AUTHOR'S NOTE: I removed the first six parts of this series due to some fairly emotional negative feedback. Against my better judgment, I've decided to put them back in response to a lot of personal messages I've received. Once the first six are approved, I will continue the series until the end.
If you haven't read these yet, you should know that the story is about a highly intelligent woman who manipulates her husband into a strict and harsh (or, as has been argued by my critics, abusive) femdom relationship in order to satisfy her ever-growing sadistic urges. If this type of story isn't your cup of tea, I strongly discourage you from reading it.
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Ellen was right. It did take me some time to adjust to my new status. But to be fair, she was much stricter with me as her submissive than I'd been with her as mine, so I had a lot more to adjust to. Here are a few examples of how our life at home changed:
When I was dominant, Ellen had called me "Sir," but she'd used it less as a title, and more as a substitute for my name. So it didn't come up all that frequently in conversation. When she took charge, however, she required me to append "Mistress" to most of the phrases that I addressed to her, and to acknowledge her every command with "Yes, Mistress." (If you can imagine a friendly conversation between, say, a Lieutenant and a Colonel in the army, you get the idea.)
As Ellen's dominant, I'd never paid much attention to her posture, as long as she carried herself respectfully and submissively, which she always did. But she was a stickler about my posture. In her presence, I was required to keep my head bowed at all times, and I was forbidden to look in her eyes, unless she explicitly ordered it. If I entered a room where she was, I was required to stand until she ordered me to sit, and as often as not, she either left me standing or told me to sit on the floor. Likewise, if she entered a room where I was sitting, I had to stand up until she told me whether and where to sit back down.
When Ellen was my submissive, I'd always enjoyed sleeping next to her, holding her close and letting her feel the security of being owned and treasured by a powerful man. But she made me kneel next to "her" bed each night and ask for permission to share it with her. She refused only when she had a very good reason to, but she always made it clear that sleeping in the bed was a privilege, not a right.
And I was never, ever to sully her bed with my body when I was by myself.
This meant that no matter how tired I was, I had to wait for her to go to bed before I could. Sometimes, I'd doze off in the armchair near the bed, and if she'd fallen asleep in the meantime, I had the unenviable choice between spending the night in discomfort, or waking her up to ask for permission to get into bed. Ugh.
She also imposed many more day-to-day rules than I had, and she was meticulous about their enforcement. When I transgressed in any way, I never failed to receive a sharp smack or two on my bare buttocks from her riding crop, which she kept within reach at all times. (Unless we had guests, I was naked and collared at all times, as she had been.) At first, I found it difficult to keep track of all her rules, which were never written down anywhere, but her keen eye caught everything, and she never let slide even the most minor infraction.
"Look, the only way this arrangement will work, is if we make it work," she once patiently explained to me. "All the experts agree that the key to effective discipline is consistency. And I think you deserve a wife who will put in the effort to punish you consistently. Don't you agree?"
Of course, my only possible answer to this was, "Yes, Mistress. Thank you, Mistress."
One rule seemed to sum up the others, although she never put it this way: "You will always remember that Ellen is your Mistress, and you will always treat her as such." Obeying this unspoken rule went a long way to keeping me on track, even when I didn't remember exactly what I was supposed to do in a particular situation. I'm sure it saved my butt a lot of welts.
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I remember one day kneeling contentedly at Ellen's feet, as she stroked my hair to reward me for some good behavior or other. Since she seemed to be in such a kind mood, I dared to ask her why she was so much stricter with me than I'd been with her.
Big mistake.
She froze, withdrew her hand from the top of my head, and used her forefinger to lift up my chin slowly until my eyes met hers. "Do you really need me to explain that to you?" she asked, giving me a withering look.
"It would be nice," I answered, with just a hint of sarcasm. "When I agreed to this, I thought things would stay basically the same, but with our roles reversed."
"Oh, you mean with me constantly cheating on you and lying to you?" she retorted coldly.
