Probation Officer #65: The timid sex offender

I picked up my afternoon’s work. “There still has to be a report.”

“Do you think Lance should go to jail?”

“No. He’s still not a risk to the community. Public safety.”

“He thumped someone.” 

“Yeah. Farm guy. But he was resisting unlawful imprisonment. And he didn’t thump farm guy very hard. Anyway, he needs to have to come in on the weekends and do a bit of work scrubbing graffiti and so on, to keep him tired. He needs someone who knows more about this than I do to get him to stay in his bedroom when he feels like having a wank. And he needs to stay out of jail, because that would fuck him up beyond repair.”

obrienJock looked at me. Blankly. “I’m not so sure he’s not beyond repair anyway. But I’d agree that jail will fuck him up. He’s a sex offender and he’s timid. He’s got victim written all over him. And if there was a dangerous idiot out on that farm, it was the farm manager. If he’d tried to lock me in his goddamn barn, I’d have thumped him too. All right.” 

I waited. 

Probation Officer #64: Jock the director

Jock, the director, said, “You’ve written a report? That’s something. Give it here.”

Jock took my report and turned away to skim it. I hate it when people do that with anything I’ve written. I like to read their faces while they read me. Jock was a terrifying bastard, with a big red face, a gorilla’s arm muscles and a pigeon’s chest. He’d passed the mandatory age but no-one had the nerve to tell him to retire.

He spun his chair back to face me. “It’s good in a way. And it’s bullshit.”

“Bullshit?” I was more surprised than offended. I thought I’d written something honest. 

“Yes. Read that and it’s clear that you’re to blame. You probably think writing that’s a noble … gesture or something.” 

“It’s just what I think was happening.” 

obrien boxes“Ah, bullshit, Jaime. Actually, I expected you to produce some bullshit. Just, I thought it’d be something that covers your arse. Since you’re a clever bastard. But this isn’t even clever.” Jock was known to take some of the cockier young offenders to the Police and Citizens boxing ring, to show them that a man in his sixties could beat them. He said he was demonstrating that violence is meaningless. Really, he thought it got their attention.

I was getting annoyed. “I was trying to protect my colleagues.”

“Y’arrogant little weasel, you think the people here need your protection? We’ve been doing this longer than you’ve known how to tie your own laces. You thought it’d be romantic to throw your career away. Make a big gesture, take all the blame and walk. That’s no use to us. We’d rather you turn up to work every day. Do your share.”   

“Well, Lance is going to jail. He’s not going to do very well there. That’s down to me.”

“Well, Jaime, it aint. Guess who’s fault it is? It’s Lance’s. You can’t mind him every minute of his life. You couldn’t stop him from fucking his life up when you weren’t around, because you’re not god. Contrary to what you seem to think. Here, take this report back. Keep it somewhere, and have a look at it if you ever start thinking you’re clever again.” 

Probation Officer #57: Samoan skin

“Am I out of trouble yet?”

Sa’afia grunted, but she sounded affectionate. “Maybe.”

“‘K, I’m going to dump myself back in. Fact is, I do like it that you’re Samoan. Because I think your skin’s gorgeous. I love the contrast with mine. It just seems hot. And your nose. I was thinking about your nose being pretty before. But that’s because I think everything about you is hot.”

“You’re allowed to like my skin. And my nose. I like yours, actually.”

“My nose?”

“Sure. It’s noble.”

“Fuck’s sake. No-one’s ever said that. Anyway, I didn’t know I thought Samoan skin was incredibly hot until after we’d spent Saturday night together.”

“I liked your nose straight away. You’re just slow. Anyway, what about my ass. Is it hot?”

spoonsShe pushed her hips back against me. I pushed back against her ass, hoping I could manage some show of penile appreciation. But my cock was wet, soft and comfortable. I was fucked out for now, and it stayed soft. I had to make do with words. “Your ass is hot. Damn hot. Fucking hot. And beautiful. Like a rose. Maybe a magnolia.”

“Magnolia! That’s nice. A purple one?”

I put my hand on her breast. “Yup. But it’s sleeptime now. G’night, dormouse.”

“’Dormouse’. You can call me ‘dormouse’. Good night.”

I was out of trouble. But I felt like coming back from the defensive. I felt a push from what RL Stevenson called the imp of the perverse. I put my hand on her warm ass, which was also hot, and slapped her lightly, squeezing a nipple with the other, breast-cupping hand. And I bit her ear lightly. Sa’afia stirred. “Nnnnn?”

duck“Mind you, I fancy that Daisy Duck too.”

Probation Officer #55: The great woman of the night

It was after one in the morning.

spoonI lay on my side with Sa’afia spooned against me. I had my arm round her, and my hand cupped her breast. A soft breast, with a hard purple-black nipple. It moved when she breathed. It was tender, in my hand, a reason why men might love women.

