Apologia.

TL:DR

These stories are nothing but fantasies, but they are trying not to be genre fantasies; I try to write them so that, with some suspension of disbelief, they might actually be stories about real people, rather than genre stereotypes or ‘lifestyle’ roleplayers.

None of this means that I think that such scenes have any place in real life. This is kink fantasy, and nothing more. If you want to be cruel to people in reality, please, restrain yourself, and find some other way to feel OK.

I have nothing against genre fiction — I just don’t want to write it, and I have no knowledge of real-world ‘lifestyle’ BDSM — so I couldn’t write usefully write about that if I wanted to.

I am interested in the difficult and dangerous territory around control, submission, manipulation, cruelty, acceptance. This results in stories which will certainly upset some people. I would rather you didn’t read these stories if you think that might be you.

I hope this helps; the intention is to avoid people reading things they won’t enjoy, not to explain or excuse the content of the stories, to ‘sell’ them or to deflect criticism. Please, don’t read anything you don’t feel a positive desire to.

de•lir•i•ous (dĭ-lîr′ē-əs) — adj.

1. Of, suffering from, or characteristic of delirium.

2. Marked by uncontrolled excitement or emotion; ecstatic.

ca•pit•u•la•tion (kə-pĭch′ə-lā′shən) — n.

1. The act of surrendering or giving up.

These stories, while hopefully fulfilling their immediate function as erotica, are explorations of the implications of a particular set of impulses and their outcomes, in the context of a more-or-less recognisable modern society (almost without exception settings are contemporary, with no magic, new world order, or science fiction devices).

The results being some version of ‘delirious capitulation’ — a young woman (in these stories it is always a young woman) surrendering herself to submissive impulses, in the context of the transgressive, dominant/controlling desires of (an)other(s), in some condition of delirium — intense and deep excess of feeling.

Behaviour which, outside of the world of fantasy (and these stories are wild fantasy and nothing else), would be considered insane or bordering on it (as with the behaviour of characters in most fantasy genres).

It is all too easy to see domination as a believable impulse — sociopaths rule us after all — but hard to see it as acceptable.

On the other side of the coin, submission is built into our culture — all major world religions preach submission of one sort or another, while at the same time the whole of modern/enlightenment culture has been about rejecting it — asserting the sovereignty of the individual.

Both urges are clearly ‘live’ issues in contemporary social settings of all kinds.

Domination has been codified — set about with “do’s and don’ts”: it’s fine to be a boss of wage slaves living in poverty, or a general, or a government minister who cuts welfare payments; it’s not fine to boss someone harshly in a one to one situation.

Submission has also been codified: it’s ‘sensible’ to accept wage slavery, but ‘perverted’ to be a sexual submissive.

The codification is asymmetrical though.

Domination is clearly the normal accepted aim of an ambitious person: even if it is dressed up and hemmed in, ‘success’ is at the very least assumed to mean economic wealth — which most immediately confers the power to have others do menial labour on your behalf.

On the other hand, because we (both rightly and instinctively) abhor cruelty, bullying and victimisation in a person-to-person context, having sexual impulses that relate to domination is a dangerous position to occupy — the circumstances in which these impulses may be gratified are, rightly, very tightly policed (therefore, lots of transference — people working to get themselves into acceptable dominant positions so they can get their rocks off that way — Trump starting a modelling agency, for instance).

On the other hand, having submissive sexual impulses — while regarded as ‘perverse’, is not as socially dangerous. Even happy, consensual submissives tend to be seen as the victims of dominants — and thus receive much less severe social sanction.

All of this results in a very particular condition, which is sort of what the exploration in many of these stories hinges on.

And it is this — that the submissive is actually in the position of power — in the wider world — while being in the subordinate position within the situation.

All a submissive needs to do (an explicit option in the mind of the protagonist in several stories here) is to step outside the situation and cry foul. They don’t even need to play the victim — the asymmetry of the social code will pour fire on the head of the dominant, while pitying the submissive, seeing them as the victim, in need of help.

This reality is not being complained about by me — it provides some at least some safeguard against real sadists abusing people, which is a Good Thing.

