SM 101: A Realistic Introduction (7 page)

I put the image out of my mind as best I could and went on with my life, but it refused to stay away. The image began to appear in virtually every erotic fantasy I had. It got stronger and stronger, clearer and clearer. I found that more and more I wanted to act it out. I once timidly asked my old lady if she would let me tie her up while we had sex. Not only did she turn me down flat, but she also started looking at me with slightly wary eyes. What in the world was going on?

Understand that I was a hippie. I was a Haight-Ashbury-living, marijuana-smoking, LSD-taking hippie. Other than acting as a medic at several demonstrations, I wasn’t even political. I was a thoroughgoing peacenik pacifist - to the point of having taken several beatings from bullying groups of “straight” men without lifting a hand to defend myself.
People like me just didn’t do things like this.

Trouble. I began to feel seriously concerned. Remember, this was just a year or so after the Manson killings. I wondered and worried — boy, did I worry. Was I was turning into somebody like that?

I looked through the local bookstores and found nothing but discouragement. Even “The Sensuous Woman” thought that the people who wanted to tie or be tied during sex were sick. Oh, great. That was all I needed.

I went to the library of nearby Sonoma State College and looked through its psychology section to see what I could learn. What I found was grim. There were several books that talked about sexual sadism and its often-murderous results. One especially disturbing book contained numerous police photographs of rape/murder victims. The sight of these women’s bodies, often horribly mutilated, sickened me and terrified me more than I can say. Was I turning into a person who might someday do something like that?

I decided to keep myself under surveillance. I made up my mind that I was not going to allow myself to hurt anybody. If I thought I was turning into someone that would harm somebody else, then I would either put myself into a mental institution or commit suicide. And thus I lived, waiting and watching to see if I was turning into someone that I needed to shoot. Such a life was, shall we say, not fun.

My old lady and I went our separate ways a few months later. (For the rest of our relationship, I had never had the nerve to raise the issue with her again.) The image, however, stayed in my mind, clearer and stronger than ever. The desire to do it grew stronger, too.

Despair. After that relationship ended, I was certain of one thing: no “decent” woman would ever want anything to do with me. As soon as I revealed my “sickness,” she would be gone. For the rest of my life, I would have to settle for women too crazy or too desperate to object. Such a conclusion was, to say the least, depressing.

One day I walked into a local variety store and bought a length of rope with no other purpose in mind than to use it to tie a woman up. (Exactly how I was going to do this, I had only the vaguest of ideas. I’d think of something. Or try, anyway.) During this purchase, I felt like slime, complete slime. I was certain the clerk knew why I wanted this rope, and I felt somewhat surprised that he would sell it to me. The utterly bored look on his face as he handed me my change convinced me that I was right. He knew, all right. He just wasn’t letting on that he knew.

On my way home I wondered what kind of defective person
he
was. (I knew, to my shame, what kind of “sicko” I was, or might become.) What kind of merchant sells something to a customer so clearly determined to use the purchased item for “immoral purposes”? What was our world coming to?

Weirdness.
Then a strange thing happened. I started regularly dating a pleasant, utterly normal, lady. She wasn’t even a hippie. We had an enjoyable if routine sex life. I, however, wanted more. One night, while we embraced, I pulled together every bit of my courage. It was just barely enough to allow me to stammer out “the” question.

Feeling terrified, I pulled slightly free, then leaned over and removed the rope from a nearby desk drawer. I held it in my hand and, quaking, managed to ask her, “Would you do me a favor?” She looked at me with a distinctly guarded expression and asked what the favor was. I was barely able to stammer out, “Would you please lie down on your stomach and put your hands behind your back?” There couldn’t have been any doubt as to what I intended to do to her once she did that.

A very long moment of silence passed while she scrutinized my face, then she said, rather cheerfully, “OK.” There was absolutely no doubt that, as I tied her up, I was much, much more scared than she was.

