My Journey to Submission Pt. 09

"I think a relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward, or it dies," said Alvy Singer, Woody Allen's gloomy alter ego in his classic film Annie Hall. I've thought a lot about that quote over the years, and to this day I'm still torn as to the truth of it.

As dating advice for young people, there's something there. When two people start a romantic relationship, there's a finite period of so-called limerence, when they can't keep their hands off each other, want to spend every minute together, can't imagine life without each other, and all the rest. If they're smart, they use this window of opportunity to agree on fundamentals: What are their shared goals and values? What lifestyle do they aspire to? How will they balance career and family? That type of thing.

With a bit of luck and effort, they gather enough momentum during this phase of the relationship to carry them through the inevitable next phase.

Because when the limerence wears off, the couple learns that they haven't come close to resolving the thousands of conflicts that comprise real life. Doing so turns out to be a pain in the ass, and often one or both of them start to think it would be easier to break up than to discuss for the umpteenth time such questions as: How much time watching sports is too much? Is learning to fold a fitted sheet a critical life skill? Does grabbing take-out on the way home count for as much as cooking a meal on the scoreboard of household contributions?

One tried-and-true way stay together during the post-limerence phase is to invest into the relationship, so that the cost of breaking up becomes higher than the cost of dealing with whatever bullshit is up for discussion at the moment. They delete Tinder profiles and contacts of booty-call partners from their smartphones. They move in together, consolidating furniture and linens and dishes. They abandon pre-relationship friends in favor of friendships with people who view them solely as a couple.

This type of investment is, I believe, what Alvy Singer had in mind by "constantly moving forward."

But at some point, a couple reaches a final destination. Right? When they can just live their lives without endlessly brooding about the progress of their relationship. Right? Take my friends Senator Mike McCleary and his wife Jennifer, for instance. They've been married for twenty odd years, and their everyday lives haven't changed much in well over a decade. Now, I'm sure Mike would protest that his love for Jennifer grows deeper every day, blah, blah, blah. But come on, let's be realistic. These two don't need to "move forward" any more, because they're already there.

On the other hand, Alvy Singer's observation seems to be much more salient for couples in BDSM relationships, at least in my experience. The reason for this, I believe, is the central role of kink in defining what the relationship is all about. No vanilla couple I'm aware of spends nearly as much time negotiating their sexual dynamic as a typical kinky couple. Are they Dominant/submissive, Master/slave, or something else? Do they switch roles? Is kink just for playtime, or does it govern everyday life? What are the sub/slave's soft and hard limits? How much polyamory is permitted and/or encouraged? And on, and on, and on.

I obviously consider kinky relationships as "normal" as vanilla relationships (in fact, much healthier in some ways). And kinky couples must navigate the same minefield of day-to-day relationship issues that vanilla couples do. But at the end of the day, there's a reason why every fetish forum and website labels itself as NSFW and 18+.

BDSM, at its core, is focused on transgressive sex ("transgressive" in the purely non-judgmental sense of "not the norm for the majority of people"). The problem is, the longer a kinky couple's kinks don't change, the less transgressive they feel. And if the couple wants to get back into the transgressive zone, then they must try something new. This, I believe, explains why denizens of BDSM forums and chat rooms so often use phrases like "exploring boundaries" and "pushing limits" and all the rest.

This is a long-winded way of explaining why, in my opinion, the tremendous heartache that I was about to suffer at Ellen's hands was inevitable. She was trying, in Alvy Singer's phrase, to avoid finding herself with a dead shark.

Understanding this did not make it any easier.

***********

I thought that my first extended lockup as Ellen's slave would end on a high note. She'd been pleased with my behavior throughout the sixteen days, and she'd rewarded my endurance with the best sex that I'd had since the beginning of my submission.

That evening, we returned home from our perfect dinner date and immediately headed up to bed, our physical desire clearly mutual. It had been a while since she'd let me see her in the nude, and the simple perfection of her body took my breath away. We lay on the bed caressing each other affectionately for a long time, and she even ignored her longstanding prohibition on open mouth kissing.

