I have heard the Siamang sing. They don’t sing to me (well durr, Mr Prufock) but they sing for sex and joy.

I had the memory of Maureen’s screamed pleasure and then my own, even as I’d deliberately hurt her and then fucked her with none of the consideration that my lovers had so carefully taught me.

Her skin still burned under me. I pressed tight against her back, revelling in that heated proof of my own violence. I was still hard in her and I wasn’t tender-hearted yet. I hoped she still hurt, and I was certain that the hurt felt good to her.

 My sweat had pooled below her shoulders and in the small of her back, and spilled down her sides, soaking the sheet. Even then, Maureen was cooler and more elegant than me. I could see the left corner of her mouth, curved in a smile. We were comfortably silent.

This was a world where previously unattainable pleasures had suddenly and somehow become possible. Maureen had cried out in the same joy as me, or a version of it. Incredibly, I had a partner in this. It could happen again and surely would. I held her and was held. She was extraordinary, and real.

Then I felt doubt. In this new and undoubtedly wonderful world it seemed that I sometimes beat her. As I’ve mentioned, I hate men who beat women. As our silence continued, Maureen’s smile faltered. She’d just accepted a beating from a man. More, she’d invited it and had just been screaming her joy at it.

There were uncomfortable thoughts for her to have about that. If a man who hits a woman is as low as a man can be, then what kind of a woman could she be, who had enjoyed that treatment and who lay contentedly with the man who’d inflicted it? I knew that she felt troubled, as I did, and that we had to talk about this.

But I couldn’t find the right words.

I did my first real bdsm thing with a real live submissive girl when I was 17, and that incident is one of the most excruciatingly embarrassing memories of my life and, if I told it to you, yours. I’ve nearly recovered now, but I’ll share it some other time.  

I didn’t get a second chance until I was 22. I was lying on the bed of a woman, Maureen, who was a bit more rich and cultured than me. The university we were at, and quite a few other places and institutions in that State, were named after her family. 

I was helping Maureen with her Milton project, for an English paper. I didn’t know as many famous live people as she did, but I knew more about famous dead people. We both knew it was just my excuse to drop by, and we’d finished up in her bed before we’d got round to anything, you know, scholarly.

But it was deadline time, or nearly, for her Milton project, so it was time to deliver the promised help. We were lying on her bed, post-sex, naked with a laptop and a copy of the Oxford Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.

I was being terribly serious-minded. So I wasn’t quite ready when the conversation took a sharp and unexpected swerve. The dialogue went something like this: 

Maureen: Should I shove in a paragraph about Milton’s defence of liberty and free speech in Areopagitica? 

Me: Maybe. But actually he wrote that liberty should only apply to Protestant Christians. He specifically says that Catholics shouldn’t be allowed free speech, let alone atheists and such. So by “liberty” he only meant the right to agree with him.

Maureen: Ok, but I’m still going to have to mention Areopagitica.  

Me: Well, you can say it’s an ambivalent defence of free speech, and hey! you could link it to the Romantics’ idea that Satan was a sort of spirit of freedom. Must be at least 400 words in that. 

Maureen: Mmmm. I guess. So would you like to spank me? 

Me: What? Uh, hrrrrrrm. Um-hrrrrrrm. Oh. Uh, yes. Yes, please. Absolutely. Yes. 

 (To be continued, obviously.) 

From my earliest childhood, my parents taught me that pretty much the worst thing a male person, a boy or man, can do is hit a girl, or woman.

I remember there being a tremendous fuss when I was about five. There was a kids’  baseball game, and an argument between some girl and me about whose turn it was to bat. I can’t remember who was right: probably neither of us. We were just bored.

Anyway, she had height, age and weight on me, so she grabbed the bat and punched me. I took a couple of seconds to review what my parents had told me about the girl-hitting question, and I decided that there had to be an exception in which a boy can honourably punch a girl who’s bigger than him and punched him first. So, after a five-second pause, I hit her back.

Which is how I learned that there are no exceptions to the rule. I was despised by the other boys and girls alike, for having done a contemptible, unmanly, cowardly and nasty thing. And I got lectured by my parents when I got home. So there was the lesson: you don’t hit a girl, and there are no exceptions.

I think it’s basically a good rule, and I’d teach it to any chidden I may have. Including making the “no exceptions” part clear from the start.

It sounds unfair, but it’s not. There’s some statistical evidence that women may assault men nearly as often as men assault women, but the question isn’t which gender is more virtuous. The issue is which gender can do real damage to the other.

A man who fights a woman, and gets angry and loses control can put her into hospital just with his fists. In general a woman can’t do much harm, unless she’s had special training or has a weapon. Hospital statistics confirm this. Men put lots of women into hospital, and women put very few men into hospital.

So my advice to any male child learning these rules would be, if a girl hits you, tell her she shouldn’t because you’re not supposed to hit her back. If she persists, leave her and tell a teacher. Schools are supposed to provide a place without violence. If the school thinks that’s a problem and it shouldn’t or can’t be violence-free, then call me, and we’ll show them what a real problem is like.

When you’re an adult, and a woman gets so angry with you that she gets out-of-control violent, leave. There’s nothing good you can achieve by staying. No words you say, no “restraining her”, will have any good effect. If you stay it’s going to escalate, and you’ll get angry too. If you get angry enough you’ll harm her. You won’t forgive yourself for that, and you’ll be in a mess of legal trouble. So: leave. Talk later, like the next morning.

So: yeah, I think my parents’ rule is generally a good one: never hit a woman, and there are no exceptions. 

Trouble is, it made it very difficult to be a dom.