My first spanking party

Sometimes I love where I live. I find two skirts in a renowned local charity shop. £2.99 each. I say a silent "hooray" for the patronizing woman in the vintage shop who wouldn't drop the price of a navy wool pencil skirt from £45 to £40 (honestly). To think I'd nearly spent £40 when I got two skirts for £5.98.

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I do not understand some people

I don't think I have the emotional resources for another lover but I want to have more sex. I already have a long-term partner in Virgil. And there is the exciting and preoccupying, as yet undefined, new connection with Jay. The idea of meaningless sex makes me nervous. More romantic entanglement would be exhausting: I'm barely coping with the new things I'm feeling. And I would still like some kink in my life.

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Insect kink

This housesit is giving me some peace at last. It's very familiar and comforting. It takes me back to how I lived before I met Virgil. I eat brown rice and vegetables. I sit in the garden. There's a lavender bush with bees bobbing around in it. Several spiders have built webs in the bush too. One has caught a bee and tied it up. I think about being tied up and how long it has been.

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Motivations and progress

I complain to my therapist, Deirdre, that Virgil is incompetent. He cannot tie up properly and he cannot beat to my satisfaction. He doesn't care about kink enough to be skillful. Virgil is a very amazing head on a body that he doesn't really live in. Dyspraxic is the word I use in private. It's unkind but therapy sessions are not a place to pull punches about people who aren't there. I think about how much better for me solo-therapy is than joint therapy.

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First date

I have a date with Oliver tonight. I haven't told anyone about it. When Virgil asked what I was doing I said only that I was busy. We have an honesty policy but I don't think a first date needs to be announced in advance of its happening. If it goes well (or very badly), I'll tell him: for now he can speculate.

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I think of kink and (separately) recall that Virgil is not perfect

Oliver the dom would 'love' to meet! He's on holiday for a few days but will contact me on his return. I'm about as pleased as a grouch can be at the prospect of a first date with someone first encountered on a contact site for perverts.

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Dom hunt

Keep working away on that wishlist, Harlot. Do a little more each day. I write an email:

"Hi Oliver, 

Confession: I didn't message you completely out of the blue last week. Your name came up recently in conversation with a good mutual friend. She reminisced fondly about you one night over dinner. I had expressing a hankering for kinky new friends and she told me that you were something of a master-beater and a sound person to boot. 

So, without any knowledge of your current situation, and with no more previous than a few long-ago messages on a social network for perverts, I'm going to risk an award for social gaucheness to ask whether you would care to meet for a drink to, well, sniff each other out a bit?

Do let me know.

Harlot"

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Sweet Valley High meets the Story of Oh My!

I like reading porn and erotic fiction and - guess what? - I've just read the first two books of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Why? Because I'd heard about their success is why. I was curious and thought they'd be worth a try. Reader: I will not be reading the third. It's a damn shame that once a thing gets talked up enough many more people will try it even though it is shit. While it's generally agreed that you cannot polish a turd, you could certainly sell one if enough people wrote about it. Here's why I think Fifty Shades of Grey is indifferent, boring writing, a waste of your time and money and - worse still - propagates some very bad ideas indeed.

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Sex homework: Scene 2

Encouraged by the success of the first of our sex homeworks, I jettison the timid sex-ed scenario and get writing. The new scene is more ambitious and kinkier. To my delight it is the one Virgil chooses.

I am blindfolded and wait for you in the living room. You don’t talk to me at all when you come in and throughout the scene you only address me curtly to tell me what to do and what not to do. I’d like you to be really strict and exacting about what positions I assume and how I hold them or move. Tell me exactly what I have to do and how to do it. You undress me roughly and handcuff my hands behind my back. Kneeling over the sofa with my face in the pillow, spank or beat me with an implement of your choice. Put a butt plug or the smaller black dildo inside me and move it around. Tease my clit with your fingers and/or a vibrator. Hurt me some more if you like. Tease me and withhold my orgasm, making me beg to be allowed to come. It is up to you whether you fuck me with your cock or a dildo. 

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History

I meet up with a very old friend and her daughter. I am apprehensive almost to the point of cancelling. Andrea and I were teenage best buddies but she's really hard work these days. She rarely comes to the city and swears she no longer feels safe. Andrea jokes relentlessly about how her family drive her mad and confound her. She just can't seem to say anything positive or pleasant. I want to say: Well if you really feel like you're such a martyr to everyone that's a problem. What I say is: Why don't you change what you do?

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Needing or deserving?

Some submissives are able to say that they deserve a beating. I envy them. It probably helps them get what they want. All I know is that, whatever my behaviour has been like (frequently lacking), I am often in need of a beating. Whether I deserve it or not I cannot judge. Although being spanked, flogged, caned and so on is one of my favourite things ever I'd much rather pretend not to enjoy it (at first).

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Doldrums

The last person I talk to is Amelia. Amelia is gentle and thoughtful, fragile looking but strong inside. Exploring kink in a most imaginative and personal way, she plays both queens and pony girls. We met in unusual circumstances in a pay-by-the-hour commercial dungeon in the centre of the city, introduced by the Dom, who was, and probably still is, an orchestrator of people. I was presented, naked and collared, to Amelia. She sat masked on a wooden 'throne'. I kissed her brown leather boots and called her Mistress. Then she got to witness the spectacle of the Dom, his enormous frame gleaming white in leather shorts, flogging me first on my knees and then tied to a ceiling beam, while The Four Seasons played in the background. I vaguely remember kneeling on a horse and going down on her while the Dom fucked me from behind. 

The Dom ejaculated and our time was up. Amelia and I were ejected onto the pavement. The Dom swept off on his motorbike and we stumbled onto the tube in rush hour together. We've stayed in touch ever since. Now we are sitting by the side of a wooden dancefloor in the west of the city, recovering from our beginner's class and watching more advanced couples dance Lindy Hop, Charleston and jive. Amelia's partner Thomas is among them. They are quite a new couple too and, in name, have an open relationship.

Like me with Virgil, Amelia met Thomas during a period of exploration and she still occasionally meets other people for BDSM play, "But although it's sexual it's never for actual sex," she says. "Penetrative sex? No... It would be too much."  I explain what Virgil wants from an open relationship. We agree that me and Virgil need to talk much more about what romance means. She also says that although Thomas doesn't seem to object to her occasional assignations, which she tells him about, he doesn't seem to want to talk about them. He just says "Oh," and changes the subject. She would like to be able to discuss them with him and worries slightly about this.

I feel like I've talked to everyone but Virgil this last week. But I don't feel much clearer than I did before. Instead I feel gloomy and doomed. I'm starting to try to imagine life without Virgil. It doesn't help that I have no work, another thing to be miserable about. I can't even get angry about anything this week. Where are the successful poly people? Probably too busy with their rampant sex lives. Everyone I've asked says either that they're doing it but not enjoying it, that they were doing it but had to stop as it was too difficult, or that they've split up for other reasons. It's a small survey sample but it doesn't fill me with confidence. 

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