“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” ― Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

“She was no longer free? Yes! thank God, she was no longer free. But she was light, a nymph on clouds, a fish in water, lost in happiness.” ― Pauline Réage, “Story of O”

Chapter 16: BDSM

One of the primary misconceptions about BDSM is that it’s about people that get off on bullying and hurting one other. There are aspects of that, but that’s not what it’s about. As carnivore primates we all have sadistic impulses. BDSM is a good way to act on them in a safe consensual environment. But true BDSM isn’t for the Dominant partner, it’s for the Submissive one.

We live in a society of rules. We might not always like them, or follow them, but by following rules we are released from the burden of constantly measuring our actions. Rules free us. Imagine if there were no traffic laws. Consider how stressful your morning commute would be. You wouldn’t be able to anticipate the actions of anyone around you. You would never know if your own actions were appropriate. With rules you can go into a trance. How many times have you driven somewhere only to realize you don’t even remember the drive?

In my experience with female Submissives, that is one of their primary motivations. They need control and to be controlled, and to break control. When they are chained up they may be physically restrained and out of physical control, they are controlling the situation. She is the person speeding on the highway. The car she is driving is more powerful than her, but she is driving it. The “Dominant” partner is performing for her.

All his attention is focused on her. He is making sure that he’s using the right amount of force. Making sure to alternate between painful acts and pleasurable ones. Making sure to push her just enough. She is the center of his universe.

She doesn’t have to think about her makeup or clothes. She doesn’t have to worry about her hair, or her body. Her body isn’t hers anymore. She doesn’t have to worry about her behavior. She is to be acted upon, she doesn’t act. She is free of all her daily concerns, free to lose herself in the moment.

He is heavy, she is light.

I’ve been with several lovers that were into BDSM to varying degrees. If you’ve never tried it, don’t read “Fifty Shades of Grey”. That book is boring and poorly written. The best introduction to BDSM is, “Story of O”. It was how I was introduced. A woman gave it to me and asked me to read it.

The story is about a woman that is introduced into a secret society that practice extreme group BDSM. It’s all very “Eyes Wide Shut” except 30 years earlier, but with the same fancy clothes and masks. Her lover donates her to his society, not really telling her what she is getting into, but she agrees to do anything for him, for love. She spends time in a mansion, where she is broken into the role of a Submissive in the same way you would break a horse. When she graduates she is given a ring with a little O-ring on it, an echo of bondage restraints she wore 24/7 in the mansion. It announces her membership in the organization and her willingness to submit to anyone that knows its meaning. The book isn’t about her subjugation, it’s about the tremendous about of power she gains.

When I read it, I initially misunderstood everything. I took it as a tale of a woman being abused. I was literally, Tom Cruises’ character in “Eyes Wide Shut”, repulsed and freaking out. I suppose too many feminism classes had made me easily triggered. I didn’t even get a few chapters in before I had to stop reading it. I had no idea why this woman wanted me to read this book.

Later, she showed me a video she had made with her ex-boyfriend. He was taking her from behind, then grabbed her hair and violently snapped her head back, then drove her forward with all his weight burying her head in the mattress. She described it as the most perfect sexual experience she had ever had.

I put two and two together. The book she gave me wasn’t a book about a woman being abused, it was erotica describing something that spoke to her. Unfortunately, I got it a little too late. That relationship was brief. It didn’t really matter, I was too inexperienced and timid to give her what she wanted.

One thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that people that like being a Submissive tend to be the most prim and proper outside of the bedroom. One could even say tight-assed. Dominants on the other hand tend to be unconcerned with what other people think of them. They tend to be publicly arrogant, and a bit blunt.

One could theorize that people’s behavior in the bedroom is a direct result and response to their behavior out of it. Most Subs I’ve dated tended to be no nonsense, dressed to the nines, without a hair or a stich out of place. They are some of the most self-disciplined women I’ve ever known. There are other types of social discipline though, and this where religion comes into it.

