"6": The 400 blows: Pain is pleasure is pain...

I have a strong mind and an even stronger will. While I’d been waiting for years for someone who could subdue me, sometimes I wasn’t all that easy to subdue. Even if I wanted to be. Even if I wanted to reach that place of softness, of opening, of letting someone in, I couldn’t necessarily command it into being.

So he’d whip me.

There was an element of ritual to these whippings. A footstool was placed in the middle of his living room that he’d bend me over. I’d be on all fours, with my ass in the air, expectant. Scared. Sometimes the sweat would drip from my armpits, as I knelt poised on the edge of anything-could-happen. I could not move away or flinch or he’d whip me harder. The only recourse I had was acceptance. I could hear the whoosh of the crop through the air and its subsequent sting, slicing my ass, or my upper thighs, would reverberate through my entire body.

Sometimes the whipping was sensuous. He’d alternate moderate strokes with rubbing my pussy, working me into an endorphin-fueled fever. Other times he was severe and I would be welted for days afterward. I never knew which it would be. He carried only one accoutrement with him when we ventured out, and when unused it lay on the footstool over which I bent when we were at his house. It was a riding crop and it easily wielded a fierce, sharp blow.

I remember going for a massage and when the woman came to my naked buttocks, I could hear her draw in her breath. I could sense her worry, her thought that I was being subjected to horrific things and that I might be in danger. She stuttered, trying to address the bruises on my ass that would have been in various states of transition – colored blue, purple, yellow - the remnants of that weekend's calisthenics. I enjoyed looking at them afterward, these symbols of my endurance and evidence of his ability to retrieve me and greater still, of his desire to. I dismissed her. She had no idea.


After a beating, I was malleable. Soft. Suppliant. Full of feeling. After each blow, he had me thank him. I didn’t understand the power of this until one day I was at my gym after a workout, in the communal showers. I turned the faucet all the way to cold and I felt the water hit my skin. Something curious had happened. I didn’t distinguish anymore that the water was cold or that it was uncomfortable. I was only aware of it as a sensation. I had no judgment of it, only the experience of noticing it was cold. I did not flinch, I did not back away, I accepted it completely. That’s when I realized that I’d ceased to let the fear of pain prevent me from living. Or more precisely, from loving. The thank yous became a thank you to life, and to all that it might bring me.

**

There is a gift in someone who dares to be so rough with me. Most men would never dare. I need to know that a man will be so bold, that at least he is capable of this sort of wielding. Then I can trust him. The flimsy men, the ones who would never dare to hurt me, to see me flinch, to bend me over and take me anywhere, anytime; I have no use for. Their trepidation is suffocating to me. And reflective of their behavior outside the bedroom. It always is. You can tell a lot about someone by how they fuck: Timid or decisive. Experimental or staid. Hard-driving and fierce or languid and droopy. My selection criteria is all about this crucial element: Can this man take charge? Does he dare?

Top photo: Bruno Bisang

Other photos: Sources unknown