The Collar of Blue Stones
IT’S ALL MY FAULT. I’m not like Ana, an innocent accidentally falling in love with a dominant man. No, not me. I knew exactly who I was messing with the moment that I met him. Oh, I might have uttered “holy cow” a few times. But if there was any blush in my cheeks, it was there because he put the color just where he wanted it. I didn’t flee my sadist, as Ana fled hers in Fifty Shades of Grey. Instead, every day for three months now, I’ve put on a beautiful necklace made of blue crystals and stones. Not a day goes by without someone noticing it and telling me how lovely it is. Every time they do, my fingers wander up to the blue crystals and I smile. They think it’s simply jewelry, but for me it’s my beautiful secret. When they compliment it, I feel like they are telling me that my surrender is beautiful. That my commitment is beautiful. Of course they don’t know that it is my “day collar,” placed there by the Blue Flame, the man who tops me.
Blue Flame has a lot in common with Christian Grey. No, he is not a mega-millionaire, but he understands what he wants from a woman. These words that Christian utters to Ana so beautifully could easily have been spoken by my Blue Flame to me: “I have rules, and I want you to comply with them. They are for your benefit and for my pleasure. If you follow these rules to my satisfaction, I shall reward you. If you don’t, I shall punish you, and you will learn.”
My friends don’t know that every morning when I put my necklace on, it reminds me of my submission to him—this man who lives across the country and is not mine except for this agreement that we have. They don’t know that every night when I take it off before I go to sleep, my mind flashes to bits of memory of my visits with him: Sitting at a sushi bar with his ropes tied into a harness under my dress. His arm around me, gently tugging on them through my clothing. My body yielding to the push-pull of the ropes. Sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco, taking off his black heavy boots and rubbing his feet as he reads the paper and sips his coffee. The pleasure that I feel in my body when I please him. Me, on my belly, tied to a four-poster bed, completely open to him as he places a vibrator underneath me and canes me while I am having dozens of orgasms. The necklace is my constant reminder, the trigger of sense memories that feed me between the long stretches of separation, that stitch our visits together. The memories can hit like a smooth wooden paddle. They can land soft and smooth with a gentle caress or strike so hard that I lose all of my breath. Because, for me, being with the Blue Flame is all of those things.
Domination and submission, power and surrender, mean different things for different people. For some it’s about having a chance to trust someone else to take control. For others it’s the pure physical sensation—spanking, flogging, licking, restraints—that bends the mind, the antithesis of thinking in straight hard lines.
Being held in just the way you need to be by someone stronger than you are in that moment, being told what to do in the safe context of a mutually agreed upon power exchange, is pretty damn intoxicating. That is what Christian was trying to offer Ana. But she had too much resistance to truly understand the gift that he was offering. For her, it was an aberration—something that seemed broken and disturbed. For me, it is nothing less than perfection.
No one would guess that I am a submissive woman, that I take pleasure in serving. After all, in most of my life I am the one giving the orders or, at the very least, taking charge. Perhaps that is why surrender calls to me. It is the path not taken, or perhaps it is the path that, as an American woman, I was taught was beneath me. Something to be avoided at all costs. Yet I would risk a lot to have this.
There is a transformation that comes over me in surrender. A softening of the hard intellect and practicality that is my usual way of being in the world. I love my yielding woman. I find her bewitching. My collar leads me to her.
My mind wanders to my last visit with him. We are in my hotel room and it’s our last day together before we go back into our real lives. It will be many months before we’re together again. We are not supposed to be sexually intimate today, that was the plan—to make going home easier. We are in my hotel room. I offer him a glass of wine. I don’t want to transition. I am hungry for him. The heaviness of months without physical contact with him looms over me like a bad cold. I nestle into his body and implore him with my eyes. I take off the blue collar of stones. He reaches for our play collar. It’s made of leather with one blue crystal dangling. This is a good sign.
Blue Flame asks me to kneel. He likes to start with me on my knees. I am asked to kiss my collar. He beckons me to lift my hair. I can feel his strong hands. They are the hands of a man that does things, and they feel steady as he places the leather around my neck. There is ritual to mark this time of my submission. He always pulls the collar very tight at first before he settles it into a comfortable snugness. This always startles me, almost as unexpected as me finding myself on my knees. Yet I hunger for this, as much as my hunger embarrasses me.
