Victoria likes to please me. But she’s not a literal masochist in the sense of liking the pain. On the other hand, we recently visited some friends and were looking at their toys, and there was a very nice cane. Victoria was looking at it in that way that I knew. I lifted her skirt and tried it out. And she came. Victoria comes very easily. So she usually [has] an orgasm. Whereas I don’t come easily anymore and don’t have to.
Victoria has moved in with me. We are negotiating together how much a part of our life is D&S [and] what [to] label it. We’re also negotiating a six-month contract—to see if it works and how far we can go. It will lay out the basic parameters. Her inclination was for a year. I, being older and wiser, shortened it. I feel there will be flack, of course, and I’m really a feminist by nature. An egalitarian. I’d only take a strong, confident person as a submissive, because then it meant it’s a very valuable gift and one that I respect.
I [find] Victoria very beautiful and sweet and demure and open and trusting. We established a rapport with very few words. It became a strong relationship in a short time. I love her very much. She’s really cute and charming. I have a lot of respect for her: She’s a very bright woman. I take immense pride [knowing] that she’s mine. I think that summarizes it: a mixture of love and pride.
BIFF
I’m heterosexual. I’ve had a couple of bisexual fantasies but never tried it. I have tried submissive, but I’ve been dominant for several years now. I’m not really sure why. I think it’s like some people are homosexual; one day they discover that they are. I just discovered that I had this tremendous interest in S/M. It took me a while to discover my orientation, but I really enjoy it. I’ve had some very gratifying scenes. Something I’ve explained to my submissives is that I don’t get any satisfaction out of it unless I know that the submissive is enjoying it. It is more of a foreplay. And it invariably ends in some type of sexual release.
There was a book I read and it primarily dealt with dominant females, but I think it carried over to dominant males, too. They said that there are some people who are dominant in their regular life and dominant in their D&S life, and they call them natural dominants, and then there were balancers who were rather submissive in their regular life and dominant in their sexual life. I think I’m more of a balancer. In my job I’m not really in charge of anything, but when I play a D&S scene I get to be in charge, and that gives me a very satisfying feeling.
People go to assertiveness training to be more assertive in their lives. I think I learned that from D&S. I [put] that in practice in my job and in my life. I feel surer of myself; I feel better about myself. I get more accomplished now [by] being more forceful and more assertive. In emergency medicine you have to be very diplomatic but very firm. I deal with the public all the time. One of the big problems in my life is that my job really doesn’t have a whole lot of chance for promotion, so you don’t get any satisfaction that way. It’s often a thankless job. When you’re out, you don’t [usually] have a lot of control over what you’re doing. I think that’s why it’s been so satisfying in my life to be a dominant. I can be in control of something; I can get a lot of satisfaction out of making things happen.
Right after I got out of the service, I started collecting a lot of literature on [D&S]. I realized that most of the literature was in adult bookstores and was kept real hush-hush and that a lot of the mainstream magazines considered it almost a dangerous fetish. It was very difficult for me to talk to my wife about it. I changed by talking to people. I met a couple that were very heavily into it. He was dominant, she was submissive, and they used to invite people over and just sit [and] talk with them. They knew a lot of other people. I started meeting people and seeing magazines that were devoted to it. I started realizing that there were a lot of people out there.
[At the time], we were having a lot of personal problems in our marriage. I think there was a lot of emotional and sexual tension in our relationship because I hadn’t come to grips with [D&S] yet. We had a lot of problems until I started mentioning it to my wife. We talked it out. My wife was very understanding. She wasn’t into it, [though] she tried it a little bit. She didn’t like it, so she allowed me to go out and find partners for it. It took quite a while, but once I found partners and started to practice, I calmed down a lot. I think it’s helped our relationship. There had been a lot of sexual tension, some anger and confrontation.
The only person I’ve ever done a submissive thing with was my wife. She’s not a born dominant and it didn’t go over very well, but the biggest thing I remember was that I kept imagining being the dominant while I was being submissive, and [I imagined] controlling the whole thing. I think that before a person becomes a full-fledged dominant, they should try a submissive scene. They have to try it first to know what it feels like.
I began to practice [D&S], and began to accumulate toys and videotapes. I took my wife along to a couple of parties, where she was more or less a spectator. When she realized that I wasn’t the only person out there—that I wasn’t a serial killer, that it was just something sexual—she loosened up [and said], “Let me try a few things.” She’s gotten to like a few things. Light bondage and spanking have become a part of our relationship. We use a few toys—vibrators and dildos, a couple of restraints—but not too much. I think my wife still has a little apprehension. She had a very strict Catholic upbringing; [so] I think she thinks it’s weird and a little sick. But she’s beginning to enjoy it more. She makes a lot more suggestions and mentions it more frequently. In fact, she’s asked for it on a few occasions, where she never used to before.
