Paradoxical

My idea of myself in a BDSM relationship lies in the intersection between my fantasies of myself as a unbreakable hero and a corrupted slave.

I know that sounds weird.

When I was growing up, I was fascinated by heroes who took beatings, who were broken down to nothing, and came out of it stronger. Who found some…inner strength, some spark, to carry on even in the face of a furious beatdown that left them on the edge of death. Bruce Willis in “Die Hard.” Mel Gibson in the first “Lethal Weapon.” Arnold in “Predator.” The superhero Daredevil in the “Born Again” arc. Cowboys and cops and superheroes. I was fascinated by the ability to survive, to be strong in the face of superior power, to be alive when the dust settles. To bleed and not fall.

The recipe is simple: Take one man. Maybe a normal guy, maybe a supercop, whatever. Then, have him beaten. Have everything he loves taken away from him. Hurt him. Torture him. Gloat over him. Break him down to nothing. And then, at the end, watch him stand up, indomitable. Watch him overcome all of the odds, watch him get past his beating, see him still standing.

I wanted to be that guy. I wanted to be tested, I wanted to be tortured, and I wanted to be still standing. I wanted to take the beating. I wanted to be put through a psychological ringer. And I wanted to still be standing at the end of it. “See? I’m strong. I am a man.”

On the other side of the fence, there was me being “the good guy.” I tried to be noble. I tried to give. I tried to always be there for people. I was the rebound-guy girls could get over their boyfriends with. I used to be the guy my best friend’s girl could come to and whose shoulder she could cry on, even as I tried to deny the erection in my pants. I was the guy who was always dependable, who always stayed sober so everybody else could party, always there when you wanted to talk or needed help.

And inside me, there was this seed, this little germ of a fantasy. And that fantasy was about being weak. About not being noble. About being selfish and hungry and saying, “Fuck my friends. I’m going to fuck their girlfriends when they come over for solace. Fuck sitting around at parties, I’m going to let somebody else watch out for me for a change. Fuck being there for people, I want to think about me. My needs. My hunger. My desires.”

I wanted to be weak. I wanted to be ignoble. I wanted to screw over my friends and fuck their vulnerable girlfriends, and have a good time doing it. The turning point for me was one night, when my best friend’s girl was drinking with me, and they had just broken up as we were all heading out of town in the middle years between junior college and college, and I admitted I always wanted her, and she said, “Every time I went over to your house after he was an asshole to me, I wanted you to fuck me. And you never did. You could have had me so many times.”

Doh. I made sure to make up for lost time later on but still…it kind of smarted. My friends were dicks, and they had mindless, remorseless fun. I was a good guy, and I ended up with girls who were terrible for me. I missed out on a bunch of stuff, by being too nice. Too selfless. I should have been selfish, just a bit. I should have been weak.

***

At the intersection of that guy who takes a beating, who sacrifices, and that guy who is weak and who is lustful and selfish and who craves sensation, there’s where I am now.

I am finally in a position to show my strength by letting myself be beaten, by letting myself be pushed to the breaking point, by letting myself be hurt and torn down and rebuilt. I can be pushed to the limit, and show that I’m strong enough to take it. I can be spit on and degraded and mastered and overwhelmed and overcome, and at the end of it, I’m still standing. That’s the point of masochism — I can show that pain doesn’t hurt. Or — more properly — that it hurts, but I am strong enough to take it. It’s what I’ve always wanted — to be tortured and heroic and strong. That’s part of what gets me off — my own strength, my endurance, my desire to show my wife that however hard she can hit me, I can take it.

At the same time, there’s the part of me who wants to give in. Who wants to crawl on his knees to the bad girl, who wants to ignore his responsibilities and fuck her. Who wants to be corrupted. Who wants to be used. Who wants to wallow in his own weakness and moral depravity.

Yeah, I said it: Depravity. Because as much as I can honestly say BDSM has been good for me, as much as it’s made me confident and self-assured and sexually sated, as much as it’s been healthy — I can also say that there’s a great big goddamn turn-on about being humiliated. Used. Cursed at. Objectified. Pissed on and sodomized and bled and turned into a cheap fucking toy for another person. To be, in short, a slut. (I want to live in a world where that word loses its gender connotations and I can have it.) To be used and hungry for more when it’s all done. To be weak and selfish and happy in my own degradation.

