>>> It's funny when you think about it. I am the one who is the slave and yet I have the ultimate tool of power....My tool is simply that this slavery is my choice. At any time, for any reason I find valid, I can choose to no longer be a slave. <<<

>>> There is no reason for me to choose this option....And yet I still know that should I need it, the ultimate power is waiting. <<<

Interesting message! Thanks for sharing the details of your relationship. In response, I have a question and a story. Question first: does it ever bother you, as a slave, that you have this ultimate power?

The story is about how my relationship, which is also master-slave, works. First of all, when I first started looking into S&M as a sexual option for myself (it was only about 5-6 years ago, but sometimes it seems like several decades--g), I got most of my initial information from S&M pornographic fiction: _The Story of O_, _La Image_, _9 1/2 Weeks_, the Beauty books, and yes , those notorious GOR books. In those works of fiction slaves were more often than not portrayed as completely in thrall to, if not the captives of, their masters. These slaves had no choice about walking out a door: they couldn't. Sometimes the fetters that kept them from leaving were physical, like the heavy metal cages and clanking hardware of GOR; other times they were emotional or mental, like the state of passive helplessness and acceptance of her fate that O often had. But for whatever reason the slaves were held, the fact that they _could not escape_ was both an enormous turn-on for me and one of those concepts that set my mind and body reverberating in a big "YES! I have to have this in my life." I'm not a fetishist; I think of myself as a sort of generic slave that takes a little bit of everything that comes her way on the S&M dim sum carts of life (big grin: as I think I mentioned to someone else, metaphors and I don't mix--rather, we mix it up). But there are some basic concepts in S&M that attract me so strongly that I think my reaction to them is similar in intensity that of a fetishist toward the object of her adoration. Anyway, the idea that a slave is an individual in a situation from which s/he cannot ever, of his or her own volition, escape from held (and still holds, for that matter, five years of experience hasn't changed this one bit) immense drawing power for me: I was pulled toward it the way a twig is sucked down a storm drain, and I had no regrets, no horror at my fascination, no desire to escape this dark conceptual whirlpool.

I think I've always been this way. My earliest memories of my childhood involve enjoying the punishments that my father made me perform if I was, in his opinion, bad. I never was the sort (as a child or as an adult sub) to act out just to get punished, but my father was a demanding, irrational drunk, and managed to find much fault with me, despite my best intentions. Once he made me kneel on a footstool and stare at it for an hour (and you know how one hour when you're little feels like five hours when you're adult?) I spent the entire hour in an intense state of sexual excitement thinking, or rather, wallowing, in the fact that I wasn't allowed to get up or even look up--that I was forced to kneel in this uncomfortable fashion on this footstool and never raise my eyes. I think I was about five then.

I had a dream around that time that I was under the sea, naked, and my bottom was glued to a giant mushroom which I was sitting on. All these mermaids and mermen and other creatures were dancing around the toadstool, pointing at me and making fun of my nakedness and the fact that I was glued stuck, and I felt, in that dream the same sort of intense humiliation and arousal that I feel today in less watery circumstances .

I went about being an ordinary kid but living a sub life in my fantasies (although everything, including the fantasies, went underground at puberty--I was the straightest, most vanilla teenager imaginable), but eventually, when well into adulthood, I made the connection between my longterm fantasies of being tied down, tortured, controlled, etc. and this S&M fiction reading I had been doing: two plus two finally equaled four, and:

To call it an epiphany is a significant understatement. I remember what I was doing when the big moment occurred. I was sitting on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom, masturbating and reading the pornography. Besides the fact that orgasms feel better when you're sitting up, I hid the books in the bathroom and only took them out when I could lock the door behind me, because my husband, in response to my probings, had made it absolutely clear that he wasn't into this sort of thing. He wasn't a violent or abusive man, in fact, I was the "mommy" in that relationship, but I feared both his disapproval and his scorn for something that was becoming so increasingly important to me--I feared it would crush me.

After I had my epiphany, everything became very simple: I had to change my life, I had to start living the life of a slave. My rocky relationship with my husband was almost at its end and I was already falling madly in love with this darling woman from work (boy, did that relationship take me by surprise! I had theoretically considered the possibility of sleeping with women, but I had never, until Miriam, met one that attracted me sexually), and so, during the months that I separated from my husband, I tried to get Miriam to share my enthusiasm with S&M. But as I mentioned in another message, she wasn't havin' none of it. So I looked elsewhere. Newspaper personals ads. Electronic bulletin boards. Anywhere I could think. And it wasn't too long after that I began meeting real people doing real S&M. One of them was my master, Donald. After some intense conversations with him, I discovered that he felt the same way about slavery that I did: that there had to be this element of inescapability (call it non-consensuality, if you prefer, but this term has such negative connotations for so many people that I hesitate to use it without an enormous qualifier, which I don't think I have the patience to write right now. So let's pretend that I never said the dirty word, OK? ). I did not want to have what Terry has termed "the ultimate power," and Donald didn't want me to have it, so in that sense (and in many other senses as well--else the relationship would never have gotten off the ground) we were an excellent match for each other.

