The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (9 page)

    Surfing the Web did indeed turn out to be a more interesting waste of time than what I’d been doing. On one of my first afternoons online, I came across a message board that claimed to be a place to discuss feminism. Considering the number of anti-feminist posts that had gravitated to it, I don’t know why I was so surprised to see this one among them:

    
Ladies, stop lying to yourselves. Admit you want it. Visit www.spankingnet.com.

    Believing it to be someone’s idea of subversive humor, I resolved to ignore it at first. I had paranoid visions of some tracking system that kept a record of how many “feminists” were clandestinely taking the bait, for the purposes of a huge AHA! at some future point in time. Although I dreaded being the bad apple that poisons the reputation of the whole group, I lasted only a few hours before I had to return to the computer and look up the Web site.

    The site was not only real, it was better than any other real thing I had encountered in a long time. It was a place for the spanking-obsessed to put up personal ads and talk to each other live in chat rooms. With jittery hands, I typed a description of myself and posted it on the Web site, and by that evening, I had received more private messages in my kinky in-box than I had time to scan through before my housemate came home and needed the phone line.

    Before pure glee could sink in, I had a bout of nervousness about what I’d posted. In addition to stating I was very new to the whole bondage and discipline scene and looking for a decent, unattached person to explore with, I’d said I weighed one hundred ten pounds and had perfect 34C breasts. In actuality, I was closer to one twenty at the time, and my left breast was a tiny bit bigger than my right one. I had dread-filled visions of finally meeting someone, only to see his face fall before my eyes as he realized I’d oversold myself online. That evening, after my housemate went to bed and I had time to check my messages at a leisurely pace, it became instantly clear that my left breast was the least of my worries.

    It was as if the Renaissance Faire nerds had invaded
Hustler
magazine. I know this is judgmental, but I personally can’t get it up for people who address me as “M’lady.” Worse, these Little Lord Fauntleroys offered poorly written descriptions of everything they wanted to do to me — without so much as an initial “nice to meet you” — leaving me with visions of disembodied tongues shoving themselves rudely toward places they had not yet been invited. I resisted the urge to send out a mass reply consisting solely of the word
Ick.
On a positive note, it was a relief in a way, because all of my own anxiety about whether I’d be able to shed a few final pounds disappeared completely in the face of people who faked British accents in cyberspace.

    Thus, I was startled when I read the profile of a man who invited me into a private chat one afternoon not long after. His onscreen name was “T,” and while he didn’t say anything especially intriguing in his profile, the sheer absence of any kind of clownish posturing was fairly stunning to me by that point. The only problem was that he’d checked “attached” in his marital status section.

    
So, was that a mistake or are you actually with someone?
I typed to him that first day. This may sound unbelievably naive, but I didn’t get why someone who openly admitted to having a partner would be contacting me. I thought most guys would try to hide being attached if they were on the prowl to cheat, or at least complain that it was a miserable situation that they would be getting out of any minute now.

    
No, it wasn’t a mistake,
T typed back.

    
Well, are you married to this person?
I asked.

    
Yes,
he wrote without elaborating.

    
Are you in love with her?

    
Very much so, yes.

    By this point I was both confused and angry. Why did the only non-spastic man I’d communicated with so far on this contraption have to wave himself in my face tauntingly if he wasn’t available?
Fine, you’re sadistic, but this is a little out of bounds even for kink,
I thought.

    
Why are you writing to me, then?
I typed.

    
I’m looking for a submissive. I particularly enjoy training novices, which your profile says you are; and I liked that you were clearly intelligent and polite.

    I paused for a moment, and then typed
thank you
automatically, proving his point.
I just don’t want to be messing around with someone else’s husband, that’s all. I would feel guilty about it, plus I don’t like to share.

    
Understood. So you know, my wife is aware of my search for a dominant/submissive relationship outside of our marriage. We have an arrangement, which allows both for my consideration for her feelings and for her awareness that I seek submissives to train.

    
I’m happy for you and your wife, but I don’t want to be with a married man.

    I was irritated now and would have had the urge to slam down a receiver if we’d been talking on the phone instead of online. How dare he think I’d settle for a fraction of someone else’s man? How dare he think I wanted so little for myself, arrangement or no arrangement with his wife?

    
Okay,
he typed.
If you’d like, I would still be interested in mentoring you to whatever degree you’d be comfortable with.

    
What exactly would that mean, for you to mentor me?

    
Well, it means that instead of being completely adrift in this new situation, you’d have someone to answer your questions, someone who wasn’t trying to get anything from you.

    My irritation of moments before disappeared, and, in its place, I felt the beginnings of what I thought would be a safe, and distant, crush. He was here to help me, and as a guy of forty-five, who’d been in the scene almost as long as I’d been alive, he undoubtedly had information that I needed. When he offered to call me that day so we could talk without the lag of typing time, I agreed. When he informed me that I was to call him “sir” and follow whatever instructions he gave me during our actual conversation, I was doubly happy. It seemed I would get to have the safety of a purely platonic involvement, while still experiencing some of the rituals of dominance and submission that I’d already found stimulating. I logged off and sank into the beat-up couch next to the telephone in our living room. When the phone jingled loudly, I made myself wait until the third ring to pick up.

    “Hello?”

    “Hello, Joan.” His voice had an almost whispery quality.

    “Hello, sir.” I tried to think of what to say next. What would be good kinky-stranger etiquette? Do I launch into my questions, or wait for him to guide the conversation?

    “Tell me, Joan, do you have a wooden ruler in your apartment?” Thank God he stepped in to take the initiative. I realized I was suddenly unable to think of a single question anyway.

    “I know I don’t have one, but my housemate might. I can go look.”

    “Do that now,” he said gently, and the receiver slipped out of my hand to land noisily on the wooden tabletop.

