Falling off horses, and gate-keeping at bdsm meetings

Falling off horses

Even bad holidays are holidays, and holidays end. So I stood on the road with my suitcase waiting for the country bus that would, eventually, take to the airport that would take me home. My uncle and aunt waited with me, not overwhelmed with grief that I was going. Samantha was there too, not grieving either, but giving me the full force of her disdain. She was good at disdain. She wished me a good trip, going home.

So I was sadder, though not much wiser. Still, I had two new pieces of knowledge.

The first was that girls didn’t pick guys for their niceness or their intelligence or whatever. It was something subtler, that Greg had and I didn’t. He was a shit, and he was sexy. I could whine about that, or I could try to work out ways of being sexy myself, while still being me.

“Thou wilt never come for pity;

Thou mayest come for pleasure.”

If I really liked girls, and it was clear that I did, then I’d have to be someone girls enjoyed hanging around with. I had no idea how to go about that, but at least the project was clear.

Ruth is stranger than Richard.

Ruth is stranger than Richard.

The other thing I learnt was even more depressing, because there seemed to be nothing much I could do about it. It was that there was no reason to think that even I met a a submissive girl, or woman, and we got on well, she’d want the same things as me.

Bdsm is a big tent, and it includes all sorts of tastes, desires and practices. They’re not always going to be compatible.

At the time that seemed like bad news.

Of course, as you know, you can almost always find common ground with a lover, and you can pervert them in your direction, and they can teach you a few of their own favourite things. I just didn’t know that yet. 

Bdsm meetings

Girl in fishnets

Girl in fishnets

So – and now I’m going back to something I said in those posts about running bdsm meetings, especially this one – the fact that bdsm is a big tent  also means that it’s hard to draw lines about who is and who isn’t into bdsm. And that woman Ruby, who came to my bdsm meet’n’greet wearing a fishing net, and who got dissed for only being interested in getting spanked and fucked, is definitely inside the tent and under the umbrella. 

If anyone wants to identify with us, it seems to me that (except for people who advocate non-consensual practices) we don’t need gatekeepers to keep them out. 

Falling off horses and bdsm 3

So up in that hiding place on the upper floor I read, “But Henry never understood about gloves. He’ll give a swift beating followed by sex, but nothing kinky.”

I liked that line, mostly for the outrageousness of the goes-without-saying assumption that there’s nothing kinky about “a swift beating followed by sex”. It was an insouciant joke, and though I didn’t know the word I knew I liked the style.

But there was also some bad news in it, for me. The woman narrating the story was submissive, but she dismissed her husband as an unsatisfactory lover because he wasn’t sexually responsive to gloves.

Bond effortlessly established his dominance with his purple mink glove.

Bond effortlessly established his dominance with his purple mink glove.

I wasn’t a gloves man either, nor even a glove-fancying eleven-year old. These days I have a pair of leather gloves that I use for spanking and stroking girls who like the feel of leather a lot. But that’s more to indulge a submissive than because of any strong interest in gloves or leather on my part.

But in that shed the  gloves reference made me suspect that life was going to be even harder for me  than I’d come to expect.

At the time I wanted a girlfriend, who I imagined  as a girl prepared to cuddle me, and to talk about important things with. 

I also wanted to discover all that newly appeared girl stuff, like breasts and amazing phenomena like Samantha’s arse in tight Jodhpurs. And then I wanted to feel myself in the body of that girl who liked me enough to want to take me on board.

Those were my main ambitions, and they spent a lot of time haunting my waking and sleeping dreams. They seemed hard enough to achieve. I’d just failed spectacularly with Samantha, where a completely unworthy rival I thought – had succeeded.

It didn't seem much to ask.

It didn’t seem much to ask.

But then there were the other things I wanted. I was a dom, though I didn’t know the word. (The only word I knew was “sadist”, which didn’t really capture what I was like or what I wanted. I’d read some Sade, and I was – and am – no admirer of the Marquis.) But I wanted to find a submissive girl, who wanted the things I wanted to do with and to her. She’d want to be spanked, that dream girl, and tied, and to kneel with her hands and ankles tied together. Waiting for me to decide what I’d do with her.

So I’d somehow have to meet a submissive girl. There had to be at least one, somewhere in the world. I hoped so, anyway.

But the gloves line taught me, suddenly, that finding a submissive girl was only half of my task, though that seemed impossible enough. But what if I found that submissive girl and what she wanted was to be dressed in tight corsets and long black gloves, or wrapped in plastic, and tied in amazingly complicated ways? I’d seen images of that sort of thing, and they’d puzzled more than excited me. What if it turned out that the submissive girl I finally met didn’t want any of the relatively simple things I wanted? What if I didn’t enjoy the things she liked?

I had to re-define my goal. I didn’t just need to find a submissive girl, which was more than hard enough: I’d have to find the specific submissive girl who wanted what I wanted, and also wanted me.

The odds against me seemed high. Quite a bit too high. Life looked, from my rickety vantage point on the mezzanine floor of an abandoned shearing shed, likely to be grim.

Falling off horses and bdsm 2

Farmers don’t knock old buildings down. If a farmer builds a new family home on top of the hill, then the old house near the road is used for travelling workers like shearing gangs and fruit pickers. It’ll stay there until the floor caves in and the roof sags, and the younger son starts cannibalising it for wood and corrugated iron.

shedSo on my uncle’s farm there was a newish shearing shed, and a little further off there was the skeleton structure of the old shed, which was so ancient there were no electrical fittings for the clippers. There were manual, non-powered clippers on the bench, with other antique equipment that was probably worth a fortune, even then.

