Pain – Part II

I went into work last Wednesday with a couple of bandaids on my upper arm. Within seconds of saying ‘hello’ to everyone, the interrogation about the bandaids began. (My colleagues are so horribly bored and cooped up in that miserable space that the slightest, most minute disruption to what is mundane and predictable immediately sparks a flurry of questioning, gossip and hysteria. Haircuts are enough to cause a stroke in that place – in hindsight I was a damned fool thinking my bandaids would slip below the radar).

I didn’t want to talk about the bandaids. I wasn’t ashamed, it was just that it was personal and I didn’t want it dissected as part of the daily office conversation, wedged in-between what so-and-so ate for lunch, and what what’s-his-face said to that-stupid-bitch at the Christmas party.

But they persisted. My protests of “it’s a long story” held them off for all of about ten minutes, when someone came out with “but you love telling us long stories!”. I tried feeding them a few more crumbs, hoping it would shut them up. But “it’s a burn” only added fuel to the flame, so to speak. By this stage they were nearly foaming at the mouths, agog, apoplectic with curiosity.

“Fine!” I cried, ripping the bandaids off, “a friend of mine burned my arm with an incense stick. Okay?”

Finally I was granted that silence I had, up until that second, wanted. There was an awkward, horrified moment as everyone stared at the small round scabs that descended in neat rows down my arm. It was even more awkward than that time Lazy-Jerk-Face said “fuck you” to Pole-Up-His-Arse.

“It’s not what you think,” I said, slightly desperate. “It’s not a bad thing. I was just, ah, drunk. It seemed like a good idea.”

“You were drunk?” The look of concern on their faces was unbearable.

“Yes, yes. So drunk. Stinking drunk. Ah, the silly things you do, when you are drunk.”

At this, everyone calmed down a bit.

And this is what brings me to today’s rant. Because I wasn’t drunk. I’d had half a glass of wine and the whole thing was calm, controlled. Meditative, serene. The only thing I regret about it was that I let her burn me in a place that was so visible. But apart from that it was an intimate moment of power exchange that I found to be deeply soothing. The burns were only surface, the burning sensation only lasted for a few seconds, and now that the skin is healing I’m fairly confident the scars will fade to nothing, blending in with my freckles.

I know my colleagues were only acting out of concern, and I appreciate that, but I don’t understand why “I was drunk” is a more acceptable explanation than “I like pain”. I still feel the slightest twinge of shame in admitting that. Like there’s something wrong with me that needs to be fixed, and that I need to obscure the truth in case some well-meaning person insists on fixing it for me.

Liking pain is not so weird. Hear me out on this one.

Pain is a taboo in western culture (I don’t have the time to go into what constitutes ‘western’ culture, but you know what I mean), but in other cultures it is celebrated, revered. Coming of age rituals and initiation rites are considered, by our ‘humane’ standards to be barbaric, but what we don’t realise is that it’s just one way of looking at it. We consider pain to be a bad thing, and we spend most of our lives shielded from it. As a consequence of this, pain becomes something that is largely unfamiliar and unknown. Thus, it becomes frightening. There is nothing scarier than that which we do not know (see: death).

Obviously, pain serves a purpose, and too much pain is like too much of anything – not so good. And pain in the context of anyone who is suffering from an ongoing illness is by no means glamorous; I’m not saying it should be. But what I am saying is that people should accept that pain is part of the experience of life, and not to make it into anything larger than it is. A little bit of pain helps for you to appreciate not being in pain, and actively seeking a little bit of pain gives you the satisfying sensation of having a measure of control over it. (It’s a common myth that sadists and dominants are the only ones with control issues…)

I think it’s interesting that body piercing and tattoos have become extremely popular (dare I say, ‘mainstream‘) in the last twenty years. What used to be shocking and rebellious has become reasonably banal, something that ‘youths’ are prone to do and prone to regret when they get older. What frustrates me is the way that the pain side of things is downplayed and minimised by those catering to the more fashion-conscious side of the market. If I hear another ditsy blonde talk about ‘numbing patches’ or ‘anaesthetic cream’ in relation to the Playboy bunny they’re going to get tattooed on their lower back or the pink jewel they’re going to get inserted through their navel, I’m going to punch them in the face.

