nurture, nature, and how I got this way

Sunday night, Mother and I sat outside on the porch with bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream. It became a reliving of a memory that led me through a maze of thoughts on psychology, submission, and dairy products.

It’s a question posed to me sometimes: about the psychology of submission and dominance, specifically how much of it might be derived from one’s relationship to parents. Jeremy asked me this, but others have too, so I won’t put this in the form of Jeremy’s conversation with me.

The presumption is that an adult submissive like me might be submissive due to a childhood of pleasing a difficult or distant parent. Likewise, it’s suggested an adult dominant might be dominant because an upbringing of chaos compelled a child toward order and control.

It’s a tricky question for me because I don’t really agree with those explanations, yet I do believe in the basic ideas of psychology, which is based largely on childhood cause and adult effect.

Yes, we are creatures of our nurture to some degree, no question. As adults, we are inclined to some things because of childhood associations. Being back in my childhood world is replete with personal examples.

This is where dairy comes in.

I remember when I was in grade school my parents taking me to an ice cream parlor called “The Barn.” We went nearly every Sunday night after church, and I always got their mint chocolate chip ice cream. To this day, that’s my favorite flavor, and I always buy it, often saying, “It’s good, but not as good as The Barn.”

It’s obvious that I am, as an adult, reaching for the mint chocolate chip at the grocery because of my memory association with it as a child. That’s a basic tenet of psychology, common knowledge. I agree that my childhood nurture influences much of what I do today.

Another example: I have written often about how in my slave life I am required to scrub the kitchen floor, and also how, quite incidental to the degradation that often accompanies it, I quite enjoy the floor-scrubbing itself. I know this is a feeling that derives from when as a child my mother asked me to scrub the floor for her because she had problems with her knees. If I did a good job (which I always did), she’d treat me to, well, mint chocolate chip ice cream. That pleasant association persists in me today and attests to the frequent association between adult propensities and childhood nurture experiences.

(In an ironic twist, in this current time here with Mother, I have twice now scrubbed the kitchen floor, not because it needed it nor for any ice cream but to relive the recent memories of my slavery in which I would be sexualized and objectified and watched with sexual pleasure.)

Another example illustrates the point I’m getting to.

As a child, I was also a maker of stories. First in my head, then in play with friends (in which I was always the damsel in distress, often tied to trees, waiting to be rescued), and later in grade school as a writer of these same stories, putting them down on paper.

That I am a writer today, even as I am writing this now, is perhaps a result of my childhood penchant for telling stories — again reinforcing the nurture side of things.

Yes, but then there’s the further question of where my attraction to writing came from in the first place. How was it that at a very early age, as I started to form simple sentences, I became so inclined? My parents always told their friends that I was “such the teller of stories.” Neither of my parents had that in them; nothing in their rearing of me suggests I was a child bard out of some coping reaction to my mom or dad.

I was a writer then, and am a writer now, because that was in me. It was the way I was made. It was nature.

I think of my submissiveness this same way.

Certainly, there are things in my childhood you might point to that suggest nurture-experiences of being controlled or submitting to authority. I haven’t written much about my father (I will someday), who was stern and authoritarian, and I’m sure analysts of me could make a lot of that. I have written about the church culture I grew up in (what I’m back in now), its emphasis on hierarchy and the submission of women — and you could point to that as rendering (nurturing) me to be submissive then and now.

But those experiences don’t really align. If anything, I should be rebelling against that in adulthood, eschewing anything that aims to subjugate me and make me submissive. Somehow, I have left those experiences behind, yet found my true submissiveness, that which I think I was born with. I believe I am an adult submissive despite my upbringing, not because of it.

This goes to my belief that my adult submissiveness is actually a kind of sexual orientation. That’s another conversation, and one I’ve written about before.

My point is that I am a writer today because I was born with a brain that was adept at ideas and stories (and likewise not adept at putting things together — mechanics).

And I am a submissive today because I was born to be this way, oriented from birth to live a submissive life.

There is truth in both nurture and nature, of course — each well illustrated in my life by a dairy product.

Nurture makes me long for a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream on the porch on a Sunday night.

Nature makes me long for Amanda, as an act of her dominance, to smear mint chocolate chip ice cream over my naked body and watch me drip.

submissive-in-waiting

Last night on the phone, Amanda called me her “submissive-in-waiting.”

I like the association with “lady-in-waiting,” which historically could refer to my favorite identity — courtesan. It’s also an appropriate nod to Amanda’s implicit royalty, as she is ever and always the queen of me.

She continues to remind me that I have not been gone that long, but it feels like an eternity. Here with Mother, much has happened regarding her hospitalization and ongoing condition, medical decisions and paperwork, and constant engagement with Mother’s people. But back home, the worlds of McKenna and Amanda have not changed much, it seems. They both have day jobs they’ve worked as usual without me around. Nothing has really happened, nothing is different, and it’s all there as I left it.

That’s comforting in some way. I think it’s why I long to be caged — it’s about a place, a space, where I am contained and where I belong. And so, for this submissive-in-waiting, the Great Room and the Wet Bar await unchanged, ready to hold me and defile me once again.

