Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (32 page)

In marked contrast to erotic myth, lifestylers confront the complex challenge of integrating an unconventional sexual dynamic with the typical stresses and demands of family, religion, career, and citizenship.

Another serious problem for many submissives in lifestyle relationships is accepting the control which they have deliberately sought, for the fantasy rarely translates smoothly into reality.

For the submissive, keeping his or her ego in check may be extraordinarily difficult even when this is precisely his or her goal. In this respect, the attempt to live out the submissive role in a lifestyle relationship may resemble a religious struggle between the temptations of the world and an inner craving to surrender to a force which one sincerely believes will ultimately afford serenity. Not all surrender is necessarily good surrender: D&Sers consistently grapple with clarifying or modifying their goals within the lifestyle relationship. Extent of control and type of control are negotiated and renegotiated.

A significant problem for all who regularly engage in D&S is the failure of professionals—medical, psychological, legal, and spiritual—to provide informed assistance. Many fear consulting either doctors or clergymen lest they be censured or urged to forswear their sexual desires; few helping professionals are trained to work with D&Sers. Spiritually, some D&Sers are turning to New Age religious beliefs, and increasing numbers of peer counselors are now a prime source of third-party assistance for troubled D&S relationships.

I
NTERVIEWS

[D&S] is not 100 percent vital with someone I really care about. [But] I have both. I am madly in love with my slave, so it’s wonderful. I’m heterosexual and quite definitely a dominant. I haven’t had any real submissive fantasies since prepuberty. My D&S needs were extremely important. They were not irresistible driving forces. There were cases where I would get into a vanilla relationship, [albeit] with serious trepidation.

I have given an awful lot of thought to where my needs come from. I am afraid I do not have any real answers. I, along with many other people, have noticed the tendency for people in D&S to be more neglected than abused as kids. But clearly there are many kids who have that kind of upbringing and don’t end up in D&S.

I remember tying myself up and doing it with playmates, [dating] back to [age] four or five. I’ve got one fantasy that I know predates first grade. I have one that I can date to [age] six: Somebody had given me a pile of British comics, and I remember having all sorts of fantasies about tying up the heroine and doing horrible things to her. I pretty much put that down to the fact that six-year-olds aren’t really up on medicine. They aren’t real good on knowing when they’re maiming somebody, because all you’ve seen is cartoons. [The fantasies] died away for several years, until puberty. At that point, I started getting actual, realizable wants in terms of a particular girl from school. I was interested in her, and I was into D&S, so I was interested in a D&S way—spanking and bondage and so forth.

The first time I really had a chance to do much was [in my] mid-20s. I went with one woman all through college. When
Joy of Sex
came out and made bondage respectable, she was willing to try it a couple of times. But it was ho-hum [to her]; she was basically falling asleep. Then, a year or two after I was out of college, I actually managed to start getting opportunities to do something. But the problem, really, was me. I’m a techie, [a] white-socks-and-slide-rule engineer. I simply was not every woman’s cup of tea. [I was] looking for a real, complete relationship. So I would either find vanilla women with whom [a relationship] would have worked but she didn’t want D&S, or I’d find a woman who wanted D&S but otherwise didn’t want to marry an engineer. So that was a problem.

I lucked out [with Lisa]. I was at the right place at the right time. I was active on the HSX Forum on CompuServe. Lisa had been around for a while,
mostly talking real time with people, which I don’t like to do. But she was also reading the message board, and she liked what I had to say about what I was looking for. She sent me a message and we wrote back and forth. [Then] she sent me her phone number, and I called her. We talked for a while, and [eventually] I sent her an airplane ticket. She came [to visit], and she went home with a diamond ring.

We’ve been together now about two years. We’ve got enough stuff going on to strain any relationship of any flavor, so there certainly have been some rocky times, but at the moment, things are really, really, really going great. Both Lisa and I had decades-long arrears of hugs and kisses when we came into this thing, so we still like a whole lot of catching up on cuddling. There are no real hard-and-fast stops in our life for anything, but as for D&S-type stuff, we like to do little reminder things out of the bedroom. Before we had people popping in, any time the sun was up, she would wear a collar around the house—just a dime-store pet-choke collar, with a little hardware-store padlock on it. We’ve also had her put a chain around her waist, or we’ve got little nipple thingies that she can wear. Stuff can go on for hours with that kind of mutual reminder. I like the collar because I get to see it. The nipple thingie or the chain around the waist, well, she knows it’s there, and I know that she knows, but it’s not as good as being able to look at it. And then, of course, we’ll talk and tease [each other] throughout the day.

[For us D&S] is out of the bedroom but not out of the front door. I’ll have her undress in the evenings, and she’ll wear the collar and a leash, and she’ll sit or kneel at my feet when we’re answering the messages on CompuServe. Or we will go for a walk in the woods [and] bring along a leash; we’ll stop and cut a switch, and I’ll tie her to a tree.