I’ve never experienced this type myself, as I tend to date people that are not in any way religious. I’m not disparaging it, it is just not part of the world I’m interested in intersecting with. I had a friend that experienced religious women quite a bit, and he had some stories. The type of BDSM these women were into wasn’t transcendental like the type I outlined above, it was self-flagellation.

Back when I was doing art handling in Vol. 9, I had a friend that I worked with most days. We had known each other for a while and spent our days in the truck laughing and gossiping about our misadventures.

We came from very different backgrounds. I came from a poor urban mid-Atlantic area, he grew up in a gated community in the deep south. I found his accent very charming, and he certainly had the gift of gab. It was a joy to work with him.

We were both using online dating sites. My girlfriend had just left me for another guy, his wife had just left him for another girl. I had started using Yahoo Personals, and he had started using eHarmony.

I asked him why he was using eHarmony?

eHarmony at the time was the first popular conservative Christian dating site, yet he was neither conservative or Christian. To quote Patrick Bateman, he was part of that whole Yale thing. He had attended weekly orgies in New Haven before he moved to the City. He once even asked me to help him open a luxury sex toy business. A business proposition I still regret turning down.

eHarmony banned me before I even got halfway through the signup questionnaire. They wished me success in dating but told me that I wasn’t the sort of guy they wanted in the eHarmony community. I was crushed… kidding, I took it as a compliment.

He explained that he used it for two reasons. The first was that he was homesick in the City and trying to find someone from the south. So, he listed himself as a Southern Baptist. The second was that it was his experience that the more sexually repressed a woman was, the freakier she was in bed, and it doesn’t get more southern and sexually repressed than Baptists. Given that this guy had a sex swing mounted in his living room where most people would put a TV stand, he definitely knew freaky.

His stories were freaky, but I also found them a bit disturbing. He’d go home with a girl every week or so. Most of them asked him to do things that he wasn’t really comfortable with, even though he liked freaky. Women would ask him to choke them, they would spit on him, they would tell him to slap them in the face, and to call them a “dirty slut”, “whore”, or “filthy cunt”. He even had one girl that started calling him “Daddy” then punched him in the face and started crying, all the while demanding that he fuck her. He ran like hell from that.

While some of these sex acts translate into BDSM, I believe the way they were being employed was the opposite in spirit to BDSM. Whereas in good BDSM you are using sex and pain to transcend your personal boundaries and feel like a badass, these women had been made to be ashamed of their sexuality and desired to be degraded. They wanted their fears confirmed, they wanted it to be proved that they were shameful. I suppose there is a type of release in that, but Christ... fucking Baptists.

I didn’t get involved in my first relationship where BDSM was a nearly nightly component until a few years later. I dabbled a bit beforehand, I kind of knew the ropes (not literally, I never did rope stuff). But it took a particularly enthusiastic Sub to really get me into it.

We were having lunch one day in the City. We had been seeing one another for a couple of weeks. We were spending every night together, spending every free moment together, in fact. She was telling me about the class she had just taken at the Museum of Sex on spanking. She said that wanted me to take her on a shopping spree, at Babeland. I happily agreed.

If you aren’t familiar with Babeland, it’s a very upscale sex toy shop. If you are looking to buy a $200 dildo, one that connects wirelessly to your phone, and can even do your taxes for you; you can find one at Babeland. This shopping spree wasn’t going to be cheap, but I was going to have a fun night.

At Babeland, she selected several pairs of lingerie, padded leather restraints with steal O-rings like the woman from “Story of O” would wear, a riding crop, and a somewhat mid-priced vibrating dildo. We also swung by Home Depot to get mounting hardware and chains for the restraints. We were excited. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other the entire ride home.

Consent is sexy. I’m not saying that to be PC, progressive, or even just a decent human being. I mean discussing beforehand in exquisite detail exactly what you want to do with someone and what you don’t, discussing boundaries, establishing a safe word, is very sexy. We were so horny by the time we got to my place that we actually started undressing in the hall as I fumbled with my apartment keys. Once inside, after some hungry kisses, I grabbed her under the ass and lifted her to be sitting on my shoulders, only hitting her head lightly on the ceiling.

