(The White) Rabbit Redux

I call him The White Rabbit because he was the one I followed into kink. I’ve never met him and I probably never will. I’m not even sure what he looks like.

We met on a vanilla dating website. I had a fairly strange initial phone conversation with him. He wanted a TPE 24/7 master-slave arrangement with no ‘outs’ for him. His fantasies involved some fairly extreme, risky stuff: forced (bareback) bi; forced breeding; branding; drowning and breath play; total castration; etc. In retrospect, it’s clear that he was describing pure fantasy most of the time. Like his initial fixation on having his genitals removed, or agreeing ahead of time to be ‘put down’ (or ‘sent to Thailand’…what?)  if I tired of him.

I always had a feeling of unease or imbalance while talking to him. I’d think I had him pegged, then he’d come out with something so incredible that I’d be thrown off again.

He told me he was a millionaire with homes in Manhattan Beach, Greenwich and New York. He was a day trader who’d recently made about four times what I make in a single year on some trade involving AIG. He’d patented something that was currently on display in the Smithsonian.

He told me he was a writer, that he had a book being published this year. He had another in the works. He was planning a third one about kink and femdom and was hoping that I’d serve as a muse for the project. Since I’m not ‘out’ about my kinkiness (and have no plans to be), I wasn’t too keen on being the focus of this book. Especially after I found out he wanted to call it The Gilded Cage: The Modern Geisha.

Yeah.

He said that his father had been a loan shark and that his uncle had been a founding member of the Hell’s Angels. The latter once decapitated a state trooper.

The most insane claim was that he had no fear. The White Rabbit was never afraid. That’s why he wanted a really severe mistress, someone who could inspire some feeling, some reaction in him. Pure Freudian blah-blah-blah. Brutal father + disconnected little boy = terribly abusive childhood. I would help him play out this little psycho-drama correctly by somehow instilling the fear in him that his big, mean, underworld daddy couldn’t.

Right.

Rabbit would call me randomly. Sometimes it was every weekday for two or three weeks in a row. Then silence for a long time. Then a phone call out of the blue. I was pretty sure he was married or otherwise involved, and told him so, but he denied it smoothly every time. I still don’t believe it. What good-looking millionaire (assuming anything he told me was true) manages to get to his late forties without having been ensnared at least once by a wily, bronzed and buffed bunny?

Maybe it’s just my native cynicism at work, but the most believable things about Rabbit were actually the worst things.

The White Rabbit was a hard-core Republican. (He actually voted for McCain, which reveals the true depths of his depravity). He was racist and well-versed in that pseudo-scientific hogwash that eugenicists spew. He had no fucking clue about female sexuality; even his grasp of a lady’s southerly anatomy was shaky. He admitted that he was very selfish in bed. He had lost his ability to climax from sex and was no longer interested in vanilla sex. He was a misanthrope who worked long hours to avoid human contact (“alone but not lonely”, he claimed). He was self-centered–other people didn’t matter unless they represented some value for him (always the businessman). He had an Asian fetish.

Ugh.

It should not come as a surprise that the Rabbit’s ad on the dating site mentioned that he was searching for “that elusive dream, the perfect woman.” For him, the perfect woman was a ravishing, sophisticated bitch who was materialistic, ruthless, hyper-sadistic, utterly amoral, and purely selfish (and a bit of a man-hater to boot)…the usual sort of character you come across in femdom porn. A Super Dominatrix, in other words.

Once he decided that I was that perfect woman (though it was clear that he was selectively ignoring the parts of my personality that didn’t fit the model, like a sense of humor, and, um, sanity), he insisted on a 24/7 arrangement, even marriage. All this without having met in person once.

He said he adored me (I’m not fond of this word, which gets thrown around in a BDSM context a lot. You adore an idol, a god, an idea, not a person). He said he loved me, but the way he said the word, ‘love’, was indescribably awkward, as if he had to force the word out. (And of course, you can’t love an idol, a god, an idea. You can love a person).

In retrospect, I’m surprised the experience didn’t turn me off kink for good.

