Myrna's Choice

Chapter 7. Myrna's Choice

At Richard's suggestion, I'll write this chapter. Primarily, it's the story of my own development and dilemma, and thus my story to tell. But it's also a backstory to his narrative of LifeMate's growth and his own -- an account of what was going on in my life and mind while the events unfolded.

The story of LifeMates is a tale of four women and one man, connected to one another through our involvement in the lifestyle of 'power exchange,' also known as Dominance/submission. This 24/7 lifestyle (not to be confused with sexual games that run on the same principle) aims to prevent conflict through a mutual understanding that when individual volitions pull in different directions, one party (the submissive) will always concede to the other, rather than fight to get their way. This arrangement may be attractive because one party is relatively weaker, and knows beforehand that conflict will be futile because they are bound to lose. But it may also be attractive to strong persons who care more about their journey than the destination -- and much more about a happy life with their beloved partner than about any given issue at point.

Richard is a submissive of the second kind. Fundamentally, he's an intellectual -- a man of words and ideas, indifferent to his surroundings, so long as they are stimulating enough to stave off boredom, but tranquil enough to leave him in peace. He looks for 'flow' -- for the challenge just difficult enough to hold his interest. He loves to be useful, he loves to please. He loves to be pointed at some worthwhile goal, and given not too detailed instructions on how to get there. He wants a partner who knows her own mind, sets him goals worth pursuing and travels pleasurably with him along their way. I satisfy all those needs of his, and he satisfies most of mine. He knows by now how much I love him. He cares about LifeMates mostly because he loves and trusts me. If I went into politics or ran a farm, he would assist and back me just as happily.

Amanda, Sylvie, Bernice and I are four very different women, who enter this story in different ways:

• Amanda, the oldest of us, is still a sexual magnet who draws men and women to her like iron filings. Much more than the other three of us, she loves power for its own sake. Starting out as a professional Dominatrix, along with a lawyer client of hers who effectively gave her his soul, she founded the highly successful Keyholders corporation. Still my Mistress in theory, she now treats me as a colleague Domme, albeit junior to herself. She is a sponsor and major shareholder of LifeMates who loaned us a lot of money to get us started.

• Bernice, once my mentor, and later friend, housekeeper and assistant, was a professional Dominatrix for many years. She still is, though she's in semi-retirement now. She's a technician of the human body who can play a submissive the way Heifetz played the violin. What she loves most about our lifestyle is her own technical skill.

• Sylvie is an ambitious woman who likes to play and win at almost any game at all -- the trait which makes her a successful lawyer. She enters this story as the amateur Domme and former wife who trained Richard as a submissive and, through the failure of their marriage, prepared him for his role with me. Today, she is a client of ours who runs a small law firm with two proxies under her. Though she and Richard are friendly now, whatever personal stake Richard has in LifeMates -- apart from his devotion to me -- is a residue of his bad experience with her.

And who am I? I'm the president of LifeMates, Richard's fond Mistress and Amanda's submissive and protege, pretty much in that order. Withal, like all of us, I'm still a work in progress, as you're about to read.

I don't need to write about my childhood here, except as it led me to the D/s lifestyle. There was nothing special about my family. I grew up in Quebec city, in an ethnically Irish family. My parents were vanilla with each other, so far as I can tell looking back; and they were neither very strict nor very permissive with me. My older sister, with much the same upbringing that I had, is a rather straight-laced vanilla housewife with three children by a staunchly Catholic husband. But as a teenager, when I read

The Story of O

,

Beauty and the Birch

,

Harriet Marwood, Governess

, and other classics of BDSM erotica, I completely identified with the Dominants and with the subs who worshipped them. When I discovered (just a little later) that BDSM, more than a literary fantasy was also a playable game that real people were playing, I wanted to play too.

