Oh master, let me worship at your feet. Let me lick them and beg for your sexual favour and look up at you with adoring eyes and unquestioning obedience.

Or, more realistically, let me do the opposite. Let me call you a dickhead when we’re in the pub and you make a stupid joke. Let me eat all your Fruit Pastilles and tell you your iPhone is rubbish and bollock you when you make us miss the trailers at the cinema.

I’m a crap submissive. Or rather, I used to think I was a crap submissive back when I thought submissives had to be a certain way.

When I first got involved with the kink scene by attending fetish parties and spanking sessions, I found it quite hard to keep my mouth shut in the appropriate places. This isn’t because I didn’t want to be spanked – I bloody well did. But it’s not even because I was deliberately being a brat so that I’d achieve more spankings – telling a fifty-something dom guy that by voting Tory he’s contributing to the demise of the NHS is more likely to lead to a cold shoulder than a hot beating.

No, the reason I couldn’t keep my mouth shut is because I was – still am, and always fucking will be – a gobby twat.

It’s all about the challenge

I read a rather excellent blog about this the other day from a domme’s point of view. Not Just Bitchy explained how submissives who kick ass and take names are fucking hot. I like this point of view very much, because not only am I one of the aforementioned ass-kicking subs, but naturally most of the men I have submitted to have pretty similar attitudes. In short: they didn’t see the fun in controlling me if I was too easy to control.

Perhaps they were just being nice. There is, after all, something fairly unsexy about a girl who is willing to swallow your cock one minute then steal your chips the next. But I don’t think I could have any kind of long-term play relationship with someone who insisted on compliance (or even fake compliance) at all times.

Ultimately, submission for me is about sex: I do what you tell me to do because it makes me wet when you give me orders. I like being bossed around, punished and manipulated in bed because it makes me weak at the knees. But these things only really seem relevant in the bedroom. If you tried to order me to do something in the pub, I’d either slick my knickers and demand that you took me immediately home to fuck, or I’d laugh at your assumption that I’d abandon my pint just a couple of sips in.

Submissives are like boxes of chocolates

Some people – magical, rare people – have enough self-control that they can do the D/S thing all day every day (or something pretty close to it). Others don’t need to put any effort in, because their natural state is one of demure submissiveness. But the vast majority of us are incapable of doing that for longer than is necessary for us to have a twitching orgasm.

I like playing like this – pretending to be sweet and compliant and ever-so-slightly terrified of your massive cock, and what you’re going to do to me with it. I like acting as if my stroppy comments are genuinely unacceptable and warrant a spanking for misbehaviour.

But that’s all it is – play. Occasionally I get emails from guys saying they wish they could meet a girl like me or that they wish their girlfriend was this submissive. My immediate response to both of these things is to consider reporting myself to the Advertising Standards Agency. You have no idea – no idea – how much of a slovenly, disobedient, swearing cock I am. All you know is that I like some specific somethings, and when those specific, submissive somethings are good enough – they provoke the right hot feelings or desperate moans – then I’ll write about them on the internet.

Submission, for me, isn’t about being controlled and dominated – it’s about getting fucked. I’ll bend over for you, suck your dick, and squirm with pleasure when you call me a ‘good girl’, but at the end of the day we have to pack away the toys and get back to real life. And by ‘real life’ I mean me, in my pants on the sofa, shouting obscenities at the telly while you make me a fucking sandwich.

Some questions are designed to elicit sexy answers, and others invoke a sense of wariness and dread. “Do you like spanking?” falls into the latter category, and here’s why:

‘Spanking’ encompasses a range of things – you can be spanked by someone who is giggling and brandishing a pink heart-shaped toy from Anne Summers. You can be spanked by a teacher, parent, boyfriend, girlfriend, or midget in a gimp suit. You can be spanked until it just about hurts or you can be spanked until the agony is so much that you want to bite straight through the pillow and into your bottom lip.

You can be spanked by someone who can’t get hard unless he knows you’re uncomfortable – who digs his fingers into the back of your neck and forces you over his knee, yanks your knickers down and rubs his cock into you while he whacks you. You can be spanked by someone who’s afraid that if he gives you more than a light-hearted slap you’ll report him to the authorities.

So the question ‘do you like being spanked?’ is about as relevant as ‘do you like food?’
Like ‘food’, I think everyone likes spanking. Be it a gentle tap on the bum to demonstrate ownership or so they can see your butt jiggle as they’re fucking you from behind, right up to a full-on gutwrenching spitefuck accompanied by slaps so hard they give you stars behind the eyes.

