Warning: This essay includes some recounting of my and a partner’s forced sex fantasies. I believe that rape fantasies and play are consistent with feminism, but as a feminist and woman who has only feared real rape and not experienced it, all while fantasizing for years about erotic surrender and forced sex, I want to acknowledge the potential tensions between feminism and rape fantasies and the potential for my fantasies and experiences with forced-sex BDSM to be hurtful to victims of real rape.
Background: I have a story to tell. It’s a story about body image, porn, sexuality and relationships. Its main characters are myself; my aunt; the internet; its technological cohorts; and D, J, and M – three men I have, for lack of a better term, dated – in that order. Stories told in chronological order are nice, but I don’t want to tell this story starting from the beginning and proceeding to the present. I need to tell it in bits and pieces, not necessarily in order, with breaks in-between for essays on related topics that aren’t at the heart of my (our?) story, yet are topics that also compel me to write. Hopefully, the collection of these vignettes about my lovers, cybersex/porn and the deceased aunt I miss – hopefully, they will form some sort of coherent whole.
I’ve been bound with leather belts once … like the ones straight off someone’s pants. One belt bound my wrists above my head. One bound my breasts. If I said “I liked it,” it wouldn’t do justice to how it made me feel … powerful, free, throbbing, special, girlish, beautiful, owned, ready to worship at his feet or perhaps elsewhere on his body. We didn’t go farther than getting topless and doing a little heavy petting over the pants – second seems like it would be the right base to claim – but the experience was a more intense, meaningful and important romantic and sexual first than was losing my virginity. It was something like losing my real virginity.
I believe my ex-friend/ex-top/ex-boyfriend, J, would feel something similar about our sexual experiences with each other … if not this particular time at second base, probably the first time we slid into home. “Coming-of-age” was the phrase he used to describe the date on which we actually fucked for the first time – the date on which he bought twine at the hardware store on the way to meeting me, and then tied my arms behind my back. The thin scratchy twine cut into my elbows dangerously but thrust my chest out in the most lovely way. The danger to the nerves that run through my elbows was something we learned about the next day, over breakfast with my kinky rope-bondage-loving friends – it certainly explained why it had hurt like hell when he tried laying me on my back while he had me tied like that.
But the belts at second base – the belts are most vivid in my mind. I had felt submissive a few times before with other lovers, including the anal experience with D which I’ve already written about. But the belts with J – that was my first real-life BDSM experience. It was his second. Especially given our ages at the time (him 28, me 31), our mutual inexperience with our core kinky identities is certainly a powerful and romantic part of the story in this vignette – a powerful aspect of our entire relationship in fact – we were each other’s first real BDSM partners. Yet there was another kind of inexperience making the hour with the belts worth describing – and appropriate in my broader story of male gazes, body image, and sexuality – it was only J’s third experience with naked tits.
J was 28, but he had the maturity and sexual experience of a 14-year-old. And so … even though he was wildly attracted to me, I feared the inexperience of his gaze more than anything. I feared a gaze that had been so thoroughly steeped in almost nothing but porn for a good 10 years longer than the average man. I feared a gaze and a mentality that not only paid for a subscription to Maxim magazine but also took the rag seriously. I also feared his lack of any sort of filtering of what came out of his mouth. He had said things about women’s bodies that were glaring red flags. There was the time he had made just about the cheapest, unfunniest shot possible at a party, blurting out “You can say that again,” in response to an un-self-conscious big girl cheerfully asking a guy to scooch his chair in because, as she put it, she was “too fat” to get past. There was the time I had asked him about recent dating prospects, and he described how his attraction to a girl ended when she got up from the table she was sitting at, revealing wide hips in the process. Ultimately, I was right to fear his gaze, and I should have feared it more than I did because, in the end, he hurt me terribly with it. But that day – that first bondage experience for me, that third naked-tits experience for him – his gaze and his introducing me to breast bondage gave me a temporary freedom from my worries about these things, a freedom that left me able to focus on the pleasure of submitting, a freedom to appreciate the experience of a deep need being plainly and enthusiastically fulfilled for real, for the first time – it was like gasping for air after holding my breath during the years of my youth.
