Free Being a Girl by Chloë Thurlow Page A

to myself. I am a woman. I am the figurehead on my own ship. The master of my own destiny and desires. I am going to do
everything
.
    They say you always remember your first and I know I certainly will! How could anyone forget the Laird of the Black Watch? When Hamish popped into my mind, as he often did, I had this terrible fear that I would never again meet anyone quite like him. That the first time would be the best time and my life would become an eternal quest in search of the next great orgasm. The next thorough spanking!
    Spanking. It was still an absolute mystery to me. Two men had inveigled me into taking off my clothes and three men had spanked me until my bottom was a roaring fire and my pussy leaked liquid ecstasy. Spanking and orgasm. It was a surreal combination. What did this mean? What did it say about me? About men? Were all men obsessed by bottoms? Did they all want to put you over their knee and tan your buttocks? We had learned in Classics at school about Aristotle and he said the way to happiness is to be your ‘authentic natural self’. It seems to me that it was perfectly natural that men would want to spank girls and,
ipso facto
, girls must all secretly dream of being spanked. They did and they just never got the opportunity to realise it. I was lucky.
    When the girls had talked late at night in the dorms about their
first time
, no one ever mentioned spanking, corporal punishment, discipline, humiliation, sado-masochism, role play, words that whirled around my head like little birds on currents of air, flying for the chaste pleasure of flying. I had left school to take a journey with my sister. But the real journey I was taking without maps, without a route, with no sense of a destination. Confucius, or somebody else who was just as clever, said a journey of one thousand miles starts with the first step, and I thought a journey of one thousand orgasms would obviously start in the Isle of Skye. I was a wanderer in the dreamy dark realms of the senses and if being an explorer is my destiny, I suppose the best thing to do is pursue it with all the energy and conviction in my soul. Or in my knickers, anyway.
    There, you see, I have become philosophical. I am the butterfly easing my wings from the prison of the chrysalis. I am a girl growing into the woman. When I lie in the bath running my palms over my nipples, they are a woman’s hands enjoying the springy erectness of a woman’s nipples. When I spread cream over my thighs, the dewy dampness around my natal cleft is the arousal of a woman who knows what it is to be a woman. I had enjoyed doing all the things that girls do, all that studying and gym and bitching and thinking about boys, but I had arrived back from Scotland with an intuition that the next bit of life is going to be much more fun.
    When I was growing up, I had always thought of virginity as something sacred, mystical, a soap bubble, perfect and impermanent. When you reach the age of fourteen, you saunter along the high street on Saturday, the only time we were allowed out of theconvent, and you are aware that men are analysing you, ogling you, sizing you up. When they catch your eye, you understand that what they are looking for is some outward revelation that the treasured little membrane stretched invisibly up there is still up there, and what they desire more than anything in the world, and would give ten years inside the walls of the chrysalis to bring that desire to fruition, is to go crashing through that cherished and ephemeral maidenhead.
    It’s heady stuff. Your little tits are exploding from your chest like anarchist bombs, your bum is growing pert and round, your hip bones are jutting out like scaffolding around the wall of a castle, a barricade you raise up to protect the prize while, conversely, and at the same time, you long for an errant knight to slash away your clothes and pierce the heart of your being with his comely sword. Like the butterfly