Pain is half the point. It’s about conquering your fear, marking the moment, being reborn. It’s about release. We shuffle around most of the time in our adult lives with politely lowered voices, keeping our tempers in check, not expressing how we really feel for fear of getting fired/dumped/rejected/arrested. But sometimes it is necessary to scream, to cry, to gnash our teeth. To have an opportunity to do so, in an appropriate setting, is a blissful thing.

(I witnessed a nipple piercing on Sunday, of someone who had never been pierced before. I was expecting a characteristically stoic reaction from him, but as the big needle was forced through he yelled “muddafucker!”. I thought about all the people waiting outside for their piercings, and suppressed a smile. The piercer was a no-nonsense lass who was good at her job. She said: “I love hearing people in pain.”)

Body art is one thing, but I sincerely believe that pain for pain’s sake is artistic in its own right. Because it defies logic, it goes against our survival instincts. Choosing to receive pain for no practical reason is, in my book, a poetic act. I have had tattoos and piercings, and I have always hid behind the “it looks cool” excuse that keeps everyone at bay. But piercings never heal on me (overactive immune system) and tattoos are way too sacred and expensive to be getting every time the wolf comes to my door. There is something so pure about pursuing pain in itself. It lets my demons out.

Play piercing (surgical-grade needles threaded through the surface of the skin) is the purest, and most intense sensation of pain I’ve received through a BDSM scenario. The sensation of the needle sliding beneath skin is exact and sharp and blindingly intense. The last time I played with needles, it was with two other people who I love, and the atmosphere in the room was close and heavy. I shuddered with pain at each fresh piercing, but seconds later a rich endorphin rush hit me and sent me higher, higher. When finally I had about 24 needles threaded through my back, Marauder ran his gloved fingers over the skin, twisting the plastic tips. The feeling was so intense that it stopped being necessarily ‘bad’; it no longer had a label. Then, I had an orgasm.

The incense stick was similar to needles in that it was calm and slow. I watched the ember melt into my skin, watched it smoulder. I was not afraid. The feeling was amazingly warm and soothing. She looked me in the eye, smiled, and pressed the burning tip down, again, again. Sinister bliss.

Later that same night, I was caned by a man I’ve known for a long time but have never played with. It was hard. I was lying on a massage table but couldn’t stop moving, writhing, trying to slither away. There was not really a warm up, he just came down on me hard, fast and with force. Halfway through it our light fitting was broken on the upswing. Glass came down like snow. I had the option then of quitting, of calling it a night. But I chose to stay, knowing that something deep and guttural in me was not yet satisfied. I watched, trance-like, as the glass was swept away and as my arms and legs were bound to the table so I couldn’t move. I took it upon myself to shove some material in my mouth. I lay still, breathing like an animal, ready.

He came back at me with the same mad energy, all force and brutality, whack whack whack. The pain was amazing. There was nothing calm about it – I struggled desperately against my bindings and screamed into the cloth in my mouth, masticating it to a pulp. It couldn’t accept it, couldn’t make peace with this pain. The marks burned long after the cane hit. I was sweaty, knotted, ablaze.

As the tears came so did the release. Like a hot flood. I was not simply crying; I wept. And then it was easy, then my body could lie peacefully, accepting fate. All the bottled emotion of that past week came out of me, dredged from where I’d shoved it, out of sight. I realised it had been an emotionally turbulent week, and it all came out, leaving me drained and free. Softened.

Everyone must have been too distracted by the bandaids to notice the way I was wincing ever so slightly every time I sat down at my desk that week. Which is a shame. Because instead of saying “it’s okay, I was drunk” I would have been able to say “you think that’s bad, you should see my arse!”

Rubber Pics

Me as a human foot stool.

Inside the vac bed.

