Sex and Violence

I’ve been constantly discovering blogs lately, including a few by pro-dommes and lifestyle dominant women, whose approaches differ drastically from my wife’s. Mistress Victoria X, for instance, has been a fun read. If I see an address pop up as linking in, I tend to check it out, and my personal blog roll on my Mac is like, 50 blogs at this point. (Although some of them are infrequent posters.)

I’ve also been rediscovering old blogs that I lost somewhere along the way, probably when I switched from my PC to a Mac and the RSS list didn’t export properly. One of those blogs is Almost Magic, which I quickly started catching up on. While scrolling through the archives, I came across a post I’d never read before, about how her kink and sex are separate — they’re not intertwined. And then Maymay posted a link to his blog in her comments, where he said much the same thing.

Now, both of those posts predate my first submissive play with my wife, and were off my radar during my first real forays into the BDSM blogosphere. And so both posts, despite their age, pack this kind of, “Whoah!” punch for me, because, man, I had no idea that people could separate their kink from their sexual pleasure. For me, being hit hurts and is pleasurable at the same time — the pain is this bright, indeterminate thing that makes me get harder and wetter even while it, you know, hurts.

And hurting me makes my wife wet. Pain — receiving it, in my case, and dealing it out in hers — is sexualized. But it’s sexualized only in a sexual context, in a context of submission. I don’t get off having my blood drawn or getting a prostate exam. Being hurt sexually, though, causes my cock to get harder, to the extent that my wife will sometimes strike me as hard as she can while we’re fucking in order to feel my cock swell inside of her, and even as she does it, I can feel her muscles tighten and her sex get wetter. Repeated blows to my face drive us both closer to orgasm, and sometimes will push her into a frenzy where she just starts slapping. I can’t count how many times at this point that I’ve come with a swollen and numb face because she — hell, we — both got off on me being a punching bag.

Now, naturally, everybody interprets their kink differently. But I can’t for the life of me figure out why I eroticize pain so deeply, why I sexualize submission and self-annihilation. My first submissive fantasies date back to childhood, well before puberty. My first masochistic instincts officially date back to my wife and I and our second scene. But when I think back, I can remember that my first real lover — not the girl I had nightmarish, awful, fumbling sex with, but the first girl I had fun, no-strings-attached sex with — would always scratch me at orgasm. She would wrap her long, coltish legs around my body and dig her fingernails into my back and just drag them over me. We had sex all of the time — she actually failed several of her classes that semester because we never left her apartment — and so a week into our sexual relationship, my back was crisscrossed with scabs and bloody furrows. And I remember — clearly — being proud every time that pain happened, because it meant I had pleased her, it meant I had made her come.

But there’s a huge difference between scratching and the new kinds of torture we play with now, and even if I can psychoanalyze myself to the extent that I can hypothesize where my masochism comes from, I can’t figure out why my wife gets juicy-close-to-coming-ohmigod-I-have-to-masturbate-on-you-slave excited when she hits me. My wife is, well, normal. The classic American background. Normal family. No abuse. No kink. No craziness. Just…a paragon of middle-American virtue. And yet somehow, she’s wired so that hitting me with a crop drives her near to orgasm, so that a few swipes of her clit after she beats me leave her shuddering and coming.

Is it nature or nurture? Is it hardwired into us at birth, or something we learn? Is it the product of our experiences? Is it natural? I think those questions need to be answered. I don’t think I have those answers — I can’t even puzzle out why I’m wired into the submissive masochist I am, or why my wife is the dominant sadist she’s turned out to be, and as I read more and more blogs like Almost Magic or May’s, I realize that there’s more under the sun than I’d ever dreamed.

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.

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.

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.

Ignoring the Wires

I reread the post I wrote last night, about making my wife recite that she’s a slave and a whore a set number of times, of her fantasies of humiliation, of my orders that she fall asleep dreaming of being bound and fucked by me, of her texting me for permission before she spends money and to check in.

And here’s the problem: There are moments when I stop and think about the whole male dominance thing and I think, “That’s lame.” I mean, the recitation thing is clearly me playing at her reaching some kind of self-hypnotic state, the orders about what to think about as she drifts off to sleep are all about me thinking I can control her dreams, the control of the money goes into her desire to fall into domestic slavery ’50’s housewife-style, where Ward works and June stays home in pearls and functions as a perfect mother to the children and a total whore in bed. (Ward and June had hot sex. We all know it.)