But I saw the same paradox that Terry did and it dismayed me rather than reassured me: how could this master-slave relationship be in the least bit real when I could pull the plug on it any time I wanted to by walking out the door? By being able to walk, I was, as Terry pointed out, the partner ultimately in control, ultimately in charge. And the only way I saw out of this position of control was something that I fantasized plenty about but was not acceptable to me in reality (not because I refused it categorically but because I was pretty sure that when you came down to the practical nuts and bolts of it, it could never work out). That something was a nonconsensual abduction and forced captivity, such as the ones so germaine to the fiction books I had read.

Luckily, Donald was not limited in his thinking to these two options: he saw a way that lay outside a black-and-white choice between a forced, nonconsensual captivity and a situation where the ultimate control over the relationship belonged to the sub. He told me that the way he wanted this relationship to work was that if and when he decided to accept me as a permanent slave, I would then be given a single choice: to decide if I wanted to live as his slave or not. If I decided yes, then from that point onward all choice would be stripped from me and I would be his, period. No walking out the door would be allowed, no leaving the relationship, no escape, no major decisions about anything, in fact, would be made by me unless he desired it. If the relationship ended, it would not be at my instigation, but his. Likewise for any other choice I might want to make about anything that happened to me: it wasn't mine to choose anymore. It was his.

Ok, now I know exactly what the standard objection to this is (I've heard it at least once before--understated grin): such an arrangement is not valid, is not real, it is not possible simply because it is made up in two people's minds and is not enforced physically, or culturally, or legally. Donald wasn't about to stick me in a cage for the rest of my life (however much I might desire it ). Neither was he about to brainwash me, hypnotize me, or break me emotionally--he liked me, brains and stubborn will and all, just the way I was. So how could such a thing be real? How could he strip away all my choice from me, without watching me 24 hours a day, or keeping me under lock and key or keeping me sedated? Well, once upon a time, a very long time ago, when there wasn't a lot of paper around, when verbal contracts were the norm, a little phrase called "I give you my word," had immense significance. It meant that the person who had promised something was bound to deliver it--bound by his word. Of course even back then in the paper-starved past, when one's word was all one had, people sometimes consistently broke their commitments and often didn't keep their promises, but word travelled fast about those people, and those in the community who knew their reputation refused to do business with them. Other people, the ones who always did what they said they were going to do, who always delivered, had things said about them like "her words are worth their weight in gold."

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and words like commitment and vows and promises have almost become meaningless. We live in a time of flakes. Virtually no one keeps their word consistently, virtually nobody always turns their papers in when they promise their teacher they will, virtually nobody consistently calls you back when they say they are going to. Lies, broken promises, welching on commitments, saying one thing and doing another are so much the norm, so much a part of the murky cultural water in which we swim that we just don't notice it as anything out of the ordinary. We expect it from people, in fact.

Ok, back to me and Donald. Donald could tell that I was an unusually sincere person, and in fact that is one of my most outstanding traits: I (and Donald) don't think I have a cynical bone in my body (note, however, that cynicism is not the same as critical thinking garbed in sarcasm, says the author of the essay on yipping little dogs--g), and I was (and still am) especially honest and forthright about my intense desire to be a slave. I wasn't exploring S&M primarily to experience pain nor to satisfy my love/lust for bondage, humiliation, helplessness, fear, etc. Although all those elements drew me irresistably, I saw them as sideshows, spinoffs of the main S&M TV program, if I may dare to get metaphorical again. I was exploring S&M primarily to fulfill the desire that I had had all of my life to be someone's slave absolutely and without reservations, to be totally controlled and to have _no_ say (unless my master permitted it) as to how I ran my life.

