A very, very special friend wrote this for me. It is deeply meaningful and quite, quite accurate. It is perhaps the most beautiful thing anyone has ever written to me.

My Darling Whore

Slut. A slut to the gray-green wilderness that hovers over her home, the misted mistress of the environment she loves so deeply, that covers her, disguises her, renders her safely anonymous and—at the same time—places her at the center of the universe, demanding her full attention with senses, camera, and pen, embracing her with the quiet inevitability of adiabatic currents that rise from river, creek, and marshlands, gentle powers that blend air and water, seamless, the water breathes the air, the air inhales the water. Slut.

Whore. A whore to self-discovery, prostrating herself to the truth of where she comes from, selling her past to understanding, spreading herself open to redeem her future and celebrate the day in which her heart beats, now. Today. Here. Whore.

Harlot. A harlot to hedonism, to the exultant complexity of unabashed awareness–of the body, its senses, their frenetic, joyful dialog, the dance between body and soul, mind and heart, brain and genitals. Harlot.

Bitch. A bitch to her own unique principles, snapping at any bastion, shibboleth, or vestigial, arcane supposition that dares to hint at impinging on the freedom that she carves from the dense environment of ponderous, bible-bound past (not her own), a reactionary society, and a bankrupt, dumbed-down culture that would surround her with tawdry stereotypes and diminishing contempt. Bitch.

Concubine. A concubine to knowledge, knowing its power, a courtesan devoted to the nurturing of of the millennial growth of understanding, at once a geisha and a canny perpetrator of the struggle that all artists and thinkers have undergone to leave a deeper imprint of human experience for others to share. Concubine.

Goddam! What a fuckin’ whore this woman is…

Thank you, love. I may be Simone de Beauvoir to your Sartre, but you are Henry Miller to my Anais Nin.

Friendship is a source of love and acceptance and communion. And yet, women are encouraged to see other women as mere competitors, and men as potential providers and mates. And men, they are encouraged to develop the same mindset. Their male friends are buddies with whom they jokingly compete, and women are objects to be desired.

So it seems that friendships between men and women, even in this post-sexual revolution era, are awkward and easily discouraged. This, despite the fact that friendships between men and women provide amazing benefits. Men can express to women the thoughts and feelings that they would never express to other men, the thoughts and feelings that society considers weak and unmanly, and have them validated. And women, knowing economic independence and reproductive choice, can go to men with their thoughts and ideas, not as beggars and dependents, not merely tolerated as objects of sexual gratification, but appreciated as intellectual equals.

Today, when a man and a woman meet in friendship, it is possible for us to meet as people, to touch the humanity in each other, to enjoy the exchange between different-yet-same that results in us receiving from each other something that could not have come from within us.

And yet, conventional wisdom states that men and women cannot be friends, that sex gets in the way. What a sad thing that is. In my experience, the sexual tension only gets in the way if it goes unacknowledged.

I am female, you are male, we are hetero. We could form a sexual union. Or not. But sex is not the root of our affinity. Or is it?

Ah, the power of a question that does not require an answer. It is enough simply for us to be aware, awake, open, perceptive, inquisitive. The answers, like the questions, come in their own time.

One day, I hope the answer to the question “why can’t men and women be friends?” will be moot.

Regardless, I’ll continue with my hetero amity.

In recent months I’ve had the pleasure of making the online acquaintance of some remarkably sensual, hedonistic, and outright kinky women. One of these smart and sexy women, who goes by Hedone, seems to have chosen erotic spanking as her unofficial theme for May. She blogs about pleasure and submission in a way that resonates with me — as a Femdom. Here on the internet she waves her words at us like a flower’s scent on the breeze and I just want to pick that flower and caress the petals and peel them away, one-by-one, until she is naked, stripped to the core, and begging for more.

I have her permission to read some recent entries from her Pleasure Principle blog, and as well I will give my response to her very provocative material.

Hedone May 12, 2010: Fantasy Spanking

I’ve been itching for a spanking. A bare hand spanking.
I want it standing up.
Pants dropped to the ankles. Panties pushed to mid-thigh.

Stand next to me. Speak softly, lovingly in my ear.
Tell me firmly the why and the what of that which you are about to do.

Caress my bottom, lull me into security.
Take your time rubbing, squeezing, and massaging my undisciplined bottom.

Your touch, your breath, your voice
sends my mind reeling; makes my pussy moisten.

Hedone May 14, 2010: Smack My Kitty

Over Caesar salad, french onion soup, and fish ‘n’ chips SirDom asked me, “Why do you like your pussy slapped?”