And there was about half an upper floor, where there was a press like a giant vice, with handles for two men, that compressed the wool into bales. They stored the bales up on that platform until they were taken away for auction.

Greg and Samantha were off riding somewhere. I didn’t want to think about that. The climb to the upper floor looked dangerous. Good. I’d been disappointed in lust, and I didn’t care if I was dead. And so forth.

Anyway, up on that rickety platform there was half a bale of wool still left in the press, some fleeces, a pile of woolsacks and some hay bales, stored and forgotten. So I went over to the hay bales, and found that they concealed a sort of nest. For shirkers and lovers.

And, as it turned out, wankers, because when I climbed down into this hiding place I discovered, under a sack, a small but select pile of ancient magazines, some Playboys, a few issues from the original British run of Penthouse, and some issues of something called Mayfair, which I’d never seen or heard of before.

The Penthouses were so old that the models didn’t show their pink bits, and often had a carefully placed hand or prop to cover their nipples. They made up for that with a Penthouse Forum section that seemed more explicit than in the later, more gynaecological issues. (I have no idea what Penthouse is like now. I haven’t seen one, or a Playboy, in the last twenty-odd years.)

nude spank2So people claiming to be office girls wrote to Penthouse to share their experience with being spanked in the office, which they agreed to because the pay was good. Eventually, after some terrible mistake, they’d have to strip quite naked before going over the boss’s knee, and as the spanking wore on they’d have an intense, screaming orgasm. After which, as it did in Penthouse Forum letters, “one thing led to another”.

I read the best of those letters so often I memorised them. Then I moved on to the Mayfairs. It was more cheaply produced, and so the girls in the pictorials looked like girls next door who might take their clothes off because they fancied you, rather than looking like models. They were still pretty, and there was something endearing about their tiny imperfections.

The Mayfairs were twenty or thirty years old when I discovered them. The newer ones had only pictures, and headings like “Thirty tits-out, daks-down bathing babes – AND THEY’RE STARKERS!” So something had gone badly wrong with Mayfair. The older issues were more up-market, with fiction, and articles on serious topics, competing with Playboy.

There was a story in one of the older issues, called “The Inner Room”, or “The Saddle”, or something. It contained two sentences I still remember. The heroine and narrator, a devastatingly heartless and aristocratic submissive woman, puts on her gloves, and reflects ruefully about her unsatisfactory husband:

“But Henry never understood about gloves. He’ll give a swift beating followed by sex, but nothing kinky.

Falling off horses, and bdsm 1

I stayed on my uncle and aunt’s farm one Christmas vacation, when I was eleven. I learned a lot about falling off horses, and I learned two things about sex.

What I learned about falling off horses was that although you seem to be very far from the ground up there on horseback, hitting the ground doesn’t actually hurt that much. In fact it struck me as quite a bit less uncomfortable than staying aboard a trotting or galloping horse, at least until I learned to move with the horse and got used to the saddle.

The first thing I discovered about sex involved my horse-riding, spray-on jodhpur-wearing cousin Samantha, who was sullen, moon-faced in a pretty way, and thirteen. She was an older woman. Eleven year old boys mostly don’t go after thirteen year old girls, and I knew that it was unlikely that she’d see me as a serious sexual contender.

But lust drove me to try, and ignorance drove me to try by hanging around gazing at her, trying to find ways of being “helpful”, and being too tongue-tied to say anything amusing. So I dropped, in her esteem, from irrelevant to irritating to revolting. I told myself, once I understood that, that the age gap, in that direction, made the whole thing impossible.

That saved my pride until Greg, a boy from the nearest city, also turned up to stay. He was eleven too, but a couple of months younger than me. These things matter when you’re eleven. Anyway, he started going riding with Samantha, and I smirked to myself about how much his failure was going to embarrass him, because I’d be there to see it.

It was at this moment that my heart made a little "nk" sound.

It was at this moment that my heart made a little “nk” sound.

So I came in from swimming a couple of days later, and there was Greg, sitting on the old couch on the veranda, with Samantha curled up on his lap. They were kissing. I noted with the precision of jealousy that he didn’t have his hand under her shirt.

But I knew better than to hang any remnant of my pride or hopes on that. It was only a matter of time.

My heart and pride snapping was the quietest and least important sound in the world. I’d got too close to back out without being seen so I came up, pretended not to notice their position, and enthused about my swim. I was as cheerful as anyone might seem to be, under the circumstances. There was, after all, nowhere else for me to go.

But Greg was a terrible person. He was in trouble at school for bullying, and he used to beat up his younger brother. He crept around the neighbourhood after dark and peered in the windows of women living alone. He stole things and blamed others. I found it hard to believe that he was good to Samantha. I, on the other hand, was a reasonably good person. I was gentle with people smaller than me, though I stood my ground with bullies. I had a lot to learn about riding, but at least I’d been brave about falling off horses, and got on again. I liked helping people. So clearly, being good, gentle and brave, I deserved Samantha more than Greg.

So I learned that the desire and affection of girls is not something you get as a prize, by “deserving” it. I had more to learn than that, but it was a start.

The second thing I learned about sex will have to wait till the next post.