For months prior to our first date, there had been extreme mutual attraction between me and J. Although it’s not necessary that I describe anything about those months in order to write up a vignette about our first time getting partially naked and doing some bondage together, I feel it’s only fair to talk about that attraction because it occurred under circumstances that were probably unfair and at times humiliating for J. I don’t want to write anything more about J without some context about the initial tough and embarrassing crush he had on me, which I couldn’t help but encourage because I was totally crushed out on him, too.
J was my boyfriend’s roommate. In fact, J was my geeky and brainy boyfriend’s even geekier, perhaps brainier, and most definitely – completely – totally – obnoxious and rude roommate. And yet … J was also hip, really hip. My best and most concise description of J:
A cross between …
Max Fischer, the genius prep school teenager, played by Jason Schwartzman, from Wes Anderson’s Rushmore …
one of the guys off of Jackass … perhaps this one:
and Michael Scott, the boss played by Steve Carell, in The Office …
Let’s take a moment and reiterate that last one – when I watch The Office, I get eerie flashbacks to J acting just like Michael Scott. Anyone who has watched The Office may find it hard to bel
ieve any woman would be into someone who literally behaved like that character, but I was – I was totally into him.
J’s life imitating pop culture doesn’t end for me there, though. If we use the traditional definition of first-time vaginal intercourse, J had lost his virginity at age 28, only a few weeks before meeting me, and his sum total sexual experience prior to that was a single blow job and a few French kisses. So there were also some strong similarities to another character Steve Carell has played – The 40-Year-Old Virgin:
The upshot was that J desperately needed to grow up in a lot of ways, sexually being just one. As for me, a 31-year-old who had had the adjective “mature” applied to me in its non-porn sense by various family members, teachers and friends since a very young age, I had a need to be less mature and have more of the fun I felt I had missed out on in my teens and 20’s. We were in for a dizzying train wreck.
My intentions were mostly good in initially trying to channel my attraction to J into friendship – trying to be a confidant, mentor and cheerleader about dating, women and sex. I had also worked hard to be honest and open with both my boyfriend and J about my attraction to J, as well as my loyalty to my boyfriend, so that no one felt misled. I don’t think I did anything truly wrong or dishonest under the circumstances – it’s not like I went looking for J. I had a good thing with and was wildly attracted to the vanilla boyfriend myself, and I didn’t want to mess things up with him. But before I write anything more about J and his ADD gaze – immature and porn-addled to the point of cruelty one minute, deliciously objectifying and accepting of my real body the next minute – it’s important that I confess to my own girlish immaturity during these months before J moved, and my boyfriend gave me – his polyamorous (and married) girlfriend (have I mentioned I’m happily married?) – permission and rules under which J and I could pursue our mutual attraction physically. (Whew – did you get all that? ADD gaze, affirming and immaturely cruel. My own immaturity, about to be revealed. My boyfriend saying J and I could date and fool around, after J moved out of their house. And yes, I’m married.)
Before my boyfriend relaxed his rule against J, during the time J and I were dangerously flirtatious “friends,” I found the love triangle terribly exciting. I was as giddy about the two of them as your average 16-year-old just discovering lust-love. I flirted with J pretty shamelessly, sometimes in front of my boyfriend, sometimes when my boyfriend wasn’t there, sometimes over email, sometimes in front of my boyfriend and all their friends. In my defense, J needed my flirting bad. I also loved it when J flirted with me, something he took every opportunity to engage in. It gets worse, though … J’s room was right above my boyfriend’s room, and I was loud when my boyfriend fucked me. Sometimes I was even louder because wanting J, too, led to my wanting him to hear me and think about having sex with me, and all of that made me that much more turned on and loud. And I was the one to suggest going on walks together, when my boyfriend was too sleepy or lazy to join me excercising. J and I would talk about sex and dating on these walks, under the guise of friendship. But in actuality, our talking about sex and dating relieved and fed my desire for some sort of sexual interaction with him, without crossing any boundaries of physical intimacy. Well … except for the time he lamented his thick curly Jewish fro hair, and shocked at his self-hatred of a physical trait I found really sexy about him, I reached over and stroked my hand through it, telling him how much I liked his hair, discovering how good it felt in addition to how good it looked; his head nuzzled into my hand, hungry for being touched. And well … there was also the time he hopped behind me and deftly maneuvered me to a sitting position on the ground with his arm around me, before I even knew what hit me. I sat there for a minute feeling a mixture of excitement and guilt about encouraging him and toying with our flirting like this, behind my boyfriend’s back. That particular interaction prompted one of my open talks with my boyfriend, again making clear to him I was attracted to J but hadn’t crossed any lines he found important (no kissing J, no sex with J) and wouldn’t cross those lines without permission.
