaying and owning cats

Master and I finally played again last night; he'd asked me to choose some old clothes that I didn't want to keep, and he would then rip them off me (after they'd been primed with a few well-placed snips) during a rape scene.

It's funny - yes, part of my love for roleplaying of that sort comes from the visceral thrill that rape invokes (oh, how I do love exploring the darker aspects of human psychology and society), but a good part of it is simply my love for acting. It's fun to pretend to be someone else; it's a mental exercise, a game. So when he holds the knife to my throat, even while I'm thinking, "Ohmygod is he gonna kill me?" I'm also thinking, "What could I do to make this more dramatic (that won't get one of us hurt)?" It's an interesting dualism; neither thought process detracts from the other. Yay cognitive dissonance?

Part that made me lol but not really: At one point I accidentally slipped out a, "Yes!" And Master heard it, and commented on it. ("Oh, you like it, huh?") I was like, Crap! I'm supposed to not like it! Uhh... fuck, I'll just run with it! Afterwards, Master commented, "I wasn't sure if your character liked it at the end or not."

"I wasn't sure either." Heheh.

Another tidbit of post-scene conversation: Master said to me, "You know, you don't have to be afraid to say I'm yours."

"Eh? How do you mean?"

"I mean sometimes I notice you seem... reluctant to say that I'm yours. You don't need to be."

I nodded; I knew what he meant. Up to that point, I'd made a conscious point of subverting any tendencies I had to claim some sort of ownership over him. I didn't want to make him feel like I wasn't actually submitting to him - something that had been a point of issue earlier in our relationship. When I explained this all to him, Master said, "Well, you may own a cat, but the cat also owns you."

~*~

I know the sterotype of cats is that they're independent to a fault, but that's not at all true. My ten-year-old cat is a farm cat at heart. She was born under a porch, and long ago we gave up on trying to keep her from adventuring outdoors. Yes, she's independent, but she's also formed an intensely strong relationship with me. My father recently told me that the day I left for school, she began to wander the hallways and cry incessantly. She sleeps next to me every night when I'm home. Though she doesn't hesitate to bite me when I cross some arbitrary boundary of hers, she never bites hard enough to actually harm me; just enough to get her point across.

I like to imagine that her relationship towards me is similar to mine and Master's. I love Master with everything that I am; I feel more keenly for him when he's gone, and when we're near I like to go "exploring," though I always return; Master punishes me when I'm out of line - and, conversely, I can rebuke him when he violates my personal set of rules - but that rarely comes up because our needs and wants are closely aligned most of the time; Master tends to dote on me; I'm so eager to please him that I'm sure it's at times exhasperating. :)

I'm sure many people would be perturbed that I just compared the most loving, committed relationship I've ever been in with my cat. But I can think of a lot worse things for my love life to be like.

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