I’d had high expectations of that night, from the moment I’d decided that tintanabula needed to find out what a paddle can do. That was because she’d got only mediocre marks in a university test. I was outraged, when she admitted her score, because I want her to pass near the top of her class. So I decided that she would feel a little warning twinge in her bottom, a painful memory, any time she felt like giving a test less than 100% of her effort. But to have a painful memory you first have to have a painful experience. That was where the paddle came in.

The other details, that I’d paddle her in the open air at night, with her bound naked over a whipping frame, filled themselves in. I’d just made the whipping frame, and obviously I was going to find a use for it soon. So I was expecting the experience to be memorable, in different ways, for both of us.

But all my expectations were exceeded. It was emotionally and sexually overwhelming. The source of all this extra power was her tears. They’d lifted the emotional and sexual stakes dramatically. At first, when tintanabula started to cry, I’d been pleased simply because it meant that she would be trying harder for her next exam. 

But tears and sobs can mean an ocean, a world, of feeling and communication between a dominant and a submissive.  

I’m not much of a fetishist, really. I don’t care about leather, or corsets, or gloves or shoes or any of that kind of thing. But I think I may have a thing for the tears of a submissive woman. There’s something intimate about her tears, the way she brings me this physical, surrendered, sign of her emotion for me to see and share it. Her tears make me both cruel and loving. Her tears move me emotionally, and they make me hard. 

There’s a word for tear fetishism, by the way: dacryphilia. It seems that I’m a dacryphiliac.

One of the cliches of Italian opera is that the baritone, who never gets the girl though he’s usually much better looking than the tenor, will at some stage sing a jolly and slightly misogynist song about women’s tears, and how women use them as weapons against men.

Men, he will sing, can stand up bravely to swords and spears, But are helpless against a woman’s tears, tra-la. 

In rom-coms the man will give in on any point if the woman even appears as if she might be considering crying. She just has to pull out a tissue and he caves in.

This is what mascara is for, really.

If delivering my first spanking was a hard thing for me to do, which it was even though the girl had demanded it, the first time I made a girl cry and then continued because she didn’t want me to stop was harder still.

I was taught that hitting a woman or making her cry was the lowest thing that a man could do. When submissive women started teaching me something different, which fitted my own desires, it set up a real conflict.

It took a lot of will to force myself to stay merciless to a crying girl. In the end, submissive women and my desires were bound to win that conflict, and they did. I’m glad I persisted.