The advent of O

Story of O was my downfall. Or my uplift, if you prefer.

Thus I write at the start of Emily's Submissive Wedding Night. It was the same for the realer me: reading it for the first time among the shelves of a perfectly proper academic bookstore in New Haven, though it corresponded in its outlines with the terrible, slender books with the awful covers and the young schoolgirls (aged younger than I could age them) having their bottoms fucked--indeed though it was itself a slender book (with, thank God, a plain white cover)--I knew there was hope.

That hope didn't materialize into flesh (rigid flesh [heh]) for three years, however, and in that time I began really to explore. That was the time of the first butt-plug, and the first sexy lingerie, bought just for me to, er, explore in. It was also the only time in my life that I was promiscuous, as will come to light as this "real" story continues: in addition to my solo explorations, I also lost my virginity and slept with a total of five guys (including that first one), really I think in an effort to feel like I was living the way I thought I should be living and not because I was looking for anyone to play BDSM with, since I still thought of that as something completely private, even if with the help of Réage I now thought there was hope for me in that area.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: there's still several years' ground to cover between The Pearl on the ferry to Nova Scotia and Histoire d'O in New Haven.

The next thing that happened was that I found a copy of the first terrible, slender book I ever saw, Aphrodizzia, in my best friend's father's desk (this is the friend called "Sarah Cleveland" in EXPLORATIONS). Discovering The Pearl had led to series of deductions about the way the erotic world worked, including the insight that has never since played me false, that there are more people who are into BDSM than you'd ever think. Until I finally developed the courage to acquire erotica for myself (senior year in college--though even that development was still marred by the periodic purifications I would carry out, putting all my porn into an opaque bag, putting that bag in another opaque bag, and finding a dumpster to throw the package into) this insight made me a really awful snoop, for which I'm thoroughly ashamed. That copy of Aphrodizzia was my greatest find, but there were many, many others.

I did not steal it. I did take every possible opportunity to read it, over the course of a few weeks, to the point that I committed much of it to memory. Standing there in Sarah's Dad's office, with my back turned to the door so that no one could see that my hand was inside my jeans, I would read furiously, melting. The first time I came in Sarah's Dad's office I was so ashamed that it was months before I dared open the desk-drawer again. The book was gone.

Schoolgirl bottoms, and the things a schoolmaster and schoolmistress might do to them: I suppose you might say they have been from that time my submissive Alpha and my anal Omega.

I think the thing I'm most curious about with regard to the development of my orientation is how I could both have felt such terrible shame and guilt about masturbating, and yet still have done it so much. I dramatize the dynamic in EXPLORATIONS by having my 18 year-old avatar fantasy-Emily abstain for much longer than I ever could have, though the stuff about occasionally not masturbating for an entire Lent is true. But the images of schoolgirl bottoms, spanked and ravished--their power has nearly always been too much for me, and the number of nights of my self-aware, pre-Charles life on which I didn't abuse myself (funny how I delight in using that phrase that once made me fear for my eternal soul) was vanishingly small.