by Wendy Jones
Human beings and animals all have sexual desires, right? But God has taught us to value ourselves and discipline ourselves, because we’re not going to show our bum and this and that because that’s relating yourself to an animal. The men are told to lower their gaze. The first glimpse – okay, God has forgiven him. Don’t take the second glimpse, respect that woman the way she is. Don’t take her as meat. They’re persuaded to lower their head, walk past, giving the woman space and respect. The same for a woman. If I find someone amazingly attractive, obviously I saw him once to figure out that he is attractive! Me, I wouldn’t look again. Say, for instance, I found someone so good-looking, I wouldn’t burst out, ‘Oh my God! He’s so hot!’ No! It’s not something I ponder over. Like, ‘Oh, I find someone attractive, oh, now I’m thinking about being intimate with them.’ It’s nothing like that.
I wouldn’t say that I don’t have sexual feelings, that wouldn’t make me human. It’s what I do with them. I don’t follow my sexual desires because that doesn’t lead me anywhere. I carry on with my life because I’ve got other things to think about: God gave me praying times, I pray five times a day so my life is really busy. Sexual stuff, that all comes after marriage. When I’m married I can have sexual thoughts about my husband. Yeah. It’s my husband. Obviously! Yeah.
I’m looking forward to getting married. Yeah, such a blessing. God has already written who I’m going to get married to. I want a good-looking man! No, I’m not really into looks; personality wins me over, definitely. Has to be funny, because I also have a character, I’m very boisterous and very naughty and cheeky, trust me, I have this cheekiness in me. I was such a naughty kid. When I was a child I had behavioural problems. I used to get into fights, had a foul mouth, trust me, honestly. Because I was very small, other kids used to provoke me, they didn’t know this little monster was inside me, so I would bark back. My parents were like, ‘You can’t be naughty all the time; we can’t always collect you early from school.’ And you know, I never used to listen. Never used to listen. Then something hit me and I just had to change. And since I was trying, and when I was praying, my life kind of pieced together. My religion grounded me and changed me into a completely different person. When it comes to my religion I can be very passionate. My goodness! I am passionate and full of peace and tranquillity. I would never jeopardise my heaven for anything really.
I am telling you, this society is too sexualised. I hear about one-night stands, and where’s the human being in that? Where are human beings going? Back in the days, even Western culture had the tradition to get married first, of sex after marriage. Women give it too easy for the men to grab them and do whatever to them. They need to protect themselves, they need to value themselves and find a man who’s going to protect them and value them for who they are, not for what they have.
I think of myself as English. Yeah, why not? I was born here. I am Muslim more than anything. I do feel free as a Muslim woman but there are times when I go outside and I do get abused, especially around the city. Many times. Vans drive past, and they say names or ‘you bomber’, and ‘terrorist’. I’ve got a traditional Asian culture behind me and I’ve also got the Muslim culture around me. I’m surrounded by one value system but live in a different one. I know I have a few values that are different from others, but I don’t think any less of Western women. No way. I cannot even think that … It would be a sin if I looked any less at someone. You and me are human at the end of the day. Not everything is about men for me. My goodness, that would make me like …! No, not everything is about me. Everything is about, ‘How can I make myself a better Muslim.’ The main thing when I do something is I have to say, ‘How do I please the Lord?’
14
Student
Anna, 19, Windsor
‘In exam time recently I’ve had this feeling, “I want to be whipped!”’
‘My necklace is a black leather strap with a silver heart padlock on. That’s a symbol of submission and ownership. I keep the key; my boyfriend has the other key. My colleague in the shop I work in recognised it when I came into work wearing it! She said, ‘Oh! Has William given you a collar?’ and I was like, ‘Yes!’ I was really pleased because she’s someone I talk with very openly about sexuality and it was nice for me to have that reaffirmed. I like talking openly about this stuff because people don’t! There’s a lot of stigma attached to sex. You have a big dichotomy, particularly with women, between: Do you have sex? Do you not? Do you be a slut? Do you be a virgin? Do you be a prude? Do you be a man-whore? You can’t really win. All of these give a very negative impression of sex. And it’s a good thing to have sex; it’s a good thing to be intimate with someone.
