Learning The Ropes, Pt #1

Exploring your kinky side (or in my case, your kinky, sicko whole) as a dom or domme*, I’m now convinced more than ever, can have a wide variety of psychological and practical benefits. It can vastly improve your confidence and decision-making faculties. It can encourage an erotic playfulness that extends beyond the bedroom. It urges you towards creativity. It helps to teach you how to tie a decent knot with speed and self-assurance, which will undoubtedly impress all of your friends if you’re unlucky enough to ever go camping.

The difficulty is getting there in the first place.

Because a novice dom, if you stop to think about it, is very nearly a contradiction in terms. A dom is in charge. A dom knows what he or she is doing. There’s a reason that the two most popular (if in the latter case, famously dubious) BDSM stories of recent years, Secretary and Fifty Shades of Grey, are written as sexual awakening stories (bildongsromans?) for their heroines and their heroines alone. Christian Grey and James Spader’s character - also, confusingly, called Mr Grey - are both psychologically broken, sure, but they’re sexually complete, because their narrative function is to guide their subs into the kinky underworld without breaking a step or hesitating.

In fact, the most prominent uncertain dom I can think of is Wanda in Leopold Masoch’s Venus In Furs, who - like her male slave Severin - is new to this whole BDSM scene. And so she finds herself alternately throwing herself into the role - literally keeping her sub as an unpaid, ignored gardener for months at a time - and rebelling against it, unable to come to terms with her own ability to be so cruel and emotionally unavailable to somebody she genuinely loves.

“Wanda was already somewhat out of humour. Suddenly she said to me,“Severin, the seriousness with which you play your part is charming, and the restrictions which we have placed upon each other are really annoying me. I can’t stand it any longer, I do love you, I must kiss you. Let’s go into one of the houses.”

In this particular scene, Severin - both suffering horribly under her cruelties and compulsively, pleasurably unwilling to escape them - immediately reminds her of her place as his master, (“My lady…” I interposed)...and she slips quite happily back into character.

But even Wanda, while she may waver psychologically, never fucks up in the moment; she never fails to properly secure Severin to his punishment cross or mis-times her attempts to slap him. Which is a good thing, after all, since it’s supposed to be a sexy fantasy.

Real erotic encounters are rarely a sexy fantasy. Mistakes happen, things go wrong. But for most people, the process doesn’t also require you to correctly tie a bunch of rope around your partner’s naked body without doing any of the following: 1) tying it too softly, so that they find themselves coming loose ten minutes in, 2) failing to tie a knot correctly, panicking, and then looping the rope around again and again until they end up with a massive ball of twisted cord bouncing around beneath their wrists, 3) leaving the end of the rope dangling down so that it slaps you in the testicles later on, 4) accidentally cutting off their circulation until their skin turns purple.

Then there are the handcuff keys that can be lost. The hot wax which turns out to be uselessly tepid (I could always test it myself beforehand, but that might just damage the whole ‘sadist’ image for everyone involved). The horrible moment when moments after a firm and unyielding command to your sub, you freeze up because you've just realised it came out of your mouth as, “I want you to beel down and, um, no, wait, I mean kneel, uh - what was I going to tell you to do again?”

There are a great many more opportunities for fucking up, is what I’m saying.

As I was repeatedly to learn.

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* I think I’m just going to use ‘dom’ from now on, if that’s OK. We don’t really need to distinguish between the sexes on this (whereas if you’re writing a personal ad, I imagine ‘looking for a dom’ and ‘looking for a domme’ are quite important to get right) and ‘dom’ itself isn’t actually a masculine contraction.

The Boy Who Liked BDSM - And Felt Kind Of Shitty About It

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to tie up women, to gag them, to punish them both physically and psychologically, to put them into a state of helplessness, and to submit them to every kind of excruciating humiliation that my filthy mind is capable of concocting.

Yeah, I know.

It may sound like too pat an explanation, but the truth is that I can pinpoint pretty much exactly when it began. An imaginative game, taking place inside a crude canvas tent in my parent’s tiny patio-and-rockery garden, during which the plot required that a blonde girl of my own age be bound up by a cruel pair of thugs and then left to be rescued. I stood well back from the entire affair and controlled the story. That was what I liked, and I knew it already. Telling stories, and being in control.

Mind you, I don’t think Daphne from Scooby-Doo helped all that much either. (Although judging from some very basic research online, that smoking redhead may just have been responsible for corrupting the minds of multiple generations, like Wonder Woman before her.)

As a wide-eyed and bespectacled pre-pubescent boy with an alarming pudding-bowl haircut, my kinky predilection didn’t present that much of an immediate problem. After all, I don’t think many eleven-year-olds are going to stop to consider exactly why they have an erection in the back of Miss Turrilow’s English class, or beat themselves up about the reasons behind it. Your willy is just your willy (not yet your dick), and the funny feelings you get from it are a cause for both happy distraction and scientific curiosity.

But adolescence? Adolescence was a fucking stinker. (Just like everyone else’s, I suppose, only with the box ticked at ‘terrifying and humiliating sexual paralysis’ rather than ‘terrifying and humiliating sexual discovery’.)