Master McKenna call

He calls me occasionally. At first it was every week but has been less frequent of late. He called Wednesday.

“I’m thinking you’ve replaced me by now,” I say.

“Not yet but taking applications. I’ve put the job request through HR.”

“Ha, ha. Glad to know I mean so much to you.”

“For some reason,” he says drolly, “my HR people balked at one of my job requirements. I listed ‘big tits.’ They said it wasn’t PC. Go figure.”

“Nice…” I reply.

He asks if I’m having any “adventures” out here. I sigh and tell him that absolutely nothing is going on. “I’ve taken to walking half naked in the woods,” I say. “It’s come to that.”

He likes hearing my submissive desperation. And I like being desperate in his presence. In normal times, me there with him, it would lead to something.

He asks about Mother. He has been genuinely concerned, and I sense it’s not just for my sake, but an empathy for her. He is not far from her age. I update him, and I tell him the latest thinking about Lucille providing live-in service, although I imagine he’s already heard that from Amanda.

“I think I will at least be back for a short time in June,” I say. “Just ten days or so… Maybe, I’m just thinking, maybe you might take me, even if not our regular schedule, just a few days?”

“Amanda will have plans for you.”

“I know. She wants to mate me with the whole neighborhood. But if I could convince her… You know, it could be a great opportunity for you.”

“Oh, really? How’s that?” I hear the smile in his voice.

“I’m at a point where I would do anything for you.”

“You already do.”

“OK… I know. That’s the problem of my being your slave. I have nothing to bargain with.”

“Besides,” he adds, “it sounds like if I took you, it would be more for your need than for my pleasure.”

“I kinda thought they were the same… But you’re going to make me beg for this, aren’t you.”

“I am.”

“I’ll work on that.”

“It’ll have to be a creative, utterly humiliating beg.”

“I was afraid of that.”

I ask him about his work. He talks business for a while, and how it’s been a season of travel for him. I wonder how he has gotten all the reports done. He says he’s farmed it out to one of his offices, but it’s a pain in the ass for him. “They get things wrong,” he says.

“I do too sometimes,” I say. “But you have me naked while I do them, so you don’t notice so much.”

He laughs.

“So, I think you should get me a cage,” I say impulsively. “A big vertical cage to put me in.” I go on to say that Amanda won’t get me one. “It’s all I can think about these days.”

“Maybe in the garden outside the wall of windows in the Great Room,” he says.

“Oh, Jeffress would have a field day with that.” (Jeffress is the landscaping guy at the mansion.)

“It would make a lovely bird cage. For a big bird.”

“See, now, you’re making fun,” I say. “I’m serious. No one takes me seriously on this. I’m telling you I am meant to be kept in a cage. It’s something you should want too.”

“Seems you have a lot to beg for.”

I sigh. “Like I say, working on that, sir.”

Being in conversation with him, this kind of repartee, heats my longing to serve him, to submit to his dominance. Out here, I have never been able to turn off my submissive desire, but it certainly has been running in idle. Every conversation with Master M revs it up once again.

He says he has another meeting in a few minutes. I thank him for the call and for bearing with my sassy demeanor, although I know he likes it.

“Oh, yes,” he adds, “before I go, there’s something else. About Maria. I’ll put it this way: If I actually did post a vacancy for your position, she might like to apply. I’m guessing.”

Maria is Master McKenna’s housemaid. “I’ve wondered about her,” I say. “She’s asked me a lot of questions. A little too curious for it not to be… something.”

“Well, one, she misses you. She’s asked about you a dozen times. Two, she’s afraid of me, but has mustered courage to ask me about what I do… with you.”

“Maria is afraid of you because of what you do to girls like me.”

Master M laughs. “Probably… She’s naturally timid, but I think some of that is a natural submissiveness…”

“I sense that too. Which may be why she’s curious.”

“So, I’ve been noodling on something,” he says. “It would be for when you’re back. Like for a longer chunk of time.”

“Whenever that is.”

“It’ll happen. With great respect for your mother’s situation, you’ll find a solution, and you’ll make it back… You need this too much.”

I sigh. “You have no idea.”

“So, this might be complicated. If Maria is open to it, I wonder if you might tutor her. In the art of submission.”

This is new. I take a moment to absorb it. “What’s your end goal?” I ask, using his vocabulary.

“Big picture: a training program. If I am making the D/s retreats with dominant trainees a regular thing, it makes sense to me that I’d have a submissive training academy as well. Maybe they get paired. But that’s getting ahead of things. For now, I am just putting two pieces together, you and Maria. If she’s interested in learning.”

He’s talking about me in a way as if I’ve never left, including me in his Next Big Thing, and it warms my heart that I continue to partner with him in my own slavery.

“Would you be her dominant?” I ask.

“That’s the complicated part. I employ her, technically through one of my businesses. That poses legal problems. But I think there’s a way around that eventually.” He goes on to suggest that at first I approach Maria casually about her own submissive orientation. “See if something’s there.” Then he says maybe it could progress to my teaching her the basics about the submissive life. “I’ll provide you time for that,” he says. “After a while you’ll tell her that you’ll approach me about allowing her to observe you when you’re with me.” And he says that in time he could work it out, if she wishes, to submit to him. “It could be a modest D/s with her, simple and relatively mild. Whatever she wishes to try.”

