Authors: Emily Tilton
Yeah. I also needed to know that I was going to be tied to Geoffrey’s headboard at some point in the not-too-distant future and taken roughly in the ass, that there was a spreader-bar waiting for me in my master’s house, that at some point he would raise my dress in front of well-dressed company to show them my panties.
“So, she struggles, but then, you know, she submits, and then she, you know, really needs it.”
There couldn’t have been a better audience for the song, I thought, than I. But what Chaser wanted for the video, and what Geoffrey seemed to be going along with in that meeting, turned my stomach. The actress—the stand-in, that is, for Lia—was going to be shown as struggling against Chaser as he pulled her across his lap. She was going to be shown becoming pliant. Then she was going to be shown as incredibly horny, afterward, begging Chaser to fuck her.
I looked at Geoffrey as Chaser described the scene he wanted. He was nodding. He was not asking my opinion.
My opinion was that it was a very bad idea to incorporate a punishment spanking in the video at all because of the possibility of misinterpretation. Was Geoffrey saying anything like “Have you thought about what that would look like?” No, he wasn’t.
If you were going to speed through that red light—the punishment spanking—then it was a bad idea to have the character struggle, because the possibility of misinterpretation got magnified exponentially that way. Was Geoffrey saying, “It’s probably not a great idea to have her struggle that way.” No.
I seethed. If you were going to be foolhardy enough to have her struggle, then you absolutely had to have real aftercare: cuddling. To show her as horny after a punishment-spanking demonstrated a misunderstanding of BDSM so thorough that you wouldn’t even have BDSM-advocates on your side.
I looked at Chaser, then back at Geoffrey. Geoffrey said, “Interesting. We’ll take it back and see what we can do.”
My jaw dropped. This was the point in every meeting when Geoffrey said, “Chloe, what do you think?” He hadn’t said that. He hadn’t given me any room at all.
Somewhere in my subconscious, a door opened; my internal professors came out of their cells, blinking at the light. I said, “You have to have aftercare. Real aftercare.”
Geoffrey’s head snapped over to look at me. The look on his face was a warning I had seen once before that summer, when I had spoken out of turn on a much less serious matter at another meeting. It said, “You just earned a spanking; if this goes any further, that spanking will be the least of your worries.”
“That’s why she’s horny,” said Chaser, as if he knew all about it.
I lost it. “Oh my God. If you think that’s aftercare, you need to have your head examined and your dom’s license revoked.”
“Chloe!” said Geoffrey. “We will discuss this later.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Chloe, I’m not going to warn you again.”
“Warn me all you want, asshole.”
“Do you seriously want a spanking here in the restaurant? We will discuss this later.” To my shock, he pulled something from the breast pocket of his blazer. It was the little leather paddle he always kept in the car. I had a great affection for that paddle, actually; it had given me several lovely al fresco experiences all over New England.
“Java,” I said, and rose and left. I heard Chaser say, “She’s in for it,” and laugh as I made my way to the door.
On my way home, I got a text from Geoffrey.
Young lady, get your impertinent backside to my house by 5:00 p.m. You are in serious trouble.
I wrote back immediately.
Fuck you.
Then I blocked his number.
“Exactly,” said Professor Whitlock. “Exactly, Chloe. That’s just the kind of thing I was hoping for from you.”
I had just finished reading the first of the little essays Professor Whitlock and I had agreed upon as the basic written component of my work for the independent study. It was about the gravity of Sade’s influence on the mainstream of modernity, and I had written it in the midst of massive sub drop. I had never actually experienced true sub drop before at all, because Geoffrey was so good at aftercare. Now, I wondered whether the price of academic inspiration was going to be that I felt like that all the time.
I had grabbed two pieces of pizza, mumbling to Anne and Jen that I was okay, and gone to my room and started to cry and to write. I never ate the pizza.
