This is the story of the summer I spent as a sex slave in San Francisco.
Yes, it alliterates. Quite a bit. Maybe a bit too much. And I confess I used 'sex' mostly because it starts with 's'. Truth be told, I was more than a sex slave; perhaps 'personal slave' is more accurate. Not that there wasn't any sex, because there was plenty, but there was more to it than that. It's just that 'sex' alliterates in that sentence so well.
I'm getting distracted. You want to know what on Earth happened during my slave summer in San Francisco, and I want to tell you. So let's start at the beginning, shall we?
I peer at the text on my screen again, trying to view it with "fresh" eyes before posting it. I have spent so long agonizing over every word that it's honestly quite hard for me to gauge how it will come across to people reading it. To them, it will just be a post by a total stranger in the personals section of an online forum.
I try to imagine I'm browsing the web, maybe bored and a little horny, glancing through titles of new posts. To help with the exercise, I browse some of the other personals on this forum:
"single guy L4 mature bi couple for kinky fun."
"submissive bottom in Lakeview to serve men fully."
"spank me."
The list is endless. Capitalization seems rare, even rarified. Maybe that will set mine apart from the others, because I'm not looking for a fling, here. My proposal is deadly serious, and I need it to be stable: ideally, I want the arrangement to last for months, maybe even a full year if I can pull it off.
"I'll be your personal slave for free rent."
That's pretty eye-catching, right? I think so, anyway. It's bound to get some clicks, out of pure curiosity if for no other reason. And among those people... who knows? Some fraction of them are likely to have a spare bedroom lying around, unused (or hell, I'll take a large, walk-in closet at this point). And I'm hoping that some small fraction of them are also kinky and adventure-loving (or deeply lazy and desperate to offload chores onto someone else).
This is my plan for surviving my first year as a writer in San Francisco. It's April, I'm graduating in May, and I have no job, no money, and no place to live.
I've wanted all my life to be a writer, and I figure this is the best chance I'm ever going to get. I know that if I get a day job and write on the side, two things will happen. First, I won't have the time or emotional space to really write, to get in the flow and really produce authentic art. At best, it will be a bunch of chicken scratch forced out under great distress like play dough squeezed through one of those 'pasta maker' toys. No thanks.
Second--and perhaps worst of all--I'll become accustomed to the comforts of a steady income, my standard of living will invariably rise to match it, and I'll have nothing left over to save away for writing. I'll be trading away artistic freedom for comfort. Meanwhile, the dream of being an honest-to-goodness writer will slip away like youth or summer or... whatever. I told you I'm the eloquent writer type, right?
As my senior year of college waned and graduation approached, I committed to myself that I would give it a shot. "One year," I told myself. If after one year the whole 'literary fiction' gig hasn't panned out, I'll reevaluate. But if I don't at least give myself an honest-to-goodness year while I'm young and am not yet fully ensnared in the rat race I'll never forgive myself.
But addicted to income or no, one still needs a place to live. Writing while homeless is impossible. Doing anything while homeless is impossible. From friends who have experienced it, I know that homeless people spend so much time dealing with being homeless that there's basically no time or energy left over to do anything else. I need a place to stay, but until I sell a book, I have no money to pay rent.
On the surface, it sounds like a catch-22, right? I can't write and publish a book if I have a day job. But unless I get a day job, I can't pay rent. And if I don't have a place, I can't write. What I need is free rent for one year while I write the first book. Then, presuming I sell that book (a pretty massive presumption, I know), I can use that money to pay rent while I write the second, and so forth.
Basically, what I need is free rent for a year.
I know what you're thinking: who the hell is going to give you that? It's a great question, honestly. The cost of housing is so damn high that even hoping for the privilege of paying sky high rent to live in a shoe box sounds like an unrealistic ask of the gods of capitalism. But we live in a society of great inequality, and one of the things you should know about highly unequal societies is that they allow for people living side by side with wildly different circumstances. And, in some cases, those circumstances are mutually compatible.
Take, for instance, the young, single, tech worker. They generally have no children, live by themselves, put in a lot of hours coding nonsense social media or advertising garbage, and get paid very well. Such a person likely has lots of disposable income and therefore probably rents a nice flat--bigger than they need, in all probability. But they have very little spare time to do mundane things like cleaning the place, doing laundry, or even cooking half-decent meals for themselves. Quite the conundrum. Amply money, but insufficient time for a high quality of life.
And then there are people like me: no full-time job and therefore spare time and lots of flexibility in how to spend it, yet no income. Ample time and flexibility but no income also makes for a low quality of life.