I discovered BDSM by accident on a creative-writing website. I came to this story; it was like, ‘WARNING: BDSM’, and a list of sex acts. I was like, ‘I don’t know what these are. I’m just going to read them.’ I was like, ‘This is like really interesting!’ I was thirteen years old and it was a huge revelation for me. BDSM is bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadomasochism. Just kind of like, ‘I didn’t know this existed.’ I was very attracted to a lot of women at that time. Still am.
I turned eighteen in March, I waited until my A-level exams were done, and in June I went to my first BDSM gathering. It was in Windsor. It was just a social gathering: we met up in a pub, got to know each other. There are loads of BDSM gatherings up in the north, which is brilliant because I can go to them at university and not have to lie to Mother about where I am! My mum doesn’t know what my relationship is like!
I met my boyfriend at my first event. Which was a bit of a surprise. I went in going, ‘Right, first of all I’m a lesbian,’ because I’d only ever been attracted to women. Then I was like, ‘Wait a minute! This is a guy! I kind of like this guy! Whoops!’ A few weeks later we ended up getting together. We’re getting on for a year now. Which is lovely. And obviously I went off to university at the end of the summer and then we kept it going. He’s twenty-eight and I go down to Windsor to see him.
Now I really like whips. My boyfriend got really into whips, and I was just like, ‘Okay, I’ll try it!’ And then I really enjoyed it. He’s got a proper good whip: oh, it’s a proper whip. It’s four foot long. It’s black and leather and got a little silver – I’ve completely forgotten what the technical term is for it – on the handle. He’s just bought a dressage whip in a sports shop. So that’s going to be interesting.
It hurts. Yeah. Part of the pleasure is that it hurts. It hurts a lot. Yep! Though it doesn’t hurt me as much as it could. I tend to find there’s a thing called subspace and when I am submitting to my boyfriend I go into a slightly altered state of consciousness. When I’m in subspace it hurts but nowhere near as much. I don’t cry because I get a lot of endorphins and adrenaline and it feels really good but when I’m coming back to reality then I can cry if I’m really stressed or emotional. I get a little bit embarrassed but my boyfriend is lovely about it, he just hugs me and lets me come down. That’s aftercare, looking after who’s been involved. For me it’s giving hugs. Basically just hugs. And cuddles. When I’m coming out of it I shake because I have all this adrenaline in my system. Occasionally I need to eat something really sugary so I actually keep sweets in my bag if I’m ever going round to my boyfriend’s house.
I do it whenever I get the chance. My boyfriend’s room is tiny! Somehow we manage to do it. We just about have enough width in his flat in Windsor to do it front-on. In my university bedroom we do it side-on rather than front-on, which is kind of irritating because one side of me gets a lot heavier hit than the other side. Whipping is quite loud! Once my flatmates were playing loud music so we thought we’d irritate them, cracked the whip around my room a bit. Just for fun.
Beating turns me on sexually. I haven’t got an orgasm from being whipped but I know people who do. It does hurt – but I don’t mind! The thing I really like about whips is I love having marks; I love having something to show for it. I like taking pictures of mys
elf, and admiring myself. It’s usually just the back of my legs from my knees to my bottom. I generally keep it hidden, particularly when I’m at home with my parents. How long my skin takes to heal depends. When I use the whip on bare skin I get marks down my thighs. My thighs take a lot longer to heal up; a couple of weeks. My bum is usually healed in a week or so. I’ve never had to have medical care before. I’ve got Arnica cream if I bruise and antiseptic plasters if my skin cuts open accidentally. That would only ever be by accident. I know people who play to that level regularly but that’s not something I’m at yet. It’s one of my boyfriend’s limits as well.