I feel so self-conscious every time I participate in this ritual. Imagine, me kneeling. Kissing his hands in gratitude for whatever they will offer me in these moments. My eagerness to do this even though I almost have to force myself to my knees is unyielding. The freedom I feel in this physical expression of giving myself to this man so wantonly, the pleasure of my submission, rushes my body like a river overflowing a dam. And at the same time, I know that this scene would make some feminist somewhere completely crazy. Women getting spanked and men loving to do it? It’s scary for a lot of people. Miss Steele is not alone in her fear. It’s not politically correct, but it’s my desire. And that’s where decades of feminism should have brought us—to every woman being able to speak and have her own true desire. And I was claiming mine.
For all the pockets of sexual freedom in which people can and do have their desires met, there are vast expanses where people live blunted lives because this deep, dark stuff must be relegated to porn or fiction or TV or freak shows. Why is that? Is it because we conflate BDSM with abuse? Unfortunately, it is even linked there in Fifty Shades of Grey—and that is where the book fell short for me. We are once again hiding desire and sexual instinct behind a veil. The story that somehow Christian became a dominant man because of abuse is so unfortunate in that it perpetuates the myth that BDSM is a psychological disorder.
But that is not my experience with men who dominate women and the women who enjoy surrendering to them. BDSM and abuse are not the same, and we can’t intellectualize sexual desire away. Public discussion by “sensible” people inevitably harkens back to what a woman will put up with for “love” (especially if the guy is loaded and handsome with a buried broken heart just yearning to be held). I’m so sick of hearing that women do “this” to please their man, that they submit for love. They may. We do lots of things for love. But I think we hide behind “love” so we don’t have to take responsibility for our desire, which may have nothing at all to do with gushy emotion and everything to do with raw sexual pleasure. That is Ana’s story. It’s not mine.
How about the fact that lots of women want to feel dominated because it feels good. Period. And I was now on my knees and loving it even if I was debating my right to be on my knees in that very moment with my unseen critics. In this place, my pleasure comes from serving this man.
We find our way to the bed. Perhaps I will get what I want after all. He is smiling, lying back on the pillows, sipping his wine. He beckons to me. I make my way to his arms and he holds me. I feel his kisses on the top of my head, his hands playing with my hair. Oh God it feels so good! My body is on fire in an instant. I begin to kiss his body through his clothing. Soon, they are more than kisses; I am trying to get to his flesh. I want him to want me. I use my teeth and gently bite through his clothes. I feel his body relax, and he puts the glass of wine down. I have his full attention as I pleasure his body. I can feel his hard-on pressing against his blue jeans. I somehow try to give him a blowjob through his clothes.
“Please,” I ask softly. He knows what I am asking for. I am asking him to get undressed. He shakes his head no. I whine and moan softly. “Oh God … please?” He laughs at me.
“May I get naked, Sir?” I ask. He nods yes.
I pull off my clothing and rub my body against the coarse Levi’s, locked down with a leather belt and silver buckle. He pulls me to sit astride him, as if I was making love to him. He looks at me with eyes that love and mock me. He loves my struggle to have him.
I know he wants me. I can feel his desire rock hard beneath me. His eyes never leave mine. And soon mine are full of tears.
“Please. Please. Please,” I beg. He shakes his head no. “Don’t you want me?” I weep.
“Yes, of course I want you. I want you just like this,” he says.
I collapse for a while on his chest, sobbing. I hate him. I love him. Why is he doing this to me? I cannot believe that I just begged for a man to make love to me. It was incredibly humiliating and he was enjoying the show. I wanted to claw his face. Instead I allowed him to hold me, as I moaned, and kissed his body everywhere and tried to find release like a cat rubbing up against a tree. My pussy is burning, hot and wet. How could he not want me? How could he possibly leave me like this, I ask myself again and again.
Blue Flame’s hands are mostly steady. He holds me as I tremble and he just asks for the same simple thing. He asks me to yield to him. To know that I am desired. His requests for me are to simply melt into that. Easier said than done. I can still feel the candle of my surrender fight against the flame with words and endless debate and pleading. Submission does not come easy for feminists with big lives and even bigger mouths.
