Metamorphosis

It feels as though the dominant part of my personality is just coming out of a period of hibernation which has lasted for over ten years. Actually, when I think about it some more I would say that a better description would be a process of metamorphosis. It's like emerging from a chrysalis to discover that I've changed, and so has the environment I'm emerging into.

Over a decade ago I decided to withdraw from my involvement in BDSM, the catalyst for this being the birth of my son. At that time Operation Spanner was in full swing arresting and later imprisoning gay men for sadomasochistic activities. There was a witch-hunt in progress hunting for paedophiles, but since no-once seemed too sure how to identify a paedophile anyone with a penis was a suspect. Social workers were smashing up families in the name of child protection and seeing abuse round every corner. (I've since had several social workers as clients, and they are lovely people, but in those days they felt as welcome in your home as a dose of clostridium difficile.)

It didn't seem a good time to be identified as a "sadist", so I withdrew and focussed on other things. At the time I was the owner of a computer business - an introverted technical whizz-kid who programmed computers for a living. In the intervening years I've changed myself radically - into a therapist who can be as introverted or extraverted as he wants to be. I talk to a much wider range of people, am no longer as intimidated by women as I used to be, and I've discovered that although you can learn a lot from reading a computer manual, it doesn't teach much about life!

The changes that have taken place in the world of Domination and submission are no less dramatic. For one thing the language has changed. Back in those days players were either "sadists" or "masochists" and some of the people I knew liked to call themselves "perves", or "kinky".

These days we have Doms and subs - I was never very keen on calling myself a sadist, but Dom sounds much nicer. I can almost imagine being introduced to someone's grandmother…

"Is that your new man, dear?"

"Yes, gran, he's a Dom"

"Well I always knew you'd find yourself an aristocrat dear, is he from Portugal?"

"No, he's the sort of Dom who spanks me"

"Well, these people have their little foibles, dear. I'm sure it won't do you any harm. Does he own a castle?" …

In fact the whole image of BDSM seems to be much more wholesome these days, and as I browse the internet a real feeling of community emerges. There is a wealth of information and advice, hundreds or thousands of people are writing about their experiences, diversity is celebrated and all tastes and preferences seem to be accepted. I don't want to pretend that everything is perfect, as clearly some people are still having bad experiences, but the overwhelming impression is positive. I also don’t want to give the impression that there weren't some really excellent, friendly people around before, as I did eventually meet some of them, but accessing that community was so much more difficult without the internet to facilitate it.

Often the only source of information was some unappealing magazine bought wrapped in brown paper from a seedy back-street shop. Even this limited source of information was better than none, because it helped me to realise that I wasn't the only person in the world fascinated by spanking. However the means of accessing that information did little to diminish the shame I felt.

It was also quite hard to know what to believe, and how to separate fact from fantasy. For a long time I found it difficult to accept that female submissives actually existed, and thought that all the letters claiming to be from women were actually written as fantasies by men. The number of 21-year-old girls living at home and still getting bare-bottom spankings from their fathers seemed to be beyond the bounds of statistical probability! Some of these letters definitely were fantasies, as I eventually met one of the men who had composed quite a few of them. It was only when I met a real-life submissive - the lovely Paula Meadows who was the resident artist of the Janus and Februs magazines, that I finally became convinced that submissive women really existed.

My Dom is now coming out of his chrysalis, helped by this blog and the encouragement it has brought from several people. It's too early to predict what sort of creature he'll turn out to be, but I have to say that I'm proud of him. He's exercised a lot of restraint, delayed a lot of gratification, and has behaved more like an aristocrat than a "perve". I think he deserves the title.