I’ve had two especially memorable experiences. One, when I first met this couple that I talked about before, it was so tremendously exciting to find attractive, intelligent people who were into the same things I was. I could talk freely with them about all this. They weren’t afraid of it [and] didn’t bear animosity towards me because of my feelings. Later in our relationship, they played a scene that they thought up, where she was delivered to my home and given to me. All she was wearing was a raincoat, a pair of handcuffs, fishnet nylons, and high heels. I was told that I could do anything I wanted with her. In the course of the next couple of hours, I tied her up to the ceiling, whipped her lightly; I took her down and put a dildo in her and brought her to orgasm a couple of times, played with nipple clips and stuff, and then had her do oral sex on me. Then her boyfriend arrived, and he said, “Now I get my payment,” and he took my toys and went into my bedroom and played with her for about an hour. Afterwards, we all sat and had a drink, and it was very enjoyable for everybody. [It] was one of my ultimate fantasies to have a slave delivered to my door and just given to me. It was just fantastic.
The other scene that really sticks out was just recently. I [had] brought this girl along for several months, starting out very slowly. She was very apprehensive but very interested. It isn’t a tremendous, overpowering part of her life, like it is for me, but she’s still very turned on. We went to this group, and I guess she finally graduated. I never pushed her, [but] she finally said, “Maybe it’s time for us to play.” She stripped down to just high heels and cuffs and a collar, and I chained her up to a big cross and started whipping her and put nipple clips on her, and she started to moan. As I was playing with her, I asked, “Do you want me to stop?” And she said, “God, no!” I just kept playing with her vagina and clitoris and whipping her, and she came to three or four really powerful orgasms. It was a memorable scene, because she had been so apprehensive and so shy [before], and here she was, and we had maybe 20 people looking on. A couple of people actually clapped. It was quite a performance.
I would like my wife to come along and help me dominate my submissive. Maybe it’s just because I want her to be a part of my life. I have expressed this fantasy to my wife. At first she said no, and in the last few months she’s said maybe. I have this very attractive female submissive in Chicago. I’ve been visiting her, and my wife has gotten a little jealous over it. I think sh
e realizes that we have a solid relationship, and it’s going to stay that way, [but] S/M has to be part of my life. If she put her foot down and said, “You’re not going to do that ever again. Give away all your toys, your movies,” I think I would have to seriously consider ending our relationship.
The best advice I could give to somebody would be just write, write, write, write, write. Write ads; write letters; go to a club or an organization that deals with D&S. It took me years to get where I am, especially in a sleepy little Midwestern town. It takes forever to find somebody, but there are people out there. Don’t get discouraged.
GENEVIEVE REYNOLDS
S/M, especially when I first was learning about it, was very explicit, very step-by-step. It made me aware of the process of taking control. S/M said, “You have the power to make choices for what happens in your life, and here’s how you do it: say, ‘This is what I need.’ You have the power to make choices, and this is how you do it: negotiate.” So, while feminism told me to act in certain ways, S/M actually showed me how.
For a long time when people would ask me, “Are you a top, bottom, switch?” I would say, “I’m a switch but mostly bottom; I get out my top energy dealing with the real world by being in charge of my own life.” I’ve been able to take the ideas outside of my sex life into, say, dealing with bureaucracy. I learned early on that I could go into a situation and say, “I need you to do this for me.” I try not to do it meanly, but people aren’t used to women being in charge in their own lives—it takes them aback.
Sadomasochist is the most fully inclusive and descriptive word for me. I experimented actively with it in some of my earliest sexual relationships. S/M isn’t what I do all the time, but it’s the single thing that always has my attention. That’s why I choose to say that I’m a sadomasochist rather than a bisexual woman or a lesbian sadomasochist or any of those other ways that I can describe myself.
As long back as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by women’s bodies. I had a hard time seeing where it fit into my everyday life. I was also interested in boys and in men, but that was more of a given, it was easier to do. Physically, a woman’s body will always have my attention. A man has to be pretty darn special for me to pay much attention to him. Far too many men have accepted what the mainstream tells them they should be like; they just don’t have enough humanity in them.
I was always very sexually curious, very precocious, always read well above my grade level, and was looking for information about all aspects of sex: reproductive information, sexual-variations information. I was intensely curious.
By age 14 or so, I [was reading] about bondage and anal sex. Those two had the biggest kicks for me then. I first read a publication by Samois [Author’s note: a lesbian feminist S/M collective] when I was 18 or 19, and that was my first exposure not only to people doing this on purpose—I had been exposed to that before—but people doing it on purpose and thinking hard about it and applying analyses to it.
