Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (51 page)

After that, I got involved with the science-fiction crowd and was one of the few women there. I was not out as a lesbian. I ended up forming a relationship with a man who was younger than I and who, in many ways, was submissive to me, except in bed, where I would tell him what I liked having done to me. Because he was relatively sexually inexperienced, he was wonderful. He was willing to try almost anything. My relationship with him lasted about three years, until we realized something very important about each other. We were both really gay! We parted as friends and I still talk to him every once in a while.

I then went into a dry period. I was working full-time. I had started and ended a business with an old friend that didn’t work out, and I was alone. I felt alone. I was scared to go out to what I knew were the two public S&M clubs in New York. I can’t tell you why I was scared. I can’t remember what I thought might happen to me if I went out to them. But I grew desperate. I really needed some sort of outlet. One weekend a friend of mine came to visit me, a man I’d known professionally. Over the weekend that he stayed with me, we came very close to some form of sex. He knew that I was into S&M and that was what I was prepared to do with him. But it didn’t work out: We parted and went our separate ways. The following evening I was so frustrated. I realized that I would have slept with a man I didn’t know very well [and] that I didn’t like sleeping with men that much, but I was willing to do it in order to get that experience, just to feel the sensuality. I hopped into my car, drove into the city, picked up a copy of
Screw
magazine, read the club reviews, and immediately went to Paddles. And from that day on I was a public person.

At first I used a pseudonym. People who did computer sex and phone
sex always told me, “If you ever go out in public, don’t use your real name.” The reasons for that were, presumably, that if you did, people would know who you really were and something bad would happen. Maybe they would blackmail you or come visit you at home when you were serving tea to Mom. I don’t know. I gradually stopped using [the pseudonym]. That’s why I agreed to use my own name with this interview.

So that was my journey toward being public. I have courage in places where courage really means something. I think of myself as a person of integrity. I don’t lie. I think of myself as a person of honor. I don’t think of myself as having battlefield courage but the courage to say who and what I am and stand by it and not apologize for it is very important to me.

I like whips and flogging. I have a large collection of whips. I have 30 of them. All of them are handmade and most of them by the same craftsman. I appreciate the beauty of a fine whip. I practice frequently. I like straps. I like a nice woodshed scene with “daddy’s” belt or the razor strop. I like the sound they make, I like the sensation.

The most moving experience I’ve had to date was a night last year when I offered my formal submission to Sir Adam in public in a ceremony we created ourselves. He accepted it for a year and a day. For the occasion, a friend of mine gave me a beautiful floor-length black hooded cloak with a red satin lining. We had a stage. We had music written for the occasion, we made programs. We even had formal entertainment.

It was a really simple ceremony. We took an oath, one that Sir Adam particularly liked, out of
The Lord of the Rings
. The entire ceremony was based on a classic hero’s journey. I was to enter the room, walk through the crowd. I was attended by a man who, then and now, wanted to be my submissive. I carried one of my personal whips. When I reached the stage I gave my whip to Sir Adam as a symbol of my giving up my dominance for him.

In many people’s eyes, I did not literally belong to him. For one, our relationship was bounded always by the fact that it was an S&M relationship. He had a lover. I was not his lover. Neither was I his slave. I was his submissive. There were some things that people expected us to be doing with each other that we didn’t do. I didn’t perform household chores for him; I didn’t live with him. He had no control over my professional life or my money. To a lot of people, these things are necessary for a D&S relationship.

I fantasize and dream about being able to have two relationships simultaneously, one where I am submissive and masochistic, and the other where I’m a sadistic dominant. One of my most powerful images is coming home late at night after a session where I have been bottom—my body is marked, I’m tired, [and] I’m so emotionally tense that I need relief. I could come
home and have my bottom waiting to take my boots off, to attend me when I bathe, and then to service and please me, to feel their tongue washing over welts on my body. I think that is particularly hot. I’m going to work on making it happen.