Then her pent-up sexual need took over, and she guided my mouth to her crotch. This time, she didn't require anal worship before allowing me to lick her pussy to climax. And after she came, she leave me frustrated. Instead, once she'd recovered her breath, she lay purring contentedly next to me, and she massaged my cock until I was fully erect.

She took me inside her.

Befitting her status as my Mistress, she positioned herself on top of me. But instead of assuming reverse cowgirl or Amazon as she usually did during coitus, she straddled my hips facing me. She held my hands as I fondled her breasts. She moaned in pleasure and rocked her body rhythmically, her vagina massaging my shaft. Of course, I knew better than to cum inside her. But when I told her I was ready, she dismounted and stimulated me with her hand for a few moments.

Then -- miraculously -- she put her lips to my cock and took it in her mouth, the first time she'd done so since I'd asked her to become my Mistress, so many months before. She swirled her tongue on me expertly, maximizing and prolonging my pleasure at the same time. When she knew that I could hold back no longer, she removed her mouth and gave me a few final strokes with her hand until I had a huge and satisfying (unruined!) orgasm, my second of the day. My body writhed and jerked, and my head slammed back repeatedly into my pillow.

She smiled at me, as I panted in exhaustion. "Look at you," she said. "You made me so happy today that I completely forgot about my all of my own rules."

"I'm very glad you did," I replied. "That was amazing. Thank you, Mistress."

She stroked my hair. Then, in a curiously tender gesture, she dabbed a bit of the sperm that had spurted onto my stomach with her index finger, and she held it to my lips. Not wanting to spoil the moment, I opened my mouth obediently and sucked her finger clean. Somehow, the vile substance seemed a little less slimy and awful-tasting than it had when she'd forced me to lick it from the dungeon floor earlier that afternoon. She stroked my hair affectionately and fed me my sperm until it was gone.

It was one of the most intimate moments of our marriage.

"Hold me," she said, laying her head on my chest. I wrapped my arms around her for the first time in many months, and she sighed contentedly and nuzzled my neck. I closed my eyes, happier than I'd been in a very long time.

But just before we dozed off, Ellen roused herself. She got up to go to the bathroom, and when she returned, she was wearing her negligee and carrying my chastity cage. She sat on the side of the bed and snapped her fingers in a signal for me to come and kneel before her. A few moments later, my cock was locked up, and I was wearing my sleeping mitts.

Cinderella's carriage had turned into a pumpkin.

***********

As I was getting ready to go to work the next morning, Ellen announced that my current chastity period would last for three weeks, and that she would increase my deprivation by one week after every release. So, my next lockup would be four weeks, then five, etc. Her tone voice when announcing this policy made it clear I should not ask how long the longest lockup would be.

The week started off badly. It ended much worse.

On Saturday morning, I served Ellen her breakfast, as I usually did. I waited patiently with my head bowed as she finished eating, then took her dishes to the sink. When I returned with the coffee pot to refill her mug a second time, she waved it away.

"I've had enough, thanks," she said. "But breakfast was just lovely. I really appreciate how much effort you put into it." She rewarded me with a brilliant smile.

"It's always my pleasure, Mistress," I said, and I meant it. I would have cooked ten breakfasts in exchange for one of her smiles.

"Now, I'm going to Tysons to meet the girls for some shopping and lunch," she said in the same friendly voice. "And while I'm gone, you will tidy up the bathrooms and kitchen, and to scrub the toilets and floors extra clean. And also vacuum the carpets while you're at it. Is that clear?"

"But Mistress, the maid will be here on Monday," I ventured. "That's in only two days." When Ellen was my submissive, I'd never made her do housework. What was the point, when I already paid for a maid service?

"But that's exactly why I want you to do it," she said. "It's embarrassing to let a total stranger see our house in such a filthy state. You don't want me to be embarrassed, do you?"

"Of course not, Mistress," I said. "But it's..." I intended to say that the house was already spic and span, and that the maid service was nearly superfluous as it was. But my wife interrupted.

"Well, then," she said. "I'm relying on you not to let it happen. I can rely on you, can't I?"

"Yes, Mistress," I said resignedly, looking around the spotless kitchen. I suspected my wife couldn't give a wooden nickel for the maid's opinion. She simply wanted a pretext to deepen my humiliation and feminization. She immediately confirmed my suspicion.