I never worried why I had these interests. My first boyfriend and I had been going out for a while before something reminded me there was this other stuff, too. I wanted him to top me in a very mild way. I really wanted to struggle a little and have him hold me down. But I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. So while we were kissing and rolling around in the bed and kind of necking and doing foreplay things, I pushed him away just a little bit, not trying to really push him away. He was confused. He pulled back and gave me a funny look and tried to kiss me again. I tried it again, and after two or three times, he got up and walked to the other side of the room, all grumpy and very confused. He didn’t have a clue about what I was trying to do! So we sat there unhappy for a few minutes, and I said, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “What’s going on? I’m confused!” That was probably the hardest moment of my life! I had to get the words out to say, “I want you to hold me down; I want you to push a little bit.” Then he said, “If that’s what you want, sure, we can give that a try.” So we gave it a try, and we talked about it afterwards. He’d be happy to do it for me if I wanted him to, but he didn’t really get it! We did it a few more times. I suspect we didn’t do it more because it didn’t do anything for him, and so a lot of the thrill wasn’t there for me, either.
I’ve always been a switch, but I’m in a transition. I always got a great deal of pleasure from bottoming—direct visceral pleasure. The pleasure I got from topping was not as direct; I am not a natural top. I enjoy [it], but topping wasn’t something that I automatically wanted to do: It was specific to a person who wanted me to do that. Just recently I have found women I was attracted to who were interested in S/M. My attraction was so intense that I just thought, I want to do S/M with this person; I don’t care how it has to happen. I have a girlfriend of several months now. We didn’t intend to get serious, but it’s gotten very serious. She is a bottom, and I’ve been doing all the topping. We’ve both been enjoying it a great deal.
As a bottom I like things that make me the center of attention. A few times I’ve been in scenes where I was ignored for long periods. I got very bored. I like a lot of physical attention, both painful and nonpainful. I like sexual play, and sometimes I like play where nothing sexual happens at all. I haven’t done formal meditation, but it seems to me that [pain] does something similar to what meditation [or] yoga can do, because you’re focusing your body, and your mind can be free to drift and not think analytically at all.
S/M is the only time that I’m only paying attention to one thing. Even in the middle of sex, I find myself being distracted [by] work or the dishes! S/M gets me completely focused. There have been a few times when everything has been just right, and it got to where I could take anything. I don’t know where the energy goes. It’s like a balloon breaking! I’m getting closer and closer to something, [it’s] swelling up in me, all the energy from the beating is going inside and staying there, and as I get to that stage, it’s broken. The energy is flowing real freely through my body and out of my body and, God, yes, anything can happen at that point.
Unfortunately, the first time I lived away from my parents’ house, I was young and uncertain. I lived with a dominant who was a couple of years older than me. He had a lot more experience. I deferred to his life experience and stopped trusting my own intuition. There was emotional domination that wasn’t Scene domination. I got into S/M for good reasons, but the relationship itself got twisted because we were both young. We did lots of play where I was submissive in ways that more than anything else looked like a traditional heterosexual relationship.
If you’ve ever talked to women who are in battered relationships, you’ll hear a lot of what I’m saying here. I’d gotten very confused; I lost my sense of who I was. I lost the ability to objectively and independently judge what was going on around me. I was trying to figure out why this stuff that had been so exciting and wonderful at the beginning had gotten so scary. I puzzled it through and realized that there was an emotional dynamic that was happening which wasn’t S/M. Coming to the realization—that the S/M was great, but that the things that were going on that I didn’t like were not the same as the S/M—was very powerful for me. [This] allowed me to get out of the relationship and not blame the sex. To be able to separate those things is very valuable. I’ve read writings by women who were “saved” from a life of perversion; they didn’t separate those things. I read sadness in their words.
[In order for a] full-time D&S relationship to work, you have to be much more aware and negotiate more thoroughly and be able to talk about stuff and say, “When you did this, I felt that way.” S/M is not a matter of activity nor of degree: It’s a matter of intention.
SECTION TWO
IMAGINATION AND DESIRE
Four
POWER
To lie at the feet of an imperious mistress, to obey her commands, to ask her forgiveness—this was for me a sweet enjoyment.
—JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU1
Power—its uses and abuses—makes th
e world go ’round. To most people, power is a political, economic, or social phenomenon which often entails the assertion of superiority over others for personal or group gain. But to the D&Ser, the power exchange between lovers is a fundamental source of erotic excitement, shared by equals, and often an intellectually enlightening experience.
A lot of people think S/M is about conquest: about domineering rather than domination. For me, that’s not what it’s about at all. When we begin to play there [may] be some resistance, because we’re not trained to gracefully surrender personal power. Submission is an alternate way of dealing with power, a way of exploring the nature of your own power, how to access it and choosing to turn it over or not. Choice is the key. S/M is a tool for surrender.
—M. CYBELE
In this chapter, we explore the erotic potency of power. We profile six people for whom the power exchange is a critical aspect of their sexual play:
• M. Cybele is 42 years old. She is a professional dominant, sex educator, and transformation counselor to the transgender community. Her life partner is James W.
• James W. is 47 years old. He is a writer and a teacher.
• Sri Shivaynanda is 48 years old. He is a former Air Force pilot and now works in the film industry in California. He is a spokesperson for the Service of Mankind Church (SMC).
• Morgan Lewis is in her 50s and is on the board of directors of the Eulenspiegel Society. She is an entertainer and a professional massage therapist. She has children.
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