His joy in my suffering is the only pleasure that I can find. And it is in the end the pleasure that I seek. He is a sadist, after all. But another wave of resistance bubbles up, even as I gently touch the pleasure. I want to pound his chest. I tell myself to stop. To yield. To surrender. I am the submissive, and he is the Dominant. He gets to call the shots. But I am used to the shots being called mostly around things that give me pleasure. Bend over? Sure! Where?
Canes always frighten me, but I am developing a taste for them because Blue Flame enjoys playing with them. I want his pleasure to be my pleasure. But can I find pleasure in my own sexual hunger? Can I surrender so deeply that I can find joy in my own pain if it pleases him? Can I allow myself to care about him like that? Apparently so.
Blue Flame has found ways to torture me that I never considered. It is humiliating to beg. To literally weep at his feet. In this moment, on the bed in this hotel room, he is asking me to yield everything to “his way” on the deepest of levels. He wants me to go home hungry.
The physical pain of wanting, and knowing that I will be wanting for a long time. The cruelty of that. The pain of not understanding the why of it. The knowledge that I am not supposed to be busy in my head with the why of it. That is not my business. That is not my concern. On the deepest of levels, I am simply to find my pleasure in the sadistic grin on his face while he enjoys my struggle and the same tears that I am shocked and humiliated by. My place is in the acceptance of it.
Was I really crying? Was I really pleading for him? It is unreal to me, now, away from him. I can remember his hands holding me, telling me that it was okay to cry. His desire was clear and stated again and again in so many ways. It is for me to find my pleasure in his pleasure. Sometimes that does include many orgasms for me without him taking a single one. Not this time.
This time his pleasure is so painful to me that even the memory of it rips my heart out. But in my memory his hands are right there to catch my heart and kiss it. He looks at me with his beautiful blue eyes and places my heart right back inside my chest. I can hear him right now, “Breathe, Pamela … breathe.” I smile into our shared giggle of breathing into the hard stuff.
I receive praise with my burning, angry sexual desire. I receive praise with my spirit crumbling. He loves me with gentleness after he asks me to calm my sexual energy and put away my arousal, after a good long time of allowing me to raise it fruitlessly, sitting astride and naked on his dressed body as he smiles into my crying eyes and I buck like a wild mustang caught by ropes.
Reluctantly, I dress as he watches me. I kiss the fur on his chest with one more moment of hopeful expectation. But he takes off my play collar and replaces it with the necklace of stones. I want to kick him. And despite all of that I want to go deeper. I can’t wait for next time. On some deep level I know that I am a moth that can’t wait to fly into the flame again and again.
I remember feeling powerful in my body, as I knew that I met the challenges of the day. I felt submissive pride, and more … I felt a pleasure that was way more interesting to me than the orgasms that I was leaving behind. His pleasure was mine.
We go for a coffee.
We hold hands as we walk through shops. I buy dark purple flowers for him. They remind me of what my sex must look like, all filled with blood with no place to go. I give them to him. Let them sit on his table. A reminder of my desire left unfulfilled on our last day. Dark and beautiful. The pain of my surrender is beautiful in the petals.
It is morning, two or three days after my trip. I reach for the blue stones. My pretty little necklace that someone will admire today. My fingers touch the stones, and my hips open gently into the softest of surrenders that will guide me through my day. I think of Anastasia fleeing, and how I stay. Well, she is a girl who doesn’t really understand her desires yet and shouts no as she flees from herself and her lover. I am a woman, and I whisper, “Yes, please, Sir. Thank you, Sir,” as I learn to stay.
A pioneer in fertility advocacy, PAMELA MADSEN is the Founder and first Executive Director of The American Fertility Association. She is a fearless advocate for women’s health and integrated sexuality who leverages her raw honesty and well-informed wit to help strip the stigma from infertility, female desire, and body image.
Pamela is a veteran speaker, educator, and renowned blogger for Psychology Today, The Fertility Advocate, and Care2. She is the author of Shameless: How I Ditched the Diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure … and Somehow Got Home in Time to Cook Dinner (Rodale, January 2011).
Pamela has appeared on 60 Minutes, Oprah, CNN, AARP Primetime Radio, The Dr. Laura Berman Show, The Jane Pratt Show, and Playboy Radio.
To learn more about Pamela’s Shameless Community, coaching, retreats, blogs, and her book, please visit www.beingshameless.com.