All Fours.
Ninety minutes, half-naked, on my hands and knees.
My name is not Naomi. It’s a nom de plume to protect my identity. Though names and identifying details have been changed, all the stories in Gen XXX are true. My anonymity means that I rely on word of mouth to grow my subscriber base, so if you’re intrigued by what you’re reading, please: share with friends.
Seth, the dom I met at the sex party, is scheduled to arrive at 2:30pm. But the 4th of July traffic is making for slow going, which means that I’ve got an extra hour in which to work myself up into a highly anxious state. I sit outside on my porch in the sun to try to relax. That doesn’t work. I go back into the house and pace around the living room. That definitely doesn’t do me any good.
“How’s it going?” texts Max.
“I’m so nervous,” I respond. “More nervous than I was at the sex party. I feel sick.”
I think about why, and realize that at the sex party, I could remain relatively anonymous. No one person was going to be focusing on me. (Unless I let them.) Here, with Seth, there’s no hiding. All eyes are on my ass.
“Nerves = excitement,” writes Max. “Think of it like play. Make believe. Amusement park.”
Amusement parks make me want to throw up.
“I’m just a ball of nerves,” I say.
“Aw, I get it,” she says. “You’re great. You can stop at any time. Remember you are in control of everything. Top from the bottom, baby.”
I love Max. She’s been extra supportive over the past few weeks as I dip my toe into the world of sex parties and impact play. She has some experience with the latter; none with the former. (Though she seems curious.) A few days before my date with Seth, I give Max his full name. And his number.
“Such a cute sex nerd,” she says, after she Googles him. “And SO SAFE.”
“What do you mean by ‘SO SAFE’?” I ask.
“He just looks safe!” she says. “He doesn’t seem like a serial killer.”
He does not seem like a serial killer, this is true. Still, I knock on wood.
After Seth arrives, I offer him some water — no Trader Joe’s snacks after all — and we chat for a bit. About the weather. About his drive. I tell him that I’m feeling jumpy. On the way to my bedroom, I introduce him to the cats. The girl cat regards him with extreme suspicion. The boy cat walks right up to him for a pat.
My bedroom is awash with light.
“Are you okay with this being open?” Seth asks, pointing to my east-facing window, which has the shades pulled back.
“Yes,” I say. The exposure to the outside world makes me feel safer, sort of the way I felt safer having sex at the sex party guy in an open, public area rather than in one of the space’s many bedrooms. Though I guess that at a sex party, every area is a public area.
Seth opens his bag of toys. Everything is where it should be — where it was going to be, according to the photo he texted me the previous day. There’s the row of floggers, followed by a series of paddles. Interspersed among these items are a few cane-like rods and a riding crop that makes an intimidating swoosh when Seth waves it in an arc-like pattern through the air. I’m a little wary of that one, and tell him so, and he says we don’t have to use it. He just brought it in case it’s of interest.
Seth and I change out of our street clothes. I’m wearing a camo-print cotton thong and a black lacy bra. Seth has an eye-catching get-up that I don’t want to describe because it feels too personal, like I’d be intruding on his privacy. I’ll all say is that it’s provocative.
Seth hands me the first flogger to inspect. The tassels — Seth has another word for them that I’m forgetting — are soft and velvety. Suede. I position myself on my bed on hands and knees, my head facing away from where Seth is standing. The room seems even brighter all of a sudden. I am hyper-aware that Seth can see every inch of my butt and thighs. My blemishes. All that dimpled cellulite. Probably even tufts of my pubic hair, which I haven’t groomed since Antoine was in town.
I try to put this stuff out of my mind.
Seth’s first thwacks are gentle. Soft. Almost ticklish.
“How does that feel?” he asks.
“Nice,” I say. “You can go harder.”
Seth goes a little bit harder, explaining things as he goes along. He’s taking the flogger to my upper back and then to my butt, taking care to avoid my kidneys and other vulnerable areas. He moves the flogger in a figure eight motion — florentining, as he calls it. I notice that his thwacks are timed with the beat of the music playing through my Bluetooth speaker.
Panic at the Disco and Chappell Roan. His choices, not mine.
It’s surprisingly difficult for me to maintain a position on all fours for more than a minute or so. My wrist joints are stiff and the weight of my body makes them cramp up. I should do more yoga, I think.
I try a different pose: bent over on my forearms. In this position, I can tuck my chin against my chest and look through my legs and see some of what Seth is doing with his hands as he works. I can also see my inner thighs — never one of my best features — jiggling like Jell-O with every blow they absorb.
I remember what Max said about having one’s vision obscured by a blindfold or eye mask during BDSM play. I guess wearing a blindfold protects you from focusing too much on yourself as much as the other person.