Her bottom glowed pleasantly warm now, but it had been burning hot not so long ago.

When I’d last seen it, her ass had been a beautiful brownish red. But the night had got colder while we’d fucked, and eventually I’d let her slip under the bedcovers. While we’d fucked I’d spanked her, just with my hand but hitting hard till it hurt her.

She’d sworn, and bitten my forearm while I hurt her, and claimed all of my cock inside her. We’d fucked hard, and we’d found that so long as I gave her cunt plenty of attention she didn’t seem to have a point at which a hand spanking could hurt her more than she liked.

Some time early in the night she said she’d lost count of her orgasms. I didn’t know how many she had, either. But she screamed her pleasure over and over, politely thanking me each time, as if I saved her soul when she came. More prosaically I came just three times, but they had left me happily exhausted.

We lay breathing together with the light out. The half-moonlight flowed through Sa’afia’s window, catching highlights in her hair and the shiny sweat on her face. There were photographs above her bed, scenes of a Samoan village, in a wooden frame studded with seashells. There was a poster of the young, wet-lipped Mick Jagger, and a charcoal drawing, simply framed, of Hine-Nui-te-Po, the Great Woman of the Night, goddess of death, feeding her children.

hine 1Hine-Nui-te-Po was a Maori goddess, not a Samoan one, but the drawing was somberly beautiful. I knew why she would want to have it. I suspected it was quite valuable. The furniture was simple and old, in mahogany or whitewashed. There was something nautical, sailorish, about the taste and style. 

 I squeezed her breast affectionately. People who worked in the morning needed to fall asleep soon. Sa’afia was a gofer at a local law firm, where they liked having a well-presented Samoan woman regularly walking across the reception area. In fact she was studying chemistry, but there were no relevant jobs in a small city. She didn’t want to work at a chemist.

Sa’afia wasn’t ready to sleep, though. I could see she was frowning. 

“You said you think Minnie Mouse is sexy.” 

I didn’t realise immediately that this was dangerous ground. “Yeah, it’s the bow. And the clumpy shoes. And she’s always flashing her knickers.”

Sa’afia said, “and she’s black. Have you always liked the black girls then?”

“Minnie Mouse is black?” 

More Lican thropology

The Rape of Proserpina, Roman school, c 1700

I eventually realised that Lican was putting up a fight, but – and here, I just had to trust that I was reading her signals right – she wanted me to win. She wanted to know that I had the strength and the lust to force her, before she’d fuck me willingly.

Which is, you know, macho bullshit, and generally stuff that I hate. I don’t just hate it on political grounds; it makes me feel a bit stupid, to be honest, and that’s somewhere near the opposite of sexy. I really don’t enjoy ambiguity about consent.

But I relied on what seemed to be noises of pleasure amongst the struggling sounds, and little gives, like the way she’d stop for a second when I had my hand against her breasts or her cunt. And other places she liked touched. And the fact that she only had to say “no” if she wanted me to stop. I don’t know enough Spanish to cover a post-it note, but I know what “no” means. I’d have understood “basta”, because of Italian. 

So I pushed her legs open with mine, tugged a pleasantly damp bit of gusset out of the way, and pressed my cock forward, and it was only then that she smiled again, said yes-like things, and made me welcome. Which isn’t the order I prefer. I like consent first, then penetration. But we had different ways of getting to the things we both liked.

Lican thropology: male dominance without bdsm

I’ve been thinking about how Lican and I couldn’t say anything complicated to each other, because I don’t speak any of her languages and she doesn’t speak much English.

Angelica could translate between us, but there were things we didn’t feel comfortable talking about, not if we had to talk about them through Angelica. It got easier once Angelica was brought inside our sexual circle, so we could all be more intimate about what we said and did with, or in front of, each other. Even then, there were things that we never said.

We never sorted out what was happening between us when she submitted. Lican feels, as best we’ve been able to clarify this, that a man should rule a woman. She sees that as a general principle: in any heterosexual couple, the man should rule. I just think that a man or a woman can be submissive, or dominant, or not interested in these categories at all. It’s something people can agree to explore, according to what feels right to them and turns them on.

I think I’m right, and that I’d naturally win that argument and convince her, if we were actually able to talk about it. No doubt Lican thinks the opposite.

But one of the first things we did in that hotel room back in Porvenir was to have a wrestling match. We were fighting over possession of her cunt, really. If I won, I’d fuck her. If she won, she’d stay unfucked. So ordinarily I’d have backed off immediately, because that’s pretty much a definition of rape.

