I don't believe that there's a man reading this who has been symbolically castrated as thoroughly as I. What began as virtually a sexless marriage for my wife and I, has remained a sexless marriage, but changed drastically in nature. In effect, my wife took a passive withholding of sex and turned it into an active withholding with female domination as the weapon. She is perfect proof that a dominatrix does not have to be born one. She can surely become one.
Maxine and I are both 37, she is a teacher, and I am a freelance financial consultant. I am 6'2" tall, and she is 5'4". We are now both slender and fit. She has long and full light brown hair. We are homeowners, and together earn a nice living. Our neighbors like us, we are close with our families, and together and separately, we have some good friends.
I met Maxine in high school, and we dated through college, after which we got married. We were both virgins when we met. Maxine is the All-American girl next door. She has a lovely, warm almost shy smile, perfect teeth, is squeaky clean and well pressed. Until the last few years, she was slightly overweight. The one word everyone had for her was "lovable." Maxine grew up being the girl whose friend always got married. She was the perennial bridesmaid type.
We love each other, but she had never really enjoyed sex. She never liked oral or anal sex either, and only reluctantly sucked me as a short preparation to entering her. She hated the feel and taste of my semen. For herself, she only enjoyed manual stimulation of her clitoris, and put up with intercourse with me. I don't want to paint the picture of a prude, or someone who found sex dirty. Sex, as I found out, just didn't play an important role in her life.
Despite all of this, we loved each other very much. We are very warm to each other, and enjoy life. But gradually, because sex was such a stumbling block, I began to withdraw into a sexual fantasy world based on masturbation, which was often my only sexual release for weeks at a time. We made love less than a dozen times during our second year of marriage, and it didn't change much over the years.
Something allowed me to put up with this. Perhaps it was a subconscious living out of the s&m literature which I was inceasingly drawn to. I found out through therapy later, that I was blaming myself for our lack of sex, and fantasizing that she should punish me for our poor sex life. This was all subconscious. In the third year of marriage (1977), I finally acted on this fantasy. I had to do something.
One night, I tried to convince Maxine to make love to me. She was not in the mood, so on an impulse, I handed her my belt, got on my hands and knees, and asked her to hit me a few times on the ass. She looked at me curiously, but playfully, she began hitting me. When she saw that I was turned on, she reached under and began to play with my penis. After a few more hits, and some firm hand strokes, I came in her hand. She wiped it in my hair, and made me clean her fingers with my mouth. She giggled embarrassingly and said, "You're a sicko."
I sensed, however, that she was very relieved that we didn't have to have sexual intercourse. The episode had no negative effects on our marriage.
The next few years saw much of the same pattern continuing. I started a collection of s&m toys, which included nipple clamps, seven gates of hell, a small cat o'nine tails, a riding crop. The scenerio every time when I brought these home were always the same.
"What in the world is this?!" Maxine would look at the item like it was a dead rat, expressing distaste. She would then give me a cold look letting me know what she thought of me for buying it. "Well, what do you want me to do with it?"
We would always try the item, and while she was either hitting my ass with the crop, or yanking on the nipple clamps, I would masturbate to orgasm. Everytime, just at the point that I was coming, she would always begin her lecture. "You're sick, you know. I can't believe that this pain and degradation excites you." Afterward, on the rare instances when she was sexually excited, I would use my fingers to give her an orgasm.
Whenever I asked her if her sex drive and attitude toward conventional sex would improve if we stopped with the s&m scenarios, she said that they might. But again, the pattern became the same. We would give conventional sex a try with absolutely no success, and we would be back to the s&m substitute for me. She indulged me, but made no bones about it that even though she was denying me any sexual release except s&m, she found it mildly repelling.
This pattern continued, with us having an s&m session maybe once a month, then battle over sex maybe once every three months. She remained uninvolved through it all, and never initiated these sessions. I always had to ask for them. I spent the first ten years of my marriage geting rejected for sexual contact about 9 out of 10 times. As I noted, this could be seen as a very effective, if passive, castration.
Things got worse. Maxine was tired from gaining much weight and often for more than two months in a row, I was sexually ignored. I would masturbate nightly.
In 1981 I couldn't stand it any more, and had an affair. I needed some attention and validation of my existance and sexuality. The affair was a conventional one, with wonderful sex and was very intense. I even briefly considering leaving Maxine for this woman. But as she lived in England, it became impossible to continue. But it served its purpose. I knew what I DIDN'T want: I didn't want to be ignored sexually anymore.
After a few weeks of thinking about it, I told Maxine not about the affair, but about my not wanting to be sexually ignored. I told her that I thought we should go into marital therapy. She exploded. She was vehemently against any kind of therapy. "I don't need a therapist to tell me what to do, and that I have to change my life. We can settle our own problems," she said. I said that something had to be done, that I felt like a subhuman the way she just ignored my sexuality.
We began talking realistically about our expectations. I enjoyed intercourse and all forms of conventional sex, but when not available, I could accept s&m as a substitute. She disliked intercourse and oral sex, but could accept s&m as a substitute.
I asked her if we should stop totally with conventional intercourse, (if she wanted to fuck, she would initiate it) but for my release, we would stick to s&m. She said it was okay with her, but how did I feel. I agreed to do it for a while.
Things improved for a while, with us having a weekly s&m session, after which, if she was hot, I would finger her to orgasm. With the pressure of intercourse off her, more often than before, when she was torturing me, she got hot, and I would have to masturbate her.
But in a few months, things began to slip again, and soon we were back to the once monthly session. For four years, we had no intercourse, and only about two dozen s&m sessions. I would almost have to beg her to do them. She never initiated.
When Maxine's school term was over in June of 1985, I packed a suitcase, made a reservation at a local motel, and told her I was leaving. She was in shock, but understood why. She told me she loved me, begged me to stay, and said that we should talk. I told her that "talk was just talk," and that it was obvious that she didn't care about me or my sexual fulfillment.
She finally got me to sit down and we talked again. It boiled down to the fact that while s&m was a good substitute for conventional sex, if I had to initiate every session, and she was so uninvolved, and if she were too tired, then the only option I had was to go into the bathroom and masturbate. I felt ignored. (I secretly turned on my tape recorder for this conversation, so the words are verbatim. She had a habit of denying things that she said, and I wanted this on the record for us.)
It was then that she came up with an idea. "Honey, you are unsatisfied that I don't take an active enough part in your sex life. It's hard for me to do anything when I'm asleep, or tired or when I don't want to. But what is the one hardest part of the whole thing for you?"
"You ignoring me."
"You wanted me to be your dominant mistress, right? Well, why can't you look at it that I was ignoring you sexually on purpose. And in my role, I was still allowing you to masturbate. Why can't you look on this as kind of a fantasy punishment. As part of the game?" she said.