***

Two almost mutually exclusive impulses. To be strong. To be weak. To be loved and respected, and to be despised and degraded, by the same person. Somehow, that paradox is what makes it hot. I can be strong and heroic even as I let myself be weak and humiliated. I can let her own me and yet rejoice in my ability to be standing when it’s all done.

And on some level, I know my wife has similar conflicting impulses: to care for me. To own me and treasure me and love me. But also to hurt, and not worry about holding back. To spit on and degrade me. To be the bad girl instead of the good girl, and to be strong instead of timid. To selfishly hurt for her own pleasure instead of being loving and gentle.

I don’t know if anybody else has these paradoxes feeding into their BDSM, but I do. Oh, man, I do.

The Fix

Wife: So I was talking to Tracy, and her husband is having problems with his ex-wife again. I said to myself, “Thank God that B doesn’t have an ex wife. Thank God I’ve been his one and only, and there’s no baggage.” I don’t know if I could handle it.

Me: Well, there’s baggage, but no kids. Or ex-wives.

Wife: I can’t imagine being with anyone else, or ever leaving you.

Me: I can’t imagine ever leaving you, dear.

Well, duh, of course not. Even if you strip away love and affection and companionship, of which there is plenty, there’s an 800 lb. gorilla in the room, and that gorilla is: You are the only woman who could ever dominate me. You are the only woman who has seen my naked need to submit and become a worm, to become dirt, to become nothing or less than nothing — if that’s possible. I could never find another you.

I don’t know how a slave could. I’m sure many have had to, but I’ve only read one blog that really ever deals with the collapse of that D/s relationship, and God help me, I don’t know if I could handle it. The flip side of the trust you put in a woman that allows you to open yourself up — to let her sodomize you, to let her bleed you like a side of beef, to let her punch and smack and whip you — is the vulnerability that comes with, “If this woman ever decides not to love me, she will have seen me at my meekest. My weakest. My most fragile. She will have compromised me in a way that I may never recover from.”

I don’t trust anyone enough to let them stick something in my ass, but I trust my wife that much. I don’t trust anyone to touch my neck with a naked knife, but I trust my wife, without hesitation.

And that’s the flip side — I don’t know if I could ever trust someone else enough to do those things. At least, not without my wife there, to watch over me. If my wife ever left me, I don’t know how the hell I’d meet someone and build up a relationship in a realistic amount of time in order to let them dominate and beat me. I don’t know who would want me. I don’t know how to approach a dominant woman, or how to make her see me as strong and simultaneously submissive. I think, if faced with putting all of myself out there like that, I may just give up on this wonderful life I live and recede into bored and tortured vanilla existence.

I mean, I read Unspeakable Axe talk about what it’s like to find that other half, and I think, “Jesus, that guy is good looking and clever, and he has a tough time finding a domme. I’m middle-aged. (Technically.) I’d never survive. I’d be forced to pay for it, and not from the expensive, pretty pro-dommes either — the cut-rate ones, who demand tribute in phone cards and gift certificates to Dollar King, and who look like a mean version of Flo from ‘Alice.’ She’d be saying things like, “Kiss my grits, slave,” and I’d have to say, “I don’t even know where your grits are, ma’am…” And it would just be awkward like that.

Which leads me to the final reason why I’m bound so tightly now — my wife has my fix. She’s the only woman I trust. The only woman strong enough. The only woman intriguing enough. She’s the only source for what I need, what I’ve learned I have to have. She’s my dealer, and I’m just a junkie, only my drug of choice is her: her power, her control, her domination and the pain she metes out. I’m dependent on her, even if we strip away the love and devotion and fact that we’re best friends — at this point, I’m hooked. If you strip away the romance and mutual respect, there’s still that left: my naked, hungry, junkie need for her.

Luckily, I can pay for that fix. With love. With devotion. And once in a while, when she sees how needy I am, with my fear. Those are all forms of tribute she accepts, and I gladly give them.

My Sloppy Curse

Occasionally, when my mind is wandering as I think about my relationship with my wife, I wonder if it’s all real. How can I be a masochist? What made me this way? What about my past wired me to get off on pain? How did I get that way? I mean, do I really get off on pain?

The answer to that is undeniably “yes.” And I’ll tell you why.

Men naturally get a bit of precome on their cocks when they get aroused, and I’ve mentioned that I get more than normal when my wife and I play with D/s. But I don’t know if I’ve ever conveyed just what it’s like. My cock literally starts leaking the minute we start playing — often, when we just talk about playing. There’s a slow, steady drip of clear fluid from the minute we start messing around with D/s, and if she starts hurting me, it literally becomes a non-stop torrent.

