Tara guessed that Susan was probably interested in Mark too, and Susan was taller, a natural blonde, had bigger tits and was curvier in all the right places. Susan was more of an extrovert, too. She liked to talk about sex, she was competitive, and she usually got what she wanted. Tara was a couple of inches shorter at 5'6" than Susan, and more of a tomboy with her B-cups and brunette ponytail. Mark was 6'1" and fit with exactly the right amount of burliness. Tara really liked him, but she thought that if she let it show, Susan would somehow get him in bed first.
Shane was just as handsome as Mark, but shorter and leaner. He was bi. As much as they were all supportive of whoever he dated, Tara didn't think of him as boyfriend material for herself.
As college seniors, they all had a heavy workload. Mark and Shane were both in Mechanical Engineering, Susan was studying Psychology and Tara was in Health Studies. Their regular get-togethers were a welcome break.
Early on in the fall term, Susan had admitted that she'd become obsessed with reading stories on the Literotica website. As a group, they loved to dissect popular culture and they found this to be rich territory. They all started reading stories in their spare time and swapping links to ones that they found particularly sexy or interesting.
Tara was immediately hooked. She thought the others considered her a bit of a prude, so she wanted to impress her friends that she was open to talking about the stories.
It was Susan again who first came across the stories depicting legalized human slavery. She sent a couple of links to the group and these stories in particular stirred something in Tara. She'd already read several by the next time they met for dinner.
By then, they'd all read a few stories set in a universe where women were regularly graded, enslaved, paraded around naked and used as pleasure sluts. Their dinner conversation quickly veered in that direction.
"These stories are incredibly misogynistic," Mark said.
"It's not only women that get enslaved," Shane said. "There are stories about male slaves, too."
"It's just fantasy, guys," Susan said. She gave them all a conspiratorial look. "Having said that, and having read quite a few stories now, I think that maybe there's something wrong with me."
"What do you mean?" Tara asked.
"I haven't read any of the stories about male slaves," Susan explained. "In every one of the ones I've read, there's a scene where the female protagonist signs some document agreeing to become a slave. Sometimes she does it to repay a debt, sometimes she gives someone power of attorney over her and does it just to see what it's like. She's then told to strip completely naked right then and there, usually in a public setting, and loses all her rights. She goes from being an intelligent, respected member of society to being just a number in an instant."
"Yup," Tara knew exactly what scenes Susan was talking about, "and she not only gets naked, the people around her no longer see her face anymore. She becomes human livestock to be graded, bought and sold. She invariably also becomes a brainless, horny slut that has one orgasm after another after another. Yeah, they're not exactly realistic."
Susan nodded. "Agreed. The descriptions of what goes through the slave's head when they're tied up, whipped, humiliated, groped and fucked in every hole by people they don't even know, well, they're mostly just silly."
"Mostly?" Shane raised his eyebrows at her.
"Well, the woman always realizes that she's made a colossally stupid mistake, but it's too late. She has to get naked, they put a collar on her, they bind her hands behind her back and she's publicly paraded like that as they take her somewhere to be processed as a slave. Sometimes she's caged for transport. Nobody around her is in the least bit sympathetic to her plight. Everyone just laughs at her, calls her a stupid slut and gropes her naked body. She's completely helpless and full of remorse." Susan paused for a moment and looked at each of her friends. "Is it wrong that I get totally aroused by those scenes?"
"How aroused are we talking about here?" Mark said, grinning.
It was rare to see Susan blush, but she went quite pink. "I must be some kind of freak."
Tara was doing her very best not to blush, too. She had found herself having a strong reaction to the exact scenes Susan was talking about. It was like she was a guitar and the specific scenario that Susan had just described was the precise thing that plucked her strings. She had found herself rereading some of them a few times. Her heart raced thinking about being publicly humiliated like that.
"Um, I don't think it makes you a freak," Tara ventured, tentatively.
Tara's father was a good poker player. Good enough to have won state level competitions. Over the years, he'd supplemented his meager auto-mechanic income enough to fund Tara's passion for figure skating in high school and, later, her college tuition. Tara's mother had died when she was young, so he'd done his best to raise her as a single parent and, considering how addictive gambling can be, he'd done a great job of keeping their lives stable. He had possibly overcompensated and protected her too much. That was probably why, even as a college senior, she still blushed like a girl at her first school dance when trying to talk intelligently about something that turned her on.
It was inevitable that Tara had become a very good poker player in her own right. Being a pretty girl and coming across as shy meant that she could usually take her opponents to the cleaners. In a poker game, she could bluff like a pro, but when it came to talking about sex, she was hopeless.
"Maybe it's just a side-effect of having empathy," she said, trying to sound savvy but knowing that her face was getting red. "The experience of making a mistake, the consequences of that mistake, and the remorse are all as universal as it gets. The other aspect of those scenes, the public nudity, that's classic exhibitionism. We tend to categorize people as exhibitionists or voyeurs, but like everything else, it's a spectrum and everyone has at least some of both of those characteristics. I was a little turned on thinking about being exposed like that, too."
"Yeah, baby!" Shane leered at her.
"Hey, clearly not as turned on as Susan." Tara blushed even more as she tried to deflect Shane's teasing back onto her friend.
On some level Tara understood that it was not "classic exhibitionism" but rather submissiveness. She was fine with her friends thinking she was a bit of an exhibitionist, although if she'd thought about it, Tara was not an exhibitionist at all. Susan was the one that took her top off at concerts. Susan was the first one to get naked to go skinny dipping when the four of them had gone camping together. Tara was shy about going to the beach in an overly skimpy bikini.
If Tara had thought about it, she would have had to acknowledge that her reaction to the Literotica human slavery scenes was empathy for the submissiveness of the protagonists. But the possibility that she was a bit of a submissive wasn't something that Tara was ready to admit to herself, let alone admit to her friends. A bit of exhibitionism was sexy, but a bit of submissiveness was a character flaw.
Nobody suggested that Susan and Tara might have submissive tendencies and the evening continued with lots of teasing and laughter.