Already in high school, when the boys I dated wanted to fondle my breasts or pussy, I would let them do it, but only if they would let me tie their hands behind their backs, with velcro straps kept in my purse for just that purpose. Then I would tease them with glimpses of my nipples and vulva, and let them kiss, lick and suckle to their heart's content, while teaching them to do it the way I liked it. I taught them how pleasant it could be to take a bare-bottom spanking over my lap -- and how I could make this rather painful (but still pleasurably submissive to endure) when I was annoyed with them, or felt like taking them a little further. I would usually finish by getting them to masturbate ('spill their tribute,' was the way I put it) as they knelt before me, sometimes halting them as they were about to come, and making them wait until their woodies were well down before letting them start over. I learned to ruin their orgasms, for sheer badness, by having them put their hands on their heads, just as they were about to come. Sometimes I sent them home and told them to finish there -- or not to, until they saw me again a few days later.

In this way, I got quite a reputation, but became very popular. The boys knew I was no easy lay -- that they could have a very good time with me, but short of intercourse, and on

my

terms, which were mostly, but not always agreeable to them, for I was becoming very inventive. But it was not their pain

per se

that I enjoyed, rather the humbling of their male egos by their own abject desire. A few of my dates chickened out when they found that my reputation had been well earned, but these were small loss. Like Brunhilde on her rock -- so my fantasy went -- I had a circle of magic fire to deter the unworthy.

Thus I was still a virgin until my sophomore year at McGill, in the merely anatomical sense that my hymen was unbroken. But by then, I was an accomplished Domme, using only a minimum of equipment but a full repertoire of mind games to keep my submissives in thrall.

Of course, I knew about cock cages, chastity belts and keyholding, and was aware of the company called Keyholders Inc. which sold such items; but I wasn't much interested in them. I had heard of that company's founder and chief executive, a Domme called Mistress Amanda whose signature appeared on all her packaging and promotional material; but I knew nothing about her, not even that she was based in Montreal where I was going to school. One day, however, I received a rather flattering email from her inviting me to lunch. "As a promising young Domme, I had come to her attention," she wrote, "and she hoped to meet me." I wrote back, as politely as I could, that I would be honoured to meet her and join her for lunch at the restaurant she named. I suspected that my life was about to change, and I was right.

* * * * *

Mistress Amanda was old enough to be my mother, but still presented herself as a sexy witch in her black leathers and stiletto boots. What she told me over lunch was that I faced a choice. I could remain in the D/s lifestyle as an amateur player, or I could turn professional. As an amateur, I could have lots of fun, but would achieve neither the income nor the impact of a serious pro. If I was thinking to turn pro, my best bet was to apprentice myself to a professional Domme who was already well-established; and there was no one in Canada at that time more established than herself. "As my apprentice," she explained, you would learn the tricks of our trade, and also come to understand our lifestyle from the submissive's perspective -- from that of the customers who create the market for all Dominants like ourselves."

"What I know is that males will grovel to get a whiff of my body odour, or a peep at some private parts of my anatomy," I told her. "I know too that I enjoy getting them to do it. What else is there to know?"

"Asking that question betrays your ignorance," she replied. "There are at least as many submissive women as submissive men in this world. What a great philosopher called the 'cruel thirst for worship' is a human need, not just a male one. A professional Dominant (male or female) needs to understand that. At present, relatively few of her customers will be women; but that may change. And even now, most of the professional's competition comes from women who enjoy letting their husbands spank or bind them in their foreplay. And her customers are men whose wives refuse to let them do it -- or refuse to do it to them. Also you are forgetting the gay and lesbian D/s scene, which has little interest in peeping."

"Men like to look, and are aroused through vision. That's just the way their sexuality works. Ours works differently. And the D/s thing is much bigger than you think it is. The psychology of Dominance and submission touches every aspect of human social life."

"I don't know," I said to her. "Submissiveness has never been my thing. You're telling me that practising submission to you, as your apprentice, will make me a better Dominant."

"That's exactly what I'm telling you," Amanda answered. "And for two reasons: First because a professional needs skills and technical knowledge that an amateur can do without. And second, because a professional Domme needs to understand what drives her customers on a gut level, because she's been there herself."

