Today I’m a hot librarian. I’m getting my books out of boxes, and sorting them by Dewey, more or less, and alphabetical for the fiction. I’m a snob, so “literary fiction” is shelved separate from genre science fiction, crime, etc. It’s so wrong, but it feels so right.
Then I’m going to buy a leather armchair. I’m sure I’ll find some uses for it.
But I won’t be writing much today.
It’s a very retro look, the skinhead thing. These are 1960s skins, but the guys who crashed the party dressed exactly the same. But they didn’t listen to ska anymore; it was white power music.
I was at a party once, that got gatecrashed by skinheads. Shaven heads, Doc Martin steel-capped boots, yellow laces, admiration for Hitler, weird views about Jews and Asians, and so on. Neo-Nazi skinheads, not the fashion trend following kind.
Quite a lot of the guys at the party got beaten up, and … I couldn’t see anything I could do. I could get beaten up too, but I couldn’t save anyone else. I hadn’t punched anyone at high school or since. I was shit at fighting. So I wasn’t much use to any of the non-skinhead guys present.
The skins didn’t attack the women. They made themselves unpleasant, but they didn’t do any punching or raping.
They’d planned it. Someone in the house must have annoyed them, because they’d guarded the doors and windows so there was no way out.
So, because my girlfriend and I were less drunk or drugged than most people there, we climbed to the end of the fire escape, and then pulled ourselves up onto the roof. It was quite cold up there under the stars, with this house of horror scenario going on underneath us. She was shivering, so I held her tight for body warmth.
We finished up fucking. On a sloping corrugated iron roof, with a two and a half story drop below us, and nothing to break your fall except the concrete at ground level.
We must have made enough skeleton sex noise that the skins realised there were people hiding on the roof, because one of them poked his head over, but before I’d even moved he fell while he was trying to pull himself up.
He must have hit the concrete walkway at some speed, but I never heard the impact, or what happened to him. Drunks are often lucky. I don’t like skins, but I hope he was lucky.
Eventually, it was the women at the party who saved the guys. They realised that the skinheads weren’t just ideologically weird about women: they were afraid of them. So some of the bigger women simply beat up a couple of the leaders.
The skins leaders didn’t know what to do. Getting punched by big punkette and goth women hurt, and it was humiliating; it didn’t fit the things they believed. Then the guys from the party started punching back, and someone grabbed a poker from the fire and was angry with it. This time the skinheads lost.
Me and girlfriend, we were on the roof. Unscathed. Useless.
I always feel privileged when I get a dream in which I can fly. I’d love to fly. It’s why I prefer Superman to Batman, probably.
Also, I want stories to be serious, but I get sick of the idea that darkness is the same thing as seriousness. I think the Superman idea, of having a being of near-infinite power, essentially a god, who is a fairly good person trying to be better, is more interesting than the Batman idea, which is about being driven and twisted by childhood trauma, and so forth.
I think the effort to be good is more interesting, and more like most people, than being shaped by some endlessly romanticised “terrible event”.
Anyway, I like dreams of flying. I also like dreams about huge, old labyrinthine wooden houses, that have a ricketty third floor that waves a little in a strong wind, and then I discover there’s a fourth floor, and a tower above that. I can’t stop climbing.
I guess I like heights. Top of a tree. Top of the stairs. Up in the air. Up on the roof. It’s safe up there.
My mom would have insisted this was no way to treat a woman.
When I first started finding willing partners and doing bdsm I was worried about the apparent contradictions between being a dom, and having convictions about gender equality and strict rules against hitting women.
So I felt some shame about being a dom, and about my desires.
But these days I’m absolutely shameless, even proud. Here are some key reasons why.
1 Respecting “yes”.
There’s still a duty of care even when someone says “yes”. Consent isn’t the only consideration you take into account. But if a submissive says, “hurt me, rule me, and fuck me when I’m crushed,” and that’s something you both want, then you have to respect the submissive’s right to consent and get what she wants.
(“She” wants? I thought about using inclusive pronouns, but that makes it sound as though I’m laying down universal rules. These are only my personal conclusions.)
You can and should look out for your lovers, a duty that applies to submissives as much as to doms. Sometimes a submissive might beg for harder pain or tighter bonds because the moment is so good, and it may not always be safe and sensible to give her that. Still, unless you have a good safety concern, or it’s something that you personally don’t want to do (I won’t do scat or cut someone, for example, no matter how nicely the submissive might ask for it), you shouldn’t protect people from having their desires met.
Respecting the “yes” as well as respecting no, and hard limits, is respecting the submissive.
