Porn for each other

That summer of anal love was also our most intense time of porn-watching. In EXPLORATIONS I mention the Eastern European spanking videos, but they were just the tip of the iceberg. If it had "anal" in the title, we watched it. If it had "school" in the title, we watched it. Among other things, we decided we would identify a canon of porn (being good lit majors) and watch all of it. I don't know how much older porn you've watched, reader, but it's really pretty remarkable how much porn has changed over the years. Boogie Nights only covers the broadest aspect of this change. The Mitchell Brothers stuff retains some of its hotness, to be sure, but the attempts to make things like The Devil in Miss Jones and Behind the Green Door profound are really kind of embarrassing in the modern context. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Summer of mythic anal love

Charles kicked his own roommate out, more or less (guys deal with that more sanely than girls, I think [there's no way I could have done it to my roommate], but despite the transaction being relatively businesslike I have to admit to feeling rather stimulated by the urgency with which my betrothed lord went about making sure I would be in his bed every night, to the point of really being a bit unfeeling for the displaced roommate--yet another paradox of hotness, I guess, for he clearly felt it, too: when the door closed behind the roommate and the roommate's stuff, Charles turned me around, my face to the door, lifted my skirt, lowered my panties, and entered me, hard, so that I cried out in a way that the roommate must have recognized), and I moved in with him. 

I ended up as a summer associate in New York, which put a small crimp in what we later called our summer of anal love, but, because the firms want you to give them your heart and soul after you graduate, it wasn't too much of a burden in the end (heh).  . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

A BDSM couple hors de combat

So, as I intimate in Emily's First Caning, we had a very frustrating period for several weeks after that. Even when our respective apartment-mates were out (the things we wanted to do to one another were loud enough that shutting the door just wasn't sufficient), the moment Charles got hard he opened up the sore on his cock, and while for the first few days, before we started worrying about infection, he didn't object to me going down on him, the pleasure being so much greater than the pain, which I did more than once a day over the course of three or four days, sometimes in very questionable locations (the library twice, I think), which was gratifying for both of us in its way (I was in a constant state of frustration because of my own bladder infection), we finally decided that we had to refrain from anything that would even arouse us.

So we were like an old married couple through, I think, all of March and most of April. I nearly managed to get caught up on my reading, at least. And Charles had time to buy me an engagement ring. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Betrothal coda

It was about then (it couldn't have been later than 10pm, I think, since our "night of nights" had started around 5, before the sun had even gone down if I recall correctly) that we fell asleep. Before I drifted off, I enjoined on Charles something that I haven't yet found a way to get into EXPLORATIONS--that he fuck me awake, if he woke up first. Even if I woke up first myself, my plan was to lie there pretending to be asleep until he did wake up and ravish me out of sleep. That probably would have been much better, but Charles has always been an early riser.

I wanted, you see, to feel that magical, pure constellation of desire behind so many ravishment fantasies: "He loves me, wants me, so much that he doesn't care whether I'm awake or not, ready or not, aroused or not." It was my birthday, too, so it felt like it would be just the right way to wake up with my new master. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Post-coital colloquy: of sexual expression

"OK," replied Charles. "We fucking did what?"

I grew serious, and fixed his gaze with mine. "How many girls have you fucked before me?"

He looked steadily back. "Three."

"Was it ever like that?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because. . . I couldn't. . ." He didn't want to continue, because he clearly didn't know how to put it right. He hadn't thought as philosophically about the matter as I had, to that point at least. I think it's easier for a sub, sometimes; we don't instinctively pull back from our own cravings quite as quickly as dominants do. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

The first afterglow: of wedding-nights and BDSM

If the spanking and doggy-style sex were intense, the suite of oral-anal-A2M was shattering; I really felt like I was left in pieces, lying there in my first real bondage (of course I'd played around by myself with towels and things, but it's not, obviously, a solo activity) with Charles' come all over my face, and this look in his eyes begging for forgiveness for having wanted to do to me what I'd demanded he do to me. He released my hands, and wiped my face.

I, for my part, was laughing, nearly hysterically. My laughter eventually infected Charles, and we were both helpless with it for a while.

"I. . . kind of know," he choked out, "why we're laughing" (gasp) "but I'm not sure?"

