I’m trying to keep the Probation Officer story as true and honest as I can manage. I’ve made various changes, particularly to ensure that even someone who knows me will find it hard to identify or locate Ana, Sa’afia or Svitlana. It helps that I’m not a probation officer any more, and that I’m not living in that part of the world any more.  I’ve tried to keep the emotional truth, and not to protect myself too much.

At the time I was still more diffident about bdsm than I am in the version I’ve told here. But I haven’t felt like writing about my self-doubt and the evasions I used to cover for desires that were sometimes a little darker than I was comfortable with. Even striping Sa’afia’s ass with the rod seemed to me to be a bit dark, a shameful thing to be enjoying. You can take it that I spent more time worrying about sexual politics, about whether I’d shock those women and turn them off me, and so on, than I’ve written about here. I just haven’t gone on about it because it’s boring, it’s self-obsessed and it gets in the way of telling the story.

I’ve also noticed, re-reading this long story so far, that I haven’t made much of an issue about things I didn’t know then. For example, there’s very little in the way of discussion, in advance of any session, about practices that are good and practices to avoid because the submissive doesn’t want them. These days I’d formalise that part of the conversation more, but then I trusted and relied on the submissive woman to give me clues during a session if something was a turn-off, or too painful or scary.

Also, it hadn’t even occurred to me at the time how much a submissive can want to give of herself. I saw bdsm as very hot sex that resolved into loving pleasure. Of course, bdsm is that, but there were doors I hadn’t opened yet. So some questions about submission just never arose with me, though they certainly arose for Sa’afia’s and (SPOILER ALERT) for Ana. Svitlana not so much. Some of the time I wasn’t listening, or paying attention. But I haven’t given myself any anachronistic awareness of that.

There’s another observation, about the insouciant cheerfulness with which Sa’afia told me I’d left her with severe bruises across her arse and the backs of her thighs. I’ve reported that reaction accurately, but in some ways it’s strange, isn’t it?

I’ll talk about that tomorrow.