I Like A Bit Of Bondage

With EL James’ 50 Shades Of Grey selling by the truckload, it’s clear that there’s a big appetite out there for BDSM, and that women are indeed partial to it. Just don’t try giving me orders, says Anne Sexton.

Anne Sexton, 27 Aug 2012

We were in the pub when Liam asked me how I felt about handcuffs.

Handcuffs, I don’t mind as long as they are not fluffy. Fluffy seems like a cop-out – a toy, not a restraint.

Did I like discipline spanking? Discipline? Whips? Ropes?

Here it was, my chance to experience my very own Fifty Shades Of Grey – if I wanted it.

Like the protagonist of EL James’ best selling novel, Liam was young, handsome and was a committed practitioner of BDSM – bondage and discipline/dominance and submission and sado-maochism. Unfortunately he wasn’t a billionaire, or even a millionaire – worse luck! Then again, I am not an impressionable 21-year-old virgin, so who am I to quibble over details?

Fifty Shades Of Grey is essentially your bog-standard Mills & Boon romance, with added kink for spice. Personally I think it’s all a bit dull, but when you work your way through the Marquis de Sade’s collected works at a young age, you become inured.

I’d also read Pauline Réage’s The Story Of O and Venus In Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch because BDSM relationships fascinated me, and books were my initial education. But that was when I was a teenager. Since then I’ve grown up. Been there, done that, and at this stage I’ve no real desire to buy the ball gag.

I told Liam that I didn’t think we’d be sexually compatible. This was not without regrets. Did I mention how handsome he was? And having been out with him a few times, I’d learnt that he wasn’t all tight t-shirt and no substance either.

I understand the pleasure of pain, and the fine line between the two. I like the costumes the BDSM community tend to favour, but the dom and sub, or master and slave, relationship – that’s just not for me. I don’t do submission, I told Liam, but he didn’t believe me.

“We’ll see”, he said.

“You’ll see”, I replied.

As I stood up to go to the bathroom, Liam smacked me on the backside. In the mirror I could see that the left cheek was red.

“You’d better even that out”, I told him when I returned, and he hit the other cheek.

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