Down the rabbit hole

Everyone has a ‘how-I-got-into-kink’ story and everyone describes it in exactly the same way (see title). Mine is maybe a little more random than the usual fare. I didn’t identify as kinky or dominant until recently. But I’ve always had a strong personality, more stereotypically ‘masculine’ than not. I don’t think I’m overbearing, but I don’t like to fuck around. Since I’m a woman, this is usually interpreted as me being mean or bitchy (rather than, say, confident or direct). I’ve been told that I can be intimidating. I hardly ever get asked out because men don’t realize that I signal interest by, you know, actually talking to them like a normal person rather than flirting. I even walk like I mean it–head up, staring straight-ahead, fast, fast, fast.

My sex life was pretty conventional. I had a healthy appetite, was somewhat adventurous but nothing too wild. First serious relationship was with a guy I now recognize had submissive tendencies. He wasn’t a doormat, but I knew I could get him to do almost anything I wanted. He was also a leg man. (Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like sub guys fetishize legs and feet rather than T&A)

Since then, I’ve dated a number of men. The sex was always dissatisfying. Never enough foreplay. Never enough oral. Something was always missing. I thought maybe it was the fact that these were all younger guys. So I found a thirty-something. A little better, but still kind of blah. I still thought it was a maturity/experience thing.

The White Rabbit was in his late forties. I met him on a vanilla dating site. He called one cool night while I was walking to a friend’s house. I remember he spoke very quietly, almost in a whisper, and I had to strain to hear him. A few minutes in, I had to ask him to repeat himself because I thought I’d heard him say something like, “slave contract.”

TWR: “I’m looking for a master. Someone I can devote the rest of my life to serving. Would you feel comfortable owning me?”

Me: “Ummmm….”

This guy wanted a hard-core, 24/7 total power exchange (TPE) all spelled out in a legally airtight document (a thing which, by the way, is pure fantasy). As a sign of his devotion and a sort of ‘seal’  to the contract, he’d have his cock and balls cut off and preserved in a little jar for me.

Me: “Ummmm…”

Still can’t understand why I didn’t just hang up on the guy. He was clearly off his rocker. I mean, just the way he kept saying, “cock and balls, in a jar” so gleefully. What the fuck? As a well-raised, ex-Catholic school girl I should’ve been traumatized, disgusted.

Instead, I played along.

When he asked whether I had any objections to the plan, I told him castration was a lame idea because then the slave would be missing a major area to torture. What if I wanted to tie a little noose around his scrotum and yank until it turned purple? What if I wanted to use his penis as a pincushion?

I got really elaborate. And graphic. He loved it. I got off the phone feeling oddly giddy. The conversation had pushed a little button in my brain. I know it’s  a cliche, but everything really did look different afterward. I hadn’t ever thought of myself as a sadist before. The idea was strange and exciting–a game-changer…certain things about myself started to make sense.

Later, I did what anyone would do in my situation. I googled “master+slave+contract” and got a ton of BDSM links. I was so new to all of this stuff (still am) that I hadn’t thought of that conversation as being about kink. I read for hours. Stuff on femdom and power exchange, bizarre-sounding acts, weird grammatical rules and elaborate protocol guides.

(A big mess, in other words. I’m still sorting it out.)

Last thing I did was to look for femdom porn. Even then I thought that BDSM porn wasn’t all that different from vanilla stuff–plastic girls in tacky clothes, bad acting, penis everywhere, money shot. There was just more equipment involved and the women yelled a lot (and still didn’t seem to be having much fun). Meh.

I did like it when someone was being hurt. I liked hearing the snap of leather on skin, the whimpering and grunting and screaming…sometimes even crying. I liked seeing the men kneeling in submission, writhing against their bonds, groveling, begging. Oh yeah.

A few months pass. I’ve acquired a few toys, a boy to play with, and some new experiences. Am I happy? Yes. Is the sex better? God yes. Would I ever go back? Hell no. If I ever do meet the Rabbit, I’ll be sure to thank him and not to pull that noose too hard.