If I look too close at us flying across the air, I see the wires. When I think about my clumsy attempts at mindfuckery in order to become her world, I see those strings holding the acrobats up. And when I see the wires, the illusion is ruined. I’m aware that it’s not Superman, it’s a guy in a leotard with red underwear worn inside instead of out. It’s not the actress who plays Lois Lane, it’s her stunt-double. There’s something unreal about it. I start wondering if my dominance is a fraud, if all the people reading the blog know it’s a fraud, if…the most important if…my wife thinks it’s a fraud.

But then I think, “We are doing nothing more or less than what she did to me when I was subbing for her.” The intrusive control. The orders to masturbate only at appointed times, the idea that I should request the right to come and that she controlled my orgasms. Beatings because I wasn’t living up to expectations. Boot worship, yummy, humiliating, prostrating boot worship and foot worship. A strap-on in the ass while I’m cursed for being a bitch and a whore and my every plea for more cock is raised up to the light to show that I’m a dirty, needy, male slut. Flogging. Blood. Painful blows to the face to bring on my orgasm. Golden showers as she stood over me and talked about how I was worth less because I’d swallowed her piss and all of the other women out there would smell her mark.

(Her pee is actually not odorous. I suddenly feel the urge to point that out.)

She wants from me only what she gave me. Maybe less, because her tolerance for masochism is far lower than mine, even if her tolerance for submission play runs deeper. Was my headspace an illusion? Was my buy-in to the mindfucks she put me through a fraud? Were my orgasms — hell, the constant, unending, pre-come drip from my cock the minute we started playing, which lasted from start to finish and made me wet like women get wet, so that my wife would grasp my cock and gasp — was that a lie?

No, no, fuck no. My submission was — is — beautiful and honest and it came from a place that was just like my heart, only darker and self-annihilating. The nights I spent curled up into a ball, my insides torn up because all I wanted was for my Mistress to be here to hurt me and piss on me and fuck me, those were real. And when I think about it, my dominance is real. I want her to recite her little devotional because I want to own her headspace. I want to drive her into that place where I went, where the world recedes and all that’s left is the object of your obsession. I want to be that to her — her World. Her Master. I want to get as close to owning her body and mind and soul as humanly possible.

Because that’s what she did — she owned me. Body. Soul. Mind She still does. If she called me up on the phone again and used the voice, I would respond. I would obey. No matter how far we drift into Maledom and Femsub, we’re also still Mistress and Slave. When I think about how far I would go for her…what taboos I’ve set up that I would break for her. The self-harm I would do at her command, the degree of pain and punishment I would take for her to show her my strength…

I am hers. Always.

But I want her to be mine, right now. And she wants to be.

In essence, I want her to be for me what I am for her — a postulant, a worshipper, a slave who has learned to love the lash and love their master and whose will to say no is a distant thing. I remember that feeling — where the word “no” was something that if I uttered it, it would mean leaving the golden glow of her power and dominance, and so I didn’t need “no.” She was better than the ability to say no — she was better than choice, even though she hurt and humiliated and controlled.

And when I think about it like that the wires disappear, and our D/s play with the man as the dominant becomes true and real, and not a fraud at all. Fucking with her head doesn’t seem like play acting, it seems like something that we both need. And want.

If that makes any sense. I’m so hot writing about what I want from her — that level of subservience and slavery — that I’m off to masturbate.

Baggage Handling

I, as constant readers of this column may have guessed by now, have a lot of issues.

Fears of the Gimp. Issues about the size of my penis (since dealt with by my wife.) Issues about an event that happened when I was fifteen or sixteen. As I read the blogs of folks into BDSM, I’m always struck at how…well-balanced they are. How normal. I mean, seriously, do Goose & Gander have any hangups at all? It’s like the perfect relationship. Eileen and May? Even my wife is calm and serene, like a bodhisattva of kink. And here I am, like a neuroses-prone BDSM version of Woody Allen, only non-Jewish and without the somewhat offputting stepdaughter thing.

I sometimes wonder if I would do this much self-examination, this much of what I can only call “neurosis archaeology,” if I didn’t have the blog. But I’m a thinker. I ruminate. I ponder. My wife is much more at ease with flying by the seat of her pants, but I spend a lot of time just thinking and musing and trying to figure it all out.