The laughter finally subsided. He lay down next to me on the bed, and I, as I always have and I hope always will, clung to him, and buried my face in his tastefully-hirsute chest (not too much, not too little). (He does have back-hair, unfortunately, but a girl can't have everything.) I kissed it (his chest, that is), for a while, just because I loved him, and I knew it. He waited patiently for an answer.  . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

The Waldorf, anally

We walked from Grand Central to the Waldorf. I felt like I wasn't walking but rather floating on a cloud of arousal, even though we couldn't really hold hands very much because we were both pulling roller suitcases full of our secrets. (As is mythologized especially in Emily's Dark Gift and Emily's Little Trainer notable contents of mine included my butt-plug and a stash of porn not because I felt like I was going to need to play with myself but because I had in mind precisely the scene you find in Emily's Dark Gift, where I get what I deserve for bringing porn on my "honeymoon." Also, of course, a lot of lingerie, in particular my absolute favorite white lace thong, featured in EXPLORATIONS: Books 1-5, and the blue pajamas featured in Emily's First Caning.)

It was the first time I'd ever checked into a hotel with a man, and that was fun all by itself, if you enjoy full body blushes. It was at that moment, as I was checking in, with Charles a discreet distance behind me in the lobby, that I heard one of my Mom's best friends say "Charles Smith! What the heck are you doing here?" I left the second key at the desk, with instructions to deliver it to Charles, and fled to the room. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Lascivious Train to NYC

The next day I didn't chicken out, but instead told him what time he needed to pick me up to go to the train station. I told him to bring anything he might be interested in playing with, and hinted that I would be doing the same.

Friday night, the first Friday in March (the night before my birthday, actually), was going to be the night. If I had ever thought of going the corporate route, I probably would have lost millions of dollars over my lifetime by my utter failure to get any reading done that week. Lord forgive me, I was thinking of it as a wedding night; I had intimated as much to Charles on the phone, saying I think (I had stiffened my resolve with several glasses of wine before making this call), "One last question, Mr. Smith: are you prepared to deflower a virgin anus?"; "Oh. . . um. . . sweet Jesus, Emily, are you trying to give me a heart attack?" was his reply, which did indeed sound weak, as if he were having a cardiac episode, at which I broke down into giggles, unfortunately. At any rate, I was not going to lose the chance to indulge my thing for white lace thongs. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Planning for submission, at last

The last things we said to one another before the lingering kiss (I did not catch his cold; in his defense he tried to stop me from kissing him and I finally had to take him by surprise, since among his cheekbones, the beer, and him telling me he was a top he was not escaping unkissed) and the walking away with a chest full of hope and joy were:

CHARLES: So. . . what do we do now.

EMILY: We should, um, plan something. (Beat) I'll call you tomorrow.

CHARLES: You mean. . . really plan. . . something. . . (Not a question)

Emily nods, and kisses him (lingeringly), and walks away. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Chaste first date, with unchaste implications

Choosing lingerie for that date was not easy, not only because I got my period that morning but also because I had three countervailing desires for what would happen that night:

1. Charles would tell me, sweetly, that he thought we needed to go slow, since we were old friends, and we didn't want to jeopardize that. In which case, lace thong=disappointment, though the frustration of that disappointment and the thought of what it would cause me to do when I returned chastely home had an attraction all its own that nevertheless wasn't enough to outweigh the need for comfort, in my delicate menstrual condition.
2. Charles would, conventionally, rip my clothes off at some point. In which case, lace thong=disappointment for both of us, but perhaps in a good way, if I could manage the courage to tell him that my panties were staying firmly on, despite really wanting them off. I'm not invariably horny during my period, but for the right reasons I can definitely get that way, and that afternoon, thinking about the date, I was getting that way. (Nor do I object to period sex, actually, but first-date period sex? Nope.)
3. Charles would do something dominant. It didn't go any further than that, because I didn't want to set myself up for disappointment, and the very beginning of a fantasy in which he would find some pretext to tell me I needed a spanking, or told me that we were going to have anal sex, so I needed to find a drugstore and buy some lube, made me so unbearably, even uncomfortably (in my delicate condition) aroused that I couldn't take it and had to distract myself with some law school reading (that is, the least hot thing imaginable). . . .
   For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Charles captures my hand

So, yes, at a bar in New Haven, in Fall 2000. I was with law school friends--at that point I was about as big a BWOC as I'd ever been or would ever be, and the fall of 2L is a time when the few Friday nights you can go out drinking with your 2L friends are like hours snatched from the jaws of death. I'm not a woman who has ever acted particularly wild at bars, but that fall was an exception because of the tension that gripped all of us as we headed towards the crucial 2L make or break summer-associateship. I may have had too much to drink that night.

