Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (37 page)

When I started, I was only interested in whipping. Little by little, I was introduced to things by [the] people that wanted them. A bottom or masochist would bring in a new interest, and I would start playing with it and see if I liked it or not. I realized I like a variety of things. That’s how corsets came waltzing into my life! [For me] corsets are a kind of bondage; [it’s] an aesthetic. I enjoy corsetry as a sadist; I enjoy it as a sadistic piece of bondage equipment. And I enjoy the visual.

What I’d really like people to know about S&M is that the display—that which appears to the outsider—and the reality are usually opposites. Somebody may seem to be in intense agony, but might very well be in intense ecstasy. If somebody is in inescapable bondage an outsider might think, Poor them! They’re totally helpless! [But] they might be having a great time, feeling very free about their desire, their emotions, their vulnerability, their catharsis, their sexuality.

I experience pain as pleasure. I’ve known all my life [that] I have a high threshold for pain. It has to become really severe before I begin perceiving it as actual pain. Otherwise, it is erotic stimulation to me.

Nobody wants to really be hurt [in S&M]. It is a lot more controlled, a lot safer than ordinary stuff being done out there. It’s very important to know this, especially if someone wants to get into some of this stuff. If the thought of it turns them on and they’d like to experiment, [they should] read about it and learn about it first, so that nobody
does
get hurt. I have taken friends who are straight and shown them how I played.

I can pretty much get into any pain that I choose. I can go to the dentist and [enjoy] having him diddle around with that little metal instrument. But if he was to take that instrument and put it into a cavity, I would experience that as pain and probably jump out of the seat.

I prefer the bottom in most cases, but I probably end up doing 50-50. My guess is that there are 15 or 20 male submissives to every female dominant. There are so many male submissives! Most submissives are not masochists. I have a pet name for it: I call it the “Tie Me Up and Fuck Me School of S&M.” It’s basically, “Please tie me on the bed, maybe spank me a couple of times, pinch my nipples a little, and then fuck me!” And that’s it. That’s not my trip. My trip is pain. When I top and I find somebody who is a masochist, I relish it.

I have had an active fantasy life since I was eight years old, but my fantasies [then] were what I would call goddess-worship fantasies. I was the white goddess. I was the object of men’s worship. [I didn’t develop real] S&M [feelings] until my 20s. I was married at the time, and my husband got a copy of
Story of
O. We used to lie in bed together and read it. That appealed to me a lot. That was when my first full S&M feelings developed, but [they, too, were] strictly in the realm of fantasy. When I was in my mid-30s I discovered Victorian pornography. I have been and continue to be an extremely active fantasizer about Victorian pornography.

I did not lose my virginity until I was 17 years old. I cannot say for sure what influenced me toward S&M, but I think it stems from an incident [of sexual abuse] when I was eight years old. A couple years after that, I became very ill; the illness involved pain, and I was the center of attention for a few months, so that might have contributed to my interest in pain. [But when I was eight], I lived in Florida. We were an upper-middle-class Jewish family. My mother would give me money to go to the movies alone. That’s a pretty strange thing for a woman to do, to send an eight-year-old female child onto a bus and to the movies alone! A pedophile found me and used a standard
pedophile technique of rubbing my leg and gradually working his way up my leg until he was in essence masturbating me. It felt great! I had a sexual orgasm from it.

[But] I had ambivalence: I loved what he was doing, but I knew it wasn’t what should be going on. So the last time, I decided to sit in another place in the theater, thinking he wouldn’t find me. Of course, he did. And this time he got heavier. I can
vividly
recall this. He took my hand, and he put it on something. I remember thinking that it was smooth like baby skin and so amazingly soft, but underneath the softness there was this really hard inner core. He asked me if I would go home with him, and I knew that was dangerous, that [it] was something I shouldn’t do. So I told him no. Then he asked me to go to the women’s bathroom and to take off my panties and to come back and sit next to him. He took my carfare away.

