Arousal, Desire, and the Lightness of Being

Spanking. The rules of the dungeon were such as to initiate me as a submissive. No one graduated to become a dominatrix until they were a submissive first. I wore a white lace bodice that corseted me in and a garter belt with white thigh-high stockings. My submissive attire was to look girlish and innocent. Sweet. And I’m real good at being sweet. I’m a darling girl.

The dominatrix took me into a room fashioned like a classroom. In place were school desks and a chalkboard. She gently bent me over the teacher’s desk. Wearing her black latex outfit and shiny thigh high boots, she looked like a rocker from the late 80′s. I almost expected to see an electric guitar strapped to the front of her. In a way, she looked like Nancy Wilson from the rock band Heart. She was excited that I was so willing to become a submissive. Her thrill bubbling over her cool exterior, she was gentle when guiding my hips into position. Much like a yoga instructor helping me out with the proper pose of “down dog,” she angled my ample bottom into an upwards place. Contrary to my ideas of dominatrix behavior, she was, well… sweet to me.

This was when I realized the connection between my arousal and the sense of trust and safety. Mental connection and mutual respect needs to be the foundation for such explorations. The dominatrix was doing her best to make me comfortable, without pushing me beyond my threshold.

While I was bending over the teacher’s desk, the dominatrix gave my bottom a light swat with her leather paddle. It felt a little cold and kind of soft. The sting didn’t come until a few more swats to my behind. I felt a flush of excitement thrum through my body—my neck turned red and splotched, my face tingled. I was blushing. My body was responding with arousal. She didn’t say much but mentioned that she’d have to give me a number of spanks in order to train me properly as a submissive. The paddle was warming up, and the swats turned into full leather blows to my cushiony bottom. The ample amount of tush I had served me well. She caressed one of my cheeks with her hand, feeling the heat. She devilishly remarked how red my bottom was getting and giggled. It seemed as though she was enjoying it with all the mischievous glee of a naughty child stealing a cookie.

And just when I was getting into it… she was done. My eyes were glazing, my head lowered, facing the desk. A rush of sexual tingling flowed through my sex. I was swollen and wet; juicy through my white lace panties. I wanted her to do it more. The desks were all orderly, lined up in the classroom, facing the chalkboard like good children. I gave her a demure schoolgirl look like I wanted to be taken. I was aroused by the spanking, my breathing was heavy, and if she had pulled my hair and took me with a dildo I would have allowed her to.

“There’s two things in this world: wonderful, visceral, sexy sex. And death. Horrible, boring death.”

~ Kieran, Dinner for Schmucks

Rough sex. It’s like anything extreme or intense. If it’s done properly, with the right ingredients, it’s delicious. If it’s not done with skill, if it’s devoid of emotion, it can be awful. Cooking is much the same.

If you don’t handle your ingredients with care, you’ll ruin the whole meal. Don’t just thrash around the kitchen, stir things violently, cook haphazardly over a high flame, without knowing how to manage things in an artful way. Otherwise you might as well just microwave it and forget about what it tastes like. It’ll end up as inedible cardboard. And that is how I feel about rough sex without the right ingredients.

And I have had a desire for rough sex lately, which is an unusual thing for me. What I thought I liked or what I felt safe with was soft, gentle, and loving sexual encounters. Most of the time, I want it slow. Tenderness, caresses, and kisses. And then, past the point of orgasm and beyond, I long for my lover to take me as hard as he can. I want more. When I enter this zone, there is an emotional realm, a hidden place that runs along the periphery of my brain, and that realm asks for it rough. I want to be pushed into intensity. I want pleasure, and I want more of it. I want it harder, deeper, more. I need that animalistic sex— the pulling of my hair, the pounding into my body, the growling, screaming, moaning, wild fucking of sex.

