Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (30 page)

Interrogation scenarios often continue until the submissive feels that his will has been bent.

Some D&Sers will wear appropriate uniforms or costumes to enhance the reality of the scene. Not only submissives are aroused by this type of play, but dominants often have more reservations about playing so close to the edge.

Most institutional scenarios are infrequently or tentatively enacted, and adherence to safety guidelines is critical in any type of invasive play. Such fantasies, however, proliferate in D&S pornography, where fictional characters regularly subject the human body to abuses which no sane D&Ser would ever attempt.

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NTERVIEWS

I’m 100 percent hetero. I’m not homophobic. I have many homosexual friends whom [I] respect. They understand it’s not my thing. I don’t put it down, [but] it’s just not for me. I consider myself a little more aware of the sexuality of a woman, because I grew up in the age of the “new woman,” or the feminists. Dating in the feminist world, you get badgered with a lot of information. So I know more of where women are coming from, and it helped me [with] the act, to tell the truth.

I make my living by entertaining at different functions—clubs, parties, whatever—as Danny the Wonder Pony, who literally gives a pony ride to ladies who want one. I have a custom-made costume, and it consists of a saddle, reins, stirrups, all the equestrian equipment, [tailored to] fit me. I get down on all fours for a second, and the lady sits in the saddle. Her feet go in the self-adjusting stirrups, and then I stand up on two legs and dance. The lady looks and she feels like she’s riding a pony, although it’s going to the music. There are also parts of a pony ride that are a little more stimulating than others for the ladies. The Wonder Pony knows all. He knows all about what the women want.

Men are really into dogs, and women literally fall in love with their horses, especially if they’re teenagers, because it’s the first sexual awareness, sometimes. If you’ve ever noticed, teenage girls are always the most enthusiastic pony riders. There’s a reason for that; it literally feels good to them, just the way, maybe, a man feels good in a sports car because of the adrenaline. If you ever go to a ranch and watch people riding, you’ll see that eight or nine out of 10 are girls. [It] has to do with a Western saddle. The English saddle doesn’t have the same effect, because it just isn’t built the same way. It doesn’t have the horn; it doesn’t have the slope in the front.

I managed a dude ranch for three years. I studied the way the women moved, not the horses. If I move like a horse, it just waddles around, because I’m not shaped like a horse, so I had to develop dance moves to correlate to the movement of the pony. There’s a whole bunch of things involved in the erotic. Think of all the equestrian expressions that are also bestowed in the sexual area. Mounting—she mounted him; hung like a horse; [referring] to men as stallions, studs; sowing your wild oats. You don’t hear references to birds or cats or dogs—that’s considered perverted. Watch a woman galloping along, and then turn that picture sideways, and
envision the horse gone and a man on her, and you’ll see that she actually looks like she’s having sex.

The first experience I had was when I was about 12 years old. I was hanging around with this 11-year-old girl and it was a boring afternoon. She innocently said, “Give me a horsey ride!” like her daddy used to do. So, what the hell, I gave it to her. It was my first real experience with a girl. It was like, “Wow, this is nice, this is pleasurable!” It stuck in my head and became an erotic fantasy. I don’t think about doing this when I’m making love, and I don’t think about making love when I’m doing this. But it is a turn-on. The fact that I’m making a living at it, the fact that women are having a good time with it—all of that gives me erotic feelings, because I guess we all, basically, get erotic when it comes to sex and money.

I was motivated by the desire to have it all: to make a living at something that you enjoy and then throw in that it gets you sexually interested. Being a pony is very important because it intertwines itself [with the] identity in your head. You want to have a positive sexual identity. Everyone wants to have a strength; this is my strength. Women pay attention to me because of it.

I’ve dated a lot of women I’ve met through this. There is also that dominant-submissive thing there, but it’s more of a chivalrous thing. It’s like I’m giving pleasure to women in a manner like, I guess, Sir Walter Raleigh. When he laid his coat down, was that submission or chivalry? He did it because he wanted to, so it was chivalry. He didn’t have to—that would have been submission. I do this for myself, but I also do it because it gives pleasure to women, and I have a good time doing that, so it’s chivalry. Most of the people that I wind up dating have taken pony rides. Let’s face it: [If] I get involved with someone, she’s got to like pony rides. It’s like a singer hooking up with someone that hates to hear someone sing. That would be ridiculous. I wouldn’t get involved with a woman who disapproved. When I’m involved with someone, my life is intertwined with hers. It’s not like, “Well, we’ll tolerate each other.” You should have many, many things in your life intertwine—your professions and what you consider erotic should be compatible. Otherwise, don’t even bother.

[It’s] an amazing thing. I never get tired of it—it never gets old.