J’s desperate needy attraction to me was revealed in plain and sometimes explicit detail on these walks – J was into me for sure – but he also really really needed sex, something he’d only experienced four times. He was somewhat willing to take any female that came along, having lost his virginity with a girl he really didn’t find attractive. My thorough attraction to him was revealed in plain detail on these walks, as well – I oozed with compliments on his looks, his brains, his coolness – I laughed and gushed at his jokes and his teasing me – he made me laugh in that way that instantaneously turns a girl’s clit into a throbbing drain on the blood in her brain. His thorough potential for being an insensitive thoughtless prick about women’s bodies was revealed on these walks, too, as was his related talent for the type of objectification I adored: a lewd yet clever remark about staring at my tits; my favorite kind of compliment – one I’d never heard before – directed at my shoulders, their cuteness, and how effectively I communicated and flirted with them; telling me about my boyfriends’ buddies at the gym the week after they all met me – they discussed my nice, big, full, round, perky tits. The picture he painted was one of approval, admiration, wonder, envy. The approval, admiration and wonder was intended for my tits. The envy was for my boyfriend. I reveled in his tale of me being objectified, and I smiled at the implication that the perception of my tits made my boyfriend more of a man in their eyes. I loved and admired my boyfriend and felt he deserved the kind of envy that comes from having a sexy girlfriend. At the time, I felt no need for it to be known, nor guilt nor shame, that any approval, admiration and wonder was actually for my bra, since my tits were only round, full and perky when corralled in one. In fact, it filled me with pride at my ability to pick out great-supporting bras and fool them dudes with what appeared to be eye-popping perky tits.
But most importantly, my and J’s mutual desires for and inexperience in BDSM were revealed explicitly on these walks. I do believe our top-bottom dynamic was there from the very first time we met, though. I left the take-out teriyaki place, at which I met my boyfriend’s friends, indelibly marked and intrigued by what felt like hostility yet desire from J. My perception of hostility/desire made all the more sense when my boyfriend later told me about J having only had intercourse for the first time a few weeks before – a virgin at 28, he must have had a lot of resentment towards women. The hostility/desire made even more sense on the walk in which I confessed to identifying as submissive and J confessed to the type of porn he liked – bondage – in particular, rope bondage.
We didn’t have any rope at second base, though. We only had his two leather belts … and lots of anticipation …
Lots of anticipation.
A few hours after our actual fooling around with the belts, I wrote him an email about the sexual fantasy I had been having about him for months. The fantasy was inspired by our friends-only predicament, my tendency towards fantasizing about forced sex, and his mentioning the way he had used the belts off of his pants to do some bondage with that first girl he fucked a few weeks
before we met. I wrote:
Being with you today was intensely good. I lack adequate words for it.
My fantasy about belts and silence:
We’re still not supposed to be doing anything beyond friendship, so I’m settling for friendship. I want to help you with the whole sex/girls issue. I want to learn more about BDSM myself. I want to do things like go to munches and meet other BDSM types for talking and learning…community. I want to see your BDSM porn. I’m curious about your having tied Shelly up with belts, hands behind her back, ankles together. I don’t understand how you would get belts to do that…do they have special notches way in close so that they’ll be tight around the wrists and ankles, which are much smaller than anyone’s waist? I’m curious about how the belts would feel. Would I like it? Should I put BDSM higher on my sex to do list? I’m visiting you, we’re in your room, I ask you to tie me up with the belts like you did to Shelly. My conditions are the belts will only stay on for a few minutes and I don’t want to be facing you–I don’t want you to see my face–if the belts cause me to feel sexual, it won’t count as cheating if you don’t see my reaction–and I’m embarrassed at the thought of you seeing me react anyways. I’m kneeling. I’m in front of your bed. You belt my wrists, then my ankles. You let me experience the feel of it for a few minutes. Then you come up behind me and cover my mouth…press yourself against me…grab at my tits. I feel scared. violated. wanted. not responsible. at your mercy. dumb/naive. You pull up my shirt. You undo my pants, pull them down. You bend me over the bed. You fuck me with one hand over my mouth and one hand holding me down, sometimes on my shoulder, sometimes my neck, sometimes my hip, sometimes the small of my back. Big, strong, hands.
