Unethical Conduct

1

Web Site

I don't want to sound stuffy, and I hate the thought of being stereotyped as some humorless kill-joy, but I'm going to say it anyway. As a professional woman in my mid-thirties, and - yes, I admit it - a card-carrying feminist at that, my attitude toward pornography would probably surprise no-one. I despise and reject the devaluing of women in any form, but portraying females as empty-headed decorative playthings fit only for baby-making is guaranteed to drive me into a cold fury. So maybe you can imagine my reaction when I came home early the other day and found my lawyer husband mesmerized by his computer, staring at a screen-full of graphic depictions of buxom nude women positively oozing sexuality and just panting to get laid.

He was at least gracious enough not to be defensive about it.

"Come and take a look at this, honey."

"No, thank you, Michael. I think I've seen enough to get the general idea, even from way over here. Glad to see you're enjoying yourself, though. Nothing like a bit of hard-core porno for an evening of wholesome family fun. Though for some dumb reason, up to now I hadn't thought of you as the sort of man who . . ."

"Stephanie, please relax for a minute. No, of course I'm not that sort of man. Most of this stuff is utter garbage, I can't for a minute understand why it's so popular . . ."

"It seems popular enough with you."

"Please. Just look at this for a moment."

Reluctantly, I came closer. He moved the mouse around and clicked on a bar at the top of the screen. The words "search results" appeared.

"What does that mean? You deliberately looked for this?" But he had me interested by now.

"Wait a minute. Keep looking. This is what I searched for."

Michael clicked one more time and another phrase appeared: "Sexual coercion + marriage." He hit the return key, and "Items 1 - 20 of 1,742 entries" duly flashed on the screen.

"I was trying to get some general information, not from the law books and statutes this time, on the status of forced marital sex in this country today. Remember that client I told you about?"

He'd told me about her at breakfast. An awful story of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage, determined to leave as soon as she can but unable to get out for all sorts of compelling reasons - the "charming" husband would probably get the kids in a custody fight, no money or check book of her own, they live way out in the woods, he has control of the only vehicle, so on and so forth. Meanwhile, he practically keeps her prisoner in her home and actually subjects her to forced sex over her protests. She's almost literally helpless, unable to escape.

Yes, of course she is able get out of the house sometimes, or she couldn't have consulted Michael. There's a friend who takes her shopping once a week. And yes, she probably could put up more of a fight over the sex if she were prepared to make a truly determined effort, but for obvious reasons she's unwilling to call her husband's bluff and assume he wouldn't escalate the level of abuse still further. So now, after making token efforts to repel him, she submits quickly rather than risk waking the children and confronting them, too, with the horrors of her situation.

The irony of it was, before she got married she was a professional woman with a ton of education and a highly responsible and demanding job. As her lawyer my husband had the tough assignment of acquainting her, as tactfully as possible, with the unkind realities. Convincing a judge or jury that she, with all her resources, had allowed herself to be victimized by any man, let alone such a decent-looking person as her husband, would be a very difficult proposition indeed.

"Well," Michael went on, "I'm still trying to get some angle on this that I can use for a compelling argument in court. In our good old state, as you know, there's effectively no law against marital rape. Ask any prosecutor. They routinely throw up their hands and sigh that any implicit law on the subject is unenforceable. Of necessity, as it takes place in private, it's always a 'he said, she said' situation."

"But surely your client, with all her smarts and education, would be a credible witness against her husband? I realize you can't predict what a jury's going to do, but there's got to be a chance of convincing them? Or what about waiving a jury trial altogether and having a judge decide? Almost a third of judges are themselves women these days!"

"Stephanie, if only. If only. But the problem is even worse than getting the court to believe my client. You know what a typical indictment for a sex offense looks like, don't you?"

