Free The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive by Joan Kelly

minute later, as I’d been trying to think of this same boy kissing me, the spanking scene re-invaded. And this time, I noted something besides my embarrassment — the image of being over this boy’s knee accomplished a kind of excitement that made the work of my fingers nearly irrelevant. I fought it off a second time, now worried I was beyond the bounds of extreme mental illness, never mind lesbianism. But I did not take my hand out from beneath my covers. When I saw myself a third time, ass in the air over Willie’s lap, I gave up. I let the image have its way with me, shutting my eyes tight against whatever it might mean.
        Afraid of a recurrence, I lived in frustrated self-abstinence for the next few years. A girl named Mallory helped break my dry spell at age sixteen, passing around a bodice-ripper she’d picked up at the local drug store.
        “This is so sexy! Oh my God, you guys have to read it,” she’d announced in the girls’ bathroom, holding the book out to my friend at thigh level, as if it were an incendiary device that might detonate at a higher altitude.
        “What’s it about?” I asked. I was heavily into both Stephen King and true crime by then, and hesitated to take my mind off the distraction of terror and bloody death for a mere Danielle Steele rip-off. At sixteen I had bad skin, worse hair, a tragically misguided sense of fashion, and — needless to say — my virginity. By that point, I needed something more than raven-haired beauties and throbbing manhoods to keep suicide off the top of my to-do list.
        “Just read it,” Mallory growled quietly, waving us away as she disappeared into the halls.
        I not only read it, I tore through it. A sexy Arab prince kidnaps a beautiful young woman and brings her to his luxury tent in the desert. When he’s not at work in his sandy kingdom, he’s banging the hell out of her in a way that makes her forget, at least during the banging, that she’s mad at him. He tries to win her over with good sex and witty repartee, but she insists on trying to escape anyway. When she brandishes a pair of sewing scissors — after all he’s done for her — it’s the final straw. He knocks them from her hand and pulls her over his knee. By the time he’s done spanking her, they both know she’s in love with him.
         How dare he? I raged inside. How dare the author, how dare the publishers, how dare the world at large pretend that this is what makes women happy? Just because it made me ache with longing didn’t mean it was realistic or right. Yet a smaller voice inside me did find some comfort amidst the indignity of this kind of propaganda. Mallory, too, had found it sexy I remembered, and, indeed, the fact of its publication in the first place proved to me that I must not be the only person in the world who felt this way. And there were now at least some options for the future — if I could somehow grow up pretty enough to be the object of a handsome kidnapper’s attention, I might be able to get the spanking and sex that I now thought about on a daily basis.
        Still un-abducted years later, I tried to get my first couple of boyfriends to help, but their attempts to humor me were always awkward and frustrating at best. None of my fantasies had involved being slapped like a horse getting the giddy-up signal while doing it doggy style, and I was still too uptight about my yearnings in the first place to go into any helpful detail about what would have worked. It was to their credit that all these guys were up for trying. But their failures merely served to accentuate my despair over ever getting what I wanted.
        Relief appeared one day during my junior year of college. I’d just gotten a university e-mail account, and had taken to visiting the computer science building after class each afternoon. I didn’t have a computer of my own, and the basement of the computer lab had a dozen or so antiquated machines