I was hooked, and Mistress Amanda knew it. A few minutes later, I agreed to become her apprentice; and she agreed that its commencement would remain on hold until I finished at McGill.

* * * * *

Finishing at McGill took a little longer than planned because I decided (with Mistress Amanda's permission) to take a few courses and do my senior's thesis on

Submission in Social Psychology

. Basically, all I did was a literature review around her claim that submission in social situations was more than a default strategy in quarrels when you were weaker than your opponent. I found, of course, that Amanda was right: submissive behaviour could also be, and often was, a social choice that people made to avoid the anxiety and responsibility of personal decision. Quite a few people behave as if they are allergic to the responsibility of choice: They are temperamentally submissive, preferring someone else to make their important decisions for them. Thus, Sartre was wrong that 'Man is condemned to be free.' In practice, he often evades that sentence by passing its burden to someone else. And paying good money to do so.

I got an 'A' for the paper; and Amanda liked it. It didn't change my temperament any, but did convince me that I had something to learn from the submissive experience. When I finished at McGill, I moved up north to her chateau, to commence training as one of her house slaves.

Within weeks of starting at her chateau, it became obvious, both to Mistress Amanda and to me, that my potential as a submissive was very limited. Without complaint, I did the drudge work that was expected of me, but never received from it the 'joy of service' that I had gotten from writing my thesis. I learned to take corporal punishment without a fuss when the Cook or Head Maid were displeased with me; Used as Amanda's sex pet, I learned to enjoy her playful sadism without developing a passion for it. I learned to take pride in giving a good blow job to any man, or clit licking to any woman, who could require this service from me, but it was my own skill, not my partner's pleasure, that I most enjoyed.

What I lacked, Amanda once told me, was the 'negative capability' of a true submissive. "You think too much," she said. "You analyze. You submit to those put over you to win a reward or avoid punishment; but you feel no joy in the submission itself."

"Some day," she went on, "you may have a pet submissive whom you really care for. Then, when you observe the way this pet looks at you and takes pleasure in following your orders, your empathy with his feelings may help you grasp what I am trying to show you."

Shortly after this, she began to train me in earnest as a pro Domme in her service. First, she used me as a kind of chatelaine, working under her to oversee and discipline her stable of slaves. She had me assist her in working 'guest-slaves' who paid a fee for the privilege of serving and being trained by her. Then she sent me to one of her studios, run by a Mistress Bernice, to work as an apprentice Domme and a professional sub. I assisted Bernice with her submissive clients and learned a lot about technique. I also gave myself to would-be dominant clients who wanted -- for an hour or two, at least -- to have a slave of their own.

Hanging in her studio, Bernice had a poster with this fascinating quote on a decorative background, misattributed (as she told me) to Oscar Wilde: "

Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.

" She directed me to meditate on that dictum, and learn what I could from it.

Working under her, I gained a more rounded experience of the whole BDSM subculture than had been possible, either as an amateur Domme with my boyfriends, or as a sub to Amanda. I understood what Amanda had told me over lunch that day, that if I wished to change people's lives, I'd have more power as a Domme than as a psychotherapist.

I also began to understand the existential payoff for submissives. What they seem to require -- what I sometimes felt myself receiving when I played that role -- is best described as a kind of biological and social grounding, or anchoring, that's mostly missing in ordinary life. What's missing is usually spoken of as 'meaning.' Living creatures eat and are eaten. We reproduce and perish, all to no purpose except that cycle itself. If you wonder about the

meaning

of it all, you find no answer. The cycle of life strives to continue and elaborate itself, but the core of that cycle feels empty. Some people fill that emptiness with an imagined 'God'; but in the Cosmos as we know it, life appears to have no purpose except itself: its own continuation.