I just want to be free of hangups. And to be honest, I’m getting there. It’s amazing how much stuff from my first few steps into mature sexuality, things that happened in high school or college, affect my ability to be at ease with my sexuality twenty years later. It’s absurd, really — everybody has bad experiences, but somehow all of mine accreted around my subconscious and formed this kind of shell of hangups, and for me to become truly at ease with being a dominant, a switch, a sub, I feel like I have to go rooting around in there, hold all of the issues up to the light and see, in the end, that they don’t fucking matter at all.

Or more to the point, I want to hold them up and let my wife excise them. She’s so good at that. She’s like a domme with a PhD in psychology or something: sado-masochistic psychoanalysis. I mean, she sodomized my insecurity about my penis out of me, imagine what she’ll do with everything else?

(As an aside, on the issue of my fear of The Gimp: I am fascinated by This Girl’s blog. The extreme boundary of BDSM for me is not knifeplay or 24/7 or anything like that, it’s masks. I’m going to come out and say that I get a pure-raw fear reaction of masks in BDSM play, to the extent that I can actually feel my stomach tighten. And This Girl’s blog is heavy on the latex, and heavy on the masks, and yet I can only marvel at her relationship with her Master. I would pay good money for my wife and I to achieve that level of comfort in our play, to just go that deep. It’s probably one of the more interesting — and to be frank, hottest — blogs I read, but those masks still unnerve me, and I’m not sure if it makes the blog slightly offputting for me, or somehow hotter, because they’re so comfortable with something I have such a visceral reaction to.)

Why Male Dominance is Scary…

I am anonymous. Anonymity gives me the freedom to be honest. And so now I’m going to tell you why my wife’s desire to allow me to dominate and have control scares the ever-living hell out of me. Some of you will probably think I’m a dick for this, and I don’t blame you — I’ve spent years running over this in my head, and I think I’m a dick.

My Dark Side

I am tired of living apart from my Mistress. I’m tired of getting punishment and domination in 48-hour doses once every month or two. I know I should be grateful for what I have — for what a lot of submissive men apparently want but don’t get — but dammit, I’m frustrated.

I had planned on writing a long, honest post about why male domination scares me, to open wounds long thought healed — about why letting myself dominate my wife when she wants to switch is so hard for me, even when her need is so raw and honest and my own urge to control is so powerful. But I’m having a rough night, and I’m feeling down, and when I’m at my emotional nadir like this, when my self-loathing is at its peak — or lowest depth, so to speak — what I want is to be obliterated before Her Will. I want her to make me strip and then to collar me and then to smack my face. I want to be tortured. I want to be told to lick her feet, to kiss my way up her legs, to eat her out until she comes sloppily in my face while she absently watches porn or fucks my face with her hips, of both. To rest my head on her thigh while her orgasm dries on my face and to feel her relax and to sigh as she runs her hand through my hair and calls me a good boy.

I want to fuck her while she tortures me, her nails tearing at my chest, her thumbnail and forefinger trying to pry my nipple off, her hands scratching my stomach and my shoulders, punctuated with blows to the face that burn with pain, then ache, then numb up until the next blow. Slaps, punches, all of it, nothing is too much. I would happily wear a black eye into work, happily wear a split lip, that’s how deep my need runs. I fantasize about being forced to lie about it, to say that I fell or that I was clumsy, to cover up my dirty secret.

Thanking her for every abuse. Her cock in my mouth and then my ass, while she chokes me with a leash or with my collar, pulling on it as she grinds into me, my airway closing as I rejoice in the knowledge that I’m just a fucking object — literally, a fucking-object, something for her to use, something to put her cock in or to put into her sex, something to be used to get off. A knife on my skin, scarlet flowing into her lips, my head hazy in the glow of being food, of being something she can drink.

Floggers, crops, belts, and the switch, all used on my thighs, my ass, my back. Pain, pain, pain. Red lines that show she loves me. Clamps and blows to my balls and my cock, each one obscenely making me hot and hurt at the same time. Then, the finale, me laid out on the floor, while she pisses on me: warm, liquid disdain.

I want to be ground down into nothing. I want to be hurt and fucked and to serve and pleasure her, for my own desires not to matter except insofar as they coincide with hers, for her wickedness and cruelty to make me into a victim, a slave, a nothing.

