“You’re so fun at parties because you always have the best stories,” Austin joked. “Tell them what you told me.”
Austin and I had been friends since high school, and I was standing among a group of his friends at a party back home over Thanksgiving break. He was asking me to share the story of what happened during sex with my summer fling. I tend to be pretty open about sex, so I didn’t mind talking about my experiences, though this one elicited a bit of shame.
“Well,” I started, blushing, “you have to understand he was a teenager and loved the fact that I was a few years older than him. I’d never been with a younger guy.” Austin was already giggling. “Anyway, there was one night where I was going down on him, and he was really enjoying it, and I guess the sensations just made him feel really … submissive,” I said, “and he started moaning and calling me ‘Mommy.’” Laughter erupted from the group. Jaws dropped. Everyone had a good chuckle about the boy who got off on likening me to his mother. I laughed too. I didn’t say that I had kind of liked it.
My first experience with a submissive guy was years earlier. He was only my third sexual partner, and a lot of the words he used and desires he described were completely foreign to me. I had to do a deep scrub of my Google history after our text conversations. I learned about knots and degradation and orgasm denial, which was quite a leap for a girl whose first kiss had only been a few months prior. When I told my friends about it, they were shocked and asked why I was still talking to someone like this. I guess I didn’t really know, but I was curious, and who wouldn’t be into the idea of someone whose greatest desire was to pleasure his partner? At the time, however, I didn’t quite possess the sexual confidence to effectively dominate a man, and that relationship fizzled out relatively quickly. Still, the mental image of the Snapchat he’d sent me of his own cum dripping from his lips was enough for me to leave the door open to dating a submissive-type in the future.
Flash forward a few years, and I found myself responding “good boy” to a 19-year-old who calls me Mommy when he touches himself. I’d come into my own a bit, and now know a lot about sex. So when I stumbled on a Bumble profile of an exceedingly hot man who wrote “bonus points if you’re into Female Led Relationships,” I bit. I dropped him a line and before I knew it, he told me that he owned a chastity cage. Wearing it would prevent him from achieving an erection, even when everything in his body was screaming for one. And the longer that went on, the hornier he would get, and all that frustration would be channeled toward pleasing me. My interest was piqued, to say the least. When we took the conversation to text, I got my first glimpse: a video of a man painstakingly maneuvering his sizable penis into a minuscule metal contraption and sealing it with a padlock, all because I said so. I could get used to this.
Things escalated from there. He mailed me the key to the cage (while keeping a spare for emergencies, like doctor visits or TSA screenings) so that it really felt like I owned him. I could tell just how much he enjoyed feeling under my control, and that got me off. I was faking my way through the whole bossing-him-around thing as best I could, since it’s not really in my nature, but whatever I was doing was working. He went from masturbating every day to not touching himself for three months. He was settling into his role, and I was getting more comfortable in mine.
That said, I’m still not completely sold on this kind of dynamic. I know that a lot of people would be turned off by it from the start, and I do not fall into that camp, but I still don’t know if I can be in charge 100 percent of the time. I also enjoy taking instruction and being on the receiving end of restraints and degrading comments, even more so than I like doling it out. The appeal of this type of dynamic, for me, is mainly in the power exchange; I am a firm believer in Oscar Wilde’s maxim, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” While I do enjoy both sides of the power spectrum, in truth, I am more of a submissive-leaning switch. With a different partner, it’s not uncommon to find me on my knees, shamelessly begging for what I want. I’ll happily bear the title of “whore” when the situation feels right. But when I’m in the bedroom with one of these men, I’m the HBIC and my word is law. Take it from me, the feeling of control is a stronger aphrodisiac than the most potent Four Loko. So if your partner’s up for it, go ahead and lock him up. You might be surprised.
Sweet Tease is a student at Cornell University. Comments can be sent to [email protected]. Sex on Thursday runs every Thursday throughout the summer.