I can say, with some honesty and a little embarrassment, that when my wife and I start playing, I’m often wetter than she is. My whole crotch gets soaked with precome, my cock so slick it’s nearly frictionless. If she strikes me, it will literally throb and pour out another flood of precome. My balls become slick, and the bed will get an enormous wetspot. (If I’m wearing a gag or a bit, there’s often two wet spots to contend with — one from my drool, and a larger one from my cock.)

I first noticed my extreme arousal reaction to pain the first time my wife hit me in play. I was standing against the wall, my legs spread at shoulder length, my arms up in the air and crossed at the wrist. My wife raised up her hand and smacked me on the ass and I felt my cock jerk, my crotch grow wetter. Each blow brought another tiny pulse of precome out of me. When she began pegging me, it got worse — the pain of the violation and the prostate stimulus combining so that my cock was sloppily slick.

The most extreme incident happened a couple of months ago. My wife had a leather cord that she had wrapped around my balls and cock, and she would twist and tighten it, causing me a large amount of pain. She placed a hand on my cock and just…tightened the cord with the other hand. My cock throbbed and literally, precome splashed out of my cock in such a volume that my wife had to ask me if I’d orgasmed.

“No, mistress,” I groaned, embarrassed. “I…it’s just how it works for me.” I was shy, embarrassed — she knew I got wet, it was impossible to hide, but she’d never realized how much CBT pushed it to extremes.

“That is so…” she started to say, and I tensed up for her disgust. “That is so fucking cool.” She was ecstatic that she had this unnatural effect on me. She had me get on my hands and knees with my legs spread and started tapping my balls with her riding crop in increasing intensity until with each aching blow my cock dripped stringers of precome all over the bed. She made me clean off the leather tongue of the crop with my mouth, telling me how awful I was for dirtying up the toys, and then, to punish me, got out the flogger.

She flogged my balls. Gently at first, and then harder, with a great amount of skill, she whipped them with underhanded shots. She did just enough to make them sting from the initial contact with the tips of the flogger and then ache a moment later when my testicles started reacting to the blow. She timed it perfectly, each blow letting me ache for a moment before the next shot hit. And with every shot, I felt my cock pour out precome. The tips of the flogger actually started getting darker.

I’m sometimes ashamed and grossed out by how wet I get when my wife hurts me. I don’t know if it’s normal. But God, only masochistic activity does this to me. I am never so turned on as when she’s beating me. It’s incredible. And as long as she doesn’t mind — as long as she still loves me in spite of the sloppy curse — I can accept it for what it is: proof that masochism is something wired into me, fundamentally, and I may never know where it came from, but I can never doubt that it’s pure and true.

A Letter For My Mistress

My wife demanded that I write a wish-list of what kind of debased acts of sado-masochism and submission I want to get up to once we’re living in the same house. In fact, this post — which I will send to her via email, as well — is the only way I get to come tonight. I get to have an orgasm if I send her my wish list. We just spent the last hour on the phone discussing how our D/s and S&M activities are going to work when we live in the same house again, and we’re both revved up, so if you don’t want to read about a sub’s daydreams, hie thee forth to another blog and don’t follow the link.

In A Month…

…I will be living with my wife again, for the first time in two years.

I’ll be moving up north, a decision that we’ve made jointly after long, arduous and definitely un-fun and un-sexy debate.

And we talked about it tonight — briefly, since I’ve been sick for the last two days — and I get the feeling we’re both a little nervous. Part of that nervousness is sexy, “Ohmigod, we’re going to be living together and having S&M sex whenever we want it! How will we ever stop fucking long enough for Belisarius to get a job?” nervousness. Our sex has happened in pulses of a couple days here, a week there — it’s never been something “on tap” as it were.

And part of it is that this is going to be new for us — we’ve both been tempted by the idea of 24/7, no-holds-barred, he’s-my-human-pet domination and submission, but it’s never been even remotely feasible. Until now. Will we resist the urge to take things to new extremes? Will we keep a lid on it when we’re living it every night? Will we keep pushing the envelope until I’m showing up to jobs with a black eye or scabs on my back? Will we get involved in whatever local scene there is? Will we come out to the one or two people we know up there who openly practice BDSM lifestyles?