Michael had shown me one or two, and anyway I had already seen enough of them to last a lifetime at the women's shelter where I work. Anyway, I recalled the sort of wording the legal system used when accusing a defendant of rape:

"That on or about the 25th. day of such month such defendant did subject said victim, not his spouse, to non-consensual sexual contact," and so forth. The "not his spouse" part was the kicker, implying of course that forced sex in marriage was just par for the course among the upright and law-abiding male citizenry of our God-fearing community. Anyone voicing any objection to this would surely be a liberal troublemaker bent on inviting the government into everyone's bedroom.

"Anyway," Michael continued, "I thought I'd try the Internet for some new ideas. So, look what I got."

He moved the pointer to the first entry, "Rape in the marriage bed," and almost as soon as he touched the key an image leapt on the screen of a big-busted woman, spread-eagled naked on a brass bedstead, her arms and legs tied tightly to the rails with thick ropes, as she pouted sullenly at her approaching "husband," salaciously wetting her lips with her tongue.

"My God!" I really had no idea this stuff was quite that graphic, or that it was so easy to find. Michael went on,

"You know I have a healthy interest in sex, and I'd be the last person in the world to take a vow of celibacy . . ." Before I could interrupt him with a suitably withering remark, he hurried on. "But if I were really bent on looking for a bit of erotic stimulation on the Internet I would truly prefer something a little more subtle than this."

Reluctantly, I had to agree. I believed him.

"All right, Michael," I began, grudgingly, "You've made your point. But I think you'd better stick to your law books for professional information from now on."

"Agreed. But, now, having said all that, here's one that I'd like your opinion on."

"If it's anything like that last one" (he had at last removed the revolting thing from the screen) "I bet I can give my opinion without seeing it."

"Humor me."

The picture that suddenly filled the screen was gripping, utterly compelling. My heart surged with emotion. I would never have believed the intensity of feeling that was tugged out of me by the simple color photograph that shone out from that little fluorescent rectangle. And I sure wasn't going to tell Michael why I was reacting so powerfully, either.

A featureless room. The unadorned rear wall was white, the carpet gray. The only item of furniture, a stylish swivel chair with seat and back upholstered in burgundy, came straight from an office products catalogue. The chair was near the center of the picture, facing more or less towards us, the seat angled slightly to the right. There were two people, a man and a woman. The man was in the foreground in the left-hand side of the picture, looking away from us toward the center, so we could see his face only in profile. He was approaching fifty, with neatly trimmed dark hair, a blue oxford shirt, slacks, and loafers. He could have been a lawyer himself.

"Teacher," said Michael.

The woman was standing facing the chair, so we could see her mostly from the rear with a partial view of her left side. Her long legs were straight and vertical, but she was leaning well forward from the waist, gripping the black metal arms of the low chair with her hands, her arms straight. Not quite sideways-on to us, she was looking up at the man over her left shoulder, giving us a full view of her face.

She was in her late twenties, maybe thirty. Tall, slim, attractive - and stark naked. Her nudity was stunning, her protuberant bare buttocks utterly arresting. But there was nothing sleazy about this photograph. The woman conveyed grace and charm, an unmistakable glimmer of insight in her pleasant face despite its current expression of worried concern - or was it eager anticipation? An intelligent person, even if all one had to judge by were her thoughtful mien, her keenly appraising glance, the studied tension of her grip on the chair. Was she a scientist? A doctor?

Even in the presence of the fully-clothed man she seemed perfectly at home with her nakedness. She was wearing shiny black spike-heeled shoes, her feet together, the high heels accentuating the tautness of her long legs. The very presence of the shoes emphasized the absence of clothing. Her well-shaped bottom jutted out pertly. Her breasts, visible beneath her upper left arm as she bent over the chair, were neither large nor pendulous but trim, tight, well-proportioned. Her long brown hair, elegantly styled, framed her pretty face and cascaded down her bare back. Glossy dark lipstick shone on her moist lips.

The woman was unsmiling, her lips parted; she was frowning in wary concentration. Her eyes, wide open, bore an unmistakable stamp of alarm.

"Not surprising, if you consider what he's about to do to her," put in my husband.

"Shut up, Michael."

