Stop hitting yourself
My first BDSM date
Pro-prologue
When I share my life with you, it’s a conscious choice. For most of my life, I kept my work and myself separate, but I don’t do that anymore.
Some things I do because I want to write about them. This, though, I did because I’ve been fantasising about doing it for three decades.
Prologue
I have wanted to be tied up and fucked since before I had language for either of those things. Since before I had much language at all. I know— that’s a hard fact to swallow, and maybe something you didn’t want to know about me. But life is brimming with uncomfortable truths. When adults pretend those truths don’t exist, when they refuse to look at what unsettles them, they don’t protect anyone. They raise children who grow up craving escape, in whatever fucked-up form that takes.
Stop hitting yourself
I knew it was going to happen. That horniness would hit as soon as I walked through the porch of my parent’s semi (there’s a joke there but you can find it yourself).
It happens every year: somewhere in between the almond-mum Christmas dinner and the pin-drop-silence-sex-scenes, my family home sees me craving the sensation of being hung, drawn, and quartered, every single time. This year, at the age of thirty, I decided to act on that.
It’s widely acknowledged by now that the time in between Christmas and New Year is no man’s land. It’s anyone’s game. With this in mind, and the backdrop of The Grinch on the TV, I decided to take advantage of this brief lawless interlude and downloaded the fetish dating app Feeld, for the first time in my life.
Richard
I connected almost instantly with a man named Richard.
Richard is that rare kind of attractive that both your twelve-year-old self and your thirty-year-old self could agree on. He has those Robbie Williams lines around his mouth that make you want to fold in half like a deckchair and be stored in someone’s garage until June. Sorry, I mean those lines that hold his smirk like parentheses. Dark hair, dark eyes, stubble. Cool, calm, collected.
One of his pictures shows him smiling in front of a nice car (crucially in front of, not leaning on— this is Feeld, not Raya). Another shows him in a suit at [insert generic formal occasion here]. The final slide of his profile: a Calvin Klein waistband concealing what can only be described as a tube of festive Pringles.
Though I’d never seriously weighed up the potential of a BDSM-experienced profile as someone I might actually meet up with, I had a strong sense that he was all the right levels of wrong. His bio explains that he’s in a healthy, long-term ENM relationship (Ethical Non-Monogamy), which I took to mean he’d have at least a working understanding of consent, boundaries, and modern intimacy.
Given my track record of relentless, medical-grade yearning, it felt safer to meet for the first time with someone I was confident couldn’t turn into a romantic relationship— or worse: the far away idea of one.
After an evening of soft-sexting Richard from my parents’ sofa (exchanging our desires, boundaries, hard limits, and crucially my preference of Daddy over Sir), we decide to meet for a drink.
Dad, can I have a lift?
As a woman who lives on her own for the other 51 weeks of the year, the irony of preparing for my first fetish date in my childhood home isn’t lost on me.
Unfortunately, this humiliation ritual is no coincidence. As I mentioned earlier, I know for certain that the urge toward deviant, compulsive sexual fantasies— and now, behaviours— reliably resurfaces during the ten days I spend in my childhood home every year. In this house, in which I evolved from an awkward, repressed, shame-filled child into an awkward, repressed, shame-filled teenager. No matter how far I’ve come, my annual pilgrimage hurls me back to factory settings. And all the travel vibrators and VPNs in the world wouldn’t cut it this time.
There seemed to be benefits to exploring it in my hometown, too. Aside from the fact that I no longer really know anyone in Manchester (granting me a rare, almost adolescent anonymity) I was relieved of the usual logistical anxieties. I packed only my pyjamas, gym clothes, and the jeans I travelled in, which meant I couldn’t spend the usual hours trying on outfits, figuring out which top says ‘choke me, but be nice about it’. In the absence of choice, I was forced to arrive as I was: underprepared, improperly dressed, and somewhat desperate.
Dad offered to give me a lift to the station, where he was dropping me off to ‘meet my cousin in town’. As we climb into the car he says, “I can just take you straight there, chicken. It’s only a couple more minutes.”
“No, no,” I panic. “I like the Metro. It’s nostalgic.” I insist. “I wanna get the Met”.
“If you say so,” he shrugs, pressing the radio on.
It’s Wouldn’t It Be Nice by The Beach Boys, and we’re off.
Meeting
The metro pulls into the stop where Richard’s picking me up, and I sit for a moment on the platform wall. I can’t remember the exact words running through my head, but they were definitely some version of ‘oh fuck, is this a terrible idea?’.
I text the three girlfriends I’ve told about the date: “oh fuck, is this a terrible idea?”, followed by my live location and the time they should expect to hear from me again. I’m bombarded with a flurry of ‘you go girl’s and heart emojis, which are promptly interrupted by Richard’s: I’ve arrived.
Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Everything’s normal.
We’re all adults here.
