So, I’m standing there, a white guy with a history of different kinds of anti-racist activism, tediously well-meaning, with a riding crop in my hand and a black woman tied, helplessly, across a table. She’s already well welted from the crop. I suddenly became very self-conscious.

My first reaction was confusion: is this okay? Am I getting off on this race thing? Is this like playing “Jews and SS men”? I mean, I don’t think eroticising Nazi concentration camps should be illegal or anything, or even wrong, if the people involved are consenting, but I’d still find it pretty creepy.   

And then, because this isn’t a story about how wonderful I am, I’ll say that my second reaction was: Cool! The idea that Carol could have been a real slave, getting this whipping from her white Master, just 150 years ago: fuck the politics of it, that was hot. Sorry about that, but it’s what I felt.

So although she’d disobeyed no order, and as far as I could remember I’d given her none, I said, “You. Will. Do. As. You. Are. TOLD!” in the harshest voice I’d used with Carol, and lashed the crop down hard with every word. It hurt, and Carol howled. I gave her more, but that was my plantation owner moment, at least in my head.

Then I fucked her while she wriggled, without untying her.  

Later, when I’d untied Carol, and rubbed vitamin E cream over her ass, and we were comfortably snuggling, I considered whether to tell her what had passed through my head. It was why her whipping, and my cock, had got harder towards the climax. So she had a right to know. On the other hand, I expected her to be pissed at me. 

Anyway, I confessed.