I don't know how much of an effect a person's childhood has on whether or not they are kinky when they become adults. I know that it is often a stereotype that submissives were abused as children. I was not one of those statistics, if the stereotype is indeed true. I was raised in a kind of strict family, mainly because my father had put thirty years in the military and because of his generation (he was almost 50 when I was born and my mother was almost 40). So I was raised to be a good girl, to obey, to be quiet and not raise too much of a ruckus. This was despite the fact that I was a tomboy and really rebelled once I reached my teens. Sex was never discussed in my family and it was an unspoken rule that I was to remain a virgin until I married. I did kind of follow that rule. I remained a virgin until I was 25 and then became engaged to my first lover. But I still caught hell from my father once he found out that I was no longer a virgin.

I have always been kinky. All of the sexual fantasies I had as a teenager were kinky, which involved me being kidnapped, raped, forced to submit to a dominant man. I devoured historical romance novels and loved the ones that contained scenes of "forced seduction" (and I still love them to this day). All the erotica and porn that I read back then were BDSM-related. All the erotica and porn that I read and write today are BDSM-related. As I was maturing I saw it as the simple order of relationships: the male is dominant and the female is submissive (my views have since changed, of course, because of dominant females and submissive males and switches). But this is the way I viewed relationships and sexuality.

I didn't date in high school or even college, because I had very low self-esteem issues and was very shy and withdrawn. I'm a loner by nature and I've always been one who hates being the center of attention. I prefer to blend in with the woodwork. So once I started graduate school I still had not ever been on a date. So my best friend and her boyfriend at the time hooked me up with someone, who ended up being my first husband. I ended up dropping out of grad school and marrying him and the marriage was a disaster. He became a drug addict and an alcoholic and was abusive. And he was strictly vanilla. He did tie me up once and I loved it, but he didn't get anything out of it himself. If he had, then maybe I would've brought up the subject of kinky sex with him. But it didn't turn out that way. After my divorce I decided that I was going to look for someone who was into BDSM.

I discovered the world of online chat rooms and websites. At first I just went into the adult rooms and began to cyber with men. Then I gradually shifted towards the other kinds of chat rooms. I also discovered the many BDSM websites. I began to read a lot and got a lot of books on the subject, trying to decide what I really wanted and needed from BDSM. I began to meet Doms in the chat rooms. My very first Master was a switch and I quickly learned that I could not be a Domme for him. It just wasn't in me. I wore the velcro collar a couple of times, where I would not hear from my Master for a couple of weeks and then find out that he had collared another online sub and didn't tell me about it. I also had a Gorean Master and was a white silk kajira for about a year and a half. While I enjoyed being in Gor, I knew that it really wasn't for me. Then I met Master online one night. Something told me that He was the One. W/we chatted, sent e-mail and snail mail and called on the phone for a year before meeting IRL. He came down to spend Christmas and New Year's with me. Then He went back up to His home to settle some things and came back to me in late January. Ten months later W/we were married. I have been His collared submissive for nine years now and W/we have been married for almost eight years.

One thing that I have trouble with is understanding why I enjoy certain BDSM activities. I belong to a forum for women that has boards on sex, and while there are some kinky people there, most of them are vanilla. Their ideas of being kinky are anal sex and threesomes. So when I tell them that I'm a pain slut or that I enjoy age play, they can't understand why. And I can't really give them an answer. I have never been one to analyze why I enjoy what I do. I've always been a "go with the flow" type of person when it came to my sexuality and didn't look for all the deep psychological reasons behind my submissiveness or my BDSM activities. My stock answer has always been, "Because it's fun and I enjoy it." And I wonder sometimes if I owe anyone an explanation anyway. The only people who should really care and need to know are Master and myself, not some stranger on the Internet. All I know is that I'm kinky and submissive. It is who and what I am. It is one of the ways that I define myself. And I am proud and happy to belong to the BDSM community.