J wrote me back:
Missy,
I’m a little confused… did you write this before today? “We’re still not supposed to be doing anything beyond friendship, so I’m settling for friendship.” Or is this just a part of the fantasy? Because it’s part of my fantasy. I won’t tell you exactly what is involved, should it ruin the surprise… but it starts with us doing something “friendly” like watching a movie on a couch. We have agreed previously that it’s not ok for us to be sexual and that we’re just going to be friends for the time. At some point in the movie I clap my hand over your mouth and tell you that if you don’t do what I ask you to I’ll hurt you. I use my other hand to feel over your chest, slowly circling in to your crotch…
Anyway there’s more, but the general “thrust” of things is that you’re being violated, taken against your will. It’s very similar to your fantasy I think. I love to see that we’re so aligned.
Mmmmm, yeah. We found it terribly romantic that unbeknownst to each other, we’d both been independently having fantasies about him “raping” me for months. Like I said, lots of anticipation.
The story of this second-base date is even more wild, though, and I’ve debated about whether to include these details because I’m not going to explore them in a meaningful way and they may further distract from the parts of the experience I most want to emphasize – the gaze, the bondage freeing me from my worries about the gaze. But the fact is the whole polyamorous married thing is a fundamental aspect of our first date. J and I were actually on this date with my husband. My husband and I had picked J up from the train station the night before, and then the three of us had gone out to dinner, with J playing footsie with me, and me playing footsie with my husband under the table. We all went to a party. J and I stole away from the party and made out in the backseat of our car at one point. That first kiss, the opportunity to run my hands through his hair freely, was incredibly intense after 6 months of flirting. We stayed the night at a friend’s – my husband and me in one room, J in his own room. In the morning, I asked my husband if I could go to J’s room for a while after we fooled around, and my fooling around with J occurred during my husband’s post-BJ-slumber. As if that isn’t enough outrageous but earnest polyamorousness, there’s more – I had a visit planned with my boyfriend immediately after my three-way date between me, J and my husband. I timed J’s and my boyfriend’s train departure and arrivals to avoid the two of them meeting awkwardly at the train station, and I confess, I liked it … I liked it a lot that they were passing each other on opposite trains for me … the official start of the four months during which I dated two guys in addition to my husband was incredibly exciting, and scandalous, no? Perhaps I’ll write more sometime about carrying on with three relationships at once (and why I won’t ever try that again), but as I’ve said, today is about belts, gaze, and freedom in restraints; today is not about maintaining sexual restraint.
While still in the room with my husband the morning after the three-way dinner, the party, and the making out in the back seat, I heard J get up and go to the bathroom. After it sounded like he’d returned to his room, I opened the door of our room and saw that J’s door was cracked. I tiptoed across the hall and peaked through the crack. J was lying in bed, apparently dozing again. I pushed my way in, and closed the door behind me. He perked up and said that it looked like I had accepted his invitation – he had cracked his door open expecting me – hoping for me. He lifted the covers. I slid in beside him. We pressed against one another. I felt him hard through his thin pajama pants. I felt his hard naked hairy chest. We made out. He felt me up over my top and bra.
And then, it was time. It was time for my top and my bra to come off.
But, of course …
Of course, I was reluctant.
I was reluctant to share my body, especially my tits, with J. It wasn’t just the red flags of J’s words about other women’s bodies making me suspect that he would not appreciate my body. It wasn’t just that I could no longer be so carefree about his and his friends’ misplaced praise for my full round perky tits in fact being praise for the bra I’d have to take off if I was to share my real body and my real self with J. It was also that my history with D had me scared – I didn’t want to expose myself to another guy with an insensitive, cruel, youth-obsessed gaze intent on some ideal I didn’t fit – I didn’t want to share myself with someone who didn’t appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of my natural breasts. I expressed some of these things to J, less eloquently of course, and I remember his response distinctly. I was lying on my back. He was laying next to me, over me. He said, “I’ll see your flaws. That’s cool.”
I sort of liked that comment and sort of didn’t. D identified my breasts as utter total ugly flaws – flaws being a word we argued about extensively – so I winced at the mention of flaws at the same time that, “That’s cool,” put such a different spin on it.