Most of my life I’ve responded to sweetness. Sweet behavior and treatment opens me up, allows me to respond. If you are sweet, thoughtful, and gentle with me, I will most certainly enjoy (when the mood strikes) rough sex. You see, I don’t respond to rough right away. Crude behavior is a big turn off. Rough doesn’t mean you can be a boorish ogre and get your way with me.

Going back to the memory of being spanked by that dominatrix in that dungeon. Odd to say, but it was one of the most pleasant experiences I’ve had with a stranger. She was caring and feminine, strong yet soft.

It happened out of necessity. After I had moved back from New Orleans, I needed a job. I had just had my son— he was just a baby then. I was a single mother. My body was still carrying the extra pregnancy weight. Add to that, living in New Orleans. All the food. The wonderful, delicious, gourmet-buttery food. The extra weight wasn’t unattractive, just a little zaftig. Curvy.

I was thirty years old. I was in the prime of my life. And the strip club that I once worked at in Los Angeles wouldn’t hire me back. I was once one of their best girls.

Ten years before then, I had made them a fortune. They gave me any shifts I wanted, and I left with hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, each day. My body was supple, young, and tanned, with a small waist you could put both hands around, and large, bountiful (albeit silicone) breasts. My hips were sensual and feminine, and my legs as long as a gazelle. In heels, I was towering, over six feet tall. When I emerged from behind the curtain, the slow bump and grind of my hips melted men’s minds, moving like syrupy molasses onstage. With my sultry gaze, I mesmerized men by the crowd. Men lined up for me, waiting, for a private dance. Hordes, dozens, hundreds of men spent their pretty wallets up dry just to have me near. I was in my early twenties. Pretty face, healthy as a thoroughbred, intelligent mind. Not a wrinkle on my face or a reason to be discouraged. To add to my arsenal of seduction, I had a growing comprehension of what men really wanted. My British cousin once said disdainfully: “You’ve always been a man magnet.”

Surprisingly, this time, the club wouldn’t take me back. The manager I dubbed “Valium Bob” poked my belly with his bony index finger.

“What’s this?” he prodded.

“My belly, of course.” I snipped back.

I wanted to say that this was how women naturally look. Surrounded by the new girls, all of them skinny as supermodels in their rhinestone-studded bikinis, Valium Bob was surrounded by girls that resembled greyhound dogs. Compared to my womanly belly dancer curves, I stood out. I wondered, how did this happen? Wasn’t it just years ago I was scooping up bills off the main stage? Slithering out of my satin gowns, giving sideways looks, casting spells over any man like a siren to a sailor, drawing him closer toward the rocky collision of lust. I was the Princess of the Bare Elegance. Where were the girls I knew before? So I had to get over myself. It was all as false as the breasts in that club. And my breast implants had been removed years ago. The moment of pseudo-downfall and has-been realization was no matter. It wasn’t a small world my mind existed in. I saw it for what it was: superficial and nonsense. I had developed an illusion, a mechanism, to exist in that world. But, when my belly was poked by a scrawny, drugged up slimeball, I took offense. My feminist perspective found this behavior in men to push me beyond loathing. I kept my disgust at bay, held my head high, and gracefully stated that I wasn’t about to kill myself with amphetamines or crystal meth in order to work in their club. I walked out.

I had just given birth six months prior to that moment. I was back in Los Angeles, far from the Big Easy of butter and cream. I was not in New Orleans anymore. Dazzling through my mind, thoughts were spinning around, like a dancer spinning down a metal pole. I was wondering what happened to Lucky, Sasha, Heather, Precious, Cherry, Zee, Anita Dawn, and Renee— my sisterhood? The new girls were Fembots, representative of the stereotypical strippers. And those girls were thin, stick-thin, emaciated— some I suspected were anorexic or worse. And everyone in Los Angeles, it seemed, was fixated on body image, whether they knew it or not. It was a rude awakening from the sleepy romance of Louisiana bayou and Nouvelle-Orléans grace. In the Land of Hollywood, supermarkets contained shelves of magazines with celebrities on diets, and diet drinks, diet sodas, ‘lose weight now’ blurbs and fat-free options. Where was the joy of living? The laissez les bons temps rouler of New Orleans left behind, I was lost again in the asphalt maze of Los Angeles traffic and the underground of sex work in a megalopolis. It was a lonely place to be.