Like a top exec, he’s worked it all out. While he seems genuinely interested in helping Maria find her own submissive self — it’s consistent with the Master Teacher he is — I also sense he has a desire for another submissive, to have two of us. That would be interesting. Much for me to chew on.

“Sounds like a workable plan,” I finally say. “Yes, of course. I will gladly do that.”

“Good… And, by the way, when you come out here for the ten days… work it out with Amanda. Yes, of course, I will have you.”

“In so many ways…” I sigh.

“Exactly.”

morgan’s woods

I park the car in a little alcove off the dirt road that runs through Morgan’s Woods. There is no traffic here, probably only the owner himself, Mr. Morgan, as I imagine him bearded and fifty, I presume, canvassing his property in a faded blue Ford pickup. Rich people always have a beater truck they love to drive in.

The alcove is not visible from the dirt road. I made sure of that. So, my imagined Mr. Morgan would not stop along his prowl to investigate who was poaching on his land.

I leave the car and walk about a hundred yards into the dense forest. There is no path, no one has ever trodden down these leaves, which is part of the experience I like. I come upon a glade where sun breaks through. There is a patch of grass, green and fresh, and I sometimes come back here with a towel to lie down and bask in the sun. But today I have farther to go.

Still, this glade is where I take off my top. I’m in a flannel shirt of orange-and-sienna plaid, and I slowly unbutton it as if the woods is my lover looking. I pull my shirt off, and my pale breasts feel the cool air. There’s a branch of a sapling that serves every time as a hanger, and I drape the shirt there, where it hovers like a ghost in my closet.

Topless now, I walk farther toward my sweet spot, through thickets of maples and oaks with low branches that spank my breasts like whips. Ten minutes of this, and I will be reddened and scraped, marked by nature, which is, to me, a lovely thing. Especially here in this world of proper living and dull kindness, the scratchy pain of it is an experience of love. It is about feeling, well, something, anything.

My spot these days is a particular oak tree set at the edge of a creek.

I am disallowed from wearing jeans or shorts, which would be the dress code for woods-walking, so I wear a short denim skirt and my orange-striped tennis shoes. The denim would be too heavy for Amanda’s liking — she’d prefer me in thin cotton — but I need to sit on twigs and leaves, and the heavier fabric offers a slight cushion for my unpantied flesh underneath.

Here I sit, against the oak, and I lean my head back, closing my eyes. I feel the breeze off the creek against my breasts, and I smell the earthy aroma of the forest loam. The silence is not actually silence — it is a constant rustle of leaves, trees chattering in the background, a hushing lullaby that sends me into half sleep.

I have dreams. Dreams of being taken and tied, like my forest play with childhood friends. And more adult dreams as well, being roped to trees, face-in, my flesh tender against the bark and my arms circling around the girth of a trunk, as if embracing the phallus of a god.

Later I awaken and step gingerly down to the creekside. There’s a spot with stepping stones into the middle of the trickling water. I make my way, each hop step jouncing my tits, until I stand in the middle of the waterway, with cold water seeping through my shoes.

It is time to go. I walk back, I stop at the glade and retrieve my shirt, but do not put it on. I find my car in the alcove, and there I begin to clothe myself again. But I have another thought. I put my flannel shirt in the car.

I walk, bare-breasted, out to the main road.

I do not know what I hope for here. Perhaps I simply wish to extend this nature-reverie. But it matters to me to be revealed as I am, somehow, even unto no one. Or else, it’s the danger of the stray someone driving through. More likely I long for the humiliation of the mere possibility.

Maybe it’s just that I hope to meet Mr. Morgan stopping, peering out of his faded blue Ford pickup, and enjoying the view in his woods.

out… and about Lucille

I came out to Lucille yesterday.

I’m in a kind of reckless, what-the-hell moment these days, my submissiveness having been untouched for so long. My dialogues with Jeremy are wonderful, but they leave me with longing in the very personal parts of me he is probing, a wishfulness for what I had before. My slavery has become nostalgia.

This was somehow my impulse to tell her. I needed someone else to know.

Lucille spells me with Mom during my afternoons at the diner with Jeremy, so she knows about Jeremy and our college friendship.

It happened that Lucille was here yesterday afternoon for a time. Mother was napping, and Lucille and I were on the porch talking. She asked me about Jeremy, what we talk about at the diner. I could have steered away from that but didn’t. I just impulsively felt like telling her about what I am.

I just said I “need to tell you something.” And it went from there.

My coming-out experiences, limited as they’ve been, have had to navigate the double-punch of my personal reveal: that I am bisexual and that I am submissive. The problem is that people are likely to be judgmental of the first and clueless about the second.

I’ve come to a shorthand for this, focusing primarily on my bisexual orientation and my relationship with Amanda. “I’m in a relationship with another woman…” so it goes, and so it went with Lucille. The news of my submissive orientation can seep out later, even naturally, as it did here — but more on that in a moment.

