I managed a dude ranch for three years. I studied the way the women moved, not the horses. If I move like a horse, it just waddles around, because I’m not shaped like a horse, so I had to develop dance moves to correlate to the movement of the pony. There’s a whole bunch of things involved in the erotic. Think of all the equestrian expressions that are also bestowed in the sexual area. Mounting—she mounted him; hung like a horse; [referring] to men as stallions, studs; sowing your wild oats. You don’t hear references to birds or cats or dogs—that’s considered perverted. Watch a woman galloping along, and then turn that picture sideways, and envision the horse gone and a man on her, and you’ll see that she actually looks like she’s having sex.
The first experience I had was when I was about 12 years old. I was hanging around with this 11-year-old girl and it was a boring afternoon. She innocently said, “Give me a horsey ride!” like her daddy used to do. So, what the hell, I gave it to her. It was my first real experience with a girl. It was like, “Wow, this is nice, this is pleasurable!” It stuck in my head and became an erotic fantasy. I don’t think about doing this when I’m making love, and I don’t think about making love when I’m doing this. But it is a turn-on. The fact that I’m making a living at it, the fact that women are having a good time with it—all of that gives me erotic feelings, because I guess we all, basically, get erotic when it comes to sex and money.
I was motivated by the desire to have it all: to make a living at something that you enjoy and then throw in that it gets you sexually interested. Being a pony is very important because it intertwines itself [with the] identity in your head. You want to have a positive sexual identity. Everyone wants to have a strength; this is my strength. Women pay attention to me because of it.
I’ve dated a lot of women I’ve met through this. There is also that dominant-submissive thing there, but it’s more of a chivalrous thing. It’s like I’m giving pleasure to women in a manner like, I guess, Sir Walter Raleigh. When he laid his coat down, was that submission or chivalry? He did it because he wanted to, so it was chivalry. He didn’t have to—that would have been submission. I do this for myself, but I also do it because it gives pleasure to women, and I have a good time doing that, so it’s chivalry. Most of the people that I wind up dating have taken pony rides. Let’s face it: [If] I get involved with someone, she’s got to like pony rides. It’s like a singer hooking up with someone that hates to hear someone sing. That would be ridiculous. I wouldn’t get involved with a woman who disapproved. When I’m involved with someone, my life is intertwined with hers. It’s not like, “Well, we’ll tolerate each other.” You should have many, many things in your life intertwine—your professions and what you consider erotic should be compatible. Otherwise, don’t even bother.
[It’s] an amazing thing. I never get tired of it—it never gets old.
What’s always amazed me is that there’s not much difference between my act at an S/M club and at a Sweet Sixteen party. The presentation has to change according to the crowd, but the actual ride itself is exactly the same, which is funny. What changes are the clothes underneath the horse equipment, not the equipment or the ride. It’s like they base whether the act is risqué or cute depending on whether my clothes are risqué or cute.
If the person is treating me as a pony, then [it’s not erotic], but if the person is treating me as a person—being used as a pony—then possibly [it’s erotic], depending on their attitude. If they’re doing it in a mean, selfish way, it isn’t fun. If they’re having a lot of fun with it, then I’ll have fun with it. My idea is not to do my thing whether they enjoy it or not: I want the person to enjoy. I want that more than just doing a good act.
I can read an audience pretty quickly and do what’s needed to please them. The most unreceptive [crowds] have been the yuppie-ish types. It isn’t the women. The men who want to attract and impress women with money are the most threatened by my act, because they can’t compete with this.
Picking my most exciting experience is real hard. Is it when I got a hundred-dollar tip or when a beautiful woman took off her top? All of them have been exciting. I was very excited when I flew to Miami and started doing my act every six weeks. I was very excited when I met my girlfriend through it. The most exciting thing monetarily is when I’m making the most money; the most exciting thing sexually is when the woman is gorgeous and maybe coming on to me. It changes constantly. There are so many avenues of my life that are exciting to me! Maybe that’s why I’m not married—so many different women are exciting to me. It’s very hard to say, “What was the favorite woman you were with?” The favorite woman is the one that likes to pony ride the most.
The whole Wonder Pony [act is] copyrighted, so that if anyone tried to do a similar act in a similar way, I’d have recourse. Not only that, but it’s physically difficult. I have chiropractors come up to me, telling me I shouldn’t be doing this. It’s a lot more than throwing a saddle on your back and people wanting to pay money. I got it to the point where I get hired to take women along the beach at night in the summertime. I put boots on; I go through the surf. I’ve gotten it to a real pinnacle.
MAX
I’m very sexual. I always have been, and in order to sustain that amount of sexuality, I try to have as large a repertoire as possible. Things can get boring if you just do one thing. I am strictly heterosexual [and] pretty monogamous. I’m dominant.