    “Sorry, sir,” I snatched it back up and breathed into the phone. “I’ll be right back.” A minute later, I was seated again. “I found a ruler, sir, but it’s three-sided and plastic, not wooden.”

    “Even better.” I could hear the smile in his voice, and purposefully refused to think about where this might be going.

    It was one handy skill I’d learned in rehab — how to fend off sheer terror of the unknown by focusing exactly on what’s going on in any particular moment.
We are just talking. I am just sitting in my living room. Thin, vertical lines of sunlight are shining through the blinds onto our ugly brown carpet.

    “I’d like you to lie down with your back on the couch, and lift and spread your legs so that you have access to the backs and insides of your thighs.”

    “Okay, sir, I’m in that position.” I rearranged myself, scooting some pillows out of the way, and ran through the litany in my mind.
I’m lying down. I’m holding a phone receiver to my ear. Nothing bad is happening.

    “Good. Now I want you to use the ruler on yourself, first on the back of each thigh, then on the insides, ten strokes at a time, and I want you to count out loud for me.”

    Hearing his instructions, I realized I had never before been so aroused and ashamed at the same time, even back in eighth grade when I’d first fantasized about this. What kind of person sat alone in her living room and beat herself with a ruler while talking on the phone? What if the neighbors heard, and worse, what if they understood what the sounds meant? And yet there was never any question in my mind that I would do it. Already the sound of his voice in my ear felt like a physical touch to me, like his hands were on my body, mostly around my rib cage of all things, pressing my heart and lungs together so that breath, pulse, and longing all became one blended bodily function in response to his calm orders.

    “Does it matter which side I start on?” It felt like a silly question as soon as I asked it, a lame attempt to stall and ask for some kind of reassurance at the same time.

    “No, it doesn’t matter, but why don’t you start with your right side? And it needs to be hard enough for me to hear it.” It didn’t seem as if he thought I was being silly. If anything, I thought I detected a note of genuine warmth in his response, and I wondered if it was just an attempt to put me at ease, or something he really felt.

    “Yes, sir,” I said, and then, “One.”

    “I couldn’t really hear that,” he interrupted me evenly. “Please begin again.”

    “One,” I gasped as I brought one side of the ruler down on the back of my right thigh with as much momentum as my short arm and the position of my body would allow. Before the full sting of it could take hold, his voice interceded.

    “That was much better,” he sounded like he was smiling again, and the redness on my white leg felt only warm then, not painful. By the time I had finished all forty strokes, I thought either I must have an unusually weak arm, or an unusually high tolerance for pain. I’d tried really hard to make it hurt, but mostly all it had done was make my body throb in a different location altogether from where the ruler was landing.

    “That was wonderful. I’m very pleased, Joan.”

    I thanked him, and wondered why his simple words of approval made me feel simultaneously so happy and so horrified. I did not like to think of myself as someone who sought validation from men, and yet here I was, feeling like a cat who’d been scratched behind the ears just because a guy I didn’t know was “pleased” with me. Beyond that, I wasn’t even totally convinced he meant it. He could be anyone. He could be laughing at me right now, or taping this for some humiliating purpose in the future, for all I knew.

    “Tell me how you’re feeling right now.” Apparently he was not done bossing me around. I wanted to hang up the phone then, not ever talk to him again. Who was he to pry into my feelings, anyway?

    I’d done what he’d wanted me to do, why did he need to know how attached I already was to the idea of submitting to him?

    “I’m okay,” I said, more to myself than him.
I’m still okay. This is okay.
And then he did laugh, but not at me.

    “You don’t sound too sure, although it hadn’t occurred to me that you
wouldn’t
be, quite frankly,” he chuckled softly as he spoke.

    
Is it okay to tell a stranger the truth, or is that a socially awkward thing to do?
I wondered silently.
It couldn’t be any weirder than what I just did, could it?

    
“Ugh,
I don’t know,” I began. “This is exciting for me, and I’m afraid that makes me some kind of freak. I’m also afraid you’ll think I’m weird for it, and not talk to me after this.” I exhaled loudly, relieved that at least it was out there.

    “Let me get this straight — you’re worried that I’m going to reject you for enjoying the things I like doing with you?” he asked seriously.

    “I know that sounds strange.” I started to explain, and he cut me off.

    “That’s okay, I just wanted to make sure I understood what you were saying. Let me ask you something, and I’m not meaning this in a teasing way, but is it your experience that that’s normal human behavior when you’ve done something you enjoy with another person?”

    “I don’t know, really.”

    I stumbled for the right way to say what I didn’t want him to know: that the last person who’d seemed to enjoy dominating me had also appeared to find me repellent afterwards, and had left me with a fear that it was the very nature and depth of my urges that would put people off thereafter. But there was no way to really backpedal from it now, so I told him, with as little detail as possible and admitting fully only to the fact that Tim had hurt my feelings and left me wary of taking any of this seriously.

    “But you don’t have a choice about that,” he said reasonably.

    “What do you mean?”

    “If you were capable of
not
taking your feelings and desires seriously, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d be feeling happily detached right now, and that would be that.”

    “Then as my mentor, can you help me learn how to do that?” I asked, only half joking. He roared on the other end of the line.

    “That’s something I liked about you from the start. Even in reading your profile, it was clear you had a sense of humor. But no, I can’t help you feel any of this less intensely.” He paused. “I can tell you though, that of the things that could potentially make me uncomfortable with you, your excitement isn’t one of them. I’m sorry to hear you had such a hurtful experience before; it sounds like the guy was a jerk.”

    I didn’t realize how hunched up and tense I’d been until his simple words made my shoulders drop down to their normal position. I stretched my neck, rolling my head forward and to each side in the couch cushions, wondering what it was that people were supposed to talk about after an exchange like this.