I never know in these parts what any particular person believes, what they consider to be morality. While certainly not everyone in this region of Pennsylvania is morally judgmental, this particular burb is immersed in the conservative religion of my childhood world. Lucille comes from this too, so I expected some measure of judgment or even rejection from her.

She was reserved at first, not saying much, and I felt perhaps I had made a big error. I know people need time to process, but even so, Lucille’s countenance remained cloudy, hard to read, and I had the sense this was not going to end well.

She just said, “Thank you for telling me.”

“Well,” I said, “I just thought I should say something. In light of my dates with Jeremy. He has a girlfriend, and, well, I do too. He and I are just friends.”

Again, Lucille was slow in responding. She eventually spoke: “I have a sister. She lives in Florida. We have always been close. She is gay…” Lucille now looked over at me with a soft smile. “I just want her to be happy.”

We talked more then about her sister, details that should remain private. I mentioned that I had come out to Mother a couple of years ago. “Now we all know,” I said.

Later, Lucille noted that I often wear a collar. I have worn chokers out in public, but at the house I’ve worn metal. She asked if my collar was like a “ring of commitment” to Amanda. “Kind of,” I said. “You might say we have a different kind of relationship.” I chose not to try to explain further, not to itemize “different.” Lucille didn’t ask.

That was all that needed to be shared for now about my submissive lifestyle.

I still don’t know exactly how Lucille thinks about my orientation. I find that church people can have strong biblical beliefs against bi and gay, but for some, when it involves a member of the family or a close friend, it becomes a different reality. There’s a mental opposition but an emotional acceptance.

Perhaps that’s true for Lucille. But in these moments Lucille was clearly accepting of her sister, supportive, it seems, and loving.

And she remains warm and friendly with me. That’s all I can expect.

Recklessly impulsive as my coming out was, it occurred to me later it needed to be done.

Amanda will be visiting soon, her length of stay still to be determined, and our relationship will be obvious to anyone who hangs around us for more than a cup of coffee. Lucille will be here frequently, as she always is; she and Amanda will meet; Lucille will see us together.

Amanda is never discreet with me, doesn’t have to be, but I imagine she’ll try to be sensitive to Lucille’s presence. Still, there will be kissing and the kind of touching of me Amanda does that’s delightfully inappropriate. At some point, that and my freckled blush will be witnessed.

Even so, what will be most telltale, what will give us away, is the simple look we exchange, the one in which Amanda peers into my deepest parts, the core of me she owns, and sees my trembling and willing abandonment to her.

But for a while longer, that’s just nostalgia.

Jeremy 4: submissive and the world (b)

This is a continuation of my diner-time with Jeremy Thursday. What I’ve reassembled here, I admit, is a bit of a jumble. Some things are out of order, but I can’t seem to fix it. My sorries. It is what it is…

After a while, we order pie. The diner has a carousel display of fresh-baked pies at the front, and it’s been our custom to order a wedge after a couple hours of chatting. I don’t eat desserts as a rule, and I haven’t been around Amanda of late, who adores chocolate, so I feel in general I’m on the calorie-deficit side of things, enough to “keep my figure,” as they used to say. (I sound like a sixties housewife. These days, I kind of am.) In any case, this is the train of rationalization that justifies in my mind this gorgeous piece of key-lime pie.

Again, Jeremy and I have other conversation, on other topics. These posts are not as linear as I report them to be. We circle and twist around the orbits of a number of subjects. In this case, it swings back to a question about social benefit and value.

“It seems you and I both agree,” Jeremy says, “as to the value of sex work in a society. I wonder if you feel the same way about your lifestyle submission and slavery.”

“Yes, I do, but of course a lot of D/s is still private, between dom and sub couples, and that’s fine, but it means it’s simply not really public or social. Most doms and subs probably don’t think much about that. When you’re chained to a wet bar, you don’t necessarily have a vision of social betterment.”

Jeremy laughs. “Probably not… but it seems your Amanda thinks that way. That there’s an ultimate purpose in the world for your lifestyle.”

“She does. She wants it all to be public. Keeping a slave as a kind of marital status.”

“Wet bar situations aside, do you see a benefit — that you provide a benefit to others you are, ah… with?”

I nod. He continues to have an impression I am generally shared with multiple people, and there needs to be some parsing of that. I am shared visually with multiple people, yes, but I am not yet given to strangers for sex. But I decide now to let that go and just roll with his questions.

“I think so, yes,” I say. “Although that may be just more about my own need for purpose. I like to think I am improving another person’s life in a submissive way. Though I sometimes feel I justify my scandal by presuming that I am a benefit to others.”

“I think,” Jeremy replies, “the others who have you don’t have any question about your benefits.”

I get a phone call. It’s Lucille, asking about a medication for mother. I leave our booth, taking the call into the diner’s entryway, but as soon as I get there, I’ve settled it with Lucille and head back.

“I’ve been fascinated,” Jeremy is saying, “by your interest in the roles of the courtesan in history.”

I’m pleased he remembers that from my blog. I talk a bit about that with him, but won’t belabor it in this post — I’ve covered that ground before.