Well, we got through that evening without any major problems. In the morning, she was still there, looking at me with a smile — and perhaps even a bit of a smirk. Rope became a regular part of our sex life after that, and I often thought how fortunate I was to find such a woman, who managed to so completely conceal her craziness or desperation (I never did figure out which it was), on my very first try.

Master, you were always good to me.

During this time, I discovered that adult magazines devoted to something called “bondage” existed. It took a lot for me to fight down my guilt and fear in order to enter the adult bookstores and look at them, but I did. I had to. Some of these magazines even had “how to” articles in them, and the techniques they described really worked! Furthermore, they recommended consulting military hand-to-hand combat manuals. This was something our government had studied? Unbelievable!

More weirdness. That lady and I separated after a few months. What stunned me was that the next woman I dated
also
liked being tied up during sex.

And so did the
next
woman. She, in fact, would ask me to tie her up if it had been a while since I’d last done that. She even went so far as to suggest how I could tie her up better! I took the extraordinary step of letting
her
tie
me
up a few times.

Clearly, I had to do some more thinking about this whole bondage thing. I had now batted three for three in meeting apparently mentally healthy, normal women who enjoyed being tied up during sex. Either this meant that there were a lot more “sick” women in the world than I had imagined, or that my thinking was somehow off regarding this matter. Things just weren’t adding up, and I still felt worried as hell. It didn’t help that the next woman I dated absolutely refused to have anything to do with bondage.

Relief.
The turning point came in the fall of 1973.
Playboy
magazine, in its “Advisor” section, had a question to the effect of: Dear Playboy, My boyfriend wants me to tie him up. What should I do about that? I expected that, like “The Sensuous Woman,” their answer would be something like “get rid of him, fast.”

Instead, to my utter shock, they started talking about what lengths of rope worked best, and giving tips on how to tie him, and suggestions on what to do after he was tied. They went on to mention that more information could be found in a book called “The Joy of Sex” by Dr. Alex Comfort.

Bondage was acceptable to a mainstream resource like
Playboy
? I could do this, could be interested in this, and still be regarded as a mentally healthy person? I wasn’t somebody that I had to keep an eye on? I can’t describe the relief that flooded over me when I read that section. I literally felt that I had been re-admitted to the human race.

Remember, one sign of good SM is that after the session is over, both parties would like to do that same session again.

It was still a struggle. I found a copy of “The Joy of Sex” in a nearby mainstream bookstore (of all places!) but I had to come back to the store to look through it a dozen times or so before I actually worked up enough courage to buy it. (If the clerks felt annoyed by my repeated visits, they didn’t show it — and I’m grateful for that.) When I got it home, I read the “Bondage” and “Discipline” sections (I wasn’t so sure how I felt about that “discipline” part) over and over and over.

First
contact. About two years went by, and I was involved with yet another lady who enjoyed bondage. (Ye gods! How many of them were out there, anyhow?) One day, for no particular reason, I bought a local adult newspaper. While looking through the ads in the back, I came across one from, of all things, an SM club called Backdrop located in the entirely normal, All-American city of Hayward, California. There were dubs for this sort of thing? I had read about clubs in fiction but, for all sorts of reasons, I didn’t think any
really
existed. Apparently I was (yet again) wrong. I sent them a self-addressed, stamped envelope along with a request for information.

The information I requested arrived about a week later, and reading it almost gave me a stroke. Backdrop had events like master/slave dinner parties, bondage demonstrations (that one caught my attention), slave auctions, and many other events. I couldn’t believe this! This couldn’t be right! And yet there it was: dates, times, addresses, phone numbers, admission fees, and all the rest of it. Could it really be?

There was a “slave auction” happening on a night I was free. Once again, I gathered my courage (I had needed to do that many times in recent years), and called the phone number. A pleasant, quite matter-of-fact lady answered and confirmed that the information I had about the date, time, address and fee were indeed correct. I thanked her and quickly hung up.