Rubber

(Pain Part II is coming soon…)

So few people have heard the real story about how Marauder and I got together, despite it being one of my favourite stories to tell. So here it is, in its uncensored glory:

We first met at an Under 30s gathering at the Marlborough Hotel. Flirtation was had, numbers were exchanged. I went home that night buzzing with possibility.

The following Thursday we met up after work, with the idea to go fetish wardrobe shopping for Hellfire (which was on Friday). We walked together down Oxford Street, and I did my usual nervous chatterbox thing. (It had been a long time between dates, okay?) We ended up at House of Fetish, and for a bit of fun, I ended up trying on a $600 rubber ensemble. It was my first experience with rubber, which up until that point had seemed all a bit freaky and silly for my tastes. But as I talced up and squeezed in, all assumptions dropped away. It felt snug, secure, smooth. It squeezed my body into that of a voluptuous woman. It cinched me in and made all the sex bits stick out. It was so sexy I was having a lesbian experience just looking at myself in the mirror.

I had to exit the cubicle to access said mirror, and everyone in the store was suitably impressed. I stood there gawking at myself for a while, and then I turned to Marauder:

“Want to feel me up?”

His reply:

“Yes.”

That kicked off my now sizeable rubber fetish (and Marauder fetish, for that matter). Up until last night, my ability to explore that fetish was limited by its expense (my first outfit set me back around $300 bucks), and by the fact I didn’t really see a way of ‘playing’ with rubber, other than by wearing it in sexy outfits. I’d seen a bunch of stuff in porn, but I didn’t really think it was possible to try unless you were a porn star (why do I persist in thinking this way?).

At a private party I went to about six months ago, a couple was there who I’d seen around at other parties, but had never properly gotten to know. At this particular party, they’d brought around a few different rubber hoods (one of them a gas mask with a long breathing tube), which I got to try on. We did some breath play (where the top restricts the bottom’s breathing, in this instance through blocking the air tube) and I loved it. It scared me just enough to make me want more, more, more. I got to borrow the mask, but somehow it felt incomplete. I wanted to be completely encased and completely at the mercy of someone else. A rubber doll.

We’d been talking about it for ages, and we finally made a date for me to come over to their house and play with their rubber. And as the date approached, I got more and more nervous. I was excited by my nerves, realising that I’ve been playing it fairly safe of late (attending only parties held in my own home and playing with mostly the same people, and mostly the same kind of play). I like to still feel nervous, because I don’t want to ever get to the point where I’m completely comfortable and I know exactly what to expect. I savoured my anxiety all afternoon, chewing on it, extracting what intoxicating dread I could. When I finally rang their doorbell in my one rubber outfit at 9pm that night, I was awkward and stilted on the outside, but inwardly seething with nervous excitement.

There is something extra thrilling about playing in a new space – it lends a rich element of other-worldliness to the play. Entering their house was like being sucked into a vortex, which is funny, because later that evening I pretty well literally got sucked into a vortex. From the moment I was inside I felt it begin – even during the social formalities of general chit chat and fixing a drink. Everything was discussed before it started, and I sat there through it all with a big stupid grin on my face. I’m an atrocious poker player.

First up, I was told to take off all my clothes, and step into a big rubber sack that fastened around my neck. (I got to keep my rubber underpants on, which was more awesome than being completely naked). I was placed on my back and the sack was pumped full of air. ‘Sack’ isn’t the best descriptor – it was more of a big tube, which meant that one layer of rubber was pressed against my body, while the other layer ballooned outwards, turning me into a giant human caterpillar. It also meant that sections of the tube could be unzipped (so my body could be accessed) without letting all the air out. Once it was completely inflated, a rubber gas mask was placed over my head, limiting my breathing to that vulnerable rubber tube. It also limited my eyesight, but I was keen to close my eyes anyway.

I could barely wiggle inside the sack; I was helpless. Totally at the mercy of my two friends, who were using me as a footstool. It was utterly perfect, and I felt so euphoric it was better than any drug I’ve ever tried. It put me right in the moment, so blissfully disconnected from any of the stuff going on in my life. Inside my head, the same thing over and over: this is wild.