But it provides the landscape of these stories’ exploration of the circumstances in which someone intelligent, thoughtful, not in a position of desperate weakness, or psychologically vulnerable, or blinded by love, might actually choose to submit to a dominant who is honest about their intentions (while also being understood by the protagonist as being machiavellian and manipulative), and who is clearly going to make rather extreme demands.

By contrast, the dominants — at least in the opening stages of the stories, have to be very careful. As the women in the stories are generally not already aware of any submissive tendencies, they have to be carefully approached. As the particular constraints I have accepted require the submissive to be more or less aware what she is letting herself in for, the dominants have to be more or less honest. Any misstep will result in the girl walking away, and the would-be Master/Mistress having no option but to accept that they have failed. The flipside of this, of course, is that as the story progresses, the submissive is incresingly trapped by her own history of willing consent — feels complicit in her own subjugation.

Is it possible to write a fantasy (and it is all the wildest fantasy) wherein all this happens, from the submissive’s internal psychological perspective, and have it ‘stack up’ in the reader’s mind? Wherein the submissive is not a helpless or coerced victim, but a conscious, willing participant — however dark the places are which that might take them to? And how much willing ‘suspension of disbelief’ is required from the reader to make it work?

In these stories, it is the submissive whose point of view we mostly occupy, whose internal psychological landscape is rich, complex, sympathetically explored in detail, while the dominants are cartoon-like characters — strong, rich, older, opaque, unemotional, mostly absent outside the sex scenes, the nature of their inner world taken for granted.

Further, despite the attractions of the present continuous tense in its offer of immediacy of emotional impact, these stories are (mostly — although I am noticing that I do this less in newer stories) told by the protagonist herself from a position in the future — a position where the she is somehow free and able to tell her story in a measured way; where she has survived — more than that, she has grown (in understanding at least), and is whole and sane (which is not to imply that she is necessarily content). The most complete example of this is my imagining of how a young woman came to be ‘Anne-Marie’.

In all the films of ‘The Story of O’ I have seen, the male leads seem nervous, hopeful, tortured, tentative; while O is mostly serene and calm (except, of course, in the extreme moments — her ability to volunteer for which, her knowledge of her ability to remain whole in their aftermath are, arguably, one source of her serenity — alongside the knowledge that she can, as we have said, cry ‘foul’ at any point and be assured of rescue); they are the supplicants, asking for what only she can give them — which is consent for them to indulge in their ultimately one-dimensional fantasies, while she is seeking to resolve some deep quality of her own psychology. When (if) she gets there, she will have moved on, while they will be left stuck in an endless cycle in which, having dulled their sensitivities by excess, they will never be satisfied — always needing new extremes to get their rocks off.

Even in the book, ‘Rene’ and ‘Sir Stephen’ hardly exist as characters. Beyond their sexual natures, one can learn almost nothing about their existence as people. Even Anne-Marie is more three dimensional as an individual.

As at the end of ‘The Story of O’, for the landscape of my stories to have any real risk, any real light and shade, the possibility of things going too far must be ‘in play’ for the submission to have real meaning, real jeopardy. There are no ‘safewords’ in these stories (although there are ‘escape hatches’ in some stories, these are not ‘soft’, ‘get-out-of-jail-free, but keep playing’ devices, but high-stakes — ‘choose this and it’s over’, which makes them more like carefully constructed cruel traps — often openly presented as such).

All of this takes these stories far outside the ‘lifestyle’ bdsm world — which is the domain of reality — real people live those lives, and seem to attempt to resolve their impulses in consensual, boundaried settings, as is sane and healthy.

These stories wouldn’t work if set in that context, because the ‘high’ and ‘low’ points are conventional (safewords, detailed pre-consent, timeboxing), rather than bounded only by possibility.

Nevertheless, the protagonists of these stories are not intended to be understood as victims (either of their own weakness or of the depravity of others), but rather as people who walk the edge, in intensity of emotion and risk, in search of some new meaning, some resolution of their own imbalance. In some stories it is explicit that all characters are flawed, and the option of therapy vs submission is acknowledged.

This means that the stories go into fairly dark territory at times, without immediate relief — and this is clearly not what some readers want. So please, if you don’t want to be taken to these places, don’t read these stories!