Sade, I wrote, was pernicious, not just in the overt way he fetishized gender roles (really the fantasy violence was almost beside the point because of the greater violence he did to the feminine imagination) but in the way that fetishization left no room for critique, Sade’s own critique of social mores being falsified by his pleasure in those same mores. The question “Must we burn Sade?” was trivial; instead, we should ask “How can we stop Sade from burning us?”
To put it more simply, I was saying that BDSM was bad, bad, bad because it made women (by which I meant me) think that they
wanted
to submit. It was masculinist trickery, and my new mission would be to persuade anyone who thought, as I had thought, that she wanted to submit to a man, whether erotically or otherwise, that she had been duped by society into thinking that she had a choice in the matter at all. The fact that it felt good was, according to this little essay, the worst part, because that made women (me) easier to dupe.
It was not a bad essay, for all the haste of its creation and for all its reliance on theory and theory’s jargon. It deserved Professor Whitlock’s praise, and I was happy that it got that praise. For about fifteen minutes, I thought,
I’ve got this. It’s awful that the guy who showed me how to call forth the true strength of my imagination in the service of intellectual enterprise is also an asshole who thinks it’s okay to dominate women, but I set out to be a professor, and I’m going to be a professor.
I repeated various different versions of that to myself four or five times as I walked away from Professor Whitlock’s office. Then, to my distress, my inner voice of reason became over-confident.
What does it matter if I can’t read BDSM books anymore? Who cares if I’ll never let a man spank me again? I’m doing what academia requires of me.
But the mere thought of never being spanked again, rushing in upon me with the thought of never feeling Geoffrey’s cock in my ass again, of never being tied to his headboard again, of never even seeing my master’s cock again, undid me, and I had to sit down on a bench in front of the library and put my head in my hands, weeping.
“It’s just sub drop,” I said to myself, fiercely. “It will pass.”
Two weeks of nothing, more or less, went by. Geoffrey emailed every day, but I deleted them unread. He came to the apartment, but I, in the old style, was not at home to him. I wrote another paper for Professor Whitlock, along precisely the same lines, and I went to my meeting with her to read it, sure that, as awful as it felt a lot of the time, I was on the proper path.
“I’m so glad,” Professor Whitlock said, after I had finished reading part two of “Sade Burns Us,” as I was now calling the project, which I now expected to be my dissertation, “that this has worked out so well. I was really worried about you last spring.”
“Thanks, Christine,” I said. It still felt a little strange to call her by her first name, but she had encouraged me to do so at the previous meeting, and it made for a neat moment of arrival to set against the gloom of giving up “all that” as I thought of it. “I was worried, too.”
“Between you and me, I don’t see anything wrong with doing it in the bedroom, but I think especially when you’re young, it’s much too easy to mistake the sexual dynamic—just as you’ve been outlining in these great little papers—for something greater, and to start feeling grateful to the guy who gives you that sexual rush when he fucks you in the ass, as you so eloquently put it.” She laughed her elegant laugh. “I mean,” she continued, “I have college friends who talk about how they love the way their husbands lead them.”
I felt my mouth open, and I felt myself gasp. I saw Christine misinterpret my gasp completely; she was sure that I was astonished that any educated woman would ever say that about her husband, when in fact the floor I thought I had constructed under me, with my refusal even to think about Geoffrey and my little position-papers about Sade, had just disintegrated, and I was falling freely through intellectual and ethical space.
Geoffrey had led me. Geoffrey had employed me, and he had set certain rules, as my boss and as the man I had accepted as my master—however I thought of him now. And I had betrayed him and undermined him because I had allowed the voice of this woman, Professor Whitlock, and her academic ilk to speak through me at that meeting.
The thoughts that shot through my head at that moment were many and various, but the one that was uppermost—and its being uppermost convinced me that I had to do something right here, right now, to put my life back on the path where it belonged—was that I had a very severe spanking coming. I had it coming not because it would turn me on or because it would turn Geoffrey on; in fact, I hoped (with a decided admixture of dread) that it wouldn’t turn me on at all, just to prove at last to Chaser that punishment spankings don’t make you horny.