But I can’t have it, because we’re apart. And we’re apart because of mistakes I made, bad decisions that led us to living a thousand miles from each other. This is my punishment: the discovery of BDSM, the discovery of her sadism, the discovery of her nearly divine power over me.

Divinity. That’s what dominance is, and I don’t care how ridiculous it sounds — to be like a god to the person you’re dominating. To be worshipped. To be the only thing in their world for a few brief moments, to know that you can hurt them and they’ll cry for more, that you are the only source of pleasure or love for those minutes while the scene lasts. To be everything. That’s what I want — for her, for my Mistress, to be EVERYTHING, and for me to be nothing. To be a flyspeck in her glory. To be a dustmote in her presence and dance and whirl in her wake. Yes, it’s cheesy. Yes, it’s overdramatic. But nights like tonight, when I’m alone and my need is a physical ache, where it’s a fog of depression that won’t lift until I’m hurt and humiliated and that hurt and humiliation is always out of reach — that’s what it’s like. To be unhappy and miserable and to know that it would all be better if she were only here, to hurt and control and dominate and annihilate.

Nights like tonight, I hate myself, and I know that only she can exorcise that emotion from me. Only she can wring it out, along with everything else, until I’m nothing, and then reborn as she holds me in the aftermath of the scene.

–B

Wait, we’re what?

I’ve got a quiet break in the action of my weekend of social butterflying and hotel-room debauchery, and to make a long story short, apparently sometime this weekend my wife and I switched.

Again. Only this time, she needs it. She aches for it. There’s a yearning in her for humiliation and submission — to me — that I have never, ever seen before. I’ve spanked her, flogged her, clamped her until she cried because she forgot the safe word, fucked her, pissed on her, and had her beg me for a facial. She has just demonstrated a need to submit that I’ve never, ever known her to have, and I’ve demonstrated a need to dominate that I didn’t know was there.

But…

As the weekend goes on, I realize that I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. I feel mean. I have no touchstone for whether or not I’m being “good dominant” or “selfish, cheesy, lisping bad maledom stereotype dominant”. More than that, I feel selfish — as a white male raised by women, who had mostly female friends during his sexual development, I was raised to give orgasms and be polite and respectful and treat women as my equals and not be a dominant fuckface. And now I’ve got a woman begging me to hurt her and be selfish and to humiliate the hell out of her. (As I write this, she’s in the shower, and I can hear her coughing up semen and piss and whatever else went into her mouth this morning.)

Shit, I don’t even know if I’m dominant. I mean, we all know I’m submissive, and I know that I’ve had an urge to switch of late — to have the power, to control, to hurt — but when it comes time to put that into practice, well, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. And she’s talking about a permanent switch…

So, I’m punch-drunk and off-balance and now I’m scrambling to figure out if I’m dominant, and if I am, to get in touch with that side of me. Because there’s part of me that wants to be that. But I’m having a hard time finding my footing here in order to get the emotional leverage to make that switch. If I’m even capable of it.

She’s out of the shower now, I’ll update more later, and fill in the background for this switch when I have time. But I’ll say that I’m a wee bit scared — of this going wrong, of this being wrong for us, and of what it may unleash inside me. I’ve spent my whole life avoiding being selfish and cruel and dominant to women, and now all of a sudden…

My Hypocrisy

(This is kind of boring political stuff: there will be scene reports aplenty in the coming days, but I felt the need to get this off of my chest.)

I went out and bought “Yes Ma’am: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance” today, because I’m a giant coward. The editor was nice enough to offer me a free review copy, and I was all for it until I realized I’d have to offer up my address for shipping. And I thought, “Wow, I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” I’m enjoying being an anonymous figure right now, and all of a sudden I was faced with, you know, admitting that I was John Doe of West Palm, Florida. And so I just quietly waited until the local Borders got the book in, strolled over to the erotica section, grabbed a copy, and then went over to buy a book by a feminist author who I’d stumbled upon via a blog. Borders down here being what it is, the Women’s Studies section was next to the Gay and Lesbian Erotica Section, and I spent a half hour looking for my book amidst the confused shelves, scanning through bookcase after bookcase of gay porn and stories of transgendered struggles, getting weird stares from the two geeky guys sitting on the ground reading books of folklore, because somehow Women’s Studies is with imaginary myth and not with all of the other studies — African-American Studies, Asian Studies, etc.