Sex is probably the most important thing in both of our lives as partners. I was very inhibited before. I was married for 25 years to one woman who never had sex with anybody else. I started exploring myself when I was about 40. Lindsay is 15 years younger than I. When we met, she was not into S&M. With my previous wife, I tried different things: I tried dildos, I tried tying her up. It just didn’t work. She would go limp. There has to be some sort of spark between us to make this work. But I had this desire, and then I met Lindsay. Lindsay was game for anything that was sensual. She could enjoy the intensity of an experience without it converting into pain, which has an awful lot to do with how much you relax into things. It went from “How can I give you more of an intense feeling than before?” and got where we are [now]. She wants to do it all.
I’d always had S&M kind of fantasies. Going back to my earliest sexual memories, in preschool, I used to have dreams of being kidnapped and locked up in a room with a girl; we were naked, [and] we’d lie on top of each other. I went through school having fantasies of finding women and tying them up and being able to have them. There was this whole mystique around women being unavailable to me. As oldest boy in a family of boys, not knowing about women and being very shy and not being able to know how to come in contact with them, women [seemed] very unapproachable. It developed into this fantasy about a way to make women approachable. When I’d go to the library as a little kid, I’d go to the sex books and [read] the torture books. It was funny because I’m afraid of pain, [and] I faint at the sight of blood. There’s a very nebulous thing around pain that’s always been fascinating to me. I was turned on by the fact of people being helpless, of somebody having power over another person, [but] the bloody, painful stuff really turns my stomach. So, to me, in S&M there seems to be a definite dichotomy between fantasy and reality.
I have experience being a bottom, and my partner has experience being a top; we prefer it the way we have it, but we don’t find the other way anathema. It gives you an ability to see what it feels like on the other side. When I become submissive, I feel completely overwhelmed. I feel like a goddess has taken me; I feel completely like I worship this person, and whatever they would do to me would be just fine: it would be like a sacrifice to them.
The most exciting fantasies that I have right now are, first, the dog-show fantasy. Women are brought in cages by masters. They’re naked, and they’re in little cages with carpets, and they’re all put up on benches, and everybody’d go around and look at them. Then they’re brought out on leashes, strutted around the floor, and judged like a dog would be. Their
necks are brought up; their mouths are looked at, their orifices are opened up. They’re probed in front of the audience, so that there’s an element of humiliation, there’s an element of objectification.
I think the fantasy comes from the fact that women have always been so hard to get. Women really control the relationship in all the courting stages, and men feel very frustrated. I know I felt very frustrated about women, how hard it was to get them and how powerless I always was. It seems to be a way where I can just express my pure, erotic lust.
One of my favorite things is to tie her: I cuff her ankles to her wrists and her ankles back to her calves so that her legs are spread. I can pick her up that way [and] move her around: she’s a little compact bundle of woman who can’t move [and is] completely accessible. And [then] I like to do things to her. When I’m actually engaged in fucking her, I merge and lose myself in the experience of sex and orgasm. But in S/M, I can sit back and play with her. It becomes very erotic, very charged. I can watch her come without losing myself in the experience. I’ll bind her into a form where she isn’t my love: she’s an object of sexual desire. I can focus my eroticism on her, which I find is different from love.
Everybody has a light and a dark side. S/M means coming to terms with finding out where the boundaries are; why do some things repel you? Why do some things attract you? It’s a way to explore that boundary. A lot of people read de Sade and say he was horrible. I read it as a piece of philosophy: Here was a man who wasn’t doing these things [but] was pushing the bounds of what was acceptable dogma around sex and pain. In my sexual life I always wanted to push boundaries. I’ve always wanted to find out how far [one] can go.
Eight
LIFESTYLE D&S
You are here to serve your masters. During the day, you will perform whatever domestic duties are assigned you, such as sweeping, putting back the books, arranging flowers, or waiting on tables. Nothing more difficult than that. But at the first word or sign from anyone you will drop whatever you are doing and ready yourself for what is really your one and only duty: to lend yourself.
—STORY OF O1
For most of us, sex is an act or series of acts, done in private, often compartmentalized or distinct from our larger reality. It may bear little or no relation to how we live outside the moment of erotic pleasure and may not define how we feel, what we do, or how we view ourselves. For lifestyle D&Sers, however, sexuality is an integral aspect of identity.
In this chapter we profile three lifestylers:
• Frank and Lisa W. are 37 and 25, respectively. They own a computer-consulting firm and lead the on-line D&S support group of CompuServe, where they first met. They have two children.
• Bambi Bottom is 33 years old and an independent management consultant. She and her husband live in the Bible Belt.
WHAT IS LIFESTYLE D&S?
The term lifestyle has no universal definition in a D&S context. Broadly speaking, it refers to those individuals who elect to be sexually intimate exclusively with other D&Sers. Lifestyle may be a statement of sexual preference or of sexual politics; it may dictate the choices one makes about friends and lovers. Lifestylers often limit new friendships to other D&Sers—indeed, many prefer the tribal atmosphere of an established D&S community for reasons of safety, common interests, and acceptance.
A more parochial definition of lifestyle D&S is used to describe permanent partners for whom the power dynamic is an ever-present reality in all areas of their relationship.