When you have someone with as intense a need for permanent slavery as I had/have who also is absolutely sincere about her desire, and who also, for various reasons has an unusually strong will (it's not usual to think of a sub with that characteristic, but many successful subs are very stubborn strong personalities--it comes in handy in those moments when the last thing you want to do is submit to that bozo dum-dum head dominant's @#$!?@ idjit orders--at those times you use your will to carry you over that last little bit of resistance), you have all the ingredients you need for someone who, when they make up their minds to say, "I give you my word," gives it absolutely and forever, without a hitch or a welch or a backing out--ever. And that's basically what I did: I made one single decision at the start of my slavery to Donald to give up all rights to ever make another decision again (unless of course he wished me to) and to completely submit and subsume my will to his. That was it. A decision which took 20 seconds to make. (I dragged it out, wouldn't you?... I savored the moment of hovering on the edge, on one side freedom, on the other side slavery, feeling intensely conscious that these were my last seconds as a free-willed person). And that was it, you know what I decided, and there were no more decisions after that (well actually, there were, but they were only the minor ones that Donald assigned me to make because he didn't want to be bothered). No constant reaffirmations that I was in this relationship only because I decided to be in it at every moment, no thoughts that I could walk out that door, because for me that truly is not an option. I have committed myself, and until the steel that is in my core melts and runs out my ass, I will not break my word.

Now, if I had made a mistake, if I had committed myself in slavery to the wrong man, an abuser like my daddy, or just as bad, someone who couldn't handle the responsibility of owning someone, I would have been a very miserable person by now, because I still would not have broken my word. I might have asked, begged, pleaded to be let free, but if the person I had committed myself to in slavery had not chosen to set me free, I would not walk. The only time I would have tried to escape (and this holds true for my relationship with Donald too, in fact, he has explicitly ordered me to do this) is if I were absolutely certain that my life were in danger. Then I would run, not walk, and use every ounce of intelligence, skill, and experience that I have to stay alive.

But the thing is, that is a theoretical situation, and I'm talking about reality here, not theory. Theory is all very nice...until reality proves it wrong. Donald is not a destructive or incompetant top. In fact, as I think I have mentioned before, I am immensely happy being his slave, happier that I have ever been in my life. This feels so right to me, this is what I had been looking for all of my life. And I also take some credit for my happy ending. I could have chosen the wrong top (or at least the wrong top for me) but I didn't. While part of that is attributable to lady luck: I was in the right place at the right time to meet Donald, another part of it is attributable to the fact that somehow, whether by intelligence, or by experience with people, or by intuition, I managed to home in on just the sort of person who was able to and desirous of meeting my peculiarly intense need to experience slavery in its most absolute form.

Five years ago I was a rank beginner, and, because all of my information about S&M came from reading fiction, I probably shouldn't have been able to tell a good dominant from a terrible dominant. In fact, some of the really bad tops that I was meeting in real life (only I didn't know how bad they were till much later) closely resembled the cold, rigid fiction-inspired dominants that strode disdainfully through my fantasies: hmmm...perhaps we all got our inspiration from the same source (can you say "Sir Steven"?--grin). They definitely turned me on, aloofness always has, but Donald, although not aloof, was able to almost effortlessly break through my stereotypes about True Doms. He was dominant but also Silly with a capital S, for christ's sake! He was easygoing, humorous, flexible, but deep inside, and about the matters that really meant something to him, his core was also steel (rather, make that diamond). And he was bright, brilliant in fact, a quartz hallogen that the other dominants I was meeting around that time couldn't hold their candles to . Behind their airs of aloofness was a certain simplicity, a difficulty with facing reality, and an inability to see the various nuances and complexities in situations that was really disappointing. Oh no, not another one who doesn't quite get it! Not another one reducing a calculus equation to simple arithmetic because s/he isn't equipped to handle anything more advanced! Ever have that feeling? I had it in spades...with every dominant I met, except Donald. And how the hell anyway do you submit to someone, turn over your will to someone who is dumber than you? I've never figured out a way to do this that works for longer than a weekend . I mean, If you can run rings around them mentally, how do you avoid the knowledge that you're really the one in control, because, after all, you're smart enough to manipulate them into doing whatever you want while still believing that they're the ones running the show. As I said above, I cringe away from playing manipulation games--it just isn't my idea of a good time.

Anyway, I've kind of rambled off the path of the message, and got into more of my life details than I expected I would. To wind things up, I guess I just want to say that there are all kinds of S&M relationships, and, ta! da!, here's another one for you to chew on! The slavery I experience, while not enforced by physical means, is, nevertheless, absolutely real to me. Real does not always equal physical, nor does it always equal logical or obvious, and sometimes, one's will and one's heart's desire (in my case the desire to submit) are stronger and realer than two hypothetical feet which can hypothetically walk out of a hypothetical door at any theoretically given time.