Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission by Gloria G. Brame, William D. Brame, Jon Jacobs Page A

feelingof power, both within myself and with other people. When I got into high school, a woman friend was into Victorian pornography, which has a lot of S/M and D&S, whipping scenes. I would read it and go, “Oooh, that’s disgusting! That’s awful! That’s horrible! What’s on the next page?” I found it disturbing because the women were objects. I never found out what they were feeling, why they were enjoying it. I thought, That’s not me, because, if I were having sex, I’d enjoy it, and these women aren’t enjoying it. I’m not a pervert like that.
    When I got into college, it was a tradition for graduating seniors to give things to freshmen and sophomores. One woman gave me a copy of
Story of O
. I read [it] and thought, This is absolutely ghastly, this woman gives up her personality, but for years my favorite bedtime reading was the first few scenes of
Story of
O, when she’s shown all the instruments of torture and told what’s going to happen to her. I thought that was really nasty and dirty and wonderful.
    I started reading magazines like
On Our Backs
, a lesbian porn magazine [with] a lot of D&S. I thought that was really hot, so I couldn’t understand why I was having fantasies about
men
. I was tempted a couple of times to find someone, but I didn’t know where to go. I felt guilty. Maybe these people were awful: I could end up in a body bag. I had horrible fantasies about what could happen to me. What changed was that I heard about a women-only group which met at a D&S club. I went, but I didn’t see any really interesting action, because of what I’m into. [Then] I read
Outweek
and answered an ad from a woman who said that she did some D&S. So I went on a blind date with her. She was nothing like what I expected. She was not a terribly interesting person, but she was going to a party and invited me along, and [that’s when] I met the man I’m with right now. We hit it off immediately. There was just something about him … I wanted to know more about him as a person. There was an aura about him that seemed to show that he was rather experienced. I figured [that] if worse comes to worse, we’ll have a couple of dates, and I’ll learn why I want to do this stuff.
    On our first date we went to see this absolutely beastly movie, and he kept touching my thigh and murmuring subtle threats in my ear. I said, “Oh, my God! I’m going out with a maniac!” But I wanted to go out with him again. Somehow he seemed very gentle. It was really confusing. He told me that he thought that I was really beautiful, that I’d look even more beautiful if I had a collar on, and that he’d really like to put his hands on my breasts and caress them. I was just looking at him like, “I don’t believe that you’re saying this!” And he said, “You know you don’t want to [leave].” That really scared me, because he was right. It was like he could … read me. My mouth was saying, “This is horrible; why are you saying this to me?” But I couldfeel myself getting all warm and excited. So I had to keep on going out with him to figure him out.
    A couple of dates later we went to a museum, and while we were walking around, he started whispering things in my ear about how he’d like to tie me up and how he’d like to spank me right there in the museum and let everybody see me with my skirt pulled up and how much I’d probably enjoy exposing myself because I was a naughty little slut. I almost ran out of the museum. But I wanted to hear more, even though I was horrified. Now that I look back, I realize that I was horrified because he was saying exactly what I wanted to hear. I didn’t want to believe that a nice girl—whatever “nice” means—could want to do things like that. Before I knew it, I kept going out with him, because I really liked him as a person. And he was great in bed. He was teaching me things that I had only fantasized about before. Some of them I hadn’t even fantasized about. I