Charles was with classics friends. Now classicists have been known to drink a lot, and you will often hear them say that classicists can drink with the best of them. Indeed it's clear that when they're drunk they lose the slightest suspicion (which, sober, they have) that no one other than a classicist could ever be interested in what they have to say about Vergil. When drunk, therefore, they are positive that shouting offensive things about Camilla in the eleventh book of the Aeneid makes them some sort of Dionysiac demi-gods. Charles had had too much to drink, as well, and was shouting said things.

Here was I, barely aware (if that) that he had decided to return to school for an MA; even less aware that he had decided to do that in New Haven (he confesses, the darling, that knowing I would be there provided a strong nudge for his choice of grad school, as he thought about me, and Pisistratus butt-fucking the daughter of Megacles). . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Warm-up: talking anal at the country club

I ran into Charles Smith, recently moved to New Haven, at a bar. The last time we had seen each other was at the country club at home two summers before, when he had just graduated from college and I was about to head to law school after a year off from formal education, having finished college myself the previous spring. Neither of us can remember exactly when this encounter was, but we both remember it vividly, because of the subject matter and a single look that passed between us.

For reasons that are now impossible fully to reconstruct, we started talking about the sexiest passages of classical literature we had read, and began trying to top one another, as it were. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Epoch 3: law school in the post-Histoire d'O period: prelude to Charles

In my senior year of college (Spring 1998), in New Haven, Connecticut, on the recommendation of a grad student in comparative literature who I suspect had a crush on me, I found Story of O on the shelves of a bookstore, and my life changed.

Fantasy-Emily would put it like this:

About a month before I married Charles Smith, I noticed that Amazon.com had recommended a book I'd never heard of, with a strange, bare cover, called Story of O. I ordered it, with a click, and my life changed.

I never slept with the comp lit grad student, but I did, probably as a way of trying to deny my longing for Roissy, lose my virginity to a forgettable law student, in the most vanilla way possible, and then proceed to "date" (really, just sleep with) four more guys (grad students, all of them, in one field or another--English, English, Philosophy, French, I think), all of them nice guys and I think objectively worth sleeping with if you were 21-25 and interested in sleeping with people.  . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Epoch 2: high-school and college as an anal-submissive

Really not very hot. Very few boyfriends; no penetration until late senior year. Lots of reading, lots of self-abuse.

The narrative mechanics of fantasy-Emily's life in EXPLORATIONS shorten this period to a few months: my conceit there is that fantasy-Emily was an anal-submissive powder-keg that finally went off a few months before her wedding to fantasy-Charles; that she'd had the fantasies, and masturbated to them, but that she had never come across erotic material (ha!) until she caught her first glimpse of a lace thong in a Victoria's Secret window. That thong produced, for fantasy-Emily, I elaborate in Emily's First Submission, a sort of pornographic cascade effect. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

My real first spanking

This, as I said in my last post, is from epoch 1. My poor mother, divorced and trying to start a career as a lawyer, had very little choice when it came to childcare. There was a family living next door with several adolescent children, and they became, nearly by default, my babysitters.

Truthfully, I've completely forgotten their names, but they all (in my memory, this includes both parents) had flaming red hair, of (I'm not making this up) the Heat Miser shade. In general, since they were older, I looked up to them, though to the extent that I can now remember, they didn't deserve to be looked up to in any way. Among other things, they were apparently obsessed with rug-hooking, and I look back with disbelief on how dedicated I was, for months and months, to learning to rug-hook.

They must themselves have been disciplined with their father's belt. I can't think of another reason why, on some minor pretext (not coming when I was called, maybe?) the older girl (let's call her "Alice") told me to lie on my bed on my stomach, because I was going to get a whipping. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

The epochs of my erotic life

In case it's helpful.

1. Before The Pearl
2. From The Pearl to Story of O
3. From Story of O to Charles
4. Charles

My last post concerns events early in epoch 2--namely, the finding of Aphrodizzia. The post before that concerns the transition from epoch 1 to epoch 2. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Before Histoire d'O

Story of O was my downfall. Or my uplift, if you prefer.

Thus I write at the start of Emily's Submissive Wedding Night. It was the same for the realer me: reading it for the first time among the shelves of a perfectly proper academic bookstore in New Haven, though it corresponded in its outlines with the terrible, slender books with the awful covers and the young schoolgirls (aged younger than I could age them) having their bottoms fucked--indeed though it was itself a slender book (with, thank God, a plain white cover)--I knew there was hope.

