Reflections on a Bondage Session

by kimmie holland

Master is at the kitchen sink making himself a pair of matching ham sandwiches with the fixings I rushed out to buy after work, along with the Perrier water and strawberries, also as per his orders. I’m kneeling on the tile floor, in a pair of black see-through panties, a bra, and black fishnet stockings. I’m wearing the candy-red high heel pumps he had me buy the week before. Nothing else.

It's a Thursday night.

My wrists are bound tightly behind my back with a pair of black silk stockings, a leather harness is fitted around my head which holds in place a large black plastic ball gag. My knees are aching and I lean forward to take a little of the pressure off, resting my forehead on the cool tile. From this unique perspective, I notice a small piece of dried-up lettuce on the floor from last week. I really need to give this kitchen a thorough cleaning tomorrow.

I close my eyes.

“No moving,” Master says, around a mouthful of ham and 16-grain bread.

I open my eyes again and watch with a simpleton's wonder the little puddle of saliva forming on the floor three inches from my nose. When you have a gag in your mouth for as long as I have now, you begin to drool in a rather humiliating fashion. Master walks passed me, sandwich in hand, the sound of his footsteps leaving the kitchen, traveling elsewhere through the apartment. Bedroom, bathroom, I hear him opening and closing drawers and closets. He’s making himself at home, in my home, while I kneel bound and gagged on the floor. Maybe he's stealing stuff; maybe he's going to ransack the place while I'm bound and gagged here on the floor. Why not​? It could happen. This is only the second time I've ever met him.

By any measure of common sense, even of self-survival, what I'm doing is reckless, stupid, and begging for the kind of disaster that has people shaking their heads and concluding that anyone so reckless, stupid, and looking for trouble deserved what was coming to them.

I understand their reasoning. I even agree with them. But I would maintain that they're looking at the situation all wrong.

Just the opposite. There seems something entirely ‘right’ about all this, something that I can’t even explain. That's in large part because explanations are always utilitarian, rational, and based on principles of acquisition, self-justification, and the universally agreed upon value of survival.

What I'm doing here has nothing to do with any of these sensible daytime pursuits. What I'm doing is gambling everything (yes, even my life) for a moment of ecstasy—the ecstasy of losing everything for nothing.

Nothing, that is, but the thrill of absolute surrender.

It’s sexual, to be sure, but not just physically; in fact, one would be hard-pressed to find any signs of physical arousal in my current state. I remember how some twenty minutes before, Master took the stocking I handed him, wrapped one end around each of his fists, and pulled it taut, just as a killer does in the movies when he’s about to strangle the unsuspecting heroine. And yet, even with this vague misgiving, I obediently turned and faced the wall, knelt on the floor as he ordered, crossed my wrists behind my back, and waited hopefully that I hadn’t guessed wrong to trust him. Because there was a time, brief thought it might have been, right at the beginning of this session, when I gave a good deal of consideration to my safety. But we're way beyond that point now.

It’s a kind of oceanic state that I’m in during these sessions; I give up all boundaries, opinions, ego, initiative, choice, and desires. I feel the contented sense of belonging that I imagine a dog must feel, following so closely its master’s every cue, spoken and unspoken, that there is never a moment’s indecision, never a gap in which you must make a choice, in which you must decide what to do next. These decisions have already been made for you. You only have to follow them unthinkingly, as if your body were a puppet dancing in a show where you, too, are part of the audience. You are being directed from above. You are part of something larger than yourself, a will stronger, more resolute and decisive than your own. You aren't responsible for what you do, no matter how depraved or disgusting. This is the deeper, more satisfying significance of bondage; the ropes and chains, the gags and blindfolds are only the outward symbols of a paradoxical liberation.

It’s a relief before its an ecstasy to surrender.

I hear cabinets and drawers being pulled open. Closets yanked open and closed. I wonder, is Master really looking for something or is he just making a point? Is this part of the role-play, or is he going through my wallet for cash and credit cards? Is he casing the joint for a future home invasion? I'm a private person but the message is clear: I have no secrets from Master. From the contents of my desk to the dark velvet beyond the tight pink modesty of my asshole, there is nothing he isn't entitled to open. He has free access to everything. I was going to write that he every much a right to my body as I do, but that's plainly wrong as he so often shows me. He has more of a right to my body than I do. For he has the right to deny me the pleasure of my own body, and the authority to forbid me from avoiding the pain and humiliation of whatever punishment he sees fit to administer. He has the right to lock my hands and feet away so that I can't use them. He can take away my sight, my power of speech, the pleasure of my genitals. He has the right, theoretically at least, to take my life.

Even though he can’t see me from the other room, I try my best not to move a muscle, to meet his impossible standards of obedience that are, in fact, devised to insure that I’ll fail. It’s precisely this irrational cruelty that I find so sexually stimulating. I will be given an order. I will fail. I will be disciplined. It is, in microcosm, the old religious formula first articulated in Eden. And it is, in slightly altered form, the algebra of human life. We are born under the order to survive indefinitely. We ultimately fail through age and disease. We die. In each session, one might say that I experience, from birth to death, the drama of an entire life.

It is the cruelty of life, of the tragic and doomed conditions of our life, of our planet's life, of all life, that I am eroticizing in this theater of the psyche. The universe is a cruel taskmaster. No—it is not merely cruel. Cruelty is a human value. The cosmos is cold. It is the utter lack of warmth, of caring or concern, that perversely turns me on.

Some masochists enjoy the stimulation of physical pain; for me, the pain I crave is psychological. It is the pain one experiences when one's human warmth fails to melt the cold implacability of the cosmos, as personified by an inhuman god.

--or a Master who cares and empathizes not at all when you suffer. All the better if he shows no emotion whatsoever. The perfect Master is enigmatic, like death, like eternity.

The clear distinction between mental and physical masochism is perhaps laid out side-by-side nowhere more clearly in a text than in Sacher-Masoch’s classic Venus in Furs. It wasn’t, I noted, while reading this book, the scenes where Severin was being whipped that aroused me; in fact I found them rather boring. Instead it was the dialog, as formulaic and no less powerful as a ritual incantation, in which his Mistress coldly demeans him, mercilessly flaunts her affair with another man in his face. And, indeed, this is what Severin wants most, to be humiliated, not only physically, but, in particular, mentally. He wants his face rubbed in it. He wants to be dehumanized. He wants to be ground into the dirt, returned to the clay that he is.

Perhaps mother was cold and distant and these traits, overlaid upon the universe and what I feel I can ultimately expect from it (nothing), became associated in some perverse way with “love.” Perhaps the chronic craving after this always unattainable love-object is the genesis of the sexual desire I feel when it is symbolically re-enacted during these sessions: helpless, unable to move or to speak, seemingly forgotten, the footsteps of some all-powerful parent in another room. Would Master simply open the door and leave and never come back? Was he returning to the kitchen, after all? I let out a small whimper of appreciation when he helps me unsteadily to my feet.

He has not gone. He has answered my unspoken wish—unspoken because I am gagged, and gagged because I am not entitled to wishes. He has answered the prayer he let me recite to the tops of his shoes, silently, of course, in my head, where all prayers begin and end.

Punish me. Humiliate me. Hurt me.

I am yours.

Annihilate me.

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