Most of the other thoughts had to do with whether I was going to say something to Christine Whitlock or just slink away, perhaps never to return to campus, let alone her office.
“This is going to sound like I’m crazy, possibly, Christine,” I began.
She looked at me quizzically. I blushed as I continued, and she noticed the blush. A look of slight alarm crossed her face.
“But I loved the way my…” I took a deep breath “… my master led me, until I was stupid enough to think that there was anything ethically wrong with letting him lead me, and I broke up with him.”
“Chloe, perhaps I’ve misunderstood, but—”
“I don’t take back anything I wrote about Sade, professor,” reverting to her title because I wanted to emphasize to her that I knew what her position required of her, in the way of gender-theory formulations. “We subs need to know that we can be duped by culture. Molly Bloom is in no position to overturn the social order of Dublin; whatever pleasure she gets in being fucked in the ass doesn’t free her, or me, from behaving ethically. If her husband, or my master, told her or me to do something that harmed another person, we would tell them to take a hike. But the range of ethical behavior open to Molly Bloom and to me includes accepting the leadership of a boyfriend or a husband or a master, just as your students accept your leadership in the seminar room, or a junior associate at a consulting firm lets her boss take the lead at a meeting, no matter what she thinks of the client.”
Professor Whitlock looked at me coldly. “It seems to me,” she said, slowly, “that the vast majority of that little rant was for your own benefit, rather than mine. To the extent I understood it, I believe you were telling me that as of now you are not prepared to conduct yourself in a manner that suits the demands of the academic discipline you don’t seem yet to have given up. Let me simply then repeat my warning of last spring: you will have a very hard time finding a job, I believe.”
I looked into her eyes, realizing the full measure of the threat implied there. If your adviser won’t give you a sterling letter of recommendation, you might as well just choose a different career.
“I’ll see you in two weeks?” she asked.
“Yes, professor,” I said.
I texted Geoffrey from the bench outside, fighting back tears of anger and of sadness.
I’m so sorry, sir. Are you in Cambridge? On bench outside Emerson. I need you.
He texted back instantly.
On my way.
Five tear-stained minutes later, Geoffrey sat down beside me.
“I love you,” I sobbed and turned and reached for him and buried my face in his chest as he put his arms around me. “I’m so sorry. Take me back to your house and punish me, please, sir.”
“What happened?”
“I just had a terrible showdown with Whitlock.”
“About what?”
“About you, actually… no, I mean, yes, about you, but really about me and my work. I wrote these two little things, after I…” I gulped air, trying to control the fear that suddenly constricted my chest as I came close to confessing that I knew I had been horrible and thought of the spanking he should give me. “After I ruined the meeting.”
“Shh,” he said. “You didn’t ruin it. It’s alright. I have the business—we have the business, if you want to stay.”
“But I was so horrible.”
“Let’s talk about that later. What’s the bottom-line with Whitlock?”
“Oh, it’s all messed up. I was starting to say that I wrote these two anti-BDSM papers that she loved, and then she said this horrible thing about how she was so glad I had decided I wasn’t going to submit to a man…” I felt his grip tighten around me. “And then I realized that she was just completely wrong, and you were right, and I’d let all that crap from theory basically take me over and make me think I couldn’t even keep my mouth shut at a client meeting.”
“So what does that mean for grad school?”
“Well, unless I go back to her with my tail between my legs, I can pretty much kiss my chances of getting a job goodbye.”
“Hmm.” He absorbed my words for a moment. “Well, as you know, I can see a solution to that.”
“Yes!” I said. “I want that—I want you to take me home and spank me, and we’ll put this behind us.”
He held me tightly for a moment, then he loosened his embrace slightly and said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. There are things that need to be resolved first, and I don’t want to let myself think you’re going to want to stay with me once they are, because it’s a really big fork in the road, and I’m concerned that what happened at Mistral could keep happening.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, still crying. “I love you. I want you to lead me.”
That seemed to startle him a bit, but he said, “It’s bigger than that. Will you listen to what I have to say?”