Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
CHAPTER I - Jonathan
CHAPTER II - Krazy Kat
CHAPTER III - Professionalism
CHAPTER IV - Kibbles and Bits
CHAPTER V - Entr’acte
CHAPTER VI - Long Corridors
CHAPTER VII - What Happens Next?
About the Author
Copyright Page
This story about a readerly-writerly girl
is dedicated to my readerly- writerly girlfriends
and, always and already and of course,
to my husband.
Passion and expression are not really separable. Passion comes to birth in that powerful impetus of the mind which also brings language into existence. So soon as passion goes beyond instinct and becomes truly itself, it tends to self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep going.
—DENIS DE ROUGEMENT, Love in the Western World
Foreword
The Thinking Woman’s Submissive
ONE OF MY FIRST JOBS AFTER I GRADUATED college was working as an assistant to Richard Kasak, the head of Masquerade Books, which published mostly mass-market erotic paperbacks. It was 1994, and there were very few erotic fiction books on the market, so, at the time, Masquerade was blazing a trail in the tradition of steamy pulp fiction novels of the 1950s and 1960s; at its high point before the company eventually folded, it was considered the largest publisher of erotica in the United States. Some of the books were in the public domain, like My Secret Life and Venus in Furs. Others were written by established and up-and-coming gay and lesbian writers including Felice Picano, Larry Townsend, Marilyn Jaye Lewis, and Michael Bronski. Richard also published plenty of outlaw writers whose work was not just sexually explicit, but provocative, like Samuel Delany, John Preston, Patrick Califia, Cecilia Tan, and Laura Antoniou (then writing as Sara Adamson).
Richard had a stable of writers he worked with regularly, but he also received lots of unsolicited manuscripts. He encouraged me to go through this pile of smut submissions in my spare time, and I had the chance to read some wacky, awful, compelling, sexy, and silly erotica. Most of it was pretty bad. One day, I came across the manuscript for a novel titled Carrie’s Story. It was an entertaining read, well-written, and held my attention all the way through. I remember thinking, this is actually pretty good, and definitely better than most of the stuff in that pile. I told Richard that I really liked it, to which he replied, “Good, since I’m publishing it.” So, I was there when Carrie’s Story first debuted in print.
I can still remember the original Masquerade cover photo, featuring a doe-eyed brunette with porcelain skin and piercing eyes peering directly at the reader on a stark white background (reminiscent of the rooms in a certain labyrinthine building with a semicircular driveway you’ll read about near the end of the novel). The old cover never explicitly referenced the book’s kinky contents—no restraints, leather, handcuffs, or blindfolds. Just this young woman staring at you. She looked innocent yet confident, transparent yet still mysterious. She looked like Carrie. I called the author, Pam Rosenthal aka Molly Weatherfield, who I’d met at a reading at Good Vibrations in San Francisco, to tell her the cover was spot on.
Nearly two decades later, I sat down to reread Carrie’s Story, and I like it even more now than I did then. In the past twenty years, I’ve read thousands and thousands of erotic stories, and this novel does more than stand the test of time. It has so much of what I look for in quality erotica: a strong female heroine, an elaborately crafted fantasy world, suspense, clever details, and a sense of humor. Plus, it beautifully captures one of the most highly charged erotic fantasies for many people: the fantasy of being someone’s slave, disciplined, put on display, and sexually used. Between the brutal whippings, exquisite objectification, pony girl training, and preauction preparation, there’s plenty to love in this story—and jerk off to. It’s a world where sex—with strangers, on demand, in beds of hay, as a courtesy, without negotiation—is just moments away. The sex is never-ending, and not just with masters and mistresses, but also with maids, security guards, stable boys, chauffeurs, trainers, and cafeteria workers, all complicit in this world of perversion and eager to indulge their own kinks.
Today, it seems no one can talk about a BDSM novel—hell, we can’t talk about any erotic fiction—without invoking Fifty Shades of Grey. Carrie’s Story was written decades before Fifty Shades, and it surpasses it on nearly every level. But one difference in particular stands out: Carrie’s Story is about a submissive female heroine with a brain! Carrie is the thinking woman’s submissive—sharp, funny, self-reflective, much like the woman who created her, who is also a wonderful storyteller. Carrie debases herself for sometimes creepy men and accepts endless punishments, yet still remains a woman with strength and agency. In fact, as someone who is told at one point that she will be referred to only as “slave,”—a symbolic erasure of identity—Carrie has an incredibly well-defined and constructed identity that never gets lost. She is pushed, pulled, and brought to the brink, but her spirit is never broken; nothing ever goes too far for Carrie, a quintessential element in a great fantasy.
Weatherfield has managed to create a world that’s so fantastical, it draws you in immediately with its shiny nipple clamps and tight corsets. In that way, it’s quite reminiscent of Laura Antoniou’s classic BDSM series The Marketplace. In Carrie’s Story, we are swept into a secret underground world of human equine dressage competitions, BDSM brokers and auctions, spectacular indoor gardens with slaves on display, and around every corner, a ring drilled into the wall to chain your sex slave to. Yet, it’s grounded in enough familiar details that it might just be true—you may never look at a nondescript corporate building, a closed horse trailer, or a simple leather bracelet the same way again. Weatherfield really manages to capture some of the most compelling aspects of kink—and not the cheap “Law and Order: SVU” crap, either. There is depth and detail here that will resonate with actual kinky people, from the high-tech geekery and protocols to the “willfully disobedient” character, along with the complex power dynamics and hierarchies. More than once I found myself asking, who is really in control here? Who has the power?
