The series
"What Women Want; What Women Need"
is
reportage,
not fiction. It involves more than a dozen persons and spans several decades. This
Part 05
tells about four individuals, only one of whom was in an earlier installment.
Marti
is a woman who grew up with a very jaded view of sex and members of the opposite sex. From an early age, Marti's mother had inculcated in her the notion that sex was odious and men were detestable. An overweight ugly duckling, none of the boys in her High School crowd had any interest in her. In the middle of her Senior year, something happened. Perhaps it was her metabolism. She didn't seem to eat less or exercise more. For whatever reason, her baby fat melted away (but not where it counted on a woman) and she had a killer body by the time she entered college. She avoided all college boys who wanted to get to know her better: by choice she did not date at all.
In her Junior year, Marty had her first, disappointing sexual encounter was with a gay, hetero-curious student named
Edgar
. Soon thereafter Marti survived a fate worse than death, and came to hate men. She exacted revenge upon the male of the species the only way she could reliably do so, through ritual emasculation: this led to her forcefully enslaving
Roger
, a graduate student.
Arthur
, featured in Parts 01 and 02
of this series, is a Dominant who came to admire Marti and decided to cure her misandry by involuntarily enslaving her. In his mind he did this for her welfare, not just his benefit. She didn't agree with that assessment and fiercely fought to prevent her subjugation. In the end, though, she was helpless to avoid that fate.
This installment chronicles more from Arthur's life; explores his methods; considers the ethics of his behavior; and studies the lives of four young adults in a changing world.
Marti
:
The Summer following my junior year at Connecticut College I went on a "dig" in Greece. Majoring in "Classical Studies," I read timeless works in their original Latin and Greek and studied Roman and Greek history, philosophy and culture. I and the other dorks in the program soaked in ancient wisdoms. That made us wise dorks.
I took a mildly-interesting archeology course that I used as a "hook" encouraging my parents to reward me for collegiate success with a three-week Summer excursion to Greece. Here students could engage in hands-on archeological practices, earning three college credits in the bargain. My greater interest lay in visiting an exotic land with party-minded students, but I didn't reveal that to my folks.
I was a Military brat. My father was career Coast Guard and had reached the rank one rung below Admiral. As a child I had lived in a series of locales with Coast Guard facilities: Hawaii; New Orleans; Governor's Island, NY; Cape May, NJ; and New London, CT.
My Dad was paid well, but with four kids to support (three of us in college at one time), money was tight. My Mom's family had bucks, and so when this opportunity for scholarly enrichment presented itself they helped out.
I had only recently escaped the tepid ranks of virginity. During Spring Break my junior year, aged 20, I arranged to spend time with a High School bud, Edgar. We had never dated, but palled around some as secondary school nerds. Edgar had attended Williams College, joined a fraternity and earned a wild reputation. (He famously landed a private plane on the arts quad of the Williams campus.) Yet he too was a virgin. And like me, Edgar was definitely ready to explore sexual intimacy.
We made candid, almost businesslike, plans over the phone, arranging to meet during the ten-day break from college. We wanted to experiment together to get beyond the sexual "book learning" and inexact peer tutelage to which we'd previously been limited. That way we could develop skill sets to avoid cratering out when one day we'd have sex with someone we cared for in a romantic way (or at least pretended to.)
We met three times during Spring Break, engaging in many and varied couplings. Our first
rendezvous
was a disaster, as we fumbled with condoms, hesitant and stilted foreplay, erratic timing, and faulty logistics. The unsatisfying end result: a bout of embarrassing jackrabbit intercourse. (Since this is not a comedic history, I spare the awkward details.) Because Edgar and I weren't romantically tethered, we were disappointed but not distraught; it was a setback, not a defeat. So we resumed our efforts the next day, and fared somewhat better. Our third tryst, while not spectular, was still fairly agreeable. That said, I didn't cum.
Edgar
:
I was sexually inexperienced with women, and also ambivalent. (Marti did not know this.) My only previous sexual experiences were with male students, and these were never overtly acknowledged:
"Boy, was I drunk last night"
was a refrain that excused all manner of excess. I had known Marti for years, and while she was extremely attractive in any objective sense, I simply wasn't drawn to her physically.