I went to the bathroom to do what he wanted me to do. I remember looking at myself in the mirror. I was beginning to get scared. So I walked out of the theater and walked the mile home. It was one of those absolutely glorious [Florida] days. While I was walking back, I was repeating over and over to myself like a mantra, “You have to walk because this is your punishment for having enjoyed what happened to you.”

Although it did not entail intercourse or sodomy or oral sex, I certainly lost my innocence. I became an eight-year-old child actively involved in a sexual fantasy life, masturbating, and aware of other people’s sexuality. Because I lost my innocence so young, innocence is something that I value highly. I can’t play with younger people. I draw the line at the early 30s, possibly late 20s. I do not think that children should be sexually involved with older people. I get horrified at the thought of a 25-year-old man having sex with a 16-year-old girl. I know that’s done all the time, but I really believe that children cannot be consensual. They are precious and should be taken care of and their innocence protected. Mine wasn’t.

To me, [play] piercing is a loss of innocence, a loss of virginity. That needle is, in essence, the man’s penis symbolically entering my body. And it’s in a nontraditional area of my body. That excites me. I’m a tremendous reader of women’s romances, and within the genre what turns me on the most is the young innocent virgin who is ravished by her first lover. I don’t think women have
rape
fantasies; I think women have ravishment fantasies. A man adores them to such an extent that he must sexually possess them. Every time I’m pierced, I am devirginized again.

[I edit the Janus newsletter.] The Society of Janus is an educational society. Written right on the business cards is, “Safe, Sane, and Consensual.” San Francisco Janus has about 450 members. The one in Los Angeles has
[about] 600. [Janus] is not primarily social; it’s not a dating service. You don’t go there to find somebody [to play with]. Its purpose is to teach interested people about S&M.

The most intense, special moments of dominance or of submission are things that probably could be described as staring into someone else’s eyes. It’s not so much action as contact between two people. It’s knowing that there’s real communication: a level of trust. When I am with my liege I basically say, “Take me wherever you choose; I wish to learn whatever you have to teach me.” He shows me things about myself that are very valuable to me, that I’ve been afraid of learning but wanted to learn. It’s a kind of compact. It’s much more than just the mechanics of doing a scene.

It was a strong drive in me to submit and to want to be submerged in someone else. I didn’t have much of a struggle with it. The only time it was a problem was if the person I was with started giving me negative stuff about it. But I didn’t have negative thoughts in my own head. My experience up until I came out here was entirely submissive. I was not interested in topping very often. When I did try to top someone, I generally wasn’t very good at it: [I] didn’t want to do this until I knew what I was doing. [Since coming to San Francisco,] I have finally gotten to the point where I understood enough of what I wanted to be able to give those things to someone else. I don’t know any really good tops who don’t also bottom. I can’t really imagine that even the best of tops couldn’t learn more about what they do from bottoming.

I’m currently in the process of moving in with -j-. It was one of those instant serious relationships. We switch a fair amount. It has turned out that I’m mostly dominant within this relationship. It’s interesting the way that evolved. Both of us feel that our greatest fantasy would be to be the slave of the other. I would be perfectly happy if he wanted to be master all the time. I would be the slave all the time and be just thrilled with life in general. I can’t imagine anything better than that. In a way, by being his mistress, I serve him. It’s sort of a circular logic that goes around and around: Whichever one is getting to be the slave is actually the one being served.

You can require a lot of things from somebody, but you can’t require them to take charge. There are times when it gets very frustrating. Both of us, when we’re topping, are doing it because it is what we want. But I would not want it if he did not want it from me. A major component of my desire to top is the fact that I know how happy it makes him. I get a lot of gratification out of it. It’s not purely sex play. If I’m sitting down and I want him to go and get me something to drink, I’ll say, “Slave, please go get me
a glass of water!” [and] he’ll go get me a glass of water. He’s very happy to do it. Sometimes there’ve been stretches when neither of us is in charge because neither of us is really in a state to deal with it. It does take quite a bit of energy and focus to be able to do that.

