Wendy liked to be spanked

Wendy liked to be spanked. As a child, she had played spanking games with her brother and cousins when there had been no adults around. These games stopped as they reached adolescence, but their power over her imagination did not.

To relieve the now almost constant sexual itch, the fourteen-year-old would regularly masturbate. When she was absolutely sure no one around, she would do this while also vigorously applying her mother’s hairbrush to her buttocks, until by degrees, she fell into a sweating, breathless and violent orgasm of masochistic pleasure. The pain was a nitrous fuel to the sexing, as was the shame and guilt she felt afterwards. It was her darkest secret.

It was therefore only some years later and quite by accident that this covert predilection revealed itself. One day, a young man playfully smacked her. Her reaction so involuntarily and transparently revealed her feelings that he tried it again and then again.

This practice became a regular, frequent and ever more elaborate part of their sexing. They explored its possibilities and nuances with all the enthusiasm of first flush success. However, as time went by, their relationship began to develop some less endearing features.

He was not content to stay within her comfort zone. At first it was an ‘athletic’ challenge to elevate her pain tolerances, which she was able and very motivated to do, up to a point. However, he kept upping the ante past that into the domain of torture and abuse.

Her urgent pleas that he not go at her too hard, too quickly and too many times were increasingly ignored. Thus it was that fear began to insinuate itself into her sexual feelings; fear that was arousing and exciting too, for a while.

As he accumulated power in their relationship, she became more supine. Gradually his affection became infused with contempt. As he got to know her better, his playful insults became hurtful and then wounding blows, aimed at her vulnerability and weaknesses.

Increasingly he made her feel incompetent and stupid. The master and slave game crept out of the bedroom and set itself up in style wherever it liked. She became his servant to the extent that one day when she did not do something to his satisfaction, he felt entitled to hit her in the face. She told her friends that she had ‘fallen over’.

The end of the affair was as messy and unpleasant as its beginning had been exciting and promising. He reacted with rage and violence when she first suggested that perhaps they should see less of each other. The power he had over her was too great to give up voluntarily. He could no longer see her needs beyond his own. It took several court restraining orders to convince him otherwise.

Her confidence and self-esteem were very battered. It took a tremendous effort and the loyal support of close friends for her to see that he was responsible for his violence and that she was worthy of more than abuse. As she freed herself from his influence, anger at what he had done to her gradually replaced her fear of him.

Only as the wounds healed was she able to admit to herself the effects of her own behavior and attitudes. Whatever he had done, she eventually accepted that she had significantly contributed to the pattern of abuse by helping set it up and then going along with it.

As she reflected on what had happened, she realized that the fantasy game had been so powerful, it had overwhelmed everything else and colonized the entire relationship. Neither of them got beyond the realization of their sexual needs or became sufficiently aware of their own fullness of being, let alone that of the other. When things went wrong there was neither enough fabric in their relationship, nor a sufficient individual maturity for either of them to draw on, that might have empowered them to pull back from a destructive spiral.

She had not anticipated that the games of her childhood and the sexual fantasies that arose from them could have such tough consequence in an adult context. And yet her sexuality was intensified rather than cured by catastrophe. Not only was ordinary sex unexciting, but orgasm was almost out of the question unless accompanied by masochistic fantasizing.

The fact was she wanted a relationship that gave her the chance to keep exploring her sexuality. On the other hand she didn’t want a repeat of the last one. She realized that minimizing the risk of that would mean finding and creating a relationship that met all the ordinary criteria for developing trust and security first. Then she might have the chance to negotiate her sexual agenda in reasonable safety.

She understood that the nature of her sexuality was not only potentially dangerous for what it was, but also for the kinds of people it attracted; people who couldn’t or didn’t want to enter equitable or full relationships. Thus she resisted the temptation to select potential partners on the basis of sexual interest and stayed clear of the B & D scene.

She had grown up enough in herself to understand that in all likelihood the outcome was going to be something of a compromise.

