“ESP ON THE BUTTOCKS” – first chapter of a book

I came across this today. A while ago, when I was still seeing Mistress Elita, I considered turning my blog, and the experiences therein, into a book. I got as far as putting together the first three chapters and a synopsis and sending them to an agent who seemed to represent some writers in this space. He didn’t reply and I haven’t revisited the idea since. Perhaps I should.

My working title for the book was “Considered Strange.”

The first chapter pulled stuff from a number of posts and some new writing. I don’t think I’ve shared it before so here it is:

 

Kinky: If you describe something, usually a sexual practice or preference, as kinky, you mean that it is unusual and would be considered strange by most people (Collins)

 

CHAPTER ONE – ESP ON THE BUTTOCKS

Early 60’s; an Officers club in a far-off outpost of the British Commonwealth. It’s movie night and, while their parents drink Gin and Tonic and socialise before tonight’s film is loaded onto the clackety projector, three small boys try to sleep in blankets on inflatable beds in the back of the estate car outside. It’s a different time, and other children lie in the cars parked alongside theirs. The oldest child, the eight-year-old, is restlessly awake. He picks up the hard case his father keeps his glasses in and plays with the spring mechanism, opening and closing it, making sure it doesn’t snap shut loudly and wake his brothers. Without really understanding why, he pulls his pyjamas down and, twisting round awkwardly, smacks his own bottom with it. It’s experimental at first, but he likes the sting of it and smacks himself harder, listening for the steady breathing of the others after each blow.

I have many early memories of liking things that would have seemed strange to most my age: they range from wanting to be the subject of discipline in children’s role play games, to vague fantasies in which I was tied up and hurt in lurid and complex ways. I can detect in my memory no obvious link between these fantasies and my upbringing. Corporal punishment was not, for those days, a large part of our lives and I don’t remember either parent ever handing out more than the occasional slap, usually only when one of us had put themselves in danger.

I remember repeatedly looking up words like “spank” in my first school dictionary. When I say repeatedly, I don’t mean once or twice; I mean again and again; compulsively returning to the same words with the cold-eyed, obsessive intent of the true addict. I could burn an hour doing nothing more than look up words associated with pain, discipline and punishment. That tired old book is in the room with me as I write this: Chamber’s Etymological Dictionary; worn and dusty, an ancient splodge of regulation, school approved, ink on the, rather sadly torn, fabric of its cover. Even now, I can feel my pulse rate drift upwards as I turn the pages: “senile,” “sortie;” getting close now; Yes! There it is! “spank!”

spank, spangk, v.t. to strike with the flat of the hand, to smack, esp. on the buttocks

“Esp. on the buttocks” was a pleasing notion to me then, much as it is now.

Pursuing deeper, more intense sensations than those available in my narrow, boarding school bed, I would sneak off in the middle of the night to the toilets of my dormitory armed with a tube of Deep Heat or Tiger Balm that I had liberated from the rugby team’s first aid kit. I’d breathe deeply but quietly as it penetrated my genitals; warmth becoming heat, heat becoming pain; masturbating into the toilet bowl, my orgasm arriving just as the searing heat reached its almost unbearable peak.

I’d have been around fourteen at the time, mildly confused but not deeply troubled by these strange predilections. This was puberty and, at a time when so much else was changing in me, this was an almost reassuring constant, carried over from long before puberty’s whirlwind had set in.

At home in the school holidays and finding myself alone in the house, I would enter the forbidden territory of my parent’s bedroom to borrow my mother’s wooden hairbrush, relishing its sharp sting as I smacked myself with it. (esp. on the buttocks of course!)

In my late teens and looking for another level in this exploration of the strange relationship between my experience of pain and my experience of pleasure, I cycled into the town near where we lived and bought a riding crop from a Country Suppliers. Such shops were not uncommon on the high streets of country towns in those days and I had spent weeks building the courage to visit this one. I remember standing outside for an age, letting the thrill and the fear of what I was about to do seep into me. Somehow, I got myself into the shop, selected a crop from a group standing in a bucket, paid for it with cash already counted out, and left. To this day, I still derive a thrill from buying BDSM equipment, whether the purchase is from a specialist BDSM store or from a shop where the person behind the counter has no clue what I intend to do with the innocent piece of hardware they are selling me. I suspect that thrill is most likely rooted in that first purchase.

Much later, my parents found the crop and asked why I had it. I had given no thought to this moment, never considering the possibility of discovery. So how did the lie so immediately materialize in my head, so perfect and so fully formed? One moment the room was full of the question, pregnant with danger; the next, conjured from somewhere deep in my subconscious, the perfect lie stood alongside it, patiently waiting to be told.

“Oh, that. I was going out with a girl from near school who has a horse. It was a birthday present she had asked for, but we stopped seeing each other before I gave it to her. You can get rid of it.”

To this day I have never really known if they believed me, or if accepting the lie was easier for them than trying to understand the strange and unpalatable truth.

I now know that all this early flirtation with the heightened stimulation of pain and pleasure, and the outlandish fantasies that went with it, was typical for those who do the things that I now do, those who visit professional Dominatrix’s in their basement dungeons for sessions of pain and submission. I also know it to be typical for the Dominatrix’s themselves. I once swapped ‘growing up’ stories with a Dominatrix over a glass of wine after a BDSM session. She recalled how, in a school lesson on the slave trade of the eighteenth century, she had excitedly raised her hand and asked the teacher what would happen if a slave was, ‘naughty.’

“Not just a bit naughty, Miss, but really, really naughty; what would happen then?”

The adjective used to describe people who like to explore these things, whether in fantasies or real life is ‘kinky’. Searching for dictionary definitions of kinky is troublesome as many still use pejorative words such as ‘bizarre’ and ‘deviant.’ Collins goes with this:

“If you describe something, usually a sexual practice or preference, as kinky, you mean that it is unusual and would be considered strange by most people.”

I’m happy to live with that. I’ve certainly allowed plenty of things to be done to me that would be ‘considered strange’ by most people. That’s how I came to choose those words as the title for this book.

This kinky self has been present all through my adult life, sometimes more insistently, sometimes less. For many years all I ever did about it was to indulge in unsatisfactory self-administered corporal punishment sessions, until I finally summoned up the courage to see my first mistress in my thirties.

More recently, and freed of guilt by the breakdown of my second marriage, I have actively explored this kinky self, developing a relationship with a professional dominatrix who has acted as my guide. She is beautiful, multi-talented in diverse fields and her working name is Mistress Elita. She is very important in my story, leading me into a world of intense, challenging experiences, a world of extreme sensations and emotions, of nipple clips, ball tying, flogging, bondage and, of course, caning. esp. on the buttocks!

I am convinced people “like me” are born kinky rather than have it thrust upon us by circumstance, as 50 Shades of Grey wanted us to believe. I could no more choose to deny this part of me than a person born gay could choose to be heterosexual. And yet, I have had to live this life in secret, building a web of deceits and lies around my visits to my Mistress. At a time when to announce I was gay or bisexual would cause barely a ripple in my business life, to let it be known that I paid a beautiful woman to tie me up and hurt me would lead at best to bewilderment and incomprehension, at worst to contempt and ridicule.

Perhaps BDSM really is the last taboo. For as long as that is true, I shall have to pursue my predilection for being struck with the flat of the hand, esp. on the buttocks, in private.