"That's a good boy," she said. "Wait here a second." She went to the front closet and returned with a garment bag. "I bought this for you," she said, unzipping the bag. "Isn't it adorable?"

She proudly displayed a French maid's uniform -- black, with a white apron and white frilly trim, topped off by a black and white lace headband. My face fell.

"Don't you like it?" she asked with mock disappointment. "I got you some stockings and some gorgeous five-inch heels to go with it. It may take some time to get used to the heels, but the stockings should feel nice, since you already shave your legs. You seemed so unhappy when I made you wear shackles the last time you did chores, and I thought that this would be much more comfortable for you. Wasn't that a good idea?"

"Yes, Mistress," I answered. It was true that wearing the heavy iron shackles had been mentally and physically torturous, and in the face of Ellen's veiled threat to force me into them again, it was an easy choice to assent to the maid's uniform.

My wife was determined that our relationship would not become a dead shark.

***********

Over the next several months, Ellen steadily tightened the bonds of my slavery. In addition to regular increases in the duration of my chastity lockups, she seemed constantly on the lookout for ways -- big and small -- to humiliate and degrade me, and her punishments grew more frequent and more varied.

She developed an unfortunate taste for ball-busting. Since my first day as my wife's submissive, I'd often felt her soft, feminine hand squeezing my nuts to demonstrate her power over me. But it was an intimate, almost playful form of torment, always done with a smile, albeit a cruel one. Once she'd dubbed me her slave, however, she added my scrotum to her list of targets for her ever-present riding crop. Soon after that, she made stomping on and kicking my genitals with her boots her go-to punishment when the cane was insufficient to correct my behavior. I've already described my first experience with ball-busting, and won't re-live the horror of it here.

Then, near the beginning of my seven-week lockup, she exhibited unambiguous sadism for the first time. I've already related this episode, but I'll recap it briefly now for those who don't recall.

Up to that point, Ellen had beat me only as punishment for breaking one of her rules. She had many rules and an eagle eye for infractions, but even her harshest punishments had always been within the bounds of our Dom/sub (now Mistress/slave) dynamic. This time was different. I'd been on my best behavior, and recently she'd recently even given me an unscheduled handjob as a reward. But then one evening, without any warning or explanation, Ellen took me to the dungeon, bound me in the strappado position, and caned my buttocks severely, for no reason whatsoever.

It was the first time she'd ever inflicted pain on me simply for the pleasure of seeing me suffer. It wouldn't be the last time.

In retrospect, I should have seen that Ellen's treatment of me frequently crossed the line from BDSM to abuse. It should have been obvious that my marriage was on a path towards places I'd always said I would never go. But Ellen being Ellen, she made the path so easy to follow that I hardly even noticed where we were heading. The good days with her were so good that they made me overlook or excuse or forget the bad days.

And frankly, I remained so blinded by my love for her, my guilt over the way I'd treated her, and my fear of losing her, that I almost didn't care, provided that following her path would keep our marriage intact.

Nevertheless, some days were more difficult than others.

***********

On a brilliant October morning, nearly six weeks into my eight-week period of chastity, Ellen and I shot eighteen holes of golf with Mike and Jennifer McCleary. Naturally, we played at the spectacular Congressional Country Club in Maryland, which is arguably the most exclusive club in the United States, since no amount of money or connections would be enough to circumvent the requirement that one be a member of Congress (current or former) to join.

I shot eight over par, two better than my handicap (thankfully, my chastity cage did not interfere much with my swing), so I was feeling pretty good as we relaxed at the "nineteenth hole," i.e., as we enjoyed a light lunch and a couple rounds of post-golf drinks in the club's lounge. The conversation was more pleasant than usual, and there was laughter all around. I signaled the waiter to come over to take orders for a third round, but Mike waved him off.

He slapped his thighs with his hands and said regrettably in his west Texas drawl, "Well, Son, it's gonna be that kinda day. I gotta get back" (He pronounced it "Wail, Son.") "You 'bout ready to hit the showers?"

I froze. From the beginning of my submission, I'd taken great pains to avoid situations where I might risk someone noticing my lack of body hair, my chastity cage, or my pink, frilly panties. Miraculously, this issue had never come up with Mike before, but there was absolutely no way the I could agree to share a locker room with him now.