I thought:
Hmm. How to answer, how to answer. Be thorough. Elucidate to uncover the mystery that SirDom so boldly seeks to understand.

My reply:
It feels soooooooooooo GOOD!

Yup that’s all I came up with. He just looked at me, he had no reaction really. But you could see the wheels turning, his eyes staring in wonderment and his eyebrows set quizzically.

What I should have said:

I like the feeling.
I like to hear the soft toned smack,
I like the spicy tingling sensation that force leaves on my pussy lips.
I love the more concentrated blows to my clit; the ones that make my pussy twitch and my body jerk.

Wop!
zing!
swat!
Pat…pat…pat, smack!!

Ooooh yea. More, more, more. I love it.

I like the anticipation…the not knowing when the next strike will fall or how hard it will be or where it will land.
I get off on the power you wield creating and controlling this sensual experience–my pleasure.

~~@~~

In six months I’ve come a long way from “I don’t like pain”, “I’m not interested in impact play” to purring “smack my pussy…please” and cumming profusely from the marvelous encounter.

After reading her “Spank My Kitty” post, I responded to it with: I love spanking pussies. I love the way the eyes of you pain sluts open wide with the impact, the way your luscious mouths drop open. I love the gasps and hisses and moans. I love the way you pump your hips up to meet the strap or the hand. I love watching the labia change color, watching them flood with blood, getting puffy and lewd-looking. I love it when the sound of the strap against your pussy changes when the wetness comes. I love it when you beg to cum, when you beg for more slaps to your clit. Being on the receiving end of a good pussy spanking has never really interested me but being on the giving end — ah, now that makes me wet ;)

I followed the trail of erotic spanking breadcrumbs back to Hedone’s March 28th post called “Spanked! A metamorphosis.” I’m excerpting a hot little section from it that I am sure will get everyone’s attention, and hopefully, do a fine job of illustrating why you shouldn’t knock erotic spanking until you’ve tried it.

No sooner had I lowered my pants was I pushed forward, face down onto the workbench.  SirDom pushed his warm digits into my wetness from behind, and began his phenomenal fingering of my pussy. I didn’t know what hit me. The rhythm was firm, fast, and calculated. I went from oblivious, to highly aroused to ecstasy in what seems like seconds. Because all of a sudden, the fantastic finger fuck ended and SirDom was swatting my ass.

“Oh!” the first one startled me but made me quiver. The next smack of my ass stung but definitely blurred the line between pain and pleasure. And the next hard, stinging swat on my firm, round, soft-to-the-touch ass was nothing but pleasure. His hand landed heavily on my skin, and my pulsating pussy dripped. SirDom kept spanking me…smack, smack, smack, smack…thwack! I don’t know how many swats my ass endured, I only know I was gone. My mind–the consciousness, left on a plane called ecstasy.

My spanking, and being sexually—but willingly—molested in His sanctuary were the prelude to an afternoon of surprises and new sexual activities I was to enjoy with SirDom. It was a splendid afternoon, which left me floating far out in ‘sub-space’. Only it is the delicious spanking that has crept into my thoughts again and again throughout the week.

I am a changed woman. A woman who needs to be spanked.

I’ve really enjoyed following Hedone’s sensual evolution, enjoyed how she’s come around to understanding the pleasure her body can witness when it is seasoned with little pops of pain, when the shock of the sting wakes her up from her sensuous oxytocin lethargy into an edgy adrenaline alertness that is followed by the sweet seduction of endorphins singing in her veins. I can feel the delirium and the longing in her words, I can see it in my mind’s eye, having seen it so many times before as a consequence of my own ministrations. I’ve seen women sway and swing, gasp and sing, their bodies convulsing, gasping, begging for me to give them just one more, and then for another, faster, harder — it is intense, electric, and incredibly fucking hot.

For more on erotic spanking, please stop by my SilkenOnSex.com website and click on the Spanking tag, which will link to 4 erotic audio stories that feature erotic spankings of both men and women.

Lastly, I’ve got a special second podcast release this week to feature the work of Kitty Thomas, who recently released her eBook Comfort Food, a disturbingly erotic story about the effects of social isolation and monotony on one woman who learns to endure the unendurable by finding pleasure in it. Look for Silken on Sex episode #69 and listen in as I tell a lengthy excerpt of her tale.

He said he’d tried talking to her, had even asked her what he could do to spice things up, and her response was “I shouldn’t have to tell you what I want.” Which blew my mind. Amy was playing the You should read my mind and if you can’t I’ll punish you until you’ve tried everything game that many women play — a game that one of my lovers played so well that I swore off women for years.

So I invited Amy to meet me for coffee.

