Sarah K - The Secret Life of a Submissive

So that was it: I was a pervert. My first very tentative attempt at expressing what I wanted – fuelled by a little wine and a lot of nerve – had been thrown back in my face. It confirmed what I had feared: nice men didn’t find this kind of stuff acceptable.

It was during that weekend that I decided it was time I found some way to let the genie out of the bottle and go in search of something else – something a little more rock and roll. I was in my mid-forties with a broken marriage and three children in their late teens and early twenties, and I wanted to try some of those things I had always dreamed of and been writing about, before it was too late. What had I got to lose?

It’s a scary journey to start all on your own. What I needed was a guide: someone to help me find my way through a sexual landscape about which, despite several books, in reality I had absolutely no idea – and more to the point, someone who I felt I could trust enough to bring me out wiser but unscathed on the other side.

It had also occurred to me that maybe when I got to the point of experimenting I would chicken out, so I also needed someone with a sense of humour and a lot of patience: someone who wouldn’t freak out if ultimately I put it all down to research.

I’m not sure I was setting out on a journey to look for a happy-ever-after with anyone, but there definitely had to be a spark, that magic indefinable something between us. What I needed was a hero, a dominant man – referred to as a Dom in the BDSM world – who I could trust implicitly and who I liked, and who was prepared to help me, and spank me, and who I fancied. And we all know how very easy men like that are to find …

Then again, if I didn’t try now, my fantasies would stay just that and I might as well settle down with someone like Henry and look forward to a lifetime of sensible pants and going Dutch.

When I arrived home after our weekend away I dumped him, put ‘BDSM’ into a search engine and watched the hits roll in. It is astonishing what you can find if you ask the right questions. There is everything you can ever want on the net and much more besides. Some of it in leather, some in plus sizes and an awful lot of it in America.

As I stared at the screen, flicking between websites, it occurred to me that I really needed to work out exactly what it was I was looking for. As research projects go I’ve had far worse. I made a list.

‘There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.’

Marquis de Sade

A lot of reading, trawling and research later I took out a three-month membership on a well-known international BDSM website. I printed off a picture of Henry and taped it to the edge of my computer screen, just in case I weakened, and spent evenings browsing the site’s personal ads for inspiration, trying to work up the courage to place an ad of my own. After all, that was why I’d joined, wasn’t it? You couldn’t contact anyone unless you had a profile on the site, so I couldn’t email the men I thought looked interesting until I’d taken the plunge and posted something.

The trouble with real life, unlike fiction, is that you have no control over the outcome or how the plot develops. I was nervous of making the move, nervous of making a terrible mistake, scared that I’d be exposing myself to things that I had no understanding of with people I didn’t know.

In the end, bizarrely, it was Henry who convinced me to get on with it. I’d read and re-read my profile, editing and adding to it until I’d almost lost sight of what I was trying to say, and was sitting with my finger hovering above the ‘post’ button for the fifth or sixth night in a row, trying to work up the courage to press it. I was about to have another go at editing my latest attempt when Henry rang and said he was sorry for whatever it was he’d done, and that he’d got tickets for an open-air concert at the weekend. Maybe I’d like to go with him?

And I almost said yes, except that he hadn’t quite finished.

‘I’d really like us to be friends, Sarah,’ he said. ‘The sex thing gets in the way a bit, don’t you think? The tickets are thirty pounds each. I’m happy to take a cheque. I thought perhaps you could come over and pick me up.’

I didn’t want a relationship with anyone who thought that sex got in the way. He was still talking when I pressed ‘post’.

As I did, a little message popped up on the computer screen:

‘Thank you for posting on our website. Your profile will appear on our system within twenty-four hours, although it is currently available for you to view and may still be edited. You may remove your profile or make it invisible at any time.’

My heart lurched. What the hell had I done?

‘So what do you think?’ said Henry.

‘I think that I’m busy on Sunday,’ I said, and hung up, still staring at the message on the screen.

Bloody hell! What if I attracted an axe-wielding psychopath? What if the website accidentally posted my real email address? Or my real name? Worse still, what if after all this whittling and worrying I didn’t get a single reply?

A new message popped up alongside the first. ‘Members with photos on their profiles attract more replies.’

I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to post a photo. What if someone recognized me? I flicked through the ones that had caught my eye – some had photos, but not all; some were full-faced, others pixellated, some were naked, some dressed. There didn’t seem to be a norm: you posted what you were happy with.

I clicked through to my profile to read it one more time. I could always take it down.‘Forty-something female novice submissive, with lots of imagination but no real-time experience, seeks a man to show her the ropes.’

There was a lot more but that was the gist of it. In the end I also posted a current photograph of myself on holiday in a sundress on a beach sipping a cocktail, with the face pixellated out.

Then I waited – and worried.

Maybe I’d made a mistake; maybe this was best kept as a fantasy. Maybe I’d just take my profile down before any harm was done. Maybe I’d give up on men and get some cats.

I was on tenterhooks all day, refusing to look at the site, wanting to peek at the website inbox but resisting the temptation.

That evening, when I’d finished my day’s work, I opened up my account on the website. There were forty replies. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or terrified.

Taking a deep breath to steady my nerves, I opened the first one: ‘Hi, I saw your profile. Nice picture. My name is Craig and I’m a taxi driver and live just outside Cambridge. I’m into …’ It took about ten seconds for my anxiety to fade. These were real people, looking for the same thing as I was. There were some great emails among that first batch, including one from a woman, who emailed to offer advice.

The profiles were no longer nameless, faceless weirdos; they were people like me, and yes, they all had what other people might think of as unusual sexual tastes, but they were also looking for the same things as the rest of us – love, affection, sex, physical connections, understanding, companionship, someone to share things with, somewhere to belong.

I’d read dozens of other profiles before posting mine and I had composed an email to send to anyone who caught my eye. It didn’t take me long to weed out the one-liners, the men who replied with a photo of their wedding tackle, and those who came across as illiterate, barking mad, wannabes or just plain weird. Though, oddly enough, in all the time when I met men from BDSM websites I met only one genuinely scary man – far fewer than on the straight sites I’d signed up to.