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.