I sank into subspace and stayed there, pieces of me scattered among stars. I saw what could only be described as hallucinations – dancing colours and shapes, rubber-clad androids, and at one particularly intense moment, Kate Bush in the film clip for Running Up That Hill. (I fucking love Kate Bush). There was also much rudeness – it was surprisingly sexual. Hot and lush and pure. Wrenched away from the controlling clutches of my conscious mind. Rhythm running through me like electricity.

I eventually emerged calm and spaced and malleable. Sweaty, engorged. Beatific, docile. At ease.

We went upstairs, where I was caned, paddled and spanked. I took it as quietly as I could, but it cut into the my dream-state and woke me up. Each stroke brought things sharply back into focus, and each anticipatory void let me drift. Time had lost all meaning; I had no idea how long it lasted or how many strokes I endured. I moaned and groaned, accepted and sighed, wriggled and twitched. Then it was over.

Into yet another room, on the floor of which was a large rectangle of rubber known as a vac bed. This was another type of sack – sealed on three sides, and with a zipper along the forth. It was held in shape by a rectangular frame made out of strong plastic pipes. I crawled inside, lay on my back, and put the breathing tube in my mouth. Then it was zipped up, and a vacuum was used to suck all the air out of the sack, trapping me inside nearly instantly. The rubber clung to my skin, pressed in on me. It was so tight I couldn’t even move my fingers. I was expecting to be freaked out by it, but all I felt was peace.

The breath play did scare me earlier when I was wearing the gas mask, but in the vac bed I had absolutely no problem with having my air restricted. I felt invincible. And it was still very sexual, deeply sexual. I never wanted it to end.

Even after the vacuum was turned off, just lying inside the sack in the warm blackness did it for me.

After that I got to watch other people in the sack (including Marauder, who had arrived towards the end of the caning). It was astonishing to see him shrink wrapped inside the rubber – the detail was incredible. It pulls so tight you can see individual hairs, and fingernails. I can imagine that the best part about it, if you’re a bloke, is fighting a battle against the rubber with a semi-erect cock.

It was feeling like the night was over, but just as we were getting ready to leave, I was distracted by a rubber catsuit hanging in the room. It was made to fit a man, and therefore it fit me very badly, but I got the gist. Before I got it we filled it with silicon lube, and it felt like wearing a giant condom. A bit gross and slimy at first, but once it warmed up it felt very good. Then I lay on the bed on top of a rubber sheet which we also drowned in lube, and I slid around on it for a while, wiggling and carrying on. It felt like Slip ‘N Slide. I giggled a lot.

After a long shower, the night was truly over. I thanked my hosts profusely and stumbled out into the night. I was so high Marauder almost refused to let me drive home. But I got there, it was all right.

Pain (Part One)

I was born an optimist into a family of depressed cynics. My mother’s motto was “expect the worst – you won’t be disappointed”. In our household, not only was the glass half empty, it was poisoned. “Why do I always fail at everything?” was another catchcry you might have heard if you were lucky enough to visit my childhood home, as was “life’s a bitch and then you die”. (Dad was particularly fond of replacing the word ‘bitch’ with ‘beach’, especially while we were at the beach, or planning to go to the beach, or if the word ‘beach’ was mentioned in any context, by anyone, anytime, or not at all. It never got old!) It wasn’t until well into my adult years that I realised that not all families were like that. Both my parents, like, seriously needed a hug. And Valium.

So, if you take my natural inclination to view the world as totally awesome, coupled with my parent’s repeated indoctrination that life was fucked, you get… me. The depressed optimist!