As she pondered further on her disastrous sexual adventure, she began to see that  any activity involved with really strong sensation or emotion, whether it be exotic food, exciting work, power, sex, drugs or extreme sports, had to be treated with extreme respect and care. Any protracted overuse or over stimulation would eventually cause injury and/or dysfunction, just as surely as habitually redlining a car tachometer would ruin its engine, if an accident didn't destroy it first.

She comforted herself in the face of her disappointment and sexual frustration with the story of the bell curve. It is a graph representation of standard statistical distribution of outcomes. On this curve the vast majority of ‘hits’ are somewhere in the middle. Relatively few lie at the positive and negative extremes near its base.

She came to understand that on the Great Bell Curve of Life, not only was a middle path the safest, where the herd gathers around itself, but that the relatively few outcomes at the far negative and positive ends often involved the same sort of people.

The great winners and losers are life's extremists whose radical behavior involves them at the riskiest and most unstable ends of the 'options market'; roller coasting, juggling polarities, failing to learn, or learning well, but often too narrowly or obsessively.

She wanted to have it all, but she knew deep down that the more she ‘went for it’, the more violent the oscillations in her life might become.

And yet she also knew that there are a very, very few, who are dazzling winners in the great gambles of life. They have overcome the odds against them and are beacons to the ordinary punters to keep playing them despite their losses.

She ached for the charmed sex life of a successful composer like Percy Grainger, but did not want to live so perilously without the wealth and fame that helped procure his perfect courtesan dominatrix and wife, Ella Ström . And being childless and rich, she had little else to do except think about new, exciting and exotic ways of giving Percy yet another thrashing whenever he had ‘composers' block’, or even when he didn’t.

However, she also wondered what it would be like for Ella to be locked into permanently playing surrogate for Percy’s severe, demanding, possibly incestuous and neurotically dependent late mother. And she wondered how it would be for him to be forever stuck emotionally as a naughty little boy who had never got over the incestuous feelings his mother’s beatings aroused in him.

While as a composer he was enormously successful, as a character he seemed something of a mess. Ella may well have had to deal with a man who could hardly see her at all, except as an extension of his own needs, just like her (Wendy’s) own former lover.

Perhaps there was something in the old Greek Aphorism that one had to be careful what one asked of the gods, for they just might perversely grant it, by taking away what one once had and giving more of what one either hoped for or wanted or was able to manage.

She eventually found a decent and understanding partner who had enough good points to work on and deficits that she could live with. He rather liked the idea of spanking his wife, but the reality was he didn’t have much of a clue as to what was really involved. He had neither ‘the feel’ of a genuine sadist, nor the acting ability of a gigolo. However, at least he hadn’t picked up vicious habits and he was to some extent trainable.

Their sexual practices became increasingly circumscribed by the coming of children.  Spanking is far too noisy not to be noticed, so increasingly this pastime became restricted to holiday periods when progeny could be packed off to the grandparents for a few days.

Besides, he was never going to be the dominant of her dreams. With him she never got those flaming adrenaline and endorphin rushes that had made the initial weeks of her first encounter so incandescent. Thus it was that these occasional holiday 'sessions' gradually petered out in the wash of a busy life and absorbing family responsibilities.

She never forgot what it was once like, but accepted that life moves on and desire must necessarily find a smaller place in the heart.

When she struck a particularly depressing peri-menopausal moment on or about her forty-second birthday, her dull but affectionate husband offered her the present of an evening with a certain ‘Master Michael’, to cheer her up a bit. She knocked it back in the same spirit of affection, for it was a humble, well-meant and thoughtful offering.

Such an incendiary match might rekindle flames that could burn down the comfortable, but tinder dry structure of their existence.

That evening she took him to bed and mustered the enthusiasm to make his night. It wasn't exciting, but it was an act of the kind of friendship and warmth that would sustain them in the afternoon and evening of their lives.