My latest reading of Carrie’s Story also brought me new insights and pleasures, some I simply couldn’t grasp or imagine when I was twenty-three years old. Many of the characters who cross paths with Carrie immediately recognize how smart and verbal she is, and I found myself seeing a meditative quality to Carrie’s journey from college student to submissive to slave. It’s one I think will resonate with readers who are highly cerebral (just as clever references, like “the crying of Lot 14,” will). Carrie ultimately wants to shed her ego and her inhibitions, get out of her head, and surrender to an experience. It’s a tricky place for many of us to get to in sex, and BDSM is often a vehicle to help us find our way there. It’s a testament to the depth with which Weatherfield writes and her ability to craft intelligent smut. Discovering something new in an old story is a gift. And this story leaves me wanting more.
Tristan Taormino
New York
October 2012
Preface
I WROTE THIS S/M ODYSSEY OF A VERY YOUNG, very intellectual girl in the early 1990s, but its roots go back about a dozen years earlier, when a friend had asked me if I was going to a Take Back the Night March. Those of us who date back to the feminism of the late 1970s will remember those women’s marches through urban red-light districts to demonstrate against pornography. Something about these marches disturbed me, but until that moment I hadn’t known why.
“No,” I told my f
riend. No, I wouldn’t march.
“Why?” she asked.
I stammered a few unimpeachable sentiments about the First Amendment, but I knew I wasn’t being completely honest.
“It’s because of who I was when I was younger,” I finally said. “In my teens and early twenties. I read a lot of S/M porn back then before feminism.”
Lots of Sade anyway. Story of O—innumerable times—as well as the inferior imitations it had inspired. I hadn’t been hurt by these books. I’d read them bravely and honestly, helplessly and joyfully, deep into the night. Blissfully enthralled by narrative, my younger self hadn’t bothered to sort out sex from intellect, power from creativity. I hadn’t thought about it for years, but I knew I couldn’t participate in a movement that wanted to “protect” other women from the confusing pleasures I’d experienced.
The more I thought about this conversation, the more I wanted to reach back to the young person I’d been. I wanted to reconnect with her fledgling sexuality, and to find out how she’d come to be so smart (especially since I knew that she’d considered herself exceedingly stupid). Over the years I’d learned something about politics and literary theory, but my younger, porn-reading self had understood stories and their seductive power directly.
Of course, reconnecting with the erotics of reading and writing wasn’t something I undertook alone. No member of the boomer generation ever does anything alone. I had only to look around me: what came to be called the Sex Wars were raging within the women’s movement throughout the 1980s. Feminists debated pornography and censorship. More importantly, we thought long and hard about the relationship of sexual expression to action, nature to culture. I read and listened, learning invaluable lessons from the boldest (and sometimes most beleaguered) fighters for “pro-sex feminism,” notably Susie Bright, Gayle Rubin, and Amber Hollibaugh.
I learned even more from the feminist pornography that was suddenly, deliciously available. This new stuff tried to democratize the old conventions of bondage and domination and absolutely refused to be complicit with anybody’s victimization. Of course, with the important exception of Anne Rice, feminist pornography was largely created by lesbian, gay, and bisexual authors, written with all the brio of a movement creating its public voice. I’m a straight married lady, but I nonetheless treasured the first Samois collection, and I devoured the work of Pat Califia, Carol Queen, and John Preston.
In some ways, it was like revisiting the heavy hetero French porn I’d read so many years ago. But in other ways, this late twentieth-century porn bore the indelible marks of its own era. Confident, optimistic, flush with the wisdom of consciousness-raising and a new grassroots “sexpertise,” this porn believed in consensual relationships, fulfillment, and happy endings.
As I gratefully do as well. Except that on another, private channel, I kept hearing the older stories. “Chateau porn,” my husband called it. Well, that was part of it; I’ve always been a sucker for the moment when the heavy double doors shut behind you and there you are, bound and gagged and alone with your terror and desire.
I wanted more attention paid to the very strangeness of that moment: the deadpan humor implicit in all the chatty, philosophical storytelling that flows out of a gagged and bound O or Justine. Perhaps I’d simply read too many French writers: God help me, I wanted a little more theory. How did mind and body conspire to produce these stories anyway? Perhaps I’d find out only by telling one myself.
I’m grateful to Richard Kasak, who thought that people would want to read such a thing, for the original Masquerade edition. Many thanks to Felice Newman for making this Cleis edition possible. And my deepest thanks go to Darlene Pagano, for convincing me—at a time when I needed a lot of convincing—that people might still want to read Carrie’s Story.