How does this work, you ask? Well, here are some examples:

While going through a severe bout of depression brought on by my parent’s outrageously horrible divorce (who would have thought such a happy couple would ever divorce?), a shit job, no money, a crummy apartment and a heart broken so many times by so many crap men that it was less an organ and more a glorified mass of scar tissue (metaphorically speaking), I thought to myself:

Dude, when you’re a famous writer, this is going to give you so much cred! All the best writers of history were horribly depressed with crap lives – you’ve totally got it made! All right! Maybe you could squeeze in a suicide attempt and wind up in a mental hospital for that authentic element of Plath? How awesome would THAT be?!

Or, whenever I weigh myself, and the number is higher than the ‘acceptable upper limit’ I decided upon before I hopped on, I try to look at it this way:

Okay so yeah, that is a little high, but that’s only because I’m approaching it from the angle of having GAINED weight. What would my opinion be if I’d, say, LOST 100 kilos to get to this number, huh? I’d be pretty bloody stoked right now, wouldn’t I? If I were on The Biggest Loser, I’d totally be kicking butt. So, congratulations, me! That’s 100 kilos LESS than it could have been! Now, let’s eat ice cream to celebrate!

And finally, my grotesquely optimistic spin on all things negative turns the well-known fact ‘life is pain’ into:

Life IS pain, therefore the secret to enjoying life is to learn to enjoy pain.

Which brings me, (456 words later) to today’s topic.

Learning to love pain has not been hard for me, because, truth be told, we’ve always had a thing. It started in adolescence, when after eight years of classical ballet lessons, I was finally allowed to get my first pair of pointe shoes (the ones that facilitate ‘toe dancing’. No wonder the language of ballet is French – how bloody ugly does ‘toe dancing’ sound in comparison to ‘en pointe’?) I was thrilled, as was everyone in my class at the time. Difference between me and them was, I remained thrilled. For anyone who doesn’t know – pointe work is brutal. It takes the skin off your toes and presses them into a stylised shape that looks nothing like your own foot structure, or indeed a human foot structure. Most lessons we’d come away with bloody, calloused toes; stockings stuck to the exposed flesh. The insides of our shoes were dark with brown stains. They had a particular smell – of old bandaids, resin and sweat. If you had two pointe classes in two days, your wounds would not have time to form a sufficient scab, and it would feel like you were grinding your toes into a bucket of fire and glass. Beautiful, huh?

But it was beautiful. I loved the blood, the bandaids, the cruel teachers who would scream “AGAIN! DO IT AGAIN!”. I loved, and still love, the abnormal line of the foot pointe shoes create – gracefully curved ends at the ends of long stockinged legs. I love the sound the blocks make as they patter over the floor, the taut muscles around the ankles, the strength and the glory. To this day (six years after my last ballet class) I still fantasise about squeezing my feet into those shoes. I suppose you could say it’s become something of a fetish. (When I am rich, I will totally be buying a pair of ballet boots. Oh boy oh boy.)

As mentioned, I was the only student in my class who would actively request a pointe work lesson. Sometimes the teachers would let us choose, and my classmates detested me because I would always, always suggest pointe. (Maybe I also secretly got off on their suffering too, who knows).

So. I was into pain before I had any idea about BDSM but strangely, when I started getting into kink, pain was something that really freaked me out. I was intrigued by it, but was still plagued by the notion that it was unhealthy and unbalanced. I thought the pain had to be mostly superficial for it to be acceptable in a BDSM play scenario. (At the time I was reading a lot of electro-play erotica, but for a long time I thought there were things that could be explored through fantasy that would not be possible or permissible in reality). In particular, I thought that if it made the submissive cry, it had gone too far.

Up until about two years ago, I drew the line at light cropping, pinching, spanking, candle wax – anything that caused discomfort but did not tip the scale into full-blown pain. That all changed for me when I met a girl through Under 30s who introduced me to the cane. After she hit me I had purple bruises for two weeks. It was fucking awesome.

The cane is the perfect marriage of eroticism and pain. It leaves beautiful straight welts across rounded flesh; it makes you quiver with every hit. And the pain is sharp, hot immediate. It strikes in a flash and resonates through you. Once the endorphins kick in you get flooded with a rich, heavy, dope-like serenity. It continues to hurt, but you find yourself requesting more and more, wanting it and fearing it in equal amounts. It brings blood to the surface of the skin. It leaves bruises for weeks that make it hard to sit down. It can be unbearable, and it has made me cry and faint. It’s cathartic, addictive.