Both in the D/s game and in real life, what the submissive receives is an illusion of the missing meaning. By giving ourselves to some cause or iconic person -- in effect, to a Dominant -- we fill in that centre for ourselves, and create meaning that is absent otherwise. In D/s at its best, both parties know that they are playing a game which does this. In real life, the absence of meaning, and of the playful, sexual element, are usually forgotten. What remains is a blind passion in which the Self gets lost in some frantic pursuit.

* * * * *

The idea for LifeMates came to me one day, from a client of Mistress Bernice who had just finished flogging me around the room with a riding crop, on my hands and knees, under Bernice's supervision. He asked Bernice if he could buy me from her, and invited me to come and work for him -- at a generous salary -- to help relieve the pressures of his work. He was the CEO of a large corporation, he explained, and the pressures were considerable. He often needed sexual release at work, and wanted to hire me, as a private secretary to give him blow jobs under his desk or take some corporal punishment (with a safe word, of course) when he felt like giving it. I declined, and Bernice explained that I was not available, but it set me thinking that there must be many such people, both men and women, who were too busy -- too involved with their work or careers and/or too tied down in sexless marriages -- to get the release and satisfaction that they needed. Sometimes their wives (or husbands) just weren't interested or obliging. Sometimes they were just too busy supporting a family in the style to which it had become accustomed. Usually, it was a combination of these reasons. I had no interest in working for that man as a combination secretary and sex slave but a real submissive might. She might accept a 24/7 deal along those lines -- might even pay to be trained for it.

When I broached this idea to Bernice, she told me to think it through and research it, then write it up as a business proposal and take it to Mistress Amanda. With the help of a chartered accountant whose card I found in her client file, I did so.

Through this effort I learned, and could argue to Amanda:

• that very many people with well-paying, high-level jobs were too busy to have much of a private life;

• that many couples with double incomes with or without children) were too busy and/or exhausted to have sex more than a couple of times a month (if that);

• that many submissives were either unemployed or working well below the level for which they had been educated, and might welcome the chance to jump-start their careers by apprenticing to senior people in their chosen fields;

• that a significant percentage of playmate submissives were left unsatisfied with D/s as a bedroom game, and hoped to experiment with, or follow it as a 24/7 lifestyle, if they could find acceptable Dominants.

In sum, the accountant concluded, a company that, on a routine basis, could provide well-trained submissive assistants and companions to busy professionals and executives might gain an ample return on investment. "Just between us," he told me, "if you know of a rich, sexy lady who needs a good accountant, I'll sign up myself." I told him that in a few years, we might have someone for him, and took the proposal to Mistress Amanda.

On a personal level, she was dubious. On one hand, she argued to me (using her husband George as an example) that real submissives were too slavish by nature to make good business associates or companions. "He was a fine lawyer once," she told me, "but the more he became submissive to me, the more whatever made him so went away." But she was also intrigued by the proposal as an experiment.

If

I could train submissives who were good associates and companions as well as serviceable slaves, bed pets and sex toys, it would be a real achievement.

As a business proposition, she was less doubtful, but had a number of conditions: Within reason, she would put up money to get the venture started, but it would be a personal loan to me. If the business failed, for whatever reason, I would have to repay the loan from personal earnings. In effect, I would become one of her slaves, even though working for her at arms length.

Second, when I incorporated, she would be the majority shareholder. To my objection that this would give her the right to throw me out and take the new company away from me she offered a compromise: I would have tenure in the job at an agreed salary, adjusted for inflation, but the bulk of my earnings would come from declared dividends, so that whatever I took from the business, she would get slightly more.

Third, she suggested that Bernice de la Roque, who was getting a bit long in the tooth to run a commercial dungeon, should come in with me to help out and advise. This was more than acceptable: If Bernice helped out, I would continue to learn from her and we would make it in the business of mentoring and training submissives, even if we could not sell their companionship and services at all. And fourth, as a submissive to her as Domme, Amanda required my promise that I would devote my energies to this new business -- in particular that I would not marry or have children until the monies borrowed from her and her company were paid off.