Despite my limited interest in women, I gave the project my all. My,
uh,
equipment functioned fine in the way intended, but my passion for heterosexual sex was only mild. I have since embraced unabashed homosexuality, though for convention's sake I've been in a show marriage for years.
Marti
:
Six weeks following my de-flowering with a fairly subdued Edgar, I found myself, 27 other students, and two professors in Delos, a small islet situated a few miles from Mykonos, Greece. There we were inculcated into the mind-numbing world of archeology on this working vacation. The emphasis was on "working" and by no means on comfort: humid days in the hot sun, sweaty grime-encrusted bodies on hands and knees bending over tediously with tiny brushes clearing away dried mud to uncover what might (but usually did not) turn out to be something significant. Nothing glamorous here: second-rate food and not a bathtub in sight.
Our night life wasn't much fun either. We hung out with the same drippy students and drank copious amounts of unchilled
Retsina,
a cheap local wine with hints of chalk, concrete dust and donkey dung. We female students fended off half-hearted advances from the local men, who in any event seemed more interested in one another than us. We were captives to, but not captivated by, the local music.
Yawn.
All in all I learned valuable lessons about getting what you wish for and reading between the lines of travel brochures.
Our group lodged an inn with tiny single rooms featuring broken tile flooring and a bathroom down the hall. If the Four Seasons rates five stars, the
Κατάλυμα
in which we stayed rated roughly minus 14 stars. And that's rounding well up.
My next to last night I turned in early and gratefully. (The next day we would travel 95 miles over poor roads in a sweltering, dilapidated bus to reach a local airport for the first segment of our homeward return to civilization.)
Mercifully my room was quiet and, as usual, I slept very soundly.
I had a vivid dream, a sensual wet dream featuring explicit decent (well, actually indecent) sex; I didn't know my partner, but that hardly detracted from the pleasure. It was plain old missionary-position intercourse, but simple vanilla sex was just fine given my limited experience.
Then I slowly awakened. But, wait,
I was still having sex.
I was underneath a man who was pumping away with animal intensity. By now fully conscious, the realization hit me: far from having a dream about sex, what I was experiencing was sex initiated while I slept.
At first I didn't know who was fucking me in the dimly-lit room. Then I realized it was Professor T., one of the excursion's two faculty teachers and
(HA!!)
chaperones. Professor T. was a middle-aged, balding, slovenly, pigeon-toed, pot-bellied, near-sighted specimen of rampant male decrepitude with bad breath, worse teeth and the ugliest knees known to mankind. And there he was, doing his thing, pumping away. On me!
In
me!!
Well, I freaked out, screamed, hit and kicked him. I scurried to the tiny room's corner, huddling on the floor. Professor T. left unhurriedly, without explanation or excuse. Nice to know he could take a hint.
I was stunned. Neither of addressed the incident the next morning. I discussed it with no one until two days later, when my parents picked me up at New York's JFK Airport. They gave me all the support I could want and assisted me in seeking justice.
================================
Marti complained to her college. (Professor T. taught at a different school, located in Toronto.) Marti's college opened an "investigation" that was hampered by the distances involved and a lack of clear-cut procedure. (This was before Title IX regulations.) What happened to the man who ravished her? -
Nothing,
no action whatsoever: after all, there was no police report, no contemporaneous complaint, no witnesses, no evidence of forced penetration,
etc.
Marti
:
The episode passed, but was never behind me. Returning to school for my Senior year in September, my life had changed permanently and profoundly. My eyes were opened to the ever-present bane of brutal male toxicity: the biological impulse compelling men to spread their seed and propagate the species. This fervid instinct has continued over millennia relatively unconstrained though mankind no longer has a hunter-and-gatherer economy and men aren't supposed to take women by force.
Nowadays things are "civilized" - or so we are told - but men are still selfish and primitive brutes, especially as respects sex. And too often this male ideation translates into
droit de seigneur
for men in positions of authority.
Most men feel they aren't bound by society's sexual strictures: basically, because of their brutal sex drives and fucked-up phallocentric attitudes, they believe they are
special.
Arthur