SM 101: A Realistic Introduction by Jay Wiseman Read Free Book Online Page A

as best I could and went on with my life, but it refused to stay away. The image began to appear in virtually every erotic fantasy I had. It got stronger and stronger, clearer and clearer. I found that more and more I wanted to act it out. I once timidly asked my old lady if she would let me tie her up while we had sex. Not only did she turn me down flat, but she also started looking at me with slightly wary eyes. What in the world was going on?
    Understand that I was a hippie. I was a Haight-Ashbury-living, marijuana-smoking, LSD-taking hippie. Other than acting as a medic at several demonstrations, I wasn’t even political. I was a thoroughgoing peacenik pacifist - to the point of having taken several beatings from bullying groups of “straight” men without lifting a hand to defend myself. People like me just didn’t do things like this.
    Trouble. I began to feel seriously concerned. Remember, this was just a year or so after the Manson killings. I wondered and worried — boy, did I worry. Was I was turning into somebody like that?
    I looked through the local bookstores and found nothing but discouragement. Even “The Sensuous Woman” thought that the people who wanted to tie or be tied during sex were sick. Oh, great. That was all I needed.
    I went to the library of nearby Sonoma State College and looked through its psychology section to see what I could learn. What I found was grim. There were several books that talked about sexual sadism and its often-murderous results. One especially disturbing book contained numerous police photographs of rape/murder victims. The sight of these women’s bodies, often horribly mutilated, sickened me and terrified me more than I can say. Was I turning into a person who might someday do something like that?
    I decided to keep myself under surveillance. I made up my mind that I was not going to allow myself to hurt anybody. If I thought I was turning into someone that would harm somebody else, then I would either put myself into a mental institution or commit suicide. And thus I lived, waiting and watching to see if I was turning into someone that I needed to shoot. Such a life was, shall we say, not fun.
    My old lady and I went our separate ways a few months later. (For the rest of our relationship, I had never had the nerve to raise the issue with her again.) The image, however, stayed in my mind, clearer and stronger than ever. The desire to do it grew stronger, too.
    Despair. After that relationship ended, I was certain of one thing: no “decent” woman would ever want anything to do with me. As soon as I revealed my “sickness,” she would be gone. For the rest of my life, I would have to settle for women too crazy or too desperate to object. Such a conclusion was, to say the least, depressing.
    One day I walked into a local variety store and bought a length of rope with no other purpose in mind than to use it to tie a woman up. (Exactly how I was going to do this, I had only the vaguest of ideas. I’d think of something. Or try, anyway.) During this purchase, I felt like slime, complete slime. I was certain the clerk knew why I wanted this rope, and I felt somewhat surprised that he would sell it to me. The utterly bored look on his face as he handed me my change convinced me that I was right. He knew, all right. He just wasn’t letting on that he knew.
    On my way home I wondered what kind of defective person he was. (I knew, to my shame, what kind of “sicko” I was, or might become.) What kind of merchant sells something to a customer so clearly determined to use the purchased item for “immoral purposes”? What was our world coming to?
    Weirdness. Then a strange thing happened. I started regularly dating a pleasant, utterly normal, lady. She wasn’t even a hippie. We had an enjoyable if routine sex life. I, however, wanted more. One night, while we embraced, I pulled together every bit of my courage. It was just barely enough to allow me to stammer out “the”