But what if two such people joined forces? What if, say, the overpaid techie lets me stay in his redundant second bedroom for free and, in return, I clean the place, do his laundry, and cook his meals for him? I could do all that and still have plenty of time left over to write, while he would experience an improvement in his quality of living at next to no cost. I would, of course, be living in his space, reducing his privacy. But I could make myself scarce, barely noticeable except when he wanted me around.
You might also be thinking that this is a raw sort of deal for me, too. After all, I have to wash some immature tech kid's underwear, mop his floors, and cook his meals like some sort of domestic slave. But there again you would be wrong. Because I have a confession to make.
I'm a kinky bastard.
Since I can remember, I have been fascinated with being captured: defeated, then tied up by my captors. My first concrete memory of this is watching cartoons on Saturday morning. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are on and Donatello gets overpowered by a cloned version of himself who, to avoid the other turtles seeing two Donatellos running around, ties him up, gags him, and stuffs him in a closet.
Now, you should know that I loved Donatello the most of all the turtles, and I identified pretty strongly with him. I still remember being transfixed by this scene. To this day I can feel this buzzing energy vibrating in my body, especially in my thighs, belly, and crotch. Accompanying it is a squirming, churning sensation in my gut linked to a deep fear of being seen like this. I imagine being found by the other turtles all tied up and helpless. The situation is so utterly humiliating.
My obsession stayed with me into my college years. I took this scenario and fantasized about it over and over, modifying it in thousands of different varieties and situations. One of the most common themes, however, was that in addition to being tied up and gagged, my captor takes my clothes as well. Being found captive in my underwear only heightened the humiliation (and therefore the excitement), a feeling I still take an intense, perverse pleasure in. For me, this pleasure takes on a distinctly sexual flavor and I find myself intensely turned on by these scenarios of captivity and bondage. What's more, enjoy the scenario where I get captured as well as the one where I get rescued. Indeed, this has become more and more the focus over time.
The scenario goes like this. First, I find myself in a compromised position. Perhaps I'm with friends and lose a bet; or I'm a hero of some kind and I get defeated or surprised by a villain; or I'm home alone and a burglar discovers me there after he's already broken in and begun to rob the place. Next, the person with power over me (the person I lost the bet with; the villain; the burglar) tells me to strip. This is totally unnecessary narratively speaking most of the time, except to prove to me that they can do whatever they want with me. Turns out, making me take off all my clothes, revealing my slender, vulnerable body, is a great way to do it.
Once my captor has me naked (often, in the fantasy I would be wearing some really skimpy, eye-catching underwear because somehow this felt even more humiliating), they would tie me up and gag me. The resulting feeling--that my naked body was totally at their disposal--was incredibly erotic to me. I would often extend the scenario by imaging situations where my captor forced me to be their slave, serving them in my humiliating, near-naked state as a constant reminder that I had been defeated, overpowered, and rendered helpless.
Anyway, sorry for the long aside. Point is, I actually get really excited at the thought of being someone's personal slave, assuming they also really enjoy being my captor.
Now, I realize this isn't everybody's cup of tea, by any stretch. But the way I see it, if there's someone as fucked up as me, there's bound to be someone equally fucked up but in a complementary way, right? I mean, it's a big universe--there's gotta be people out there who would enjoy having a slender, attractive young guy around tied up and gagged, wearing nothing but a speedo or a thong, cleaning your house, doing your laundry, and cooking your meals for free. And all you have to do is let him stay in that small extra room you don't really use. Simple, right?
Not really.
It's honestly a rather complicated business finding two people with complementary interests (some of which are sexually charged), clearly communicating and negotiating those needs and wants to each other, and coming to a mutually beneficial, shared arrangement. I wasn't sure I had another angle, though, and it was at least worth a shot.
So here I am, reading one last time through the advertisement I'm about to post to the personals section of an online forum.
"Young, soon-to-be graduate from an elite college and aspiring writer looking for a small room, rent-free. Will cook, clean, do laundry, and run errands for you in exchange. I'm also rather kinky. I'm young, fit, rather good-looking (will send pics upon request), and will do all the above naked if you want. I'm the submissive type and would also enjoy being bound and gagged if that's something you're into.
"TL/DR: I'm a young, attractive, recent college graduate willing to be your kinky personal slave in exchange for free rent while I focus on writing. If interested, reach out to me for details."
Ok, this is crazy, I think to myself. Objectively speaking, this is insane. I'm literally offering to be some random stranger's naked, kinky slave just to get free rent and the time and space to write.