I have to admit to a little trepidation. I love reading Dev and Eileen’s blogs, because they live in close proximity to their partners. And I love reading Mistress 160’s blog, because she and Sol cohabitate and clearly get up to all kinds of trouble. And I haven’t been able to live any of that with my wife — no building a queening stool, no being in each other’s presence for longer than a couple weeks at a time, no day-in, day-out grind of BDSM and seeing whether it remains hot and sexy when we’re not seeing each other in tiny commercial breaks from our separate lives.

But I’m happy. Because we’ll be together again, and I think we’re going to make BDSM work for us. My real issue is I suspect we’ll have to start out in an apartment when we get settled in up there, and I’m a little frightened of how we’ll make loud-hurty-sex and not have the neighbors dialing 911 every night. “That’s right officer, I heard blows, and then screams, and then moans, and now a bed creaking.”

I think I’ll celebrate our reunion with something permanent — a piercing, or that ownership tattoo I’ve wanted for so long. (Can I just say that I wish there was some male version of a corset piercing out there? God, I would love to be pierced all over for my wife, then have the piercings threaded into something sexy, but a corset piercing just doesn’t look cool and masculine enough for me. Maybe a big spider web?) And I’ll finally get that daycollar I’ve been wanting, but she’s never gotten around to buying me.

There’s always been this feeling in our play that what we’ve had are stolen moments — brief, beautiful moments of heaven that are special but so, so fleeting. Now, we face the prospect of being together, but also the fear that our sex will become routinized. And I don’t want routine — I want for it to continue to be as wonderful as it’s been. If we can figure out how to do that, I’ll be happy.

I am so happy. But just a little worried. But I also think we’re going to figure it out and it’s going to be no trouble at all to keep that spark lit, if we’re willing to put in the work.

I Have Disabled WordPress’ new feature…

WordPress has a new feature where they link to possibly related blog entries from other blogs. I don’t know when they activated it, but when I checked on new responses by Mrs.Keeper and Axe tonight, I noticed the function for the first time.

Now, if this function were linking me to other BDSM blogs, this would be fine. But a quick glance at the other blogs revealed that one of them was a Christian blog, another about knitting, and I didn’t bother to look at the third.

If you have come to this BDSM blog via one of those links, I apologize, and urge you to quickly link away if tales of domination and submission don’t float your boat.

On a related note, I also want to apologize to all of the people who have been searching out “Coconut Creme Cake” and somehow clicking into this blog. I don’t know why it’s coming up in your search results, but about once a day I get somebody linking in looking for coconut cake recipes. I do have a fantastic recipe for coconut cake, which I will post soon just to make this up to you.

You Can’t Have It Both Ways…

Unspeakable Axe has a good post about what some dommes want over at his blog today. On a related note, my wife and I spent an hour this morning chatting about yesterday’s post.

Amongst other things, she specifically said she wanted our debate over our future to remain free from the baggage of our BDSM relationship. “I don’t want you to argue with me as my slave, I want you to argue with me as my husband. I don’t want to dominate you into a decision, because it would be coercive, and it would make our Mistress/slave dynamic…impure. Wrong, somehow.”

She mentioned in passing that she hadn’t realized how deep my submissive urges ran. “Is that bad?” I asked.

“Nooo…” She said hesitantly. “But I do want you to…how do I put this? I want you to put up a fight. I want you to resist. I want to conquer you. I don’t want you just to curl up and surrender, I like a challenge.”

“So,” I said quietly, “You want me to fight?”

“I’m just saying…the fun is in breaking you, right?”

(I don’t know if I have all of the words right, but that’s the gist of the conversation.)

Now, if she wants me to fight, I’m happy to fight. If she wants me to be combative, hey, I’ll see what I can do. Anything for Mistress. But the problem with these dominant women who want to break a dominant man is that I spend my days being a Type-A, competitive, guy. I like the taste of blood, so to speak. I get off on crushing the opposition. (Get off. Nothing makes me hornier than beating someone. I mean, after one victory a couple years ago, I could have used my cock to jackhammer through concrete.) I’m downright bipolar about this — Darryl Zero-esque, so uncomfortable in my own skin sometimes that I don’t want to talk to the local Chinese place to order take-out, but at work — I break my back. I work hard. And I like to win.

I mean, sure, when I come home, I want to curl up at my lady’s feet, but that means it’s one or the other — you can choose between column A or column B, but I don’t know if you can order something unique. And… I’m really worried that the ass-kicking column is a bit too combative. Too competitive. I’m worried that I won’t be able to find a middle-ground, between abuse-hungry slave and competitive bastard. And, if I can be a little bit cocky — hey, you opened up the door when you asked for the fighter, sweetie — I’m afraid she’ll be biting off more than she can chew.

