Don't frighten the horses

(This note is inspired by a brief comment of Louise Culmer’s in the thread of When rape is a gift: “Try and adopt the philosophy of the immortal Mrs Patrick Campbell, you know ‘I don't care what people do as long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.’”)

I have been blessed, mixedly, over recent years in intimate relationship with two strong, willful, resistant women with deep but largely unacknowledged desires to be taken in hand by a strong, loving man. Such women are so very hard to read that the issue of consensual non-consent is troublingly problematic. In both cases these were women capable of profound connection with animals, specifically horses and dogs. I wish to suggest that a woman’s ‘guard dog’ can provide a useful objective correlative for the ongoing state of openness, trust, and loving attachment in the romantic relation of man and woman; if you will, a rather reliable barometric reading of the intimate atmosphere.

Years ago I was fond of telling outrageous, frightening campfire stories to a warm, extended community of folks, dog lovers all, on a rural pond in New Hampshire. My niece in particular loved to be scared be-jeebers. A sweet little mongrel dog named Brutus, who would howl when talk got animated – his way of asserting his role in the family pack – was in attendance on special story-telling evening. As I reached the thrilling climax to the story, approaching my niece all the while, arm extended in mock menacing manner, she let out a classic Lois Lane scream, and gentle Brutus, suddenly fiercely protective of her, chomped down on my wrist – biting but not biting.

Children and dogs have rather exquisite intuition of the human heart and its intentions. Other than the evidence of the loving trust of a good woman, there are few experiences that surpass the feeling of so being seen, known, and understood than to be the playmate-uncle to a mischievous, energy-filled child or alpha to a spirited dog. I ride very high on the loving teasing and the mock-fighting. Is consensual non-consent any different from these implicit arrangements where nothing is stated and all is understood?

I’ve great admiration for the many women whose disclosures I’ve read on this site. Privacy, delicacy, modesty militate against exposure of the personal intimacies revealed in such pieces as When rape is a gift – these are matters that are the exclusive domain of the shared world of loving man and woman. “Like freedom feels where wild horses run” sings Elton John. When we let our own wild horses run and then talk about it we do indeed risk stampeding the rest of the herd. I feel gratitude that folks are willing to share their deepest heart publicly – it is deeply inspiring and encouraging to know that there are others who share our needs for full intimacy, passionate intensity, and release of our animal-human powers and energies – but there is as well a sense of shame, particularly for a man, and in the name of strong, loving, aggressive men, that women should feel so deeply unfulfilled in certain desires that they must so explicitly open themselves to dopey public censure in giving away the keys to the candy store.

“An it harm none, do as ye will” summarizes well my own pagan, libertarian convictions. Clearly, many who participate on this site hold similar views. With this qualifier, perhaps.“Harm” is not given primacy. We want the good stuff and we are more willing than some to assume certain risks in order to get it. Perhaps more shyly than football players or wrestlers, some women are proud to wear the inexplicable and certainly unintended bruises of strenuous, passionate bouts. One grows weary of insisting that this is not about harm or hurting. The overarching objection to this site is, I suspect, not so much the envy, spite, and malice of those with the puritan fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying illicit delight, but that we talk about it in ways that cast aside the modern commandment of bullying, tame, egalitarian mediocrity that demands above all else that one shall not give offense and hurt another’s feelings. To adapt common currency, why should taken in hand couples have 90% of the fun?

Though we may frighten some of the nanny-staters riding their ginned up panting and ranting hobby-horses I think we need not be concerned with their grievance mongering. There will always be those totalitarian mentalities to draw momentous metaphysical implications and ‘messages’ from evidence of unconventional, private, consensual behavior. The personal and intimate is decidedly not the political; indeed, at its best, it is largely primal, animal, carnal (oh yuck) and spontaneously pre-rational and non-discursive. It goes largely to explain why some of us with deep needs for intuitive, emotional connection so often have a sense of mammalian family that far outweighs phony-baloney family-of-man pieties.

Call me goofy but I love having a woman’s protective dog in attendance at the primal scene. They do indeed get stirred up, but they do not bite. And nothing is more telling than a woman in the throes of passionate resistance (when she is, so to speak, the piece de resistance of a lovely encounter) who reassures her dog that all is well. Thus, children fully absorbed in playing street stickball, using eyes in the back of their head, unfailingly dodge the cars.