"Come on. You know what I mean," I said, allowing a measure petulance into my voice.
She sighed impatiently. "Fine, I'll explain," she said. "You didn't need to be very strict with me, because I was already the woman you wanted me to be." Well, I certainly couldn't argue with her on that point. "Your situation is entirely different. My task is to rewire your brain completely. To rid you of all your harmful attitudes and habits. To help you discover a nature that you've buried so deep you don't even know it's there. So I can't afford to be lax with you. Do you understand?"
Not really.
But I anyway replied, "Yes, Mistress."
"Besides, if I'd told you that I was going to be this strict, would you have refused my terms? It's not too late to change your mind, you know. If you want, we can put an end to this right now."
"Of course not, Mistress," I said hurriedly. Even the veiled threat that I might possibly lose her sent a shiver of fear through me. "I'm very grateful to you for helping me. And I apologize for questioning you."
"It's quite alright," she said, nudging my head back down to its humbled position and giving me a pat. "I'm always here for you. Part of my job is to help you understand things, so you should never be afraid to ask me questions."
"Thank you, Mistress."
"But don't think I didn't notice the tone of your voice just now," she added in her schoolmarmish voice. "You were disrespectful, and you will be punished for that."
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One thing that did stay pretty much the same as it had been before (but with the roles reversed) was our set of rituals.
Every day when I came home from work, I immediately went upstairs and stripped, taking a few seconds to wash myself off, especially during the oppressively humid Washington summers. Then I hurried to find my wife, usually in the family room sipping a glass of wine, and I stood with my head bowed to wait for her attention. When she was ready to give it, she snapped her fingers, and I knelt at her feet so that she could attach my collar. This was also my chance to ask her to remove my chastity cage for the night, which she was usually willing to do.
On weekend mornings, I got up first to make us breakfast, and afterwards I kept her coffee cup full. I began to take great pride in my new-found abilities -- for example, poaching eggs to the precise degree of hardness that she favored, or adding just enough cream to her coffee to maintain her preferred shade of tan. And, of course, my weekend was complete only when I could clearly see my reflection in Ellen's newly-shined, knee-high, black leather boots.
Over time, I came to enjoy these rituals more and more. And one fine day, I realized that I'd not only accepted my status as Ellen's submissive, but actually preferred it in some respects to my former status as her dominant.
Wait, what? Really? Why?
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In my opinion, the American TV series Billions contained one of mainstream media's more realistic portrayals of a femdom relationship. A lot of vanilla viewers may have been surprised to see someone like Paul Giamatti's Chuck Rhoades, the ruthless, powerful US Attorney for Manhattan, submit himself to bondage and torture at the hands of his wife in order to meet some deep-seated sexual need.
But not kinky people. Kinky people know that the more avidly a man plays the role of Beta in the bedroom, the more likely he is to be an Alpha in his professional life. After all, the reason why top-end professional dominatrices are able to charge hourly fees that would make the managing partners of the whitest of white-shoe law firms blush is quite simply that their clients -- C-suite executives of Fortune 500 companies, successful entrepreneurs, prominent politicians, and so forth -- can afford them.
Unfortunately, the writers of Billions used Chuck Rhoades' masochism kink as a mere plot device, not as a central feature of his character, and they never bothered to explain where it came from. Which is a shame, since a sympathetic portrayal of a BDSM relationship on primetime television might have gone some way to normalizing kink. And which is also a bit odd, because the dynamic that impels powerful men to cede power to female dominants is fairly straightforward and would have made perfect sense in the context of the series.
This dynamic, in short, is that most men have a limited capacity for accepting responsibility. Men in highly influential positions must take decisions every day (most often, many times per day) that have a tremendous impact on the future of their families, their co-workers, their organizations, and often of society itself. The consequences of these decisions can be overwhelming, but what is even worse is the relentless pressure to make them quickly and the inability to share the burden with anyone else.
Sure, it's lonely at the top. It's also exhausting.