It didn’t hit me until I was in the car, really, that I had calmly walked up in my suit and tie and purchased erotica with a credit card with my name on it without blinking, yet the idea of giving somebody my address had me nervous. I’d sat there and caught nervous glances from a couple of vanilla geek boys because they thought I was some gay guy from the beach looking for pornographic novels without blinking (and I admit to thumbing through one or two books just to see what they were like.) I hadn’t worried about the look from the girl behind the counter or the stares from the geek boys, I just calmly went about my business. But my address? Oh, no…

It’s one of those illogical quirks that you realize after the fact, and then want to punch yourself for. I end up refusing a perfectly wonderful gesture out of some bizarre shyness and then calmly look at gay porn around a bunch of increasingly nervous college freshmen without blinking.

And what this quirkiness made me wonder about, afterwards, is this: Is my submission less genuine because I leave it separate from my other self? My daytime self, who’s strong and dominant and can work a room of people like they’re putty in his hands? Is my wife’s dominance less valid a reversal of gender roles because it’s limited to our private life? Is our kink less politically genuine because it’s closeted? In fact, is our kink hypocritical because all of the gender bending and power exchange we do is basically something that’s there to get us off? To get me off? Is my request that my wife dominate me and peg me and hurt me just me exerting some kind of patriarchal power over her, an expression of weakness that’s okay because I initiated it? Is our play a slap in the face of people who really are dominated unwillingly? Is our use of the word “slave” a giant, ahistorical bit of cluelessness?

Now, obviously, not everything is political. The undergrad part of me that did his tour of the Sociology department and became the darling of the Women’s Studies professors demurs, politely, and recalls that everything is political — but the older, married part of me thinks that when I undertook this journey, I was not thinking of feminism or patriarchy or what it meant on that level for me to exchange power with my wife: I was just praying and hoping that she’d be receptive to making me lick her leather boots. My actions may have had a political meaning, but it’s not something my wife or I thought of at the time, and there’s not much point in dissecting our wonderful ride to the extent that it stops being the joyful trip it’s been.

More to the point, I have to admit: there’s something of the Victorian hypocrite in me. I like being normal and dominant and vanilla on the outside, and then being tied up and beat in private. I like being manly and smelling like alpha male and then curling up at my Mistress’ feet when she taps her leg with the crop. The Victorians were prudish people, on the surface, but their sexuality roiled under constant pressure, and I think — in my mind, at least — the energy generated by being constantly contained made the release that much sweeter when it came.

To put it another way: I like that my wife sings in the church choir and is — really is — sweet and innocent and domestic in her daytime life, and a cruel, selfish and pain-loving bitch in private. I like the idea that my life is a James Ellroy version of the ’50s — clean and pretty and neat on the outside, full of dark twists and turns on the inside.

I’m good at bifurcating my life. I was an awful geek when I was younger, well before geek-chic gave playing RPGs and reading comics and liking sci-fi a veneer of coolness. My response to the stigma was to closet my geekhood deep, and go about trying to be — well, normal, except when my buddies and I got together to play D&D or see an indie-band. When all of a sudden, being a geek and a music nerd had cachet, I quietly scorned it — I had worked too hard burying the more obvious bits of my dorkiness to let the cool parts out. I knew I’d never hide all of my geekiness — it’s just too strong to bury entirely, and anyone who gets to know me privately can see it in all its glory — but I could at least get by amongst strangers without showing off my Mark of Cain shamelessly.

And now, BDSM is kind of like that. It’s another dirty, glorious secret for me to hide. Just like those nights I snuck away from my surfer-girl, geek-hating girlfriend to play D&D were wonderful because of their taboo nature, there’s something about being strong and normal at a party and knowing, in my heart, that the other me is just under the surface. The other night I was having a wonderful conversation with several beautiful girls at a banquet, and while I could appreciate their looks and their personality and their kickass intellects, I wasn’t too attracted: only my wife can give me what I need. Only my wife knows and can satisfy that part of me. The public me gets shared with everybody, but the submissive part of me is hers, and hers alone.

(Naturally, when I examine this love of double-existences in the same political light I spoke of a few paragraphs ago, part of me thinks that it’s the straight, white male’s luxury to enjoy being in a closet, whereas other people have it forced upon them. But…I can only say, I get off on what I get off on.)

Oh, and for the record, the book is delicious. If my wife didn’t have me on the masturbatory equivalent of starvation rations, I would be reading the whole book tonight…