I was struck by how comfortable the man looked. He seemed relaxed, self-assured, good-humored, the kind of man one might enjoy meeting and talking to. There was no hint of malice or cruelty about him. He could have been about to ask one of his colleagues how the sales talk went, but he obviously had something quite different in mind. He had a firm grasp on the handle of a slender willow cane, the tip poised a foot or so above the woman's beautiful bare bottom. She was tensed and ready, her features expressing an admixture of fear, determination, and unquestioning submission. And was there pride in those wide, dark eyes? Tightly controlled defiance in her alert face and taut posture? It was clear that the caning had not yet begun.

I used the word "arresting" a minute ago. It was the whole picture, the gestalt, that grabbed our attention so forcefully. The sterile office setting, the fear in the woman's eyes, her tense concentration, her stark nudity, her complete submission as she bent over and presented that magnificent bare behind, the sinister menace of the cane, the man's air of everyday ordinariness, the aching anticipation saturating the entire scene - all combined to pull us helplessly into the self-contained little world encapsulated in that photograph.

There it is; that's the scene that so aroused our interest. Well, I guess that applies to Michael, anyway. "Arousing interest" would be a pretty tame way of expressing my own reaction, I can tell you, and you'll see why if you read on. But I didn't let on, of course. I acted as if the contents of that photograph were as new to me as they were to Michael.

Anyway, he and I talked about that photograph for half the night. We were besieged by questions. Had the woman taken her clothes off voluntarily? Did she want to be punished? Could this be a consensual act, performed enthusiastically by both partners purely for sexual pleasure? Or was that genuine fear in her eyes? Was she frantically planning a desperate, last-minute escape before that cruel cane swished down on her? But she wasn't restrained physically; presumably, she could have left at any moment. Or could she? What if the man had coerced her compliance by terrible threats? What if, out of view, others were present, ready to compel her acquiescence by force if necessary? Perhaps the viewer had to decide.

But that raised other questions, about the photograph itself. Obviously, it had been staged by an expert photographer with professional actors, a commercial enterprise designed to satisfy the prurient curiosity of men seeking sexual turn-ons from the Internet. Or was it? Could the woman have been kidnapped, forced into the situation under duress, and the photograph taken without her consent and over her protests? Surely her hair was far too well-groomed for that, her pose too artfully arranged.

How could such a situation have arisen? What could possibly have gone before, and what would happen next? What was stunning about the photograph was that such a scene could never occur in life, certainly not in a business or professional office. Or could it? Could an intelligent, attractive woman have chosen to place herself thus for some valid and uncontroversial purpose of her own? Could she have been compelled to submit to such treatment? Or could she only be an actor or prostitute, indulging a warped male whim in return for substantial monetary gain?

Well, I was pretty confident I knew the answers to some of those questions, but the unanswered ones tantalized me mercilessly. I knew I wouldn't rest until I got the whole story behind that photograph, and I decided then and there that I would have that whole story by the end of the very next day at the latest. All I had to do was to take aside my close friend and colleague Dr. Jessica Sherwood, the shelter's psychologist and Executive Director, and ask her what the hell had been going on with her ten years or so ago to have played the starring role in the sado-masochistic porno scene portrayed in that photograph.

2

Lovers

I called up that web site again early the next morning. I didn't realize it at first, but there were two more photos of my delectable friend Jessica in the caning scene. She was still in that same room with the man, the chair, and the cane, but later in the sequence of events. If you've ever seen this sort of thing before you probably know how they're set up. Twenty-eight tiny pictures, "thumbnails," in a seven by four array; you click on one to bring it up to full size, filling the screen. Before you do that, it's hard to see what's going on in some of them, they're so small, which is why I overlooked the others at first.

The second photo is right next to the first one. A close-up this time, providing an ample view of her bottom. She's still holding on to the chair, but she's bent her knees a little, and her head's hanging way down, her hair brushing the seat of the chair. She looks utterly defeated. The cane is in contact with her behind. All you can see of the man is his right arm and hand, holding the cane. So, it's quite clear she actually gets swatted by that thing.

