This is the first installment in a four part series I’ll be releasing this month called “Daddy Issues.” I’m thinking of it as a micro-memoir/deep dive into the origins of my interest in D/s play. This series is super-revealing and a lot, so it will be pay-walled. I’m getting into stuff here I’ve never talked about elsewhere. If you are a patreon member, you can also access it on patreon.
If you’re not a paid supporter, there are alternative ways to access paid content! You can use your one free article unlock on any of the posts in this series. You can also get into the referral game and earn free months of a paid membership. More on that here.
However you support, I am so grateful you’re here.
The car was pulled into the farthest reaches of a massive mall parking lot in the outskirts of Los Angeles. The guy I was seeing and I sat as far apart as we could in the front seat despite the fact that no one would ever recognize us in this neighborhood. This stance would be the basis for many subsequent conversations about our “relationship,” if you could call it that, but this one is still stuck in my memory years later.
At 24, in the grand tradition of girls of that age, I was in the center of a drama cyclone of my own making. I was in a relationship with my high school boyfriend that I had pried into openness with my bare hands in a series of probably very unfair ultimatums so I could start hooking up with this slightly older guy who, at the time, seemed sophisticated and knowledgeable rather than the complete doofus he truly was. It might have been a one-off thing had we not discovered through late night sexting that we were both kinky and not getting that part of ourselves satisfied in our primary relationships. Oh, did I mention he was also in a longterm, cohabitating, very much NOT open relationship with a nice girl I’d met on a few occasions? Did I mention our relationship ended up stretching on for the better part of a year? What can I say, the manic pixie archetype had unspooled into the self-destructive, early Lana Del Rey archetype and I was On One.1
These toxic, short-lived pseudo-breakups were a big part of the draw. We’d sit in my car (he was afraid my smell would linger in his if I ever got in it, potentially alerting his girlfriend to his secret life) and agonize about what we were doing to her, as well as the illicit nature of the kink we were engaging in. During this particular conversation he asserted kink didn’t have anything to do with what we were doing despite the clumsy spanking, uninformed choking, and one aborted attempt at bondage where I had an instant panic attack and wiggled out of the stupid handcuffs he used to tie me up. He insisted we weren’t like those people. For some reason this was a crucial moral distinction for him that I was increasingly bumping against.
“I like to call women ‘baby’ in bed but I think it’s gross when they call me Daddy. This girl did it once, and I was like — I’m not that weird.”
In that instant, I knew I was.