J did some more coaxing, saying that it was a shame that my experiences with D were affecting our experience together – because he wasn’t D – D was an asshole – J was a nice guy – and J needed this with me. He appealed to my desire to correct what I saw as the injustice of J’s lack of sex, love and attention from women in his life.
Persuaded, I decided to take control of my exposure. I decided to take my top and my bra off in a way and in a position that I felt effectively presented the loveliness of my naked breasts. I sat up opposite of him, kneeling on the bed, strong proud posture, but obviously vulnerable. I looked at him. He looked back at me. I took my top off over my head. I unhooked my bra in the back. And then I took my bra off the same way I’d taken off my top – over my head, lifting my arms, lifting my breasts.
Perhaps he was be
ing kind. Perhaps he was fooled by my posturing and positioning. Perhaps he was lost in the moment and had lost his true gaze in the process. Perhaps he was just desperate and willing to settle for my saggy tits. But I think in reality, he really believed and felt what he said at the time, and his change in attitude later – a year later, when he berated my body – was his ADD gaze and temperament at work.
After my bra came off, and I was sitting in front of him topless, waiting for his reaction, he didn’t skip a beat … he said, “They’re beautiful. I don’t see how you could think I’d think otherwise.”
I was so relieved. I felt safe.
He perked up again – delighting in an idea – remembering something he’d brought for us to play with. He got out of bed and went searching for his pants in a heap of clothes he had taken off before going to bed and piling them on the floor. He fished out the pants and then pulled the belt out of them, tossing it onto the bed and the pants back into the pile. Then he went to his bag and got out a second belt. He uncoiled the belt and pulled it taught, teasing me, “Why would I need two belts on an overnight trip? They’re not even different colors.”
I learned how a belt would bind my narrow wrists – no notches close in like I had envisioned – no, he wound and wound the belt around my wrists, which I had placed out in front of me, offering them to his control, and then he secured it in one of its regular notches, one of the notches he used when wearing it around his own waist.
I learned how it felt – tight, secure, safe. There was such pleasure in him laying on top of me, our naked chests pressed against each other, as he hooked his thumb in the belt and used his strength to stretch my arms far overhead – conveying a feeling that I was his to toy with.
He talked about the sounds the leather makes. “Don’t you love those noises?” I did. The leather creaked from being stretched taught and rubbing against itself in its coils around my wrists.
Then he told me about how much he loves breast bondage, and he asked whether he should bind my breasts. I readily agreed, eager for the experience, eager to please.
Before he bound my breasts, during the time he only had my wrists bound, I had been enjoying it immensely, buuut … I was also mindful of being close to a position I tried hard to avoid, even with guys whose gazes I completely trusted. I confess: I don’t particularly like the shape of my tits when I lay flat on my back and they flop to the side. With my arms overhead instead of pressed against the sides of my chest, I couldn’t do what I’ve always done while lying on my back, whether naked with a guy today, or alone at age 13, examining what my tits did and how they compared to my concept of what breasts were supposed to do when I laid on my back. With my arms overhead, I couldn’t push my arms under my boobs to prop them up and make them into round mounds beneath nipples that point straight up towards the ceiling. I had to settle on a compromise position – twisting my torso a bit, balancing my right breast so that it appeared large and full on my chest – only the left breast sagged and flopped to the side, and even that particular flopping and sagging was in a shape that was rather pleasing to me, as opposed to the flat flopping that occurs when I’m flat on my back. Eagerly anticipating the breast bondage, I was unaware that it would free me from these worries about the shape of my breasts. I also presume J remained unaware that binding my breasts let me drop my guard about twisting my torso just so.
J had me lift my torso up so that he could slip the belt underneath me. He wrapped the belt around my breasts, right across my nipples – the leather was cool and smooth against them – and once he tightened the belt, I enjoyed the feeling of pressure permeating through my tits, my whole chest in fact, giving me the sensation that he controlled one of the most sensitive erogenous zones on my body. But something else happened once he tightened the belt: my tits stood up straight against gravity – they bulged and strained against the tight leather, just the way those fantasy tits I lacked would bulge and strain.
Freedom, I do say. Freedom to lay flat and relaxed on my back. Freedom to enjoy a perky shape without destroying my natural shape with surgery or implants. I like belts as much as I like bras, maybe even more.