My closest friend loves showing off all her marks. It’s brilliant, I love it! She gets so excited about it and it’s really lovely, actually. She’s just gotten engaged to the guy who she does it with. They’re really sweet and she really loves him and it’s really, really sweet to see. He would break the skin. He’s twenty-six and she has just turned twenty-three. She’s graduating this year; he graduated a few years ago. They are getting married in a couple of years.
There’s a thing called hard limits. Hard limits are things you won’t do. Soft limits are things you could push. Blood is on my hard list. Blood means anything that draws blood, so it could be cutting or being hit so hard you draw blood; it could be needles. You insert needles into the skin; it’s a masochistic thing. I’ve seen some really gorgeous patterns made by coloured needles put though the skin on people’s backs. It’s really beautiful but it makes me shudder. The needles are inserted sideways in and out, like sewing without thread. A couple of my friends who’d just got engaged were doing needles at a demonstration and he was like, ‘Hey, Anna, do you want come and watch us?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m kind of curious.’ She had three needles stuck sideways into her arm and then he was taking them out of her arm and the sight of that made me nearly faint! Don’t do needles. She was in pain. She likes it – she’s very masochistic, she loves everything like that.
Also on my hard limits list is anything illegal like bestiality, under-age sex, that’s like – no. Another big one I have is verbal humiliation – I won’t do that. It’s basically verbally degrading someone. I had a very bad experience with it and I’m not going anywhere near that. I vaguely knew him; his girlfriend was a friend of mine. It was last October, my second week of university. I said the safe word: he didn’t stop. So that crossed into sexual assault territory. It wasn’t a good experience for me. It took me a long time to talk about it because my memory was blurred; I didn’t know what happened, and there was a high possibility that my drink was spiked with drugs because afterwards I needed to stick a lot of the pieces together from that night. It’s been good for me to actually talk about it. Now I’m getting it out there and it feels better.
I know people who get sexual pleasure from being in pain, and have orgasms. I’ve seen this girl have orgasms through being whipped. Having said that, her boyfriend has trained her to orgasm on command so she can’t actually orgasm unless he tells her that she can. It’s by hypnotism and conditioned responses – it’s fascinating and I love watching them do it. He’s got a trigger to make her be still, which is running a finger along her eyebrow. He does that and she will go completely still. She can’t do anything. She’s very aware of everything happening around her but she can’t do anything about it. To stop her being completely still, he kisses her. He loves tickling people to irritate them and he’s now got her conditioned to feel the sensation of tickling when he says certain stuff to her. He’s done it at social events before. It’s really funny! She gets really irritated at him. Usually she just hits him on the arm.
I’ve played with them as a couple privately in their homes, a kind of open relationship kind of thing. They’re like, ‘Hey! Come round to our house. We’ll hit you!’ And I’m just like, ‘Okay!’ The man will hit – can be hand, paddles, canes, hairbrush, ruler, floggers. Floggers are similar to whips but they’re multi-tailed, heavy. You can do fancy stuff, like twist them. It’s quite artsy, interesting flogging. When my boyfriend came up to stay we got the floggers out – he’s done a lot of circus skills before – and the four of us were playing and it was really fun. Last time there was a foursome on the cards; we never got round to it, we were all tired. But yeah, I would be fine with a foursome. We haven’t reached that point yet of my boyfriend and I having sex with someone else. We operate a policy of, ‘Do what you want, just tell each other.’ But not in front of each other, not yet.
I wasn’t whipped as a child. I was raised very normally. As a child I had a fantasy of being whipped. Definitely! My boyfriend said the scene in Aladdin where Jasmine gets chained up – he liked that. For me it was watching Thunderbirds because Lady Penelope always got tied up! At school we would re-enact Thunderbirds scenes and I always wanted to be Lady Penelope.