But I started the wrestling match because Lican was clearly turned on and wanted to fuck, and she’d been enthusiastic about getting her outer layer of clothes off, and most of my clothes. She pushed me away and closed her legs suddenly, but she was laughing, so I thought it was just a playful, jokey thing. I was happy to hold her and wriggle around on a bed with her, and she seemed happy to be wriggling and rolling. She was laughing, and there was something encouraging about her eyes, but she was still keeping her knickers on, more or less, and her cunt out of my cock’s way. 

That’s not the end of the topic, but I’m out of time. 

Freud: Masochistic women caused Nazism

Freud wasn’t all crank ideas about Edward de Vere writing Shakespeare’s plays, and Akhnaton possibly running off to Canaan and re-naming himself Moses. He also had amusingly crank ideas about bdsm.

My favourite, from Eros and Civilisation is that masochistic women are so opposed to the life force, in their desire for negation and destruction, that they’re responsible for Nazism. 

That’s a paraphrase, of course. But it is the argument. It’s not as if women, or gays, owe Freud any favours. Nor do we bdsm perverts. 

Bdsm and vanilla consent #4

 Sometimes, you might happen to be the first person to encourage a lover to try mild bondage, say, or mild pain, or a slave game where they give the orders, or they have to do as they’re told. You don’t think you’re putting them at any real risk. 

No-one is likely to come to any harm having their wrists tied to a bed, or from finding out that their lover likes to be tied up. Same with spanking or being spanked. Don’t dive straight into the deep end, and you’ll be fine. Get your asses into the shallow end, and start paddling. (Yeah, ha ha.)

But there is a risk for newcomers to bdsm, even mild bdsm. It’s not about welts; it’s about self-knowledge. Someone who finds out that he or she likes to inflict pain or to suffer it, or to bind their lover or be tied up, or to command or be commanded, or any combination, may not welcome that self-discovery.

There’s a sort of standing bdsm joke about the woman who’s always thought of herself as a feminist, but finds that she really likes being spanked.

There’s another one, which – unfairly – usually gets a more sympathetic hearing. That’s the man who thinks of himself as a decent guy, sympathetic to feminism and absolutely horrified by domestic violence. But he discovers that he not only enjoys spanking that woman; he really wants to take his belt to her ass each time she gags while she’s sucking his cock. With her hands tied behind her back. Um, so long as he does it nicely.

And it’s hard enough for women who discover submissive desires, and men who find out that they’re doms. (And yes, of course consensual bdsm is compatible with feminism, but that’s not our argument, just now.) Women who find that their desires are mostly dominant and men who discover their sexual submissiveness can have an even harder road to travel before they get to self-acceptance. 

We’ve been asking why consent is such a big issue in bdsm, compared to the vanilla world, so that bdsm consent has to be explicit, it has to be informed, and it should be prior consent, given before the lust gets into the driver’s seat?

Another possible answer is that people learn things about themselves when they first discover the desire to do things that generally labelled as bdsm. They may not always welcome that self-learning, or be able to handle what they find.

That old command, “Know thyself”, can be fucking dangerous advice. 

Bdsm and vanilla consent #3

There’s a legal case that began earlier this year. It’s kind of trivial, but anything involving a Disney employee being sued for spanking-related sexual harassment is noteworthy.It’s just a shame that it doesn’t involve one of the guys in the mouse costumes.

Anyway, Kellie Rodriguez, is suing the comedian Ron Pearson, for sexual harrassment.

She alleges that she was in the studio audience for a Disney show, where Pearson was the warm-up act. She says he’d been checking her out before the show, and when there was a segment for audience participation he made sure she was called. While she was up on stage, he spanked her bottom repeatedly (while she was standing with her back to him) and then kissed her. She alleges.

I’m not commenting on the case itself.

But what strikes me as interesting is that Ms Rodriguez is alleging two kinds of non-consensual sexual assault. One, the kissing, we’d call vanilla, or “not bdsm”. The other, the spanking, we’d say was very light bdsm. Of the two, it’s the (alleged) kissing that she says affected her more, because her children, who were in the audience, saw a strange man kissing their mother and were upset because they couldn’t understand what was going on. 

I had been thinking – Greedo aaargh made the same point, in his comment on Vanilla and bdsm consent #1 – that the standards of consent in bdsm are so much higher because what’s at stake in bdsm is greater. That is, there are more risks, especially for the submissive, in bdsm sex than in “vanilla” sex.

But that isn’t necessarily true.

In most bdsm no-one is really hurt. A rope mark from bondage or a blushing bottom from a spanking may not last as long as a vanilla love bite.  Getting kissed in front of your family could (again, not referring to the Disney case)  have greater consequences for your life than spending an evening chained to your bed.

The emotional consequences of fucking someone can be more important and have greater potential for benefit or harm, than the emotional consequences of spending a night as that person’s slave, but without intercourse.  

So the comparative riskiness of vanilla and bdsm sex is one issue in why the standard of consent is higher for bdsm than for other kinds of sex. But it can’t be the only issue.