My reflections after reading ‘Story of O’

This writing contains spoilers.

It’s way too late for me to read this book only now, but better later than never, I guess. It is such a deep account of a mind of a woman who gives herself entirely to someone else and it stirred up so much in me that I just had to collect my thoughts together after reading.

My dark side is darker than I thought

First of all, reading this book made me realize that I might be even more fucked up than I thought I am. Because no matter how much I don’t want to admit it, there is a part of me that truly envies O. And it’s not naive childish envy without realizing the consequences. I think that by now I can have quite a good feeling of what being in her place would entail. And I still kind of want it. Not just the sex and the pain and the loss of control over your body. I want her brokenness and her despair. I want her transformation and the total loss of dignity. I want the disintegration of her ego in the name of the man who owns her.

And believe me or not, but writing about it is really scary. It’s scary because it reveals my darkest side which existence I don't necessarily want to admit to. In the same way, as dominants are sometimes afraid of the darkness that lies within them and that revealing it to other people will cause losing them, I am also afraid of revealing my darkest desires. At the same time I feel like if I don’t, they will only grow until they really get out of control.

Because I think that as much as it is scary for a submissive to play with someone who has a really dark side that they must keep at bay or otherwise things will go really wrong, it is as scary for a dominant to play with a submissive who has such dark side. In a different way of course. Because the dominant knowing it about me will not be afraid of me hurting him irreversibly. He will be afraid of him doing it to me and me not telling him when to stop. And there is a part of me that will not want to stop.

I realize that being in such an intense dynamic as O would basically fuck up my life. I realize that I would lose my identity. Because it is not possible to be exposed to such extreme situations of mental degradation and humiliation, to be stripped away of any control over what is happening with you and your body and get out of it unscathed. It would break me. And exactly that brokenness is what is luring me. Because I am curious what lies beyond that state. Would I be able to build myself up again?

In my teenage years, I loved reading fantasy books, because they were full of stories of people tortured physically and mentally and subsequently broken and becoming pets of their enemies. I devoured those stories. And not because I am a sadist and enjoyed reading about their misery. On the contrary, I enjoyed putting myself in the position of the victims. Imagining me being in their place and experiencing all the humiliation and tortures and slow breaking of my spirit. Watching myself becoming docile and obedient.

The interesting thing is that as much as I enjoyed reading about the breaking, I also very much enjoyed the rebuild. Because in the end, they were always becoming stronger. In the end, they always managed to get free and were starting the slow journey of rebuilding themselves. And after that was done, they were even fiercer and stronger. Because once you lost everything that you thought holds value and you’re still there, your perspective on who you are and what really is worthy, shifts entirely. And I think that that is one of the things that I am really interested in. Would I be able to repair myself after being so broken? And what kind of person would I become after that?

I started to appreciate much more the possibilities that the physical pain gives

My journey into kink started with humiliation, as this was what my first kinky boyfriend was very much into. After him, I quickly moved into the realms of physical pain though. I had a period of being extremely masochistic and looking mostly for physical pain in play. But then, after a while, something shifted in me and my kinks made a full circle back to humiliation, while I stopped enjoying physical pain so much.

I am not sure whether it is my auto-sadistic brain that decided that I will have more fun if I actually don’t enjoy pain, as it will increase my mental suffering, or whether after the first period of hormonal high, I decided that there is not enough depth for me in the physical pain domain, but the fact is that currently, I am in a period of appreciating mental pain much more than physical. More than that, I basically stopped enjoying physical pain altogether. I think that one of the reasons might be also that the people who give me pain nowadays are often the ones with whom I feel very submissive and from whom I wish only tenderness.

Reading ‘Story of O’ I started to see physical pain in a new light again. Not as a source of potential pleasure, but rather as a way to intensify my misery and as a catalyst for a mental breakdown that otherwise would be very difficult to achieve. And that got my attention.

I realized that being physically tortured really does something to you that possibly nothing else can. It makes you docile and obedient. It trains you to accept your faith and it shows you that you don’t matter. Of course, you can possibly achieve the same results with mental abuse, but something tells me (although I can’t explain why) that the results would not be exactly the same. There is something urgent and inevitable in the physical pain that mental abuse does not have. I don’t think that it is only the speed with which it causes the person to break, I think that it is also the way that it makes you break that is very different and quite interesting.

There is also another aspect of corporal torture, and especially the marks that it leaves that 'Story of O' revealed to me thanks to one sentence.

