This is the second 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.
When I was fourteen, I fell head over heels in love, and head over heels into an alternate reality. One minute I was journaling about my crushes and reading Harry Potter fan fiction, then in the blink of an eye, I was madly in love with our lord, the one and only, Jesus Christ himself.
Falling in love with Jesus felt like falling into a black hole. I don’t remember anything about my introduction to the little evangelical baptist church on the hill1, but seemingly in the time it took to raise my hand in the air to God Of Wonders, I was hooked. I swiftly became not just a new Christian, but the poster child for our church. I taught Vacation Bible School, I led abstinence groups and wore a “worth waiting for” silver cuff bracelet everywhere I went, and most Sundays I could be seen singing in the church rock band, hands on my heart and eyes closed belting out the words to Hillsong United’s Hosanna. It was full throttle cringe from the get go, and before I knew it I was getting baptized in our pastor’s hot tub under the California sunshine.
Church was a heady brew for a perfectionistic teenage girl with an emotionally absent father. There were so many ways to be good and rewarded and I was doing all of them. Every adult took a shine to me, and every kid was a mark for my sanctimonious evangelism. I think I reached my pinnacle when I played Mary in the church nativity play alongside an age-accurate Joseph with a salt and pepper beard shepherding me into the manger with a light touch across my shoulders. Talk about the inception of a kink.
But it was the abstinence stuff that really wedged its way into my psyche for life. Prior to the church, I’d certainly had brushes with sex shame, but they weren’t as coherent as they were within the church’s warm wooden walls. When I was in the third grade, my parents went on a trip to Europe and brought back a German-language copy of Penthouse magazine with them. I found it one day while snooping through my mother’s jewelry box and my jaw dropped. I flipped to the centerfold and found a woman lying on the hood of a red sports car and spreading the lips of her vulva open with one hand. I had no idea the significance of this act — why would she want us to see so deep inside her?? — but I knew it made my whole body feel weird. I laid under the covers in my bedroom and flipped through the rest of the magazine, looking at the many naked women through squinted eyes. There was only one way to figure out what was happening here, and in a move strangely foreshadowing my future career I took the magazine to school, and used the power of the public forum to get my peers’ opinions on the artifact I’d uncovered.