Marco's Coffee Shop & Restaurant, Northgate

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Service: * *
Food: * * * *
Ambience: * * *
Babe Count: * * * * *

Phone: +27 11 794 2936

Northgate. Home of Johannesburg's horse drivers. Well, not entirely. There are more horse-worshippers living in Bryanston. But this is a close second. Jodhpurs. Very flattering on the inner thigh.

I'm meeting Karen, the second babe I'll be seeing in the flesh from the internet dating site I'm on. We connected via the telephone, and made each other laugh a lot, and have decided to meet.

(I'll state up front that I've clarified my intentions of writing about us on this site, and she's fine with it.)

In her case, I'm a little nervous. I think I may have misread her profile a bit, and may have gotten the wrong end of the stick. Her description of her ideal mate was a tiny bit contradictory. Said something like, "Looking for a partnership of equals with a man who will be my friend, companion, lover, master, protector."

When I read that, I thought, 'Hmm. She's into bondage and discipline.'

So I wrote her an email mentioning the B&D, and telling her that I'd never engaged in it. Hit send, and immediately regretted it. Fired off a quick apology, asking her to overlook my naivete in assuming she might be kinky.

Got a note back from her saying, "Thanks for emailing me, but I have a gut feeling that we're not compatible."

So I sent her a note back saying, "We may very well be incompatible, but how about a strings-free cup of coffee anyway? And maybe you'd like to look at my website to see what kind of dude I am?"

And she mails me back saying the "strings-free" bit appealed to her, and that she had enjoyed my site. So yeah. Coffee would be a reality.

She arrives at Marco's, just after I press send on an sms telling her that I'm wearing my shaggy black beret, a yak's wool jersey, and my position in the restaurant. Her phone beeps as she sees me. We both look like our photos on the site, evidently.

She's an unusual looking woman, with a very smiley face. One eye seems to stay a little more closed than the other. Stunning body. Pretty face. At certain angles, she could easily be Antoinette's sister.

Small talk. And then at a certain point, I say, "Did I misread your profile?"

She looks me in the eye, and murmurs, "No."

Gulp. That's some Milo that almost went down the wrong pipe.

She calls herself kinky. And her brand of kinkiness has a name... MS... Mastery & Submission. She enjoys being submissive. In short, it's a sexual turnon for her to be totally dominated by her man. She loves taking instructions. Loves giving him pleasure. Loves being tied up. Disciplined.

As we're talking, I'm thinking about an ex of mine who once asked me to buy her a set of furry handcuffs for her birthday. Silly boy. It probably wasn't a joke! Maybe SHE was into this stuff too, and I just didn't know?

And as we're talking, I'm aware that this woman is nobody's cliche stereotype of a kinkster. Heck... I wouldn't even BEGIN to know how a kinky person looks. She's a normal, vivacious, amazing, sexy, intelligent, evolved woman. She's plenty my equal. She's someone I could see myself spending lots and lots of time with.

And here I am, this man who calls himself a maverick. This dude who defines himself as being somewhat left of centre. Broadminded. Open to things. But I've never done anything like this. The closest I've come to anything kinky was with a girlfriend who liked REALLLLLLY hard sex. Like viciously hard. She enjoyed having her hair wrapped around my hand and yanked hard when she was coming. And she dug having me bite hard into her shoulder. And having her nipples brutally squashed. And having her cunni spanked hard with my hand until she came. And in that particular relationship, we both had a lot of blood under the fingernails due to backs being ripped at climax.

But that's really the only properly kinky stuff I've done. (Not that I'm naive. Just that my range has been almost normal.)

So with Karen, I'm sitting here facing a woman who is pushing all sorts of excitement buttons in me. (No, not nipple clips! Not yet, anyway.)

The main buttons are these:

(1) I don't want to be in a relationship with anyone where I am the exclusive decision maker, where I am exclusively in control. (She's been in a relationship before with someone where they did the Mastery & Submission thing across the entire relationship, not just the sex, and it didn't entirely work for her. She's not sure if it was the guy, or the role.)

(2) I'm a non-genderist, so, for me, it would be very difficult (but not necessarily impossible) to see her as being a submissive WOMAN. I can easily see myself ordering her about as a PERSON, one who happens to have a vagina and other orifices at my command, but not as a WOMAN, a female. That stuff just pisses me off.

(3) I'm a virgin in this stuff. And as someone ruthlessly committed to excellence, I feel as though I don't know enough about the paradigm to be able to enter it successfully. I'm firmly aware that Karen requires domination, and that my asking fumbling questions about how to tie her up? and, is she comfortable? and, am I hurting her? might very well run counter to the experience she's after. But I'm also aware that I'll probably only be on training wheels for a short time. I'm a very quick and dedicated learner.

(4) I'm not keen on pain and torture and rape. Turns out she's not keen on that either. She's truly a normal person with a need to be dominated. Not hurt. Not humiliated. Not disregarded.

So hey. I'm gonna take these thoughts to therapy tomorrow, and see what Zahava has to say. I'm not fearing for my sanity here. Instead, I'm trying to work out exactly what I can do to please Karen sexually.

Maybe I'm finally liberating myself into true gender-free malehood.