So what does she want? Does she really want the challenge, or does she want the teddy-bear? And if she wants something in-between, can I somehow find it in me to give it to her?

It’s hard to admit…

I have the chance to get a job I’ve wanted for a long while. My wife wants me to move back North. Our views are in total conflict on this. I really believe that staying here is possibly the best thing, she really believes the North is where our future is at.

We’ve been…debating this. Vigorously. Often. It’s resulted in tears on her part, anger on mine, her hurting me, me hurting her. It’s been, for want of a better word, a fight.

And it’s hard. So hard to fight her. So hard to resist her will. Every time we go back and forth, the cracked part of me that desires her will — needs her will — in order to make me whole again, that part quails at the thought of resisting her desires. I want to obey. I want to submit. I want to surrender. It would be so fucking sweet to stop fighting and resisting and thinking and just slide into that warm, safe place where she makes all the decisions.

It’s times like this where I know in my heart that if our life allowed it, I would happily be a lifestyle submissive. I have it in me to give up completely to her. To surrender, totally. To let her control be total.

I honestly don’t know what to do. The longer I fight her, the stronger the voice in my head gets telling me to give in. I’ve never been in a situation like this before in our relationship since we started BDSM, where she and I are in direct opposition to each other, where one of us has to win and one of us has to lose, where there’s no compromise, and our future is at stake — the direction the next few years will take is up in the air. Because I know we’re two equals fighting, but on another level, she is my Mistress and I am a fucking slave and I know my place.

Is this weird? Do I have bad boundaries? Or is it natural, due to the intimacy of a power exchange in a marriage, in an intense love affair like ours has been for eight months, for there to be bleed-off into our day-time lives? For me to want to submit everywhere, not just in the bedroom?

Kink & Current Events: The FLDS

Anyone not watching the events that have been unfolding in Texas at the FLDS compound with interest is missing out on something a bit chilling. The news is full of it, so I’ll spare the more obvious summary, except to say the sight of armored transports surrounding a religious community and a whole town’s worth of children being moved away from their parents is disturbing for a few reasons.

Oddly enough, the kink blogosphere has been extraordinarily quiet about all of this, or at least the 50 or so blogs I read about BDSM have been (which may not be the same thing.) Much more was made of Elliot Spitzer’s dalliances with a high-priced hooker, for example, which probably says more about BDSM’s obsession with pro-dommery rather than folks living a lifestyle, or even practicing privately in their off-hours.

Now, obviously the FLDS, which is the Mormon splinter-church at the center of this controversy, is probably anathema from the point of view of most kinksters, and most people into BDSM. The church is conservative, religiously fundamentalist, patriarchal, and the brand of polygamy they practice is pretty much — by its very nature — socially deleterious, both on the young girls that provide the fuel for its group marriages and the faith’s persistence, and for its effect on non-privileged men within the compounds, who tend to get driven out at the first opportunity. (I have no idea if the Texas compound was practicing the kind of shunning practiced in other FLDS strongholds, but simple math tells you that if the balance between women and men is 50/50, and you have a handful of elites marrying multiple women, the young men at the bottom of the totem pole will have to be dealt with, one way or another.)

This post is in no way a screed defending the FLDS. I’m not a fan of polygamy in general, given how it tends to play out in the real world, and the story behind the FLDS creates a particularly unlikeable fact pattern. But as a professor of mine said on several occasions, “Bad facts make for bad law,” and Texas has already demonstrated that it’s not friendly to people practicing kink. Amongst other things, it managed to create — whole cloth — a tort based on Infliction of Emotional Distress to allow a wife to collect damages in a divorce for consensual S&M she practiced with her husband on three or four occasions during their marriage. SS&C is not going to pass muster as a defense in those courts if the judges aren’t fans of S&M.

So when I say that the scenes on TV are chilling, they’re not frightening because I feel any real kinship with the FLDS, or approve of their particular brand of sexist patriarchy and the side-effects it creates. I say it because kink and poly folks in America should always have their eyes open for the state — or State, if you will — using its coercive power against those who are sexual minorities. We’re living in a country where a large voting bloc gives lip service to the more ridiculous portions of the Old Testament, where for the last 8 years that voting bloc has promoted a strong and frightening version of Unitary Executive legal theory under the guidance of the head of state, and where the supreme legal authority of the land has veered into more and more conservative territory. (Scalia’s dissent and its talk of a gay agenda co-opting America in Lawrence, for example, is sheer paranoid madness, but few people blinked at it being in a Supreme Court opinion. And they should have — it was like reading about Zionist Conspiracies in an Executive Order.)