We’ve known each other for well over a decade and she’s accustomed to my directness, so I dispensed with the preliminary chit-chat.

“Boriska is worried you’re either having an affair, or that you’re going to leave him.”

Amy’s expression changed. I think she’d been expecting to play the sympathetic listener to my woe-is-me-my-sister-has-cancer tale, so she was completely surprised to find that her marriage was the topic. I sat in silence and watched her run through a series of emotions: surprise, anger, chagrin, and finally, something that looked like pouty resignation.

“I’m bored,” Amy said, looking down into her coffee cup. Definitely pouty.

“Bored?”

I couldn’t help but remember the last time I was bored.  I was 9 and I told my grandmother I wanted to go somewhere because I was bored. “You’re not bored,” Grandmother had said, looking over her glasses at me with her intense blue eyes, “You’re boring.” Something about the way she explained it to me really hit home, and from that day forward I was almost obsessed with being the opposite of boring. Today, one of the highest compliments anyone can pay me is to say that I’m interesting.

“I’m going to take a page out of my grandmother’s book, Amy, and ask you to consider that you’re not bored so much as boring.”

Her mouth fell open with a gasp and her eyebrows drew together in a frown. I raised my hand. I knew I needed to speak up fast or she’d flounce off in a huff. I love her dearly, but Amy’s what most of her friends call “high-strung.”

“Now before you get all upset with me, give me a chance to explain. When you say “I’m bored” you’re speaking as though the world, or in this case, your husband, is somehow failing to entertain you. That is a very passive place to be, Amy.”

She went back to pouting.

“You own your life, and you’re responsible for whether you’re bored or not. It is a choice. You’ve made choices that have led to you feeling bored in your marriage, so you can certainly make choices that make it more exciting!”

“It’s a lot of work!” she exclaimed.

“I know,” I answered.

“How can you? You’ve never been married.”

I looked into her eyes and smiled slowly, meaningfully. “Why do you think I’ve never married?”

She laughed, thankfully.

“Fair enough, Kay. Fair enough.”

We sipped our drinks for a long moment. Amy’s never been good at concealing her emotions. I could see her turmoil all over her face. I could also see that she wanted to talk, but just didn’t seem to know where to start. I decided to give her a nudge.

“So… why are you bored?” I asked.

“We’ve been having the same sex over and over for 8 of the last 10 years!”

“Well whose fault is that?”

“Whuuut?”

“If you’ve been having the same boring sex over and over, why haven’t you told Boris you want to try something different?”

“I shouldn’t have to!”

Oh. My. God. It was my turn to say “Whuuut?”

“He should know me by now…” She sounded both outraged and plaintive, if that is possible. I could almost see her anger and disappointment over her husband’s failure to magically transform into Fabio-the-Mindreader during the course of their marriage.

“Amy, you’ve been reading waaay too many romance novels. Sure there are men who can intuit what you want, but how can they know for certain if you don’t tell them?”

“Not everyone is like you, Kay… I’m not comfortable talking about sex…”

I got what she was saying, and yet I didn’t. Yes, there are few people so comfortable with talking openly about sex, but surely…

“Are you telling me that you and I can talk about how much we want to be bent over the couch for a hard fast fuck — but you aren’t comfortable talking about what you want in the bedroom with the man you’ve been sleeping next to for the past 10 years? Amy!”

She looked miserable and sheepish at the same time.

“Good sex is artful and intuitive. Great sex is artful, intuitive, and informed by communication. If you aren’t communicating your wants and needs to your husband then the only person you have to blame for your boring sex life is yourself, damnit!”

“How do I know he’d even want to try anything else? He’s got his routine down and seems pretty happy with it!”

I gave her my best oh come on, really?! look.

“I’m going to tell you a few things about men, Amy dear. At heart humans are novelty seekers, and we know that monotony in monogamy is almost inevitable… but we still settle down into monogamous relationships. Why? For women, it’s about security. For men it’s about guaranteed pussy. They give up variety in the hopes of increased frequency. So if you tell your man that you want to spice things up by having sex standing on your head in the corner — he’ll make it happen even if he has to build a scaffolding in the bedroom.”

Amy choked on her coffee, then gasped with laughter at that mental image.

“I’m serious. And another thing — In the absence of clear communication, men do their best to read us. They try anything and everything, and each time they are slapped away, or get an annoyed look, or a hurt yelp, they eliminate whatever they were doing from their repertoire. Forever. Most of them won’t try it again. Most of them don’t get that what irritated the fuck out of you last night might make you moist today. They just don’t want to feel rejected, Amy. People feel vulnerable when they are making love.”