To deny that we can know against knowing and consent without consenting is to ignore important dimensions of full, rich, living human reality.

I'd like to close with a kind of friendly toast to both the more traditional taken in hand women, those whose male counterpart both insists they keep after the household chores and sees to their erotic gratification (one might say, he makes you both mop and glow), and to all those radiantly willful, resistant, tempting, spitfires: To those blissful moments when men get hard and women melt (and with a nod to Nina Simone), here's to some steam on your clothes and a little sugar in your bowl.
Bottoms up!

VelvetHammer

Take the Taken In Hand tour

Have you seen the following articles?
Happy living in fear of a man?!
Moving into a Taken In Hand relationship
Equality isn't all it's cracked up to be
Don't forget your whip
Give new love a chance
My life, my choice
The submissive alpha female
He isn't interested in or capable of taking you in hand?
Keeping the lines of communication open
Resistance is futile

2006 Aug 7 - 16:46 | login or register to post comments | latest article | previous article | next article |

Speaking of Horses...

Velvet Hammer, I love your descriptive writing (even though I admit that I am trying to fully understand everything you were communicating). From what I've read here on this site, it sounds like to me that Taken In Hand women want their men to be studs, not geldings.

I've always loved horses and dogs myself. I used to have a gelding and he was fun to ride, but a gelding and a stallion are completely different. One time I was touring a stable and saw a magnificent dapple gray Arabian stud. I will never forget the way he acted when I came up to his stall...boy, he KNEW he was something else!! He was 100% STUD, alert and powerful, and he knew what he was created for. That WAS and IS his nature...even with me, a human female, standing there.

I hope we, as women, haven't "gelded" our men and made them too tame and "manageable." As to your toast "To those blissful moments when men get hard and women melt.." a hard man is a good find!!

by a Taken In Hand reader on 2006 Aug 10 - 22:59 | login or register to post comments

Horses...

Good analogy. But I don't agree entirely. I don't want to be one of the 1000 women that stallion has taken whose attention I'll get for 1% of his time. I'd rather he had a lower testosterone count and a measure of faithfulness. Difficult balance to get right.

As for seeking out men who aren't gelded as it were you need to look in the right places if those are the men you like - go where the power is, go where mostly men are and few women, look in the army and on the sportsfield. There's a science to this art of dominant man hunting. But when you get there you have to develop a very good ability to differentiate between domineering uncaring dominance and the real stuff.

by Hera on 2006 Aug 12 - 14:14 | login or register to post comments

Horses and Men

Hera, yes, it is a difficult balance. There's an old saying about men wanting their women to be "ladies in the daytime and whores at night"...or something like that. I guess we can make up our own...Taken In Hand women want their men to be geldings around other women and faithful, caring, exciting, dominant studs just with them...to ride them hard and put them away wet.

by a Taken In Hand reader on 2006 Aug 12 - 17:45 | login or register to post comments

Out to stud

I’m glad you enjoy my style. We all thrive on strokes and appreciation and yours are welcome. I’d be happy to clarify or elaborate on things that seem a bit elusive.

Horses are magnificent creatures, are they not? Especially when a bit wary and aroused, such a sense of innate nobility and energy on ready alert; horsepower. I grew up riding horses and taking care of them and most of my best adventures as a boy and young man centered on them: moonlit bareback rides on rural dirt roads, jumping bales of hay, skinny-dipping and in your bare-ee (as my niece used to say) swims on horseback, overnight pack trips to a beaver pond on the Appalachian trail. My boyhood was heaven and I haven’t left it behind. Around kids I am the Pied Piper.

Being civilized means living in a world of abstractions that is rather easily split off in stand-alone fashion from the underlying specific, concrete, sensuous realities that give rise to them: instead of, rather than along with. We become a protocol-driven society of persons “communicating” and “interacting” rather than flesh and blood human animals handling, shaping native materials and each other. The internet is a wonderful creation, but think of the levels of abstraction entailed right now in “communicating” with you—it’s goofy.