To me a lifestyle S&M relationship is lived by the partners full-time; there are no boundaries between what you do in the bedroom and what you do in the rest of your life. The power dynamic is a part of every activity that the people do, the things they say to each other, the attitudes they have toward each other.
—BAMBI BOTTOM
In such full-time lifestyle relationships the partners usually do not switch roles—the line between dominant and submissive is fixed. These relationships in some ways appear to resemble traditional marriages, where one partner is the authority figure. But the lifestyle dominant is as likely to be female as male, and the sex centers on D&S activity.
Although lifestyle D&S does not depend on degree or type of activity, many who have full-time partnered relationships seem to enjoy intense physical and psychological control. There are, of course, D&Sers who enjoy extreme activity without opting for lifestyle, just as some lifestylers prefer mild control. What is most important to the lifestyler is the constant awareness of power roles. This negotiated exchange is both erotically and emotionally gratifying.
[D&S] is very important [for us] in the bedroom [and] to our [overall] relationship. I’m certainly interested in all the vanilla stuff, but D&S is required. Both I and Lisa explicitly went looking for someone who was interested in D&S.
—FRANK W.
Although lifestyle submissives live in service to their dominants, the personal dynamic does not alter their social or business personae. Lifestylers are as apt as anyone else to lead mainstream public lives.
I think some people imagine [D&S] to be [that] you give up your career and basically spend your time at this woman’s feet. A woman who could enjoy that would not have the respect for me that I [want]. The roles are defined, but she wants me to be successful; she wants me to enjoy myself.
—JOHN H.
Lifestylers generally feel that the clear delineation of power issues at home liberates them socially. In effect, once the submissive grants power to the dominant, there is no reason to cede power to any other. They also believe that the communication needed to make a D&S relationship work effects immense positive changes in their daily lives. For them, D&S may help to resolve larger control issues.
Most of the submissives I know are outwardly strong-willed individuals, and they’ve actualized themselves to the point that you have to overcome that part of their nature before they’ll submit. I’ve found some so-called submissives who were bad life-mates. Self-destruction crops up in a number of them because of bad childhood experiences. I found that channeling that negative energy through the Scene is really an excellent coping mechanism for them. When they’re able to have this outlet—[a] safe, consensual aspect of the Scene—it mellows them out.
—MICHAEL V.
While some lifestylers publicize their involvement in the Scene, a majority maintain a low profile for fear of legal, occupational, or social harassment.
People like us are not in the Scene; we’re not public. People can’t find us, and we can’t find them. I believe that there are [other] extreme master-slave relationships out there absolutely hidden from view. I’d love to meet others who are as deep into S&M as [we are].
—BAMBI BOTTOM
Virtually no pressure is put on people in the D&S communities to “come out,” and discretion is an unspoken law, particularly among lifestylers, since a high percentage of them appear to be middle- to upper-middle-class professionals. Scene names, or pseudonyms, are popular to ensure anonymity. Some lifestylers, however, will confide in family members or sympathetic friends.
I’ve come out to my brother. I’ve come out to my sister. I’ve come out to my older daughter, [though] not in a great deal of detail. By and large reaction has been positive.
—JOHN M.
Even the most private lifestyler often wears some token of his relationship, whether concealed or visible.
I must wear a collar at all times. I have a variety of collars: Some look very vanilla, [so] no straight person would know.
—BAMBI BOTTOM
Such tokens remind D&Sers of the underlying power dynamic with their partners and of their commitment to D&S, not merely as a sexual variation but as a way of life.
WHY DO THEY LIKE IT?
Those who maintain a 24-hour lifestyle relationship bring a unique perspective to D&S. For them, the decision to control or to be controlled in a full-time relationship is fundamental to their identity.
I got out of a vanilla marriage [and] actively looked
for a D&S partner. It’s a big part of who I am, and without it, I’m not happy.
—LISA W.
To the lifestyle dominant, a consistent ability to control all areas of a consenting partner’s life is intrinsic to his or her identity as a person of power and authority and is a source of self-esteem. With this power comes responsibility, a responsibility that dominants find deeply fulfilling. Many actively work toward improving the quality of their submissives’ lives and see themselves in the role of protector, parent, and teacher. They are the submissives’ greatest ally and advocate.
My master is a natural healer. He’s helped me through a lot. I’ve gone from being a borderline alcoholic to drinking only about once a week; from being a coffeeholic, 14 cups a day, to drinking just [two] cups a day; from being a foodaholic to being a normal weight. He’s worked with me on all the emotional problems that are the source of the destructive behavior.
—BAMBI BOTTOM
A lifestyle submissive usually feels unfulfilled or bereft when there is no positive, dominant presence in his or her life. Emotionally, the lifestyle submissive typically desires to be in a subservient position to a fundamentally benevolent authority who supervises and disciplines, punishes, and rewards. This supervision may range from the sharply erotic to the sheerly mundane; in this context the fact of control is a confirmation of love and commitment.
Protection and guidance are of themselves erotic to the lifestyle submissive. The ways in which the dominant expresses control may also create a constant, low-level pitch of erotic tension between the partners.
Different Loving Page 21