This is so normal.
Normal and not weird at all.
I walk towards the only car in the car park.
“Hello! How are you?” I manage as we hug.
He’s tall.
Shit, he’s tall.
And handsome.
And tall.
I climb into the passenger seat of his car and fumble some generic rubbish about how cold it is— in Manchester, in December. He humours me and I realise I’m unable to look at him in the eyes. That’s fine, I’ll build up to it, I reassure myself.
“How was the journey?” he asks, shifting gear.
I love his hand.
I love his hand on that stick thing.
I wish I was that stick thing.
God I should learn to drive, shouldn’t I?
Imagine if we crash.
Imagine if we crash and I’m found dead with Richard.
Richard from the internet.
And it’s all over the news and my mum has to identify me with—
“Yeah not bad thank you, my dad dropped me off” I pause, “my, erm, my actual Dad”.
Horrible joke.
Horrible, terrible joke.
I hope we do crash.
At least then I’d stop spewing garbage.
“Ha, nice. And how is he? Mister…?”
“Richardson.” I finish.
Oh good, Harriet. Why don’t you just give him your national insurance number and your blood type while you’re at it? At least then he can donate what’s left of it as he cleans it from his bathtub.
“O negative”, I mumble to myself, as we pull up to the bar.
“What was that?” he catches.
“O— nothing”.
It’s normal
A pint of whatever it is that comes in pints, and a house white wine, and we’re outside under a patio heater.
On plucking up the courage to actually look at him, I’m reminded that I’m somewhat capable of holding a conversation with another adult. We discuss Christmas, our families, his car business, my inability to drive and how ‘London’ that makes me— absolutely everything other than fetish.
I kind of like that it’s just there, in the middle, with neither of us touching it.
“Press the button”, he orders, as the heater fades off.
I reach over the table and do as I’m told. I do as I’m told every five minutes, for the rest of the time we’re outside. In fact, I quickly learn to press it before he has to ask.
We take our second drinks inside and slip into a table at the back, where the rest of the bar can’t quite see us. I wonder how many times he’s been at this exact table, and remind myself that it actually doesn’t matter at all.
We’re talking about whether or not we would’ve been friends at school when he places his hand on my thigh. I can’t hear anything he’s saying anymore, and I humour the absence by playing that ringing noise in my head— the one that soaps do when someone’s about to pass out. It makes me giggle.
“What’s funny, Harriet?”
Harriet.
Said as if it’s an insult, or a silly little joke.
He’s looking me in the eyes now.
“Nothing, I just—”, I look away, in search of what could possibly be funny.
He slides his hand further up my thigh, stopping just shy of the top. He continues on about school days, as if nothing’s happening— eye-contact unbroken.
It’s been 74 days since someone last touched my skin (someone who wasn’t my hygienist or the Pilates instructor correcting my downward dog). The urge to take all my clothes off and straddle him tidal-waves over me, and I’m speaking before I have time to think.
“I want to fuck you”, I announce.
“I know” he replies, with the calmness of someone who’s watching a tidal wave from afar.
*
Two hours pass with the blunt efficiency of desire being indulged but not yet satisfied. I curse myself for telling him I needed to be home by nine (at the risk that he was a weirdo), but he’s adamant that this is still the plan. Before I know it, we’re walking back to his car.
He pins me against an alley wall, his right hand holding both of mine at the small of my back, cigarette in his left. He tells me to “say please”.
“Please”, I say with urgency. I’m more serious than I realised I could be.
“Good girl”.
Taking one more drag, he drops the ember, and hits me once across the face. Hard. Before I have time to react, he’s kissing me. He tastes of cigarettes and whatever it is that comes in pints. I make a note that I don’t want to taste anything other than this ever again.
The loss of my footing is saved by him taking my hand to pull us both back on to the street. Back with all the normal people, doing normal things.
We arrange to meet again in two days time, on New Year’s Eve Eve.
New Year’s Eve Eve
I start getting irritated as I get ready for our second BDSM date.
I’m sure my parents can smell the anticipation on me. As I move around the house, a line from fifteen years ago keeps intruding: “As long as you’re back before 7, and no boys!” The irritation sharpens as I lock the bathroom door.
I think about it as I begin to lather dad’s shaving foam on my skin. If my parents really had my best interests at heart— if safety truly came before everything else— they wouldn’t create an environment in which it feels necessary to lie. And they certainly wouldn’t knock on the bathroom door while you’re shaving your asshole.
This thought is interrupted by my mother knocking on the bathroom door as I’m shaving my asshole: “Harriet! You’re going to be late for your evening Pilates! Dad’s already in the car!”.
Dad’s always already in the car.
“OK, two minutes!”, I say, repressing the pissed-off-ness in my voice.
We’re meeting at the same station as last time, but the destination is his unheated warehouse on the edge of the city. Richard warns me to wear layers, and I put on everything I own.