Molly Weatherfield
San Francisco
May 2002
CHAPTER I
Jonathan
Ihad been Jonathan’s slave for about a year when he told me he wanted to sell me at an auction. I wasn’t in any condition to respond when he told me this—I was very carefully licking his balls, concentrating on doing it the way he liked, wondering when it would be time to snake my tongue into his asshole, waiting for the little tug on the chain clipped to my nipples, which would be the signal. I got it right, I think—or at least close enough. His cock got very big, and he rammed it deep into my throat, coming hugely, while he continued to tug on the chain. I swallowed hard, letting myself sigh and shudder. He held my head down tightly with one of his hands, only very slowly releasing it, allowing me to relax between his thighs.
It was only later, after I had brought in some tea and buttered toast and knelt silently at his feet while he read through the book review sections—New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle both—occasionally stroking my head and feeding me bits of toast with his fingers, that he decided to tell me what he had meant.
“Did you hear me before, Carrie?” he asked.
“Yes, Jonathan,” I said, following the rules we maintained. I always had to address him by name, and deferentially. I also had to look him straight in the eye, which I was doing as well. “But I didn’t understand what you meant,” I added.
“Well, get dressed,” he said. “We’ll go for a walk, and I’ll tell you.”
“Yes, Jonathan,” I said. He removed the nipple clips and attached a leather leash to the collar around my neck. The leash dangled down between my breasts, and he pulled it up between my legs, looping it around my waist and knotting it in the back. He often said that he wished he could take me on a leash whenever we went out, but he couldn’t without causing a stir. So this would have to do. The leather felt tight between the lips of my cunt. I put on a pair of jeans, a big turtleneck sweater, and some high-heeled boots. You couldn’t see the leash or collar, of course, but I was very conscious of them, as I always was. Jonathan had gotten dressed while I was getting the tea, but I helped him put on his boots and got his leather jacket from the closet.
We looked, I guess, like any yuppie couple out walking on Filbert Street on a Sunday afternoon. No, to tell you the truth, we’re better-looking. Or at least Jonathan is. He has warm olive skin, a lively, quirky, intelligent face, and very bright brown eyes. He’s tallish, with elegant shoulders and a tapering waist. I’m not as special-looking, though I think I’m okay, and I do think we look nice together. His gray hair and brown eyes look great against my brown hair and gray eyes, and we have almost matching very short haircuts. As for the rest of me—a little taller than average, small bones, slender hips. Pale skin and a wide mouth. Stormy gray shadows around my eyes, even when I’ve gotten lots of sleep.
The day was a little foggy, but we were warm from sex and tea, and I was too confused and curious to worry about any chill in the air anyway. Jonathan held my hand tightly and began to explain.
“You don’t know about the auctions, I guess,” he said, “or how slave ownership really works. But haven’t you wondered, when we’ve gone to dressage shows, what the real relationships are?”
“Yes, Jonathan,” I said meekly, “I had hoped you’d tell me.”
The dressage shows were among the stranger events Jonathan had taken me to. They had their rules, too. They’d take place in some very fancy house, really a mansion, usually down the peninsula, often with walled grounds you’d drive through on the way to the house. Jonathan would give the car to a valet, who would also take my coat. Without my coat, I’d be naked, except for boots and a leash and collar. Jonathan would take my leash and lead me to the chairs set up in a ring, usually in some gorgeous garden area. He’d take a seat and attach the leash to a little post set up next to it, and I’d kneel there, as all the other slaves were doing next to their little posts.
The first couple of times we’d gone to these events, I couldn’t entirely believe it. I mean, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Jonathan had just hired this bunch of attractive people from central casting, that’s about how real it was to me. It was hard for me t
o believe, or admit, that other people were participating in arrangements similar to the one I had with Jonathan and that, moreover, there was a world of them—a miniworld, anyway. But little by little I began to accept at least a certain level of factual reality. Physical facts, like the thin red lines on that blond, curly-haired girl’s thighs. They were precisely spaced, those lines, and I had to believe that they were the work of that very sallow, soignée woman in white silk whom the blond girl was gazing at so adoringly. I had accepted the evidence by now, and I was beginning to wonder how much more there was to all of this and how it all worked.
Jonathan had had no patience for my curiosity. The point of the show, he’d told me in no uncertain terms, was the performances. I was there to watch and learn from them, not to drool over the audience. Or, to be more precise, the point for me should be those performances he was interested in. Because actually there were many kinds of performances featured, including races and steeplechases performed by slaves in boots and harnesses, sometimes in color-coordinated equipage (were there really people who had more than one slave? I wondered). Jonathan didn’t care so much about the horsier parts, though, and sometimes left early. As I followed him out I’d be filled with disturbing feelings, incoherent imaginings, for example, of what it would feel like to be commanded by tugs at reins attached to a bit in my mouth.
What Jonathan did care about, though, were the performances called presentations. These were likely to be up at the front of the program right after the introductions, which were usually delivered by some very manicured rich man or lady. Last time we’d been to one of these, it had been a lady in a garden-party dress, welcoming the assemblage to her home, in a creamy voice. Then she announced the participants, although actually that information was all on a beautifully printed little card, which had been distributed to all the masters and mistresses when they’d come in.
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