Caught off guard, I stammered, unable to come up with response quickly, but Ellen jumped in. "You two always take forever down there," she complained to Mike. She turned to Jennifer as an aside. "No doubt gossiping about us behind our backs." Then turning to me, she continued, "Don't forget, you promised to take me antiquing today, and I'm not about to let you get out of it. I'll allow you to have a quick shower when we get home."

At that, Mike gave me a puzzled look. I had a brief moment of panic, worried that he somehow suspected something close to the truth, but then I realized that he was simply taken aback by Ellen's phrasing, which made me seem more than a little henpecked.

If only he knew the half of it...

However, Ellen's intervention had saved me from having to come up with an excuse, and I was at least grateful for that.

It's strange how even a very minor event like this can sometimes set off a landslide of negative emotions. Obviously, I had no burning desire to take a shower with Mike after our round of golf. But it bothered me that I couldn't do it. And as Ellen and I drove away from the country club, it bothered me more and more, and it got me thinking about all of the other things I couldn't do since I started submission.

Like fuck my wife, for example.

I didn't bring this up in the car. In fact, we didn't speak at all on the way home, but Ellen didn't seem to notice. She had her own business to attend to that afternoon, so when we walked in the front door, she went to find her iPad, leaving me to my own devices. After stripping off my clothes and donning my collar, I grabbed a beer, walked to my office, and switched on the National League playoffs.

I stared at the TV, but the game barely registered in my consciousness.

I drank my beer and stewed about my situation. I missed the way things had been before. Nothing to do with BDSM or my lost status as a sexual dominant. Just ordinary life. I missed pissing standing up. I missed wearing clothes. I missed sitting on furniture. I missed sleeping in once in a while on a Saturday morning. I missed walking around my own house without worrying about keeping my head bowed. I missed not having to ask for permission any time I wanted to do anything at all, except go to the office in the morning and come home in the evening.

As I was in the kitchen getting my second beer, I began to stew about our current relationship more generally. Again, my focus was not on BDSM. I didn't necessarily object to my wife's countless rules, or to the degradation and punishments (ignoring for the moment their increasing frequency and abusiveness) that she inflicted on me when I failed to obey them. Rather, I missed being treated with a modicum of dignity -- not as a dominant, but merely as a partner worthy of some consideration.

I freely admitted (even to myself) that Ellen made much better choices about our relationship than I had when I was dominant. And I saw that our female-led relationship (FLR) had benefits for me, as well as for her. Frankly, I'd become much less of an asshole since donning the chastity cage. Still, I felt that I'd been relegated to the role of a mere appendage to Ellen in my own marriage. And this didn't sit well with me.

I was on my third beer, when I finally got to the heart of what was bothering me so much.

A central aspect of BDSM that people rarely discuss on fetish forums is the vastly different role played by sex in maledom versus femdom. This difference, I believe, was best summed up by the great psychiatrist Frasier Crane: "Men can't use sex to get what we want. Sex is what we want." The iconic image of femdom is of an imperious dominatrix in bondage gear looking down cruelly at her kneeling, naked, cowering submissive and announcing that he can expect no sexual release for the foreseeable future. It would be laughable to depict this scene with the genders reversed.

Maledom is fundamentally about ensuring the sexual availability of the submissive female. Usually, this means having sex frequently, often more frequently than she wants. Hence, the ubiquitous images on BDSM sites of women tied up and penetrated, or being forced to achieve multiple orgasms on the Sybian or with vibrating wands applied to their vaginas.

Sure, one sees the occasional image of a woman in a chastity belt. But the implication of female chastity is not that the submissive is denied sex, but rather that she is allowed sex only at the discretion of her dominant -- which, again, is probably at least as frequently than she desires.

The male chastity cage serves an entirely different function. The female dominant uses the cage to control her submissive's non-sexual behavior by limiting his access to sex. The implication is that she has no needs or desires of her own (at least none that her partner could fulfil), and that male sexuality is a regrettable vestige of evolution -- something that she must consider only grudgingly, usually as a reward for obedience. I can't even begin to think of how a dominatrix might "force" her submissive to achieve an orgasm.