What’s always amazed me is that there’s not much difference between my act at an S/M club and at a Sweet Sixteen party. The presentation has to change according to the crowd, but the actual ride itself is exactly the same, which is funny. What changes are the clothes underneath the horse equipment, not the equipment or the ride. It’s like they base whether the act is risqué or cute depending on whether my clothes are risqué or cute.

If the person is treating me as a pony, then [it’s not erotic], but if the
person is treating me as a person—being used as a pony—then possibly [it’s erotic], depending on their attitude. If they’re doing it in a mean, selfish way, it isn’t fun. If they’re having a lot of fun with it, then I’ll have fun with it. My idea is not to do my thing whether they enjoy it or not: I want the person to enjoy. I want that more than just doing a good act.

I can read an audience pretty quickly and do what’s needed to please them. The most unreceptive [crowds] have been the yuppie-ish types. It isn’t the women. The men who want to attract and impress women with money are the most threatened by my act, because they can’t compete with this.

Picking my most exciting experience is real hard. Is it when I got a hundred-dollar tip or when a beautiful woman took off her top? All of them have been exciting. I was very excited when I flew to Miami and started doing my act every six weeks. I was very excited when I met my girlfriend through it. The most exciting thing monetarily is when I’m making the most money; the most exciting thing sexually is when the woman is gorgeous and maybe coming on to me. It changes constantly. There are so many avenues of my life that are exciting to me! Maybe that’s why I’m not married—so many different women are exciting to me. It’s very hard to say, “What was the favorite woman you were with?” The favorite woman is the one that likes to pony ride the most.

The whole Wonder Pony [act is] copyrighted, so that if anyone tried to do a similar act in a similar way, I’d have recourse. Not only that, but it’s physically difficult. I have chiropractors come up to me, telling me I shouldn’t be doing this. It’s a lot more than throwing a saddle on your back and people wanting to pay money. I got it to the point where I get hired to take women along the beach at night in the summertime. I put boots on; I go through the surf. I’ve gotten it to a real pinnacle.

I’m very sexual. I always have been, and in order to sustain that amount of sexuality, I try to have as large a repertoire as possible. Things can get boring if you just do one thing. I am strictly heterosexual [and] pretty monogamous. I’m dominant.

Sex is probably the most important thing in both of our lives as partners. I was very inhibited before. I was married for 25 years to one woman who never had sex with anybody else. I started exploring myself when I was about 40. Lindsay is 15 years younger than I. When we met, she was not into S&M. With my previous wife, I tried different things: I tried dildos, I tried tying her up. It just didn’t work. She would go limp. There has to be some sort of spark between us to make this work. But I had this desire, and then I met Lindsay. Lindsay was game for anything that was sensual. She could enjoy the
intensity of an experience without it converting into pain, which has an awful lot to do with how much you relax into things. It went from “How can I give you more of an intense feeling than before?” and got where we are [now]. She wants to do it all.

I’d always had S&M kind of fantasies. Going back to my earliest sexual memories, in preschool, I used to have dreams of being kidnapped and locked up in a room with a girl; we were naked, [and] we’d lie on top of each other. I went through school having fantasies of finding women and tying them up and being able to have them. There was this whole mystique around women being unavailable to me. As oldest boy in a family of boys, not knowing about women and being very shy and not being able to know how to come in contact with them, women [seemed] very unapproachable. It developed into this fantasy about a way to make women approachable. When I’d go to the library as a little kid, I’d go to the sex books and [read] the torture books. It was funny because I’m afraid of pain, [and] I faint at the sight of blood. There’s a very nebulous thing around pain that’s always been fascinating to me. I was turned on by the fact of people being helpless, of somebody having power over another person, [but] the bloody, painful stuff really turns my stomach. So, to me, in S&M there seems to be a definite dichotomy between fantasy and reality.

I have experience being a bottom, and my partner has experience being a top; we prefer it the way we have it, but we don’t find the other way anathema. It gives you an ability to see what it feels like on the other side. When I become submissive, I feel completely overwhelmed. I feel like a goddess has taken me; I feel completely like I worship this person, and whatever they would do to me would be just fine: it would be like a sacrifice to them.

The most exciting fantasies that I have right now are, first, the dog-show fantasy. Women are brought in cages by masters. They’re naked, and they’re in little cages with carpets, and they’re all put up on benches, and everybody’d go around and look at them. Then they’re brought out on leashes, strutted around the floor, and judged like a dog would be. Their necks are brought up; their mouths are looked at, their orifices are opened up. They’re probed in front of the audience, so that there’s an element of humiliation, there’s an element of objectification.

I think the fantasy comes from the fact that women have always been so hard to get. Women really control the relationship in all the courting stages, and men feel very frustrated. I know I felt very frustrated about women, how hard it was to get them and how powerless I always was. It seems to be a way where I can just express my pure, erotic lust.