I was being caned on my inside thigh at a party about six months ago, and the caner told me she wouldn’t stop until I told her to. I agreed to this, and she began. About ten seconds into it I was in agony, eyes full of tears, gasping for breath. But I held on, determined not to wuss out after such a short time. And beyond my initial reflex reaction (to want the pain to stop as soon as possible), I realised something powerful. I was able to see pain as something separate, something that didn’t have control over me. It was merely a sensation – only bad if I labelled it as such. And from there it was like peering into the heart of the universe, seeing beyond than the thin fabric of what we call reality, knowing that there is so much more to living than our physical limitations allow us.

People live their lives in fear of pain. But if you actively embrace it, you will come to the realisation that there is nothing to fear. It ceases to have power over you. And you feel… free.

This has become longer than I intended, so I’m going to split it up into two parts.

(End part one!)

Pleasure Fetish

Sometimes I worry that my accumulated list of fetishes and perversions has grown to be ridiculously large. What started out as something deceptively simple (a desire to be on the bottom during sex, and maybe possibly tied up) has branched out into so many different things I can barely keep track of them all. In the five or so years I’ve been consciously kinky, my tastes have changed and evolved fairly drastically. This is to do with the influence of people I’ve played with, the porn I’ve watched, the erotica I’ve read and the interesting stuff I’ve seen and experienced while out and about (either socially or at clubs).

If you’d asked me five years ago what I was into, I would have been very definite and specific. I probably would have said bondage (without having any idea about things like suspension bondage or shibari), corsets (not yet knowing the joys of rubber), confined spaces, being generally submissive (like letting the guy make the ‘moves’ and doing nice things for him without wanting or expecting anything in return), and rough sex (in the sense of being ‘taken’, shoved against walls, slapped about a bit, called a ’slut’, etc). I was not open to the idea of building upon or broadening these desires, I suppose because I didn’t see the point, but fear also had a lot to do with it.

My first kinky relationship included all of these kinks and then some. My boyfriend was intent on pushing my boundaries, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but the way he went about it was careless and impatient. He pushed me too hard, too fast. I ended up feeling violated, robbed. But the thing about boundaries is once they’ve been bulldozed, you can’t go back, no matter how much you might want to. I was left feeling vaguely frustrated by what I had found amazingly hot at the beginning of the relationship, yet terrified of the things I had discovered further down the track.

I’ve eventually come to love some of the things that disturbed and upset me back then. I know myself better, and know what I can and cannot endure, and where the threshold lies. The beauty and eroticism of BDSM is in this liminal grey area between pleasure and pain, desire and despair. I realise now that my ex was more interested in power than anything else, and what we ended up with was nothing like BDSM. Exerting power without the eroticism is just abuse, and there’s nothing imaginative about that.

So I’ve collected a number of different fetishes, to the point where I started to feel a need to define my ‘base’ kink, the place from which everything else stems. And it was harder than I thought it would be. Because ’submissive’ is true, but it’s also vague, and it doesn’t account for the less-than-submissive things I’m also into. ‘Masochist’ is not right for me either, because although I do like pain, I only enjoy it if the person inflicting it legitimately wants me to suffer. ‘Slave’ was never right for me, because I’m too precocious, and I truly believe that there should be room in a relationship (especially a kinky relationship) to challenge your partner. Slavery, in my opinion, borders too dangerously on losing your sense of self within a relationship, and thus the slave becomes not only vulnerable, but boring. (I appreciate that there are many people out there in M/s relationships for whom it works amazingly well, but it’s just not for me. Been there, done that, writing the book about it). A desire to ’serve’ does come into my kink, but it only becomes sexual for me when it involves a sexual act. (As an example, I happily cook all the meals and then wash up every night for my partner because I like doing it, but it’s not the same as getting off on it, unfortunately). There are some people who really do get a sexual kick out of doing chores, but unless possibly I was wearing some sort of constrictive rubber thing with ridiculously high heels, scrubbing the dunny is just never going to be sexy.