So I ended up working at that dungeon. I decided that it was an experimental thing until I lost the pregnancy weight. Then I’d go back to dancing. Or do something else. Besides, I liked being spanked. I guessed it would work out fine if I made some income from it. My behind was pleasantly plump. Spinal Tap’s song of adoration, Big Bottom, was fitting, unlike my old size eight jeans.

When I’ve had rough sex, it was done with love and emotion. The longing and ache to be set free from my contained nature, to have my lover pound me into glorious submission with his hard cock— to be shaken and stirred by the raw instinct— to be utterly taken. Surrender. It’s more about surrender and letting go of all control than violence. If it’s true violence, I’m not in the least interested— violence is not something that arouses me— I don’t want to be slapped in the face or called names. Violence is abhorrent. When I want rough sex, I want it to be about passion.

The most mind blowing rough sex scene I saw was in the erotic espionage film Lust, Caution by Ang Lee. I was pregnant with my third child when I went to see the film in the theater. I have always loved the Chinese actor Tony Leung. Any film he is in, I must watch. A parallel discovered. The parallel: my second pregnancy and my erotic fixation for Asian men which was awakened by a violent sword fight scene in House of Flying Daggers,— and again during my third pregnancy— the realization of my desire for rough sex while watching Lust, Caution. I was shocked to discover how it — rough sex and raw emotion— aroused me still. What was it about violent scenes that provoked? Was it intense love and passion that compelled me? The axis of that parallel erotic response was in correlation to my need for more. For passion and all its reasons, the vicissitudes of my experiential knowledge were weighing upon me. Physical weight, extra body weight, emotional weight—-

I want freedom. I crave lightness of being.

That sex scene in Lust, Caution— rough sex— he takes her with passion bordering on brutality. The emotions were intense, conflicting and layered. It was shocking and erotic. It was dark and dangerous, and tender and instinctual. She wants him; he takes her, roughly, on the bed. His belt buckle in hand, he’s violent with desire. I’m clutching the theater seat; my hands don’t know where to go. I can’t breathe. I’m holding my chest, my breath. I can’t watch. I’m watching. Shaking with undoing, I’m pregnant, and I want to be taken like that. My body is in conflict, wanting gentle treatment when carrying a child within my body. I am thrown into confusion. In the back of my mind, I want someone to take me like he takes her. It was done with finesse. Tony Leung, playing his part, in a sex scene that raised questions in my being as to why I want to be taken so, and the extreme emotions that go with the territory. Much like how lions subdue their mates with a bite to the neck during their mating habits and rituals, I want to surrender.

Perhaps the dangerous amount of intensity, when combined with strong emotion, lights my body up with a thrilling energy. I don’t want brutality. I want passion. Perhaps my body responds to extremes. Anal sex allows my body to feel an extra amount of intensity that vaginal sex doesn’t quite give me. When I am spanked, it’s a similar charge. It’s naughty, erotic. I love the intense orgasms I have during anal sex, which sends riveting tingling sensations and aftershocks of orgasmic pleasure through my entire body. I can reach such realms of heightened erotic stimulation during regular vaginal sex, but it takes longer. Anal sex, spanking, and rough, penetrative, emotional, animalistic sex with someone who adores me, someone I know would never truly hurt me, is the essential ingredient within the landscape of my erotic desire. Surrendering to someone who passionately loves me is the magical link to the core of my erotic being.

 

Tagged as: Ang Lee, black latex, desire, dominatrix, dungeon, emotion, erotic, erotic fascination, fetish, kink, leather paddle, lust, Lust Caution, passionate, psychosexual, rough sex, sex, sexual, sexual fetish, spank, spanking, submissive, swat