Lucrezia Magazine

The first clue came when I started reading Story of O, the 1954 French BDSM classic. I couldn’t get through ten or fifteen pages without having to stop and masturbate. Despite my strong reaction to the book, O’s world of mid-century Paris seemed far away. My boyfriend wasn’t likely to drop me off at the sex-slave training school Roissy any time soon, who would cook him dinner? So I returned the book to the library and went about my sexual routine until I encountered the Submission and Coffee podcast. Podcasters Dollie Lama and ThornDaddy are a married couple living in a 24-7 Master/slave relationship.

“24/7” means not only does Thorndaddy whip her while she blows him, but she also cleans the house, gets him whatever he asks, and does the recycling according to his instructions. Submission and Coffee offers an hour-long weekly slice of their life together. When I listened to my first episode of ThornDaddy feeding Dollie his refrigerated cum and the sounds of them having sex I felt as though huge hands had grabbed my hips and split me open, removing some sort of thick husk around my pelvis. For days after I felt like a teenage boy, getting aroused and wet at weird times, thinking about sex all the time, masturbating and pouncing on my boyfriend at least daily.

After enjoying a few episodes of the podcast I downloaded the podiobook version of Dollie Lama’s book Diary of an S&M Romance. It is also available in print from Amazon.com US or UK and Barnes and Noble.com, to learn about the development of their relationship. Described by the author as “Part introspective journey of discovery, part tender love story. Part manifesto of empowerment, part dirty dirty book,” Diary is a compilation of letters, emails, and essays, woven together with well-structured narration starting at the beginning with Chapter One: “Why I do This.” Dollie might be ThornDaddy’s “cum toilet,” and exist only to serve him in the context of her personal life but she’s no hothouse flower sequestered from the world. She has a successful career as a paralegal and considers herself a feminist explaining that unlike women of previous generations who were subject to abuse and lack of economic power, she has chosen a life she loves with informed consent. “That metaphorical slap might be just what frees me from the quiet hysteria,” she theorizes as she explains sub-space, a trance-like alteration of consciousness achieved during interaction with the Dominant.

Dollie and ThornDaddy’s early letters read in Diary remind me of the ephemera passed between my boyfriend and me in the first three months of our relationship. They met on bondage.com and while we met in a coffee shop, but the tension between embarking on something life altering and powerful while not wanting to say too much too soon and seem crazy shines through in their letters, and unlike Story of O, the story is set in my contemporary world, not a posh Parisian apartment with a courtyard. They made it all seem possible. “For me, sucking cock has always been a form of prayer, it humbles me to have such a powerful effect on another person,” Dollie writes. “That’s it exactly,” I thought to myself, feeling she had clarified a truth I always knew but could not quite articulate.

I resonated with the freedom from the self and power to be uncovered in submission as told by Dollie and expressed in the character of O and was eager to explore it for myself. Dollie Lama and ThornDaddy were both experienced BDSM practitioners before they met and the advanced lifestyle portrayed in Submission and Coffee is not something my boyfriend and I could plunge into. We listened to the podcast together and he knows how much it turns me on, but we were both unsure of the next steps to take until I bought a DVD copy of Whipsmart, a DVD beginners guide to BDSM hosted by Mistress Morgana. Now we are playing in our own sandbox of BDSM experimentation, and while I make his coffee every morning even though I’m a tea drinker, he still does the laundry for now.

***

© 2008 Eva Adivar

Eva Adivar is a freelance writer and podcast aficionado who does most of her writing, listening, and sexual experimentation in Central Virginia. Eva's previous reviews can be found in our January and February issue archives.