She looked very pensive. I gave her hand a squeeze. “Think about it. You said he’s got his routine down — did it ever occur to you that he’s narrowed it down to those things you’ve never objected to? How many times was Boris doing something and you pushed him away and he never tried that again? Face it, Amy. You’ve insisted that he read your mind all these years and punished him for failing to do so. You’ve created your own boring, monotonous marriage, my friend.”

She made a face. A cross between a wince and a grimace.

“Sometimes you scare me, Kay.”

That brought me up short.

“Why?”

“Because you’re so insightful.  And because you manage to say shit no one else can say without sounding like a complete bitch.”

“You’re welcome.” I laughed.

“Does Boriska really think I’m going to leave him?”

“He’s worried about it. He loves you, Amy. He wants you to be happy, and if he can’t make you happy, why wouldn’t you look for someone who can?”

“Oh god,” she groaned. I could see it on her face, the realization that with her stubborn silence she really had made a mess of things. “What am I going to do?”

I grinned at her. “Well, I just happen to know that he’s got this fantasy about sex in the shower….”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh reaaallly?”

“Yes, really. How about we stop by an adult toy store to pick up a waterproof rabbit? And while you’re at it, send Boris a text saying you’re working on a naughty surprise for him and you want him to send a text when he leaves the office?”

Amy blushed and squirmed in her chair. She looked like an excited child.

“And then what you do is, leave him a note he’ll find when he gets home, telling him to strip down and meet you in the shower, and then make sure you’re in there and playing with your rabbit when he gets home. I guarantee he’ll break his routine.”

She laughed. “Yeah, I suppose he would.”

“Oh, and Amy… afterward… Talk to your husband. Share your fantasies. And be more communicative. I know women think men don’t listen to them, but if there is one place they’re eager to listen, it’s in bed. You’re responsible for your pleasure, so tell him what you want.”

Opposable Thumbs:

Because of our opposable thumbs, we human beings have unique capabilities. Our muscled, contrary digits allow us to pull, twist, manipulate, and grip; to use tools, to control, even “civilize” our environment. There is, however, one essential human quality that does NOT respond well to this wondrous digital opposability…

Love.

Love is given; it is to be received with open hands, as if it was a gift of pure, clear, life-giving water, flowing into and over our cupped palms.

Love is not to be pulled, twisted, manipulated, leveraged, or squeezed. Love is not to be hijacked, hitchhiked, clamped, or hammered.

No.

Use your opposable thumbs on love, and its life-giving magic will disappear, as surely as water flows through a grasping hand.

(from Charlie, October 2006)

It has been open for weeks, open at the same page she left it on New Year’s Day, page 147. It has usurped the place once reserved for her sculpture The Caged Gifts, resting as it does on the gold brocade chair near the foot of her bed.

She doesn’t touch it, though her feather duster does tickle the pages once a week or so, and when it does, she looks away, eyes blinking tears.

From the dust.

Yes, dust.

Some days when she awakens her eyes fall upon the book, where it glows whitely in the morning light. She asks herself why she doesn’t put it away somewhere, or send it back to Charlie, the author. Her friend and mentor. Aspiring lover. He’d told her repeatedly that she was his muse. And she loves him, deeply, but with a different kind of passion.

It means something, she knows. It means something that it is still there.

And yet, nothing has meaning in and of itself, she reminds herself.

There is what happened, and then there is the meaning we give it when we try to interpret what happened.

What happened. Yes. What happened?

I don’t know. I really don’t know. She looks over at the book.

She knows the author’s pride in his opus, and she wants to know what happened in the story, even though she knows how it ends. She knows how it ends because she helped the author craft that ending. She told him she wanted to know what the protagonist was thinking and feeling, there, at the ending, which was also the beginning, where things came full circle and the reader knew only the ‘what happened’ and not the meaning the character ascribed to it.

What does it mean? she asks herself.

Sighing heavily, torn, she reaches a hand toward the book. And stops.

It means whatever I choose for it.

And today, because she feels like it, the meaning of the book is a reminder of a promise made. I promised I’d never abandon you, Charlie, she sends out into the universe, to the author’s inner child, but I didn’t notice you hadn’t make the same promise, until too late.

She glances at it again. The book remains open for lack of closure. She supposes that she will never know what happened in the middle, that perhaps it is enough to know the ending.

The only certainty in life is death, and the only certainty with books is that the pages turn until there are no more, and that is The End, whatever the state of the story. What does it mean, then, that a book lies open, abandoned, unfinished, unclosed?

Nothing. It means nothing.

Perhaps it never meant anything.

And with that thought she rises, gathers the book in both hands, and slams it closed.

The End.

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