On accepting a woman as my slave.

I’m dressed in all the Dom gear, which in my case consists of black jeans and a black tee-shirt, and the only actually bdsm-y thing is knee-high black boots with buckles all over them. I’m standing.

She is naked, and kneeling, leaning forward so her forehead touches the carpet. She’s not allowed to speak.

Me: Kiss my boots. Use your tongue. 

While she obeys, I say: You walk with me, following me and beside me. I promise to lead you. 

I raise one boot: Good girl. Now kiss the underside. 

While she obeys, one boot at a time due to my inability to levitate, I say: You come into this new relationship between us as my slave. You are always beneath me. You obey, you show respect, and you never forget your enslaved status.

Me: Good girl. Now kiss my hands.

While she obeys, I say: You are in my hands now, as my property. My hands are for your punishment when you need it, and for pleasuring you, too.

Me: Good girl. Now, using only your mouth, unzip me, kiss my cock, and take it in your mouth.

While she obeys, I say: We’re together now, for your pleasure and for mine. You will please my cock in any way I tell you, and I will please you. We’re together for love and pleasure.

Me: Good girl. Now kiss my mouth.

After she’s obeyed, I say: You listen to me, as your master, and you do as you’re told. I will praise you often, and sometimes tell you to prepare for punishment. And I’ll kiss you often, and lick your perfect cunt.

Me: Good girl. My girl. My property, little slavegirl. Now get back on your knees. Bow your head.

While she kneels, I fit her collar.

That’s the ritual of formal enslavement. I’ve done it three times in my life. It marks the transition from one kind of relationship, even if it was already a bdsm relationship, to another. So it’s very formal.

I thought about how to mark it, they first time I entered a master/slave relationship. I felt that it should be very formal, and ritualistic, with each step and each aspect (like the fact that only I speak) having a clear meaning. It may seem flat, on the screen, but live, in the moment, it has power.

When it’s done the next step follows from the ritual, but isn’t defined by it. She’s allowed to speak again. What she wants might be a glass of wine, or a fuck. Or something fierce and harsh. When the ritual’s over, the moment dictates. 

When I was at university, in my third year, I had sex with a student who was in her first year. I’d met her a few times at the Students Association, and found that she was funny, flamboyant, radical, and one of the few people I knew who’d actually read a lot of books that weren’t bestsellers.

One day she was down about a fight she’d had with a friend, and I sat with her to commiserate. We finished up pressing foreheads and holding hands. Nothing came of it because I had to go and work. But later that week there was a dance in the Students Association Hall, and she came wearing sparkly little pants and and strip of sparkly, semi-see-through material round her breasts. 

So we danced together, and drank cheap student wine and smoked student joints. The ribbon round her breasts was slinky stuff, and tended to come loose. So from time to time we’d stop dancing so I could tie it back again.  

Then we went and talked for a while, and in a dark corner we did away with that sparkly material altogether. And when it was clear that we were more or less fucking, and it was time to drop the less and do more, we sneaked off.

I had a motorbike, and (this is bad behaviour too) took her on the back to my place, with the sparkly material round her hair since she didn’t have a helmet. 

So we fucked. Then the next day I blindfolded her, not for bdsm reasons, and took her for a smell walk through the flowers and trees in the local park. That night I spanked her, for bdsm reasons, and that became the nature of our relationship.

But here’s the thing. She said she was 16, which was the age of consent in my country. I’d travelled, and been politically active for a while before going to university, so I was six years older, at 22. And I decided that it was okay because she was a first year university student, and a highly intelligent one, with a long sexual history that was in some respects more deviant than mine. For example, she’d already beaten me to “first threesome”, and I still had three years to wait till mine.

But nearly ten years later, friends told me she’d lied about her age, just a little bit. She’d had to get special permission to enrol at university because she’d finished school, but she was only 15. So for the first six months of our relationship I’d been breaking the law, and fucking an underage girl. 

Apparently there’d been scandalised gossip. But I never heard about it, at the time.

All the kids in my school had been trying their best to have sex before they turned 16, so that they could say they were sex criminals. I tried too, but ineptly, and when I finally made my sexual debut I was a boringly legal 16.

But by my 20s I wasn’t too unhappy because I’d broken other sexual laws. For example, you could go to jail for 10 years, the law said, if you had anal sex with a woman (anal sex with a man only cost seven years; I’d love to know the thinking behind that) and I broke that law repeatedly before they repealed it.

I committed a kind of quasi-incest, by shagging my sister-in-law, which doesn’t count, legally, and a couple of cousins, which doesn’t quite count either. Though it would in some countries, I think. Unfortunately, I didn’t fancy my mother or my sister, so I had to leave that law unbroken. 

So my first reaction was shock that she’d felt she had to lie to me (because I’d have talked about it a bit more first, but it wouldn’t have changed the outcome), followed by surprise, and then a kind of stupid satisfaction: “Oh, I did manage to break that law after all.” 