I sifted through all these words and definitions and finally reached a conclusion of sorts. Firstly, I realised that there are two sides to my kink persona. One side is meditative, introspective, spiritual, and the other is sexual. The quiet side is to do with confined spaces and restriction. It goes all the way back to when I was a small child, and in that sense it’s pre-sexual. Some of my oldest memories are of climbing into cupboards and dark spaces and simply feeling at peace.

The sexual side of me can be summed up with a single premise: I get off on other peoples’ pleasure. I’ve decided to describe this as a ‘pleasure fetish’.

‘Pleasure fetish’ hardly sounds kinky, and sometimes it’s not. It’s the reason why I enjoy ‘vanilla’ sex so much – because I love to give other people pleasure. Whether they derive that pleasure from fucking me or through hitting me with a stick, is up to them. I like both.

For example, I don’t normally like to be on the receiving end cunnilingus. It’s not because it doesn’t feel good, it’s because I feel uncomfortable with being the intended recipient of pleasure. I just end up feeling guilty that I’m getting all the pleasure while the other person is doing all the work. But I have discovered there is an exception to this rule, and that’s if the person eating me out has a fetish for it. I once knew this guy who literally got off on giving women spectacular orgasms, to the point where he enjoyed it more than he enjoyed having an orgasm himself. For this reason, I was able to relax and enjoy receiving oral sex. And boy, it was enjoyable. Just ask his couch.

This is why I like sadists. I do like to be pounded with a cane (for instance), but only if the person hitting me is getting off on it. I love being coaxed into taking more pain than I thought I could handle, and suffering for the gratification of the sadist. Them taking pleasure from my pain – this is what does my head in. And this is generally what I fantasise about if I’m struggling to reach orgasm. I’ve been watching a fair bit of Insex lately, and the guy who runs it says this thing that makes me crazy with lust: “suffer for me”. The girl will be struggling in pain, and he’ll ask her very softly: “will you suffer for me?” At those magic words, the girl will relax a little, settle into something which is clearly at the threshold of what she thought she could handle. He has a knack for keeping the submissive there, right on the boundary where it just becomes unbearable, and coaxing her verbally, and bribing her with orgasms.

My kink also makes me a very generous lover. Most women will give blowjobs begrudgingly, out of obligation or duty. But I love it doing it, fantasise about it in fact, because I love to give a man so much intense pleasure. I love watching them at the moment they lose control and surrender to that pleasure, and sometimes I experience orgasm at the same time, just from watching. I love being used for someone else’s sexual gratification – literally ‘used’. I get off on being another person’s orgasm provider. I don’t like being touched because they think I will like it (‘is this good for you, honey?’) but I do love being touched because they cannot help but touch me. Or grab me, push me, spank me…

I had an interesting conversation with Whipslave yesterday (a clever and articulate dude I met through Mostly Under 30s) about how we’d be willing to top people if they truly desired to be dominated. I normally have a lot of trouble inflicting pain on others, and generally can’t stop myself from apologising if I hit them too hard (which is not really the point). But if the other person is experiencing pleasure from being hit, I can do it. I was whacking a gorgeous friend of mine on the butt with a cane once, and she was moaning in ecstasy, and suddenly I felt completely comfortable in the dominant role. If I were to become intimately involved with a masochist, I would be able to hit them. (But, it still wouldn’t be the same sexual high I get from accepting pain from sadists).

I think ‘pleasure fetish’ has a delicious ring to it, and it’s satisfying to finally have an appropriate way of describing my kink. I like to have a sense of order about my life (because I’m a compulsively organised Taurus), and it feels like I’ve found a beautiful container to hold all of my different perversions. I’m certainly not going to stop exploring and trying new things, but it’s nice to have something to come back to when I start to lose track of what kink means to me.