When we first got together, most of his experience was with topping. Much of what happened with us just clicked. There were times when I would make a mistake and we would talk about it and figure out what had gone wrong, but for the most part, I was able to give him experiences that were just completely mind-blowing because they were fantasies that he didn’t even know he had. The first time I tied him down, I knew what to do. It’s very frustrating when you finally get somebody to tie you down and you lie there thinking, Well, you could do this, or they start to do something, maybe run their hand lightly along your leg, and you think, Okay, now pinch! and they don’t. I was able to look at his body, and say, “Oh, he wants to be pinched right there!” And, for the most part, I was right on target. It was very gratifying for me to be able to give him this. I knew how intense it was, I knew how wonderful it was, because I knew how much I would have wanted it. I knew that the experiences that I was giving to him were as wonderful as they would have been if they [were] given to me.

When I top, I can inflict pain. I enjoy doing it primarily because I enjoy the other person’s responses. I don’t enjoy pain for its own sake. I enjoy pain within the context of a scene. A sadist is someone who enjoys pain for its own sake. [So] when I say that I’ve seen someone who’s a sadist, it’s someone who has channeled that desire into consensual activity. The two sadists that I know—one peripherally, one very well—don’t inflict pain without consent. There might be times when they would like to, but they don’t. It’s a matter of self-control and a matter of choosing to live by certain values, certain standards.

When I was in college I ran into
Penthouse Variations
and things about bondage and S/M; these fantasies sounded very, very arousing to me. Yet whenever I tried to act some of these things out with lovers, it never worked. It always just hurt. I relegated the whole thing to “works well in fantasy, doesn’t work in reality,” until I met this person who knew what he was doing. I realized that, for most people, especially if you start with heavy pain, it just hurts. You want to start gently and work up to a higher level of sensation … a firm touch can be arousing once you’re already aroused but can be painful [otherwise].

When I’m with [my liege], I wear a chained padlock around my neck. I’ve talked about wanting to wear it all the time. It’s a very big thing for me. Wearing a chained padlock around your neck to work—it’s a statement. And I’ve been feeling more and more inclined to not be closeted. I can still pass
for conventional; I have one [piercing] in each ear, and nothing else that’s obvious unless I undress. My nipples are pierced and my outer labia are pierced, but people running into me in the hall don’t see that. I’ve been feeling more and more inclined to change that but at the same time a bit frightened of it. As of last Friday I have a chained padlock around my neck. Yesterday was the first day I went to work with it. A couple of people who know about what’s going on smiled and said, “Oh, nice necklace.” Other than that, I didn’t get a reaction. I could see people looked at it, but nobody had the nerve to ask!

It used to be that I wanted to submit because I was afraid. It’s hard to say what I was afraid of—I was afraid of a lot of things. I was very insecure. I wanted someone to say, “Yes, you are my slave” and to actively take control of my life. I didn’t want to be someone’s slave and get kicked around; I wanted to be someone’s slave and be cherished. I was very afraid that I wasn’t approved of, and I wanted to be a slave because I wanted the approval that it represented. I still like the way it feels, but I’m not desperate for it anymore. I don’t feel that something is missing from my life if I can’t have that every moment, though I feel very good when I get it. Now when I submit to the sadist whose chain I wear, it’s not out of fear. It comes from a desire to share and grow with someone else. If I feel that another person has things to show me by dominating me, I will submit to [him or her]. And if I feel that I have things to show someone else by dominating them, then I will encourage [him or her] to submit to me.

I [know I] want a slave to serve me with his mind as well as his body. I don’t want a puppy dog; I want someone whose goal is to make my life easier, who understands my goals. When my liege asked what the chain around my neck meant to me, I told him that it meant that his joy and his goals are the most important things in my life. For me to serve his goals means that sometimes I tell him when I think that he’s doing something that can go against him. It means that I look for ways to make his life easier without intruding on his energy. And probably the most gratifying moments in my service to him are the times when I am able to help him with a problem with my insight.