One thing I’ve never felt about it is guilt. As it happened I didn’t know, but it wouldn’t have changed much if I had. She was still an intelligent woman, still more worldly, in some ways, than I was (she knew wine, and how to behave at various formal events), and I reacted to the person I was with. I had no doubt at all that she knew her mind, and that if she wanted me then that was just my ridiculous good fortune. I still don’t doubt that, even looking at it with hindsight.

Anyway, this is a hotter taboo now, I think, than it was twenty years ago. But I’m a sex criminal, for breaking the age of consent law and the anal sex law (RIP), and I don’t feel bad about either. 

That doesn’t mean that I think there shouldn’t be a law. Just that it should mostly keep away from young people consensually exploring. 

I’ve written two novels, and one day will write the third in the trilogy, about a probation officer who spanks and then fucks one of his clients. In the novel he is fired, and decides he should never again work with clients. Other complicated things happen. 

I’ve been a probation officer. But I’ve never fucked, or spanked, one of my clients. Though I did meet one client after she’d finished doing probation and I wasn’t a probation officer any more. We had sex, as we’d wanted to do since we first met, and the conversation we had in the morning about our mutual attraction is part of why that series of novels exists.

This is the other source. I had a client, a girl of eighteen (I was a boy of 21) who kept getting arrested for absurdly trivial offences. She was a Pacific Islander, and impossibly pretty, with huge eyes and a beautiful mouth and – when she wasn’t in a probation office – enough vivacity to power the planet.

It was obvious that the cops were gunning for her. A bit of investigation established that one cop in particular wanted her in jail, where he could rape her. That’s how the system worked. 

So I was preparing a case against him. She didn’t trust a white guy involved in what she saw as law enforcement, so it was always hard getting information out of her, and she never really listened to the things I said to her. 

Anyway, I was a probation officer as part of my degree in social work. It was a practical part of the course, called a “placement.” And my supervisor went round visiting all the students doing placements. 

He was as abrupt and challenging as he knew how to be, and said I should be doing more to make a difference.

I later learned that this was how he was approaching everyone, to see how they’d react, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was quite badly shaken. Then he took us out to lunch, where wine was served.

My first client interview after that lunch was this girl. As usual, she sat, mostly looking at the floor, while I tried to tell her how to avoid getting arrested, and to report police harassment. We were getting nowhere.

Finally – my shaken state of mind, and the wine drove this attempt – I told her how frustrating this was. I said I wasn’t part of the law enforcement system; I was doing my best to keep it off her. I said we should know more about each other, and then we should actually talk. She glanced at me briefly and went back to staring at the carpet.  

I had the urge, very strongly, to use a particular tone of voice and tell her to Come here! And I’d make her pay attention to what I wanted her know about how to handle cops without getting arrested, and why she shouldn’t let her arrest record get any longer. And of course she was very pretty, and I’d learned that, though I couldn’t see it myself, I was a pretty boy; it wasn’t hard to imagine what would quite probably happen after that attention-getting spanking. 

I realised I was being, from her point of view, as bad as the cops. If I did what I’d just imagined I’d be far, far worse than them. 

So I finished, kind of lamely, “But that’s up to you, of course.” 

And so I stood at the door of some very bad things. And I shut that fucking door.

I’m not sure how near a miss it was. The urge was very powerful. My brain knew me well enough to couch it in terms of being real and doing good. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I actually did anything of the sort. Even in a more than slightly fucked-up state of mind that was stronger. Thank fuck for that.  

PS:

I got the Probation Service to warn the cops, which knocked the harassment on the head. For her, at least.

I should say I don’t want or expect any applause for resisting an obviously nasty and destructive impulse. Nor do I think I deserve much condemnation for having an evil impulse. No one has a spotless mind. It’s what you do about its worst impulses that counts. 

I fear human stupidity. Partly because it often comes accompanied by violence, and occasionally that violence is directed at me.

I can handle myself in a fight if I need to, but there’s always one reflection that gives me pause: a stupid person who gets in fights a lot doesn’t mind getting hurt nearly as much as I do.

Even if I “win” a fight I didn’t want, as far as I’m concerned I’ve still lost, because at best I’ve had to deal with fear.

At worst I’ve only “won” in the sense that the other person is slightly more damaged by the fight than I am.

The other frightening thing about human stupidity is that there’s so much of it, and it affects the quality of decision-making in democracies. For example, the Australian population has just voted to reinstall a government that intends to kill the Great Barrier Reef by putting in a coal mine that will be dumping waste into the ocean there. They also intend to do nothing about global warming except for encouraging more coal use, using tax-payer money to make mining companies even richer. In exchange the mining companies donate more money to the Government’s political party, and to individual Government members.

Stupid bastards are killing this planet, and we don’t have another one.

So stupidity scares me. Humans need to become more intelligent, and prize intelligence more.

But that’s still not the thing that scares me most. What scares me most is being without a lover, of living unloved.

Thank fuck there are people who love me, but if I lost that it would destroy me. I would go literally mad, insane with grief.

I know this because that has happened to me, causing the most intense misery in my life, and pain I could barely stand. I never want to experience that again. 

So loneliness is really my biggest, darkest and most personal fear.