A lot of men with good brain power deliberately stay in the trades, armed forces, police work because it is such straightforward, hands-on man’s muscle, tool, weapon work. It gives visible, concrete craft and product. I come to this from the intellectual side. At the age of fourteen I gave up football, basketball, and baseball trading them off for time to, say, listen to recordings of Shakespeare’s plays in the library and follow along with the text. Reading, company and conversation with the best minds on the planet over the last 2000 years, years and years of schooling and study, all the degrees from the best schools, a lifetime of self-education. I’ve loved city life, New York, Paris, Chicago, Atlanta, university teaching, data base technology for world-class corporate America—and have been happiest living totally on my own, remote, Spartan living in a cabin on a pond.

I struggle to remain an outdoor intellectual—the brain of a humanist in a guy whose natural tool seems to be a chainsaw. (Deep, delicious analogies: a powerful horse, a motorcycle, a chainsaw, a woman; all hitting the power band and moving out under your care and handling) There is a thing about guys—tools, toys, dogs, earth and water, women—handling, play, and somewhat gratuitous mixing it up (making mischief for ourselves enlivens our powers), that is utterly native to us. A fascination with method and system, taking things apart and putting them back together, that for me, extends into the cognitive realm as well. Simon Baron-Cohen has done some interesting study on male/female brain differences, systematizing vs. empathetic modalities of processing. Feminine/masculine differences and likenesses are a deep, absorbing interest of mine.

Perhaps men are “gelded” without their tool; Paul Goodman’s classic Growing Up Absurd speaks very probingly of the need for manly vocation—earnest, meaningful, man’s work that makes a difference.

I don’t make so much of this fidelity issue, no matter how natively charged one may be. Much like a strong vocation, a deep, spontaneously absorbing love is so compelling that one cannot leave off; the background is drained of interest and only the figure looms in fascination, concern, and attention. You only have eyes for her and cannot get enough.

I pride myself on dirty-mindedness but “ride them hard and put them away wet”? Golly, you make me blush.

by VelvetHammer on 2006 Aug 13 - 11:33 | login or register to post comments

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink..

VH,--horses and boys/men--my two all-time favorite passions--I even gave up a summer in Europe for both when I was 16! While growing up, I was consumed with the desire of having a horse, but my memories aren't as idyllic as yours.

While my horse was fun to ride, he was very high-strung. He was trained for gymkana (barrell-racing and speed) but I wasn't. He ran away with me and dumped me on my derriere more times than I would care to admit. There were times when we would be going at a good lope on the bridle trail when all of a sudden, I would unexpectedly find myself airborn between two ears...that's when he would see a piece of paper on the ground and he'd park all fours...if he saw a bicycle, I would fly sideways out of the saddle...perhaps a more experienced rider would've had more control.

I had a lover once who reminded me of my various "experiences" with my horse...fun to ride, but the devil to try to catch and easily spooked...they both had certain traits and habits (some exciting and some not-so-exciting) before I even came along, but I was the recipient of them...I had always been taught that if you were thrown off, you needed to get right back on although we, both horse and lover, eventually parted ways.

I know there are some more parallels here between dealing with a horse and a man, but right now can't think of them. I just thought you would appreciate a good horse laugh!

by a Taken In Hand reader on 2006 Aug 19 - 17:18 | login or register to post comments

Good line..

..good line - ride them hard and put them away wet whoever posted it...

VH, interesting issue whether the most dominant men probably deliberately choose the more male brain type careers than going off at a tangent from how they're made to take exams, work up an organisation and probably needing a lot of female skills in the process although I do think many of us cross over between male and female attributes depending on the person. I suspect dominant men and submissive women are at different ends of a scale and the male/female differences between them are particularly pronounced however.

Baron Cohen - yes interesting stuff and his brother is Ali G and makes me laugh - a useful family all in all. Bringing up 3 sons compared to my older daughters gives me lots of chances to look at gender and individual differences.

Submissive and indeed any women can hugely improve their relationships with men if they have some understanding of how the male brain works.

by Hera on 2006 Aug 30 - 19:17 | login or register to post comments

Strains of brain

One thing very attractive about you is your attentiveness to these differences and their dynamics. I am some sort of left-handed cross-over, throroughly male but of somewhat gay temperament in emotionality and capacity for esthetic-erotic absorption.

I have no children but spend a lot of time with them. The yard where I have been harvesting corn and tomatoes abuts a classic american backyard playground always full of kids. The mother of the children and the neighborhood adoptees calls it my anthropology lab.

by VelvetHammer on 2006 Sep 2 - 11:50 | login or register to post comments

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