But I tell him I believe that courtesans were used for daily remedies of social needs. They were used in a variety of roles that helped people get through the challenges of life each day. Likewise, today people in life have tensions, frustrations, needs — of all kinds, but including sexual — that often are pent up until they burst out in unhealthy, even violent ways. “These days, I think it’s all the more needed — a condition of modern and technological life,” I say. “I believe sex workers and social submissives like me provide in various ways a relief, release, of those knots in people’s lives.”

“Sexually, you mean.”

“Well, I think we tend to boil it down to sex, but it involves more than that — conversation, companionship, counseling, even massage, and then sometimes simply a playground for someone to play in for a few hours. I think this is what this could be. Should be.”

We went on a short tangent about the role of “relationship” in all this. This is something that fascinates him in his sex-worker interviews.

“Both sex worker and client seem to tacitly agree that as they have sex together, it doesn’t quote-unquote ‘mean anything.’ This, of course, provides the client a bit of cover for the other relationships he’s in — marriage, girlfriend, whatever. And the sex worker is distanced from any real attachment to the client. The sex is reduced to a function.”

Jeremy pauses there, and I wonder if he has a question in it for me. “Just how you think about that… and if you and Amanda deal with any of that in your lifestyle.”

“A lot to unpack,” I say.

“Well, I don’t need an answer. It’s just something I’m thinking about.”

I offer this: “I can’t help but think that we lose a piece of ourselves if we live life as if it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Well said.”

“Well, I understand that sex work is a business, and a working girl has to protect her heart. So, I can’t judge that. But for me, I can’t survive if my encounters aren’t relational. They have to mean something to me.”

“But that goes against the lifestyle you’re in. Being used functionally, being objectified. Potentially being shared with strangers.”

“Yeah, I know it sounds like a contradiction. And I don’t know how to answer you regarding strangers… But I guess I’m saying that even in being objectified, I have to allow myself to feel. If I tell myself this ‘doesn’t mean anything,’ I’m hardening myself to myself.”

“And it seems to me,” Jeremy adds, “that others watching you, your doms or neighbors, want to see you feeling it.”

“Yes. In all those experiences, for me there’s a relationship. In my being used, in my humiliations, there is an exchange between me and another, there is something between us. It may be just a shard of relationship, but it is something exchanged.”

“Is that still true when you are used for submissive sex?” he asks.

“Well, yes. But let me back up first. This has been a big shift for me, Jeremy, from my religious upbringing. I’ve come to believe that sex is not the most important thing, not the definition of ultimate relationship. Relationships can be sexual or not, and sex can be with multiple people not just one. Sex is not the most important thing — but neither is it nothing. Sex is never meaningless, it’s always significant and personal. Just not necessarily the ultimate measure of relationship.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Jeremy admits, but let me rephase it this way: when you’re used for submissive sex, you don’t consider it the most ultimate or, say, exclusive commitment between two people, but you still feel it deeply. It’s meaningful to you somehow.”

“Yes,” I say. “There’s always, for me, emotional connection.” I look across at Jeremy deciding whether to say what’s in my thoughts. I go with it: “When someone is inside me, they’re inside me.”

There is another, lighter moment at some point that afternoon. I ask Jeremy about his sex-worker interviews. “Just curious, do you pay them for the time, then simply interview them? Or,” I say with a sly grin, “is there more going on?”

Jeremy feigns offense, with a smile: “I think that’s pretty personal, Shae.”

“Right. You’re asking me all these questions about my sex life, but when it gets turned on you, it suddenly gets too personal!”

He laughs. “Actually, in perfect honesty, I really am professional in the interviews. It’s always purely interview talk.”

“How do they react when you say you just want to talk — no sex?”

“Some are surprised. Others, well, I think they get that sometimes — clients who need to talk.”

“I wonder if some are disappointed. You’re a cute guy.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” he says, and now he is the one blushing.

Jeremy circles back to a previous thread. He always circles back. He refers to when I said that sex workers and social submissives provide a service of relieving the knots in people’s lives. He asks, “Was that your original vision for yourself in slavery?”

“No, not at first. You get into this, the lifestyle, and in the beginning it’s very personal, private. I think for many female submissives lucky enough to find a responsible male dom, it’s a Christian Gray moment, and it was for me with Michael. Romantic, sort of, and that’s a long, kind of painful story, but for me intensely personal in its kink. I didn’t yet have a vision for the lifestyle, and certainly didn’t see it as a social, public thing.”

I pause for a bite of my key-lime pie. Don’t know why key-lime has become a new thing for me. It’s so good here… I continue: “But it’s been Amanda’s vision all along to make me a social submissive, which I think is similar to that of courtesan, and I have come along to adopt her same vision.”

“So you see yourself now as something of a social service.”

I blink at that, as it sounds oddly objectifying coming from Jeremy. Not that I am offended. I smile. “I think of several people who might see me that way.”

“But do you see yourself that way?”

“Yes. Not solely that, but yes, in some measure. I think social submissives, sex workers too, can be kind of the oil, so to speak, that greases the troubles of life for others. And I am used that way.”

