My year of BDSM

Newly divorced, Michelle Banks set out on a quest to discover and recover her sexual self. She had no idea where it would lead, but she was jolly well going to find out – and she did.

I am alone in a hotel room.

I am pacing, barefoot, adjusting my too-tight black minidress.

In a few minutes, a man is going to arrive.

A very tall, very muscular Italian man covered from head to toe in tattoos.

And we are going to… Well, actually, in that tense, charged, excited-scared-wild moment, my imagination has short-circuited. I know what we’ve discussed, but somehow my brain can’t quite comprehend what is actually about to happen.

We’re going to f—k, that much is certain, but this isn’t really about that, per se. No. This is no ordinary rendezvous between lovers… This is about two humans who are not romantically involved, in the conventional sense, agreeing to play out each others’ fantasies of submission and domination.

There’s a knock at the door. My heart jumps into my throat, my pulse is racing. I open it. He fills the doorway, ducking to step inside. Less than a second later, the door is closed and our tongues are entwined, my legs wrapped around his waist, his hands on me, carrying me, in one seamless motion, into the centre of the room.

The heat and electricity between us has a life of its own. It takes over. Then, he pulls away from the kiss, peels me off his body, grabs a handful of my hair and slaps my face – hard enough to make my eyes tear up, but not enough to leave a mark.

The sting of the slap, the arousal, the excitement, the tingle of fear, the sheer sensory overwhelm, is enough to do what I’d hoped – I forgot who I am. Nothing exists now except this hotel room and us in it, and nothing more is required of me than to be a good little slave.

“What are you?” he asks in his Italian accent.

“A filthy slut.”

Another slap.

“Whose filthy slut?”

“Yours.”

“What are you?”

“I’m your filthy slut.”

He pushes me to the floor, unbuckles his belt and wraps one end around his palm.

“Crawl.”

I slowly crawl away from him.

Thwack!

The pain is breathtaking. And exquisite. The world outside slips further and further away.

Thwack-thwack-thwack!

I cry out, nearly balk, but then he stops.

“Good whore. Come here.”

He gestures to the zip on his jeans, with a look that says: make yourself useful.

And I do.

Afterwards, he leaves, thanking me. Sends me messages on his drive home, telling me it was an incredible experience.

Me? I stay in the hotel room for a bit, hugging myself, smiling.

I did it. I actually did it.

My insides feel like the pristine, freshly scrubbed air after a torrid thunderstorm. I feel extraordinarily brave. I decide to take myself out for dinner, solo, to celebrate.

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The quest

Maybe the scene described above sounds normal for someone into BDSM, but that wasn’t me. Two years prior, I left a 17-year marriage, which was wonderful in some ways, but extremely codependent in others, and I really, really struggled to feel sexual pleasure.

In the lead up to our separation, I embarked on a quest to discover why I felt so dead, sexually, and how I might access the kind of sexual pleasure I’d heard women talk about. One statement by a sexologist stayed with me: “Women are bottomless wells of pleasure.” I had no idea what it might feel like to be a bottomless well of pleasure, but I sure as hell wanted to find out.

My ex and I separated, and during that time, I struck up a flirtation over email with someone I’d quoted in several articles: a tantra teacher. The clincher was, he made mention of his inner beast, and proceeded to explain what this beast would like to do to me.

A switch was tripped, I’d never felt so aroused in my entire life, and that’s when I knew I had to file for divorce. It was a big neon sign pointing to the Bottomless Well.

We embarked on an eight-month affair. There were sexual thrills aplenty and he was wonderfully sensual, but what really turned me on in a way that literally made my knees weak, was the occasional display of domination: giving orders, pulling my hair, belting. It was like a drug, and I was hooked.

The affair ended in May that year. In retrospect, I can see I was really only in it for the sex, so when things took a turn for the serious, I skedaddled. I hit Tinder, almost drunk with freedom and a hunger for more: more exploration, more intensity, more pleasure. My soul had tasted something otherworldly and intoxicating and it wanted more.