2 Respecting the power of sex
Hotness is good.
In my early bdsm career I was always troubled when I hurt a woman, even though she was a consenting submissive woman who loved the pain and wanted to be made to serve.
But I had the reassurance that came from the look on her face and the sounds she made when she came. I’d feel incredible pride in that.
And I knew the sexual joy (getting all William Blake-y here) that I’d just experienced.
It’s a good idea to trust sexual pleasure when it’s mutual and strong. You can work out the intellectual issues later.
3 Knowing yourself, and trusting yourself where you know you can
A lot of people think that bdsm must escalate, over time, as people supposedly get jaded and push out to further limits, so that one day, eventually, a spanker will be wanting to tear flesh with pincers, a la Sade.
Research has shown that this just isn’t true. People work up to the level of intensity that they’re comfortable with, and they stay there. That’s certainly been my experience.
Seconds before the grenades go off
Like everyone, I have a dark side.
For example, I’ve fantasised about throwing hand grenades into a Ku Klux Klan rally, leaving meat-spattered white sheets and groaning neo-Nazis crawling, blind with their own blood, on shattered, exposed bones across the dried-mud ground. Is that dark?
But my dark side doesn’t seem to have much to do with my dom side.
Submissives have requested me to do things that are beyond my own usual limits, like drawing blood with a birch. I’ve told that story on this blog: look for the Vampire Girl tags. Another woman wanted me to use a wooden rod on her buttocks and thighs with all my strength, not judging or pulling the strokes, just going as hard as I could.
Both times I found that my pleasure diminishes as I go further than I’m comfortable with. I can stretch a limit, but not far or for long.
So the monster in me isn’t hiding behind the dom. The dom loves giving pleasure through giving surrender. The monster seems to be hiding behind my politics, not my sexual desires.
Boo!
4 Know the submissive, and watch her
Watching submissives closely is important to keeping them safe, and keeping them happy in that bdsm way that is mostly but not entirely sexual. Luckily, I’m turned on by submission, when a woman I desire submits to me, so I can watch a submissive being submissive, all day.
Close communion comes from close observation. Close observation also tells me, as a dom, whether I’m doing good and not harm. And when I know I’m doing well and doing good, I can feel proud of it.
5 Respecting dominance
I know that I put a lot of work into domming. Regardless of how people interpret the dynamics of what happens between dominant and submissive, I know that I do more, I make more judgment calls, and the chances are that she will come quite a lot more often than me.
(On a particular occasion I might, for example, come in her mouth and refuse her permission to come. But it tends to work out in her favour on average, over a period of time.)
She gets to go into subspace when she finds the way, and though I know there’s a dom equivalent, I can’t allow myself to go there in a session. I need to stay alert, observant and active. There’s a degree of illusion-making, of legerdemain, in domming, where we give the submissive the pleasure of feeling that she is powerless and she serves, and she is not served. Providing that illusion involves skill and work and art. I am, submissive madam, your most arrogant servant.
I still think submission is a gift given to a dom. There are people who making barfing noises whenever someone says this, but it seems to me to be true.
I find the level of trust and generosity involved in giving someone submission is, ahem, moving and beautiful.
At the same time, while a submissive gives a dominant one vast gift, a dominant gives a submissive many smaller gifts, which come down to forcing on her the things she most desires.
So dominants have our own form of generosity. It took me a while to learn that and respect it, but that’s because I’m slow.
Sing if you’re proud to be a dom, sing if you think it’s da bomb
So it took me a while to work it all through, but these days I’m rather proud to be a dom. I enjoy it, and I can make a girl cry (another absolute taboo when I started) with a song in my heart and a smile on my lips.
I don’t think I’ll ever want to take part in a Dom Pride march, though. Oh my dears, the swaggering.
Maureen said, “You change, you know. Most of the time you’re all sensitive and thoughtful, and that’s cool. I like that, most of the time. But I like what this does to you. You get really hard. Not just your cock, you moron. Everything gets hard, everything you do. I like you being like that. And once I get excited, I don’t want you to go easy on me. You know that force that takes over? You know what I mean?”
That force. There’s a kind of rushing in my ears when I’m domming and it’s going really well. I said, “I don’t know what that is. Don’t know how it works. But yes: there it is.”
“And it feels good. I feel weird, saying that. I really am a traitor. I don’t want to stop doing this either. It’s just hard to understand.”
I ate a piece of her quiche, by way of being ruthless and hard. And then we talked about other things, and had a gentler kind of sex.