That hope didn't materialize into flesh (rigid flesh [heh]) for three years, however, and in that time I began really to explore. That was the time of the first butt-plug, and the first sexy lingerie, bought just for me to, er, explore in. It was also the only time in my life that I was promiscuous, as will come to light as this "real" story continues: in addition to my solo explorations, I also lost my virginity and slept with a total of five guys (including that first one), really I think in an effort to feel like I was living the way I thought I should be living and not because I was looking for anyone to play BDSM with, since I still thought of that as something completely private, even if with the help of Réage I now thought there was hope for me in that area. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

A real beginning

In Emily's Submissive Wedding Night I tell fantasy-Emily's version of the story of her awakening by porn to the importance of her anal-submissive orientation. I give a few hints there as to the reality behind it, but I want to tell that story at a bit more length, here, for myself and for anyone else who wants to read it. Who knows? This material may make it into a future book of EXPLORATIONS, so working it out here could prove useful.

My first memory of erotica was on board a ferry from Maine to Nova Scotia with my family, when I was thirteen. The tiny gift-shop on the ferry had a rack of books, and on the rack was a copy of one of the few editions of The Pearl that have come out over the years (unlike the one I later, finally, bought, only in a fit of guilt to throw away and instantly to regret having thrown away, this edition edited all the stories together into continuous narratives, rather than preserving the original shape of the journal numbers).  . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

The "Real" Story

(Note the italics; see this post for details about what they mean.)

I think I want to use this blog to do in a more thorough way what I also do in the books of EXPLORATIONS: that is, to provide the "real" version of the events allegorized, avatarized, and elaborated as hotly as I could elaborate them in EXPLORATIONS. The "truth" of these matters has a hotness all its own, I find, when I return there, to my first years with Charles, in my mind these ten or so years later.  . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Charles

Who is Charles?

Charles is my husband, Charles Smith. He's a high-school Latin teacher who's a little younger than I am. On a September night in 2000, he made me the happiest submissive girl in the world, when I told him I needed someone who was prepared to top me--seriously top me--and he said he thought he could be that person. . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

Did Charles command me to make this blog?

No.

Yes. And I told him I didn't want to, and he told me to get my paddle and bring it to him, and then to lay myself down over the arm of the sofa, and lower my panties. . .


So, reader, this is your introduction to EXPLORATIONS: here in the italics, I'm the "real" me; the girl in the Roman type is my avatar, also named Emily Tilton, but aged only 18 (I'm 35, at this point; I was 25 at the time of the events allegorized in EXPLORATIONS). Fantasy Emily is just as nubile as that magic age (18) implies, and just as submissive as I, real Emily, am--maybe more.

It all begins in Emily's Submissive Wedding Night, also to be found in Explorations: Books 1-5

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion!

EXPLORATIONS 101

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Who "I" am

I, Emily Tilton, if I exist, am a human rights lawyer who resides in Greenwich, CT. It's more likely that I'm actually someone else, who wishes she were as free to play out her real fantasies as Emily Tilton is.

EXPLORATIONS is a narrative version of my nearly lifelong quest to reconcile my submissive erotic orientation with my ethics. In this blog, as in the books of EXPLORATIONS themselves, when I'm writing in italics, I'm writing as the "real" me--35 year old lawyer Emily.

Over the many years since I became aware of my sometimes unbearable craving for ravishment, spanking, and above all anal domination, I have tried to come to terms with that craving in more ways than I can count. The first of the ways was by reading, voraciously, every piece of good BDSM erotica (and of course also a ton of bad BDSM erotica) I could find.

Eventually, I read "Story of O." As is reflected throughout EXPLORATIONS, it changed my life, though the change has been gradual, and continues to this day. The idea that other women might share the lusts I have by turns been ashamed of and defiantly proud of, that a woman like the real Pauline Réage might write so beautifully of those lusts, and work them out so thoroughly and even pitilessly on a character, put Réage's famous pencil in my right hand. Or, to put it in the terms of EXPLORATIONS, it put my left hand on the keyboard of my laptop and my right hand in my lap, if you know what I mean. I started to write spanking stories.

But because I'm interested in helping myself and others understand how BDSM can be lived within a mostly vanilla existence, the way most of us have to live it, EXPLORATIONS has a unique element that I hope will set it apart and make it useful: I have created a fantasy-version of myself (keeping to the tropes of the genre I know so well, fantasy-Emily is an eighteen-year-old virginal bride with a self-abuse problem), whose fantasies and "realities" are the central subject of the stories of EXPLORATIONS, while keeping my authorial, real voice in the margins, explaining and analyzing, and revealing from time to time the much more mundane, real version of the things I have transformed in the story of my fantasy-self. This doubling of the "I" in the first-person narrative of EXPLORATIONS might make the series worth exploring all on its own.