"Sir Stephen readily admitted that O was infinitely more moving when her body was covered with marks, of whatever kind, if only because these marks made it impossible for her to cheat and immediately proclaimed, the moment they were seen, that anything went as far as she was concerned."

I’ve never looked at it this way, but it makes so much sense that the marks are something to be ashamed of (or that one should be ashamed of) because they show that anything goes with me. They prove that you can treat me as badly as you wish and I will let you do that. I was always covering my marks, but more because I didn’t want uncomfortable questions. I’ve never looked at marks though as a source of shame about my lack of dignity, as a sign that I will let others do anything to my body. Now I can see it, though. And it offers lots of new exciting possibilities.

There is definitely something of a slave in me

There are many aspects of being a slave, like O was, that appeal to me. Above all, the lack of control and disregard with which other people are treating you. As a submissive you still have dignity, you belong to your Dom and it is something that you can be proud of. He is proud that you belong to him. You obey his orders, also because you know that he values you and he wants the best for you. He cares about you. Other people see that and respect you for that as well. But the position of a slave as was shown in the book is different. And in a way much more appealing to me.

The thing with me is that I don’t want to be cared about and respected. At least my dark side that I feed during play doesn’t. I want to be truly disregarded. I want to be used. And that is why the situation of O was so alluring for me. Because sir Stephen was truly disposing of her as if she didn’t matter to him. Or else, she did matter to him as your car would matter to you, but he definitely didn’t consider her feelings. They were completely out of the question. To him, she wasn’t a person. And she loved it.

"Would she ever dare to tell him that no pleasure, no joy, no figment of her imagination could ever compete with the happiness she felt at the way he used her with such utter freedom, at the notion that he could do anything with her, that there was no limit, no restriction in the manner with which, on her body, he might search for pleasure. Her absolute certainty that when he touched her, whether it was to fondle or flog her, when he ordered her to do something it was solely because he wanted to, her certainty that all he cared about was his own desire, so overwhelmed and gratified O that each time she saw new proof of it, and often even when it merely occurred to her in thought, a cape of fire, a burning breastplate extending from the shoulders to the knees, descended upon her."

And that’s definitely something that I identify with very strongly. To belong to someone who really uses me for his own pleasure disregarding my feelings completely is the greatest of joys.

I also loved all the small things that Rene and sir Stephen instilled on O to remind her at all times who she really is. How her lips always had to be slightly open, her legs never crossed and her clothes such that they are always easy to take off and have their way with her. I can only imagine how such small things can have a huge impact on one’s psyche. And that was only the beginning.

She had to expose herself whenever sir Stephen ordered her to, no matter who else was in the room. He would make his servant beat her, and give her away to his friends for use any way they wanted. Finally, in the last scene, he put her naked wearing an owl mask in the middle of a party, where people treated her as some weird animal, touching her and looking at her, but not once saying a word to her. She was just put in the middle of a crowd like some sort of cheap entertainment and after that used by the men who brought her there.

All these things are fantasies of mine. To be stripped away of my dignity, slowly broken into obedience, disgraced publicly, given away to anybody like a thing. To be put in a crowd for entertainment and really be treated as such. To be truly disregarded by a mob, have everyone around me treat me without respect. Isn't that how slaves are treated?

The thing about a slave in a D/s sense that doesn’t suit me though is that it seems to me like it is an awful lot of work for the Dominant/Master. Because having someone’s life in your hands is a huge burden in my opinion. Deciding about each aspect of someone else’s existence requires a lot of effort. They consume a lot of your attention. It requires a certain devotion from the owner. And I often feel that I couldn’t ask for that. Because I feel that I wouldn’t want to take so much space in someone else’s life. I am not sure if it is because of my tendency to be independent and to make my needs as small as possible or because I wouldn't trust my life to anyone to such a degree. But it's a reason why I don’t see myself as someone’s slave.

What I do see myself as is a toy. Their’s to play with whenever they please, in whatever way they please, and independent and self-sufficient whenever they get busy with their lives. Of course, in such circumstances, you won’t reach the level of devotion and depth that’s possible when you belong to the other at all times. But you also don’t become a burden that you might become as a slave. At least that is how I feel about it and being a burden is the last thing that I would wish to be for my Dominant.

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Reading this book was quite a ride for me. I can't believe that the author managed to describe the process of falling deeper and deeper into submission and the feelings of the submissive so well. And how many times I wished I was in place of O. I don't think that I ever will get to that point. But the repertoire of my fantasies definitely has grown substantially after the read.