So I had consent, but consent isn’t everything. You still have duties of care for the person in bed with you that go far beyond what you can get them to agree to.
Still, Maureen’s consent, her sexual response, and her relatively calm acceptance afterwards, were enough to let me continue.
I still had some doubts, but there was also the fact that hurting Maureen had itself been sex, and it merged into the best fucking I’d ever had. And she’d screamed, coming, like she never had before. With me, anyway, but I suspected it was ever. So I followed my cock, or my whole body, really. I took things further.
Back on April 4, 2013, I said I was going to apply toothpaste to the clitoris of a wriggly submissive women next week, and report back on the results. Well, I keep my promises. It’s just that sometimes (sometimes!) it takes me 17 months.
So, the woman was called Lisa (which means she wasn’t called Lisa, but she will be here), and she’d been promised toothpaste. Not as a punishment, just as an experience. She was curious and excited, but also nervous, which was good. She undressed and stood with her hands behind her back and her feet apart while I explained the ground rules.
The safe word was “toothbrush,” if she really couldn’t stand it or she thought she was coming to harm.
“Keep still, girl.”
Otherwise she had to stand still, with her legs apart, and her hands resting on the back of a wooden chair for support. If she started wriggling, waggling or thrusting, I’d enjoy watching her, but I’d also punish her for it with the leather paddle.
She’d be paddled in the bent over and touching her toes position, with her feet apart, so that she couldn’t press herself against anything that might be comforting. There’d be a minimum of six strokes, but the paddling would only stop if she managed to keep completely still.
I didn’t tell her that I was going to paddle her regardless, because I expected that she’d enjoy the two heats, one from her clitoris and one from her bottom, and the way they met and merged. But she knew that.
They seemed like good rules, and Lisa didn’t even bother to complain I was being unfair. So she lay back on the bed with her knees up and apart, and her feet on the edge of the bed.
I licked her until she starting breathing in the way that meant she was thinking about coming. I stopped abruptly when she caught her breath and tightened her stomach muscles. The point of no return was getting close.
“Open wide…” Actually, fingers are better than brushes, for getting toothpaste onto slippery surfaces.
I coated toothpaste all round the sides of her clit, dabbed a dollop on the tip, and then pressed it down and spread it.
The toothpaste was a slightly green colour, so it looked like she was wearing a little turquoise jewel on her cunt.
She got off the bed, and took up her position, standing straight, with her feet well apart and her hands on the back of the chair. The toothpaste had been on her clit for about five minutes, and it was, apparently, pleasantly warm.
At eight minutes she made a little, worried sound, and there was a muscle all a-tremble on her left inner thigh.
I wasn’t going to punish her for that. I waited.
Note:
The next episode is here.
“I’d really, really hate not to be able to spank you when we’re fucking” might read like a stupid thing to say. Believe me, it sounded even more stupid, spoken aloud. But Maureen nodded at last, and took a sip of the wine.
I took that as permission to get back in bed beside her. Maureen gave me her glass to hold and lay back on the pillows, staring at the cobwebs on her ceiling. There were many cobwebs. “You know, it’s weird, Jaime. I don’t let men push me around. And I’ve always known that if any man ever raised a hand to me, if he so much as touched me then I’d be gone. But this is different, I know that. I mean, that hurt, but it didn’t feel like violence.”
“Um. Did it hurt badly? Should I go easier?”
“Bits of it hurt a lot, Jaime. Especially at the very end, because I was already sore and you just kept on going, that was … Wow, that hurt. But it felt good. Even when it hurt it still seemed gentle, if you see what I mean. I think because you weren’t angry. I wasn’t scared of you at all. I knew you were trying to please me.”
“Ah. I see. And?”
“And you did please me, you complete wanker, you know that perfectly well. I don’t know how it works, but I get very animal, very primal. You get very brutal. In a good way. Quite unlike you, really.” I decided to think that was a compliment. “So, I like feeling overpowered by you, it makes me feel incredibly – god, I shouldn’t say this – female.” I raised my eyebrows. She closed her eyes. “I’m an absolute fucking traitor to all womankind.”
“I won’t tell.”
Maureen gave me another smile, but she was still frowning. “Jaime, I know you wouldn’t ever hit me. I mean, like that. I didn’t mean that you would.”
Just completely fucked up and wrong.
“Oh my …” I put the quiche in front of her, to demonstrate that I had brought her dinner, and must therefore be in a different tribe from the women-punchers. Maureen ignored it. I wasn’t hungry either.
But I was shocked back into speech. “Maureen, I really, seriously and definitely think this is nothing to do with violence.”