The last picture? I nearly missed it, because it's a few frames away from the first two. The same scene, but we're further back again. The man has just struck her again. She's kicked up her right leg behind her, knee bent, the spike of the shiny shoe pointing outward. And she's squirmed a little sideways, away from us, maybe in a useless attempt to avoid the blows. Looks like she's writhing in pain, her head down, that lovely long hair tumbling down over her face so we can't see her expression.

My heart ached, seeing Jessica humiliated, in pain. And at the same time I trembled with an undeniably sexual thrill to see her like that. If only I could have been there too, sharing every detail of her experience. I would gladly have endured a thrashing myself if it would have given her any comfort. But, of course, I was forgetting. Jessica has told me so earnestly and on so many occasions about the joys of sexual masochism that I had absolutely no doubt that she was an entirely willing participant in that photographic episode. But seeing her in that stunning scene on the computer screen just brought the whole thing home to me a heck of a lot more vividly than I wanted or needed.

Jessica and I are a little more than friends and colleagues, as you may have guessed. We are also lovers, at least we are on those sadly rare occasions when we can be alone together without our husbands, usually when we're out of town at a professional conference. And what a lover she is. It's as if she knows exactly what I want from her sexually even before I know it myself. There's something similar to that in her professional work with our clients. She never fails to put her finger on exactly what needs to be done to help a client overcome her problems, whether it's problems with self-esteem, inability to be assertive, or repeating self-defeating behavior patterns. Jessica really, truly, actually cures some of these folks. Occasionally at the shelter we joke about her having magical powers.

Michael doesn't know Jessica personally, of course, only by name. She and I have worked together for little more than a year, and in view of what our relationship so rapidly became we decided not to get together socially with our husbands present. We both love our husbands, as Jessica and I have discussed many times during our private moments together. And we both love marital sex, though from her account Jessica and Ralph are quite a bit more adventurous in that regard than Michael and I. But loving my husband and enjoying sex with him does not preclude my also taking a somewhat less intense, though ultimately more deeply fulfilling, pleasure in my erotic relationship with Jessica.

They are even connected, in a way. When Michael and I had finally got to bed after viewing that infamous photograph I was so highly aroused I could hardly wait for him to remove my undies and enter me. A sudden thrill coursed through me as I felt the unmistakable signs that he was more than ready himself. I gasped as he pushed into me, sliding right into my wetness and plunging away energetically, groaning with pleasure himself. He was thrusting quickly and deeply, rapidly stirring me to a crescendo of sensation, my head was spinning, the tension was exquisite, I was aching for release, delirious with pleasure. Holding me down firmly Michael pushed pleasure after pleasure into me as my mind reeled with confused images of Jessica and I being stripped and spanked by handsome men in business suits. I was utterly engulfed by a blur of intensely erotic sensations and emotions as Michael's unremitting pulsing rhythm tightly wound my tension to the breaking point. As I yelped in ecstasy I was overcome by a wave of involuntary spasms, swamped by delicious multiple orgasms as Michael brought himself to a frenzied climax inside me.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Jessica. Well, now that you have been put in the picture, so to speak, I'll proceed . . .

She and I left work early and had afternoon tea at a quiet little café. I couldn't wait to ask her to explain everything.

"There's so much to tell you, Steph, that it'll have to come out in bits. No, don't interrupt. First of all, yes, the whole thing was consensual. In fact, it was my idea from start to finish - or almost. It happened during my predoctoral clinical internship, a dozen years ago. I ran into some serious professional trouble in my program, but managed to extricate myself by getting into that little scene that fascinated you so much."

"You mean you did it for money? You were paid to pose for this guy, and the proceeds got you out of debt?"

"Not quite. I did it partly to get out of trouble, and partly to live out, in real life, a blissful experience that before then I had only been able to fantasize."

"Wow."

"What I'm going to do, Steph, is to actually write it all out for you. My script for the whole thing, as if I were directing the movie version. Admittedly, it'll be an edited version, written the way I would have wanted it to be rather than the way it actually happened. The true story is slightly different - though the difference is solely in the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations, the emotions, not in the objective details of what was done and said."