I preformed cunnilingus on her standing up.

Back then I was going to the gym 4-5 times a week, so I could pull off a move like that. I was only working my vanity muscles though, neglecting my core, and skipping leg days. She got heavy fast. I managed to somewhat gracefully limbo to the floor without interrupting her. Once there, she sat on top of me and made aggressive use of my face.

She retired to the bathroom to shower the City off of herself and to try on her new lingerie, and I set about installing the restraint’s mounting hardware on the bed. Fortunately, I’m pretty handy and it only took the ten minutes it took her to get ready.

She emerged, freshly washed and made up, wearing (some) of the lingerie I had bought. She was wearing stockings and a garter belt but had neglected the panties.

After a few kisses I put her in bed, kneeling, face down, supported by a pile of pillows. I secured her wrists in the leather cuffs and clipped their O-rings to the shortest chains I had bought, so that her arms formed a wide V shape. I blindfolded her. She was absolutely helpless.

On the way home, she had told me how she wanted to be spanked. I was to alternate between buttocks, making sure they received exactly the same number of slaps. With every repetition, I was to stop and massage her ass, rubbing the pain out. Pain, Pain, Pleasure, Pain, Pain, Pleasure… that was the rhythm. I was to spank her hard and not hold back. When I was ready, I should switch from my hand to the riding crop.

Bent over as she was, I began to spank her. Hesitantly at first, from the elbow. Once I began to feel more comfortable I began to spank her in earnest from the shoulder. She began to expel excited whimpers, combined with squeaks.

Gradually the pink handprints on her ass began to merge into her ass simply glowing pink. I then moved to the riding crop. I ran it teasingly up the inside of her thighs, and gently played with her labia. I then started spanking her with it.

It wasn’t great. We discovered fairly quickly that neither of us liked riding crops. The mechanical leverage they provide is too difficult to manage pain-wise and the low surface area they provide leads to welts. The riding crop might have been a good thing to start out with, but now that I was spanking her full force, it wasn’t a good tool.

Instead, I dropped my pants and pulled out my belt. It was an old army-surplus belt. A single strap of leather, worn so often that it was soft. It was the perfect implement. With a belt you can adjust the leverage.

I used the belt by doubling it over, so that it’s a simple leather strap, the buckle under my hand and not in play. I feel like I shouldn’t need to say this, but BDSM isn’t being conscripted into the British navy circa the nineteenth century. It should hurt a little but not too much. Whipping someone with the entire length, including the buckle is too far. The nice thing about a belt is that you can choke up so that the strap is small and there is very little leverage.

I spanked her with the belt, until her ass resembled the cherry on the top of a Sunday. With every stroke she called out and pulled at her restraints. The chains were doing significant damage to my cheap IKEA furniture. They don’t take well to abrasion.

After neither one of us could resist any further I entered her. I grabbed her hair, slapped her ass, tried to keep up with the spanking. She told me to get the vibrator, so I did. Like the spanking, she had instructed me on how the vibrator was to be used. She wanted to be double penetrated.

I pushed the vibrator into her vagina and pushed myself into her anus. I threw my weight upon her until I came.

Then I retired to the bathroom to wash off. I knew that she was chained up. I knew that the vibrator was still lodged deep inside her vagina and continuing in pulse mode. I took my time. I made her wait.

When I returned I removed it and unchained her. She also needed to clean up, so I opened a bottle of wine while she was in the shower. When she got out, I offered her a glass and asked if she had enjoyed herself.

She had.

She had gotten off at least four times, not counting the double penetration with the vibrator stuff which was as she described it, “a constant orgasm”. Leaving her chained up had specifically gotten her off.

Men never get to do those things. The best we can do is edging, which while I suppose is similar, doesn’t quite meet up.