And off I went. I traveled to Hayward, found the address, and parked across the street. I sat there for almost an hour while I gathered my courage. After all, I didn’t
really
know what waited on the other side of that door. I didn’t
really
know what would happen to me once I stepped inside. For all I knew, I would be immediately grabbed, strapped to a table, covered with whipped cream, and tortured to death...or something like that.

It was an ironic moment. I was an ambulance crewman at the time. I wasn’t unduly scared about responding to unstable crime scenes, or of going out to the always-dangerous sites of freeway crashes, or of confronting violent crazies, yet the idea of crossing that street and knocking on that door made me, shall we say, very, very nervous.

Well, I finally went over and knocked. I don’t remember who let me in, but I wasn’t grabbed. Instead I was shown into a large, normal-looking living room and offered a seat. I was in a nervousness-induced haze at this point, and most of my memories are a bit unclear, but I remember being introduced to Mr. Robin Roberts, who ran Backdrop.

I eventually managed to calm down somewhat, and found myself able to look around the room and make a bit of conversation with the other guests. Which ones, I wondered intently, were the submissives? I had never met a “real” submissive. (In my mind, the women I had talked into letting me tie them up didn’t count.) I was dying to meet one. What would they be like? Of one thing I was sure: 95% or more of the people into SM were going to be dominants, like me. Submissives had to be rare. After all, what kind of pathetic wretch would actually volunteer to be bound, whipped, or worse?

About 30 of us sat around the spacious room in a rough circle. At the appointed time, Robin came out and made one of the strangest announcements I had ever heard. “Will all of you who are submissive,” he asked, “please come with me?” I wondered if
anybody
would stand up. Maybe we were
all
dominants here? What kind of an evening would
that
lead to?

The only word that can be reasonably used to describe what happened next is “stampede.” While I sat shocked and wide-eyed in my chair, a long line of men and women streamed into the next room. When the dust had settled, only
four
of us remained behind. The room suddenly seemed as big and empty as a basketball gymnasium two hours after the big game.

I remember the auction only hazily. Various “slaves” were brought out by Robin for us to bid on. I didn’t bid on any of the men, but I clearly remember the old, healed whip-scars one giant of a submissive man had on his back. The sight of them sent my vision swimming to the point where I feared I’d pass out. (You might think that very little in the way of what could happen to a human body would make a veteran ambulance crewman feel faint — and, actually, you’d be right — but, trust me, this was a different type of situation, and I wasn’t any sort of veteran around this place. I was the rawest of novices.) I also learned one of the most fundamental lessons of the SM world: submissive heterosexual males can all too often be bought cheap.

I don’t do things at the expense of my submissive.

Basic training. Thus began an association with Backdrop that lasted about two years. I went to as many of their events as I could, and even moved so I could be closer to the organization.

Backdrop had two major facets to its structure: During the day, ladies worked there as professional dominants and submissives. During most nights and on weekends, club activities took place. I hung around the place as much as I could. My presence undoubtedly got on Robin’s nerves at times, but he was usually gracious and friendly to me.

And I learned. Ye Gods, did I learn! I spent hours talking with dominants, submissives, and “switch-hitters” (as they were called in those days) of both genders. I interacted with raw novices and with people who had been doing this for years. I had many “play sessions” (as they were called at the time) and I watched many more. I talked and I listened and I read and I watched. I taught the few things I knew, and had many, many things taught to me. I dominated women and I submitted to women. I tied up and got tied up. I spanked and whipped, and I got spanked and whipped. I played at parties and I played privately.

I met masters and mistresses, submissives and slaves of both genders, novices and veterans, light players and heavy players, people who did this only occasionally and people who were “in role” with their partners 24 hours a day. (These people, I learned, were sometimes called “lifestylers.”) Many people I met at Backdrop became my friends. We shared hopes and confidences, good times and bad times, erotic play and mundane tasks.