The Safe Word, part 2: A Minute Later.

My wife had just finished whipping me with the plastic switch she had decided was best suited for punishment purposes. It was roughly two and a half feet long and as wide around as a pencil, and like getting whipped with a car antenna. She had been in a cool rage as she beat me, and I had been hurting so bad that I had forgotten there even was a safeword until she threw it out to me like a life-preserver. Knowing I loathed being weak, knowing the safeword represents weakness to me, she held it up and offered me a choice: continue with the beating I was taking, or safeword out. Submit and be strong, or give up and be broken.

In the face of the stinging pain, the seemingly endless whipping, I grasped at the safeword. And although I didn’t realize it that second, the whole relationship subtly changed.

My wife was ecstatic in the face of her triumph over my strength. She leaned over me, spooning up against me, rubbing her full breasts against my back, her crotch grinding against my stinging ass. “Why doesn’t every woman on Earth do this?” she mused.

A moment later she hopped up and told me to stand with my back to her. She reached for the video camera and quietly filmed the welts on my back, ass and thighs, narrating as she went, her finger tracing the angry scarlet slashes across my skin. “Here,” she said, “and here, and there’s three up here by your shoulders, and down here…”

A moment later, aroused beyond belief by her handiwork, she commanded me to fuck her. I raised up on my knees, threw her legs around my shoulders for leverage, and just began pounding into her. At first, it was brilliant — she was tight and wet and she moaned and pled for me to continue, but after a minute, something weird happened:

I stopped feeling my dick.

Or more to the point, I stopped feeling it more intensely than anything else on my body. I realized I was overstimulated after an hour or two of frenetic, no-holds-bar play. She had carved her name into my chest with a lancet and drank the blood; she had tied a leather cord around my balls and cock and then tortured my testicles; she had clamped my nipples; she had whipped my back, my ass, my thighs; she had clamped my parenium and sodomized me roughly with a dildo; she had smacked my face repeatedly. And now, my whole body was in a haze of ache and pain and pleasure, each part of it alive and hurting and throbbing in equal parts. Everything was glittering with feeling, and it felt like each part of my body burned with its own terrible heat.

“I can’t do this,” I moaned. She looked at me like I was crazy, asked me what was wrong. I pulled out, and explained that I couldn’t feel my penis, or at least feel it with any more feeling than my aching back or throbbing balls or stinging nipples. They all shouted at the same volume.

My wife likes fucking. She likes doling out the pain, but the completion of any scene involves my cock inside her, and she needs me to come with an insane urgency. Pain and pegging and everything else is great, but what it comes down to for her, at its essence, is fucking. Fucking is the foundation on which everything else rests.

And I couldn’t do it.

In two days, she’d drank my blood and sent me into an intense submissive headspace, and whipped me like a dog until I broke and safeworded. Now, I couldn’t even fuck. I was ashamed — I can count on one hand the number of times in thirteen years where I couldn’t — or wouldn’t — have sex. And in this case, my cock was engorged and ready to go to work, but I felt isolated from it, felt like it was something distant.

I felt ashamed. Isolated. Off-balance. We tried to regain momentum, but it was off. Too much of me is invested in my own performance, and my wife made no secret of her disappointment. We fooled around some more, went back into the hot-tub, but we’d lost the narrative somehow. Afterwards, I stayed up to finish the novel I was reading as she went so sleep. And as I read, I thought about what all of this signified.

I can’t explain what happened, except that I was slowly awakening to the idea that I was no longer in territory that I controlled. I was no longer on a part of the map where I knew the boundaries. She was setting the boundaries. She was making the rules. She was pushing the envelope, throwing me out of my comfort zone. Her own sexuality was becoming dominant, her own pleasure paramount to mine. We had started this experimentation to please me, — I had asked for femdom out of my own knowledge of my submissive nature — but it was now her who had decided to embrace the lifestyle and drive the relationship forward: she who owned us, who drove us, who controlled us.

She had whipped me with the switch in a cold fury, and as I lay in bed that night, musing over the night’s events, my own mingled shame and arousal a dull roar in my head, I realized that she had really been out to hurt me. I had made all of the usual noises about wanting to be pushed to my limits, but this was the reality of that D/s blog-cliche: her, free to beat me until I broke. To hurt me until I was ready to cry, almost to the point where I was unmanned. This wasn’t noble suffering, she didn’t want some stoic masochistic hero, she wanted to hurt, and to be and feel free to just rage at me. That’s the word she used: rage. She wanted to see a strong man and just watch him writhe in agony. And without hesitation, without any doubt, she had just gone and done it.

I realized that if she had been a man, and she had come at me like that, I would have raised up and struck back with my fists. If she had struck at anyone else like that, I would have held her back and forced her away from whoever it was she was hitting. But there, in that hotel room, she had struck me in that fierce and angry way and I hadn’t stopped her, hadn’t gotten up and taken the switch away from her, hadn’t done anything until she held the safeword out like an off-switch. I had let her hurt me in a way I would never have let another human being hurt me, and not with merriment or arousal driving her, but an anger that drove each swat and stinging rebuke.

With slowly dawning amazement, I realized that she had come into her own: she had really become my master. This was the real thing for us. This isn’t us playing at Wicked Headmistress and Naughty Schoolboy, these aren’t fake roles we pop into to spice up our sex life: somehow, this was us, our nature. And I was broken, brought to heel, strong enough to dominate others in my own personal life, but now completely owned. I looked down at her name in red scabs across my chest, and looked at the sleeping wife who looked so angelic.

And knowing and realizing what it meant to be really owned, my doubts went away and I fell asleep.