A lot of the things that I’ve touched on—and the fact that I am a lifestyler—sometimes scare people. I get reactions like, “I could never do that,” or “I don’t understand how you could do that.” The fact is [that] there are a lot of things I don’t understand about other people and other people’s lives. I don’t understand how a woman could go through childbirth. This, to me, is a startling and scary thing to contemplate. Yet billions of women do it. People tell me that they couldn’t be as dedicated to S&M as I am, because I’m dedicated politically, emotionally, and socially to it. Yet people are politically, emotionally, and socially dedicated to nonpersonally pleasurable things, like political parties and corporations. It makes a lot of sense to me that one should support and be active in that which gives [her personal] pleasure.

This is my life. I want to go as far as it will take me.

Thirteen

The countless forms of extreme sensory experimentation are impossible to catalogue comprehensively. Kinsey allegedly chronicled thousands, yet his work remained incomplete. Suffice to say, D&Sers regularly experiment with several general types of intense stimulation.

Unlike the other chapters in this section, this chapter does not extensively discuss the psychological experience of the stimuli described. The
reason is simple: The forms of erotic play described here are merely further variations on the pleasures of discomfort. All the same enjoyments described in
Chapter 9
pertain. We include excerpts from some of our interviewees profiled elsewhere so that their personal experiences help to explain the excitement of these unusual stimuli. At chapter’s end, we focus on three individuals who experiment with intense play:

The use of warm wax—dripped from a burning candle onto bare skin—is a slightly esoteric practice but has many fans. Hot-wax scenes usually are done within the context of a primarily sensual power exchange. Submissives who enjoy hot wax say that it causes an extremely erotic sensation, both because of the intermingling of heat with other kinds of stimulus and because of the unpredictability of exactly where the drops will fall.

Spreading oil over the skin before dripping the wax helps to prevent burns. White, undyed candles are preferred since dyes raise the melting temperature and the heat of the wax.

Once the wax hardens, some dominants use the blunt edge of a knife to scrape it off their lover’s body slowly and meticulously. Although the use of the blunt edge ensures that the skin is not irritated, knowing that a knife is being used intensifies the sense of anticipation and danger.

Hot wax may also be a deep head trip. The submissive must place complete faith in the dominant’s ability to ensure that the experience is sensual rather than damaging. Hot-wax enthusiasts we spoke with said that, properly used, the wax should neither scald the skin nor leave any marks. Dominants often experiment on themselves first to determine the distance the candle must be held from the body in order for the wax to cool adequately before making contact.

The practice of dropping warm or hot ash onto a submissive seems to be performed most frequently among gay men. Leathermen “flag” this orientation with a tan hankie. Typically, hot-ash fetishists are aroused not only by the act but also by the body type and attitude of the dominant. Hot-ash fans described the ideal dominant body type as a “teddy bear”: a burly man with abundant body hair. (Teddy bears have a sizable cult following throughout the gay community.) He will smoke a cigar and, generally speaking, emanates a traditionally macho aura.

As is the case with candles in hot-wax scenes, cigars are usually held at a distance from the skin to prevent burning. Some hot-ash enthusiasts, however, do seek a burning sensation. Hot-ash activities may occasionally overlap with depersonalization fantasies in which the bottom is treated like a human ashtray and accepts the ash over different parts of his body. For hot ash to be one element of more complex play is not uncommon. For purists, however, it is the main event.

A popular element of heavy D&S play is the temporary compression or pinching of sensitive skin. This is typically achieved by the use of clamps or clips. Equipment may be left in place for brief periods of time to maximize the stimulation. The D&Sers with whom we spoke stated that clips should be checked every few minutes to ensure that the skin under
stress
does not grow numb; extended, unabated clamping of a sensitive area, such as the nipple, can cause minor nerve damage. Clips should not cut into skin or cause significant irritation.

Compression is usually one element in a scene, and is sometimes an adjunct to bondage. Stimulation ranges from very mild to very extreme, depending on the period of time the clips are left in place, the clips’ tension, manipulation of the clips, and whether any attachments (such as chains, which are tugged, or weights) are added.

Cottage industries produce dozens of gadgets. The most common among these is the nipple clip, which in its crudest form is an alligator clip
whose teeth have been filed down and insulated with rubber; it may contain tiny screws to adjust tension. There are innumerable refinements to this basic design. Most commercially produced clamps are made of metal and are sold in pairs, connected by lightweight chain; the tips are well insulated; the styles vary in tension capacities, size, and weight. Some are customized for men and others for women (men’s nipples tend to be smaller and can support smaller clips).