From the Top Shelf - Concertina II

From Concertina  The life and loves of a dominatrix, by Susan Winemaker, this passage might make you think. In fact, I would like to hear your opinion of it.

Mistress Anna tells about one unusual and client, a television presenter who had never visited the same dominatrix twice until he met her. They go out to dinner after his second session with her, and he tells her a little about his childhood liking for physical pain and rituals of self-flagellation.

"When I was twenty-four and in New York I came across a fetish magazine purely by accident and I was shocked to see pictures of women whipping men. It was a revelation  that you could actually pay someone to beat you, that there was a service for that sort of thing, and that other people had the same desires..."

That night he slept at my flat. He couldn't quite get over the bemusement of being in the flat of a dominatrix. Look: she reads, she has a blue fridge and cupboards, a tennis racquet in the corner of her bedroom, a worn pair of ballet slippers by the fireplace, a cute pillow on the bed embroidered with a different name. All the evidence of daily existence seemed to upset his imagination.

He wanted to spank me. He said he had a long-term girlfriend, they were on the rocks, but she loved being spanked and he was rather good at it. There was something sexy and sassy about pulling down my own pretty knickers as if to say, okay, let's see what you can do because I can take what I give. So he spanked me, not one, twice, but three times too hard. It didn't arouse me, but I could handle it. But when he unbuckled his belt and pulled it off his trousers, I thought: I don't really need to do this. And pulled up my knickers.

So what do you think of crossing the line and becoming intimate with your disciplinarian? What about going even further and wanting to spank her?

A few weeks later they meet for a third time, and Mistress Anna attempts to recreate his childhood ritual of self-whipping in the woods.

It was dusk when he arrived. He wanted to talk for a few minutes before we began. He asked me for a cigarette... He was stalling, nervous and worried that he wouldn't be able to lose himself in the role after seeing me out of context. I wasn't worried; I was a professional and I had something very special in store.

It was dark and quiet in that North London suburb by the time he was naked, gagged and blindfolded... He was aroused and in role when I led him to his shoes and instructed him to put them on. By the time I opened the cottage door and he felt the evening air, he'd figured it out and began shaking in resistance as well as muttering through the gag.

"Trust me," I whispered soothingly in his ear. "No one will see you and no one will hear you. We're alone in the woods."

I had, with fading confidence, to shove him, gently but firmly, across the garden towards a tree. I tied him to the tree, his back facing me, and tried to ignore his jerks and trembles. We kept a birch in the dungeon. Not until then had I had the occasion to use it. I warmed his bottom with the tips of the twigs before I raised my right arm to flagellate him.

I thrashed him a few times without satisfaction, for his shivers had intensified to the point of crisis and I stopped. I untied him and got him back indoors as quickly as possible while whispering words meant to reassure. I shut the door behind us and removed his gag and blindfold. Without looking up, like a petrified child, he made straight for a corner of the room, faced it, and heaved quietly.

I felt pretty awful and pretty stupid. He had malaria, but how was I to know.  More that I'd trespassed into his past for the sake of aesthetics and style without carrying a roadmap, I apologized, and it took another cigarette and a shot of cognac, which I keep in the dungeon, before he felt ready to resume--indoors.

   Stay tuned. There's one more instalment coming up next week.