I have been the youngest at pretty much every event I have been to. I don’t look like I’m into BDSM. I get that a lot! A lot of people say that to me. I look young and innocent. That’s what it is. It’s something people don’t expect from me and it’s kind of hilarious when I end up being open about it, because it defies what the expectation is. Most of the submissives I know are either very young, so twenty-five or below, or very old: fifty or above. But then I can’t speak for everyone. It’s very much in my nature to be submissive. Yeah. I was talking with my boyfriend: our personality traits are very similar. We’re both people-pleasing, supportive people, we want to take care and protect. Because I’m a people pleaser, I like making someone else feel happy. But our traits manifest themselves in different ways: him being dominant and me being submissive, it’s the same thing.
I have had fantasies and acted them out. So if my boyfriend says something then we’ll do it. Or I’ll say something. He had a schoolgirl fetish so he was like, ‘I’d like to see you in a pair of long white socks.’ I was like, ‘Okay. I’m just going the whole hog.’ I got long white socks. I had a short kilt and a white button-down shirt. Turned up at his house, hair in pigtails. It was great! It was really good. It’s nice to be able to fulfil those fantasies.
My fantasies tend to be very nameless, faceless, but a lot of them are based on my experiences now, so I can feel touch, I can hear things. I have audio clips of people stored in my head so I can actually hear my boyfriend saying a particular sentence … it’s quite nice actually. Just the enclosure that it brings, being private and being able to feel things. I usually just start masturbating and see what comes, preferably me!
Sometimes I feel I really want to be whipped. Particularly when I’m stressed, or I’m anxious or I’m nervous. In exam time recently I’ve been feeling, ‘I want to be whipped! I want to be whipped!’ because it’s stress-relieving for me, it’s cathartic, it lets me get rid of negativity and emotions so it’s healthy for me to do it. I like it and it’s just a good thing for me to do because it makes me feel better in myself. So yeah, I do get that urge quite a lot. When I first started I couldn’t take anywhere near as much the level of impact of whips, hands, floggers, tying, spanking as I can now, which is a personal achievement for me. It makes me feel proud of myself that I can do it.
I’m definitely a feminist. I really am. I have a big feminist view on people being sexually empowered, people not feeling shame about sex – within reason and the law. From BDSM I get a huge amount of self-esteem, I get self-worth, I feel good about myself and I can feel proud of something I’ve achieved. Female submissive is a very worn-down stereotype. Feminists, when they’ve opposed this stuff, say if you have a male dominant and a female submissive you’re reinforcing patriarchal values. But a, that’s heterosexist, b, that implies all women are submissive, c, who cares? They are doing what they want to do in bed, what does it matter? Heterosexist means that you’re implying that all couples are heterosexual, so you can’t include gay or lesbian couples. I don’t feel I’m acting out heterosexual value systems.
Submission is very empowering, it gives me a lot of confidence; it makes me feel like I have somet
hing to be proud of. I do it because I like doing it. I do it because I feel good doing it, I feel sexually empowered doing it, because I’ve made the choice to submit to him by my own consent because that’s what I want and it’s what he wants. There’s nothing less empowering about submitting than being dominant. As long as I have made the choice to do it, that’s what’s empowering, it’s not what I’m doing.
When I was masturbating when I was younger, because I had no sexual experience, I had nothing to go on so I was just thinking about the physical sensations. I didn’t know about gay people. I learned about it when I was twelve, I didn’t initially apply the term to myself; I was just like, ‘Okay, that’s cool, that stuff exists.’ I didn’t actually label myself as a lesbian until I was seventeen. I waited to develop, to make sure that was what I was secure in. I told my parents when I was sixteen. My mum was lovely about it; I wouldn’t have expected any different, but then it was about me being able to be comfortable with it myself before I told anyone else. My parents are conventional for the most part. My childhood was very conventional. My school – as lovely as it was, I had a brilliant time there – liked to think it was a lot more liberal than it was. It was an all-girls’ private school in the Home Counties.