Last week we did it in the backyard; that was fairly real. We had lunch [cooking] in the stove and went out in the backyard, and I had her get undressed, and I tied her to a tree. I gave her a couple of swats with my hand, and then I went back in and looked after how lunch was doing, leaving her out there. She theoretically could have been seen by someone driving up. They would have had to know exactly where to look, so as long as she refrained from doing a little dance to get their attention, she was really pretty safe. After I’d got lunch nice and happy, I went back out there and cut a switch. I gave her a little warm-up with my hand and a good solid kiss to give her some confidence, because it had been a while since we’d done anything really heavy, so she was more nervous than she would have been a couple of months ago. I gave her a dozen good, hard ones on the rear end with the switch to make welts and marks that would last for about a week.

For a while there, she was very intrigued with the idea of marks on her
breasts, and so we did some of that. I’m not really thrilled to go for marks. She squirms around too much, and I think there’s a danger of damage, but I will use a ruler on her breasts. Lisa likes bondage a whole lot more than I do. It’s very nice for the sub. She gets to sit there and enjoy it. She has all these nice fantasies about being tied up and left alone. However, when it really comes to leaving her alone while I go off and do something, it turns out that she means less than five minutes. You know, in fantasy it’s an hour, and in practice, what turns her on is about five minutes.

When you’re talking about stuff going on in the bedroom, 95 percent of the time, it’ll end up in traditional sex. However, when we’re just going through the day, a swat on the rear end or tweaking her collar so it jingles is a full substitute for a hug or a quick peck. On that level they’re interchangeable, but when we really get into it, then it generally ends up in sex.

There is a surreptitious agreement that the relationship is [very two-way]. [And] at least when her past is not really catching up with her, I do not believe that I’m really carrying the heavy end. She was sexually abused as a child and has nightmares. She talks in her sleep, and I have to hold and cuddle her and talk to her and reassure her and figure out what part of her needs reassuring.

[For me], having a woman standing naked in front of me and wearing my collar is the quintessential part of dominance: “I am master here, and she belongs to me.” Something that sort of got skipped in our very crowded life together would be having some kind of a D&S wedding, whereby Lisa would give herself [to me]. [In my earlier] fantasies, my generic submissive would give herself to me in a D&S marriage. She would come out dressed in something simple—not a big, fancy wedding dress—and she would drop it and be naked. She’d come over and kneel in front of me. I’d take her hand, and she would announce that she gives herself to me and is my property. I’d respond that I accept her. There would be some verbiage on both sides indicating love and caring—all the good stuff—and then I’d put a collar and a leash on her. Sometimes I would fantasize about branding her, [but] that was optional. Like a lot of people, the less you’re actually getting, the heavier your fantasies get.

I definitely feel that there is more that we want to do. At this point, we’re just getting back to the [intensity] that we reached around the time we got married. I finally quit my regular job. Now I’m working full-time on our business, and we’re starting to get it under control, so we’ve got time for each other again.

We need to figure out activities that we can carry on while still being business partners and not contributing any more to the town gossip than we
already do. We need a means of making this a more full-time, always-felt D&S relationship. Unfortunately, we have kids in an open-plan house.

With children around, even if we were totally vanilla, we wouldn’t do any bedroom stuff without the door closed. On the other hand, we don’t make a big deal about it if she comes over and kneels next to me at the table or on the couch at night. She’ll wear the collar in front of them. The kids are four and six. Right now, we spend an awful lot of time explaining an awful lot of things [to them] anyway. Some of them are very hard for kids that age to grasp. We don’t want the practical difficulties of trying to explain sex, let alone a variation on sex, to a six-year-old. We have enough trouble explaining why he has to return library books.

D&S was something I really wanted. I don’t know if I can say I discovered it, but once I knew the right words [for it], I knew it was something that was a big part of me. D&S is not just in the bedroom for me. If anything, D&S keeps me from staying inside a shell and having armor between me and the rest of the world. When I’m feeling submissive, I’m more open: I feel things; I enjoy life. If I’m not and I’m in my own shell and feeling like I can’t be submissive or [that] it’s not being [elicited from] me, I tend to have a wall between me and the rest of the world. I don’t enjoy life in general.

I was abused as a kid. I had a single mother and small sisters who I watched. My mother worked two jobs. Starting in second grade, I put myself and the girls to bed. There was no parent around. The neighbor who I was supposed to go to if I needed anything molested me for years. As soon as we moved away, I blocked it out. It wasn’t until about 18 months ago that I started having memories. I wasn’t sure what they were. Then all of the years that it happened became rolled up into one memory. [For a while] I said, “Okay, it happened, and it was no big deal.” Then as I became more secure in my relationship with Frank and finally had time [to] deal with it, all of a sudden I started having flashbacks, and all the gory details came out.