My very first Tinder date, in early June – and this is why I believe, if you set out to do something that is in alignment with your highest good, the universe really does support you – was with Mr Italian. We met for a drink, there was chemistry, he took me to dinner, we discovered a mutual desire for submission and domination, and the chemistry went nuclear.

We only had two dates in a hotel room, but there was so much text negotiating and flirtation – not to mention checking up on each other’s backgrounds – that the experience felt much bigger than that.

It ended with Mr Italian after two encounters. I wanted to go deeper, experience more ‘ownership’, he didn’t, so I ended it.

In the meantime, I’d been exploring FetLife – a kind of Facebook for kinky/BDSM folk looking to hook up, and though it wasn’t to my taste (tacky), I did make contact with a few interesting people. One of whom I liaised with and was getting an increasingly electric charge from, I’ll call him Mr Joburg. Just as things with Mr Italian died down in August, Mr Joburg stepped in, offering to give me the full ‘Master’ experience – if I visited Joburg (I live in Durban).

I mulled it over for a while – technically, it was risky, incredibly risky, to go to a strange man’s house in another city for BDSM… Daft, mad, crazy, my friends told me. Yet something in me said: DO IT. I’ve always trusted that voice, so I did it.

He was certainly capable of offering the full ‘Master’ experience. He had converted the top floor of his house into a BDSM temple of sorts. There were whips and sex toys aplenty; masks; ball-gags; an enormous cage replete with wrist and ankle restraints; as well as an impressive collection of esoteric paraphernalia and, in one corner, a glass tank that contained an enormous live tarantula.

There were parts of me that were screaming: you don’t know this man, this is dangerous! But this was overridden by my curiosity. And arousal. And a weird trust that somehow this was being provided to me by God.

Over that weekend, my curiosity was satisfied. I wore a collar and crawled on all fours. Every minute was accounted for: I had orders on how to behave, chores both banal and sexual, and ‘punishments’ for non-compliance. I was abased and humiliated. I was sexually ‘molested’ in every which way. It was delightfully strange and new, and arousing, to give myself over in that way, but a screaming in my gut got louder. I ignored it.

I went to Joburg to visit the ‘Master’ twice – once in October, and once in December, then he dumped me. It was weird, I felt nothing but relief. And sure, a tinge of failure. In some ways the experience had been exactly what I wanted, in other ways, I was disturbed by the gnawing instinct in my gut. Was he a (demonic) angel of mercy – or just an asshole? Either way, I felt an incredible sense of certainty once dumped: Oh, I will NEVER do that again. Put myself in a position of such trusting subservience. The desire to give another such an all-encompassing power over me completely left me.

But now I was confused. I had been convinced that I’d discovered my authentic sexual identity: a submissive. Who was I now? I clung to it for a while, though I didn’t have any more ‘hook-ups’ of that nature, until I met Him. The man I would fall in love with.

We met on Facebook, quite by accident, began a conversation. In keeping with the established pattern, he lived out of town – I went to visit him. There was chemistry, his sexual range was extraordinary, and, bizarrely, he seemed to want to know me. Really know me. I was caught off guard. He was completely capable of offering me a domination experience, yet just as capable of making love, which felt incredible, and soon it was all I wanted.

“You know that’s not a thing, right?” he said one night, gently. “BDSM isn’t a thing, submission isn’t a thing. They’re just experiences, that we can flow into and out of whenever we like – it’s never who we are.”

With that, my obsession with BDSM well and truly dissolved, and I gave myself over to a completely natural, easy and deeply nourishing kind of physical intimacy. In fact, giving it a label still feels … wrong. The sex is just an extension of our love for each other. I’m discovering that my hottest turn-on is trust. Feeling safe enough to be truly vulnerable. And desired. Feeling safe enough to have an ugly cry on his chest is, like, directly connected to my vagina. I’ve felt sexual bliss infuse every part of my being. For the first time, I experienced the kind of lovemaking where you literally feel like you are melting into each other. I finally found the bottomless well of pleasure.