Combined with the power of the administrative state — the Texas FLDS issue is being handled by state agencies — and I think anyone who practices something out of the mainstream should be a little worried. Especially those of us who practice BDSM, because no matter how comfortable I am in my own skin with what I do, the vast majority of people in America think the more extreme flavors of it are off-putting at best and offensive to human dignity at worst, and there are still psychiatrists who believe an interest in S&M comes about due to childhood trauma. (ABC news had an article to that effect not a month and a half ago.)

But they’re not us, right? The FLDS are bad guys. Well, bad facts make for bad laws, and ballgags and leather hoods and golden showers and bloody backs don’t play well in Middle America. I have to wonder if a state was pulling a couple of children from the house of a poly family, or the house of a couple into S&M (especially 24/7 or domestic discipline scenes) if we’d look any better on TV, no matter how much more into consent and negotiation we are.

But Lawrence protects us, right? I can think of a dozen reasons why Lawrence can be distinguished from S&M activities, not the least of which is simply the stigma associated with BDSM, and the psychiatric fields’ unease with it, provide plenty of fuel for a smart judge to distinguish it with. You simply don’t have to be a good lawyer to pick apart a Lawrence argument in a case about S&M.

Now, am I being a doomsayer? Not really. I don’t see this as a “First they came for the Mormon fundamentalists, and I didn’t speak up…” situation. The FLDS really does have major social costs and questions of consent hanging around its neck — as concerns its particular brand of polygamy — that it will have to deal with, and which I believe it might not ever be able to. They’re bad guys, or at least immensely misguided and harmful. But I think any kinky folks out there with an interest in the law need to watch how this is handled, and how the power of the state is exerted against undesirable sexual minorities.

You know, like us.

Whole Again, A Romantic Dream

I was thinking today, that on some level I’ve been broken all of my life. That there’s a hole in my heart or my soul, that it’s been cracked or fractured since before I was born. I cannot be truly happy — like I am when I submit — by myself. I cannot be truly satisfied, like I am after a BDSM scene, without being compromised and abused.

I was sexually insatiable, and have been since…Lord, I don’t know when. Before we discovered BDSM — before we discovered ourselves as people into BDSM — my wife used to get upset about it. “I can’t satisfy you,” she’d say. “It hurts me that when we’re done making love and I’m sated, you’re ready for something else. It’s like I can never fill up the hole inside you.”

That hole inside me was my submission. That hole needed someone else to fill it with their power and their presence and with pain and pleasure. I can be happy without submitting — I got by for 33 years, after all — I can live a pretty full life, but I will always be hollow and…and….partial…without it.

That part of me is empty without a master. A mistress. Whatever the word is.

The switching we’ve done lately proved that to me. I liked the power, I liked the control, and I liked making my wife happy. But I was never whole during it. And if I’m going to admit something to you, to me, and to my wife, in the back of my head, I always wanted to return to this…to submission and masochism and being whole again.

I keep hearing people talk about better worlds, where sexism is a thing of the past and kink is simply accepted for what it is, all of those dreams we all have, but if I can be selfish for a moment, my better world is one where being a slave is acceptable. (And by that I mean a BDSM slave. Fuck classical definitions of slavery, they’re fucked up and nobody wants to be a part of them, no matter what they may say.)

In this place, I could live my life as my wife’s pet at home and it wouldn’t affect how I raise my child, or getting up and going to work, or what people thought of me. In this fantastic, non-existent fantasy land, I would be whole and fulfilled all of the time. That part of me, the broken part of me that’s got a crack in it that can only be filled by another’s will, that part of me would be fixed in this world, because I could live my life in open service with no social cost. I could be honest: I am her pet. Her slave. I could wear a collar openly. People would understand how fucking broken and wrecked and hollow I am without a presence there to prop me up. Her presence. They would know, without prejudice, that I simply need a dominant, and accept that without one I’m just kind of missing something. Something small…something I can get by without…but without which, I’m simply not whole.

But I am happy with the world I’m in, because when my wife dominates me, for those precious few hours, I am whole. I am filled. I am sated. I have never felt that in all of my life until we started playing with D/s, and I have yearned for it since I was too young to even know what sex is. For those hours, I am whole and happy and joyful.