The question might open things up for more discussion and more extravagant play, but I’m always wary of giving a fully honest answer. Yes, of course I like spanking. But I’m loathed to tell you how I like it in case you spend the next five fucks trying to get the tone, the rhythm and the strength to my exact specifications.

So I think what I’m proposing is that we come up with a Universal Spanking Declaration, along the lines of:

“I like being spanked in some way, shape or form.”

That way we can assume everyone likes a bit, and push things gradually until we reach the point at which they say “oh fuck yes, that’s it.” After all, that’s basically what we do with sex itself, right? No one says “once my penis is inside you, do you want me to maintain a fairly steady, slow rhythm, or would you prefer me to tease you a bit then go at it hammer and tongs until you come all over my cock?”

No. With sex we play jazz. Because we assume everyone likes it we expend our energies working out how they like it best.

From now on, if you sign up to my Universal Spanking Declaration, I shall do the same. I know you like it, I just need to find out how; I’m going to play jazz.

Now bend the fuck over.

Red. Purple. Stop. やめて. Dead puppies.

Whatever your kink, if it extends beyond ‘tie me up with silk scarves and tickle me with a feather duster’ chances are someone’s suggested a safe word at some point. I think safe words suck, and here’s why:

They encourage you to push yourself further than you might like.

There’s a challenge implicit in a safe word. A safe word says ‘this is the absolute limit, as much as I can take. If you do anything more I will die/call the police/punch you into the sun.’ And so when you know that there’s a word you can use at any time to make it stop, all you’re trying to do is prevent yourself from using that word.

A safe word implies that you’re playing just to see how hard you can take it, so you want to prove that you can take it as hard as possible. You are superwoman – undefeated in all 12 rounds of this sex. He’ s beating/fucking/electrocuting you so badly that you’ve never been in so much pain – you’re gritting your teeth and biting your tongue and hating every miserable minute of it. Boy, you have never won at sex so hard as you’re winning now.

The challenge is not the fun bit – the fun is the fun bit. If you have a safe word that encourages you to push yourself to the point where you don’t like it, you might as well call ‘red’ right at the beginning and sneak off for a wank – you’re more likely to have a good time.

They curb your imagination

Hurting someone is a challenge, and one of the most difficult things to get right. You have to know roughly what they like, what they hate, and wobble uncomfortably on the high-wire that runs between those two things.

You also, if you want me to really love you, have to do some stuff that’s just for you. I might hate being caned (stupid stingy unsexy ouch fuck fuck ouch) but if you love it then it’s awesome, and I’ll grin and bear as much as possible, and even sneak in some brattiness between strikes if that’s what gets you off.

So yes, there’s a lot to balance. But sadly with a safe word there’s less incentive to work at that balance. If you give a girl a safeword, that’s a free pass for you to do whatever you like until she yells ‘stop’, which means that she and you miss out on the joy that can be had from playing around in that grey area – pushing things she doesn’t want to be pushed, into places she might not be keen on you pushing them.

They require negotiation

Anything that delays the sexual act, or requires chatter and discussion of a practical nature, will kill my drive pretty quickly. I love the pre-sex preamble where you chat about things you have done and talk about stuff you both find hot. It means that when you do get into bed you can experiment with the new knowledge you’ve acquired.

But if you chat around sex in order to tick things off a bizarre safety list, it’s no fun at all.

“So, you like to be spanked? OK. I’m going to spank you, and I’m going to start really gently, so let me know on a scale of 1-10 how much that hurts. And if I do anything too hard just say ‘red’ and I’ll immediately stop and give you a nice cuddle and a hot chocolate.”

See? It’s just not sexy. There’s no uncontrolled passion in that. As soon as you have to codify it and lay down rules, the spontaneity is ripped out of it and you end up fucking like you’re following an IKEA furniture construction leaflet. I don’t want to know that you’ll stop when I ask, I don’t want to know exactly how many strokes you’ll give me before we have a rest and a chat about my boundaries. I want you to do things you like, things I like, things you think we might both like, and see at what point I start tearing the walls down.

“So what turns you on?”
“This one time a guy bent me over and paddled me till I cried, then fucked me in the ass while he called me a ‘good girl.’”
“Take your fucking pants off.”

Attaboy.