Warehouse
He seems to take pleasure in reminding me just how remote and cut-off his warehouse is, as we drive up to the main gate.
One of the disadvantages of meeting with one half of an ENM partnership, whilst you’re staying at your parent’s house, is that neither of you have somewhere comfy and warm to offer up. But as he orders me out of his car into the sub-zero, dimly-lit warehouse, that’s starting to feel like the point.
He positions me against one of the workbenches, his feet inside mine, forcing me to straddle him while standing. I look up at him, and he holds my chin to deliver the following:
“Amber…” He pauses.
“My name’s Harriet,” I whisper.
“No, silly girl,” he continues. “Amber… means it’s nearly too much.” His finger traces from my chin downward. “And red—” closing his hand firmly, deliberately, around my neck “—red means stop.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
“I need to hear a yes, Harriet.”
“Yes, Daddy.” My voice cracks as I start to wonder if I’ve gotten in too deep, too soon. I wonder if my online self is much more capable of upholding brattiness than the teenager that’s run away from home.
Vice
I’m too caught up in my e-boldness melting away to notice he’s had his hand on a metal vice for the whole time we’ve been stood here. It’s absolutely fucking freezing, which is only reinforced as he places his hand underneath my layers, onto the warmth of my stomach. I squeal and it sounds a lot more like an orgasm than intended.
“If you don’t like that,” he whispers into my hair, “…you’re going to hate this”. I take a deep breath in and his hand isn’t on my stomach anymore.
As he begins counting down, I slip away for a moment. I think back to our conversation in the car on the way there.
My phone lit up with a message from my friend Cecily, asking for the model and make, so she could ask ChatGPT whether or not it’s a ‘pedo car’. On learning I’d told someone what I was up to, Richard seemed genuinely surprised. I realised in that moment that he doesn’t have to worry about ending up in chunks at the bottom of the Manchester Ship Canal, like I do. It bothers me. Of course, there’s always a risk for a woman who does things like this— but then again, there’s also a risk in going for a jog on Clapham Common.
I tense up, so I try a different thought.
Why is this so bad? I mean, why do people think it’s so bad?
We embrace the bitter kick of a smooth black coffee, or the slow burn of a perfectly balanced curry, or even the ache of a good workout— all of that’s fine— but the euphoria of a handsome man slapping you and then immediately kissing you afterwards is somehow too much to fathom. Impossible to comprehend. Why?
I don’t like coffee. I think it tastes like ass. You couldn’t pay me enough to try a vindaloo. But I still understand why other people like that stuff. I know what they get from the paradoxical pleasure of it all. Because, after all, there is a difference between “I don’t get it” and “it’s not for me”. So why’s this such a taboo?
I’m brought back into the room with “good girl, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”, and realise I’ve crumbled into his shoulder. Oh, and I’m really fucking wet.
The first (proper) hit
Do you remember when I was going on about how I hadn’t had pomegranate juice until it was squished fresh in front of me on a street in Morocco? Yeah, well guess what: it turns out I hadn’t been slapped properly until I was on my knees in front of a man, in a sub-zero Greater Manchester garage, on New Year’s Eve Eve, begging him to do so.
Richard retrieves a piece of cardboard from beneath one of his cars, lays it on the concrete floor in front of a nearby chair, and points. He doesn’t need to say anything for me to know where I’m meant to be.
He’s sat, and I’m knelt. His legs spread, leaned back, like he’s an extra playing one of the bad guys in West Side Story. I bet it’s on TV right now. It’s such a Christmas film, isn’t it? I bet my parents are watching it.
“Do you like it down there, Harriet?” he asks.
I nod, thinking about how my Grandad called them bad guys but they’re actually just Puerto Rican. “Yes Daddy”, I feel I should add something to reinforce that I definitely wasn’t thinking about musical gang wars “…I like it down here”.
“You’re so pretty when you’re behaving.” He drops any trace of expression and leans in until our noses are nearly touching. His breath ghosts my mouth. “What do you want?”
“I want you to kiss me”, I whisper.
“Wrong answer”.
*
When boyfriends have hit me in the past—on being asked, of course—it’s usually fallen somewhere between an over-gesticulatory piece of slapstick and a timid brush of the cheek, immediately followed by the obligatory: ‘oh my god are you okay? was that too hard? it was too hard, wasn’t it? I’m so sorry’.
This was a hit. A proper slap. He, Will Smith and, I, Chris Rock. Except instead of keeping his wife’s name out of my mouth, he was telling me that if I didn’t have his dick in there in the next five seconds, there would be consequences.
It’s worth noting, at this point, that from our online conversations, Richard is well aware that I’m exploring celibacy, and intend to do so well beyond the Christmas break. Even so, I’d be lying if I said what happened following his instruction didn’t test the practical limits of that intention.