“You mean sexually.”

“Yes, but it’s not that only. You always seem to reduce it to that!”

Jeremy shrugs. “I’m a guy.”

I smile, shake my head. “Anyway… what I provide, I think, the social service, as you put it, is an experience of a lot of things — control of someone, ease of life, erotic moments, and sometimes sex too. I don’t think of it as just about sex. I think all of it as pleasure. It’s all a facilitation of pleasure.”

“That’s your social service.”

“Well, it’s a certain kind of pleasure, for sure, not for everyone. But for dominants, people who want to control, yes.”

“And for people who want to watch you being controlled.”

“Yes. All who can get into that, the kink of it, or maybe just the novel entertainment of what I am to them… But I think I am of value to some of those people, doms for sure, because I don’t expect anything in return, there are no strings, and I am not a problem or complication. I am simply—”

“Lubrication,” Jeremy says with a grin.

I shake my head in exasperation. “If I had a pillow, I’d throw it at you.” I chuckle: “But yes, actually yes, kind of like that.”

Jeremy 3: submissive and the world (a)

At the diner yesterday… another time with Jeremy. This is in two parts.

Jeremy asks things of me from other angles than I’m used to. Perhaps that’s why I indulge his inquisitiveness, his probings. His interest is interesting.

We sit down at the diner, order our usual coffees, and after a few minutes of catching up on the past two weeks, Jeremy launches into a question. It seems to be something he has been pondering since we last met, and it becomes a thread of conversation for this particular Thursday.

“Do you wish the world would accept your lifestyle, like, consider it a normal aspect of life in vanilla society?”

I have to think about that and take my time to answer. “I wouldn’t want it to be normalized,” I finally say. “Not in the sense of people taking it in stride, paying no attention. Living in the public stigma of it is part of the submissive experience.”

“The humiliation aspect. You need to be looked down upon.”

“Kind of like that, yes. I guess I would say that I would wish D/s could be accepted yet not normalized. Accepted simply in the sense that the practice of D/s could be more public and not hidden behind closed doors.”

“Is that what you have at home with Amanda and around the neighborhood?”

Again, I haven’t thought of it that way before. “Sorta, I guess.” I sip my iced latte. It’s bitter, and this distracts me. Diners are not cafes, nor are waitresses baristas. That sounds snooty to say, and I’m no connoisseur anyway. I return to the question, throwing it back to him: “How do you mean?”

“Seems that your neighbors know what you are and accept you. Yet it’s not considered normal to them.”

“Yes, I guess you’re right… they’re all friendly to me. Accepting in that way… I think, frankly, it’s all a little overwhelming to them, Amanda with me on a leash, how to respond to it. So, there’s nothing “normal” in it to them, but they’re open to it.”

“Curious and lusting, no doubt.”

“I suppose.”

“I wonder,” Jeremy presses on, “if you would wish your lifestyle to be viewed more like sex work today. It’s getting somewhat more accepted, though still bears a stigma.”

As I recall, we swirl off onto a tangent. Jeremy has been writing an article on sex workers and has been interviewing people. We talk on that awhile, then he circles back with a little grimace: “I didn’t mean to compare you to a sex worker…”

“Not offended,” I interrupt with a smile. “I have a high view of sex work, actually… and, with Kevin, I’ve been an escort, sort of… No, I accept the comparison, but the two are a little different — D/s is a lifestyle and sex work is a profession. I’m just saying that I wish my lifestyle were more publicly passable.”

“Maybe the comp is more like sexual orientation. Wishing the public would be more accepting of two men or two women walking down the street holding hands. For you it’s being walked on a leash.”

With the mention of Kevin, I opened a door, and now Jeremy walks through it, asking me questions about my being an escort: “How did that feel to you? The role of escort to him.”

I ordered an iced tea, setting aside my iced latte. It’s a powdered mix, not much better, but I sip it anyway. “At first,” I reply, “I was more concerned about not being his slave than with being his escort. I wasn’t sure I knew how to be with him if he wasn’t commanding me, giving me orders. That kind of worked out in short time, but by then, I was already in the escort role with him, and I didn’t think about it too much. Well, that’s a lie– I did worry about it for a while. How to be with him on equal terms but in the escort role. But it sort of developed naturally.”

“I suppose it was different from real escorting in that you already knew Kevin so well.”

“True. Although I understand that some high-end escort have just a few clients who pay them for companionship for weeks on end. They get to know their clients quite well. So maybe it’s not so different.”

“With Kevin, were you actually paid for?”

I sip my tea and peer out over my glass at him, bearing a “do you really want to go here” look. “No and yes. Amanda, in providing me to him that way, wanted to create a semblance of my being bought as an escort, for my own experience of it. So, Kevin left an envelope of payment on the morning of my departure, after each week with him. It was never that much, only a symbol, but it created the illusion, gave me the feeling of it.”

“Of being paid for sex.”

“Yes.”

“How did that feel to you?”

“It’s a thing. Even though it was a token symbol, I was aware I was being paid for sex. I mean it’s not traumatic, but it’s sobering. You always want to be thought of as being valuable for more, that there’s a relationship, but then it comes down to his using your body. You feel diminished.”