At the age of thirteen, I successfully won an academic scholarship to a now infamous private school, and the finest argument for free education that I can think of. The teachers were washouts; aging, apathetic relics of a bygone decade with the energy and charisma of a half-stick of rancid butter abandoned on a sideboard. Once, in a mildly brilliant social experiment, our entire history class managed to successfully scupper our own GCSE grades after we discovered that the old duffer in charge of us was so decrepit that he’d gladly spend half of every lesson telling us his favourite story - the story of Trotsky’s death - having already forgotten that he’d told it to us yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.

The atmosphere in these hallowed halls of learning was dumb. Unashamedly dumb, ultra-masculine, and ultra-vicious. And sex, unfortunately enough for a burgeoning young sicko-to-be, was a collective learning experience.

Porn viewings - the modern young man’s real sex education - occurred in darkened rooms on a regular basis late at night, and everyone (a boarding-house year group of ten, combining ultra-rich kids from across the world in an undeniably cosmopolitan experience) was expected implicitly, at risk of being shunned socially, to attend. I can’t be certain, but I think there may have been at least one group masturbation.

The viewing material itself? It was all pretty standard vanilla stuff; this being a few years before the advent of Two Girls, One Cup and long before tiresome Daily Mail articles about ‘new’ violent pornography corrupting our nation’s youth. The usual teenage obsession with bland, half-assed, pneumatic lesbian action took priority above everything else. You’ve seen worse, as an adult. And much, much better too.

(I never enjoyed these sessions. They left me baffled, bored, and helplessly, frighteningly isolated from the pleasure that everyone else seemed to be experiencing - much like any non-believer at a cricket match.)

There was during this confusing period of sexual awakening a kid in my year who had assembled an admittedly impressive porn collection of several gigabytes. To a bunch of desperately oversexed and just generally desperate thirteen-year-olds, of course, this was the sign of a seriously cool societal alpha-dog, rather than of someone deeply in need of a slightly more active social life. He called himself the Porn King - no, seriously - and it was the habit of this miniature monarch of masturbation to hand out his collection to the popular kids while selling it at an obscene price to the outcasts.

Some months after everyone else had exhausted the collection and themselves, I plucked up the nerve to go to the King and asked him if I could get a copy for my own laptop. Luckily, His Maj owed me a favour - otherwise I would most definitely have been in the social group that was required to pay through the teeth. I got it for free.

I locked myself late in my room one night and went through the entire fucking thing, scene by scene, rimshot by rimshot. There was nothing for me in there. The best video featured a dyed-blonde nude woman with bombastic tits and the worst kind of low-effort porno glazed expression. Her hands had been tied loosely up to the bedposts with some kind of pink scarf. She didn’t seem to notice, let alone mind, and in any case the video was only 52 seconds long. It was dogcrap, but it was all I had.

I wanked ineffectually to the bored captive for some time, repeatedly distracted by the need to hit ‘replay’ and interrupting my own savage tom-tom rhythm in the process. Finally I abandoned my efforts in despair - and was startled out of my sleep five hours later by the predictable soggy load sinking into the material of my boxer shorts.

Once I think I even kept around a poster of Britney Spears, pouting and thrusting her chest upwards and looking much more like a dominatrix than any kind of submissive, just because she had a tight chain bracelet around one wrist that looked a bit like a handcuff. It was not, put it this way, a good time for sexual self-discovery.

Worse, though, was the guilt.

Nobody’s going to be able to claim any kind of monopoly on adolescent sexual neurosis any time soon, but being by nature a deeply weird and over-sensitive kid, I got bitten by the guilt bug pretty bad. My sexuality was, as far as I could see, innately immoral; its tropes - rope, restraint, handcuffs, gags, spankings, imprisonment, muffled cries, pleadings, cruel and unusual punishment, etc (you get the picture. Me, I get an erection.) - were the tropes of violent and ethically appalling criminal activity, from kidnappings to murder to rape.

The truth is that I couldn’t even begin to consider what I wanted to be a consensual and acceptable activity - simply because I couldn’t imagine that there’d be any girls out there who’d be even slightly interested in doing these things with me. And, honestly, at that age I was probably right; I can’t think there'd have been many kids any more capable of maturely and honestly coming to terms with their kink than I was.

Time moved on. I got my chance to study English Literature at university (not at Oxford, though, fuck you, Oxford). Once there, adolescent guilt congealed into young-adult embarrassment and emotional inarticulacy. I had sex (this impressively rarely) - bad sex, entirely my fault, imagine a terrified kid splashing nervously and agonisingly slowly into the shallows, psyching himself up to join his friends who are urgently convincing him that he’ll have a great time once he’s in - and spoke of it to nobody. I failed to have sex (this much more often), and again spoke of it to nobody. I had a couple of relationships, though I’m not convinced the other participants would go so far as to call them that.

I made, in short, a pretty feeble hash of being ‘normal’.

In the end, I left university with a first-class degree. It was a humanities degree, of course, and there was an economic recession on at the time, so this impressed nobody apart from my mother. But I was disciplined; I bummed around like a parasite for only a few months longer than I’d intended, and then I headed to London to begin a new life of tedious work churning out advertising copy for the highest bidder (never very high). Fifty Shades happened, of course, but by that time I was too beat down to care, or to consider what consequences this might have for me personally. In a dangerous sort of way, I’d begun to see myself as sexually incompatible with the rest of the world in general.

This blog is the true and faintly ridiculous story of how that began to change.