Other things are going through my head as the session progresses. Are the cats outside the door? Can my neighbors hear me? Is Seth aroused? Did Seth just fart or is that the floorboard creaking?
(No, really: Did he fart?)
I feel both in my body and outside of it, as if I’m watching myself from afar, and sometimes from the point of view of other people. My ex-husband. Some of my friends. I’m on my hands and knees in a bedroom with a soft blue color scheme and cat drawings on the wall and I’m being pummeled in the ass by a man in a somewhat shocking outfit! And liking it!
I think about my dad and my sister, and wonder what they’d think if they knew this was happening. My natal family never talked about sex. Too uptight. Too square. My mom was the worst offender. But now she’s dead, which, in some weird way, has freed me up in various parts of my life.
I get out of my head and go fully back into my body. There are moments when this feels like the most normal thing in the world.
About 8 to 10 toys into my session with Seth I announce that, as suspected, I like “thudding” sensations a lot more than “stinging” ones. Seth taps the meaty side of my ass with one of the paddles.
“This is a good spot,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“And this seems to be really sensitive,” he says, tapping the underside of my cheeks, where my thighs meet my butt.
I nod my head.
“Yes, let’s avoid that if we can,” I say.
Understanding that I’m giving up control of my body to a strange man is one thing in theory, another thing in reality. Positioned on my hands and knees, ass up, I feel raw and vulnerable. But Seth probably does too. He is also in a state of exposure. And I don’t just mean his outfit. Even though we met at a sex party and had two long conversations in advance of his visit, Seth has put his faith in me, not just for his own physical safety but because he needs to trust that I’ll communicate clearly with him about what I like and do not like so that he can act with integrity and intentionality.
About an hour into our session, Seth touches one of my ass cheeks with his bare hand. He asks for my permission before he does this. “You’re getting really rosy,” he says. “Very warm.” I can hear in his voice that he likes this.
I ask him, on a scale of 0-10 in terms of intensity, how hard he’s hitting me. “Mostly a four,” he says. “Though I got up to five with that one paddle.”
My session with Seth is not sexual, nor is it particularly erotic. To me, that is. There are intense sensations, yes, but the experience doesn’t arouse so much as intrigue. We talk for much of the time. He asks me a lot about how I’m doing at any given moment. How I’m feeling. I tell him that I appreciate the check-ins.
This isn’t to say that I’m not enjoying myself. Close to the end of our time together, I’m smiling from ear to ear and asking Seth to push my boundaries further. To go harder. I think at one moment he even gets up to a six.
Issuing a full report on each and every toy is neither possible — I’m not taking notes at the time — nor particularly interesting, though I will say that the riding crop does not disturb me as much as I assume it will, and that Seth is surprised by how well I take to a silicone paddle.
“You really like that one,” he says, when I ask him for more.
In terms of all the toys with which Seth and I play, the floggers — especially one with a pink floral print— are probably my absolute favorites. Then come the paddles, which are followed by the riding crop and the canes and sticks. (There’s a leather belt, too, but I decide there’s something a little too real-world corporal about it for my taste.)
After about 75 minutes of play, Seth and I are back in our street clothes and he’s packing up his stuff.
We get to talking about his own experiences getting bottomed, and his visits to dungeons. He makes some comments about types of BDSM play that make me feel uncomfortable, but he’s neither going into detail nor suggesting that I try them out.
Seth says that he began exploring kink in his late teens; about 20 years ago. I notice that there’s a gamer tattoo on his inner forearm. I hadn’t noticed it before. I make a comment about it.
“The Venn diagram of sex positive, neurodiverse kinksters who love gaming and Disneyland is less a series of overlapping circles than a stack of pancakes,” Seth says. I find this delightful. Also: I love pancakes!
After Seth leaves, I see that Max has texted. My boy cat is following me around the house and staring at me with his big saucer eyes.
“Scale of 1-10?” Max asks.
“What are you asking?” I respond. “The experience? The sensations?”
“NAOMI!” she writes.
Max is always accusing me of intellectualizing everything. But I don’t know what to tell her. Jesus Christ! He just left! I’m still processing!
My friend Holly is visiting LA for the summer. About two hours after Seth leaves, I meet up with her for a hike. I notice that Seth’s smell is on me. Just the faintest scent of something. I wonder if she notices.
“How was your time with Chappy?” asks Holly.
I tell Holly that I don’t have much to report. Unlike the sex party, where anything was possible, this was pretty straightforward. I knew in advance what was going to happen. He came, he saw, he florentined.
Holly says she can’t believe I didn’t take a picture of my bare ass after the session was over.
“Why would I do that?” I ask. “Who would that photo be for?”
She doesn’t have a good answer for that.