Maureen rubbed her arse. She looked at me, giving me eyebrows. She smirked, too. Cynically.
I said, “Hell, you know what I mean. I don’t want to hurt you, I’d hate to hurt you. Except this kind of hurt. Good hurt. And, I swear I’d rather rip my arm off than have you be afraid of me.”
“Actually, you sound scary-crazy, right there.” But she was mocking me, which was better than being scared. “But, well, are you going to start trying to tell me what to do?”
These days I wouldn’t think about starting a relationship with a submissive woman unless I was in charge of her, not just in the bedroom. Of course I’d tell her what to do, and I’d punish her if she disobeyed or displeased me, whether she felt like being punished or not. But back then I was still dealing with how spanking fits into the same moral universe as “never hit a woman”, and I was finding that was hard enough. Baby steps, okay?
So I said, “No. I don’t want to control you. I mean, I can’t imagine you doing as you’re told anyway. But I wouldn’t want you to.”
“Fat chance, Jaime.”
“Well, good. We decide things together.”
“That’s not going to change.”
“No, it isn’t. Look, if I hit you, or even spanked you without your permission, or if I said I’d punish you because you hadn’t done the dishes or something, you know, smacked you as a punishment, then course you should leave me. I’d help you throw me out myself.”
“Always helpful. Always a gentleman. Less you’ve got a hard-on.” But she smiled at me, and this time it was something like a real one.
Oh yes. Cherry ripe and very right. (Conditions apply.)
“On the other hand, this works really well as sex. It just, it really … worked. That was so, so good. If you don’t want me to do it again, then I won’t. But I’d hate to lose this. I’d really, really hate not to be able to spank you when we’re fucking.”
That last sentence hung in the air a little, because it was one of the weirdest things I’d ever said, at least to Maureen. Let’s stare at it one more time.
“I’d really, really hate not to be able to spank you when we’re fucking.”
Eventually I got up, collected dishes and pattered to the kitchen to make lunch, by way of showing that I might hit women but at least I wasn’t the sort of man who hit women and then sat himself on the couch with the Superbowl on the big flatscreen, demanding another goddam beer. I was the decent, trustworthy, lunch-making and pro-woman sort of woman-hitter.
There was no-one else home, which seemed lucky considering the extraordinary noises we’d just been making. On my return, with salad and eggs, I kissed her bottom, which was already cooling and not as fiercely red as it had been when we’d fucked.
Maureen said there was no pain; she felt pleasantly warm. I was soft-hearted again, so I was glad that she wasn’t hurting. When we’d eaten we made love face to face and tenderly, and that seemed to lift the last of that small, vexing shadow.
Of course it wasn’t. Later that night, when we were exhausted, Maureen said, “Jaime? I’m sorry, I need to talk about this. We need to.”
“Need to talk about.” I’d already learned to be afraid, whenever a woman said those words. And I’d just been hitting her. I’d never been on such shaky moral ground before. If she’d had recriminations I wouldn’t have been surprised, and I couldn’t have produced any kind of defence. “Okay.”
“Well, what does this mean, Jaime? This thing we’re doing?”
“This thing mean?” The kind of sex we’d just started to have together was, obviously, a feminist issue. I decided not to point out that she’d initiated it. We both knew that, but being legalistic and defensive wasn’t the point. It was a fair question: what did I mean by beating a woman? I said, eventually, “Well, this is about sex and pleasure. I mean, for me, anyway. But wasn’t it? Pleasurable? For you?”
Maureen smiled, though her face didn’t really lighten. “It’s okay, Jaime, yes. I thought that was amazing too. If you couldn’t tell… But I’m just worried about what it means. And when I say ‘means’ I mean …” And she pulled a face and gave up.
I was sitting on the side of the bed, with my feet on the floor. I wished I’d got under the covers before we started this conversation. Now we had to have it without touching. “Well, maybe it does only mean pleasure. And nothing else.”
“Yeah. But, well, it’s very uncool, you hitting me. I mean, I don’t think you’re going to start knocking me around -.”
“Christ! Maureen!”
“Jaime, if you ever hit me; you know, hit me like some guy hitting his wife, like if you were angry at me or something, you’d never see me again. I would never, ever give you another chance.”
“God no. God no. Never. Ever. No.” All of my heart was behind that oath, and I was horrified that I’d put myself in a position where I needed to swear it. And yet I couldn’t have clearly explained, that evening, exactly why I was so different from those contemptible men who hit women, though I felt certain that I was. Did she really think I was capable of hitting her in a violent way? “Maureen?”
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.