Jeremy is nursing a coffee, and though he usually drinks it black, this time he’s added cream. He tells me that about the women he’s interviewing, and how they believe what they do is providing a necessary service and take a kind of pride in what they do. “Being paid for it,” he adds, “is a necessary thing, yet they seem to have an emotional regret in that. Sort of what you’re saying.”

“I agree it’s a necessary service,” I say. “I see it that way too. It should be more on the level of social work or psychological counseling… But, yes, I think, well, for women at least, there’s often a longing for the relationship and the nature of the work, as legitimate as it may be, gets reduced to a payment for sex.”

“Could you ever see yourself doing escort work?”

That’s sort of a non-starter, and I tell him so. “As long as I’m Amanda’s slave-girl, such a thing wouldn’t be possible.”

“Well maybe that’s the better question: If Amanda decided she wanted to hire you out as an escort to various clients, would you do it?”

I sip my powdered iced tea and look across the table at him. “Yes.”

Jeremy 2: my bi

Jeremy and I have now had maybe four? meets at the diner. I continue to share my memories of our conversations, reconstructing them as I can. My memory of the conversations is not linear and swirl around in my head — I am likely to repeat myself, probably have. Our conversations themselves may have covered same ground from other diner times.

Moreover, I forget what I’ve posted before. Or written before — apart from any conversation with Jeremy. Long story short, I fear I am repeating things, so bear with me. I hope it’s still of interest — if only as a real-life example of how I talk about my life and sexuality in the presence of another person, a friend.

BTW, I’m renumbering some of these as just “Jeremy” with an added topic title. Eventually I’ll put all the Jeremy conversation in a separate folder at the top of my blog. (I kind of want to title these “Diner Dishes.”)

We talk about other things too, things not my current life, often reminiscing about our college years. I don’t recount those conversations here, as our references to people and events wouldn’t mean anything to my readers. But it’s a memory lane reverie for us, fun and richly poignant, as we each recall the future we imagined then and the future we’re in now.

Jeremy says, “We eventually become who we really are.”

We agree that in college — in our “arts & lit” cohort — we had visions of a life of the highest level artistic accomplishment — which we have not achieved. We also agree in retrospect, we really didn’t want that. Those aspirations were interests, perhaps, but not who we really are.

He confesses he had aims to become a “man of letters,” so to speak, a writer of the finest literature. But here he is as a stringer for an assortment of periodicals, writing human-interest articles. “But, you know, Shae,” he says, “this is what makes me happy. This is what I was supposed to become.”

I tell him I am blessed to be able to write. I share with him about some of my other writing outside my blog — and vow that I intend to get back to my erotica and mainstream fiction. “I don’t think much about getting published. That may or may not happen. But it is deeply satisfying just to write.”

He is curious as to how much I knew about myself in college in light of my lifestyle now.

I laugh. “Well I certainly didn’t think then that my high purpose in life was to become a sex slave!” I say it a little too loudly. Fortunately, at mid-afternoon the diner is not busy.

“You might,” Jeremy says with a smile, “want to use your inside voice.”

I laugh, blushing.

There’s a snippet of conversation that may have come in here or perhaps was in another diner visit. I share with him how I feel I’m about a “decade behind” in life. “I wish I had known at 19 what I knew of myself at 29.”

“I think most everyone can say that.”

“Yes, but my history is a slow self-reveal of my sexuality. I was delayed because of my upbringing. I wish I had come earlier to understand my bisexuality. And my submissiveness.”

He talks about his girlfriend (whom I will call Phoebe) in glowing terms. It leads him back to his self-confessed “sorry” dating life in college and romantic interests since.

He asks about my dating life back then: “Did you date a lot? I don’t recall.”

I dated some, I tell him, not a lot. I mention one guy I was kind of steady with one year and another I hung out with during a summer semester. “In college, at first, I was still kind of new to the dating scene. I didn’t date much in high school.”

“How much did you know of your bisexuality back in college?”

“I was aware, kinda sorta,” I tell him.

“Was it, I mean, because of your church stuff, was it a problem for you?”

It’s a great question, and while I have sifted through that part of my life before, I pause and take a sip of my coffee before answering. “The church calls it ‘same-sex attraction,’ and they see it as a sin, yes… They respect that some struggle with it, so to speak, and aren’t judgmental if you fight it, but they expect it to be overcome — somehow… Sure, I was aware of being attracted to girls in high school and college, but I never really saw it as a struggle. It wasn’t a fight for me.”

“Then did you see it as a sin inside you?”

I smile at his language. He’s outside the evangelical culture and doesn’t know the lingo. “Church stuff” and “sin inside you” are a little distant and “off.” No matter, I know what he means.

“Well, for me,” I finally say, “it was a background thing. I didn’t really think of myself as being bi in orientation… Also, I think some of this is different for girls than guys.”

“How do you mean?”

“Women have a more natural physical intimacy together. Even straight women commonly touch and hold hands and kiss, just as girlfriends. In college, I considered my attractions sort of in that category. It was more than that for me, but I rationalized it that way.”