The day after I see Seth, I take a road trip north to see my friend Penny. On the way, I talk on the phone with Antoine. Things are still feeling lukewarm with him. He seems down, and distant. Usually when we communicate outside of text exchanges we do video chats, but because I’m driving, it has to be audio only. The language barrier and not seeing his face makes the conversation difficult. What I can’t read in tone I can usually read in facial expressions but here, in the car, the sound of the wind whipping past the closed car windows, the tone can be hard to discern and the facial element is nonexistent. But it’s clear that things between us are changing.
I’m so happy to see Penny. The day after my arrival, I show her the pic of Seth’s toys.
“Have you ever done this?” I ask.
“Nobody has ever come over with a fucking arsenal, no,” she says. “But I’ve definitely been spanked with apparati.”
Penny is a successful tech executive who lives in San Francisco. Many, many years ago, she dommed her wealthy, powerful Silicon Valley boss at his request, putting his cock in a cage and walking away with the key. She also fucked him in the ass with a butt plug.
“It was a bit clinical,” she says. “I was emasculating someone.”
“How did you know what to do?” I ask.
“It was just a gut feeling,” she says.
In the middle of my conversation with Penny I get a text from Seth.
“Hey there!” he writes. “I thoroughly enjoyed playing with you, and I would be happy to play again or to be a wingman for you should you ever feel an urge to play publicly (at a party and/or dungeon) either with myself or to spot/keep an eye on you playing with someone else).
I love this guy.
Seth goes on for about five more paragraphs — he’s written a sort of post mortem on our session.
First, he thanks me for reaching out to him, and for putting my trust in him. “I am well aware of how scary things like this can/could be. I want you to know that your efforts and eagerness and clear communication were all VERY much appreciated,” he says.
He tells me that he hopes I felt safe. That he had a “hunch” that I’d like thuds more than stings. He says he was not only “shocked” that we got through the entirety of the toy bag but was surprised that I wanted to revisit some of the items.
“Not only did you identify things that you liked, but you figured out ‘how’ you like them and ‘how much more’ you wanted of each of them,” he says. “That self-realization is HUGE and I hope you give yourself credit for being so receptive to explore this side of yourself.”
I smile when I read this. I smile when I read this too:
“The giggles and giddiness at the end were absolutely a highlight for me, as I personally recognize those reactions to really fun ‘play.’ That sort of response is honestly catnip for tops.”
Seth then turns the conversation over to me.
“If you are up for sharing, I would love to know how you are feeling, what you liked/didn’t like, what you wanted more/less/none of, and how everything was from your perspective.”
To be honest, I’m not sure what to tell him, so I say that going to need to take a few days to put together a coherent response.
Meaning that I need to figure out something beyond just, “More please.”
I go back to my text exchange with Seth.
“Thanks for checking in,” I say. “I thought about the play session and I’d be open to any or all of the above! I appreciate your generosity and patience with me. It was very fun and you made it playful and relaxed.”
Seth “hearts” my message immediately.
“I don’t like it when people try to make ‘play’ some serious or scary thing,” he responds. “It should be fun! It should be playful! Depending on your dynamic/relationship it ‘can’ be sexy or hot or whatever, but it’s also totally okay to have platonic play, or specifically play for the sake of play.”
I heart his message back.
“I thought a lot about that paddle, and I’d like to buy one when I get back to Los Angeles,” I tell him. “I think it would be easier for someone to use than a flogger.”
Seth sends me a link to the paddle. It’s sold at a fetish store about 10 minutes from my house.
“Thanks,” I say. “Oh, and are you thinking of going to the next party later this month?”
Max seems surprised that I don’t have more to say about my play session.
“I don’t have a lot of self-reflection at this point,” I say.
“That’s interesting in its own way,” she says. “It just doesn’t fire up your brain. Or loins, for that matter.”
Max says that if it was her, she’d write about control, power dynamics, and her previous experiences with high sensation.
My previous experiences with “high sensation,” as Max calls it, are few and far between. I experimented briefly with BDSM with my long-term college boyfriend but that was towards the very end of our relationship, and I never felt fully safe with him. Our “play” sessions felt like they were engineered for him, not us. I was a recipient, not a participant. And that felt weird and dark.
As for control and power dynamics, I’m not sure what I have to say about them, other than that I struggle with making myself vulnerable. I don’t like having power wielded over me, but I also don’t like to wield it over others. My sweet spot is power equality, however corny that may sound. Even in my experience with Seth I was not actually giving up much power or ceding control. For one thing, I was talking to him for most of the time, both out of nervousness and as a way to assert my agency in the situation. And I was giving him feedback, as if he was doing me a favor.
Of course, in many ways, he was.
Coming this Saturday: A conversation with Monique El-Faizy, a Paris-based journalist who experienced a sexual renaissance of sorts after the end of her second marriage. As is the case with all my Saturday Q&As, my discussion with Monique will be behind the paid subscriber paywall. So please, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.