“Did you have any girl-girl relationships at school?”

“Sort of. On occasion. Did you know Ashley Smith? Blonde, slender, some said she was bossy. But she was cute.

“She doesn’t ring a bell.”

“She was in other circles than ours. She was an athlete, volleyball and field hockey. I got tossed in with her on a project during some class I was in. I developed a crush on her.”

“Did that become something?”

“No and yes. We hung out together for a while. You know, social things but not as formal dates. She always initiated, asked me if I was going to something. I’d say I was thinking of it, and she say ‘Let’s go together.’ All of it was girlfriend-ish-ness.”

Jeremy laughs at my coined word.

“Well,” I say, “that’s what it is. For women it’s sometimes just a whisper of distance between friendship and intimacy. It’s girlfriend stuff… until it’s more.”

“May I ask if you ever got intimate with Ashley?”

“We did, mildly so. We kissed sometimes. Once we made out in the back seat of a car, but not all they way. We kept our clothes on but there was more intimate touching, yes. But it was nothing more, and nothing further after that one time. She had to leave school because of a family heath issue.”

“Did you later feel guilty about that make-out time with her in the car?”

“No. I never did. I think I liked it too much.”

sex-pourri

She has still not allowed me to touch myself, a deprivation she maintains with wicked glee. She knows I attribute my unrequited yearnings to her. Abstinence is my obedience, my submission to her hand of dominance reaching across the country.

I would never defy her, intentionally plunging my oiled fingers between my wet labia lips and into my vagina. (Sigh.) But it spurs thoughts of how it could happen “accidentally.” It wouldn’t take much to send me into shudders of orgasm.

(Suddenly, I long to ride a horse.)

The real temptation is in the shower with a soapy loofah sponge. I have to clean myself, right? Yet cleaning time seems to be slightly less than what it takes for orgasmic “accidents” to happen, however primed I already am. My “Amanda-conscience” will not let me linger long enough.

On the phone I tell Amanda I now will consent to sex with total strangers.

She laughs, saying, “This is a new thing?”

“I maybe never said it before.”

“You gave me full control long ago.”

“I know. Just sayin’.”

“You,” she says, “would fuck anything right now, wouldn’t you.”

“Pretty much…”

“I like keeping you this way,” she says.

When Amanda visits in a couple weeks, she says she will allow me to climax. She says it will be in the woods where I like to go these days. She will make me naked. And she will watch.

remote D/s

So, it seems that my future will inevitably require me to be apart from Amanda for periods of time. Even if things work out with Lucille, I will be back here for periods during the year. In light of that, there is consideration of remote dominance — of Amanda “mistressing” me from afar.

I had tossed this out on my blog some posts ago, and some of you offered suggestions for my long-distance submission and humiliation. (You are so kind! she says sarcastically!) I said I would return to this in my blog and list the ideas sent in. Here that is.

Many of you have experience in remote D/s. I do not. This is new to me, so I am learning from you. Thank you, much appreciated.

Here are the ideas you generated:

Amanda could resume dictating what you wear each day. (Olivia)
She could make you go topless at your mother’s house, just as she does when you’re at home with her. (KK)
Mistress A could text you randomly to kneel in the moment no matter where you are or what you’re doing. (Mister Archie)
She could make you wear a butt plug during the day. (Vivian)
Amanda could give you assignments you must fulfill within a 48-hour period. (Olivia)
Amanda could use WhatsApp for video chat with you. (Scott)
Mistress Amanda could have you write a short piece on someone, a stranger you see in public, and how you would approach him or her offering yourself for sex. (Jeremy)
She could use an Internet-connected remote control vibrator device on you. (John)
Amanda could have you write a five-minute meditation on your serving her. (Olivia)
She could have you wear an obvious slave collar in public, maybe with one of those “half-leashes” attached. (KK)
Amanda could have you choose one person you encounter each day for you to tell her how you imagine he or she would dominate you. (Joosie)

This list remains open for new ideas. I will deliver this to Amanda when she visits in a couple of weeks.

I won’t comment on these yet, except to clarify that my mother would not be much affected by my D/s appearance or even occasional nudity around the house. As I’ve written on my blog times before, I have come out to her, and she is approving of my D/s relationship with Amanda. When she is lucid, she asks me questions about my lifestyle. All to say, suggestions from you that would happen within the house are likely feasible.

There is something I wish to say here, a kind of apology.

This season of my life with mother has made me more aware of how rare a true face-to-face, living-together D/s life really is. Many of you have expressed your own situations of remote D/s, along with wishes you could have the kind of immersed life of submission with live-in dominants that I have. Others of you have marriages and families and jobs to juggle, and you struggle to find the time and energy for the D/s lifestyle you desire.

I think I’ve been aware of those realities but perhaps have not really known how it feels or the challenge it truly is. Now I have a taste of that.

Up to now, I have hoped my circumstance as a submissive living in slavery is of benefit to others. But now I regret if at times I’ve offered my life as a possibility to those for whom it is not possible. I am sorry for that, and I will aim to be more sensitive to that going forward.